Body Wisdom Rising

Spiritual Awakening Vs. Soul Initiation

• Alyssa Stefanson

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The stories we tell about awakening often skip the hard parts. We’re sold fireworks and constant signs, then left alone when the ground drops out. This conversation offers a grounded map: why the first opening can feel destabilizing, how to move from ego awakening to soul initiation, and the practices that turn insight into embodied change.

Alyssa shares a candid personal story of rupture, addiction, and the early flood of synchronicities that eventually gave way to a steadier path of depth. From there, she unpacks core frameworks that make the process navigable. Carl Jung’s individuation reminds us that awareness isn’t maturity; shadow work is the ethical act of welcoming disowned parts so we can respond rather than react. Bill Plotkin’s lens clarifies the difference between expansion that excites and initiation that humbles, where belonging to body and earth replaces the chase for peak states. David Hawkins reframes emotion as gateway: grief, fear, and anger surface not to derail you but to be felt and released through presence.

You’ll also get a simple, repeatable somatic practice to move emotion without story, plus practical supports for the dark night of the soul when meaning feels far away. We explore how grief dissolves rigid identities, softens the heart, and creates the space where purpose finds you. Expect fewer hacks and more honesty: less spectacle, more substance; less striving, more listening. If you’re ready to trade hype for wholeness and root your awakening in daily life, this is your invitation to slow down, feel deeply, and let the work mature you.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with someone who needs a real map, and leave a five-star review so these conversations reach more people. Your reflections matter—what part of your awakening is asking for integration right now?

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Body Wisdom Rising podcast. I'm your host, Alyssa, and my intention here is to deliver grounded, embodied insights alongside practical tools and resources to help you heal, awaken, and remember your sacred nature. This is rooted spirituality, bringing people back to their bodies, back to their roots, and back into connection with the ancestral ways that have always carried us. Not spiritual fluff, not disconnected theory, weaving together the best of ancient wisdom and modern science, living, breathing practices and conversations that integrate healing, wellness, earth-based wisdom, and conscious growth. Each week I share space with experts in trauma recovery, holistic health, and ancestral ways of knowing, as well as voices with lived experience and powerful transformational stories. Together we explore what it truly means to rise rooted, embodied, and whole. And if you enjoy this episode, please take a moment to leave a five-star review as it helps these conversations reach the people who need them most. Let's get into the episode. Welcome back to the podcast. Before we dive in, I want to take a moment to share how I approach this space and the rhythm of the show. So I don't create from a rigid weekly schedule. Some weeks you'll hear from me weekly, and other times it may be every couple of weeks. But what you can trust is that I release episodes when there's depth and something real to offer, not because I'm forcing content. So I've definitely learned that when creativity is rushed, the message loses its integrity. And this work asks for presence. I've definitely had, you know, moments where I've sat down trying to record a show and I just couldn't, like there was just this block. And then later, days later, all of a sudden I'm receiving, you know, these insights of what needs to be included in the show. So I just trust that. And um, if you haven't yet, definitely subscribe and follow the show. That way you'll know when there's a new episode released. And I have another little favor to ask you if you haven't yet, if you can just take a quick moment to review the show. Um, you know, if you are receiving value from these episodes, I don't make any money off of these podcasts. So leaving a review is a really great way that you can support the show. I would greatly appreciate that. And one quick note before we begin, on February 11th, I'm hosting a live virtual, somatic breathwork journey called Final Shedding, Stepping Into the Fire. If you can't actually make the live one, uh, there will be a recording emailed out to everybody. So that way you can go back to the practice whenever you want. It's extremely powerful if you haven't experienced a full breathwork journey before. And it really is a powerful inward journey with the breath, an opportunity to get out of our minds and into our bodies and just process and digest our experiences. And many people, you know, just receive insights, clarity, or uh just an opportunity to really process and digest, you know, emotions that they haven't had an opportunity to move through. So if you're feeling called, the link is in the show notes with more details uh regarding