Wysdomly

Navigating the Most Challenging Stage of Spiritual Awakening

Spiritual awakening is not a single moment of enlightenment, but a cyclic process of growth. Over time, through both my own journey and witnessing others, I began to notice that this transformation often moves through three distinct phases, each with its own lessons and initiations.

I began calling them The Three Phases of Awakening, symbolically represented by three archetypes from the tarot:

• The Tower – the collapse of the false self, when life as you know it begins to fall apart.
• The Hermit – the inward journey, when you are stripped of external anchors and forced to face yourself.
• The Fool – the re-emergence, when a new self begins to integrate and walk in the world again.

These are not fixed stages but movements of consciousness as we grow and expand beyond our limited self. It’s a universal and timeless process of transformation that every soul passes through in some form.

The Archetype of The Hermit

In Tarot, The Hermit represents introspection, solitude, and the quest for inner truth. He stands alone on a mountain peak, lantern in hand, symbolising the retreat from the external world and its distractions. He is going inward to connect to the inner light of his consciousness.

The Hermit is the seeker who must walk through the valley of shadows. This phase is not chosen but commanded by the soul. Life removes the noise so that the inner voice can finally be heard.

Like all archetypes of transformation, The Hermit represents a universal process of inner alchemy.

The Inner Descent

There is no escape, and there is no where to turn but within.

The soul has created the curriculum for your awakening. You are being forced to turn inward by a deeper intelligence that knows exactly what it’s doing.

After The Tower collapses, you often find yourself in a void, a period of external nothingness where life as you knew it no longer exists. It’s not random or cruel, it’s often a perfectly orchestrated period of isolation, disconnected from your previous “normal” life.

You’re no longer able to distract yourself in the same ways. Life stops giving you the old forms of comfort or validation. This withdrawal is the soul’s way of turning your attention inward so that the deeper healing can begin.

We’re forced to look at ourselves directly and with complete honesty, without defensiveness, avoidance, or denial. Once the awakening process is set in motion, a self-directed energy pushes us inward. We are forced to go into deeper introspection and review, just as The Hermit archetype does in the tarot.

This is not a passive process. We have to participate in it consciously. Like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, we’re pulled into our own inner world where we begin to uncover subconscious programming, limiting beliefs, old wounds, and dysfunctional patterns that have quietly shaped our lives.

It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain.
– Michael A. Singer

What begins to surface are not just emotions, but memories, energetic imprints, soul wounds and unresolved experiences we’ve suppressed to stay safe or functional. They rise because the soul knows it’s time to release them from the shadow of unconsciousness and integrate them back into light.

We are learning to detach from the mind and its disturbances through this process of introspection. We’re learning to observe without reacting, to feel without collapsing. But this can be extremely difficult for the ego-self, which has spent an entire lifetime avoiding this level of self-confrontation.

The ego’s job has always been to protect, to keep us safe, accepted, and in control. Because it is oriented toward the external world, it cannot understand or trust this new movement inward. It sees it as a threat, not a healing.

And so it fights back. It resists. It tries to reassert control by clinging to old identities and rebuilding the familiar. This is the real source of resistance in awakening, not the pain itself, but the ego’s refusal to face it.

The pain is the unfreezing of energy locked out of sight by your ego for survival. Each emotion surfacing is a fragment of an aspect of your consciousness returning home.

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Ego Death – A Shift in Perspective

Learning to transcend the ego is an essential part of spiritual awakening, and it’s often described as “ego death.” This term can be misleading, though, and can create unnecessary fear. We are not trying to destroy or even reject or vilify the ego.

You are losing your sense of ‘I’ which is the ego. It doesn’t want to lose control because it thinks this means its death. It’s been running your show all your life. The ego isn’t bad, it just has its own fixed perspective, its own job. It doesn’t understand what’s going on, it can’t ‘see’ what your higher self sees. But unfortunately it dominates our thinking.

