Discover the Hidden Steps of Spiritual Awakening

"Inside this new love, die.
Your way begins on the other side.
Become the sky.
Take an axe to the prison wall.
Escape.
Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.
Do it now.
You're covered with a thick cloud.
Slide out the side. Die,
and be quiet. Quiteness is the surest sign
that you've died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now."
- Rumi - The Essential Rumi - Coleman Barks

Spiritual awakening isn’t a mountaintop moment reserved for monks or mystics. It’s something far messier, more intimate, and often more disorienting than most people expect.

It usually begins with a quiet rupture, the sense that something about your life doesn’t fit anymore. The roles you play, the stories you’ve inherited, they start to feel hollow, and you wonder, there’s more than this.

What follows is one phase that asks you to dismantle everything you thought was true. Another brings you face to face with parts of yourself you spent years avoiding. 

Traditions like Tantra remind us that awakening is about weaving the sacred into every part of your lived experience until there’s no part of you left outside the temple.

In this article, we’ll map the deeper layers of awakening and the practices that keep you anchored when everything else falls away.

Understanding Spiritual Awakening

Spiritual awakening often begins with a rupture you can’t explain. You’re going through the motions and then suddenly, something stops making sense, with a sense that what once held meaning now feels synthetic. 

It can feel like losing everything. But what you’re actually losing is the social mask and the coping mechanisms and conditioning that once kept you safe.

What no one tells you is that awakening is deeply physical. Your body will rebel. Fatigue, rage, insomnia, inexplicable emotion are part of the process.

You might resist it. You’ll reach for the old spiritual tools that once worked only to find they don’t touch this. That’s because awakening isn’t something you do. It’s something that happens when all your strategies stop working.

Universal Themes of Awakening

• A Truth You Can’t Unsee: At some point, awakening confronts you with a truth that rises from your gut and exposes what’s been false in your life, even the parts you worked hard to make believable. 

• The Collapse of Certainty: Questions like Who am I? and Why does any of this matter? become urgent. You’re staring into the structure of your reality and realizing it’s shakier than you thought. 

• The Shedding of Inherited Frameworks: What once fit, roles, beliefs, identities, starts to feel hollow. You begin peeling off ways of being that were never really yours. 

Stages of Spiritual Awakening: A Detailed Roadmap

Stage 1: The Call to Awakening (Spiritual Curiosity)

The journey begins with a faint nudge that your current life might just be scratching the surface of who you can really be.

This phase often feels like a mix of restless curiosity and a nagging sense that something bigger is right ahead, guiding you to explore your own path.

Signs of Stage 1:

• Feeling stuck or uninspired in your routine.
• A sudden fascination with spiritual books, philosophies, or existential questions.
• An unshakable sense that there’s more to life than what you see or experience daily.
• A heightened awareness of synchronicities, such as repeated patterns, numbers, or coincidences.
• Unexplained bursts of emotion or nostalgia.
• A deep desire to disconnect from shallow or toxic influences.
• Sudden longing to find your truths and connect with what matters mos

Stage 2: The Dark Night of the Soul

The Dark Night is an unavoidable stage of awakening where you confront past traumas, dismantle the false masks you’ve worn, and sit with the raw discomfort of inner work.

The pain feels paradoxical here: it’s gut-wrenching, but it’s also the birthplace of your most profound freedom, personal growth, and transformation.

This phase mirrors the “valley orgasm,” a moment of deep surrender that cracks you open in ways you didn’t know were possible. Resistance fades, and transformation quietly takes root during this phase.

You might feel intense emotional swings like sudden sadness, anger, or bursts of longing that catch you off guard. It can feel as though the ground beneath you is shifting, leaving you lost or disconnected.

On a physical level, fatigue or restlessness might creep in, mirroring the inner turmoil as your old self starts to transform into something new and authentic.

Practical Guidance:

• Explore movement-based meditation practices like Osho's meditations. These dynamic and active meditations were created to shake off pent-up energy and rediscover clarity.
• Create space for stillness. Even five minutes of quiet reflection daily can work wonders, helping you process emotions and thoughts without the heavy weight of judgment.
• Reach out to someone who can help light your way. This could be a trusted mentor, therapist, or spiritual guide who knows the terrain and can offer you both compassion and perspective. This journey isn’t meant to be trodden alone.