that. So I hope to see you there. And so today I want to talk about spiritual awakening as an initiation. So there is a lot of language online that frames awakening as light, bliss, expansion, peak experiences. And while there are definitely moments of bliss and joy on this journey, that isn't the full picture. And it's often the part that leaves people most unprepared for what comes next is that belief of what that awakening should actually look like. And so in this episode, we're going to look at what a spiritual awakening actually is, how it unfolds in phases, and why the first experiences are often destabilizing rather than grounding. And we'll talk about the difference between a more immature or early awakening and a more matured awakening, which is often more quieter, subtler, deeper, and rooted in integration rather than intensity. And so my intention here is to offer a map because many people are waking up without context, without elders, and without language for what they're experiencing. So let's begin by talking about what a spiritual awakening actually is and what it is not. So for many people, awakening often begins after a rupture. So a loss, a breakdown, trauma, illness, addiction, burnout, divorce, grief. Something collapses the identity we were living from. And suddenly the way that you understood yourself, the world or reality no longer works. So in the early phases, a spiritual awakening can feel intense, chaotic, and even destabilizing. And people often describe it as sudden bursts of clarity, downloads or bliss, heightened intuition, synchronicities that feel impossible to ignore, a sense of being guided or chosen, emotional highs followed by deep confusion. It can feel exhilarating, overwhelming, and disorienting all at once. And this is where many people get confused because those early experiences are often framed as the awakening, when in reality, they're more like the opening of the door. And so for many people, trauma or a breakdown is the catalyst because it shatters the structures that were holding the ego together. So when the old offenses fall away, our awareness expands. But expanded awareness without grounding can feel chaotic. So this is why awakening can feel both illuminating and destabilizing at the same time. And I'll just share a bit about my story. Back in 2017 was literally when the ground was ripped out from under me. It was a really difficult year, had a pretty serious injury. I left a very abusive relationship. I was rock bottom in my addiction. And it was actually the very beginning of 2018 that I hit a complete rock bottom, actually, nearly lost my life to addiction. And I ended up having a profound spiritual experience, which later led to this spiritual awakening. And at first, the synchronicities and signs were so intense. It was beautiful at first. And honestly, like to have that experience when I was going through something so heavy and so hard, and literally just my my reality was shattered. To have an experience like that come in where I really truly felt supported, guided, like there was something bigger at works, it was profound. It was powerful, you know? And um, so I don't want to shame that experience at all because, you know, it's it unfolds the way that it does over time because it's meant to. And um, I really truly believe that having, you know, the these peak bliss experiences were supportive for me at that time, you know. Um, but eventually we get to a place where it actually is disconnecting us from reality. And that was my experience was, you know, these constant synchronicities and signs and seeing the world so differently and not being able to go back to the way life once was, right? Like you're it shatters really um all the illusions. It's like a veil has been lifted and you see things that you just couldn't see before. And it can be very disorienting. And so I just want to say that that in itself is not the actual um awakening, it's the beginning. It unfolds over time, and you know, we keep awakening throughout our lives. We keep going through these death and rebirth cycles, keeps getting deeper and richer. And so, my experience now with my awakening, I don't have these intense sides and synchronicities. Yes, I still receive them. They're much more subtle. I would say I have to work for them more so. And um, the path has been much more humbling. It's been much more real. There's been a lot more depth. I'm, you know, no after depth, not peak experiences. You know, depth is a lot more sustainable. I'm, you know, living for and optimizing for a sense of meaning, belonging, and purpose and depth in this life. And Carl Jung spoke about this process through what he called individuation. So the lifelong unfolding of the psyche toward wholeness. And one of Young's most misunderstood ideas is that insight alone does not equal maturity. So awareness doesn't automatically make us integrated. In fact, he suggested that for many people, life doesn't truly begin until midlife, because only then are we forced to confront the parts of ourselves we couldn't bypass anymore. So awakening in this sense is not about escaping the human experience. It's about