There's so much detail I could go into about what happens AFTER a spiritual awakening. It rewires your nervous system and makes you very very tired initially. But I was thinking how the pre-awakening state is less discussed. In retrospect, all the pieces were there for me. Being unable to properly integrate them at the time is truly a lesson in how the unconscious works. So often we know something is off in life. But we brush it away because "it's too farfetched" or "coincidental." Spiritual awakenings force you to grapple with a world that's nonlinear and irrational. You stop repressing those unconscious impressions and start becoming "intuitive." My pre-spiritual awakening window began in the late summer season. My social circle was essentially an Appalachian cult of artists, homesteaders and mechanics. A good friend of mine, let's call her J, was a fellow writer. We would go to a secret park and share our writing. One day I told J that I had a vision of painting onto the American flag at my apartment. To elevate it not to desecrate it. J really liked that idea. She knew I was stuck and said it would be part of my new chapter. I was hesitant. Military family and all that. Well, I put that project off. Instead, J would invite me over to her nice house where she lived with three beautiful extroverted girls. We would all get lit, hang out, talk life. These were "normal and popular" people. The queen bee was Houston, a rep for Red Bull on campus. I felt very comfortable there but it was polar opposite of the cult hangouts, which were darker messier spaces full of tools and books. The more I hung out there, the more my internal schisms began to manifest outwardly. This is pretty classic in awakenings. You need to be broken down before you can get put back together - and a lot of times this fragmentation shows up as an identity crisis or being part of divergent groups. Suddenly, random things would happen - like a childhood schoolmate showing up in my artist circle. This was uncanny, since I went to high school a few hours from Detroit - and here we were, flung down south close to Asheville NC. These synchronicities picked up in frequency and intensity until one day I took the flag out to the spot where J and I would sit. It was fall now. The outer world was dying. In a trance state, I traced it with paint, let it dry, took it home, hung it. In retrospect, this was the start of me learning about archetypal alchemy - essentially what I help people with now. After that project, events in my life reached such a crescendo that I got rid of my possessions and began traveling across the US for several years. When the new tenant took over my apartment, I left the flag - its job was done. Now the inner world was becoming the outer world. And that disorienting realization is when the journey fully began.