Spiritual Psychosis or Awakening? How to Recover, Ground, and Rebuild After a Spiritual Emergency

The Part of Awakening No One Talks About

There’s a side of spiritual awakening that rarely gets acknowledged—until you’re already deep in it. It’s not the radiant bliss people post about. It’s not the peace that comes from aligning with your purpose. It’s the unraveling. The part where things start to feel overwhelming, confusing, and, at times, terrifying.

You might find yourself flooded with insights, symbols, voices, or synchronicities—so much that you can’t tell what’s real anymore. Time warps. Sleep disappears. You lose your sense of self or begin to believe you’re here to carry out some kind of divine mission, but the weight of that calling feels unbearable. You’re overstimulated, disconnected from your body, and unsure if what you're experiencing is a breakthrough or a breakdown.

I know this terrain because I’ve lived it.

Mine began during a holotropic breathwork session that was not held by a trauma-informed facilitator. What I thought would be a deep healing journey cracked open decades of unprocessed trauma in one sitting. Memories, sensations, and energies surged through my body with a force I wasn’t prepared for. I left that session disoriented and emotionally flooded, unsure what was mine, what was real, or how to come back to myself.

At first, I thought maybe I had accessed something sacred. And in a way, I had. But it came through so fast, with no integration, no containment, and no nervous system support, that it quickly spiraled into something that didn’t feel like healing at all. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think clearly. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me, and I didn’t have the language or support to make sense of it.

This is what many people refer to as spiritual psychosis—a state where spiritual sensitivity and insight outpace the body and nervous system’s ability to regulate and integrate. It’s not a clinical term, and it’s often misunderstood or dismissed entirely, which makes it all the more isolating. You may have been told you’re “too much,” or worse, questioned your own sanity.

But here’s what I want you to know: you’re not crazy. You’re not too far gone. And even if it feels like you’ve drifted far from center, there is a way back.

Healing from spiritual psychosis isn’t about suppressing your gifts or labeling them as a problem. It’s about learning how to ground them. To come back into the body. To build a safe enough container so your system can hold the vastness of what you’ve experienced. This process isn’t about returning to who you were before—it’s about becoming someone who can navigate this world with both feet on the ground and a deeper connection to spirit, self, and truth.

In this post, we’ll explore what spiritual psychosis really is, how it happens, and most importantly, how to recover—practically, gently, and in your own time.

What Is Spiritual Psychosis?

Spiritual psychosis is what happens when your system opens faster than it can stabilize. It’s not a diagnosis, and it doesn’t mean you’re broken or mentally ill. It’s a state of overwhelm that occurs when the body, mind, and spirit are flooded with more input than they can process. And often, it happens during or after a spiritual awakening, a trauma release, or a period of deep inner work.

You might feel like your senses are on overdrive. Thoughts come in faster than you can track. You see meaning everywhere—every word, every number, every movement seems loaded with significance. You might hear voices or receive messages that feel divine but come at a pace that’s relentless. You may feel like you’ve accessed some cosmic truth, only to lose your footing in your daily life.

It’s disorienting because it feels spiritual—and parts of it might be. But what makes it unsafe is the speed, the intensity, and the loss of agency. You don’t get to choose when the messages come, how your body reacts, or what your thoughts are doing. You start to lose touch with the here-and-now. And without proper support, it can spiral into fear, isolation, and shutdown.

The truth is, we live in a culture that doesn’t know how to hold spiritual experiences—especially the messy, nonlinear ones. We’re either told to suppress them with medication or glorify them as evidence of awakening. Neither approach helps when you’re scared, sleep-deprived, and unsure if you can trust your own mind.

What we call spiritual psychosis is often a sacred process that’s been hijacked by a dysregulated nervous system. It’s what happens when something meaningful tries to emerge—but the container isn’t strong enough yet to hold it.

This doesn’t mean your insights weren’t real. It doesn’t mean your gifts were false. It means your body needed more time, more support, and more safety to bring them through.

In the next section, we’ll talk about why this happens—so you can understand the perfect storm that leads to spiritual psychosis and begin to unwind it with compassion and clarity.

How It Happens: The Perfect Storm

Spiritual psychosis doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It’s usually the result of multiple forces colliding all at once—energetically, emotionally, and physiologically. From the outside, it might seem sudden, but in truth, it’s often a slow build that eventually hits a tipping point.

In my case, that tipping point came when a powerful breathwork session opened the floodgates of decades of trauma. There was no preparation, no integration plan, and no one in the room who understood what can happen when the psyche cracks open faster than the body can follow. What I thought would be healing turned into disorientation, insomnia, energetic overwhelm, and a complete loss of my internal compass.

Here are some of the most common ingredients in the "perfect storm" of spiritual psychosis:

1. Unprocessed Trauma Resurfacing All at Once

Many spiritual experiences—especially altered states like breathwork, plant medicine, or spontaneous awakenings—open the door to buried emotional material. When we carry layers of trauma that haven’t been metabolized, those experiences don’t just dissolve gently. They erupt. And when they do, they can mimic or intensify spiritual visions, voices, and sensations. The body starts to react as if it's reliving old danger, even while the mind tries to assign spiritual meaning to it.

