Spiritual “Adulting” Why Your Spiritual Awakening Isn’t All Rainbows and Unicorns

We’re sold a version of spirituality that involves white linen, quiet tea, and eternal peace. Maybe a vision board. Perhaps a crystal or two. Or someone serene on a mountaintop who never raises their voice.

But for most of us, waking up feels more like a detox. And let’s be honest, detoxes are not pretty.

“Shannon, why do I feel worse?”

I hear it constantly. Someone starts meditating, or they find energy work, or they finally stop numbing out, and suddenly everything is coming up. Old grief. Old rage. Old memories they thought they’d buried deep enough.

And they come to me bewildered: I started my spiritual journey and now everything is falling apart. Am I doing something wrong?

No. You’re doing it exactly right. It just doesn’t feel that way yet.

I call this Spiritual Adulting. When you decide to raise your vibration and genuinely connect to Source, not the Instagram version but the real thing, you are turning on a high-powered torch in a cellar that’s been dark for decades. You are going to see cobwebs. You are going to find things in the corners you forgot you’d left there. Things you swore you’d dealt with. Things you didn’t know were there at all.

During my last detox I must have been the only person becoming stressed out during a floating sound bath! I laugh now, but at the time those parasites dying off inside of me had much bigger emotions going on!

That’s not failure. That’s the work beginning.

The Upward Spiral (It’s Not a Straight Line)

Here’s what nobody tells you when you start: healing isn’t linear. It’s a spiral. Every time you level up, you come back around, not to the same place, but to an older wound seen from a higher vantage point.

You might suddenly remember something from when you were seven. Ancestral shame might bubble up out of nowhere, and I mean that literally. I work with ancestral healing every day, and I have watched people release grief that wasn’t even theirs to carry. Patterns passed down through bloodlines, encoded in the body, waiting for someone in the lineage to finally say: this ends here.

That moment when the tears come and you don’t even know why? That’s not a breakdown. That’s your system finally feeling safe enough to let something go that it’s been holding onto for years. Maybe lifetimes.

Honour it.

The Monkey Mind Will Try to Run the Show

The biggest obstacle I see during awakening isn’t the pain. It’s the analysis of the pain.

The Mental Monkey kicks in immediately. Why am I thinking this? What does this mean? Where did this come from? Who did this to me? Am I doing this right? Should I be feeling more? Should I be feeling less?

And I’m not just talking about clients. I’m talking about me! Even after 25 years on this path, levelling up is just another awakening to yourself.

Recently I had a premonition. Clear as anything. I knew that I’d be alone in a foreign country, yet I talked myself right out of it. The Monkey got busy. It rationalised, reframed, found reasons why the knowing wasn’t real. And I let it lead. I booked a holiday with a boyfriend and then ended the relationship. My own self-deceit cost me, financially and emotionally.

I had a couple of days struggling with that. Not about what happened or the expense, energy is energy and it moves, but about the fact that I knew. Deep down, I knew. And I didn’t listen.

That’s the Monkey’s real game. It doesn’t just analyse your pain. It talks you out of your own wisdom before you even get a chance to act on it. My higher self knew I was going to be alone in a foreign country, maybe even that I needed to be, but I would never have arranged it that way! So I created a whole other scenario that fell through, by my own choice.

Of course I asked 15 other people to come, but the Universe had other plans. I seriously could have skipped the drama in the first place. So when I say stop, I mean it from experience, not from a textbook. Once I could accept that, I got my adventure head back on, did some research, and now I’m excited to see what happens next!

In any healing modality, the hardest thing is getting out of your own way. You don’t need a special gift. You just need to get still, get quiet, and trust what comes. For me, inner guidance sometimes arrives in a Southern drawl, my mother’s voice in spirit, who has opinions and shares them freely. For you it might be a gut knowing, a word that drops in, or a feeling in your chest that something is true before your brain has caught up.

That’s your inner wisdom. It was always there. The awakening just turns up the volume.

The work isn’t learning to hear it. The work is learning to trust it enough to act. It’s like getting fine tuned.

The 3-Step Return

When the rainbows-and-unicorns version of spirituality isn’t cutting it, this is what I come back to and what I teach in The Return to You:

1. Release Emotional Shock. Before anything else, get back into your body and your centre. You can’t access truth from a triggered state. This is nervous system work first.

2. Access Your Truth. I use muscle testing with clients because the body doesn’t lie the way the mind does. Find what’s actually real beneath the story you’re telling yourself.

3. Reclaim Your Power. This is the shift from victim of your triggers to creator of your experience. It’s not a one-time decision, it’s a practice. But every time you choose it, it gets more available to you.

The Real Takeaway

The mess isn’t a sign you’ve gone wrong. The mess is the clearing.

The awakening doesn’t make your life easier right away. It makes it truer. And truth, at first, can feel like disruption. It can look like the end of a relationship, a career, an identity. It can feel like grief for a version of yourself you thought was keeping you safe.

But on the other side of all of it? That’s where the brilliance lives.

Stop overthinking the process. Trust your intuition. Trust your connection to something larger than your mind. And keep going.

The light you turned on isn’t going anywhere. Want to shine some light on what you’re struggling with at the moment? Book a Truth Map call: https://bit.ly/MyTruthMap 30 minutes to come home to your inner knowing.