The Spiritual Journey: What to Expect When You Turn Inwards

Before we get into the soul-connection practices, I believe it’s important to point out some very common obstacles. If you’re new to turning inwards, you might quickly discover all the reasons you’ve grown so skillful at avoiding your inner landscape.

If there are any unhealed wounds or trauma lurking in your psyche (hello, that’s every one of us!), there is likely to be some emotional residue stored within. Bumping up against it could activate a survival response. Here it is essential to discern the difference between discomfort that is manageable and acute agitation that threatens your sense of safety and stability. The former is something you can work with and through; the latter may require the support of a therapist, counselor, healer or professional guide of some sort.

If you find yourself distraught after a moment or two with your attention turned inward, please get yourself help before proceeding. I feel confident in saying that your soul does not wish you to suffer needlessly. Trying to override your body’s survival signals will only increase a lack of feeling safe internally and amplify the consequences. Trying to sit still when your body is screaming RUN is not only excruciating, but also undermines the capacity to develop self-trust.

For those who can tolerate the discomfort, here are a few tips to help you stay regulated and better able to stay present with yourself. First up is awareness: with some practice, you will quickly begin to recognize when your sympathetic nervous system (fight/ flight/ freeze/ fawn response) kicks in with an attempt to protect you from a dangerous situation.  Sometimes this “dangerous situation” is uncomfortable emotions and the response is somewhat overblown, but that’s how our biology works. Our primitive nervous system does not recognize a difference between emotional challenges and life-threatening situations.

Knowing this is tremendously empowering.

The spiritual journey cannot avoid the uncomfortable emotions- they are a call for healing deep, sometimes ancestral, wounds. Spiritual practice is very likely to disturb any suppressed emotions, so it can be very helpful to be prepared. It’s quite natural, normal even, to feel like you’ve come upon a dumpster fire when you turn inwards. Simply knowing this will (hopefully!) help you remember to utilize some of these tools and meet the discomfort so that the pattern can begin to shift. It is indeed possible to deactivate all the inner landmines with consistent, compassionate attention.

Photo by Sam Mgrdichian on Unsplash

Recently I’ve been seeing how my fight/flight response can be a bit furtive. It doesn’t always present as a readiness for throwing punches or running away. Sometimes it sneaks in the back door as a strong urge to get busy. It could be digging into my meditations or journaling with gusto or doing anything other than my practice. Let’s do all the things in order to feel safer. Feeling safer in this regard means: I don’t like these emotions and I’m going to distract myself so I don’t feel them.

It’s an entirely unconscious process. Logically I know that feelings can be unpleasant, but aren’t dangerous in and of themselves. In the moment, however, logic is completely offline, and an inescapable feeling of DANGER descends. This primal alarm system needs to be reset before any progress can emerge.

Truthfully, this happens to me A LOT. A compulsion to dive in and work harder at my healing or spiritual practices might seem like a helpful thing. But when it’s coming from a motivation to use activity as a way to avoid what is real in the moment, it’s drawing me further away from healing and soul-connection.

I’m learning to recognize this tendency and inquire about my motivation: is it an effort to distract myself or to turn towards my soul? Generally, when there’s a sense of urgency, it’s the survival response: hurry up and do something and prevent this feeling from being felt!

I have a lot to say on this topic, but for now I’ll stick to the basics. To deactivate the survival response, we need to learn its language. It cannot be diffused by logical thinking. Knowing that you are very much safe whilst feeling the urge to flee does nothing to calm the tension in the muscles or the chemical effects of adrenaline. Instead, we can learn to signal safety through the physical body.

If you feel angry or irritable or a sudden desire to be doing anything else, try some deep breaths, focusing on an extended exhale. Allow your belly to expand with each inhale, and let out a long, audible sigh on the the exhale, feeling the sound vibrate through your torso.  Try 20 rounds of this breathing exercise and reassess.

Has that taken the edge off? Would it help to continue? Does your body need to move to discharge any pent-up energy? Shaking, bouncing, dancing, thrashing about, punching pillows, and chanting can all be incredibly liberating. These are all ways of helping the body to metabolize adrenaline.

If you’re feeling anxious, be sure to open your eyes and look around your space, allowing your vision to send a message to your nervous system that you are indeed safe in this moment. I find that placing a hand on my chest and stroking it down the front of my torso to my public bone repeatedly is quite soothing, especially when combined with the deep breathing.

If you’re feeling frozen, stuck, or unsure, try focusing on deep inhales and short exhales. If you’re familiar with breath of fire from the yogic tradition, try a few rounds of that. I’m partial to the Wonder Woman stance, a powerful posture that signals “I’ve got this” to the nervous system. Plant your feet wider than your hips, place your fists on your hips, lift your chin and conjure up your inner superhero. Hold the pose while you do the breathing.

In the beginning, you might spend your entire practice session regulating your nervous system. Keep at it! This is essential to your progress, much like learning to skate on ice for a hockey player. If you can retrain your primal brain not to freak out every time you look within, eventually you’ll have developed the capacity to be present with yourself. It’s a total game changer!

I often find myself trying to skip over the basics and get to “the good stuff”. It took me a while, and quite a bit of suffering to realize that this stage actually is the good stuff. On the spiritual journey, there is no end destination, just a series of commitments to meeting ourselves where we are. If I can save you some of the pain I went through trying to force “progress” when I really would have benefited from kindness and awareness, I’d be delighted.

Learning to listen to your body, survival responses included, sends a message to all the parts of you that are wounded and hiding in the shadows that you’re ready, willing, and able to meet with them, enhancing the possibility that they’ll come to the surface to be healed. If you’re constantly sending out the message, “Don’t bother me, I’m on A Very Important Spiritual Mission”, well, you’re missing opportunities to prove yourself a trustworthy ally to these wounded aspects of yourself.

In some systems, the body and the emotions are forsaken in order to transcend to higher planes. That makes no sense to me! My soul has chosen this particular body and these particular circumstances to inhabit. In my eyes, that makes all the parts of me valuable to my spiritual journey.

I’m learning to see myself as an eclectic and unique package and I’m here to champion the goal of welcoming, accepting and treating our entire being with generosity and compassion. To do that, we need to be prepared to meet whatever arises in every moment with open arms. Regulating the nervous system is an essential step in that direction.

If you know someone who might be interested in the spiritual journey, it would be greatly appreciated if you shared this post! Word of mouth is the backbone of my work as I’m much more interested in writing than promoting my writing.