In this week’s episode, Heather shares all about what the “spiritual awakening experience” is all about  how to help both yourself and your clients navigate it.

Heather describes the awakening experience as a shift and growth in awareness, a phase of mental, emotional, physical and spiritual evolution. 

But awareness of what?  Here’s the 3 main things:

1. Awareness that self/others/world are NOT what they have previously believed.  
2. Awareness of the expanding concept of Self:  Higher Self, Lower Self, etc.
3. Deconstructive process of the falling away of the small/ego/false Self that one has been identified with throughout life. 

Symptoms of awakening:

Sadness, disorientation, loss of family and friends, rejection, abandonment, reopening of old wounds.

The fundamental  of the spiritual awakening experience is the loss of three things:

• Identity: “Who Am I?”
• Purpose: “What do I do?”
• Meaning:  “Why do I do it”

What is your role as a coach in that awakening process?

• To assist your client with the disintegration and the “letting go” of their previous identity.
• To assist your client in the discovery and manifestation of who the are becoming (in alignment with their Higher Self)  

Coaching Goals:

1. Help clients clearly see, understand and compassionately accept all versions of Self.
2. Assist clients with identifying when they are operating out of which state to increase integration.
3. Help clients process and release unwanted, denied, repressed, suppressed, and projected emotions, thoughts and desires.
4. Foster a sense of courage and empowerment throughout the process.

Welcome to the everyday intuitive podcast. I’m your host, Heather Alice Shea intuitive life coach trainer status quo, shaker and founder of Atmana Coaching Academy. Listen in each week to break up with your comfort zone claim your self confidence and radically embrace your role as an intuitive healer mentor and sought after coach let’s get within and get after it.

Today, we are talking about coaching your clients through their spiritual awakening. So whether you’re a coach or a person who is individually going through a spiritual awakening, I think you’re gonna find this episode really enlightening and also practical. We are gonna dive into. What exactly is a spiritual awakening.

We heard a lot about this. And so I wanna try to just give a solid definition or concept, define what this really is. We’re gonna talk about some of the symptoms of spiritual awakening and then really what is the fundamental issue that we struggle with? When we go through the awakening process. And then also we’re gonna talk a little bit about the role of a coach in helping your clients walk through their awakening experience, and then to wrap it up, we are going to of course, talk a little bit about some coaching strategies that you can use to help yourself.

If you’re going through one yourself or your clients navigate what it is to walk in the world, anew with eyes that see things they didn’t see before and ears that hear things they didn’t before in a mind, in a heart and a spirit that knows things that it maybe didn’t know before, or I should say always knew, but is now remember.

Before we continue on with this episode though, I do wanna take a minute to say happy birthday to this podcast. It is 100 episodes in when I launched this podcast, I did it truly from a place of just giving myself creative freedom. It’s. One of the few things I’ve done in my business without a plan or any real intention.

I just said, you know what, I wanna do a podcast and I’m gonna talk about whatever the hell I wanna talk about when I wanna talk about it and how I wanna talk about it. And I think that I’ve stayed true to that intention here on the show. So I did just want to take a moment to say, wow, A hundred episodes in pretty cool accomplishment.

And I wanna thank you so much for tuning in for being a part of this intuitive way of being and movement. And for being here, listening to my voice, travel through the interwebs right into your ears. Even though I can’t see you as I sit here in my home office recording this episode. I want you to know that I feel you and I see you.

And I, I am so happy that you and I are connected and that your presence and your attention here, uh, to the message that we’re sharing it out, Mon means something to me. It, it really does. It’s very important to me. And so I wanna let you know, um, that I thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening.

Okay. So let’s jump in. What the hell is a spiritual awakening? We hear people talk about this all the time and when I had my own spiritual awakening, I, I suppose mine was like, Very bipolar. There was still this part of me that was very much grounded in the real world. So I’ll just give you a little bit of backstory into my own spiritual awakening.

