What’s Your Spiritual Awakening Story?

Essay 6

October 30, 2023

This is one of the best questions to ask a spiritually awakened individual.  Many times, a spiritual awakening is triggered by a traumatic event. Job loss, a near death experience, the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one.  I have yet to hear a pleasant story of someone who just calmly chose this path. Usually, there is a tragedy or setback tied to it.  Trauma and challenging experiences are often the biggest catalysts to our growth and expansion.

Dark Night of the Soul

My spiritual awakening started in 2016.  I was laid off from a job I held for nearly 10 years.  I loved that job… or maybe I just loved who I was when I had the job.  I didn’t realize it, but my entire identity was wrapped up in it.  The job had become my life, my purpose, my joy, and I didn’t know who I was without it. 

I was talented and successful at work. I was the “go to” person for many things. In my personal life, I felt like a no one with nothing interesting to offer.  Getting laid off crushed my ego and left me feeling lost.  I was devastated and didn’t know what to do next. 

To further complicate matters, I had also left an abusive relationship of over 10 years only months before that.  Now I had no second income to fall back on.  I lived alone, and I felt like everything I had worked for was gone in an instant.  It was just me, and without the “success” I had clung to for years.  I fell into depression and eventually became suicidal as the hopelessness and deep sense of failure grew.

Over the next year, I battled what is known to many as “The Dark Night of the Soul”. I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time.   Life had lost all purpose, and I was simply going through the motions of existing.  My job had given me a drive and purpose. Now I woke every day feeling unmotivated and unsure of what to do with myself. 

At the height of my hopelessness, my best friend took me to a tarot card reader.  She wanted a reading, and she thought it might help me too.  I was still out of work and stressed about money. My friend offered to pay for me so I humored her.  I didn’t expect much from the reading. However, I was quickly amazed at all the details of my life that the reader seemed to know. He told me things that I had never told anyone.  I believed he had a real gift. 

At one point, the reader said to me, “You will always have enough money”. I hadn’t asked him any questions about money.  It’s like he knew that was at the top of my mind.  That one sentence gave me the spark of faith that I needed to keep pushing forward.  I still remind myself of that statement today, and so far, he hasn’t been wrong.

Discovering Spirituality

That reading also opened the door to a whole new metaphysical world.  I became almost obsessed with learning more.  How did he know the thoughts in my head that day?  I believed in psychics, but I had never experienced one firsthand.  I started Googling. 

Google has come a long way since 2016 related to spiritual and metaphysical topics.  At the time, I didn’t even know what I was looking for. I wasn’t sure what was going on inside me. After much digging online, I eventually came upon a YouTube video. It was a young girl discussing her spiritual awakening and dark night of the soul.  Is this what I was experiencing?  I felt drawn to her videos and continued to watch and learn more.

Eventually, I found work after being unemployed for almost four months.  I thought things would return to “normal”, but they didn’t.  The new job paid well. I ended up making the same salary I was making before. Unfortunately, I lacked passion for what I was doing.  I continued to wake up unmotivated and sloughing my way through the day. 

My new work environment was negative.  I had an unsupportive boss who didn’t train me or communicate well. Somehow, she expected me to just know things.  I’m smart and a quick learner, but she made me feel stupid.  I watched her speak in a shrill tone to most people. She was condescending with others in meetings when they didn’t understand or agree with her point.  My days turned into just avoiding her so I wouldn’t become her target. 

That job was not the right fit for me. But, it paid the bills and I didn’t know where else to go, so I hung on.  I started to wonder – would I ever be happy again?  What did I even want that would make me happy?  Clearly, it wasn’t just money and financial security.  I didn’t know.  I started writing for the first time in my life to try to process the feelings.

Answers from Spirit

My friend took me to another psychic, about 6 months after the first one.  My friend and I were both feeling lost in our lives at that point. We each wanted answers to tough questions.  I wasn’t ready for everything that happened that day. 

The psychic was a woman named Barb who lived in the Midwest. She conducted sessions out of her home.  We drove up her curved driveway, lined with snow, on a winter day.  Inside, I waited in Barb’s living room alone, as she conducted a 30-minute session with my friend in her office.  In the living room, there was soothing instrumental music playing on the TV as I waited.  I thought about my intention for my session.  I hoped to connect to my passed-on grandmother.  I prayed and talked to my grandmother in my mind as I waited.

Barb and my friend walked out of the office and into the living room. I stood up to greet them.  Barb said, “And how are you today?”

“I’m good,” I said with a smile.

“You ARE good,” Barb said happily.  “You have this beautiful white light around you”.  I didn’t even know what she meant at the time, but she sounded excited.

We walked into Barb’s office and sat in two armchairs facing one another.  My session was supposed to be 30 minutes, but it turned into almost two hours. It was filled with laughter and moments of deep realization.  Some of the things Barb said to me that day took years to fully make sense. Some things I am still waiting to see if they come to fruition. 

Barb tapped into something within me that no one ever had.  She knew things about me that I had never spoken out loud. She validated feelings that I never expected anyone to understand.

