When we experience a spiritual awakening, there is so much inner and outer conflict that we have to suddenly contend with. Where there isn’t balance, we have to cultivate it.
We spend our lives viewing the world in a certain way and believing that it operates in a specific fashion, only to have those beliefs be destroyed before our eyes.
We also might not be living in accordance with our spirit, intuition, soul etc. In order to align with our spirit, having to release so many old patterns, beliefs, energy that is stuck in the body.
It is through this transformation of the body, mind and soul that we might prompt an emotional purge. All of that old stuff has to go, and in the meantime things get get hairy!
In today’s post I want to explore this ‘purging phase’ of spiritual awakening, why it happens and how to navigate it. So without further ado let’s begin!
Spiritual purging
Throughout my spiritual journey I have experienced numerous purges, although I didn’t realize it at the time.
Back in 2018 I started getting back into a spiritual practice. I was learning about energy, vibration and the makeup of the soul.
I was specifically working on balancing and opening my seven chakras, and suddenly everything went haywire. It was as if I was suddenly a completely different person, but those around me had stayed the same.
I noticed random aches and pains in my body, energy movements and a lot of brain fog and mental confusion all at once.
What prompted this post was a more recent experience that brought all of these lessons together.
November (2022) was such a weird month for me. Not because of anything that happened in November itself, but because of what was coming up from the months prior.
I was in an environment that was not the best for me for several months, that I knew I had to stick out.
I talk about the influence of our environments often and how sometimes we simply do not have the capacity to thrive in the way we want – it’s not all mental.
In the process, having to expend extra energy just to remain balanced. I didn’t have the time or space to properly address my deeper needs. In November I experienced what I can clearly see now as an energetic purge.
What is an energetic purge?
Anytime we take a step back from a difficult period in our lives there is always this purging phase that follows. When we can finally rest, slow down, come back to ourselves, there is so much that we have to face again. Often, this purging phase happens weeks or even months later.
During a spiritual awakening there is also this purging phase!
When we come to a deeper awareness of ourselves, of the conflict between our ego and spirit, there is a lot we have to reconcile. We might have to slow down and rest, we might have to experience a period of solitude, we might become aware of so much at once that it overwhelms our system.
What a lot of people don’t realize is that the physical body is often the last thing to be affected by a spiritual awakening. It’s rare to experience a ‘complete spiritual awakening’ all at once. So often what we are referring to is an awakening of the mind, the other areas follow.
An energetic or emotional purge allows our new awareness to come through more coherently. Rather than everything being on a mental or energetic level, we see how these blockages manifest on a physical level.
It’s common for people to experience a sudden cold or flu after a spiritual awakening or when their awareness reaches a particular peak. You can think of the physical body like a small vessel – there is only so much it can contain.
When our spirit awakens, our body fills up with energy. The density or heaviness that is already in our body (that we might not even be aware of) is displaced and moves out.
This can come up through the physical body as a whole, through the lungs or stomach as flu. It can come up through the skin and bones as rashes and aches.
Our mental blockages can cause temporary brain fog or confusion. Our emotional blockages can bring up unease and cause mood swings. As you can see, everything is impacted in some way.
Signs of an emotional purge
- Lethargy & difficulty sleeping
- A persistent sense of unease
- Strong energetic movements in the body
- Aches & pains
- A cold or flu
- Mood swings
- Relationships or jobs ending abruptly
- Feeling lost, unbalanced and confused
Purging impacts us on all levels, some of the most obvious signs will be physical but there are other ways we can purge (such as through our relationships).
Eventhough our energy does impact our physical health, often these symptoms arise in order to alert us to physical health problems that we have been ignoring for some time. It’s important to also maintain good physical health and be proactive in getting any medical treatment we need.
How to manage a spiritual purge
Whenever you notice yourself in a purging phase, try your best to just allow everything to come to the surface.
It’s easy to think we’re doing something wrong, when we’re actually allowing our bodies to do what they do naturally – come to a state of equanimity.
With any sort of purge it always gets worse before it gets better. So look at an energetic purge as a sign that you are doing something right, and be aware of what the purge is bringing to your attention – so that you can actually work on it, rather than allowing that energy to fester and come back up at a later time.
One of the most important tools during a spiritual purge is grounding. Grounding is any practice that calms anxious or excitable energy. On a spiritual level, grounding is about bringing energy down into the physical body to be integrated.
Look at all of the spiritual concepts and lessons you’ve taken in on a mental level, and ask yourself how you can do a better job of incorporating them into your day to day life.
You may know intuitively that we are ‘all one’ but how well do you practice that? You may understand how important your words and thoughts are in terms of vibration, but how consistent are you with it?
Setting stronger boundaries is also important during a spiritual purge. A lot of the energy we release during a purge is not ‘our own’. We purge generational curses, societal programming, energy that we’ve taken on in relationships.
It’s no use experiencing a purge if we go right back to old unhealthy environments, or continuing acting in a disempowered way.
Another thing we can do is perform an energy clearing afterwards. After a purge there is still going to be a lot of excess energy (that didn’t get fulled pushed out) lingering in our aura.
We can clear this with a salt bath, through visualization, breathwork etc. Energy clearing isn’t a one-time thing either, we’ll have to come back again and again to remain balanced.
What happens after a spiritual purge?
We are likely to experience many such energetic purges on the spiritual path (in general life) because we are constantly coming back to old lessons to integrate them more deeply.
However there are more obvious periods of purging that seem to have a defined end-point. My experience during November this year was an example of that, eventhough I’m still working through that experience and no doubt will continue to, the majority of the more intense symptoms have stopped.
What happens after a purge is just as important as what happens during.
Your intuition becomes clearer, your body becomes more relaxed, you will find that things flow a bit easier in general. On this spiritual path our goal – if you wish to call it that – is to bring our spirit into the body, and this purging process allows that to happen.
As I explained earlier, the body can only hold so much. As density flows out and light flows in, we will feel a deeper connection with our spirit and the Universe at large.
The larger purpose of an energetic purge is to get us aligned with our soul purpose. This is the path we know we should be on but often get dissuaded from due to our environment or unconscious patterns.
After a spiritual awakening it becomes more and more difficult to ignore our intuition, because we notice the conflict so much more clearly. Often it is these energetic breakdowns that lead to a breakthrough.
So it’s important that we don’t just approach this experience as something that is happening to us, but something that is pushing us into more aligned action.
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