The Unspoken Challenge of Spiritual Awakening: When You No Longer Fit
There comes a moment on the authentic spiritual path that few teachers discuss openly—a disorienting threshold where you’ve outgrown old ways of finding meaning but haven’t yet fully embodied new ones. A space where the pursuits, beliefs, and pleasures that satisfy others no longer resonate with you, leaving you in a kind of existential no-man’s-land.
As a holistic therapist working with spiritual seekers throughout Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge, I’ve witnessed countless individuals navigate this challenging terrain. They often arrive with similar questions: “Is something wrong with me? Why can’t I enjoy what others enjoy? Am I going crazy, or is the world?”
If you’re experiencing this void—this sense of being between worlds—I want you to know that you’re not alone, you’re not losing your mind, and you haven’t taken a wrong turn. You’re experiencing what mystics and contemplatives across traditions have described as a necessary phase of authentic spiritual development—a sacred emptying that precedes deeper embodiment.
This blog explores this often-misunderstood phase of the spiritual journey, offering perspective and practical guidance for navigating what can be one of the most challenging yet transformative periods of awakening.
The Void Between Worlds: Signs You’re in Spiritual Transition
How do you know if what you’re experiencing is this spiritual void rather than depression or simple dissatisfaction? While there can be overlap, certain qualities distinguish this phase of spiritual transition:
1. Questioning Everything
You find yourself questioning assumptions, beliefs, and values you previously took for granted—not in an intellectual, argumentative way, but from a place of genuine uncertainty about what’s true.
2. Outgrowing Former Pleasures
Activities, relationships, or achievements that once brought satisfaction now feel empty or meaningless, yet you may not yet know what would feel meaningful instead.
3. Sensing Something More
Despite the disorientation, you have a persistent sense that there’s “something more”—a deeper truth or way of being that’s calling you forward, even if you can’t clearly define it.
4. Feeling Out of Step
You feel increasingly out of sync with mainstream culture and conventional pursuits, perhaps even with spiritual communities that once felt like home.
5. Experiencing Profound Loneliness
You experience a particular kind of existential loneliness that comes from seeing through games and illusions that others still find completely engaging and real.
If these signs resonate with your experience, you may well be in this sacred void—this space of transition between an old way of being that no longer fits and a new way that hasn’t yet fully emerged.
The Necessary Stripping Away: Why Spiritual Crutches Must Fall
One of the most challenging aspects of this phase is the gradual or sometimes sudden falling away of what I call “spiritual crutches”—the practices, beliefs, identities, and communities that once supported your growth but now stand in the way of deeper embodiment.
These might include:
Conceptual Frameworks
Spiritual and philosophical systems that once helped you make sense of reality but now feel like mental constructs that distance you from direct experience.
Spiritual Practices
Meditations, rituals, or techniques that once felt transformative but now seem mechanical or performative.
Spiritual Identity
The subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways you’ve defined yourself as a “spiritual person,” which may now feel like another costume hiding your authentic being.
Spiritual Communities
Groups or teachers that once provided guidance and belonging but now feel limiting or misaligned with your evolving understanding.
These supports aren’t inherently problematic—in fact, they’re valuable scaffolding for certain phases of the journey. The issue arises when we cling to them past their useful life, when they become obstacles rather than aids to our continued unfolding.
In my work with clients throughout Dublin and Ireland, I’ve observed that this stripping away rarely happens by choice. More often, these crutches simply stop working. The meditation technique no longer brings peace. The conceptual framework no longer makes sense. The community no longer feels like home.
This can be terrifying. Without our familiar supports, we feel exposed, vulnerable, and uncertain. Yet this very vulnerability creates the conditions for a more authentic embodiment of truth—one not mediated by techniques, concepts, or identities.
The Unique Loneliness of the Path: When You See Through the Games
Perhaps the most painful aspect of this phase is the profound sense of isolation it often brings. As you begin to see through the games, pursuits, and concerns that absorb most people around you, meaningful connection can become more challenging.
