The stages of spiritual awakening can feel confusing when you are in the middle of them. One minute, life feels familiar. The next, something falls apart, the old way of living no longer fits, and you are left asking bigger questions about purpose, alignment, and why you are here.
I spoke with JJ DiGeronimo, award-winning author and host of the Together We Seek podcast, about the shared patterns she has seen after conversations with more than 170 healers, lightworkers, mystics, and spiritual practitioners. Her framework offers a grounded way to understand the stages of spiritual awakening, while remembering that there is no deadline and no single correct path.
Table of Contents
Key Takeaways
- The six stages of spiritual awakening are crossroads, curiosity, seeking, shifting, emerging, and illumination.
- Shifting your frequency begins with awareness of your self-talk, inputs, beliefs, and daily habits.
- Presence practices, including noticing 10 sensory details, create room for intuition and inner guidance.
- Untapped gifts often emerge when you create space, do inner work, and act from alignment rather than pressure.
From a Crossroads to a Spiritual Path
What led you into your own spiritual awakening?
Most awakening journeys begin at a crossroads. For some people, it is a medical diagnosis, a divorce, a job loss, or a season when life seems to crumble all at once.
That was true for me, too. There were difficult things happening both at home and in my work life, and within a couple of weeks, everything felt as though it had fallen apart. I found myself sitting in a parking lot outside a metaphysical center, not really knowing where else to turn.
I began exploring energy practices and working with spiritual practitioners because I needed to reground, realign, and understand why I was on this planet in the first place. That crossroads did not give me instant answers. It gave me a reason to start asking better questions.
How did you recognize that spiritual awakening follows shared patterns?
As I worked through my own experience, I became curious about other approaches to healing and self-discovery. I began meeting with lightworkers, healers, and mystics, then created Together We Seek to introduce these practitioners and their work to a wider community.
These people are not only found in places like Sedona, Bali, or Egypt. They are living among us, doing meaningful work in everyday communities.
After more than a hundred conversations, patterns started to become clear. People may have very different stories, but many begin with a crossroads and then move through similar stages of spiritual awakening. The journey is not necessarily linear, and it is not something to rush. Still, recognizing the pattern can make the experience feel less lonely and less chaotic.
The 6 Stages of Spiritual Awakening
What are the six stages of spiritual awakening?
The six stages of spiritual awakening I have seen repeatedly are:
- Crossroads: Life interrupts your usual path. Something no longer works, and you realize change is needed.
- Curiosity: You begin wondering whether there is another way to live, heal, or understand yourself.
- Seeking: You explore practices, teachers, communities, books, healing modalities, and new perspectives.
- Shifting: You consciously begin changing your frequency, beliefs, inner dialogue, and daily choices.
- Emerging: Your innate gifts become clearer, and you begin showing up as a more aligned version of yourself.
- Illumination: You naturally help others find their way, often by sharing what you have learned through your own transformation.
Not everyone moves through all six stages in one lifetime. Some people may spend a long time in seeking. Others may move through the full cycle more than once, especially after another major transition. The stages of spiritual awakening are not a scorecard. They are simply a way to understand where you are and what may support you next.
Can someone return to an earlier stage?
Absolutely. You can revisit these stages again and again as you evolve, change, and encounter new layers of life. A person can emerge into their gifts in one area of life, then experience a new crossroads in another.
That does not mean you have failed or gone backward. It means there is another invitation to grow. Spiritual growth is not about arriving at a permanent finish line. It is about becoming more conscious, more aligned, and more available for the gifts that are already within you.
If you feel awakened but unsure what comes next, it may help to explore how to find your purpose after awakening. Often, direction becomes clearer once you stop forcing an answer and begin making space for the truth beneath the noise.
Stage Four: How to Shift Your Frequency
What does the shifting stage look like?
The shifting stage is where you start to change your internal frequency. It often involves releasing limiting beliefs, becoming aware of old stories, and investing in your own healing.
You cannot always shift your outer experience immediately, but you can begin shifting what is happening inside you. And when you shift your frequency within, you begin to relate to your external life differently too.
A simple place to start is by paying close attention to what you are taking in and what you are sending out. Notice:
- What you say to other people
- What you read and listen to
- What you spend your attention on
- What you repeatedly say to yourself in private
That internal dialogue matters deeply. Much of it happens so automatically that we do not even realize how harsh, fearful, or limiting it has become. Yet if you want to move through the stages of spiritual awakening with intention, you have to become aware of the stories you are carrying.
How can morning pages support spiritual growth?
Morning pages can be a powerful practice for seeing what is actually going on beneath the surface. The practice, made popular through The Artist’s Way, is simple: write three pages by hand in the morning without editing, judging, or trying to make the writing meaningful.
Let it be messy. Let it be random. Let your mind unload everything it has been holding.
When you look back, patterns often begin to reveal themselves. You may notice your inner bully, your recurring fears, or beliefs that have quietly been keeping you small. Once you can see a limiting belief, you can begin to reframe it into a more supportive affirmation.
This is part of clearing out the junk you have carried for years. Gratitude, positive affirmations, time in nature, and compassionate self-awareness all help you create a new inner environment.
Overthinking is often one of the biggest barriers to this process. Building the ability to pause, listen inward, and trust your intuition can help you distinguish fear-based mental noise from genuine inner guidance.
