"Did spiritual awakening ruin my life?"
The question rarely arrives all at once. Perhaps you left a job to give your search for awakening more time. Perhaps your savings went on retreats and courses, or someone close to you stopped understanding what you were doing. You may have been told it was all part of the process. Today, months or years later, you look at what is left and wonder whether it was all a mistake.
Others are asking it too. Google's own search suggestions include "spiritual awakening ruined my life", "spiritual awakening destroyed my life" and even "i wish i never had a spiritual awakening".
Here is my answer, put as gently as possible. Spiritual awakening did not ruin your life, and it cannot ruin anyone's.
The search for it, however, can cost a great deal — and what you lost deserves to be acknowledged, not explained away.
Some websites insist your old life HAD to fall apart
Read the pages that answer these searches, and one story comes back again and again. Your old life had to fall apart, they say, because your ego was dying. The losses happened for you, not to you. One writer even calls each collapse a "mercy". Hold on, they add, trust the process, and you will come out on the other side at peace.
Many of those pages also have something to sell: a course, a workbook or a membership.
I can see why this story comforts people. It gives every loss a purpose, and it promises an ending.
But it asks something of you in return. It asks you to call your losses good before you have even had the chance to grieve them.
A loss deserves grief, however others name it
When a lost job becomes part of some higher plan, and a broken relationship becomes your ego dying, nothing is left to grieve. The story expects you to feel grateful instead. And if you cannot feel grateful, you begin to suspect that the fault is yours.
A loss is a loss. The work you gave up, the money you spent, the person who left — each of them mattered to you, and each of them hurts. That hurt is not a sign of anything. It is grief, and grief is simply what love does when something it cared for is gone.
So be wary of anyone who says it all happened for a reason (nobody can know that). What is true is that you may mourn what you lost, without calling it a lesson.
Awakening takes nothing away from your life
Now let me turn to the word itself. In this post, "spiritual awakening" does not describe anything that occurs in your life. The word points to something you already are: awareness itself, which notices each thought, each feeling and each loss.
That awareness came before your search began. It was present on the hardest day of it. It is present as you read these words.
Something that is always present cannot suddenly arrive and wreck anything. It has no hands to take your work, your savings or the people you love. Whatever you lost, awakening did not take it from you.
The same line runs through my post on friends who drift away: a search can end a friendship, but awakening never does. It holds for a whole life, too.
Seeking awakening can be costly
The search can cost you something, then, and so can the ordinary events of any life, whether you search or not. I do not say this to blame you. Most people who seek awakening do so sincerely (and often at great expense to themselves).
Think of what the search asks of people over the years. Retreats and courses cost money. A daily practice costs hours. Some people leave their work, or move to be near a teacher. Others grow quiet at home, because nobody there speaks the spiritual language they have learned. Each of these is a choice made in awakening's name, and each one can leave its mark.
So if the search has shaken your life, a gentler question may help. Instead of asking "what did awakening do to me?", you might ask "what did I give to the search, and what was I hoping it would bring me?"
Novelist Leo Tolstoy had everything, yet lost his footing
The Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, who wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, learned what a search for meaning can cost. By his own account, Tolstoy was not yet fifty and enjoyed what people call complete good fortune: a wife he loved, good children, a large estate and fame.
Then, as he describes it, moments of "arrest of life" began to come, when he did not know what to do or how to live. They came again and again, always with the same questions: "What is it for? What does it lead to?" Even the thought of becoming more famous than any writer in the world only raised another question: and what of it? He could find no answer.
Nothing around the novelist was different. His wife, his children and his estate were all still there. What gave way was inside the man himself — the meaning he had expected his life to deliver.
A search can shake a life in this way too. It can work from the inside, through the stakes you place on finding something, even while everything outside stays where it was.
Do you regret your spiritual search?
Some people do, and they say so. Type "i regret my spiritual awakening" into Google, and it even offers "i hate my spiritual awakening".
Regret is an honest feeling, and you may feel it. The search may have taken years you would rather have spent elsewhere, or people you still miss. Saying so does not make you ungrateful, and it does not make you unspiritual either.
There comes a point, though, when looking back stops helping. Turning the same years over and over in your mind cannot give them back to you. Let the regret say what it needs to say… and then let your attention return to the life in front of you.
If a low mood or a lack of motivation has stayed with you for weeks, please see a doctor and tell them what has changed.
If you ever find yourself thinking about ending your life, please speak to someone now — a friend, a doctor, or a free helpline: 116 123 (UK and Ireland), 988 (US and Canada), 13 11 14 (Australia). If you ever think of harming yourself, call your local emergency services straight away: 999 or 112 (UK and Ireland), 911 (US and Canada), 000 (Australia).
You may stop looking for awakening… it needs no undoing
Google also suggests "can you reverse a spiritual awakening" and "how to stop a spiritual awakening". Both questions carry the same wish: to have your old life back.
That wish makes sense. As for awakening, there is nothing to reverse: it never happened to you as an event, so it needs no undoing.
What you can stop is your search. You can set it down today — not because you have failed, but because what you sought has been you all along.
Stopping your search does not mean giving up your work, your practice or your questions. It means you no longer need any of them to deliver you somewhere else.
Seeing what I am cost me nothing: same job, same life
I can only speak for myself here. I searched for twenty-five years. When I came to see that I was what I had been searching for, I still went to the same job. "Nothing in my external circumstances changed at that time," as I wrote on my About page. "What changed was where I was standing when I looked – in any direction (including inside of me)."
For years I kept trying to solve the arithmetic of my life, with my work on one side and my search on the other. The problem, I saw, was never the job. It was the arithmetic itself — the very idea that my life came in two sides at all.
And the freedom I had been looking for, somewhere far ahead of me, had been exactly where I stood the whole time. From outside, my days looked just as they did before, yet the change in me was real.
Whatever you have lost, you are welcome beside me
If your search has cost you more than you expected, you do not need another method to repair the damage. Nobody can give back what you lost, and I will not call your losses a gift.
What you need is company while you grieve, and while you notice what was never taken from you. That company I can give.
I invite you to dive in and swim as you are. Bring the losses, the regret and the questions with you, because nothing needs fixing first.
Spiritual awakening points at you, aware through every loss
Your losses happened in your life, and your life is where they hurt. Spiritual awakening points at something your losses never reached: you, aware through every one of them.
That awareness did not leave when the work went, or the money, or someone close to you. Of everything you have lived through, it alone was never at stake.
Spiritual awakening cannot ruin your life, but chasing it can. And right now, whatever you have lost, you are aware — just as you were before any of it began.