entering it more fully. And when I initially went through my awakening, I was very much focused on escaping this reality. Um, and early awakening phases often carry a feeling of specialness. But because the world, you know, it suddenly feels alive again, these synchronicities start to increase, a feeling of being guided, dreams are vivid. In animistic cultures, this would have been understood as the psyche opening into relationship with the living world. In modern culture, without context or elders, people often mistake this opening for completion. Bill Plotkin describes this as the difference between ego awakening and soul initiation. So ego awakening can feel expansive, exciting, even blissful. And soul initiation, on the other hand, is humbling. It dismantles who you thought you were, so something truer can emerge. This is also why the early stages of awakening can feel very messy. So emotions surface that you thought you were past, old wounds reappear, relationships begin to shift, identities dissolve. And people often think that they're moving backwards here when in reality they're entering an initiatory phase that our culture doesn't know how to hold. Awakening isn't linear, it is cyclical, and without grounding, it can feel like losing yourself before you find anything meaningful to stand on. And what's often missing is not awakening itself, but context, containment, and integration. And this is where we need to talk about the difference between an immature, so like an earlier awakening and a more matured one, not as judgment, but as development. And really to understand that difference, we need to talk about initiation. So once awakening begins, the question most people have is what do I do with this now? Right? Like we can't go back to life as we once knew it. And our culture tends to offer either spiritual bypassing or endless analysis, but very little guidance on how to metabolize what's rising. And every depth tradition agrees on this: that awakening without integration becomes destabilizing. Awareness without grounding fragments the psyche. David Hawkins spoke often about the role of emotions in spiritual development as gateways. So one of the most misunderstood aspects of awakening is the idea that feeling grief, fear, anger, or shame means that you're regressing. And Hawkins would often say the opposite. These emotions surface because consciousness is expanding. And what was previously repressed is now coming into awareness. So his work suggests that emotions are not meant to be avoided, analyzed endlessly, or overridden with positivity. They're meant to be felt, allowed, and moved through. And when emotions are fully experienced without story, without suppression, they naturally move. So this doesn't mean indulging emotion or identifying with it. It means allowing sensation, breath, and presence to do the work the mind can't. So somatic meditations are really powerful. An emotion completes itself when it is felt fully without resistance or story attached to it. So here's just a simple, you know, step-by-step process, uh, somatic process that you can do. So we want to name the emotion quietly and internally, not why, not where did it come from, just what is present. So this feels like sadness, this feels like fear, this feels like anger. So no narrative. We really want to drop our attention into the body and ask where do I feel this in my body? Chest, throat, belly, jaw, shoulders, and let our awareness rest there, not in the head, not in the mind. So allowing the sensation without trying to change it. This is the key step. So you're not pushing it away, intensifying it, or dramatizing it. You're just simply saying internally, this can be here. No agenda. So we do not need to attach a story to these emotions. And Hawkins was very clear about this. We don't need to replay the memories, we don't need to justify the emotion, we don't need to analyze the meaning, we don't need to blame someone. Story feeds emotion, presence dissolves it. So letting the sensation run its course, if allowed, emotions usually just start to rise, they'll peak, they'll soften, and they'll shift. So this may take seconds, minutes, or it can repeat over days. You don't force completion. So you just notice what happens after. So noticing if you're noticing a sense of space, relief, neutrality, quietness, not necessarily searching for happiness, right? Relief is the sign of release, not euphoria. And you don't have to feel everything at once or overwhelm yourself or relive trauma. If something feels too intense, you can back off. You can open your eyes, you can feel your feet, you can ground back to the earth, return to safety, orient to your surroundings, to your environment. So it's not about processing everything at once. It's not about force. And David Hawkins taught that emotions move when we stop resisting them, when we allow an emotion to be felt in the body, without story, without judgment. It naturally completes its cycle, not by force, but by presence. And Bill Plotkin is very clear about this. He calls, he says that soul initiation requires dissent. So he talks about modern humans waking up without rites of