When you go through any kind of personal growth, a big or small life change or an awakening of any kind (especially a Kundalini awakening), it isn’t unusual to experience a sudden and intense identity shift, a sense of loss, overwhelming confusion or loss of direction.
There’s a better way to get through this lost feeling instead of rushing to comprehend or remedy it. I have 5 steps for you to try (which I use myself).
Think of it this way: your consciousness is Spring cleaning and making space for its next evolution.
The identity you’ve been living through, the direction and structure that you’ve been relying on have reached their maximum.
It’s all served its purpose to get you to where you are now, but your consciousness can’t continue forward with these blueprints because they can’t support what’s next in your life.
So, you’re now in the transition space.
To clarify, I’m not talking about a deeper mental-health-type crisis around identity, but the kind of challenges we face each time our identity evolves and we wake up more, psychologically or spiritually.
How do you know when you’re in the transition space (AKA “lost”)?
You might feel like you’re suddenly wearing the wrong skin; that you’re walking around in a vessel that just doesn’t feel like you.
You might feel like your sense of self is starting to slip out of your grasp, making your understanding of yourself cloudier and cloudier. Your values and sense of what is meaningful are becoming questionable or no longer important.
Or you might feel like you’re losing the ability to function in your everyday life.
You can experience this as a gradual slipping away, or it can be like the ground beneath your feet is suddenly just gone.
Most of us notice it more acutely when we’re having a hard time in our life. It’s more familiar in those moments that often summon a slipping sense of self as a side effect — an extra burden on top of difficult things that we’re trying to deal with in life.
But it stands an equal chance of happening when things are going well. When you’re gliding along, succeeding in your priorities, the things that you’re making are flourishing in the world or you just feel fantastic. If it happens during this scenario, it’s extra shocking and bewildering.
I experienced this second scenario recently.
I was in Melbourne teaching my Spirit Magic classes. In the few days between teaching Spirit Magic Level 2 and Spirit Magic Level 3, I suddenly felt this really amazing sense of being on purpose, that I am doing my life’s work. I had tears of gratitude as I thought about teaching this work.
I felt a sudden, enormous consciousness shift happen as I welled up with that gratitude. In a flash, I felt my old identity and structure fall away and the new structure start to come in. I could sense that this new structure coming in was aligned with the high frequency and offering of this Spirit Magic work to the world.
Sounds nice, right?
But it was totally inconvenient! I was in the middle of teaching large groups of people in live, in-person classes. So I, at a personality level, was frustrated and disconcerted by this sudden onset of shifting who I was when I taught Spirit Magic Level 2.
What do we do when we find ourselves in this lost, transition space?
Here are 5 steps to move through the lost, shifting, skin-shedding gap with less struggle and more peace, trust and awareness.
-
Know that this identity shift is positive, meaningful and normal.
It’s a foundational process of your evolution or awakening toward the next level of growing and flourishing.
Generally, if you can work with the process instead of against it, you will reach a beautiful outcome. The first step is to acknowledge it positively. From there, you can partner with it.
At the end of the identity shift, you will feel yourself shifting into and operating from a higher level of consciousness, a new way of perception, an accelerated way of understanding things. Then you can bring that into your life and whatever you’re creating or living in that moment. -
Notice the resistance.
The first thing that happens once you notice this sense of loss is to feel objection and resistance to the shift.
We’re attached to our sense of self — the one that we’ve created, the one that has worked for us or the structures in our lives that have helped us to show up well. Our psyche or personality (whatever you want to call it) is fed by the sense of self that you’ve had until now. Losing it means totally freaking out the psyche-personality, so it pushes back.
Especially if you’re going through an awakening process in Kundalini, the shift can be extremely destabilizing.
So, it’s normal to feel scared or panicked. It’s common to scramble, cling and try to get back to what you had — even though it’s disintegrating or falling away before you. -
Allow for grief and sadness over what was lost.
This is normal, too. At this point, try to just allow. Allow tears, allow sadness. It’s part of the shedding and the letting go.
By bottling up, pushing aside or ignoring the emotions that need to come through, you’re maintaining attachment to the parts that have fallen away — you’re holding yourself back from completing this process.So, allow a loving space for whatever needs to surface and release.
-
Arriving in the transition space, help yourself trust as you wait for the new forms to put down roots.
As the old sense of self falls away, you end up in this interim space where the new form has not yet appeared. This is where you help yourself trust that it’s forming in the background; you just can’t see it yet.
I often describe this stage as feeling like a sailing ship out on the ocean.Suddenly, the breeze stops, you have no rudder and you’re just floating there. There can be no sense of direction. The energy and motivation, the life force that was filling the sails of the ship are suddenly not there.
We can fight this stage, too. So at this point, it can be most helpful to just allow yourself to be lost for a little bit. Just go through your life. Let yourself relax from trying to get back, trying to know, trying to understand. Just be.
Allow yourself to float on the vast ocean of possibilities. -
Remind yourself that these kinds of shifts don’t normally take very long.
Again, I’m not talking about deep trauma and long-term transformational processes where you really don’t know what your sense of self is for a long time. I’m talking about these shifts that naturally take place as we move through our awakening journeys.
For me, the sense of loss began trickling in between teaching the Spirit Magic classes. It didn’t affect my teaching or presence with my students, but I could sense it in the background. It set in fully the day after Spirit Magic 3 ended, and I struggled as I tried to find alignment with this identity-loss shift.
But then I received the reminder to just let myself be lost.
So, for the entire weekend after teaching Spirit Magic Level 3, I just let myself be lost. And it was such a freedom! It allowed me to relax, to stop any sort of grasping, to let myself completely surrender into not knowing.
This surrender led to a surprise.
I found that being lost is actually a really beautiful place.
By giving myself a weekend of being lost, the space I’d given my system to reconstruct allowed the beginnings of the new consciousness to arrive, ground and start to hold me as I moved forward into the projects that were coming.
Allowing myself to be lost was liberating.
When you feel lost, this is my advice:
Let yourself be lost. Don’t rush to pull back, force fill it or label it. This will allow what’s trying to birth, what’s trying to build, to find some form, to come in without you struggling, fighting and getting in the way of it.
Are you in the transition space right now? How are you moving through it? I welcome you to share your reflections in the comments below. I love reading them and learning from them.
With passion for your growth and awakening,
2 Comments
Thankyou for your supportive words Even though i know i’m going through transition i want it to hurry up and give me my life back and yet have read articles on Waiting and Trust and finding it difficult all the same to stop all the chatter in my head !!
Dear Cynthia,
Thank you for your thoughtful sharing. I understand the urge to push forward.
At this point it may be helpful to you to slow down and count the blessings, there is often a lesson or acknowledgement that the process wishes us to make before we can move on. Almost like stages in a video game! Please know slow is often safest and best. As to the chatter, I’d pay attention on an observational level, again, change your perspective. Welcome the thoughts and feelings, any variety and just let them be, don’t try and control or push them away. Some may float past like clouds but some may stand out as odd, look behind them, find what revelation they bring. Trust yourself and the process, there is no middle, there is only now that is as precious as any stage. Use it as a time to get brilliant at mindfulness, talk back to the voices, are they there for a reason? Think about it as transformational, if someone said to you that where you are going is much better than where you were before, would you be in such a hurry to get your ‘old life’ back? Beware of holding on to things that don’t feed you, leave no stone unturned!
It is normal to have chatter because of the fear and change you’re going through, the mind is very unsettled and concerned. And may have been chattering for a very long time. Awakening over time softens the chatter and dissolves it.
Big love,
Myree x