True Awakening is Not Just Up—It’s Down, Too
Why Spiritual Growth Isn’t a One-Way Ladder
Many of us have been taught that spiritual awakening is about moving upward—expanding consciousness, transcending limitations, and rising into higher states of awareness. We meditate, read sacred texts, do therapy, and engage in practices that seem to lift us toward enlightenment.
But here’s the paradox: real transformation is not just about going up. It’s about going down, too.
The path to true awakening isn’t a ladder you climb to reach an enlightened peak. It’s a circle—one that requires descent as much as ascent, integration as much as transcendence.
The Descent: Why We Must Go Back to Go Forward
Many seekers experience profound breakthroughs—moments of bliss, non-dual awareness, or deep meditative stillness—only to find themselves later thrown back into old emotional patterns, traumas, or fears. This can feel like regression, but in reality, it’s a necessary part of the process.
🔹 Going downward means reclaiming lost parts of yourself.
We all carry wounds from early life—emotions we suppressed, patterns we adopted for survival, and energies we cut off because they felt too painful.
If we never revisit these depths, we risk building a spiritual identity that is disconnected from the fullness of our humanity.
🔹 Going backward means confronting the stories that shaped you.
Many of our deepest limitations are not intellectual—they are bodily imprints, stored in our nervous system, posture, and breath.
Healing means returning to early developmental wounding and letting it be metabolized through conscious embodiment.
🔹 Going deeper means awakening is not just conceptual—it’s embodied.
It’s one thing to have a realization; it’s another to live it through your entire being.
Real awakening grounds itself in the body, in relationships, in life itself—not just in meditation cushions or abstract insights.
The Path is a Circle, Not a Ladder
Michael Washburn, a transpersonal psychologist, describes awakening as a return to what he calls the “Dynamic Ground”—the raw, primal, energetic source of our life force that we disconnected from in early childhood. According to Washburn:
We cannot evolve into our highest potential until we retrieve what was lost.
This means that when your old wounds resurface, it doesn’t mean you’ve failed—it means you’re moving deeper into authentic transformation.
Instead of seeing past struggles as obstacles to growth, we can reframe them as the very material that makes full awakening possible.
How to Integrate the Descent in Your Spiritual Practice
If you find yourself in a period of intense emotional upheaval, self-doubt, or resurfacing wounds, consider these approaches:
✅ Instead of resisting it, welcome it.
Ask yourself: What if this discomfort is not a block to my path, but an essential part of it?
✅ Get out of your head and into your body.
Awakening is not just an intellectual process. Breathe deeply. Move. Feel where tension lives in your muscles. Let the body express what words cannot.
✅ Slow down the impulse to “fix” it.
Deep transformation doesn’t happen overnight. Let yourself sit with what arises without immediately trying to escape into spiritual bypass.
✅ Recognize that true wholeness embraces all parts of you.
There is no part of you that is unworthy of love.
There is no experience you’ve had that cannot be integrated into wisdom.
There is no descent that does not ultimately lead to a greater capacity for presence.
Your Next Step
If this resonates with you, take a moment today to pause and scan your own journey:
Where do you feel like you’ve regressed?
What emotions or patterns keep resurfacing?
What if those very things are not obstacles but invitations to go deeper?
Awakening is not about transcending your humanity—it’s about becoming fully human in the deepest, most conscious way possible. And that means going up, down, forward, and backward in the beautiful, ever-unfolding spiral of self-discovery.
✨ Let’s embrace the descent as part of the journey.
