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In this post I explain the 7 stages of spiritual awakening and how to recognise them. The path to full transcendence is long and winding so it can be helpful to know where you are on the map! Read on to find out which of the spiritual awakening stages you’re in.

All spiritual awakenings are the same…but different.

The 7 stages of spiritual awakening which I’m going to outline below are a basic framework for awakening.

Every awakener goes through this journey, but on an individual level, each person may experience the spiritual awakening stages differently.

The ‘flavour’ of your awakening depends on a few things:

1. Your natural psychic talents

We all have psychic abilities but usually we’re more predisposed to one than another.

As an awakener, you will certainly have one or more of the ‘clairs‘ – this will dictate the nature of your awakening experience to some degree.

For example, if you’re clairaudient then it will be very easy for you to receive verbal telepathic communication;

If you’re claircognizant then you’ll just ‘know’ things (a lot of seers have this ability).

Otherwise you might be a healer, an animal intuituve, or proficient in using crystals (for example).

Your natural abilities will effect the nature of your awakening as well as the route you take into it.

2. How many of your soul lessons you’ve completed

During your awakening and once you’re fully transcended, you’ll only be able to open  the levels of universal knowledge you’ve gained access to at soul level.

This is dictated by how many of your lessons you’ve completed over your many lifetimes.

If you’re awakening now, you’ve completed between 70 and 100 percent of your soul lessons.

Someone who’s completed 100 percent will have greater access than someone who’s completed 70 percent.

3. Where you are in this life’s journey and therefore what you need to be able to fully awaken

The spiritual awakening stages aren’t linear. 

Instead, you can think of them as modules you need to complete.

A module is triggered when you reach a certain level of development, however you may still have lessons you need to learn from previous modules, even though you’ve started a new one.

The specific lessons you receive  during the 7 stages of awakening will depend entirely on your human psyche and what is needed to ‘shape’ you for full transcendence.

4. Whether you have volunteered to be a ‘guinea pig’ for awakening

We’re at a very early stage of the global enlightenment project.

Many of us have volunteered to be ‘guinea pigs’ so the teams in the higher dimension can test the effect of different types of awakening experience, before ‘rolling out’ to younger souls.

For example, I’m aware of people who have never had any direct contact with their guides, even though they’re in the late stages of spiritual awakening.

If you’re having an atypical awakening, it’s very likely you volunteered for testing.

(Read this blog post to find out if you’re an old soul.)

What is happening during a spiritual awakening?

To understand the spiritual awakening stages, we need to know what’s actually going on behind the scenes.

What is the process behind spiritual awakening?

It’s very simple. We’re reintegrating the earthbound soul (conscious mind) with its higher self (superconscious mind), which is situated in the higher dimensions.

This process of integration is the foundation of the spiritual awakening journey.

Basically we’re building a ‘data pipe‘.

Why are there 7 stages of spiritual awakening?

You will see different descriptions of the spiritual awakening stages on the internet.

I use 7 stages because in my coaching practice and through the extensive spiritual awakening research I’ve undertaken (take the survey!) 7 seems to be the cleanest split.

Also, the 7 stages align (loosely) to the 7 chakras: spiritual awakening starts at the root and ends at the crown.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into the 7 stages of awakening.

Spiritual Awakening Stage 1: Resolution

This stage of awakening almost always starts when we’re ‘unconscious’.

In other words, we’re not aware we’re awakening and we might not even believe in the soul or any of the ‘woo-woo’ stuff (this is more common than you might think).

The Resolution stage is characterised by deep inner work; we untangle all of the human traumas and issues we’ve collected since birth.

If you’re higher-evolved and due to awaken in this lifetime, typically you’ll have collected quite a lot.

That’s down to the Game of Life – watch the video below to find out more.

This is also the time when we might experience one or more ‘growth-oriented’ Dark Nights of the Soul.

(Read this blog post to learn about the two types of Dark Night of the Soul.)

The purpose of this stage of awakening is to build a stable emotional and mental platform for conscious awakening.

I can’t stress this enough – if you don’t do your inner work, you won’t consciously awaken.

This stage of awakening can take a long time – 7 years in my case.

We usually only understand it as part of the awakening process in retrospect, and we may still be doing inner work in the final stage of awakening (Transcendence) and beyond.

Spiritual awakening Stage 2: Discovery

During the Discovery stage we become deeply interested in spiritual and metaphysical matters.

Often we’ll start learning about topics such as quantum physics.

Sometimes we also become interested in some spiritual practices, such as yoga or meditation.

The trigger for this learning can be an ‘other-worldly’ experience, so it sometimes coincides with Stage 3 (Epiphany) or Stage 4 (Connection).

While there’s usually a specific period of intense research, if we continue the spiritual awakening journey we tend to want to keep learning.