passage, without elders, without land-based mirrors, without community to hold the process. In traditional cultures, awakening would have been followed immediately by initiation. And today people awaken and are told to stay positive or manifest more, or they're diagnosed and given medication for it. And Plot can emphasize that real maturity comes not from expansion, but from belonging, belonging to the body, to the earth, to the soul's unique shape. And that belonging is forged through grief, but grief as a solvent. So grieving your old self, dissolving who you thought you were so something truer can emerge. And according to Plotkin, during a real soul initiation, we will grieve the life we thought we would live, the version of ourselves that helped us survive that chapter of life, the version of ourselves that made sense in an earlier season, the role we played to belong, survive, or be approved of, the imagined future that can no longer exist. And this is why grief feels so existential during awakening. You're not just sad about something, you're grieving yourself. You know, I even when I quit drinking, I had to grieve that part of myself. Like uh alcohol was a companion for me. You know, it supported me, it was a coping mechanism during times that I needed it. And letting that go, I had to grieve that part of myself. I had to grieve that relationship with alcohol. Plotkin often points out that modern culture doesn't allow time for grief. It doesn't ritualize transitions, it doesn't honor identity death. And so when people begin grieving old selves, old dreams, old lives, they assume something has gone wrong. But in soul-centric cultures, this grief would be recognized as an initiation has begun. So for Plotkin, grief is the threshold emotion of initiation. It's the emotional process that moves a person from ego identity into soul identity. So grief leads to four essential outcomes. So grief dismantles the false center. Plotkin would say that grief loosens the grip of the ego identity. So the self built around roles, productivity, approval, survival strategies, and social expectations. So grief makes it possible to impossible to keep pretending. Right. So you simply no longer have the energy to maintain who you were. Grief doesn't argue with the old self, it outlasts it. And so grief really humbles the psyche, and this is crucial. Plotkin is very clear that soul cannot emerge in a psyche that still believes it is in control. Grief brings humility. It teaches I don't get to plan this, I can't outrun this, I can't positive think my way through this. I have to listen. And this humility is what creates inner spaciousness. The first condition for the soul to speak. Grief creates permeability. So Plopkin often talks about becoming permeable to the world. Grief softens the psyche. After enough grieving, defenses weaken, the heart opens. Meaning comes from outside the ego's plans. And the person becomes more receptive to guidance, myth, symbol, and instinct. And that has been my path. You know, it's it's pretty profound because I wasn't super interested in a lot of these teachings, you know, initially during my awakening. I was chasing the highs and the bliss. But as I actually allowed myself to grieve more, I did notice that my heart opening and I started noticing just this craving for more depth, for more myth, you know, for more um symbolism. And so this is why grief often coincides with increased sensitivity, deeper empathy, stronger attunement to nature, less interest in status or performance. And so grief also makes room for soul purpose to emerge. And this is the part many people end up missing is Plotkin did not believe or does not believe soul purpose is something that we decide. He believes soul purpose emerges when the ego identity has been sufficiently dismantled to stop interfering. Grief clears the inner terrain. So when that old self starts to loosen, something quieter but truer begins to surface. So a Sense of right direction, a deep yes or no, a pull toward certain work, people, places, or ways of living, and a feeling of belonging to life rather than trying to control or manage it. So grief doesn't tell you your purpose, but it does create the conditions where purpose can find you. And Carl Jung used the word individuation to describe the lifelong process of becoming whole. And one of the most essential teachings is that consciousness does not mean wholeness. So in fact, increased awareness often brings us face to face with our shadow. So the parts of us that we disown to survive. So Jung didn't see shadow work as something dark or pathological. He saw it as an inevitable and ethical part of becoming whole. So the shadow in Jung's framework is not made up of the parts that are wrong with us. It's made up of the parts that we had to push away in order to belong, the parts that we disowned, the parts that we, you know, had to suppress in order to survive or to be loved. And so during awakening, these disowned parts begin to return, to be reintegrated. And Young warned that spiritual awareness without shadow integration often leads to inflation. So a subtle sense of being above others or exempt