What to Expect During Spiritual Awakening and Ascension: Insights from My Personal Experience
If you imagined that spiritual awakening and ascension would feel like a gentle journey filled with love, light, and flowers—I'm sorry to say, that's not always the case. Having recently gone through a whirlwind month of rapid awakening myself, I want to share some honest insight into what this process can really feel like.
It wasn’t until I returned from a meditation retreat in Sedona, Arizona, that I truly began to experience the stages of spiritual awakening and the symptoms that come with it. While each person’s journey is unique, shaped by their own subconscious wounds, traumas, and beliefs, I believe sharing my personal experience might offer some clarity and help you better understand the process you may be going through.
The Stages of Spiritual Ascension – The Awakening Process
I’ve broken down my journey into seven stages, though it’s important to note that the process isn’t always linear. You may find yourself experiencing multiple stages at once, and that’s perfectly normal. Here’s how I experienced it:
Stage 1: Realization of Subconscious Pain (Level 1) & Who You Are
This is the initial awakening, where you begin to uncover the deep-seated pain and start realizing who you truly are.
Stage 2: Self-Compassion
This stage is all about learning to be gentle with yourself. It’s about acknowledging, with kindness, the difficulties and suffering you’ve experienced throughout your life, and offering yourself the love and care you deserve.
Stage 3: Gratitude
An unexpected sense of appreciation begins to emerge for everything in your life—both the good and the challenging moments. You start to thank yourself for your resilience in enduring the painful times and for the lessons learned along the way. You also find gratitude for life itself, as it has helped you gain a deeper understanding of your true nature and the essence of your soul.
Stage 4: Re-living Your Fears and Trauma
During this stage, you may find yourself confronting past fears and traumas, as intense emotions that need healing begin to surface. Your deepest fears might reappear, or emotions you’ve long buried in your subconscious may rise to the surface. This can be a deeply turbulent time, but through self-compassion and gratitude, you’ll begin to alchemize and transmute these experiences. Staying grounded in the understanding of who you truly are allows you to transform these challenges into profound healing.
Stage 5: Physical Symptoms
The body begins to mirror the emotional and spiritual shifts, leading to physical sensations like fatigue, headaches, or other discomforts. I personally suffered from dizziness and extreme tiredness.
Stage 6: Panic – The Last Release, the Most Painful Process
This stage often involves a deep sense of panic, as the last of the stored emotional wounds surface for release. It’s the hardest, but also the most liberating part of the process.
Stage 7: Peace & Embodiment of Who You Are
After the release, you find a profound sense of peace and begin to fully embody your true self.
My Personal Journey of Spiritual Awakening
Stage 1 – Realisation of Your True Self
In Sedona, I experienced Stage 1 of the awakening process. During my meditation, I saw that I originated from the One—the light within the light, the light that creates the light. I was overcome with tears as another layer of understanding unfolded. I began to realize why I had always felt such deep sadness and darkness, even as a child. This pain had been held in my subconscious for years. As a young child, I witnessed a lot of suffering around me, and the sadness I felt, I unknowingly kept inside because I didn’t have the tools to process it.
I felt a deep sense of relief afterward and truly believed that the awakening process had come to an end. But, I was so wrong!
Stage 2 – Self Compassion
A few days after returning from Sedona I started experiencing Stage 2 of the awakening process. I had a dream where I found myself uncontrollably crying over an incident from 13 years ago—something I thought I had long since gotten over. But in that moment, I realized that the sense of worthlessness I had carried from that event had deeply impacted every area of my life, especially my career. I hadn't truly healed or processed what had happened; instead, I had locked it away in a big, dark box in the corner of my mind.
After that dream, the weeks that followed were filled with non-stop, guttural crying as I began to feel an overwhelming compassion for myself. I mourned the pain I had suffered, the times I believed I was worthless, and all the unkind things I had said about myself. I realized that the warmth and love I had always sought from my family, I could now give to myself by being compassionate and gentle with my own heart.