So in a way, this spiritual awakening stage never stops.

The purpose of the Discovery stage is to build a platform of knowledge so that our guides have points of reference they can use once they’ve established contact and have started to teach us directly.

Spiritual Awakening Stage 3: Epiphany

The Epiphany is more of an event than a stage. I’ve called it stage 3, but it could also happen earlier or later in the journey.

It’s the moment we realise there’s more going on than just this 3D environment.

Sometimes we’ll also realise we’re going through a spiritual awakening, although for some people that might come later.

The Epiphany can come as a slow dawning over time or as a huge psychic event.

People can have waking visions, incredibly vivid or lucid dreams, or experiences on certain types of drug.

Sometimes they just wake up one morning and everything’s different.

The Epiphany marks the start of your ‘conscious awakening’ and is usually the time people talk about ‘having had’ a spiritual awakening.

But actually it’s just one stage of a long process and there’s plenty more to go.

Spiritual Awakening Stage 4: Connection

Connection is one of the most enjoyable stages of spiritual awakening.

This is when all the weird and wonderful things start to happen to us.

We make contact with our guides, we become intensely psychic, and we get into flow.

During the Connection stage, the universe opens up our chakras up to their full extent.

We receive all of the 7 major energies in the universe in abundance.

Why? There’s 2 reasons.

First, humans tend to believe things when they experience them first hand, we trust what we see and hear. 

So this ‘direct experience’ we get during Connection serves to convince us that, yep, there’s something else out there!

But there’s another really important reason why this happens.

The universe is showing you how your reality could be if you continued the spiritual awakening process right through to the very end, to full Transcendence.

Once you’ve built your ‘data pipe’ and learned to use it, you can access all the power you experience in Connection – but this time under your own steam.

It’s not as much as a rollercoaster, simply because you’re vibrating at a much higher rate by the end of awakening, so the distance between your earthbound self and your higher self is much smaller.

You only have to go up a couple of floors, rather than a whole skyscraper.

But the underlying abilities are the same.

So the purpose of the Connection phase is to instill belief, reveal your future, and commit you to the awakening process.

This is much needed, because when you reach 50 percent integration with your higher self you’re going to enter spiritual awakening stage 5 – the spiritual Dark Night of the Soul.

Spiritual Awakening Stage 5: The Spiritual Dark Night of the Soul

Stage 5 of the 7 stages of spiritual awakening – the spiritual Dark Night of the Soul – is literally the opposite to Connection.

The flow of energy through all of your chakras is restricted to a very low degree, sometimes as low as 5%, which is the minimum required to sustain life.

So you go from a massive rollercoaster of psychic input, to literally nothing, overnight.

No communication at all.

It’s a very strange type of depression.  You may have the crying and ‘emotional purging’ that you get with a ‘normal’ depression (and that’s good by the way, your body is releasing trauma).

But there’s usually a period of feeling ‘lobotomised’, we just don’t feel like ourselves, our ‘life force’ has gone.

It’s a really tricky stage of spiritual awakening and the vast majority of people drop out of the journey altogether at this point.

I tell the people I coach, this is the worst thing you will ever go through, nothing will ever be this bad again!

It’s really important to press on. Daily meditation is the key, as much as you can possibly do, hours and hours if you can.

And that’s because, even if you can’t feel it, meditation is helping you integrate in the background.

You exit the spiritual Dark Night of the Soul at around 65 to 70 percent integration, and everything crackles back into life as quickly as it departed.

Stage 6 of spiritual awakening: Advanced Learning

The Advanced Learning phase can take a while.

By this point you should feel that you’ve manifestly changed as a human being, you’re not the same person.

That’s because the integration process means you now identify more strongly with your soul and higher self than your ‘human avatar’.

Because you’re well on the way to full integration, you are now eqipped to do some difficult things.

That’s what the Advanced Learning Stage demands.

There’s 3 main focuses:

Firstly, you’re going to embed your daily spiritual routine and learn new techniques.

This routine and techniques are what you will use to access your full soul power post-Transcendence.

Secondly, your team are going to test you on your judgement.

You’ll find that you can’t rely on signs and communication in the same way, they’re going to misdirect you.

This is so you learn to fall back on your own resources.

It’s really important, because your team has an ‘energy quota’ they can use to help awakeners.

If they teach you to be self-sufficient, they can use that energy to help other people, rather than you.

Thirdly, you’re going to release what doesn’t serve you.

It’s a massive transformational process which can continue into Transcendence and sometimes beyond.

That means giving up substances you have a dependence on, careers which don’t fulfil you, and walking away from relationships which no longer give you what you need: partners, family, and friends.

It’s easier than it sounds because, as energy beings, we’re naturally going to seek out people with similar vibrational rates to ourselves.

