Many people experience anxiety, emotional overwhelm, dissociation, or exhaustion after spiritual openings, retreats, meditation, or deep inner work. This article explores why awakening often moves in cycles of expansion and contraction — and how psychospiritual integration helps us navigate the process safely.
It’s an incredible gift to be called to spiritual practice, to our spiritual awakening journey. During this journey, we are going to experience bliss, connectedness, joy, love, peace, sensuality, and much more. Many of us, if you’ve been on a spiritual path, you’ve already experienced a lot, and it’s so great really.
But, what happens after? Maybe after a retreat you felt so open, connected, and alive… only to crash into anxiety, numbness, or conflict days later. Does this resonate?
This is one of the things that I didn’t realize when I first started my spiritual journey over 20 years ago was: what happens after I have the spiritual experience? I practice to get more experiences that feel really nourishing. They felt good — even necessary for me.
What is Awakening?
Awakening is something that ultimately happens in the mind, the heart, and the body. It happens on all the levels. It’s not just in the mind. It’s not the mind and heart, but not the body. It’s not just the body and not the mind and heart. It is something that happens on all the levels, and it really represents realization, integration, and actualization.
Because our growth—we want to live it. We want to live it in our daily lives.
The Expansion and The Contraction
What happens after the spiritual experience, the high, the opening or expansion that we have on the spiritual path?
What happens AFTER we have an expansion into a state of being? Most of the time, after the expansion, we go into a contraction.
And what is that contraction? Many times we say, “Oh, I lost it. I was in bliss, but I lost it. Or, I was feeling my heart so open, but I lost it, and I’m just going to practice so I can get back to it.”
It doesn’t have to be bliss or an open heart. Sometimes people say my mind was totally quiet. Or they just feel relief from all their neurosis – their patterns that don’t serve them.
What happened? What created that contraction?
Our issues, our wounds, our traumas arise. Why we blocked those states – like bliss, quiet, love, etc – in the first place was because we got hurt. We were wounded. We weren’t mirrored. We were attacked. And as we endured this, we started to shut down those states of being.
And so when we open up again, what happens is that the wounds, the issues, the traumas are also being excavated. You see, this is all stored in our bodies. Maybe we forgot what happened in our childhood. But, our memories are stored in our bones, in our muscles, in our organs, in our DNA cellularly.
This is one of the biggest pitfalls that I have seen for myself for a while and also others as I work with others on the spiritual path and on the awakening path. We forget or we don’t realize the pendulum’s swings. As we experience more openings, the pendulum swings bigger.
How the Pendulum Works
When we first start on the path, oftentimes we experience a beautiful state. Let’s say love—our hearts open. There are many different types of love, but we’ll just call it love in this moment. We experience love. It feels huge because we haven’t opened that much in a while.
And then what happens is the pendulum swings back the other way. In the beginning, we can often emotionally process or emotionally release our hurts or our grief or whatever that was blocking the love. Then the pendulum opens to love again, and then it swings back to more hurt or blockages to love as much as it opened.
We can navigate that, and that’s often in the very beginning of the journey when the pendulum is just swinging a little, even though we feel like the expansion is huge (because we’re not used to it).
As we continue to transform, we continue to open up in a deeper way. That high we had may start to become more natural to us. So, if love opened up, we may start to feel love even deeper.
We may believe that as we open up deeper – to love, or silence, joy or relaxation – that we will just sustain this as our new natural. What actually happens is the pendulum swings back to excavate deeper layers of hurt, issues, traumas.
That is how the universe works. The deeper the transformation, the deeper the awakening means the deeper the issues, the deeper the wounds, the deeper the traumas that arise.
This is where people start to say they are experiencing awakening symptoms or dark night of the soul sometimes.
There are some people who claim they’ve awakened and they exist only in the high. That is not how the universe works. They have somehow transcended and bypassed this – this is often referred to as spiritual bypassing. They have disconnected from what’s actually here and put it out of their conscious awareness. That doesn’t mean it’s gone. They’re just not conscious of it.
Looking at an Example: Womb Meditation
Let’s look at an example. Spiritual expansion or highs can be referred to as States of our being. This could be love, joy, peacefulness, generosity, sensuality—it could be any number of them. States of being are actually very human.
Let’s take the womb as an example. The womb is really where the enlightenment for the female comes from. It’s really connected to the earth, it’s so rich. We get to really claim ourselves when we are embodied in our womb. It brings a deep, deep restfulness.
