Spiritual Emergence

“Many of the conditions, which are currently diagnosed as psychotic and indiscriminately treated by suppressive medication, are actually difficult stages of a radical spiritual transformation and ego integration. If the process is correctly understood and supported, these psychospiritual crises can result in emotional and psychosomatic healing, remarkable psychological transformation, and consciousness evolution.”

- Christina & Stanislav Grof

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Spiritual emergence is a natural process of opening and awakening that many people experience. Psycho-spiritual transitions can be initiated through an established faith tradition, as a result of systematic spiritual practices, through peak life experiences, through addiction or illness, or unexpectedly and unexplainably in the course of everyday life. Spiritual emergences open an individual to an embodied experience of their natural connection to the transcendent domain, forever transforming the person’s limiting self-concepts to a more integrated, awakened sense of self-knowing and interconnectedness.   
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Spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency are on a continuum of experience.  When the process of spiritual development becomes rapid and dramatic this normal process may become a crisis or a spiritual emergency.  Powerful feelings, images, inner experiences, physical sensations and energies may arise that are overwhelming and challenging to daily functioning.  When properly supported and integrated, spiritual crises can lead to deeper levels of awareness and connection to one’s Divine nature.

Sometimes these experiences can feel blissful and ecstatic. Other times, scary, isolating, and quite difficult to explain or understand. Spiritual awakenings are all too often dismissed or pathologized by medical professionals, leaving people without the support needed to make sense of what is happening, without guidance about how to digest and assimilate their new awareness. Interruption with medication and hospitalization can lead to traumatic wounding, projecting doubt, fear and a sense of “wrongness” onto the person having this experience, and seriously compromising that person’s psycho-spiritual development and maturation. Sadly, many people are medicated, labeled and hospitalized, thus losing the opportunity to complete and integrate their life-changing transformation.