I had a chronic illness. I was actually diagnosed with stage four, hemorrhagic endometriosis in 2008. And not only did I have endometriosis, which is not a life threatening, um, condition at all, but it was coupled with this unknown. Painful phenomenon. Nobody really knew what was wrong with me. So in addition to the endo, I had this like really weird, I would have these really weird, like abdominal fits of pain and the doctors couldn’t, they didn’t know what it was.

So I spent about four years on and off surgery after surgery doctor’s appointment after doctor’s appoint. living with a lot of pain and just not knowing what was going on. And I think this is a very familiar story that a lot of people have preceding their spiritual awakening. Many of us are so hardheaded that we have to become physically ill before we start listening to the signs, the universe is sending us, but mine all accumulated in 2000 and.

When I had a surgery to try to fix what was wrong with me and it, it did not go well. So I really walked into the world of woo, just because I was looking for something to help me minimize the physical pain that I was in. I was getting my undergraduate degree in psychology at this time. This was like in 2000 and like 11, 2012.

And I had read in the literature, I was a. Research assistant for a cognitive psychologist at that time. And I had access to a university library, right? Like a goal mine for a person like me. I had remember reading in the literature. We were researching human cognition and self care, and it talked about how meditation was really beneficial for pain reduction and also how.

They were taking patients who like were opioid addicted or who were allergic to opioids. Like they couldn’t take pain medication. They couldn’t go under general. What do you do with a person like that? So the research I was reading specifically was on burn victims. And what do you do with a burn victim that can’t take.

Can’t go under general anesthesia or can’t take pain meds, right? Like these people live in excruciating agonizing pain. And so what they were doing was they were putting these people under hypnosis, truly using the power of the mind to reduce pain. And so the research was all like, dude, meditation is amazing.

Basically, if you learn how to drop into these deep states of consciousness, it’s even better. Medication because there’s no side effects and people feel absolutely no pain. So I became fascinated by this whole thing called meditation. And I really stepped into it because I was like, oh my goodness, I’m not taking another opioid again, because my doctors were giving me those things.

Like they were TAC and I did not want to become addicted to that crap. So I was like, if I have to pick a poison, I will pick meditation because. Clearly good for you. I’d rather be high on that than high on opioids. So I found that I could drop into meditative states really quite easily. So I had learned to meditate.

I got into like essential oils and I walked into this world of awakening. From that perspective, it wasn’t, it, it was really from necessity. It wasn’t because I thought talking about spirit guides or angels or any of this stuff would be fun. It was more like, Hey man, I think I’m dying and I need some help.

So I, but I found that I was like really good at it that I. Get into these trans dates really easily. And so off, I went on my newly embarked hobby of meditating and fast forward many, you know, hours of storytelling later, I had my own spiritual Lukin experience where basically I became highly psychic and intuitive.

Another way to say psych get intuitive would be just able to read the energy. That physicists now know, is there quantum physicists now know, is there, it’s the soup that we’re all living in. I was able to pick up on sense and read that energy as intelligent information. And so I really think that when we talk about spiritual awakening, a great way to think about it for yourself and for the people that you’re working with.

If you’re a coach is just to describe an awakening as a shift in awareness. it’s an expansion of your awareness. I’m still that same practical girl. I’m still, wanting to dig into the research. I’m still that person. It’s just, now I have an ex an expanded awareness, right. And I think it’s the same for all of us.

It’s an, it is an expansion of our mental, emotional. And spiritual bandwidth. So we can think of it like scale of one to 10. Now we’re like a scale of one to 20 or a scale of one to 50 or a scale of one to a hundred. It’s all the same thing. I like to think of it. Like the person I was before. I had my spiritual awakening experience and the person I am now, I’m still the same person.

I’m just a much more expanded being, right. My thoughts, my opinions, my perspective, all of those things about me are elevated. They are deeper, they are more expansive. And so I like to offer that as a practical definition of spiritual awaken. I think it’s just a shift in awareness towards growth. It’s a shift in awareness towards extending ourselves up into our higher selves each day.

I think that we can also think about that awareness as it’s also an awareness that yourself, your others in the world are not what you’ve been taught to be. That’s a big part of spiritually awakening. Isn’t it? When we become aware that the things. That we wants to believe are actually not the full story.