At the same time, when we either try to connect with our wombs or after we have a nourishing meditation connecting with our wombs, we may not feel deep restfulness. We might be opening up to our personal trauma, personal sexual trauma, and abuse. It could be fear of annihilation. It could be feeling the collective trauma for women, feeling less than. There could be a lot of grief there.
There’s a number of things that could happen during, before, or after a meditation or a spiritual practice.
And so this is the thing to pay attention to, right? Because the contraction happens. Our traumas come up, and oftentimes we don’t expect it to happen. We may think, “I’m going to practice. I’m going to reach these states of being and it’s going to transform me. Just reaching these states of being, just connecting with my womb in itself is going to transform me.”
Yes, connecting with the womb is really important in terms of transformation. It’s really, really important—and the pendulum is going to swing. The womb and the pelvis is quite a hot spot for where we store a lot of our traumas.
The Pitfalls of the Journey
Why we don’t pay attention and unconsciously fall into the pitfalls on a spiritual growth journey is that we don’t expect the pendulum to swing. Or we may believe that we could simply emotionally process or release it. That is just maybe in the very beginning. It doesn’t serve us long term.
We also tend to not see or work on our issues, wounds, and traumas because we may not approve of what’s arising. We carry a lot of shame, a lot of woundedness. We don’t want to see it a lot of times, and so we repress it deep into our bodies.
Another thing that can happen is that we can feel overwhelmed. We don’t know what to do with what’s coming up. It feels like it’s unsolvable, unresolvable, whatever is coming up, and we don’t want to face it.
Another thing is that we may not have the sensitivity to see it. We may not have cultivated enough grounding and awareness to be able to see what’s arising for us. It goes into our unconscious, and we don’t catch it a lot of times.
Some of the ways that this might show up is that we feel disconnected, we feel dissociated. Many of us experience this very subtly. We experience states of being and then we’re like, “I disconnected from it. I’m in my normal life. I feel like myself again.” And we don’t catch it because there’s nothing screaming at us to say, “Hey, you need to look at this.”
Solutions for Navigating the Pendulum Swing
1. Expect it. Really expect it. Expect the pendulum to swing. And again, the more you’ve awakened, the bigger the swing. And it does not stop – ever. You never reach a place where you don’t swing anymore. You opened your heart, you opened your womb, you opened your pelvis—your issues, your wounds will arise.
2. Ground your awareness in your body. We want to create the body as the container. So when there’s emotional hurts, when there’s memories arising, when something is coming up in the body, you have the muscles, the capacity to stay grounded without identifying with the swings of the pendulum. Staying grounded and staying present in the swings can be really, really hard. Grounding in the body can really help to use your body as a container to hold your growth journey, your awakening.
3. Do not repress how you feel because of what you want to feel. A lot of this is so common. We repress—”I want to feel loving, so I’m going to repress my hate. I’m going to repress my anger. I’m going to repress my jealousy.” Don’t repress it. We have to feel it in the body. Feel it so it can transform.
4. Get some support. I think this is also sometimes really, really missed on the spiritual journey and the awakening journey – which is we want to do it ourselves. It is beautiful—to have your inner guide, to own being responsible for yourself in that way. But when a teacher, when a guide holds the space for you, then the part of us that’s terrified about what’s arising, we can open it up. We can look at it.
When there’s somebody holding the space—somebody who’s been on this journey, who has been embodying, who is further along—then they can hold the space. We can feel safer. Their presence can help our sensitivity. Their presence can affect us in a way that we can be more attuned to what’s happening than if we were to sit by ourselves. They say a group meditation has more power than just one person because the whole group brings the energy down. Same thing in working with a teacher or guide.
This is psychospiritual integration — integrating spiritual growth and awakening with the wounds and traumas that arise, so you can embody your awakening in daily life.
May you safely land on your spiritual awakening journey.
Reclaiming What Was Lost
If you are navigating the deeper swings of your own awakening and are ready to create a grounded container for integration, I offer a free 20-minute consultation. One-on-one psychospiritual integration mentorship is available worldwide to help you step out of spiritual bypassing and return safely to your real self.
If this article resonated, you may also find support in these reflections on spiritual awakening, embodiment, and psychospiritual integration:
- Is It My Mental Health or a Spiritual Awakening? — when spiritual openings trigger anxiety, depression, or chronic fatigue
- 3 Foundational Ingredients for a Safe Spiritual Awakening Journey — practical grounding for the path
- The Missing Instructions: Why Being High-Functioning Still Feels Like a Struggle — on the soul parenting we never received