Awakening… It sounds so spiritually appealing, but what is it? What does it mean?
Awakening is realizing new ideas, new perspectives, and new understandings of the spiritual and practical world around us and how we fit into it and how we relate to it. At the beginning stages of awakening, “realization” is usually very conceptual or intellectual. But in the advanced stages, realization is not conceptual, it transcends to higher levels of spirit and consciousness (not thought-based but known at the level of “being”). The ultimate spiritual awakening is to have enlightened knowing that you are not separate from the Divine but are one with it.
And just how does one become awakened? I’ve heard stories of people becoming enlightened or awakened in a single moment or single spiritual event. I will accept that at least some of those stories are true. It is within the realm of possibility. But I think more often awakening occurs in steps and stages over time – and that could easily involve months or, more likely, years of spiritual practice to reach full awakening.
But the process of awakening always begins with being open… to new ideas, perspectives, possibilities, insights, and understandings, and with being open to change based on those new mental models of how you can be in relationship to the world, Universe, and Life.
Alignment with the Universe and the Divine is always based on becoming more open, more expansive, more attuned to potentiality, more flowing, more accepting, and more one with the light or energy of divine consciousness. These are keys to spiritual awakening. Spiritual awakening is the same as growing in wholeness because both are the process of becoming one with the Universe, one with the Divine.
But amazingly, these are also keys to practical awakening and greater success in the “real world”. I put real world in quotes because it is something that someone might say in contrasting woo-woo spiritual stuff from practical, real world accomplishment and status. Yet I have found that the more spiritually developed you become, the more successful, creative, powerful, and happy you will actually be in the real world. Spirituality is an enabler of life, not an escape from life.
So learn to become more open to what Life gives you and flow with it, expand with it, grow with it. As you open to Life, you will begin to awaken – slowly but surely!