From the Soulfully Encompassed perspective, spiritual awakening begins with one of the deepest wounds of the human condition: the experience of separation from our true nature as souls. 

We are born into this world with little conscious memory of who we are or where we came from,  compressed into the limitations of a physical body and its five senses, far removed from the vastness of what we are as souls. We are dependent on those around us for survival. We instinctively learn to adapt ourselves to secure safety, love, belonging and connection. What begins as a biological necessity often becomes a way of being. We suppress aspects of our authentic self that feel unwelcome or unsafe to express, relegating them to the shadows of the subconscious. Traumatic experiences can fragment our consciousness still further.

Before we are old enough to question or discern anything, we inherit beliefs, identities and narratives that are not our own. We become confined within thought prisons that tell us who we are, what this world is and how it works. We are programmed and conditioned to believe that love, truth, identity, purpose, power, permission and authority exist outside of us. 

We learn to identify and define ourselves through the conceptual mind—personality, history, roles and relationships—Our attention and sense of self become so consumed by the external and the demands of being human that we lose sight of something extraordinary:

Who we really are.

You don’t have a soul, you are a soul

You are not a human being trying to find your soul.

You are a soul remembering itself through a human experience.

You may have always lived with the feeling that something was missing—A longing you could never fully articulate or satisfy. 

For a while, that longing can be suppressed. The further we become separated from the truth of who we are as souls, the more we search outside ourselves for what can only be found by remembering who we have always been.  We can distract or numb ourselves. We can be on autopilot to adapt, achieve, consume, conform and construct entire lives around the identity we have been given.

Until, for some of us, we can’t anymore.

Spiritual awakening begins when the soul’s longing to remember itself can no longer be suppressed.

Sometimes it is catalysed by a seismic before-and-after event: bereavement, trauma, heartbreak, illness, upheaval or another experience that fractures our existing understanding of ourselves and reality. Sometimes the catalyst is less dramatic—a growing dissatisfaction with a life that looks perfectly fine from the outside, an inexplicable sense of disconnection, or the creeping realisation that the reality we have been handed no longer makes sense.