Now notice, I didn’t say that they’re not true because I don’t think that’s helpful. I don’t think it’s helpful to just take the baby and take the bath water and throw it squarely in the trash can. It’s not that they’re not true. All the things you used to believe it’s that they’re not true in the way that you were taught to think that they were true or that they’re not true in the way that you were taught to think that is the only truth.

And so that’s another really neat perspective I think, to hold. And it also softens the blow of the nightmare that is awakening because it is very hard to go through these things, to find out that many of the things that were what you based your whole life on are not the full story. That’s very scary and very jarring.

Another aspect of the expansion of awareness. We could say that it is an awareness that the concept of yourself expands. So, not only is it an awareness. That the world and that your belief system is so much bigger than what you thought it was, but Ooh are so much more than you thought you were. You have a lower self, you have a higher self, you’ve got all these parts of you that you’re now aware of that conflict and want different things and get stuck and have blocks.

And, oh my gosh, it’s exhausting, right? To realize that you are so multidimensional and so multifaceted. Ugh, my goodness. It’s. The coolest thing ever, and also the most terrifying thing ever to see ourselves in our true nature, which is that we are all of these things. And then the third thing I would say that we can use as a practical definition of spiritual awakening is that awakening is a very deconstructive process.

It’s a falling away of what is not true. It is a falling away of the small self or the ego self, right? It is a falling away of the limiting identity that you have with yourself and the limiting definitions of others in the world that have been the labels that have been put on people. We begin to see past the merely mundane, the merely human aspect.

All creatures and of all things into something deeper and it takes a lot of courage to do it. And we can certainly understand after looking at these definitions, why some people fight tooth and nail to stay asleep, why people don’t want to wake up because it takes a very courageous person to face what it is to be awake.

And so I think that’s recognizing that is really an invitation to compass. Especially when we look at the symptoms of awakening. So let’s dive into that fun stuff real quick. So here we go. You ready for this fun list? Sadness, disorientation loss of family and friends, rejection abandonment, the reopening of old wounds, the remembrances of trauma.

Hyper self-awareness self-criticism self consciousness, right? Hyper awareness of other people’s emotions, beliefs, thoughts, and feelings, having physical symptoms, not anxiety. All of these things are symptoms of awaken. That are really challenging. And that I think that most people, when you have, when you think of spiritual awakening, you sure as hell don’t think of that list.

Do you like it reads a pharma, a BA a bad drug pharma commercial you know, who wants to take that pill? Absolutely. Nobody, you know, it’s, it’s a, again, it’s a deconstruction process. There is an aspect of mourning. That comes there is a definitive feeling of loss. And the reason why is because we are losing, we are the old self is dying.

And the new self, the higher self is being reborn. This is what it is to be born again, by the way, you die a death to be reborn into your higher self. And if we’re lucky we do this every single day. When we go to sleep, we die and we awake. We are born again, born and new with a new opportunity to become the person that we were born to be.

So this is really an invitation for compassion for yourself and for other. when we really slow down and think about it. We are walking through life. with a weight that maybe we don’t realize that we’re walking with and by weight, I don’t mean a burden. It’s it’s not a burden. It’s just an aspect of life.

Maybe that we’re not accounting for. It’s a part of the experience that when we’re not awake, we don’t really realize is there. And so it’s beautiful about being awake is that you get to acknowledge this responsibility that you. to expand your awareness for yourself, others in the world, to recognize that you have all of these aspects of yourself and that you get to choose which one you wanna listen to.

You can listen to your lower self on your ego all day long, or you can choose to listen to your higher self and you can choose to embody that individual. Every single day and you can choose to let go of what needs to be let go so that you can continue to ascend and to, to the truth of who you really are.

So now let’s talk a little bit about the fundamental challenges of being awake, right? So we’ve talked about the symptoms. We’ve talked a little bit about what it is now. I wanna look at let’s just nutshell exactly what the challenges, when. In the awakening experience, it is the fundamental loss of three things, or at least the perceived loss.

The first is identity. This can be summed up as who am I? The question, who am I? The second is purpose with the fundamental question being and what do I do? The third is meaning. With the fundamental question being, why do I do it when you are in an awakening experience? These three fundamental aspects of who we are in the world, completely disintegrate.