As the spiritual teacher Adyashanti explains, the ego is not a fixed entity – it’s a perspective. It arises from the accumulation of experiences, conditioning, and memories in the human psyche, forming what we believe to be our identity. In truth, it’s not stable or solid, but because we identify with it so completely, we say, “I am that.”

Ego death, then, is not the end of something real. It’s the shift away from identification with this learned, conditioned self toward a broader, more holistic awareness, one that belongs to the higher self or unity consciousness.

Adyashanti describes it as a “transition experience,” a movement from ego-self consciousness (conditioned) to higher-self consciousness (unconditioned).

However, because we are dissolving so much of what we unconsciously believed ourselves to be, this transition can feel like a form of death to the personality. The worldview, beliefs, and truths we once used to navigate life start to collapse. The familiar sense of “me” begins to lose its footing.

For some, this can be experienced dramatically – like the ground giving way beneath your feet. But in essence, it’s merely a change in perception: the recognition that who you thought you were was never the whole truth of what you are.

The Psychological and Physical Recalibration

Spiritual awakening isn’t just a metaphysical concept, it affects our mind and body complex too.

As the old energetic imprints release, your nervous system, mind, and body recalibrate.
You may feel exhaustion, brain fog, anxiety, or sudden bursts of emotion. The body is detoxing itself of trapped and frozen energy.

There is still your whole human structure – your body, your mind, and your personality. Awakening can often be experienced as very disorienting to this human structure. – Adyashanti, The End of Your World: Uncensored Straight Talk on the Nature of Enlightenment

We often underestimate how deeply our mental and emotional patterns are woven into our physiology. When you change your internal structure, your whole system must reorganise.

This can be frightening to the ego, but this is how your consciousness rewires itself to embody more light.

Rest. Hydrate. Ground. Let the energies move through. The purification process is not linear, it happens in waves. Some days you will feel elevated and clear, others heavy and lost. Both are necessary.

The Void

Eventually, you feel suspended between worlds, detached from the old, yet unable to anchor in the new.

This is the void, the liminal space between identities. The ego sees it as meaninglessness, but the soul recognises it as potential.

It’s the same silence that precedes creation, the zero point where everything dissolves so that something new can form. In this stillness, the mind panics. It wants to fix, plan, rebuild. But every attempt to move externally is blocked until the internal alignment is complete.

What feels like stagnation is sacred reconfiguration.

The Gifts of the Hermit

This phase is one of the most demanding initiations of awakening and also one of the most transformative.

As the ego’s resistance softens, you begin to witness your thoughts without fusing with them. You see how your old patterns created suffering, and you start to release them without judgment.

A deeper trust begins to form, not in outcomes, but in the intelligence guiding the process.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own Soul.
– Swami Vivekananda

The solitude that once felt like punishment becomes sacred space. You begin to recognise your own inner authority, not as ego confidence, but as alignment with consciousness itself.

Tips for navigating the Hermit Phase of awakening

Your awakening curriculum is unique to you

Consider how unique you are: your world view, your education, beliefs, personality, your traumas, upbringing, country of origin, religious/not religious, and so on, in a myriad of configurations.

You are so unique in your complexity, that the lens through which you view and experience your life is yours alone.

Thus no two awakenings are the same. Your soul designed a path perfectly attuned to your personality, your wounds, your strengths, and your evolution.

The way you awaken – whether quiet and reflective or shocking and disruptive – is no accident. There’s no single formula, no right or wrong way to do this. Comparison is a distraction, your path will unfold in the way that fits your soul’s design.

There is no one-fits-all process or formula.

It can be challenging to let go of much of your old identity and open to a new, heart-centered way of living”, Jeshua added. “Yet, this is the soul’s truest desire, and it therefore took the opportunity to incarnate at this time.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Trust the process

Your Soul knows what it’s doing to wake you up, because it knows you better than anyone, even yourself. It orchestrates the perfect sequence of experiences to unravel what is false and strengthen what is true.

Often, you’ll only understand your inner work in hindsight. During my awakening I was guided to articles, books and videos that always gave me an inner understanding or healing that I didn’t even understand at the time. My inner intelligence knew what I needed to do and it was 100% right. Often my mind didn’t know what was happening until after the event because the process was totally Soul-directed.

