Why You Lose Motivation After a Spiritual Awakening

One day you experience a mind-blowing spiritual awakening. You come to understand that the ‘person’ you see yourself to be is less of a concrete thing and more of an idea; an idea that you are feeding on autopilot.

You realize your job is something you do, your nationality is somewhere you were born, your relationships are something you have…and you may love and appreciate all of these things…but they aren’t YOU, not at your core.

You notice this disparity between who you think you are day to day, and who you actually are on a deeper level. You start questioning everything, and there are endless things to question.

You consume spiritual and philosophical books and seminars one after the other, you find great teachers and may even take a course or find a community to join.

It feels as if you couldn’t possible learn everything you need to. You’re interested in meditation or astrology, you learn about the chakras and dedicate yourself to a yoga practice, you dig into every informational rabbit hole you can find.

What motivated you before – work, relationships, cheap entertainment – no longer does.

You are now motivated by something much deeper, something you can’t stop thinking about even at bedtimes. Your purpose beyond these ‘things’.

You may reach out to old friends, family members or strangers on the street and desperately tell them everything you’ve learned. You tried to wake them up.

I say you here and I’m sure a lot of this applies, but I’m really laying out my ‘spiritual journey’ here.

Once I understood quite deeply that we were not just physical beings have a physical experience, everything changed for me. This was always something I had an inkling of, but it was only in 2018 after my grandma passed away that I decided to really go all in.

No longer ignore the things that were pulling my heart this way or that. And for many years I felt very motivated to write about and share my experiences with others. This very blog is an example of that.

But I noticed my motivation waning a few years ago, and by the beginning of 2025 all I wanted to do…was nothing.

I didn’t want to read anymore spiritual books, listen to anymore Manly P. Hall lectures or try to get anything to think anything. I didn’t want to be on a healing journey or do shadow work. I didn’t even want to deepen my meditation practice. I just wanted to be.

So that’s exactly what I did! I made my days very boring. I didn’t go out looking for anyone or anything exciting. I didn’t cocoon myself away but was very comfortable just being in quiet alone, if that’s what the day called for.

If you’re noticing yourself losing motivation after a spiritual awakening I highly recommend trying the same! Even if only for a week.

Why it happens

When you’re in this space you know the importance of following intuitive guidance, of taking action when everything in you is telling you to make a change.

At the beginning of a spiritual awakening this is often what we do: We quit that job, leave that relationship, let go of those unhealthy habits. We are in action-taking mode.

Then we start to fill ourselves up: We buy those books, delve into topics that have always intrigued us and start several practices.

Dissolving ego

We all have an ‘ego’ this protective armor we carry around as humans; identity.

Ego can be ‘helpful’ in some contexts (defending yourself against abuse) and ‘unhelpful’ in others (becoming arrogant or self-serving) but does not represent us fully.

I often say it doesn’t matter if we know we’re reincarnated 7th century royalty, if that doesn’t translate in this life to more empathy and understanding. We can understand that we know a lot, more than others in some areas, and still remain deeply ignorant.

There comes a time on the spiritual path where you just have to empty yourself out. You have to let go of it all…even the spiritual identities you’ve built up. This is so that we don’t just operate as human learning about or practicing spirituality, but become spirit in motion.

Although spirit doesn’t ‘have an ego’ our ego can take on a spiritual appearance.

The void phase

Another reason you might be noticing less motivation after a spiritual awakening is because you are entering a void phase.

This is a phase where you experience deeper levels of ‘nothingness’, emptiness, stillness. So often the ‘goal’ on the spiritual path whether conscious or unconscious, is to continuously raise our vibration.

To become more and more of something, or experience more and more joy and love.

I think there is benefit to these experiences. To feel divine love pouring through the body, to feel genuinely positive not because you are avoiding or repressing anything. They also do not encompass the entire spiritual journey, life in general.

We will have phases where we experience the opposite in ways we couldn’t or wouldn’t before. We get to know the shadow, the void so deeply and we learn how to be with it completely!

Spiritual preparation

Emptiness and a lack of motivation can also serve as intense preparation. When our lives were so out of balance before, so misaligned that we didn’t know who we were, we have to come back to zero point consciousness. A blank slate so we can reset.

After a year of really delving into the emptiness and nothingness, letting it be (letting myself be in it) I have noticed my motivation increasing. There are so many new things I want to do now, so many new ways I want to express myself and help others.

Sometimes we need to be completely bored and still to really hear what our intuition is saying, so that we can take aligned action on it!

We need time to detach from people, places and things so that we can move in a very purposeful direction.

How to re-engage with the world

When you enter a phase like this let it happen. Don’t delay what is inevitable or feels right to your spirit.

You want to watch out for resistance, not in an overly analytical or self-critical way, just hold awareness whenever you are pushing back against your own flow.

Continue the practices that are helping you and release the ones that are not. If meditation no longer makes sense to you in this phase, let it go! If the affirmations you’ve been reciting no longer fit, stop focusing on them.

Trust that whatever you need to do will be clear as long as you remain open and trust yourself. Sometimes necessary to drop even the ‘spiritual’ practices that are no longer aligned.

Don’t force motivation but be open to it. It may arrive in completely different ways that you are accustomed to. By way of new perspectives on old stuff or through new interests entirely.

We lose motivation on the spiritual path so that we can better integrate what we have learned.

Oftentimes we’ve done so much inner work that we forget to just live our lives, and we need time to decompress and allow everything we’ve ‘fixed’ or ‘changed’ about ourselves really show its fruits.

We don’t always have to be in an active process. Sometimes we can just allow.