Spiritual awakening is usually described as bliss or terror
Perhaps something has shifted in you lately — a mood you cannot name, or a sense that your life looks different — and you wonder whether it could be an awakening. So you went looking online and asked: what does a spiritual awakening feel like? The answers you found probably fell into two groups.
The first group is full of promise. It speaks of hope and a deep joy. Your senses sharpen, it says, and some pages even mention sensing the energies around you.
The second group warns you instead: you may feel restless, confused or cut off from everyone. The questions people type into Google tell a similar story. Why does awakening feel like death? Why do I feel crazy, empty or lost? Can it feel like a nervous breakdown?
Both groups agree on one thing, though. Awakening, they say, feels unlike anything you know, and it is extraordinary, either wonderfully or terribly.
My answer is different, and it is right there in the title of this post. Spiritual awakening feels like being who you truly are, here and now. (Yes, that is all — and it is a great deal.) The rest of the post explains what I mean.
Ecstasy and fear pass, as every mood does
Start with the joyful answers. Such joy is real — I would never want you to doubt it — but think of the happiest hour you can remember. That hour came and filled you, and then it was gone.
The frightening states go the same way. Two of them appear again and again. The dark night is a long stretch of despair, and the void is a spell of emptiness when everything seems pointless. Even these lift eventually, sometimes within days and sometimes only after months. Bliss, the dark night and the void are passing experiences, like every mood you have ever had.
That is the trouble with the usual answers. If awakening felt like ecstasy, it would end when the ecstasy did. If it felt like terror, you would have to lose it before you could feel well again.
Through every one of those moods, someone is there to feel it. The one who feels them stays, while the moods come and go.
A sense of dying is not a sign of progress
One of the warnings needs more care than the others. People ask why spiritual awakening feels like death. Some pages tell them that the ego must die first. Here the ego means the person you believe yourself to be — your name, your story and your opinions about your own worth. Dying, these pages add, always hurts.
I wrote recently that awakening is not painful, although waiting for it is. Even so, the feeling of dying can be real, and it can be frightening. It may come with panic, or with an odd impression that the world is far away.
Yet such a feeling is no measure of progress, because there is no distance to cover between you and who you are. The fear happens to you where you are, as any fear does.
So if this feeling has frightened you, you are not passing a test. You are afraid, and fear deserves care.
If panic or confusion overwhelms you, talk to a doctor
That care comes before any spiritual idea, including mine. Some of what people call awakening is your body or mind needing medical help. Perhaps you have hardly slept for weeks, or nothing looks real for days on end. The fear may keep you from working, eating or seeing anyone.
Is any of this true for you? Then please book an appointment with your doctor soon. A psychologist or a psychiatrist is another good option. Describe what you feel in your own words. Spiritual terms can wait, and so can deciding what it all means.
If thoughts of harming yourself come up, please contact emergency services at once.
Whatever is true about who you are is just as true at the doctor's.
Who you truly are is more familiar than breathing
Now, then, what is left once you set both kinds of answer aside? What is left is you. Of all the feelings you know, the feeling of being you is the most familiar.
Think of your breathing. It goes on all day without your help. You do not choose each breath, and most of the time you barely notice it. Yet the moment you turn your attention to it, there it is.
Being yourself is closer still. You can hold your breath for a while (go ahead, if you want to), but you cannot stop being you, however hard you try. And to notice a breath at all, you have to be there. The one who notices is you.
This is why the feeling is so easy to miss. It makes no announcement. It is just what being here feels like, so close that you overlook it.
People expect awakening to feel strange. The truth runs the other way. Nothing could feel less strange than being yourself.
Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki said enlightenment is nothing special
A Buddhist monk made this point more than fifty years ago. Shunryu Suzuki was born in Japan and trained in Soto, one of the main schools of Zen. He moved to the United States, founded the San Francisco Zen Center and died in that city in 1971.
His students gathered his talks into a short book, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, first published in 1970. In a chapter called "Nothing Special", Suzuki observes that "for people who have no experience of enlightenment, enlightenment is something wonderful. But if they attain it, it is nothing." (Enlightenment is his word for what this post calls awakening.)
He adds straight away: "But yet it is not nothing." What so many hope to attain is real, then, but quite ordinary. Elsewhere in the chapter, he compares it to family life: "For a mother with children, having children is nothing special."
A mother does not wake each morning amazed that she has children. They are simply her life. Who you are is like that, and just as familiar.
Life happens only in the present moment
Being here, in the present, is the other half of the answer in my title. Try to live, even for a minute, at any time other than now. Nobody can. Your memories reach you now. Your plans for next year are thoughts you are having today. Even your regrets and worries stir in this body, where you feel them.
Many descriptions quietly move awakening into the future. There it waits beyond years of practice, after the dark night, or in some distant season. But every future, when it comes, comes as now.
In other words, you cannot postpone being you. It can only happen here, at this hour, with whatever surrounds you.
That is why it makes little sense to wonder what awakening will feel like one day. The only feeling available to you is this one, here, as you read.
Relief arrives once you give up becoming someone else
If any particular feeling comes with being you, here, it is likely to be gentle. Consider the effort that searching for awakening can cost. You may have tried to become calmer, kinder, purer and more awake. Each new practice promised a "better version" of you, a little further ahead. And each morning, perhaps, you checked whether you had turned into that person yet.
All this effort is tiring, even when the practices themselves are worthwhile. It turns your whole life into a project, and you into the part that never seems good enough.
Imagine, then, dropping the project, for one simple reason: there is nobody else for you to turn into.
What follows is relief — a quiet kind, the ease of having no more to prove. You can stay exactly where you are.
I will not tell you what to feel
Plenty of teachers and retreats, however, will describe the state you are meant to reach. They call it bliss, oneness or unbroken peace. Once you have that picture, you start measuring yourself against it. And you keep falling short, because the picture is a stranger's.
I will not paint you a picture of that sort. Your feelings are your own, and they will change, as feelings do. My part is to point to the one who has them, which is you.
In April this year I wrote a personal manifesto. One line of it reads: "I am not on my way. I am here." It came after twenty-five years of searching (a search that, in its own way, still goes on). The line names a place rather than a feeling, and the place is here.
I cannot live your life for you, and no one else can either. I can only walk beside you, on a path that takes shape and form as you (and I) move.
Pause and notice that you are aware
Before you leave this page, stop reading for a few seconds. Let your eyes rest, or close them. Listen to the sounds around you, near and far. Follow your breath as it goes in and out, without changing it.
Now ask a simple question — and take your time over it: who is aware of all this? Something takes in the sounds and the breath. It takes in this question too. You neither have to search for it nor believe in it. You are it.
Being aware is the one fact you never need to prove, because every proof depends on it.
That fact is who you truly are: quiet, steady and entirely ordinary. It is simply you, here and now. So if someone asks you what spiritual awakening feels like, you can reply from experience: it feels like this.