from the messiness of being human. But true individuation produces humility. It deepens compassion and it makes us more human, not less. And so from this lens, awakening isn't about transcending personality, it's about inhabiting it consciously. So our shadow can include anger, grief, jealousy, neediness, desire, power, tenderness, intuition, creativity. These aren't bad traits, they're just disowned and often are disowned good ones, right? And so shadow work is not about getting rid of parts of yourself. It's about noticing them, listening to them, reintegrating their energy consciously. And so Young was very clear that what is not made conscious is lived out unconsciously. So integration means choice instead of compulsion, instead of unconscious reaction. So just a simple, um, some simple steps to begin shadow work, if this is new to you, is just noticing what triggers you. This is often the doorway. So the fastest way to find shadow is reaction. So, you know, just starting to ask yourself who irritates me disproportionately? What behaviors really charge me? When do I feel suddenly defensive, shamed, or reactive? So strong emotional reactions are often shadow knocking on the door. So instead of asking why they are like that, ask what part of me does this touch? Where do I feel this in my body? What emotion is actually here underneath it? And so this isn't, you know, attacking ourselves. It can feel confronting, it can definitely feel confronting, but we want to approach it with curiosity, not judgment towards ourselves. And so we just want to name the disowned part gently. So it's really important not to name these parts as bad or toxic, just noticing that there's anger here. There's grief I didn't allow myself to feel. There's a part of me that wants to be seen. There's a part of me that learned to stay quiet, you know, and that can often be for me that's been a huge part when I'm triggered by something is um, you know, this conditioning of staying quiet, especially as women. It's a big wound that come up for many, um, for many women. And so it might just be wanting to express yourself, express your voice, share your, you know, opinion or view on something. If if you're around people who are always sharing their views and um it's triggering you, it may not even necessarily be their view. It may just be you wanting to express your own, right? And of course, it's important to hold complexity and allow other people to have their perspectives. Um, you know, but often it's it's a part of ourselves that's just wanting to be expressed. And so shadow integration does not mean expressing everything outwardly, but it does mean feeling it in the body. So letting it exist internally, not shaming it, and not turning it into a story. So integration happens when a part is felt without being rejected or given the steering wheel. And so some simple questions that you can ask the part is what are you trying to protect? What do you need me to know? Often the answer surprises people. It's been my experience and many people that I've worked with. You know, shadow usually formed is as a protection, not a flaw. And so integration means being able to acknowledge the part, not repress it, and not let it run your life either. So you become the witness, not the part itself. And when shadow begins integrating, people often notice less emotional charge, more self-compassion, reduced reactivity, clearer boundaries, deeper authenticity, fewer projections onto others. And so we don't want to dig for trauma and we don't want to force memories and we don't want to analyze endlessly. We don't need to label ourselves as broken. We don't want to do shadow work when we're very dysregulated either. So shadow work isn't, you know, excavating all these parts and, you know, overanalyzing analysis paralysis is just starting to be in relationship with it and approaching with curiosity. And Michael Mead brings, you know, a mythic lens to awakening that's I feel is especially important right now. And he describes initiation as the moment when the soul begins to speak louder than the ego. So in myth, awakening is rarely sudden, clarity followed by ease, exile, disorientation, and loss of the old story. So me reminds us that the soul does not emerge through comfort, it emerges through difficulty that carries. And from this perspective, the breakdown that often accompanies awakening isn't a detour, it is the threshold. So the old identity must fail so the deeper life can begin to orient us. Myth teaches us that the gift of awakening doesn't arrive fully formed, it must be lived into, tested, shaped, and matured over time. And so when we look across these frameworks of Hopkins, Plotkin, Young, Meade, there's a shared understanding. Awakening is not completed through insight alone. It's completed through integration. So what actually supports this process? So feeling emotions in the body without narrative or self-judgment, somatic practices, even just giving yourself, you know, 10 minutes each day just to sit and feel your feelings and you notice your sensations and notice your emotions, doing a somatic meditation, time in nature, grief rituals, even