People use the phrase casually now. She’s so awakened. He’s on a spiritual journey. It gets posted beneath sunrise photos and crystal collections and quotes about vibrations. And I don’t say that to dismiss any of it — but I do want to say: what I mean when I use that word is something different. Something quieter and harder and less beautiful at first.
I want to tell you what it actually felt like.
For most of my life, I moved through the world with a kind of low hum of wrongness that I couldn’t name. I knew something was off — in my body, in my patterns, in the way I kept ending up in familiar pain wearing different faces. I was functional. I was capable. I was also, in ways I couldn’t yet see, sleepwalking.
Spiritual awakening, for me, did not begin with peace. It began with seeing.
It began the first time I looked at a pattern in my life and traced it all the way back — not to blame anyone, but to understand. To see the shape of the thing. To say: this was handed to me. This was not mine to begin with. And I have been carrying it as if it were.
That moment of seeing — that is where I locate the beginning of my awakening.
Here is what I have come to believe it means:
To be spiritually awakened is to become conscious — of yourself, of your wounds, of the invisible threads that run between your childhood and your present-day choices. It is not about becoming enlightened in some untouchable, transcendent way. It is about becoming real. More honest. More present inside your own life.
It is the moment you stop outsourcing your pain to busyness, to people-pleasing, to the performance of being fine.
It is the moment you look at the cycles in your family — the rage, the silence, the ways love got tangled up with fear — and you say: I can see this now. And because I can see it, I have a choice.
That choice — that is the sacred part.
What no one tells you about awakening is how lonely it can be at first.
When you begin to see clearly, you often begin to see what others around you cannot or will not. You may find yourself in rooms where everyone is still asleep and you are the one who cannot go back. You may reach for your people — the ones you grew up with, the ones who share your history — and find that they are not ready to meet you where you are.
This is one of the deepest griefs of the journey. The solitude of being the one who woke up first.
If you are sitting with that grief right now, I want you to know: it is real. It is valid. And it does not mean you did something wrong. It means you were brave enough to look.
I also want to name what awakening is not.
It is not a destination. There is no moment when you have fully arrived, when you are permanently above your wounds, when you never contract back into old fears. I still have days when something triggers the old thing — the child-bracing, the shrinking, the voice that says you are too much or not enough. Awakening does not erase that. But it does mean that I can usually catch it now. I can say: I know what this is. I know where it came from. I do not have to be ruled by it.
That catching — that small, steady return to consciousness — is the practice. Over and over again, for the rest of your life.
What I mean when I say I am spiritually awakened is this:
I am someone who has chosen to look at my life with open eyes. I am someone who has decided that the pain stops here — not just for me, but for the ones who come after me. I am someone who believes that healing is not just personal; it is ancestral. It moves through time.
I believe in the sacred work of becoming honest with yourself. I believe that empathy — real empathy, not the performance of it — requires that you first learn to feel your own pain clearly.
And I believe that you are here, reading this, because something in you already knows what I am talking about.
You may already be more awake than you realize.
The path forward is not about becoming someone else. It is about coming home to who you were always meant to be — before the world taught you to be afraid of her.
Welcome to Finding Solace. I’m glad you’re here.
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