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September/October 2011 Featured Stories
In Case of Spiritual Emergency

by Catherine G. Lucas

On a clear April day, I stood on top of Magdalene Hill, high up, overlooking Turin, with the snow-capped Alps in the background. I was at the tail end of a terrifying and powerful period in my life. Any memories of how desperate I had been at the height of my crisis, on the verge of killing myself, were becoming just that — memories.

It was no accident that my crisis had taken me back to Italy. I had spent part of my childhood growing up in Tuscany, climbing olive trees and picking up Italian at the local junior school. During that intense month-long spiritual emergency in 2006, I felt the invaluable support of an Italian spiritual teacher. I had never met him, but a close friend had given me a photo of this man. Now I was very grateful. I felt drawn to Italy as a place where I could feel safe.

As I stood on top of Magdalene Hill on that warm spring day, the Italian teacher came through to me. Psychically, I was still in a very open state. I felt his sadness as he said, in Italian, “Look how beautiful she is,” meaning the Earth. “And we’ve got to leave her.”

Did he mean when we die? Or did he mean the human race as a whole will have to leave this stunning planet? I don’t really know, but when I then read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, his words struck a chord. Our choice as a species is simple, he tells us: evolve or die. He puts it urgently and starkly. He is talking about evolving spiritually.

If we are going to “wake up” individually and collectively in sufficient numbers, we need to be familiar with the process of spiritual awakening. We need to be aware of the potential dangers, so that if our journey becomes challenging, we can deal with it successfully. Given the unprecedented growth in the level of consciousness that is taking place, knowledge about spiritual emergency is all the more important. There is no doubt that being familiar with the challenges that can arise during spiritual transformation helped me to cope.

As we explore and become familiar with the territory of spiritual awakening and spiritual emergency, we realize that there are very real parallels between what happens at the individual level and what is happening at the global level. We are beginning to experience global crisis — the awakening of global consciousness is starting to feel very painful and challenging. This is no different from what individuals experience when going through the birth pangs of spiritual crisis. The lessons we learn at the personal level can be translated to the global.

Humanity is embarked on its own version of the hero’s journey. If we understand the process at the individual level, we can know that the seeming breakdown of what I call the dark night of the globe is the precursor to breaking through to a whole new level of awakened consciousness.

Spiritual Awakening

So what is spiritual awakening? It is above all a process of exploration and unfolding, of learning and growth, and of healing and purification. It involves the whole of our beings and works on all levels — physical, emotional and psychological, as well as spiritual.

For me, as for many, it has been a journey of self-discovery, of learning to love myself. In our 21st century mind, body and spirit culture, that sounds like such a cliché. But I had been brought up with years of violent verbal abuse, criticism and bullying from an alcoholic father. Learning to love myself was far from a cliché. It was hard work. Yet the quality of our life and our relationships vitally depends on it, if we’re not going to carry on endlessly recreating the cycle of being abused.

So it is also a journey of healing past trauma and wounding. That in itself could be done in a very secular way, through counseling, psychotherapy and personal development. What is it that makes it a clearly spiritual path? Personally, choosing work that enables me to put my spiritual practice at the heart of my life has been key.

Along the way, the qualities that naturally develop are those of trust, faith, gratitude and devotion. We come to a place where we can stand fairly and squarely in our power, the strength of which is coupled with the softness and receptivity of surrender. And it is our trust in the universe, source or God that enables us to surrender. Above all, we learn to trust our direct experience, to nurture the glimpses of awakening that we have, whatever the circumstances in which they arise and whatever the verdict of mainstream psychiatry.

Spiritual emergency is not a new phenomenon. The process of spiritual development and awakening has never been easy. Both the Buddha, meditating under the Bodhi tree, and Jesus, in the desert, faced their own crisis points or “dark nights of the soul.” So did many of the Christian mystics, such as Saint Teresa of Ávila and Saint John of the Cross, who gave us the term dark night of the soul.

What is Spiritual Emergency?