This isn’t about spiritual superiority—quite the opposite. It’s about finding yourself unable to fully participate in what philosopher Jean Gebser called the “mental-rational” consciousness structure that dominates our culture. You see the limitations of this way of being, yet you haven’t fully stabilized in a more integrated consciousness.
Conversations that once engaged you now feel like skimming the surface. Achievements that society celebrates seem hollow. Entertainment that others enjoy feels empty or even painful to consume.
Many spiritual seekers in Dublin and beyond have described to me feeling like they’re watching a play or movie that everyone else thinks is real—seeing both the actors and the script, unable to lose themselves in the performance.
This can create a profound question: “Am I crazy, or is the world?” The answer is neither, but this question itself points to the core challenge of this phase: how to trust your evolving perception when it diverges so sharply from consensus reality.
Surrendering the Need to Know: The Challenge of Trust
When all certainties fall away and familiar landmarks disappear, the spiritual journey becomes fundamentally about trust—not blind faith in external authorities, but a deeper surrender to the intelligence that’s guiding your unfolding.
This isn’t easy, especially for those of us educated in Western culture’s emphasis on knowledge, control, and certainty. Our minds want to map the territory ahead, to know where we’re going and how we’ll get there, to have guarantees before we take the next step.
Yet the nature of this phase is that such certainty isn’t available. The ancient maps are outdated, and you haven’t yet created new ones. You’re walking a path that’s revealing itself only as you take each step.
This requires a different kind of knowing—one that’s more embodied, intuitive, and immediate than our usual analytical understanding. It asks us to listen for the subtle signals of rightness that emerge not from the thinking mind but from a deeper intelligence.
Clients throughout Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge often describe this as learning to navigate by starlight rather than sunlight—less distinct, requiring more presence and attention, yet adequate for the journey when our eyes adjust to the dimmer illumination.
A Meditation for Navigating the Void
To support those going through this challenging phase of spiritual transition, I’ve created a guided meditation called “The Sacred Void: Trusting When All Crutches Fall Away.” This practice:
- Validates the experience of being between worlds
- Addresses the particular loneliness of this phase
- Explores the necessity of dropping all spiritual crutches
- Offers guidance for finding trust when nothing is certain
Experience The Sacred Void meditation here: [MEDITATION LINK PLACEHOLDER]
This meditation is especially valuable for spiritual seekers who find themselves questioning everything, feeling out of step with conventional and even spiritual communities, or struggling to trust the process when the path ahead isn’t clear.
Practical Guidance: Navigation Tools for the Void
While there are no formulas or techniques that can bypass this phase of emptying and uncertainty, certain orientations can support you in navigating it with more grace:
1. Honor the Not Knowing
Rather than rushing to new certainties or spiritual frameworks to replace those you’ve outgrown, can you develop a more comfortable relationship with uncertainty itself? The void is teaching you to rest in mystery rather than grasping for answers.
As one contemplative teacher put it: “The spiritual journey isn’t about acquiring new certainties, but about becoming more comfortable with fundamental uncertainty.”
2. Look for Subtle Signs
In the absence of clear direction, attune to subtler forms of guidance:
- Moments of unexpected peace amid the confusion
- Small joys that arise without obvious cause
- Chance encounters that shift your perspective
- Synchronicities that suggest a hidden orchestration
- Bodily sensations of rightness or wrongness beyond rational analysis
These aren’t dramatic signs but gentle whispers that become audible only when we quiet our demand for louder guidance.
3. Find Fellow Travelers
While this phase is inherently solitary in certain ways, connecting with others who understand this territory can provide valuable perspective and support.
This doesn’t necessarily mean joining new spiritual groups, which can quickly become another crutch or identity. Rather, it might involve simple, honest conversations with others who are navigating similar terrain—whether in person or through books, podcasts, or other media that speak authentically to this phase of the journey.
Throughout Dublin and Ireland, there are others walking this path, even if they’re not always visible in obvious spiritual contexts. Sometimes these connections emerge in unexpected places when we’re open to recognizing kindred spirits.
