“We enjoy lovely music, beautiful paintings, a thousand intellectual delicacies, but we have no idea of their cost, to those who invented them, in sleepless nights, tears, spasmodic laughter, rashes, asthmas, epilepsies, and the fear of death, which is worse than all the rest.”
(Marcel Proust)
‘Am I perhaps going mad?’, is a question I sometimes get when spiritual newcomers ask me for advice. Often my answer is simply, ‘no, your monkey mind is just getting the better of you. A little more sleep, regular meditation and centering exercises should get you back on your feet. Trust your new-found powers. They are here for a good reason!’ Awakening allows us to open to dimensions that few others can experience. It is only natural that we need a little time to get our arms around it. It’s also a fact that our ego wants to take this new perspective and run with it. Conspiracy theories abound in the spiritual community. Some want to embark on a fight of good and evil that sometimes reminds a little of Star Wars. When I reflect on my awakening experience with synchronicity I never questioned my sanity, but I was also professionally prepared for sorting through the random and seeing the essence of the Signs that presented themselves. My job in the financial industry was that of pattern recognition so my mind had little chance to attack myself over it. Yet, as I already mentioned in the synchronicity chapter, after a few years I did take a conscious step back from looking for them. The Beyond makes Her Presence known but once we open up to this new communication channel we do not need to look for anyone or do anything. Everything we ever wanted we already have.
Many of us are born with different abilities and perceptions. Unfortunately we are still operating in an environment where society doubts the outliers and wants to make them ‘normal’ again. In the awakening survey there were several women who were born with special spiritual talents but their families frequently put them down over it and even put some in psychological treatment. Needless to say, it took them a long time to recover from this form of child abuse. The other complicating factor is that for many of us our awakening process coincides with a healing journey. The majority of respondents in the survey said that it was. Even for me, upbeat as my awakening experience was in 2007-2012, I also suffered from depression and mood swings that were in hindsight caused by my stressful job, but were a necessary evil to get a lot of repressed issues and resentment out on the surface. More than once did I asked myself whether I could perhaps suffer from bi-polar just as my father did. That’s when my spiritual partner showed up who lived at the other side of the planet at that time. She encouraged me to face the inner turmoil and emotional repression and helped me to get that stuff out in the open. That’s the other amazing thing about our awakening journey, when we are ready to break free our support system shows up and guides us through it.
All awakened souls are as sane as they come but it sometimes takes a little struggle to get to that stage. Accumulated karma gets thrown overboard in a series of ‘dark night of the soul’ episodes. These are scary to understand for the rational mind but have to be lived through to align the depth of our subconscious with our conscious understanding. Real physical changes take place in the awakening phase as well. Neural networks get rewired during the kundalini energy expansion, and new energy centers open up as healing takes place and the spiritual transformation takes place. Genius, madness, and spiritual awakening are but a step apart, so we should be patient with ourselves and with others when for a while when it looks like we don’t have it all together.
One of the sanest and most profound spiritual sages of all times—the 19th century mystic Sri Ramakrishna—spent months in apparent insanity. Yet, the people in his Indian village simply accepted that he was with God at that time. Needless to say, our modern society has no patience for these spiritual time-out periods. So if you find yourself struggling right now reach out to the healers and spiritual coaches in our community as well as to the established medical profession. The answer to your struggle will present itself. You are supposed to be awaken from your slumber and encouraged to reposition your life and open up to a new reality that is in your plain sight. That’s what awakening is all about and yes, you will be as sane as they come.
I remember my ‘dark night of the soul’ moments well. The stress of my work was eating me alive. So many emotions bubbled to the surface; all my repressed emotions showed up in dreams and sleepless nights. I had panic attacks. I had anger fits. I wanted to numb my mind. Alas, in an awakening journey we can no longer run away. Do you know what I did when I couldn’t keep it together in these sleepless nights at 3 am in the morning? I danced! I was literally dancing the night away to Barry White’s ‘Let the music play’. My family was sleeping at 3 am and no one was watching, otherwise people certainly would have thought that I had lost my marbles.
A little madness is part of the transformation, so be it. Instead of wishing the irritation away, consider this soul searching phase as part of the healing. As Marcel Proust observed, in the madness often lies the genius, or as Tennessee Williams put it, ‘If I got rid of my demons, I’d lose my angels.’ Still, don’t take the struggle on your own. Reach out to those who can assist you, just as I was blessed to travel my journey with a healer at my side. Sometimes traditional medicine can help to put you in that stage to embark on a healing journey. That proved to be the case for some of the folks I worked with without undermining their spiritual awareness. Rest assured that sanity is a signpost of the awakened state. That’s what the Home-coming journey is all about. We are as sane as it gets, and saner than most. Our ego sounds so sane when we makes his case, but is pretty insane viewed from the ‘out-of-self’ perspective.
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