Spiritual Emergency
For years, I had no framework for understanding a massive shift in consciousness that had launched me out of a lifetime of pain.
From 2016 - 2018, I suffered what seemed like an unfair string of unbearable losses: the death of my father, the end of a 25-year marriage, an empty nest, the loss of my home, health challenges, stress at work, and conflict on court.
During this time, I entered into a relationship built on lies. The pull between an insatiable need for validation and love, coupled with a deliberate choice to betray my own values, cost me my integrity and threatened my mental and emotional stability.
On March 22, 2018, I ended the relationship because it was the right thing to do. However, turning my back on the only person who had ever truly seen me felt like the final blow in a series of losses, and it almost killed me. Over the next 10 days, time ceased to exist as I slipped into a darkness more sinister than anything I had ever faced before. Hurt and abandoned by nearly everyone in my life, I struggled to breathe, crushed beneath the weight of pathological loneliness. When I lost my will to live, I faced a Dark Night of the Soul - a feeling of utter hopelessness, worthlessness, and fear.
In desperate need of help, on March 31, I reached out to my coach, Anna. Thankfully, she stepped up. Gently reminding me to take responsibility for my own thoughts and feelings (and release a pattern of victimhood and blame), she recommended I have a look at the website for Choose Again. While pouring over the website, I felt a glimmer of hope. Here was something that might be able to help me.
I thought I could assimilate the philosophy with the help of a long-distance Choose Again representative, but the call fell through. I turned to Anna again, and she agreed to drive me to a local Choose Again therapy circle on April 4.
April 4, 2018
Armed with a new way of thinking, including the possibility that who “I am” might be an embodiment of unconditional love, I attended the Wednesday Circle with Anna.
Feeling fragile as a lost child, and shaking with fear at the gaping hole that loomed beneath my feet, I agreed to participate in a forgiveness exercise.
The experience was terrifying, but deeply authentic, supported, and profound.
April 5, 2018
During the early morning hours of April 5, I felt the ego release.
Wonder-filled childhood memories flooded back into my mind as the energies of joy and Love filled my heart.
Something had happened at that Wednesday Circle that I still cannot fully explain.
I simply knew that something had changed.
Five hours after the Wednesday Circle, the penny dropped.
April 6, 2018
While contemplating the events of the night before, at about 3 am on April 6, it came to me like a sunrise.
The painful events in my life were not meant to hurt me. No matter how crushing, they were meant to help me align with my true Self.
Life had unfolded exactly as it should so that I could finally wake up and find peace.
This awareness allowed me not only to forgive myself and my inner child, but also the people and events I had previously experienced as betrayals. When I began to see those who had hurt me as those who had “helped” me, I could also see the ways in which I had been supported by Spirit - an epiphany that turned old beliefs upside-down and made me weep with gratitude and remorse.
I had never been alone.
Blissfully reconnected with Source, I remembered my soul and was flooded with relief, joy, light, Love, and peace.
I was me again.
I didn’t have to be afraid anymore.
This was the point of transformation.
And, I felt safe for the first time in my life.
I had spent most of my life as a non-believer. And yet, having come face to face as it were, with the energy of Divine Love on the morning of April 6, I could no longer deny the existence of some sort of higher power(s). I didn't have the language for what I experienced then. Even now, I'm not sure what to call it. God? Source? Divine Love? Higher consciousness? I understand now that the label is not important. But I’ll never forget how it felt - as if peace and joy and Love and a Higher Power were all intermingled with my soul in glorious, shimmering light. There was no doubt. No confusion. It made perfect sense to every aspect of ‘me’ and I knew that it was true - that it has always been true and that it will always be true. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
I may never fully understand exactly what happened during those three days. What I do know is that I had made a series of choices to change the way I was thinking. And then something far more profound happened when I changed a core belief - something I had neither planned nor expected.
Perhaps I could not have made this transformation alone.
Perhaps being surrounded by like-minded people at the Wednesday Circle, gathered together in a shared energy of support and holding the belief that we embody Love, somehow facilitated a reconnection with my Self and my soul.
I just don't know.
Three days that changed everything
In three days, I had shifted from the edge of self-destruction to a state of profound peace and enlightenment - a change that can (as I have since learned) take much longer. Sometimes a lifetime. Sometimes several lifetimes.
Within a few days, it became clear that landing so suddenly in a state of euphoria was not all it was cracked up to be. I was taken to hospital - apparently in a manic state. People were worried about me. I, on the other hand, had never been happier…or felt more completely well in my entire life.
The paradox was real, but so were the circumstances that followed my extraordinary breakthrough. Doctors believed I had a mental illness and so (naturally) did everyone around me, including my closest family and friends. I was treated for bipolar disorder and prescribed medication that made me feel sick. Even though I was alone and unsupported by the humans in my life, I desperately needed to understand what had happened to me so I could stop taking the drugs.
So, I began searching the internet. And I searched for a very long time.
Finding Spiritual Emergence
Three years later, I finally hit pay dirt when I found a website called Spiritual Emergence.
I remember the impact I felt while reading the opening paragraph on the Home page of their website. Seeing the words Spiritual Emergency hit me in the chest with such force that I felt slightly stunned. Years of confusion and anxiety were explained clearly - right there in front of me - in black and white.
There were words for it.
There were other people who had experienced something similar.
For me, this was enormous.
I’d been hospitalized twice since the breakthrough. Once following the initial explosion of joy, and again six months later following what’s known as “The Purge” - an expulsion of any remaining darkness, such as unexpressed anger. Each time, I was required to stay in the psych ward for 10 days before being released, and each visit was harrowing for its own reasons.
The Purge had blindsided me with such force that I occasionally wondered if the doctors might have been right and I might have been wrong.
Finding the Spiritual Emergence website provided a framework. It helped me trust that spontaneous spiritual awakenings are real and that I was not alone. The information gave me another way to understand what had happened to me, challenged the diagnosis I had been given, and released an enormous amount of anxiety.
It also gave me powerful motivation to continue writing Lightworker.
The subject of Phil Borges’ video*, Adam, had undergone a similar spiritual emergency. Hospitalized and treated with multiple medications for psychosis, he was eventually left broken and homeless. Had it not been for my sheer stubbornness to stand in the truth of my own experience, I might have met with the same fate.
As more and more people experience spiritual awakenings, I believe it is important to raise awareness so that people going through these profound experiences have access to a broader range of information and support. Greater awareness may help prevent people from being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, or mistreated simply because there is not yet enough understanding of what they are experiencing.
Knowledge is power.
D 🩵
* Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening, by Phil Borges