4. Embrace Ordinariness
Paradoxically, as spiritual crutches fall away, many find themselves drawn to greater simplicity and ordinariness. The quest for special experiences or spiritual states loses its appeal as they discover the profound in the everyday.
Simple pleasures—a cup of tea, a walk in nature, meaningful work, authentic connection—often become more nourishing than elaborate spiritual practices or peak experiences. This isn’t regression but a more integrated spirituality that doesn’t separate sacred from ordinary.
5. Trust the Intelligence That Brought You Here
Remember that the very consciousness that’s guiding your awakening is what led you to this void. It didn’t bring you this far to abandon you. The emptying you’re experiencing isn’t punishment or regression but necessary preparation for what’s next.
As the Sufi poet Rumi wrote: “When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain.”
The Gifts of the Void: What Emerges Through Surrender
While this phase can be profoundly challenging, it carries unique gifts that aren’t available through more comfortable spiritual paths:
Authentic Embodiment
As spiritual concepts, techniques, and identities fall away, what remains is the possibility of a more direct, unmediated embodiment of truth—one that emerges organically rather than being constructed or performed.
Liberation from Spiritual Materialism
Without spiritual crutches to grasp, you’re freed from what Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”—the tendency to use spiritual practices and insights to bolster the very ego they’re meant to dissolve.
Direct Knowing
As analytical certainty gives way to deeper trust, a different kind of knowing emerges—one that’s more immediate, embodied, and integrated than conceptual understanding.
Genuine Compassion
The vulnerability and humility of this phase often dissolve spiritual pretension, creating space for authentic compassion that doesn’t emerge from a position of superiority or “helping” others.
Capacity for Mystery
Perhaps most importantly, navigating this void develops your capacity to rest in the fundamental mystery of existence without needing to reduce it to concepts, techniques, or certainties.
Beyond the Void: What Comes After
While I can’t map the territory beyond this void for you—each journey unfolds uniquely—I can share what many spiritual traditions and contemporary accounts suggest: that this emptying eventually gives way to a more integrated, embodied way of being.
This isn’t a permanent state of bliss or perfection, but a different relationship with reality—one characterized by greater presence, authenticity, and capacity to meet life as it comes without the filters of rigid identity or conceptual frameworks.
Importantly, what emerges through this process isn’t a transcendence of humanity but a fuller embodiment of it—not rising above the messiness of life but being more completely present within it, with all its joy and sorrow, clarity and confusion.
As one client in Dublin beautifully expressed after navigating this void: “I’m not more spiritual now—I’m more human. And I’ve found that being fully human was what spirituality was pointing to all along.”
A Closing Reflection
If you find yourself in this sacred void—questioning everything, feeling the loneliness of being between worlds, struggling to trust when all crutches have fallen away—I offer this perspective:
You haven’t lost your way. You’re not regressing. You’re not doing anything wrong. This emptying, this uncertainty, this falling away of what once supported you—all of it is part of a natural unfolding that’s been recognized by wisdom traditions throughout time.
The 16th-century mystic John of the Cross called it “the dark night of the soul.” Buddhist traditions speak of the “falling away of the self.” Indigenous wisdom describes it as a form of initiation or death before rebirth.
What these traditions share is the recognition that genuine transformation includes phases of dissolution—periods when old structures must fall away to make space for something new to emerge.
So if you’re in this void, I encourage you to trust the process—not because I or anyone else says so, but because something in you already knows this is necessary, even as another part fears it. That knowing, that deeper intelligence that’s guiding your unfolding, hasn’t abandoned you and won’t.
As the poet Rilke advised: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
About Abi Beri
Abi Beri is a holistic therapist and spiritual guide offering sessions in Dublin, Naas, and Newbridge. His approach integrates somatic therapy, energy healing, and family constellations to support clients through profound life transitions, including spiritual awakening and transformation.
For individual sessions, workshops, or to access additional meditation resources:
- Website: www.blissfulevolution.com
- Somatic Healing: www.somatictherapyireland.com
- Family Constellations: www.familyconstellationseurope.com
- Meditation: The Sacred Void
