It is very common to feel depressed after experiencing a spiritual awakening. It might seem like these two things shouldn’t go together, but it’s quite common and there are multiple reasons why you might feel depressed after you experience and awakening.
I feel like I need to preface this by saying that we experience multiple awakenings in our lives. We experience multiple revelations, followed by the awakening and unfolding that ensues afterwards. Our spiritual awakening is an ever-unfolding process. As we awaken, as we peel layers off, as we unfold, we may experience depression. Here’s why…
When we awaken, we start to really look at how we we’ve been living.
When we start to question our beliefs and question our thought processes, we can get to a point where nothing really make sense anymore. Things that we used to enjoy, conversations that we used to have, ways that we used to show up in the world, things that we used to believe, just feel like they no longer fit.
We can experience what’s called an ego death. Our ego is responsible for our personality and our sense of individualism. It forms very early on in our development and we keep adding to it as we grow. So, when we experience an awakening and we start to question all of these ways that we’ve related to the world and all of these ways that we’ve perceived reality, we can experience an ego death. That structure of our personality shuts down, and our mind doesn’t have any framework, any past experience, to relate to our current experience…so we experience an ego death and we enter the void.
Now, the void is this weird unknown place in between who we were and who we are becoming. In that space it can feel really floaty and very ungrounded, scary and alone. This is why we can feel depressed. It can feel like we’re detached from our personality and how we used to identify. We can feel detached from the people around us and unsure of how to relate to them anymore. We can feel like nobody in the world understands what’s happening to us, like nobody in the world understands us as a soul. It can feel like nobody in the world understands how we want to move forward and how we want to live. It can just feel like nothing makes sense.
And so depression can set in.
We feel disconnected. We feel this sense of disassociation and disconnectedness from ourselves, from the world and from the people around us.
If you are experiencing depressive symptoms right now, if you’re feeling just weird and disconnected, know that this is temporary and know that this is part of the process.
We also experience depression because this is our soul’s way of letting us know that we are living out of alignment. We are living out of alignment with how our soul and our higher self want us to be living and interacting with the world. Whenever we are depressed or anxious or suffering in any way, this is our soul’s way of telling us that something needs to give. Something needs to change. Something needs to shift.
It could be something as simple as our perception. Maybe just our perception needs to shift. Maybe we don’t need to overhaul our entire life. In fact, what needs to happen, usually, is inner work. The depression can persist when we resist the inner work…When we resist slowing down, sitting in silence with ourselves, examining our thoughts, examining our past decisions, examining how we are living and really taking stock and choosing to move forward in a different way.
If we resist that work, if we resist the shadow work, the depression will persist. I can’t give you a definite timeline of “OK, well if I do XYZ and if I do this amount of shadow work, it will be this long to feel ok again.” It doesn’t work that way. It’s all very subjective and everybody’s journey is different.
Any symptom of depression is inviting us to go inside. To really evaluate what does align with us. To figure out what actually feels like a true vibrational alignment that feels good in our body and feels good to our soul. This is the constant work of consciously choosing how we show up in the world. Consciously choosing what we spend and invest our money in, our attention in, our focus in, our words in…all the time.
If you’re not feeling good it’s usually a sign that you’ve been investing your time, money, energy, focus, emotions, in something that is out of alignment with you.
I encourage you, if you’re feeling depression, to either by yourself or with a counselor, coach, therapist, spiritual mentor or whatever kind of support system you have, find someone (or do it by yourself) to really examine this. Sometimes it helps to work with someone so they can mirror back to you some of your blind spots. This is why I’m always working with a coach or healer or someone who can be my sacred mirror and show me what I’m not seeing. It’s SO important.
There are so many clues in the language that we use and we might be totally oblivious to a subconscious pattern that doesn’t serve us anymore, which could be contributing to these depressive feelings. Perhaps we’ve been doing things a certain way for a lot of years and it’s been working up until this point. Then you hit a wall or a breaking point or something happens in your reality to jar you enough to make you realize that it’s not working anymore. I know that this can sound kind of vague, but this could be anything from something as small as your diet to something as large as self- sabotaging behaviour. It’s going to be unique to you what your soul is tasking you with.
I just want to encourage any of you who are feeling depressive symptoms and remind you that this is a temporary situation if you are willing to go inside and listen to yourself. Listen to your soul’s promptings, listen to what you NEED. It doesn’t have to be a big long process. You could figure something out that is quite big in 15 minutes. Sometimes it takes multiple sittings. It’s going to depend on you.
I think I’ll leave it there for now but I just wanted to let you know that depression is a pretty common symptom that happens after a spiritual awakening.
I’ll just recap…When we go through an awakening process it usually triggers an ego death. We feel disassociated from our lives, the way we used to show up, the people and the world around us. We enter the void where it is an unknown place, where we are in uncharted waters without a map, and it can feel really scary. This is just our soul prompting us to consciously choose how we want to move forward. It’s our soul prompting us to go inside, do the inner shadow work and get deeply acquainted with every aspect of ourselves, even the ones that are not so desirable. This is how we ascend. This is how we transcend our limiting beliefs. This is how we transcend our current experience of life. This is how we ascend in vibration and consciousness and expand our awareness…by going inside.
Know that this can be temporary. Know that you can get through this, you WILL get through this and there is a divine, spiritual reason for these depressed feelings.
If you need help working through them, let me know. OK? This is why I started my YouTube channel. Depression and loneliness kind of go hand in hand. I made a video about loneliness and spiritual awakening, please check that out as well.
Know there is a reason for why this is happening. This is your soul taking to you. Will you take the time to listen and cultivate that relationship inside of you? It’s amazing the ways in which you can be blessed by doing this work.
Sending you ALL the love!!!
