What a Spiritual Awakening Really Looks Like?

Here's the basic idea.  An awakening can be seen as more of your self coming into your awareness. When this happens, "stuff" gets pushed up to the surface to be looked at, integrated, and the resistance released.  This is the nature of this article.

The cause of resistance for many people’s experience with going through a spiritual awakening is either 1) lack of awareness that it is happening or 2) lack of acceptance to what it looks like (i.e., expectations).

The perception that the "spiritual" is something that is "out there" is very confusing. Yes, there are elements of the spiritual self that are invisible to the eye - this is nonphysical. This is where ideas are tangible, where you, as an idea, exist. We tend to believe that something that cannot be seen is not "here." If it is not "here," then it is somewhere "out there." This is logical, although it is flawed logic based on the premise that only that which can be observed is real, or "here."  Another way to logically comprehend this is that by tuning your inner self, what it is that you perceive external to your physical flesh changes, and therefore the causal agent is not external, it is internal (i.e. there is nothing really "out there").

The idea of the spiritual is that of spirit or that which transcends matter. It is not to say that it NOT matters, but merely the concept that moves through matter. Your spiritual self is intertwined with your physical self, and indeed they are inseparable from this perspective. Everything in our lives is a spiritual experience. There is no one experience that is "more spiritual" than another experience. All expertise is fundamentally absent of this arbitrary allocation of "more or less spiritual." When we have a "more transcendent" experience, we are merely choosing to be more aware of what is there all of the time.

This lack of awareness of our being the one who has authored the story AND the character within it is where we experience the idea of separation in our life. Just as no one's experience is more or less spiritual, there is no such thing as a person that is more or less on their "spiritual path." Some are indeed more or less AWARE of the path, but that relative measurement of awareness does not dictate someone's path.

An incarnation into this body means you are on your spiritual path.

This lack of knowledge, however, brings about the opportunity for confusion. If you are experiencing trauma and drama and have NO IDEA why it is happening, that is to say, you do not recall the intention for your bringing about the injury and tragedy into your experience, you WILL be confused on some level. You may chalk up lessons to simply "trusting" that it is in your best interests, which is essential, but you will not connect back to the part of you that intended it. The awareness of yourself on the journey (the character) and the one that designed it (the author) is the idea of reclaiming your power. Knowledge IS power and applied learning is skilled penmanship.

Many are aware of this idea that they are on a spiritual journey all of the time. They are aware of their non-physical selves, of the soul, of choice to incarnate, and even the mission of it.

Where is the challenge? Expectations.

We have a Spirit Science friend that is SO awake and SO aware of SO MUCH that is going on in the non-physical realms that he spends a considerable amount of energy continuing to feed this curiosity. He found himself in a state of judging himself for contributing to a societal machine - as he views it - that are producing non-optimal outcomes. He struggled to apply this wisdom to his career in marketing and advertising and ultimately chose a reset. He realized that he had a vast amount of expectations for himself about what it meant to be "awake," and in doing so, was not seeing through the illusion of the physical, and therefore was stuck in not fulfilling his physical needs.

The reset involved moving 2,000 miles across the country for a new job and a completely new circle of friends. He's as much on the spiritual path as he was before, just as aware of it, but now has far fewer expectations for how it looks. He's back into designing customer experiences - the first love in retail after college - where he is applying his compassion for people's choices straightforwardly.

So, what is the path anyway?

If we are all on it, where does it lead?

The path is the path to yourself.

It is the perpetual asking and answering the question, "Who am I?" The expectation-less awareness that this is what is happening in each interaction in your life is the basic idea of enlightenment.

Enlightenment is an artificial, undefinable threshold between the attached and unaware and the aware and detached. It is NO BETTER AND NO WORSE than any other form of expression. However, it is one that once experienced - even momentarily - has profound effects on your perspective in your life. What a spiritual awakening looks like from this perspective is MUCH DIFFERENT than what it looks like from an "unenlightened" perspective. As the words describe, one aspect is illuminated, and therefore you see more.

Everything is spiritual, everything is connected, and everything is practical if you allow it to be.