And the task of the awakening person is to define identity, purpose, and meaning for themselves no longer operate from this place of my mommy and my daddy and my friends and my society. And my religion told me who I am, what I do and why I do it. No. When you step into that wake awakening experience, you are the one who defines your identity, your purpose and your meaning.

And so whether it is you. Going through this experience or you’re a coach working with someone that is our fundamental job. Our fundamental job is from a place of presence and a place of awareness, a place of presence to say, this is who I am. This is what I choose to do with my life. And this is my why behind it.

I am gonna live if I’m lucky, 85 to 90 years. And. Is who I am and what my life stands for. What a gift, how beautiful is that? Oh my gosh. Doesn’t it. Make all the sadness and loss and rejection and abandoned. All of that is so worth it in the light of a life, examined a life well lived a life. Where you get to decide.

And I believe that is why you are here. You are here to make a conscious decision about who you are and what you wanna do and why you do it in the world, the purpose and the meaning behind your own existence. That is the gift of the spiritual awakening experience. Okay. And so your role right now, again, whether it’s, you’re working with yourself or you’re working with a coach, what is it that you are really here to do?

How can you help yourself and others? How can you shepherd yourself through this experience or shepherd help shepherd another person through this experience? And I really love using the word shepherd because the word shepherd denotes that you are walking alongside of walking with. But not carrying the burden for not doing it for okay.

They have to walk the path. You stand next to them as a wise guide. Okay. They are photo Bains taking the ring into moreor you’re Sam wise, GGE the loyal friend. Who’s never gonna betray. Who’s always gonna love, support and have their back. So your role is a couple of things. The first is to assist yourself or your client with that disintegration process, right?

Without letting go process. That’s the first thing we have to let go. Okay. We can’t, we have to be willing to let it fall apart to let it let go of our previous identity. Our, what we thought our purpose was, what we thought, the meaning of life. We have to be willing to say goodbye to all. And go into the void, go into the blackness.

Oh my goodness. That’s terrifying. But we have to be willing to do that. We gotta let, we gotta just jump off the cliff and trust that there’s, that we’re gonna sprout wings and fly. Okay. The second thing that we’re here to do after we’re willing to let go. Okay. Yes. Strip me of all. That is not the true essential me.

That is not the part of me that God intended me to be strip it away. Let it all fall away. Yes, please. May I have another, no longer resisting it, but actually asking for it and being grateful for it all to be taken away. But the second thing is to discover who we, who we really are and who we wanna be. Do you really know who you are?

Do you really even understand yourself? And if you did, do you like that person? So who is the person? Here’s another way to say it. Maybe who is the person that you are, that you can’t stop being? So I give you an example. I am a very direct person. I’m a very, I’m an engram eight human design manifestor life path eight.

I am a very strong dynamic person. My energy is very penetrating like that. It’s just how I am. I can’t help it. It’s just. It’s just the way, like when I don’t, like I could be sitting there thinking about purple bunny rabbits, and I could potentially be like perceived as like intense and intimidating to some people.

And I don’t ever, I don’t mean it. I was just like, my existence is making that happen. And that’s the function in the role I play in the world as a human design. Manifestor as an engram eight. It’s just how I am. And I can’t not be that way. And as I have denied that part of myself, that I’m not that way.

It’s really just amounts to me, dimming my light, becoming an apologist for myself for no reason at all. And basically denying the version of myself. God intended me to be, which if there is a sin, that’s the number one to take a poop all over the version of, of you that God intended. Right? Who the hell are you to say that God.

Creation I E U is a mistake. Who the hell are you to say that you’re nobody, you don’t get to pronounce judgment on other people like that and you don’t get to pronounce judgment on yourself. Okay. So that is what I mean by, do you know who you are when you’re not even trying when you’re just existing?

Who is that person? And not only that, but do you like that person? We’re here to help our clients figure that out. And we’re here to answer that question for our wart and all right. Wart and all, to look at ourselves and say, oh, that’s not really a great part of me, but Hey, there, it does serve a function and I can come to peace with that.