The more you can trust this inner intelligence – even when it seems to drag you to face pain you don’t want to look at – the more quickly resistance dissolves. That’s because trusting the process dissolves an incredible amount of personality-level resistance, allowing you to move through your healing faster.

True healing comes from within. It often takes more time than the personality expects and that can make people desperate. However, your soul has provided you with the tools to heal yourself. It will create people and circumstances in your life that will in some way help you, even if you do not realise it. But foremost, you have incredible power available within you.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Take responsibility for your growth

Awakening is a solo path. You have to take radical ownership for your healing – to face your shadows, your fears, to recognise your part in the patterns that reappear, no matter how hard it is, or how victimised your personality feels.

Others can support or mirror you, but no one can do the inner work for you. There’s no way to bypass your inner work. There’s nowhere to run, except within yourself. Growth at this level requires courage and perseverance because it’s not easy to look inside ourselves and stare at our wounds – there’s a surprising amount of resistance within us to heal.

When fear arises, remember this: You knew before you were born that fear would be a prominent component of your earthly experience. To know fear while in body is part of your plan. And so be very certain of this: Only the courageous plan fear. The courage it took to plan fear is the same courage it now takes to transform it.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Don’t dismiss or compare your experiences

The ego loves to measure spiritual progress. But awakening doesn’t follow linear milestones. Some experiences feel transcendent; others feel brutal. None are more “advanced.” What’s happening through you is sacred precisely because it’s yours.

Ignore anyone that tries to negate your feelings or experiences, especially your own mind. There’s a million voices outside and inside your head that are not able to validate your highest truth, because they are not coming from your highest truth.

Don’t invalidate your own process because it looks different from someone else’s concepts, descriptions and experiences. Everyone is simply making sense of their journey, in accordance with the level of consciousness they are at in that moment. Practice discernment and take what resonates and dismiss that which doesn’t.

Each person is a vital thread within this tapestry. If just one thread were removed, the entire tapestry would unravel. In our seeming separation from one another, we often cannot see that we are essential; instead, we feel small, insignificant, even meaningless.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Keep an open mind

Your mind will try to grasp awakening as a concept, but awakening is the death of concepts. Stay open to not knowing. The truth unfolds moment by moment. Every time you release the need to define, explain, or categorise, you open space for the new consciousness to anchor more deeply.

You inner self is guiding you and its intuitive knowing and nudges don’t always start off in your thinking mind. In fact, sometimes the mind is the last to know.

If you do get stuck in overthinking, re-mind yourself that this is the ego-self trying to find answers to make things okay, rather than trusting in your higher self. Your mind probably has many concepts – misconceptions – about awakening, spiritual experiences, enlightenment and so on. They can create even more resistance, so keeping an open mind really can help your journey.

The bubble of bias that you come in with shields you from all realities that are not in your bubble. It shields you from the negative, and it shields you from the positive. Instead of coming in with a totally open mind, you carry in with you a pre-set of the way you think things work. If you’re presented, therefore, with something that is not in your bubble of reality, your analysis is not to allow it. You block it from even being discussed.
– Kryon channelling by Lee Carroll, The Recalibration of Humanity: 2013 and Beyond

Your suffering is real

Awakening doesn’t mean becoming superhuman. It’s not about transcending emotion or erasing pain. It’s about integrating your light and shadow, seeing your fear, grief, and anger through the compassionate eyes of your higher consciousness.

The soul chose this human experience for a reason: to know itself through contrast.

Don’t ever deny the realness of the pain or suffering you experience. It’s the key to what needs to heal, your areas of growth. Understanding this can bring a very deep level of acceptance and peace to the experiences of your life.

When I realised this I felt the utmost compassion for myself. I allowed myself to cry, have tantrums, to feel victimised, scared, confused, alone and abandoned. Doing this allowed me to release a lot of resistance and accept that this was hard.

