Am I Having a Spiritual Awakening? And How is it Different from Mental IIlness?
You can find decent answers to what awakening is all over the internet, but I thought I’d make it easy for anyone considering working with me to get my definition and see what fits for you, and what doesn’t. And maybe you don’t want this question all over your search history, because people you care about might think you’re crazy.
I’m here to tell you that you are not crazy if you think you’re awakening.
For the purposes of this post, I am going to define awakening as a realization of your spiritual self, and the realization that there is a much broader scope to life than checking boxes of having certain titles, certain possessions, and accessing certain earthly things. It’s realizing there is a whole part of you that is not interested in the things that we are told our whole lives to be interested in and to use as metrics for a successful life. So yes you might look crazy. And feel it.
Yes, there are awakening symptoms that can look the same as some mental health conditions and that can be evaluated; however, I believe there are two main components of what makes an awakening different from a mental health condition:
You feel some sort of flexibility in your thinking around what is happening. If you are willing to consider that things happening may not be real and you have some cognitive flexibility around other hypotheses, that in my observation makes you less likely to actually be completely out of touch with reality. I have known and worked firsthand with people who are in the throes of truly disordered thinking, and they are locked into their version of reality with little to no basis in the external world. There’s not a lot of room for evaluating the truth and experiences based on external evidence. And often this rigidity responds to medical intervention, where when someone’s brain responds to chemical rebalancing and they get more clarity, the beliefs they had while ill no longer fit in the same way.
Awakening symptoms and changes are based on consent and agreement. If things are happening too much too fast, and you’re overwhelmed, or feeling not ready for things, you can ask for things to slow down. And you can opt out altogether. Seeing things you don’t want to see? Ask not to. Overwhelmed with grief over losing things that you once felt very attached to? Ask for it to go more slowly. Want to ditch this altogether and go back to the world you knew? Go ahead. You can always stop the ride.
That said, there are common symptoms of awakening that you can take on as proof that this is a real path and that you are on it (and this is by no means exhaustive or in any sort of order):
Questioning the external systems and things you have been told your whole life to achieve. Maybe you feel like you checked all the boxes and are left wanting. Maybe your whole life, like me, you hoped and wished and looked for signs that there was more to this world than meets the eye and that you were told meets the eye.
Not wanting to participate in the same way in life as you used to, and wanting to follow your inner hunches, even if others do not understand them. Detachment from things that used to matter to you. I don’t mean that you no longer care about anything; we still need to be able to care about things to be led to the next iterations of ourselves. And detachment is not a status symbol nor can it be forced. It’s a subtle turning away from something because it no longer feels the same. It’s more about not wanting to do the things that you used to want to more than it is about having others see how much better you are than them. That’s an attachment to how you’re perceived, not a detachment.
Periods of emotional upheaval that may or may not have a basis in external reality. There have been times I have spun on something for days that normally I wouldn’t think about twice, only to sift through it to find a new level of understanding for/of myself. Times where I’m like okay why is this coming up for me now?
But also times of deep inner peace, connectedness, and love that are deeper than you have ever felt before and lead to a new level of understanding.
Along with the connectedness, feeling more in tune with and wanting to spend more time in nature.
And yes, there are symptoms of increased awareness, intuition, vivid dreams, hits/downloads, Deja vu, physical sensations of tingling, ear ringing, headaches, and heightened senses. I consider myself lucky that the more intuitive I become it actually becomes a more subtle experience in daily life than the experiences of some, who suddenly are bombarded with seeing and hearing and knowing of overwhelming levels, which is called spiritual psychosis, and it is real and it does happen.
So what do you think? Is this you?