Stage 5: Living the Awakening

Living the awakening means you are no longer seeking God outside yourself. You recognize that the divine is the ground of every moment, even the ones that feel painful.

You let consciousness fully occupy your humanity. You wash the dishes with the same awareness you once reserved for meditation. You speak with others to meet the soul behind their words. You move through life as if everything is part of the path, because it is.

You no longer separate “spiritual” and “ordinary.”  You can rest in stillness, in emptiness, in “nothing happening.” Because your sense of connection depends on being present.

You see through the illusion of identity, but you still show up for life. You laugh at your own conditioning without collapsing into it. You are rooted in awareness, and you live close to the ground of Being because you’ve stopped needing to get anywhere else.

Living the awakening means letting the divine see through your eyes and speak through your voice.

Focus

• View difficulties as catalysts for deeper connection and understanding.
• Seek teachings and practices that further expand and deepen your spiritual journey.
• Explore books and articles that resonate with your spiritual path.
• Join a spiritual workshop or mindfulness program to gain structured guidance.
• Reflect on lessons learned, even from challenges.
• Dedicate time to quietly absorb and integrate new insights.

Steps to Embark on Your Awakening Journey

Self-Reflection and Introspection

Self-reflection is sitting in the discomfort of what you already know but haven’t admitted. It asks you to examine the ways you lie to yourself to keep the peace. To notice the small betrayals you normalize daily where you keep shrinking just to stay wanted.

If you’re serious about awakening, you’ll need to stop bypassing with pretty words and start naming what actually feels off.

Are you still performing the version of you that gets approval, avoids conflict, or maintains stability at the cost of aliveness?

Where do you feel disgust, jealousy, numbness, boredom, and what are those emotions trying to signal? If you’re avoiding a feeling, you’re avoiding a truth.

What conversations do you keep avoiding because you know they’d change things? Those are the doors you’re afraid to open, and the exact places your energy is leaking.

Create a “soul inventory”:

• What drains you consistently, no matter how much you rationalize it?
• What enlivens you, deeply, even if it makes no practical sense?
• What are you willing to lose in order to stop abandoning yourself?

Then write. Say the thing you’ve been editing out of your story because it makes you feel too intense That’s probably where your truth lives.

Learn from Spiritual Teachers

Learning from teachers provides insights and inspiration to deepen your spiritual understanding. Basically, you’re gaining wisdom from those who have walked this path before you.

• Explore teachings from guides like Osho, particularly his insights on transcending duality and embracing the "watcher within."
• Study sacred texts such as the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching for timeless wisdom.
• Attend spiritual retreats like Vipassana or events on Tantra to gain immersive, hands-on learning.

Challenges Along the Spiritual Path

Navigating the Dark Night of the Soul

The Dark Night of the Soul is a state of psychic disintegration. It’s the collapse of meaning itself. What used to make sense no longer does. 

This stage often comes after a period of spiritual opening and things may have felt expansive for a while, full of synchronicity, clarity, connection ,and then suddenly, it all goes dark. You feel disconnected from yourself, your guides, your purpose. It can feel like spiritual abandonment, but in truth, it is the clearing out of anything built on illusion.

You begin to grieve what you didn’t know you were carrying. You come face to face with core wounds you thought you had already healed. You question everything, and that questioning is holy.

To move through this terrain, you must stop trying to “fix” it. You must allow what is collapsing to collapse. Stay close to your body, eat grounding foods, track your dreams. Let your nervous system down-regulate through slow breath and non-linear movement. Don’t chase light, stay with what’s real.

Overcoming Ego Resistance

The ego’s job is to keep you safe, by keeping things familiar. Even when that familiarity is stifling.

Growth, however, doesn’t happen inside the familiar. It happens in the rupture. If you want to weaken egoic control, don’t try to kill it off. Interrupt it.

Do one thing differently to be free. Loosen your grip on a routine you defend religiously. Cancel something you’re doing out of obligation and let yourself sit still for five minutes without filling the silence with scrolling or strategy.

