Feeling Crazy After Your Spiritual Awakening

I have written about spiritual awakening a lot, but if you are brand new to this blog, let me suggest that you read these two posts before travelling along through the landscape of words I’m about to paint.

What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

Am I Having a Spiritual Awakening?

These two posts should help people who are new to me understand what I mean by a spiritual awakening and get us all on the same page.

In an interesting way, a spiritual awakening is about getting on the same page with yourself. The unconscious ego beliefs that we hold tend to divorce us from ourselves, and from that divorce, we can create a lot of supporting systems, beliefs, and actions to hold it all together. For those of you who ever feel like things are always falling apart, that may be a sign that you are way out of alignment with reality.

Reality is at the core of a spiritual awakening. It is not making you better, more perfect, or more of anything. If anything, it’s taking everything away to leave you with reality, and in that process of removal, you may feel a lot of things. One of the ways people respond to this process of sacred destruction is to feel crazy. That judgment is the ego talking, and it is saying, “What the fuck is going on?!!!?!”

From that response, people can make things worse with additional fearful responses, but hopefully if you’re reading this spiritual awakening blog post today, I can help you to veer away from overreactions.

Crazy Thoughts and the Conflicted Mind

To start with, there are legitimate psychological issues that people have, and they should seek a mental health practitioner for assistance. Too many people are trying to self-diagnose mental health issues using spirituality, and ultimately, this is a misunderstanding of spirituality. Spirituality embraces all of life, and that includes psychological support when it is needed for real mental health conditions.

In general, a lot of people will benefit on the spiritual path by working out matters of the mind with a therapist of some kind. Therapists are often excellent mind healers.

In the context of a spiritual awakening, light is being shed on the illusions and false beliefs onto which a person is grasping. However, when core beliefs get illuminated as irrelevant and false, the ego self rarely is willing to give them up. This creates a mental conflict because now there are two different perspectives instead of one in someone’s mind, and that can feel kind of like you’re going crazy.

The Fear of Losing Your Mind

But the answer to this issue is simple: let go of your thoughts. Let go of your beliefs.

It’s too simple, isn’t it? People are so used to complicating things that this whole letting go thing seems to be too good to be true. Letting go also seems difficult since people are heavily conditioned to holding on. But that’s part of the inner work. You have to let go of holding on to false beliefs and practice seeing what is real. This leads to a whole lot of spiritual realizations and learning how to identify false beliefs. It’s a lot of work, but it is totally worth it.

To continue holding on will only make you feel crazier. It will make it feel like you have a foot in two worlds. Many people attempt to reconcile the two worlds, which exacerbates the issues. This attempt to keep the unconscious ego and somehow include spiritual truth makes people feel even crazier amidst a process that is attempting to help you become sane.

Overcome by Your Emotions

Another element of spiritual transformation after awakening that can make people feel crazy is all of the emotions that come pouring out. Depending on how your awakening started, this experience of tons of emotions can seem very different than what you thought awakening was. If you felt very peaceful, blissful, and/or loving, feeling tons of self-hatred, fear, depression, guilt, shame, and more can feel like you’ve gone off the rails of this whole spiritual awakening thing. But really, you’re just discovering all the inmates you’ve kept locked away in your inner prison. You have to engage with them now. In this metaphor, they’ve all been wrongfully accused, and you’ve been wasting huge amounts of your energy keeping them all locked up. Well, the divine grace of spiritual awakening has pardoned them all, and you need to process and release them.

That means learning to process these emotions as well as the physical sensations and the memories to which they’re attached. For most people there is a pretty long line of emotions coming to the processing table, and this can lead some people to bouts of fatigue and poor sleep from the intensity of this inner work. But this part of healing doesn’t last forever. You can work through them and come to greater and more stable states of peace.

After a Spiritual Awakening Unleashes All Your Emotions

Or you can avoid all of this and make yourself feel even crazier. I have to add this part because some people do just that. Some people try to avoid the inner work for years, but for whatever reason, their spiritual awakening doesn’t die down. So they eventually have to engage with it. For others, the inner surge of energy expends itself and stops, leaving some people in a demilitarized zone of strange emotions, sensitivities, and partially understood spiritual truths.

Crazy Body Sensations Everywhere

Spiritual awakening truly is a whole body experience, and the mind and heart are not separate from the body. Everything is being knit back together from the truth of oneness; people are coming into oneness with themselves. Oneness can’t be just accepted as a belief, and when you awaken, you come face-to-face with that reality. The re-uniting process is absolutely physical–it’s not some distant, esoteric belief.

