I

want to start by saying that I cannot predict how anything unfolds for another person in life much less on their spiritual path. Today’s topic about what arises for some people after a neglected spiritual awakening may reflect some people’s experiences, or it may not.

This spiritual awakening post, however, is a reminder that certain moments in our lives are particularly precious. Despite what our unconscious egos think about how our lives should go, the pain and rebirthing struggles of awakening are immeasurable gifts. And when some doorways close, they do close forever.

I have talked about so many things on this mag, and I’ve touched on the topic of an unwanted awakening. But I don’t think I’ve spent much time talking about how neglecting this shift may unfold, so that is today’s topic. If you want to hear about the unwanted spiritual awakening, you can check out the below article:

The Unwanted Awakening: Denying Your Self and Your Love

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After the Waves of Energy Subside

A spiritual awakening often brings forth a ton of energy inside of people, but like any wave, it does subside. That is the nature of life. Things arise. Things pass away. It’s very simple.

Awakening is very simple. It’s the unconscious ego that makes it complicated, and for many who embrace their awakening and the shifts that arise from their awareness, they can often over-complicate the process with spiritual tools and techniques. At times, some effort to unwind the gigantic ball of tangled string that we are is required. But as you unwind it, you find that it is all one thread of consciousness, and when it is unwound, it is a very simple reality.

Simplicity and Spirituality: The Loss of Ego Complication

That simple reality is that we are. Any additional story is superfluous, and it often leads to trouble, pain, and suffering.

But when you don’t unwind the tangled mess of unconscious beliefs and pain, the mess tends to get worse after awakening. Spiritual realizations can get twisted by the ego’s need to define itself, and so a strange combination of truth and lies create very contorted half lies and total lies that someone believes in. For example, a person may realize that romantic partnership isn’t real, so the person leaves their spouse. But then they are hunting for a soulmate with some newer, idealized version of spiritual love. The issue is still in tact around the need for romance, and there are deeper issues hidden by it.

For other people who have neglected the awakening, they didn’t leave their partner, but that didn’t come from a commitment. That came from a fear of change or a fear of being alone or some other fear. Fear rules the day in the unconscious ego’s world, and the person stays trapped.

The Trap of the Unconscious Ego

When a spiritual awakening is neglected, the unconscious ego wins, sort of. There are certain realizations that can’t be unrealized. How much truth seeps into someone who awakens and then neglects the shift varies from person to person. The deeper the truth is realized, the more someone may feel like a thorn is stuck in their sides, constantly pointing towards a truth they don’t want to deal with. That persistent pain requires the person to continue to deny themselves and their Self-knowledge because the truth keeps poking at them.

In another way of expressing this, the truth is no different than a mountain. The mountain is there, so you have to bend your neck and avert your eyes constantly when you live by the mountain if you don’t want to see it. This is how it can be for someone who neglected their spiritual awakening and who has certain realizations that just won’t go away.

Sure, some of their life may be still comfortable. This is part of what the unconscious ego sought after, and some people will do all that they can to preserve comfort. But a comfortable life is not inherently a happy one, and if you don’t understand what true happiness is or what you are defining as comfortable or uncomfortable, then how would you really know if you are truly happy?

The honest answer is that you wouldn’t know, but you think you know. And you may be the person still trying to believe that “ignorance is bliss,” but maybe that doesn’t even work for you anymore either. A little awakening goes a long way, and as I said, some parts of awareness don’t get hidden again.

Coping With Your Choices

The amount of coping someone has to do with the fact that they neglected a spiritual awakening will vary. The more conscious the person, the more denial the person has to do. Also, the greater the force of the awakened energy inside someone, the greater pain someone will be in. That pain can force the person into some sort of reluctant transformation, but the person may not want to change much. This can lead lead to many months and years of misery by resisting a lot of the inner change, and the person will usually be just waiting to jump onto a spiritual plateau.