2. Energy Opening Without Grounding

Practices like breathwork, kundalini activation, deep meditation, and psychedelics can blow open the upper chakras—especially the third eye and crown. That can bring insight, intuition, and non-ordinary perception—but if the lower chakras (root, sacral, solar plexus) aren’t stabilized, it can feel like your spirit has left your body. You become top-heavy, energetically speaking, with no foundation to anchor you.

This is when people start to feel like they’re floating above themselves, watching life from afar, or struggling to stay present in everyday conversations. They may feel connected to “source” but completely disconnected from their own nervous system.

3. Lack of Containment or Integration

Healing work without a plan for integration is like opening a wound without having any supplies to treat it. Many facilitators mean well, but if they aren't trauma-informed or trained in nervous system regulation, they may lead people into intense states without the skills to help them come back.

This is especially true in spiritual circles where “breakthroughs” are prioritized over sustainability. But real healing isn’t just about opening—it’s about what happens afterward. Without containment, what’s meant to be sacred can become unsafe.

4. Isolation and Misunderstanding

When you’re going through this, it can feel impossible to explain. Traditional therapists may not understand or may rush to pathologize. Spiritual teachers might encourage you to keep going, push through, or “surrender to the process,” without helping you slow down or make sense of what’s happening.

This leaves people caught in a limbo: too “spiritual” for the medical model, too destabilized for the spiritual community. And when you’re already questioning reality, not having someone who gets it can make things spiral faster.

The good news is that once we understand how the storm forms, we can begin to untangle it. The path out isn’t about rejecting your sensitivity or spiritual connection—it’s about rebuilding a foundation strong enough to hold it.

In the next section, we’ll explore what that recovery looks like, and how to start coming back into your body, your life, and your sense of inner safety.

Recovery Isn’t Mystical—It’s Practical

Healing from spiritual psychosis doesn’t require you to be more enlightened, more spiritual, or more surrendered. In fact, that mindset often feeds the spiral. What it does require is structure. Grounding. Nervous system support. And an honest willingness to slow down—sometimes way down.

You don’t need another activation. You need a container.
You don’t need to ascend. You need to land.

Here’s what recovery actually looks like—step by step, moment by moment.

1. Get Back Into the Body

The very first step is learning to come back to your body in a consistent, sustainable way. This may sound simple, but when you’ve been in a hyper-spiritual state or disassociated for long stretches, it can feel foreign.

Start with:

• Feeling your feet on the floor, noticing the texture beneath you

• Placing your hand on your chest or belly and naming what you feel (warmth, pressure, numbness, tingling)

• Using your senses to orient to the space around you—what do you see, hear, smell, touch?

• Eating grounding foods like root vegetables, bone broth, and warm grains

• Holding ice or using weighted blankets when feeling overstimulated

None of this is flashy. It’s not meant to be. These are small, slow ways to signal to your nervous system: We’re safe now. We’re here.

2. Nervous System First, Not Enlightenment

When your system is dysregulated, every insight gets distorted. A simple message of love from spirit might get twisted into a directive to save the world—or a warning that you’re failing your mission. The problem isn’t always the message—it’s the state your body is in while receiving it.

This is why regulation has to come before interpretation.

Try:

• Gentle breathwork with a longer exhale than inhale

• Placing cold compresses on your neck or wrists

• Somatic tracking: noticing where sensations rise and fall in your body without trying to change them

• Restoring circadian rhythm with natural light and reduced screen time

• Simple movement: shaking, stretching, walking

When your system softens, your perception sharpens. You can begin to discern what’s real, what’s fear, and what’s just noise.

3. Discernment Is a Daily Practice

One of the most disorienting parts of spiritual psychosis is not being able to trust your own mind. You may question what’s real, what’s intuitive, and what’s delusion.

Here’s the filter I often use:

• Does this insight feel grounded, or urgent?

• Is it expansive and supportive, or isolating and fear-based?

• Would my future, integrated self say yes to this?

If the message comes with panic, time pressure, or the sense that you’re the only one who understands it, that’s a sign to pause. Insight doesn’t demand chaos. Truth lands with clarity, even when it’s hard.

You’re allowed to say no to messages. You’re allowed to wait for confirmation. You don’t owe spirit 24/7 access to your consciousness.

4. Set Boundaries with Spirit (Yes, Really)

If you’re receiving too many messages, hearing voices, or having overwhelming energetic experiences—you are allowed to create boundaries.

This might sound like:

“Only messages for my highest good.”
“No communication while I’m sleeping.”
“One message at a time. I need rest.”
“I’m not available for this right now.”

Spiritual gifts don’t require your system to be on call at all hours. You can engage with your gifts like any relationship—with mutual respect, pacing, and consent.

5.Find a Trauma-Informed Spiritual Guide Who Gets It

One of the most important pieces of recovering from spiritual psychosis is who you choose to walk with as you come back to yourself. Not every therapist, healer, or coach is equipped to hold this kind of experience—and working with the wrong person can actually make things worse.

