Not all awakenings look like light, bliss, or cosmic insight.
Sometimes awakening looks like:
- Being more tired than usual
- Feeling emotionally raw for no clear reason
- Wanting more quiet, more space, fewer people
- Feeling overwhelmed by noise, crowds, or conflict
- Losing interest in old goals without knowing what replaces them
It can feel confusing — even concerning.
Many people think,
“Am I regressing?”
“Why can’t I handle things the way I used to?”
“Why does everything feel like too much?”
What if nothing is wrong?
What if your nervous system is simply recalibrating?
The Nervous System: Your Hidden Sensemaking Tool
We’re taught that the brain is what understands reality.
Think clearly. Be logical. Trust facts.
But before a thought ever forms, your nervous system has already scanned the moment.
It is constantly:
- Reading signals from your body
- Sensing safety or threat in the environment
- Filtering what you even notice
- Deciding what deserves your attention
This happens below conscious awareness. It’s fast, automatic, and deeply tied to survival.
If your nervous system is in chronic survival mode, everything gets filtered through:
Is this safe?
Do I belong?
Could this hurt me?
When that alarm is always humming in the background, life feels louder, faster, and more threatening than it actually is.
You don’t just think differently.
You literally perceive differently.
Why Awakening Feels So Physical
Many people expect awakening to be mental or spiritual — new ideas, insights, perspectives.
But real change often starts in the body.
As you begin to question old identities, roles, and beliefs, your nervous system also begins to shift out of long-held patterns of protection.
This can look like:
- Old emotions surfacing
- Sudden waves of grief, anger, or fear
- A need for more rest
- Less tolerance for drama, conflict, or noise
- A strong pull toward nature, stillness, or solitude
It’s not that you’re becoming weaker.
It’s that your system is no longer running on constant emergency mode.
And when the alarm finally quiets, you feel everything that was pushed down just to keep functioning.
That can be intense. But it’s also honest.
The “Static” Starts to Clear
Imagine trying to tune an old radio.
When there’s too much static, you can’t hear the music clearly. You might even assume there’s no signal at all.
Survival stress is like that static.
When the nervous system is overwhelmed:
- Intuition feels like anxiety
- Emotions feel like danger
- Stillness feels uncomfortable
- Slowing down feels unsafe
So many of us learned to override our inner signals and rely only on thinking our way through life.
But as the nervous system settles, something changes.
You begin to notice subtler cues:
A quiet sense of “this feels right”
A body-level “no” before you can explain why
A growing discomfort with things that once seemed normal
This isn’t mystical in the dramatic sense.
It’s your system becoming sensitive again — in a healthy way.
The static lowers. The signal was always there.
Why We Weren’t Taught to Trust This
Most of us were raised in environments that valued:
Productivity over presence
Certainty over sensitivity
Compliance over intuition
Emotions were labeled unreliable.
Gut feelings were dismissed as irrational.
Body awareness was sidelined in favor of logic alone.
Part of this came from a real place: when the nervous system is dysregulated, inner signals can feel overwhelming or confusing. It can be hard to tell the difference between intuition and fear.
So we were taught to disconnect instead of regulate.
But awakening often involves reconnecting — not just to big spiritual ideas, but to the body as a source of information.
You’re Not Falling Apart — You’re Feeling Again
One of the most frightening parts of this phase is the sense that you can’t “push through” the way you used to.
You might not tolerate:
Overworking
Toxic dynamics
Constant stimulation
Ignoring your limits
What once felt normal now feels like too much.
That’s not failure.
That’s a nervous system that no longer wants to live in constant override.
As your system learns safety again, your life may naturally reorganize:
Slower pace
Clearer boundaries
Different priorities
More honesty about what drains or nourishes you
This is not collapse.
It’s recalibration.
Awakening as Regulation
We often talk about awakening as expanding consciousness.
But it can also be understood as expanding capacity — the capacity to stay present with reality without shutting down or going into survival.
A more regulated nervous system allows for:
Clearer perception
Deeper empathy
Stronger intuition
Better discernment
More stable presence in relationships
Spiritual growth and nervous system regulation are not separate paths.
They are deeply intertwined.
As the system settles, you don’t escape your humanity.
You become more able to inhabit it.
A Gentle Reframe
If you are in a season where everything feels tender, slower, or strangely unfamiliar, consider this possibility:
Your nervous system may be learning that it doesn’t have to be on guard all the time.
That can feel like disorientation before it feels like peace.
You are not losing your edge.
You are losing constant alarm.
And in the quiet that follows, a different kind of clarity can finally be heard.
About the author
Gerry explores themes of change, emotional awareness, and inner coherence through reflective writing. His work is shaped by lived experience during times of transition and is offered as an invitation to pause, notice, and reflect.
If you’re curious about the broader personal and spiritual context behind these reflections, you can read a longer note here.
Life.Understood. 