The re-uniting process people go through pushes on all the inner walls and divisions. It breaks them all down. As that process arises, a deeper and broader experience and knowing of oneness as a truth of all of life becomes apparent.

With the body sensations, those too are like trapped inmates. Past experiences and memories that got stored in the body memory rise up. There are some times when people can feel overwhelmed by the amount of sensations that are coming through them while they are doing virtually nothing. This is simply how an awakening is. It is internally driven. You don’t have to do anything for things to rise up, but when they do come up, you have to learn to listen. You have to learn to do inner work, and if doing inner work is a brand new concept to you, then I recommend listening to this video: 

Energy Sensations Surging Through You

And I’m not done yet with the different sensations that can arise. There is a whole realm of body sensations that I consider to be energy-related. Energy sensations can arise anywhere in the body, and they can feel any kind of way. However, I usually put the following sensations as more likely related to energy:

• Buzzing
• Tingling
• A cool air passing by the body
• Pressure
• Hot/cold (particularly when you feel like energy is moving or you are doing something related to energy, not because you just worked out or need to turn up the heat in your home)
• Pulsing
• Flowing
• Involuntary muscle spasms or movements (Be sure to read the link on the left for this topic if you have this experience)

Particularly if there is a block to the flow of energy, the physical sensations can be quite extraordinary and sometimes extraordinarily painful. It is amazing how much resistance we can store in the body, but it also something we can test. Because if something is truly a physical issue, you can breathe and relax into it all that you want, and nothing changes. If something is a blockage, you can breathe and relax into it, and the pain moves, rises up, and releases. Then you may get some relief, or the next issue emerges.

When someone is immersed in a lot of resistance, there may be no respite between releases of different issues for years. As always, I recommend using Western MDs to check on your body to make sure there aren’t true body issues involved. All healers are needed and welcome in integrating a spiritual awakening.

Phantom Physical Pains and Spiritual Awakening

Psychic Awareness Emerges for Some

Finally, one last thing that makes an ego feel super crazy–on top of the fact that it usually doesn’t know what is truth from falsehood–is psychic emergence. While this doesn’t happen for everyone, some people are naturally very psychic, but they may have suppressed it. Or the person’s psychic awareness just felt like blooming in the light of a spiritual awakening. The result is that the person is getting a whole new world of sensory information that they have to learn how to handle.

Psychic abilities that may emerge or simply get enhanced if they were already accessible to the person include:

• Seeing auras
• Seeing spirits
• Having spontaneous out of body experiences
• Telepathy
• Sensing energy from other people
• Sensing emotions from other people
• The ability to prophesy/see the future
• Being able to intentionally shift the energy of different places and people
• Being able to communicate with other beings in other dimensions, and more

So on top of the new realizations and the intense emotions and the powerful body sensations, here are all these psychic experiences that someone is suddenly having, and they feel totally batshit crazy!

Take a deep breath.

Then take another.

Keep breathing.

Integrating Everything One Breath at a Time

Integration and inner work on all of this stuff is time consuming and important. If you’re brand new to a spiritual awakening, then I recommend reading this post to help you do the work you need to do to normalize with all of this stuff:

5 Practical Spiritual Awakening Strategies

In normalizing, you are healing old wounds and learning to accept the reality that you see. In so doing, you are also letting go of your unconscious ego self. This letting go is paramount to feeling less crazy because the ego that is holding on to your old beliefs is the source of much of the problem. It’s the ego saying that you shouldn’t feel this way or think this way. It’s the ego saying you shouldn’t have psychic awareness of energy surges through your body. These judgments are themselves crazy. If you see spirits, then you see spirits. That’s what’s there. If you have a realization that you don’t want to be in your marriage, then that is your truth. If you feel energy moving up and down your spine, then that is what you are feeling. To deny your realizations and your actual experiences is what is truly crazy, not the experiences themselves.

Instead of judging something as crazy, you may want to say that you feel new sensations or you are feeling overwhelmed. Take away the harshness of self-judgment. See if you can find more space of acceptance for what is arising. In finding more room for acceptance, you let go of resistance and allow a sacred process to transform you in the most amazing ways. In the end, none of this transformation will seem crazy. What will seem crazy are the many things you did and beliefs you had while lost in the unconscious ego.

If you need a little extra help, feel free to reach out to me about a session.

Contact me here.