After awakening, it typically becomes a going-out-of-business sale for the unconscious ego. Everything must go. Sure, some people get a bliss high for awhile, but that never lasts. No human experience does.

This leads us right into the going-out-of-business sale, although it’s not even a sale. It’s more like you take all your ideas, desires, fears, hopes, issues, expectations, and pile them in your yard while setting them on fire. I know it may seem strange to add “hopes” in here, but a lot of unconscious ego hopes are based on other issues. When we feel bad, we hope to one day feel good. Instead of hoping, we turn towards what feels bad to address the real issue. We don’t run away to wishful thinking that in this case we might label as hope.

As such, this kind of emptying out inside can be quite jarring and unexpected. It makes it seem like you are giving up things that you have to have, including seemingly good things. But as I’ve mentioned all over this blog, you have to trust your inner divinity and the process that is now moving. The more you do, the more this emptying out becomes rejuvenating and spacious.

But of course, many of you aren’t oriented this way, so today’s spiritual awakening blog post will focus on the feelings of being lost and losing desire as you sit and watch your old personality ignite in a ball of awakened fire.

The Loss of Desire After a Spiritual Awakening

As I already pointed out with hope, a lot of our desires are meant to mask deeper pains. Many times–often years later–we see the errors of those desires. We see how we didn’t really want what we thought we wanted. We realize that we didn’t like our friends that we once had. We realize a romantic partner just wasn’t right for us. We realize that we actually hated the work we were doing. That’s why suddenly we couldn’t stand doing accounting, project management, energy healing, or whatever it was that desire had told you should do.

But that’s the future, and that future only arises when you embrace the present and the awakened burning.

Instead, it’s all too human to hold onto the old ideas and the old ways of acting. There is a comfort that people find in familiarity, and even as desires go away, we often backslide. We try to do those things that once held our interests. But it’s not the same. You can feel it. You can try to delude yourself into believing the old relationship does work, you do still like beer, or whatever. But in a true spiritual awakening, you know the truth. And the more powerful the awakening, the more miserable you’ll feel backsliding into those old things to be.

The Spiritual Backslide

Opening Space to Perceive Craving

The loss of ego desires really is just opening the space. It’s peeling off the wallpaper to look at the prison cell walls around you. It’s very human to try and find a new set of ideas, friends, and actions to put new wallpaper back on the cell walls. In fact, some people who awaken “succeed” at this, which is ultimately a failure. Obviously higher truth says that there are no failures, but if you are sincere and honest with yourself, you know if you’ve just found a new way to hide or if you’ve been working on the deeper core issue while engaging with these new “spiritual” things and people.

And the deeper core of human craving is a powerful one. It can be a variety of core issues and/or trauma melded together. It’s overall feeling is highly uncomfortable, like sitting on a bed of thorns. You want to move or do something to appease the craving. But the suggestion is like my suggestions for most other things on the spiritual path: sit and breathe. Look at what this craving is about. No one else can do this but you.

In the meantime, you will find yourself living in this empty in-between world between your organically growing interests–many of which will be young and under-developed–and your old desires. A brand new life isn’t grown up in a day. This is always the irony of spiritual rebirth. We are reborn in an instant. However, we shift and grow from this space of clarity in very human ways, and that takes time. But always we come back to this perfection–this moment. And we practice being at peace with it. The more at peace with it we are, the more easily the deeper issues are revealed. When we are at peace, we can more easily see our natural talents and interests.

Struggling Between the Pull of Two Forces

You will very likely find that you have a lot of unconscious commitment to your unconscious ego. It’s a whole load of ignorance, really. That’s what unconsciousness essentially is; it’s ignorance. We don’t know why we think we are a certain way, and we don’t know why we’re committed to acting that way. The truly unconscious people say things like, “This is just how I am.”

Nope. How you are is a huge set of experiences and choices arising from your biology, karma, family history, and child development days along with a few other key moments from adolescence and adulthood. Mix well, and simmer. Then you get the half-baked, unconscious egos that we all start out living in.