You can offer yourself compassion by simply acknowledging how you felt or still feel, and agreeing with yourself that yes, that experience was tough. It's about giving yourself permission to have felt the way you did. Personally, I find it easier to speak to myself as a second person because it helps me observe my ego—the part of me that had forgotten my true self—from the perspective of my higher, true self. For example, I might say, "Yes, that wasn’t very kind of your family, and that really hurt your feelings. I’m so sorry you felt worthless for all these years because of that. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been for you."
Stage 3 & 4 – Alchemising Your Fears Through Gratitude
After the weeks of crying that followed, I found myself experiencing both Stage 3 and Stage 4 simultaneously. Having finally learned to be compassionate with myself, I now understood how to feel gratitude for my resilience—how I had endured the pain and wounds of my past while still managing to live my life. I began to see that all the difficulties and challenges I had faced were actually lessons, opportunities to alchemize my struggles into deep insights about who I truly am. These experiences helped me connect with my true self—my divine self—in a more profound way.
For so many years, I had been incredibly hard on myself. But through the lens of compassion, I came to understand what it really means to be kind to yourself. Having felt worthless for so long, I now realized that this belief was never true. In that realization, I finally learned what it truly feels like to feel worthy.
Even though I was experiencing gratitude in a way I had never known before, I was also struggling with severe depression and deep anger. Some days, the depressive episodes were so intense that I felt as though I was dying. But when you're going through such an intense awakening process, the universe offers you insights. During my daily Body & Brain classes, while meditating, I had a realization. The depression I was feeling was an emotion I had carried from a very young age—around three years old. It was as if a video played in my mind, showing me myself as a child in the playground, feeling these emotions.
What I came to understand was that the deep depression I had been feeling was actually a profound sense of loneliness and confusion. As a child, I felt like I was completely alone, not knowing anyone or where I was, and it terrified me. I had never thought of my depression as loneliness, and ironically, even though I am deeply empathic, I had never logically understood loneliness. It struck me that I hadn’t truly grasped loneliness because it was an emotion I had been immersed in my entire life.
I also began to understand why the One, the Divine, chose to experience duality on Earth through us. The One could never fully comprehend what it means to be Divine without experiencing separation, contrast, or duality. Kind of like how I had never fully understood loneliness because I was so deeply immersed in it from the very beginning of my life.
For some reason, understanding the origin of my deep sadness felt incredibly liberating. I realized that I didn’t need to fully understand why I felt such loneliness. Simply acknowledging the emotion was enough for my healing. This acceptance allowed me to release its grip on me and begin moving forward.
Another event that unfolded during this period forced me to face one of my deepest fears—my pet getting sick. My beloved cat suddenly began coughing badly and even threw up blood. It was a chaotic and emotional experience: rushing him to the vet, breaking down in tears thinking he might be dying, and dealing with an enormous vet bill. (Thankfully, he’s completely fine now.)
Up until that point, I had never fully understood why I would spiral into such intense panic whenever my pets showed even the slightest sign of illness. But through this experience, I finally uncovered the root of that fear. When I was seven years old, I bought a baby chick from my school. This was fairly common in Korea at the time—sickly chicks from farms were sold cheaply to children, often as a way for the sellers to quietly discard animals that were unlikely to survive.
I was overjoyed to bring my little chick home. I loved it deeply. But one day, it suddenly became ill and died in my hands. The shock, panic, and sorrow I felt in that moment were overwhelming and far too much for me to process as a child. I had unknowingly carried the trauma of that moment with me into adulthood.
Now, I understand that this was yet another wound I needed to alchemize—another piece of emotional pain to transform through compassion. I sat with that younger version of myself and offered her the love she never received in that moment. And I sent gratitude to the baby chick for the lesson it brought me: that death, while heartbreaking, is not the end. It’s simply a new beginning.
Stage 5 – Physical Discomfort
After re-living deeply rooted emotions and traumas, and alchemizing them with compassion and gratitude, I expected to feel elevated—energized, light, maybe even euphoric. But once again, I was wrong. Instead, I started feeling incredibly dizzy, nauseous, and completely drained of energy. There was also this strange sensation that everything around me was just a dream—something I later found echoed in Native American teachings, where life is described as a dream within a dream. It’s a difficult feeling to put into words, but it left me feeling extremely ungrounded and disoriented.