The natural process of spiritual unfolding I’ve just described can be gentle, gradual, even graceful. I’d like to be able to say that it’s usually so, but the more I explore this field, the more people I talk with, the more convinced I become that very few escape some sort of crisis, critical choice or dramatic turning point. Whether that turns into spiritual emergency depends on its intensity. Spiritual emergency, a term first coined by Stanislav and Christina Grof, is essentially an intensifying of the process of spiritual awakening, a speeding up of the process, that becomes unmanageable and often terrifying.

Whereas we might prefer our spiritual growth to be like a gentle paddle down the stream, spiritual emergency is more like the rough ride of a speed boat at full throttle. As it involves psychological transformation as well as spiritual, it is sometimes known as psychospiritual crisis. So one way of seeing spiritual emergency is as a complication of our natural development as spiritual beings.

Another way of approaching spiritual emergency is from the angle of mystical experiences. In a mystical experience you might feel waves of bliss and awe, you might lose your sense of an egoic self, experience the divine and much more. These are experiences beyond words, beyond the grasp of the intellectual mind. Spiritual emergency often includes many of these elements.

For many of us, because this spiritual transformation also involves psychological transformation, when we start to open up to the transcendental, any unresolved aspects of our personality can come to the surface. All the wounding we carry, any trauma we have ever been through, any parts of ourselves we have repressed, known as the shadow, all these and more can come up, demanding attention, asking to be healed, resolved.

Then what we experience is more likely to look like the spiritual emergency the Grofs identified. We may find it difficult, if not impossible, to cope with everyday life. Basics tasks of looking after ourselves, like cooking or even washing, may feel too much. Our inner world may take over, merging confusingly with the outer world.

There is a third approach to understanding spiritual emergency. In recent decades, efforts have focused on psychosis and mental health issues, to try to distinguish spiritual emergency from these. My personal take on it is that I’m not interested in trying to distinguish between so-called psychosis and spiritual emergency. I take the view that it is all the psyche’s attempt to heal and move toward wholeness, that each experience is potentially spiritually transformative.

This is informed by my own experience, which is common to many others. In 1996, I was overwhelmed by stress, coping with the aftermath of separating from my husband and dealing with a very difficult working relationship with my boss. All I wanted was some help in coping with my stress levels that were rapidly getting out of hand. I joined a meditation class and bought a book, an introduction to meditation. The final chapter described some of the states and feelings meditators aspire to after years of practice, feelings of oneness and interconnectedness with all things, of unbounded love, of blissful inner peace.

I instantly recognized such states. “I’ve experienced that,” I thought. “I know what that feels like.” But there was no mention in the book that such states could be followed by apparent mental breakdown, a month in a psychiatric hospital and losing a year of one’s life, as I had at the age of 20. Suddenly I knew I was on to something. This was confirmation of what I had known all along, that there was far more to my so-called “breakdown” than met the eye.

So it’s not that simple, trying to say this person is psychotic, whereas this person is going through spiritual emergency. The two so often go hand in hand that they can’t easily be separated out. It is more a question of both/and rather than either/or.

All of these ways of seeing spiritual crisis bear some truth. Spiritual emergency can certainly be experienced as a naturally healing process that takes us toward greater wholeness — an evolution toward fulfilling our true potential as spiritual beings. It also contains elements of mystical experiences, such as feelings of oneness with the universe, and it often contains psychotic-type elements.

This combination of the mystical and the psychotic-looking means that some cases of spiritual emergency take the form of what we might call “mystical psychosis.” Alternatively, it can take more the guise of depression, of a dark night of the soul. It’s as if the powerful energies that we have to contend with can either take us up into the heights or down to the depths.

The Chinese symbol for “crisis” consists of two characters, one that denotes “danger” and the other “opportunity.” A crisis of spiritual awakening holds both of these. There are, without doubt, some very serious dangers. There is, however, nothing “wrong” with spiritual crisis in itself. It offers phenomenal potential for spiritual growth and healing. In order to fulfill the opportunities, in order to experience such a crisis as the wonderful gift and blessing that it can be, we need to be fully aware of the dangers.

