Returning Back to The World After a Transcendent Spiritual Awakening

Today, I’m sharing all about what it means to return back into the world after any significant spiritual awakening or realization and why it’s necessary and important.

I’m talking about the distinction between leaving your relationships, career, possessions, and even your health behind versus continuing to explore, deepen, and respect those aspects of life even though you may be experiencing a spiritual transformation during which you see beyond the material world to some degree.

In this post, I have some ideas to share about Jesus, the Buddha, the idea of eating meat, of hanging around people who don’t care about spirituality, some personal things about my own spiritual process and what I’ve done to stay grounded, and some of my experiences as a spiritual teacher working with ungrounded people.

If you’ve been following along with my work for a bit, you’ll likely have gotten the sense that I speak a lot about the ideas of finding balance, staying grounded, and integrating our spiritual realizations, awakenings, and transformations into the world.

Put simply, spirituality can sometimes bring about direct experiences, feelings, or a sense of transcending the material world - going beyond it, leaving it behind, seeing it all as an illusion, a place of suffering, a distraction, and so on.

Sometimes we have a flash of insight that we are consciousness and this can cause us to feel like dismissing the material aspects of our existence, like the world and even our bodies.

But this isn’t a healthy approach to spiritual development as human beings. Balance is necessary. This means using our spiritual insights to enhance our worldly, human lives, and the lives of those around us. It means integrating our awakening into our bodies and living and expressing the Truth as material, fleshy beings.

But what happens for some, is that they have a transcendent spiritual awakening, and they run with it, or rather, they fly with it. They leave the ground of planet earth and even their body in a very strong sense, and begin floating around as consciousness, neglecting their worldly matters in the name of spiritual awakening.

Being ungrounded like this can look like - quitting your job, deciding to be homeless, living in your car, your tent, or on the beach, or mooching off others - all while saying things like “God will support me”.

Being ungrounded can look like neglecting your health, no longer exercising or eating well, all while saying “The body is only a vessel, my soul is all that really matters”

Being ungrounded can look like leaving or neglecting your relationships, all while saying “we are all one anyway, relationships are redundant and unimportant, the people in my relationships are all asleep and lowering my vibration, i'm leaving them behind, all I need is myself”

Being ungrounded can look like declaring that your purpose and mission is suddenly to educate others about the Truth that you’ve realized, all while saying things like “everyone is asleep, unlike me, and I need to wake them up from the illusion of the material world so that they can stop suffering, like I have”

Being ungrounded can look different for many people. And some of the examples I’ve given are a little extreme, though certainly not unheard of. For some people, these tendencies and patterns can show up in more subtle ways too.

Nonetheless, the point is that spiritual awakening can make a person ungrounded, causing them to act in ridiculous ways, while using spiritual jargon and excuses to deny or dismiss a person’s worldly responsibilities of maintaining a healthy body, livelihood, and relationships, all while loving others unconditionally without judging them for being awake or asleep.

Let’s look to two of the most iconic spiritual masters - Jesus and the Buddha - to really see the importance of staying grounded despite our spiritual shifts. By looking at their example, we can find our own ways to maintain our own balance too.

Jesus is known to have been a spiritual teacher, master, and guide. That’s obvious. But he had another profession - he was a carpenter. This is key. He was a carpenter that worked with his hands. Perhaps he even cut his own wood from the trees too. To do this work, he had to have been in the body, grounded, stable, and balanced.

He wasn’t just off meditating, wandering, or floating around with the Holy Spirit. He was grounded. He had a job. He made money and used that money in the world. Jesus paid taxes.

He contributed to society in a way that wasn’t just about spirituality. These details about Jesus are shared in the Bible because it is absolutely essential, though often overlooked.

We must maintain some sort of worldly purpose. We must continue to move our bodies, whether it’s professionally or recreationally.

We can’t just sit around in meditation or transcendent states of consciousness. That’s unbalanced.

We also must have some means of supporting ourselves financially. We can’t just walk around aimlessly without giving meaningful value to others.

Furthermore, Jesus is known to have spent time with people that were understood in those times to be very worldly and not spiritual at all - prostitutes and tax collectors.

He spent time with these people to teach and guide them, yes, obviously, but he also stayed with them because they kept him grounded and in the world.

If he was always only hanging around spiritual people who were constantly talking about spiritual matters, it would have made him too unbalanced and he might have floated off.

He needed balance so that he could fulfill his mission as a human being who was meant to relate with other worldly human beings. This is why he sat with apparently unspiritual people.

So keep this in mind. Please don’t reject those who aren’t necessarily on the spiritual path like you are. Don’t push them away because they don’t see the world like you do. Bring them closer. Spend time with them. Not necessarily to teach or guide them. Spend time with them because they will ground you.

These people will put you in check when you start rambling off about some ridiculous spiritual ideas that don’t make sense or matter.

They will remind you that you’re human. They’ll keep you sane. They won’t let you wander off too far from where you’re supposed to be. If you have worldly talent, potential, and responsibilities, they will encourage you to contribute as best as you can.

The importance of grounding is shown in the depictions of Gautama the Buddha too. Some statues show him sitting in the lotus position, with one finger touching the ground. This shows that even the Buddha needs to be grounded, balanced, and in the world. It’s key.

Now let’s look at Zen. In Zen, they say - before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.