The vibrational dissonance we experience with people who are at a much lower rate than ourselves can become pretty unbearable, even if we’ve known them all our lives.

There’s a few  other milestones we tend to reach in the Advanced learning stage, although for some people they may come sooner, or later:

• We shed our ego (although we always retain at least 5%, it’s what makes us unique)
• We start to think of ourselves as a ‘we’ instead of an ‘I’
• We may learn the name of our soul and higher self – this is really useful during the Transcendence stage
• We should have an open line of communication with our guides, we can talk with them telepathically during meditation, and sometimes outside of meditation, using verbal language
• We should be pretty clear on our purpose

There’s still some weird and wonderful stuff that happens in the early part of Advanced Learning, but typically this dies down a lot by the end.

It’s not unusual to feel some grief over this, it’s normal, just give yourself time to adjust.

The Advanced Learning stage ends at 100 percent integration with our higher selves.

How do you know if you’re 100 percent integrated? Ask your guides!

(Read this blog post to learn how to communicate with your guides.)

Spiritual Awakening Stage 7: Transcendence

The final stage of the 7 stages of spiritual awakening – Transcendence – can be tricky.

The expectation is that the journey will be linear from now on, but it’s not.

It can also take a long time, many months, even years.

So, what is Transcendence?

This is how my team explains it to me: during integration we’re building the ‘lift’ or ‘elevator’.

In Transcendence we’re building the elevator shaft.

So by the end of this stage we’ve established the mechanics which allow us to elevate and enter ‘higher self’ modality in full (as long as we’re sticking to a daily routine and way of life which allows us to do so).

We’ve completed the formal spiritual awakening process.

It’s important to understand that the mode of Transcendence isn’t automatic, we’ve just built the machinery.

It’s our actions which cause us to transcend.

During this spiritual awakening stage, your team are going to dot some I’s and cross some T’s.

There’s a process of refinement.

If you still need to work on judgement and self-sufficiency, you’re going to get some of those lessons.

Learning to set boundaries also seems to be a key lesson which resolves during this phase.

If you still need to release things that don’t serve you, then your team are going to make it harder and harder for you to fall back into those patterns of behaviour.

One example I have of this is that a relationship had to become abusive before the awakener finally left their partner.

So it can get quite extreme.

The other thing you’re going to find during the Transcendence stage is that you get periods of time when communication shuts off, a bit like the spiritual Dark Night of the Soul, but without the feeling of depression.

This is to teach you how to use the ‘elevator shaft’.

Throughout your awakening, your team and higher self have been coming down to you.

You need to learn how to ascend to them.

That way you’re accessing the store of universal knowledge under your own steam and they’re preserving energy so they can use it elsewhere.

The protocol for ascension is very simple:

Use a visualisation in meditation of ascending in an elevator and when you come out of the doors, see your higher self there. You should be able to speak to one another.

That’s why it’s really useful to try to uncover the name of your higher self and meet them in a meditation, earlier in the journey.

You can visualise them more clearly.

How will you know when you’ve reached 100 percent Transcendence? Again, ask your guides.

There’s no fanfare at the end and you might not feel much different to begin with.

But if you stick to a spiritual routine, you’ll soon find you have an open channel and enormous powers of manifestation.

So what happens post-Transcendence?

Post-Transcendence you find you have the ability to re-enter a modality similar to the Connection phase (just less weird).

You have to adhere to a pretty strict spiritual routine to get there, but when you do, it’s like a rocket ship.

There’s an enormous energetic rush which you need to learn how to handle.

In post-Transcendence, small actions have a big impact, both negatively and positively.

It doesn’t take much to shift modalities.

That’s because at this point you’re enormously powerful!

You’re manifesting through every single thought and behaviour and they’re hugely amplified.

If you want to ‘go the full Buddha’ (as Sophia calls it), and access higher self modality, then follow this routine:

• Meditate daily, preferably twice-daily
• Operate as mindfully as possible and intercept negative thoughts and actions
• Exercise for 30 minutes every day (walking is fine)
• Avoid meat (especially red meat), sugar, cow dairy, processed food, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and drugs
• If you have any resolution work left to do, focus on completing it

If you do this, you’ll be able access your full soul power (be warned, it’s full-on).

If it’s too much to handle, you can ‘bring yourself down’ either through physical means (eat some sugar for example) or through using manifestation techniques (preferred).

A simple crown chakra visualisation where you see yourself ascending through your crown and merging with your higher self, coupled with an affirmation such as: ‘I easily handle the energetic flow through my system’, will help.

(Or ask your team for guidance).

I hope this article about the 7 stages of spiritual awakening has been helpful.

I’d love to know which stage you’re at! Just leave a comment below.