Don’t ever dishonour yourself for what you feel, your Soul certainly never would.

Your soul feels grateful to you for your agreement and, indeed, for all you will do in your upcoming incarnation. Both your soul and your guides hold you in the utmost respect for the courage you show.
Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Be vigilant of your ego’s tactics to avoid pain

Your ego exists in the 3D world so when you start to unhook from your external world – your normal life, your history, your stories, even your society and politics – you’re creating a void that your ego-personality finds hugely uncomfortable and disorienting.

In its ignorance, it will wear many disguises and make many convincing arguments to abort this process and go back to what it knows, what feels comfortable and safe for it. It likes limitations and boundaries because it protects you from pain. This is what creates the resistance inside yourself to your own healing.

Some self-healing experiences can be acutely uncomfortable to the ego-self, and this causes us to desperately look outside of ourselves to make it go away – distractions, fixes, excuses, explanations – anything to avoid the pain.

But look deep at the pain with courage, because as soon as you stop avoiding it, denying it and suppressing it – which your ego wants you to do – it is exposed to the light of your higher consciousness. This is often all we need to do to heal even the deepest of wounds.

Your soul is evolving just as much as you are. It wants to evolve through you, it is not standing by letting you suffer; it is right here with you. The soul knows, however, that the pain has meaning and leads to a new horizon, whereas the personality is generally less in touch with that awareness. So, to bring the soul’s perspective to the attention of the personality can make the pain bearable because it is put in a larger, meaningful perspective.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Healing crisis and seeking professional help

Awakening to myself was no walk in the park. I had a ton of traumatic wounding to heal and I went through the healing quietly on my own, and for a prolonged period of time. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it and no one could tell me what was going on. The inner work I was doing to clear and upgrade myself – looking at my fears, dismantling old beliefs, healing old wounds – was creating a tidal wave of energetic movement in my mind, emotions and body.

This manifested as regular healing crisis – a term used to describe feeling unwell or unbalanced after a healing process. Yukky energetic stuff gets churned up in our mind or body as we release, and makes us feel mentally, emotionally and/or physically unbalanced or unwell. Sometimes I felt mentally confused and anxious. This was because I was experiencing a void from old beliefs and programmes that were dissolving.

Many times I felt utterly exhausted and depressed but I knew this was due to very heavy energies I was processing. I had to be compassionate with myself and rest, sleep and nurture my mind and body. I was in a constant cycle of clearing old, heavy energy to make space for new lighter energy, integrating it and then recalibrating myself to this new energy signature. And then it would repeat.

Sometimes there were moments that felt very dark to my personality-self. Times when the disconnection with the who I was and the outside world was so acute that it created a spiritual depression and despair that was unfathomably profound.

I would always recommend getting any help you can to support your health, healing and your wellbeing. Reach out to an awakening community online and share experiences, get energy healing work to assist in moving heavy energies out, get a spiritual coach, a therapist, a massage, dietary advice to support your body.

And always seek professional/medical help and advice with any mental, emotional or physical imbalances or ailments.

You did this to foster the evolution of your soul. To veil yourself from your own grandeur and magnificence is an act of extraordinary courage. Now, as you awaken, you recall yourself as Divinity Incarnate.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz

Finally, what if You chose this awakening?

At the deepest level, your soul designed this awakening. The timing, the challenges, the breakdowns – all of it is part of a divine curriculum for your evolution.

The courage it takes to walk this path is immense. And every act of awareness, every moment of surrender, contributes not just to your own freedom but to the collective evolution of consciousness itself.

What if the ancient cultures were right about this current era on Earth? That the prophecies of a new, evolved human – homo luminous – is what you are in the process of creating right now? What if your courage to chose and go through this spiritual growth is playing a critical role in this evolution?

So really consider this: what if this awakening experience was designed by You for you?

A great shift in consciousness is now occurring on our planet. This shift depends completely upon those of us who are in body to raise our vibration… As we raise our vibration, Earth rises in vibration as well.
– Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power Of The Life You Planned Before You Were Born by Robert A. Schwartz