Getting off the Spiritual Plateau

Some people partially give up some resistance as far as resolving issues that they already want to get rid of like old fears and pain. This can lead to a kind of half-assing of the spiritual path. Others may come around to the spiritual path when things feel more stable or calm. This may mean that the awakening energy has subsided or gone dormant. Now that things are calmer, the person may start to get “more spiritual” because they feel in control again. But that control is a trap. It will often lead the person towards spiritual tools and beliefs that feel good and safe. Those feelings are traps because so much of our growth is outside what feels good and safe to us.

Once again, it’s the unconscious ego defining for you whether you feel good or safe. A lot of those feelings arise from mental decisions (although not all–Check out this blog post about appreciating our physical body and the bio-chemistry we create: The Animal Within: Retraining the Primal Instinctual Body). In general, we don’t know why we feel what we feel until we do inner work, and sometimes, our responses to our environments and other people are flat wrong. This can lead to pain later.

For instance, many people feel good when they eat hamburgers, but a lot of that has to do with physiological and mental training. For those of you who have changed your diet, you may not feel good at all eating hamburgers when before you did. What happened? You came into alignment with your physical truth, and your taste buds changed. Taste buds–like a lot of human aspects–are pretty malleable, and a spiritual awakening teaches us about our overall malleability. Spiritual awakening teaches us the importance and accessibility of change, especially to match our true needs and not our habitual desires.

Sometimes Lightning Strikes Twice… Sometimes

I really don’t encourage anyone to expect this, but sometimes, a person has another spiritual awakening. As I’ve connected with people around the world for years, I occasionally hear stories of someone who had an awakening, managed to shutdown somehow, and then another one came along several decades later. I often receive quite a bit of gratitude from these individuals because they had no idea what was arising the first time. That lead to the shutting down initially. Now that we have the Internet, they have found me and other people who can help them embrace this process. So they get on-board the second awakening train.

But it’s probably not easier.

The awakening and the resulting growth and shifts now have to move through potentially more of pain. One thing human beings are good at is accumulating pain. The unconscious ego generally doesn’t know how to process difficult emotions, so things keep getting piled on top of the deeper core issues until we learn how to be present in difficult moments and process past issues. If someone already had a lot of pain, awakened, and somehow stopped the process, by the time the second one comes, this can be potentially excruciating. I can’t say this for sure for all people. That’s not how life is. But I have seen this to be true for some of the people who have followed this spiritual path. It’s not fun, and most of these people would adamantly encourage anyone awakening for the first time to take this first ride and not wait and hope for a second spiritual awakening.

A Second Spiritual Awakening and Finally Finding Guidance

The Messy Aftermath of Neglect

For some people, neglecting a spiritual awakening can bring about years of discomfort and confusion. It may never be all put back again. Some of these people often end up in therapy, which can be a good thing. But if the therapist does not understand the nature of a spiritual awakening, the person is probably putting more bandages over bullet wounds. You have to learn how to go to the core of your issues if you want to heal. That’s a lot of what awakening helps us to do. If not, those bullets cause infections and pus and all kinds of complications in your life again and again and again.

If your father leaves you as a child, abandonment issues may be huge for you. Thus, finding new skills to make more friends is a bandage for a fear of abandonment. These are the types of things an unmindful healer may have you do. Yes, making friends is an important skill, but this approach by itself will likely further mask the deeper upset–the feeling of being abandoned by dad.

Of course going to a healer of some kind is often a healthy choice. Lots of good work can be done with psychologists, therapists, and healers of all kinds. Unfortunately, there are a lot more unhealthy choices that people make in the face of discomfort. Those choices are using drugs, alcohol, sex, work, and other things in order to numb the pain that is trying to arise, but these do no good. They tend to cause harm, and the person stays stuck in this messy aftermath with a few spiritual realizations along with all the unconscious beliefs that they are trying to fight.

Numbing Yourself to Life and Over-stimulation