Instead of declaring “I trust the universe,” ask: Can I tolerate not knowing? If you want to feel what non-attachment actually is, don’t be too stuck to your identity and beliefs. 

Balancing the Inner and Outer Worlds

Living an awakened life doesn’t mean transcending the material world but rather learning how to stay in it without getting swallowed by it. The real work is returning to your inbox, your partner, your child, your calendar, with your integrity still intact.

Your inner world has changed. Your values have shifted. But your external life may not have caught up. You still have bills to pay, people to answer to, noise all around you. The work now is to bridge the two realities by weaving them into one coherent life.

Start by noticing where the split happens. Is it in the way you speak differently around certain people to avoid discomfort? Is it in the way you abandon your inner stillness the moment the pace picks up? Or in how you intellectualize your spirituality but still avoid being seen emotionally?

Rather than aiming for balance as a fixed state, treat it as a constant recalibration. Set aside time each week, even just 10 minutes, to ask yourself:

• Where did I override my inner knowing this week in order to stay “functional”?
• Where did I pause, even briefly, and let my inner world guide how I responded?
• What do I need to reclaim or re-commit to in the coming days?

Achieving Unity Consciousness

Unity consciousness is the collapse of the illusion that you were ever separate in the first place.

It’s something that happens when the boundaries you’ve built between self and other, subject and object, start to dissolve because they no longer hold under close observation.

In this state, you stop relating to life through labels. The tree is not “a tree,” it’s a living presence. The stranger’s eyes aren’t “their eyes,” they are you, looking back at yourself. Time loses its grip. Thought slows down, because there's no one left to think the thoughts.

These moments arrive in unguarded slivers of time. For me, it often shows up as standing in line at a store and suddenly feeling the heartbeat of the woman next to you as your own or looking at a dead insect and crying without knowing why.

Deepen your understanding by exploring Sufi poetry or Zen koans, which illuminate the nature of unity with profound simplicity. 

Conclusion

Spiritual awakening is a wild, beautiful, life-changing process of becoming your most authentic self. And this awakening starts as a whisper, teasing you with the idea that there’s more to life than this.

Then it becomes a deafening roar that dismantles everything you thought you knew, stripping away the limits you once clung to.

What’s left? Just you: raw, fearless, and finally free.

This journey will shake you, test you, and ask for more courage than you thought you had. But it’s worth every step. Along the way, you’ll find clarity where there was once confusion, and purpose where there was doubt.

FAQ

What is the process of a spiritual awakening?

Awareness is the first spark, an inner knowing that there’s more to life than what meets the eye. This curiosity deepens, leading to exploration of spiritual ideas and practices. As the journey unfolds, healing becomes essential, bringing old wounds and limiting beliefs to the surface for release.

With healing comes clarity, where your true self emerges, free from past conditioning. This newfound awareness must then be integrated into daily life, bridging spirituality with practical living. As integration deepens, a sense of unity develops, dissolving the illusion of separation. The final stage is embodiment, where enlightenment is not just understood but lived, radiating truth and connection in every action.

What are the 7 spiritual levels?

Hearing the call is the first step, a deep longing for purpose and meaning. This leads to facing the shadows, where fears and old patterns must be confronted. As you move through this, discovering inner truths brings clarity and freedom, allowing you to release what no longer serves you.

Next is living in alignment, where spiritual insights are applied to daily choices and actions. The final step is embodying unity, where you experience deep connection with yourself, others, and the universe, living from a place of wisdom and authenticity.

What are the 5 steps to spiritual enlightenment?

1. Hearing the Call: Recognize the longing for more meaning in your life.
2. Facing the Shadows: Confront emotional wounds and limiting beliefs.
3. Discovering Inner Truths: Gain clarity and let go of what no longer serves.
4. Living in Alignment: Integrate spiritual insights into everyday actions.
5. Embodying Unity: Radiate balance and connection in all aspects of your life.

Author

Danelle Ferreira

Danelle Ferreira, also known as Ellastrology, is the creative force behind the Tantra Essence blog, where she passionately explores and shares the transformative power of Tantra. As the editor and manager, Danelle curates content that delves deep into spiritual growth, self-discovery, and the intimate connections that Tantra fosters.