Why Are Spiritual Awakenings Often So Painful?

The dark night of the ego

When I hear people talk about spiritual awakening, it is not unusual for their story to begin on a sad or tragic note. Often it is some sort of painful life event that causes us to awaken to the idea that we are more than what we’ve come to believe ourselves to be, more than a limited physical body, stumbling around the earth, worrying about survival.

In my case, it wasn’t a particular event, but rather a span of time where I became more and more disillusioned with life and my place in it. Either way, the specific events that lead to an awakened realization aren’t really relevant.

Sure, we can string together series of life events into entertaining narratives. But at the end of the day, what is of real value is the awareness that is eventually born out of them. But why does it seem that we need to go through pain to gain this awareness?

The Dark Night

It is often referred to as the “dark night of the soul.” This is a painful period of life where we can descend to our lowest lows, experiencing everything from confusion and anxiety to complete hopelessness and despair. It can feel like we’ve lost our way. Our faith is tested and often completely lost. My dark night seemed to last a decade.

Back then, I had long been a student of spirituality. I read and listened to a lot of spiritual teachers, Eckhart Tolle being one of my favourites at the time. I became a regular meditator. I took an interest in metaphysics and became fascinated with the law of attraction. I experimented with manifesting things through visualization and even achieved some phenomenal results that bordered on miraculous.

And yet, I was descending deeper and deeper into a mental and emotional hell. I was becoming more and more dysfunctional. It seemed a paradox that a spiritually minded person could be so negative. And negative I was. I was becoming increasingly more bitter, resentful, jealous, petty, spiteful. My list of insecurities continued to grow, and with it, a false sense of pride to cover them up.

“How could this be?” I thought. “How could a spiritual person be so unspiritual?” More than anything in life, I wanted freedom. And instead I was feeling more and more trapped.

But looking back, it is plain to see that it was simply the ego acting out its role in the play of my awakening. Its part was to stop it from happening at all costs. And that meant, create every perceivable roadblock, cast every possible doubt, cling to every available hurt and continue to sow chaos and confusion in my mind.

Perhaps the dark night of the soul is really the dark night of the ego. As consciousness begins to awaken, cracks of light begin to appear in the ego’s shell. The ego’s dwelling place is darkness so the light is most unwelcome. The ego fights to keep us convinced that it is us and we are it.

If we identify with the ego, then the light appears painful to us. All of its fears, grievances, and grudges become our fears, grievances and grudges. If we begin to identify with our Higher Self and welcome the light, the ego begins to dissolve. This is the light of Divinity, but it is also the “judgement” or “wrath of God” that the ego fears.

“The ego literally lives on borrowed time, and its days are numbered. Do not fear the Last Judgment, but welcome it and do not wait, for the ego’s time is borrowed from your eternity.” — A Course in Miracles

The Dawning of the Light

The ego is undone through awareness. That is what terms like light or judgment really refer to. The ego is dissolved when it is looked at and seen for what it is — an illusory ‘self.’

When we step back and observe our thoughts and feelings, we start to see that they are not a part of us but are appearing before us. They are a passing phenomenon and we don’t need to claim any particular thought or emotion as our own.

We can let go of the ones we don’t want by not clinging to or resisting them. This is what causes the suffering. The stronger the clinging and resisting, the darker the night. When we don’t form attachments or aversions to the thoughts and emotions that pass through our awareness, they dissipate on their own.

The more I observe the ego, the more I gain an appreciation for it. Every time I let go of a piece of it, I realize just how much it had me in its grip. It is truly impressive how it gets us to identify with imagined limitations and ready to defend them at all costs. And that is why it doesn’t like to be looked at directly. The ego’s whole structure is imaginary. And if seen for what it is, it begins to unravel.

Continuing to Awaken

In my experience, spiritual awakening happens in waves. It is the undoing of layers of negative emotions and thought patterns. As we begin the work to undo our ego, we are confronted with just how dense and rigid it is and how all-pervasive its mechanisms really are.

It can feel overwhelming at first and may even look like we’re not making any progress. One of my favourite spiritual teachers, Lester Levenson, explained it the following way.

“When we start letting go of the ego it appears sometimes as though the ego is getting stronger and stronger, bigger and bigger. That’s not true. It’ll never get any bigger than it is right now. What happens is that as we let go of it, more of it presents itself to us.” — Lester Levenson

These are natural stages in spiritual growth, shaking us a little more awake every time. But the upward spiral can feel like a downward one at times. As we face our own ego, we can be frightened by what we see.

The feelings that surface from the depths of our psyche can be really painful. That’s why we stuffed them down there in the first place. But they need not be feared. With faith, the light can shine even in the darkest of nights. In the end, we are waking up to our infinite and eternal nature. And what does an infinite and eternal being have to be afraid of?