“There’s something about your jaw.  Something is off with it.  Did someone… punch you… in the jaw?” Barb questioned hesitantly.

My abusive relationship.  I hadn’t even told my best friend about that incident.  It happened the night that my friend went into labor with her first child. I came home from the hospital in the early morning hours, and I had an explosive fight with my boyfriend.  He had stayed out all night and showed up at home at 5am.  I knew he was cheating on me.  There was no other explanation, but he continued to deny it to my face every time I questioned him. 

That night, he said hateful words to me that cut deep. He was trying to destroy my self-worth. The only thing I knew to do at the time was to throw it right back at him.  I said something equally mean, and he looked shocked.  He was used to me crying and not fighting back.  He was used to me crumbling. When I fired back mean words, a switch in him flipped to rage.  He quickly drew back his fist and punched me in the side of my face, landing on my jaw.  I started to hyperventilate in response, shocked by what had happened.

“It’s like you needed that punch in the face to wake up to WHO YOU REALLY ARE,” Barb proclaimed.

Some people would be offended by that statement, but I wasn’t at all.  I knew exactly what she meant, and she was right.  That punch was a breaking point for me.  No matter how many times I fell for his apologies, there was no justifying that night. Looking back now, that punch was a turning point in my life.  He had broken me down. I had to figure out how to build up the real me who was hiding deep within.  Although I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy, it had to happen for me to evolve. I had ignored all the signs before that directing me to leave.

Opening the Door to Spiritual Gifts

“It’s funny that you say you’re scared of spirits,” Barb said at one point.  “Because you can do exactly what I do.”

“…Whaaat?” I said with wide eyes.  I had shared with Barb that I’ve always had a fear of the paranormal. I’ve always been curious about the spiritual world, ever since I was a child. At the same time, the thought of seeing spirits in physical form scared me.

“Yes, you can do exactly what I do.  Spirit is just like you and me.  You’re just a spirit in that body.  We’re the same as them.  You just can’t see them.  But they’re all around you, even here as I’m talking to you.”

My eyes darted around the room nervously.

“And spirit will never give you anything you can’t handle,” Barb shared.  I still think of those words often.

Barb shared advice with me on how to get started communicating with spirit. She explained automatic writing as something I could start doing.  She said that she has never instructed someone else to do this, but she thought that I should help spirits to cross over to the other side. She explained the process and how she does this work. At the time, I thought there’s no way I can do that.  Little did we both know, my first time helping someone cross over would be my own grandmother. I wrote more about this in a later post.

Our conversation continued, winding around to different topics and relationships in my life. It produced one revelation after the next.  Barb even connected with an ex’s passed-on son. He gave me messages that seemed to be in code and made no sense to me.  When I called his dad later, to ask if he wanted to hear the messages, all of it made perfect sense to him.  My ex sat on the other end of the phone silently. He was in total shock, and I knew he was crying and struggling to find words.

At one point, Barb said, “You’re not a country girl.  Eventually, you’re going to end up in a big city.  I see you doing a lot of writing.”  I grew up in a small town in which I had always felt trapped.  As a kid, I thought that one day I would go to college and never come back.  I dreamed of living in New York City, but life just hadn’t worked out that way.

Following My Path

Fast-forward three months after meeting Barb.  While still in the midst of my dark night of the soul, a friend tagged me on someone’s post on Facebook.  My friend lived in Chicago. His friend who created the post was looking for someone to sublet her apartment, in Chicago, for five weeks. She was leaving town for a work project.  My friend knew I worked from home full time and that I loved visiting Chicago, so he thought I might be interested. 

After much debating, I decided to go.  It was only five weeks, after all.  I would just be working from a different location.  I thought I would explore the city, spend time with my friend, and come back home to my boring life.

Halfway through my sublet, I was dreading going home to my little town.  This was the most alive I had felt in years.  The wonder of walking around the city with fresh eyes captured me daily.  I would look up at the tall buildings and around at all the diverse people, and I couldn’t believe I was here.  I felt free.  Everything I could possibly want was right at my fingertips, just outside my front door. I had barely scratched the surface.  I didn’t want to leave.

At the end of the five weeks, I drove home to the east coast. I spent two weeks packing up my apartment and tying up loose ends, and I headed back to Chicago with a U-Haul.  This is when I like to believe that my life really started.  I was 31.  Large parts of my first year in Chicago were spent alone.  It was what was needed at the time, as I started to figure out who I was and began to build my new life.  I lived alone, my family was 10 hours away, and I only had a couple friends in the city.  I used my free time to write, process my traumas, and read anything I could find about spirituality and spiritual concepts.   Most importantly, I had peace, and I started to find my hope in the future again.

I came out of my dark night of the soul seeking my purpose in life – a purpose greater than one that served only me.  And most importantly, I found gratitude for not just the good in life, but also for the pain, the trauma, and the setbacks. They have taught me the toughest lessons needed for my soul’s growth, evolution, and highest good.

What’s your awakening story?

Love,

Phoenix Rising