What does this mean? It means to stay in the world. Use your body. Fulfill your worldly purpose. Provide for yourself and those that depend on you.

Don’t leave everything behind just because you’ve attained some degree of enlightenment.

So if Jesus, the Buddha, and the Zen folk, all have clear indications of the importance of grounding, of course it also applies to you or I. Nobody is beyond staying grounded.

Sometimes with spiritual awakening, we can have the desire to make a career change. This is normal and natural.

Sometimes we need a fresh environment, fresh coworkers, more passion, or more fun. We may even begin to feel worthy of making more money. Career changes as a result of spiritual development is great!

But this doesn’t mean that your new career needs to be spiritually oriented. Please understand this. Just because you’ve had an awakening doesn’t mean that you need to become a reiki master, a pet psychic, a meditation guide, or a yoga teacher.

You can absolutely continue to blossom on your spiritual path in a career that isn’t overtly spiritual.

Ultimately, if you’ve really had a spiritual awakening, you’d see that it’s all spiritual - even things like accounting and construction.

For myself, this spiritual work is something I do very casually when I feel inspired. I do make some money doing this work, but it’s not income that I rely on at all. Instead, I have made it a point to establish a worldly career for myself.

By profession, I am a photographer. I specialize in photographing dogs. I find working with dogs to keep me very grounded and human.

I get dirty, I get down on my belly to photograph them at their level, I’m constantly rearranging setups in my studio, and I’m always interacting with different kinds of people who likely have no idea about my spirituality.

Running my own business gives me context to relate with others, to fail, to succeed, to get stressed out, to have things go wrong, and to accomplish worldly goals.

This job keeps me sane, balanced, grounded, and out of the psych ward. It reminds me that there’s more to my life than just speaking about spiritual things, especially not trying to shove it in other people’s faces.

If you’re solely doing spiritual work as a profession, and you’re not financially successful yet even though that is your aim, I advise you to take up a worldly job as well.

Chances are that you’re putting too much emphasis on the non-physical spiritual dimension of life in your spiritual work while expecting it to support your physical worldly life. If you have worldly goals, take up a worldly profession.

Just remember, Jesus was a carpenter. Chop wood, carry water.

Now, I want to touch upon an interesting pattern that I’ve seen with some people over the years doing this work as a spiritual teacher.

Occasionally, someone will approach me for guidance on their spiritual path. I’ll support them by offering a response to their question, sharing a resource, meeting them in a session, or meditating with them. A couple days later, they may experience a sudden shift, awakening, realization, or insight.

This shift throws them off balance, they become ungrounded, and start to trip out. They may begin to declare that they’re God, that they’re Jesus, that they’re fully enlightened, and crazy things like that.

Along with these declarations comes a sense of arrogance, as if they’ve seen and understood all that they could ever need.

When I advise them to breathe deeply into the belly, to take it slow, to give themselves time, a few years usually, to stabilize, integrate, and ground their awakening into the body, this is when they switch on me.

They tell me - I don’t need to do any of that. My path is over now. I’ve made it. Let me know if you need any help with your spirituality from me, Brent.

This is when it becomes nearly impossible to get through to them. Their arrogance takes over and they float off thinking that they’ve completed the spiritual path, know everything, and have seen everything.

Well without fail, some time later, I hear from these people about how hard they crashed back down to Earth. During their period of post-awakening instability, they may have quit their jobs, ended their relationships, given their money away, or said or done crazy, alarming things to people that care about them.

From this point, after the crash landing, they see the importance of grounding and integration and begin a difficult journey finding stability once again.

I share this with you as a warning. The spiritual path has many pitfalls. There are many experiences that will come and go which will feel like nothing you’ve ever felt before. They will feel as if you’ve made it all the way, as if there couldn’t possibly be anything left to see or do.

You may feel like you are the only person to have ever realized what you’ve realized. You could feel like the chosen one or something ridiculous like that.

Heed my warning. Nothing you experience on your spiritual path is new. It’s all been well documented. The specifics may be unique, but the general themes and unfoldings are not new at all and you are not the first or only one to experience them. There are teachings from throughout history that exist to support your awakening. Please don’t allow arrogance to let you float off on your own. You will crash. Stay grounded.

Here are some more tips to stay grounded in the midst of your spiritual awakening.

Turn to the texts. Read Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, The Power of Now, and other great books like these.

Find a teacher, whether it’s online, in person, or in books. And commit to them. Don’t abandon them when you have a sudden shift. When you experience a shift, this is when you need a teacher more than ever.

Eat well. For some, this means eating meat from time to time. Let’s make this very clear. Eating meat is not going to halt your spiritual development. The Buddha ate meat. Jesus ate meat. The Dalai Lama eats meat. It’s grounding. It helps during turbulent times on the spiritual path.

Move your body. Lift weights. Run. Sweat. Create something with your hands. Build.

Meditate on the breath in your belly.

Hang around grounded people.

Take a break from speaking about spirituality. Speak about worldly matters.

I hope that you’ve gained some value from me today. I want you to know that no matter what you’re going through on your path, you’re not alone. Support and love exists for you.

For more tips and insight, you can download my free ebook/audiobook called The No-Nonsense Grounding Guide. You can scroll the very bottom of this page to find it.

Let me know if you have any questions about anything to do with your spiritual path or process. Reach out.

Much love. Peace.