Creating Presence Through the 10 Things Practice
Why is presence so important during spiritual awakening?
I spent much of my life anywhere but the present moment. I was either thinking about what had already happened or pushing myself toward the next achievement. That kind of momentum can make you highly productive, but it does not necessarily make you joyful, grounded, or aligned.
Presence creates space. And space is where you begin to hear your own inner knowing.
When you are constantly plowing through your days and nights, there is little room for the quiet guidance that may be trying to reach you. The more present you become, the more you can notice what is happening around you and within you.
What is the 10 things practice?
Choose a moment in your day to pause. You can sit where you are, go outside, or take a slow walk. Then identify 10 things you notice using your senses.
- Notice what you can see.
- Notice what you can hear.
- Notice what you can smell.
- Notice what you can feel.
- Notice whether there is anything you can taste.
This is not about doing the exercise perfectly. It is about bringing yourself back into your body and your actual environment. The practice interrupts autopilot and gives your nervous system a moment to settle.
Nature can be especially helpful here. A quiet walk without a podcast, music, or outside input creates an opening for guidance to arise. Long showers, baths, writing, and meditation can serve a similar purpose. The point is to create enough silence to hear what has been drowned out by busyness.
Ambition, Alignment, and Inner Guidance
Do we have to choose between ambition and alignment?
No. We all carry both masculine and feminine energy, and both have a place in an aligned life.
Masculine energy can support execution, structure, decisions, and forward movement. Feminine energy can support receptivity, intuition, creativity, and a deeper connection to the heart. The problem is not ambition. The problem is becoming so disconnected from yourself that your ambition is driven only by fear, proving, pressure, or external expectations.
When an idea arrives, pause and ask yourself: “Is this coming from my head, or is this coming from my heart?” You can even place a hand on your heart as you ask. Then notice what you feel.
This kind of check-in helps you understand whether an impulse feels expansive and life-giving or whether it carries the energy of self-sabotage and depletion. Moving through the stages of spiritual awakening does not mean you stop taking action. It means your action becomes more connected to who you truly are.
What are the “whispers” people begin to hear?
Whispers are those subtle moments of guidance, intuition, and inner knowing that often get ignored when life is loud. For a long time, I did not recognize them because I had created no room to hear them.
I had accomplishments, but I did not have joy. I felt like a machine, always moving and doing. Eventually, I went to therapy and admitted that despite everything I had achieved, I did not feel grounded in my life.
I was encouraged to take mindfulness classes, which initially sounded ridiculous to me. It took time, and I even needed to take the classes twice, because unwinding old stories and habits does not happen overnight.
But creating that space changed everything. Through mindfulness, meditation, writing, and becoming more present, I began to hear my own guidance more clearly. I realized I had been working far harder than necessary because I was not working in alignment with my gifts.
Emerging Into Your Gifts and Serving Others
What happens in the emerging and illumination stages?
In the emerging stage, the gifts you brought into this life begin to come forward. These are not always brand-new abilities. Often, they are qualities, insights, or callings that were already there but buried beneath conditioning, difficult experiences, and the demands of everyday life.
Life circumstances can get in the way of our gifts. We may become so focused on surviving, achieving, pleasing others, or meeting expectations that we lose touch with what comes naturally to us.
As you continue through the stages of spiritual awakening, you may begin expressing those gifts more openly. Eventually, illumination can follow. This is where your own growth becomes a source of light for others. You may teach, guide, create, support, or simply embody a different way of being.
Illumination does not require a particular job title or public platform. It is about allowing your lived wisdom to benefit the people around you.
What is the most important message to remember?
You have untapped gifts. The work is often about creating enough space for those gifts to emerge.
That space might come through journaling, healing, mindfulness, nature, therapy, rest, energy work, community, or a willingness to question the stories you have always believed. It might also involve finding people who understand the path you are on. Spiritual seekers need community, because without it, an awakening experience can feel isolating and confusing.
If you want a practical way to identify your place in the stages of spiritual awakening, you can take JJ DiGeronimo’s awakening phase quiz. Her book Illuminate Your Path also follows the six-phase framework with practices and resources for each stage, while Seeking explores the inner work of clearing shadows, old energy, relationship wounds, and inherited stories.
Your path does not need to look like anyone else’s. Keep making room for the quiet truth inside you. The more space you create, the more clearly you can recognize the gifts that have been waiting for you all along.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Stages of Spiritual Awakening
What are the six stages of spiritual awakening?
The six stages are crossroads, curiosity, seeking, shifting, emerging, and illumination. They describe a recurring process of disruption, exploration, inner change, self-expression, and service.
Can I move through the stages of spiritual awakening more than once?
Yes. A person can revisit the stages of spiritual awakening many times. New life transitions can create another crossroads and invite a deeper cycle of seeking, shifting, and emerging.
How do I know whether I am in the shifting stage?
You may be in the shifting stage if you are becoming aware of limiting beliefs, changing your self-talk, releasing old patterns, practicing gratitude, or intentionally choosing more supportive inputs and habits.
Why is being present helpful for spiritual awakening?
Presence reduces the noise of constant worry about the past and future. It creates space to notice your environment, hear your inner guidance, and reconnect with the gifts and truths that may have been buried beneath busyness.