This phase lasted for about a week and a half. I had to really push through it, allowing myself to rest as much as I could, and grounding myself through movement and exercise. I also noticed I was extremely thirsty, drinking way more water than usual—which made sense, as it felt like my body was flushing out stagnant energy and recalibrating itself.
Looking back, I believe this wave of physical symptoms was my body’s way of readjusting after releasing so many long-held emotional and energetic burdens. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was all part of the process.
Stage 6 – The Panic, The Last Release
Just as I was beginning to feel better physically, and hoped the vet bill fiasco had marked the end of this emotional storm, the universe had one more layer for me to face.
I won’t go too deeply into the details, but I had an experience that triggered one of my oldest, most painful wounds. For a brief moment, I believed everything my family had ever said about me—that I was difficult, unintelligent, unworthy, and ugly… someone people could never like. I had spent almost 40 years trying to reject these beliefs, thinking I had overcome them. But the truth was, I wasn’t free from them—I was still trying to fight them. And the act of fighting meant that, deep down, a part of me still believed those things were true.
In that moment of total collapse, where I fully believed all those old narratives, I had a full-blown panic attack—something I had never experienced before. My breathing became rapid and uncontrollable, I was hyperventilating and my body went into what I later learned was a state of tetany. My muscles stiffened and curled, my face seized up, and I experienced intense peripheral nerve sensations. It felt like my nervous system was in complete shock. Honestly, I thought I was dying because I had mentally given up.
But somehow, I made it through. I came back to myself, slowly, and lived to see another day. That experience was incredibly intense—one I never, ever want to relive—but it was also a moment of reckoning. It revealed just how deeply those false beliefs had embedded themselves within me.
Stage 7 – Embodiment of Your True Self (True Peace)
After that intense experience, it took me a few days to fully integrate everything that had happened. Slowly, a deep clarity began to emerge. I realized that all those negative voices in my head—all the cruel things I had said to myself over the years—were never really mine. They came from my family, from old conditioning, from projections I had internalized. And most importantly, they were never true.
For the first time, I saw clearly who I truly am. I am not those voices. I am not the wounded stories. I am my soul—a kind, compassionate being of light. A being that is unshakeable, undeterred, and at peace. I am an expression of the Divine, the One, who chose to come to Earth to remember what it means to be Divine through the human experience.
I finally understood that my physical body, my personality, and even the circumstances of my life were all part of a chosen path—like selecting a character in a game. I chose this life, with all its challenges, in order to alchemize the pain and difficulty into wisdom, compassion, and truth. Through gratitude and self-love, I have begun to rediscover who I truly am.
Where I am Now
Right now, I am at peace—a kind of peace I had longed for nearly 40 years. Looking back, I realize that what I was truly searching for all this time was the embodiment of my true self—my soul. Now, I feel grounded, stable, and deeply compassionate.
That said, I know life moves in cycles, and duality is a constant here. Challenges may come again, and I may be asked to alchemize more pain into wisdom. But this time, I trust myself. I know I can meet those moments with clarity, strength, and love.
Since November 2024, I’ve had a strong sense that something was shifting in the world. The feeling grew louder, more undeniable, and by mid-February 2025, it was as if a switch had been flipped. By late March and early April, I could feel this change taking root—becoming real and tangible. I can’t say exactly what it is, but I know, in my soul, that something big is unfolding. And I’m not alone—many other spiritually attuned people around the world are sensing the same.
This is a profoundly important time for humanity. A time to awaken to who we truly are—not just as people, but as souls. Just as I was called to face the deepest parts of myself, I believe many others are now being asked to confront their own traumas, wounds, and limiting beliefs—things that no longer belong in the world we are stepping into.
I share my experience with the hope that it brings even a little light or understanding to those navigating their own spiritual awakening. May we all remember that compassion and gratitude for ourselves are powerful forms of unconditional love—and when we embody that love within, it naturally flows outward into the world, helping to heal not just ourselves, but each other.