simple personal lens, journaling without editing. So just like free flow writing, especially during emotionally charged periods, it could be really helpful. And reducing, you know, constantly consuming spiritual content, even constantly consuming information, right? Um, actually doing these practices, actually giving ourselves space to do this work and letting and allowing our identities to dissolve without rushing to replace it, which is super important. You know, often when we go through this void and there's kind of this liminal space and uncertainty of what's going to come next, we often want to fill that void. Can you be with that uncertainty? That is a massive spiritual practice in itself, is building your capacity to be with uncertainty. So, you know, it doesn't help to bypass discomfort or chase bliss or measure our awakening by intensity. Awakening is met with patience and embodiment. It does mature. A mature awakening doesn't look dramatic, it's very stable. You know, it often looks like someone who can feel grief without completely collapsing or being able to hold uncertainty without gripping and panicking and needing to fill the void and being able to remain in relationship with life as it actually is. So awakening matures through time, embodiment, and relationship. And so I also want to just speak to briefly the dark night of the soul that is part of this process as well. So it's often the phase where we experience that loss of meaning, uncertainty, and these experiences that once felt guided. So these super, you know, intense spiritual peak experiences, blissed experiences, downloads, synchronicities that we're receiving, they're not as intense anymore. And there's waves of this. We don't just go through one dark night of the soul, we'll go through many throughout our lifetime. And so it's helpful to know what to expect so you know how to navigate it. I was just moving through a dark night of the soul, and I can tell you what a difference actually knowing and going through the process before to understand that that was what I was in. And so I actually just allowed myself to be in it. I didn't rush to fill it with anything. I didn't try and pull myself out of it. I didn't try and fight it, I didn't try and resist it. And wow, did that ever make a difference? It just made it much more richer. I actually started to enjoy the experience. You know, and when we actually allow ourselves to be in these experiences rather than resist them, rather than thinking that life needs to be happy and joyful and forward movement all the time, that's not realistic. That's not reality, that's not part of life. You know, it's these experiences, these breakdowns that help build the resilience. It helps us mature spiritually. The soul matures during this time. So just allowing ourselves to be in it and getting rid of the comparison. I don't compare myself or my life to anyone like I used to at all anymore, or think that I should be in a certain place. Like this is the life that I've been given, and I'm gonna honor that. So for some people, the dark night of the soul just feels like emptiness. And for others, it's where grief starts to arise, fatigue, or just loss of direction, loss of meaning. It often just feels like something, you know, really precious has just disappeared from our lives. But when in reality it's just withdrawing, so it can be integrated at a deeper level. So in mature spiritual frameworks, the dark night is a necessary purification. So it strips away the parts of awakening that were sustained by excitement, identity, or peak experiences and asks whether something deeper can take root. So if you do find yourself here, the work isn't to push through or get back to how it used to feel. The work is just to stay present, to tend to the basics of being human and trust that what's reorganizing isn't finished yet. So I do hope that you found this episode helpful. I always do like to give, you know, many, as many resources, and I gave a lot of really great names. David Hawkins, one of my favorite books, is Letting Go. Um, Bill Plockins has some incredible books, Soul Initiation, um, many, many incredible books that you will uh find online. And um Carl Young, of course, is another one that you'll find plenty of books and resources on him if you want to dive deeper into his work. But starting to yeah, really explore for me. It's been really supportive. Exploring Jungian psychology, Jungian frameworks, um, animist earth-honoring traditions has been really helpful for me to actually root into this work and really help this awakening feel just richer and more alive. So don't think you're going through these peak experiences that it is any less enjoyable. It's if anything, it's more, it has more meaning, it has more depth. There really is a lot that you have to look forward to on this path, on this journey, and it's constantly unfolding. So I do hope that you gained some powerful insights and resources from this episode. And just a reminder about the breathwork journey on February 11th. If you do feel called to join, you can find that link in the show notes. And love you guys. I will see you next time.