After Awakening, Reconnection Begins

For a long time, I believed spiritual awakening was about leaving something behind.

Leaving heaviness. Leaving most of the pain.

Leaving the density and stuckness of being human.

And in a way, it does feel like that at first.
There is often a moment — or a season — when something opens.
Energy feels lighter. The body relaxes. The mind grows quiet and expands at the same time.
There is a sense of safety that doesn’t depend on circumstances or other people. Like you are not alone, and you are always protected.
A feeling of having come home.

It’s natural to want to stay there.

But what I have seen, again and again — in myself and in others — is that this opening can quietly turn into a kind of distance. Not always obvious. Sometimes very subtle.
The pull toward lightness can become a pull away from life as it actually is.

When awakening begins, attention often turns toward purification - toward releasing fear, pain, old patterns, everything unresolved and heavy.
Some of this lives in the body. Some in the psyche. Some feels older than a single lifetime.
This movement is not wrong. It is necessary.

Yet there is a moment when the search for “higher vibration” becomes a way of not staying with what still aches, what still resists, what still wants to be met rather than transcended.

The danger is not the darkness. The danger is bypassing it or trying to avoid and escape it.

It can be intoxicating to touch spaciousness, clarity, and trust — especially after years of inner struggle, confusion, and loneliness.

Slowly, without meaning to, the goal shifts. Not toward truth, but toward maintaining a certain lighter state.
And this lightness becomes something to protect.
Anything that threatens it — grief, anger, confusion, disillusionment — is quietly pushed aside. Explained away. Reframed. Or escaped.

But the parts that are denied do not disappear. They wait.

What we call “low vibration” is often nothing more than unloved experience — pain that has not been met, fear that has not been allowed to soften, aspects of ourselves that learned long ago they were not welcome.
Trying to forcefully rise above them only keeps them intact.

Human beings were never meant to be only light. We were meant to be whole.

And awakening is not an exit from this life. It is an invitation to experience it more fully.

Again and again, I encounter people who are deeply sincere, deeply open — and yet subtly stalled.

Not because they lack insight, but because they learned to associate awakening with leaving all the darkness behind.

Sometimes this shows up as constant positivity.

Sometimes it is getting into too much spiritual travel, altered states, substances, or endless seeking.

Sometimes it is as simple as avoiding ordinary pain with extraordinary language.
It looks like progress, but something essential stops moving.
And this, too, can be part of the learning.

There are no shortcuts here.
What integrates awakening is not transcendence, but connection.
Letting what is still dense be felt. Letting what is still unresolved come close enough to be held.

This does not mean drowning in pain or identifying with victimhood.

It means staying present without abandoning your real self.

There is unbelievable courage in this phase — one that rarely gets celebrated.
The courage to remain or to feel without being overly dramatic.
The courage to allow life to be ordinary again, without needing it to confirm anything but the life and existing itself.

Only from this kind of balance does something finally settle.
Not enlightenment as an achievement, but as an everyday way of living.

And this is true not only individually, but collectively.
Humanity cannot move forward by denying its shadow. Nor can the Earth be healed by bypassing what has been damaged.
What heals is not escaping into light, but the willingness to let light touch what has been left out.
Reconnection does not happen somewhere else, outside of yourself.
It happens here — in the body, in the day-to-day, in the places we once wanted to leave behind.

Perhaps this is what awakening is really for.
Not to take us away from life but to bring us back, more quietly, more honestly, and more whole.

To wiser days and enlightened ways,
Anna💛