With all that said, when we have no perspective that there is any other way to live or act, we are ignorant. And it’s difficult to sit in this ignorance at first to let the light of our truth arise. But the longer we sit in this space where our light is growing and darkness is dimming, the next step, the next true interest, and the next issue will be revealed. If you fall back into old patterns, you will simply continue to feel like you’re holding onto two horses running opposite directions. It’ll make you feel like you’re being torn apart.

The Sacred Destruction of the Unconscious Ego

If you haven’t awakened, you can make life so much easier on yourself to choose to look at your issues. You can do it gently and on your own timeline. You can step back from the work when you like, but at other times, it is important to lean in and intensify things past your comfort zone. This is the gift that those of you who travel the conscious path–the path of gradually growing spiritually–have.

For those of you who have awakened–many of whom had no interest in spirituality–you have to choose the path too even though it may not have been anything that you wanted. The awakened space within you is already arising. You might as well embrace it even though your whole life seems to be being destroyed, and you have no idea who you are anymore. Eventually, not having an ego identity will feel great, and if you embrace this path, you can find the beautiful ease in being a nobody free of so much pain and suffering, the half of which you didn’t know were carrying.

But you still have to choose it. We all have to choose it. Otherwise, a part of us hangs back, and we need all of our energy and awareness to hone in on those deeper and darker unconscious ego structures and core physiological issues (such as retraining hormonal imbalances causing excessive depression through mindfulness and so forth). Otherwise, the core structures will stay in tact, and we are likely to create a new so-called “spiritual” identity around these core issues.

Sacred Destruction: The Removal of Obstacles in Spiritual Rebirth

Barfing Out Your Ego One Issue at a Time

It can seem like a lot is happening after a spiritual awakening. Your awakened energy is moving all around you and through you. It can feel like a lot to process, and it is. Your heart, body, mind, and subtle energy are all healing and transforming. At the start of emptying out your unconscious ego and this kind of barren wasteland where you feel like you’re in between two worlds, it’s a lot of healing work. Never underestimate the importance of healing. With so many broken parts of us, we have to heal first before we can grow, and this should be appreciated. It’s part of why so many of you can’t figure out what you want to do with life. You’re too broken to do it. And further more, this idea that you need to do things is also part of the sickness of Western Society. You don’t need to do anything to be okay. You can simply be.

But as this subtitle suggests, it is just one issue at a time. It comes up, and you work it out. You work out each issue in its own time and in its own way. You cry out some heart issues. You journal out more core beliefs and illusions. You do yoga to help the body stay open and move stuck energy out of chronically stuck muscles. This is what I mean when I say you engage with each level in its own way. You cannot think a physical issue out of the body. You can let go of the associated beliefs assigned to a part of the body, such as the idea that you have a back issue of some kind. If there is a spiritual issue in your body, then as you engage with that issue, it actually moves. Real body issues stay in the same region of the body. Spiritual issues will move to different regions of the body as they start to come up, often moving from the original area they were felt and then up towards the head to be realized.

The Process of Releasing Pain from Your Energy Body

Having Patience With the Process

The newer someone is to this healing and spiritual growth after awakening, the more likely they want to run and hide. All I can do is to encourage you to have patience. This is a sacred time. You are emptying out so much pain and toxic junk than you imagine. Even if you have an idea that you are healing, it may be years before you have enough perspective to understand how truly sick you were. And let’s be honest, a lot of people in Western Culture are extremely sick. I’m not even talking about people who have endured traumas. I’m talking about the hundreds of different ways people don’t believe that they’re okay. They think they need to do something to be liked, to be happy, to be successful, or whatever. They think they need to be attractive. They think they need to have things. They think lots of things, but mainly it all is coming from this toxic belief that we are not okay as we are.

But we are. We are perfect as we are. It doesn’t mean we won’t grow, and it doesn’t mean that we don’t need to cultivate kindness. We do need to cultivate kindness, and we will grow and change our whole lives. But as your unconscious ego is being wrung out and throw out, I can only encourage you to know that this is a good thing. This is an amazing thing. This is sacred, and if you let yourself be emptied out, all that space will allow you to grow in the most true and beautiful way that you can grow in this lifetime.

The Spaces in Between

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I'm a spiritual teacher who helps people find freedom from suffering.

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