And it is just how I am in the world. It’s how it’s. It is an okay part of me, right? It’s not, there’s nothing wrong with me being that way. Now. Other people might see it as something wrong, but that’s all right. They are allowed to be in their choosing. They are allowed to be in their preference to not take their preferring us to be different preferring you.

To show up differently. That’s okay. But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong for being the way you are or that you’re bad or you’re flawed. It just means that they don’t, they prefer that you would act in a way that makes them more comfortable. And I am so sorry to tell you that your existence, you don’t exist to make other people happy.

You exist to be in your joy and to serve your God-given purpose given to you by. That’s it. So the people that are for you, the people that are gonna understand you are going to understand that. And they’re going to encourage you to be exactly who you are. And here is what I’ve learned. The parts of myself that the haters want to diminish and deny and snuff out the most are the parts of me that my true friends and my family love the most.

I’m gonna say that again, the parts of you that your haters wanna snuff out that want, they wanna dim. They wanna dampen. I guarantee you that those very parts of you are the same exact parts that the people who love you the most love you the most for think are the coolest parts of you, right? Absolutely.

So you keep that in mind the next time somebody judges you the next time, somebody tries to make you feel bad about being who you are, because that is some that person’s yuck is somebody else’s yo man, they are loving you for that. So the point of the awakening experience is that you. Love you for that, that you don’t need anybody to love you for it.

And when people don’t, it doesn’t bother you. Okay. So now let’s just talk about some of our coach, the coaching goals. Again, if you’re coaching yourself through this same thing, it’s to help yourself or your client clearly see, understand, and compassionately accept the version of themselves, that they are not changing them, not improving them.

I think that’s a big part of the awakening experience. That is misunderstood. This isn’t about becoming better. It’s about accepting yourself and through that acceptance one improves. So in other words, improvement upon yourself is a byproduct of self love and acceptance of the real version of you letting go of the parts that aren’t accepting and loving the parts that are.

That is how you change. That is how you grow. That is how you ascend. You. Don’t like quote unquote, fix yourself. You’re not a car, it. You’re not a, you’re not a transmission in a car. It’s you can’t, you don’t fix yourself. What you do is you let go of what is essentially not you and you keep what is essentially you.

Carl Rogers said it. The curious thing about myself is that the more I accept myself, I am then able to. And to the version of me, I love the most. And so that is really the job here. It’s just to accept yourself words and all. And when you do that, you are then free to ascend because how you do that is embracing the real.

Another one is to help yourself and your clients figure out how to be in choice. So to move from a reactive state or an inactive state of being to a proactive state of being. So basically to not just operate off your conditioning, it’s to put you in choice to say, you know what, actually let’s interrupt this pattern right now.

You actually have a choice. Would you like to respond differently? You don’t have to respond the same. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to sit here frozen in paralysis. You can actually just choose to do something different and that’s a beautiful opportunity for you and your client. And then a third aspect of the coaching process is to help your client process what they are release.

What are the unwanted denied, repressed, suppressed, projected emotions, thoughts, and desires that they put on other people, or they put on themselves. It’s to just sort. Bring that into focus because that’s what needs to be, let go. So the more that we can just, oh, okay. I see that let’s name. That let’s love that part.

Let’s release it. No problem. The more that you can shine the light of day on those things from a place of love and a place of acceptance, not a place of, oh, you need to fix that or, oh, you need to work on that, but just from a place of, oh, okay. So I see that this is. Part of your being that up until now has served you, I’m hearing you say it doesn’t serve you anymore.

Okay. So how would we like to be different? How would you like to think? How would you like to feel? How would you like to be, how would you like to act easy peasy? It’s just, I see it. I’m gonna make a different choice from a place of self acceptance, not from a place of, oh God, that’s bad. I need to fix it.

And then the fourth is to foster a sense of courage and empowerment. None of this happens. Unless we are courageous. The reason why, so few people live a. That they really wanna live. That’s truly reflective of their higher self. You gotta be a badass man. If you’re a guy, you need some brass balls. And if you’re a chick, you need some brass ovaries.