Awakening Seen as Illness

The whole relationship between the symptoms of mental distress and those of spiritual crisis is phenomenally complex. We need here to be aware of the unhelpful tendency to think in either/or terms, that a person is either psychotic or going through spiritual crisis. The reality is that very often psychotic-type elements go hand-in-hand with the spiritual emergency and the experience is far more likely to be a question of both/and. The danger is, however, that mental health professionals won’t understand this and, because of the psychotic-type elements, will tend to pathologize the entire process as illness.

I cannot stress too strongly how damaging this is. There are literally thousands of people who have been through the mental health system who have not had the spiritual aspect of their experience honored. The spiritual dimension has been completely overshadowed by the interpretation given to their experience by the medical model.

I know this first hand. When I became concerned about my mental health after my husband and I split up, I asked my doctor to refer me to a psychiatrist. As we discussed possible preventative measures, I remember trying to explain to her about unitive or mystical states of consciousness. Her take on it was that this was part of the early stages of illness. She was totally dismissive of the idea that what I had previously been through might in any way have been a spiritual experience, had a spiritual dimension to it or be of any value.

Part of why this is so damaging is that the spiritual aspect of our experience is what can nourish and support us after we’ve been through such a cruelly bruising time. Not to mention the lost opportunity for healing and moving towards integration and wholeness.

Unfortunately, what tends to happen is that many of us buy into the pathologizing perspective of the medical model ourselves, if we don’t have an alternative framework with which to understand what is happening to us. If those around us repeatedly tell us we’re ill, in our vulnerable, impressionable state, we end up believing them. So the dangers of lack of understanding can apply equally to individuals as well as to health professionals.

Triggers of Awakening

Often the process of spiritual unfolding happens through our conscious, deliberate spiritual exploration or searching. We start attending classes or workshops, or maybe feel drawn to a particular teacher. Perhaps we begin to introduce spiritual practices, such as prayer, chanting or meditation, into our daily routine. We start developing new friendships with those who share an interest in the path we are exploring.

However, sometimes a major life event, such as bereavement, divorce or an accident, can act as a turning point. From living a seemingly secular, material life, we find ourselves going through a powerful transition that results in a new world view. We had not intentionally set out on a spiritual journey, but we nevertheless find ourselves on one.

In the same way, people fall into these two different types of triggers for spiritual emergency —those who are actively engaged in spiritual development and those for whom some major life event catapults them into crisis, seemingly out of the blue. So the potential triggers of spiritual crisis fall into these two broad categories. On the one hand, the range of spiritual practices we use in our spiritual development and, on the other, life events and situations that are often outside our control.

From this angle we can see that practices such as meditation, prayer and ritual can all potentially trigger spiritual crisis, especially if practiced intensively, such as within a retreat context. These practices are designed to help us develop spiritually and to open us up, and that is precisely what they do. Other practices, such as yoga, chi gung and tantric sex, which all come from ancient esoteric traditions, can have the same effect.

In a study by Kaia Nightingale of the Canadian Spiritual Emergence Service, participants were asked about the various factors contributing to their profound experiences. Nearly two-thirds cited meditation, 29 percent listed yoga, nearly a third mentioned prayer and 14 percent named sex.

Nightingale also found that nearly 43 percent of participants in the study had not consciously been engaged on a spiritual path. What this possibly suggests is that profound spontaneous spiritual experiences, that appear to come out of the blue, are happening to more people now. This may relate to what I call the dark night of the globe. As we go through transition many of us are experiencing the global awakening of consciousness at an individual level. We are getting a bolt out of the blue to help wake us up.

Finding the Dawn

A spiritual emergency can be an opportunity for healing, growth and spiritual fulfilment. As you make your way through this hero’s journey, ask for support from family, friends and your spiritual community to cope with the crisis. Don’t hesitate to call on that support. Seek out sympathetic health professionals, too. Journaling and reflection can help you to make sense of it all. And finally, a spiritual awakening is about rebirth and finding your way back out into the world again. Know that your work and your relationships may change as you find a new calling. Remember, the dawn always returns after so dark a night.

Catherine G. Lucas, author of In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening, is the founder of the UK Spiritual Crisis Network. Visit www.in-case-of-spiritual-emergency.blogspot.com. Reprinted with permission by Findhorn Press at www.findhornpress.com.