Okay. And if you fall somewhere in between, on that spectrum, I wish you the brassiness of all of them. Okay. It’s where, however, wherever it is, you identify. You gotta brass it up. You’ve got to look yourself in the mirror and say, I got this shit, man. I’m a badass. And I’m not gonna let myself sit on the sidelines of my own fricking life and be dictated to by other people.

Nobody has that power. And if they do my beloved brother and sister, if there is somebody in your life that has that power, I want you to know this it’s because you gave it to him. And at any moment, Can take it back. Okay. Nobody has any power over you, unless it is acquiesced. You give it away. Power cannot be taken.

True. Power is never taken. It is surrendered. Okay. So there’s only one being in this entire universe that you should be surrendering to. And that is God . That is the almighty creator of the known universe. That’s about it. Other than that, you need to be standing in your nature here as a co-creator with God doing what you’re called to do, who am.

What is my purpose in this world? What am I gonna do with my life? And why do I do it? Why is it meaningful to me and to the world? Okay, so that is a little bit about coaching yourself and your clients through a spiritual awakening experience. There is so much I could say about this topic. I’m sure I will do many more episodes on it, but I think that this is a good start in helping a person walk every day in their own God-given presence, shining their light and helping other people.

Do the same. And speaking of that, if you are a person who is interested in looking into the world of intuition, a little more deeply, if you have ever been curious about becoming a coach or starting a business as an intuitive focus life coach, I lovingly invite you to join our upcoming workshop. It is a brand spanking new one it’s called to coach, and you can register for our workshop at called to coach.

workshop.com. That’s www.calledtocoachworkshop.com, where I am gonna be walking you through the four pillars of becoming a purposeful and prosperous, intuitive, focused life coach on your own terms, this is really about moving past being an amateur coach. Barrier to entry in the coaching industry is zero.

And I love the freedom of that, but also I think we really have an opportunity right now to, uh, distinguish between the professional coach and the dabbler. And so this workshop is designed to help you become a highly qualified. And a highly sought after coach. Okay. So to get the qualifications, you need to make the impact and the income that you really desire as a coach.

And it is a hundred percent free. So go to called to coach workshop.com, get registered. We’re gonna run it a couple of times this year. So if you go to that website and see a date that’s coming up, I urge you to, uh, get registered for it because we don’t, it’s not like we host it. Every month or anything like that.

So I’d love to see you there. I’m gonna send you over a workbook. We are gonna be doing it on zoom from here on out. So I’m gonna get to see your beautiful face if you turn your camera on. So I would love to see you there and I’ll catch you next week for our next episode. Okay, let’s wrap up with three quick things.

So my intention for this podcast is to be of impactful service to you. And one of the ways that I can tell how well I’m doing that is by reading honest reviews of the pod. So the reviews really allow me to see the topics and the ideas that are resonating with you. The most. So I would be forever honored and grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes for the show.

And I get super excited every time a review comes in, because it helps me stay in my purpose. And in my intention of supporting the coaches and entrepreneurs out there doing the heavy lifting of helping other people heal and expand and grow. So if it feels aligned, go to Heather aha.com/podcast, and show me some love by leaving me.

Built review and to express my gratitude each week, I read the names of everyone who leaves a review as a thank you to you for helping this podcast thrive. And speaking of showing love, did you know that I make 100% free tip sheets for almost every episode on this podcast? Why? Yes I do. So you can go to Heatheraliceshea.com/podcast, tip sheets, and enter in your name and best email address.

And I will send you over a page link where you can download them all into your little heart discontent. And the third and final thing is that I get. Emails each week asking how to begin the process of becoming an intuitive coach or from existing coaches and therapists who would like to begin applying intuition in their sessions.

So if you are interested or you feel called and would just like to explore, uh, the services that we offer over at Monica coaching academy, then just head over to my website@heatheraliceshea.com and check out our different offerings for coaches and creatives, who would like to explore intuitive development, business development.

Or both. So that is it for this episode. My lovely, remember, you are more powerful than you can possibly imagine. So step into your greatness and stay after it.

Settle.