If your experience is dismissed, pathologized, or forced into a clinical box, it can deepen the trauma. You’re already questioning what’s real. You don’t need to be told that the most meaningful (or terrifying) moments of your life were just “symptoms.” That’s not support. That’s gaslighting dressed up as professionalism.

What you need is someone who can hold both: the spiritual and the somatic, the mystical and the mental health, the grief and the gift.

Someone who has walked others through spiritual awakenings, spiritual emergencies, and psychic re-openings—and who understands that these experiences, while intense, are not inherently pathological. Without this level of training and experience, even the kindest therapist may unintentionally retraumatize you by invalidating what you’re going through.

This isn’t about credentials on paper. It’s about lived integration.

Look for someone who:

• Holds a grounded, steady presence (not impressed or alarmed by the intensity of your experience)

• Is trained in nervous system regulation and trauma-informed care

• Respects altered states and non-ordinary experiences without rushing to “fix” or “clear” them

• Can work with paradox: your experience might be spiritual and psychological and energetic

• Doesn’t force meaning, timelines, or rigid interpretations

• Offers containment, curiosity, and consent—especially when things feel wild

The right support won’t tell you what your experience means. They’ll help you build the internal structure to hold it, make sense of it in your own time, and metabolize what’s real for you.

Recovery might not be linear. You might feel like you’re “back” one day and spiral again the next. That’s okay. That’s part of the recalibration. You’re not failing—you’re practicing. You’re teaching your system how to come back to center—not just once, but over and over, until it becomes a way of life.

And you don’t have to do that alone.

In the next section, we’ll talk about how to rebuild trust in yourself again—and what integration really means after a rupture like this.

Rebuilding Trust and Integration After Psychosis

One of the most tender parts of recovery isn’t the symptoms—it’s what happens after they subside. It’s the emptiness, the confusion, the mistrust in yourself, your experiences, and your path. You might wonder: Was any of it real? Did I lose myself, or find something I wasn’t ready for? Will I ever feel “normal” again?

This is the slow, sacred work of integration.

Integration doesn’t mean you’ve figured it all out. It means you’re learning to live with what unfolded—with your feet on the ground. It’s not about becoming who you were before. That version of you has changed. It’s about building a new version—one who can hold the depth, the intensity, and the insight without being swept under by it.

And the first step in that process? Let go of the timeline.

Drop the Timeline, Drop the Pressure

There is no linear path out of spiritual psychosis. There’s no “three steps to balance” or 30-day plan. Some things will settle quickly. Others may linger for months or years. And some pieces of your experience may never fully make sense.

That’s not failure. That’s integration.

Let yourself drop the expectation that clarity means immediate understanding. Sometimes, the meaning arrives years later. Sometimes it doesn’t. The invitation is to stop pushing for closure and start building capacity. Let your nervous system, your body, and your life catch up before you try to make sense of what happened.

Be Willing to Pause the Spiritual Work

This one’s hard—especially if you identify as a healer, a channeler, or someone with strong intuitive gifts. But there’s no shame in pausing your spiritual practices. In fact, it might be exactly what you need.

Take a break from trying to decode the messages, activate your energy, or align your chakras. Instead:

• Eat warm food.

• Feel the sun on your skin.

• Sleep deeply and without dreams.

• Tend to your relationships, your body, your routines.

• Let the sacred show up in the ordinary, not just the mystical.

You’re not betraying your path by doing this. You’re protecting it.

Learn to Manage Your Gifts—Don’t Let Them Manage You

If this was a true spiritual awakening, your gifts may have come online in ways you weren’t prepared for. You might be sensitive to energy, hear messages, feel others’ emotions, or experience dreams and visions more vividly. That doesn’t make you “crazy.” But it does mean you need tools to manage it.

This is where Mary Shutan’s work, especially Managing Psychic Abilities, becomes essential. Her approach isn’t about amplifying your gifts—it’s about grounding them, understanding them, and using discernment so they don’t overrun your life. If you are moderately to highly psychic (which many sensitive people are), learning psychic hygiene, discernment, and energetic boundaries is non-negotiable.

Remember: your gifts are here to serve you—not deplete you.

Rebuild Trust in Yourself Slowly, Gently

After an experience like this, self-trust may feel fractured. That’s okay. You’re allowed to move carefully. Don’t force yourself to reopen intuitive channels or revisit the experience before you’re ready.

Rebuilding trust looks like:

• Asking: “Is this supportive for me right now?”

• Noticing how your body responds to information or energy

• Honoring your need to say not now, not this, or not anymore

• Giving yourself permission to be human—before anything else

Intuition doesn't have to come through in a lightning bolt. It can come in a whisper. And you get to choose when to listen.

Let the Mystery Be Just That—A Mystery

There will likely be pieces of your experience that you can’t explain. Visions that never resolved. Symbols you couldn’t decode. Moments that felt huge but now feel vague. That’s okay. The spiritual ego wants to “figure it all out.” But true integration happens when we learn to live in relationship with the mystery—without needing to dominate or decode it.

Not everything that happens in spiritual emergence has a clear storyline. Some things are meant to be lived with, not solved.

And Always, Always Return to the Body

More than anything else, your body is what will bring you home.

Don’t skip this step.

Grounding into your physical body isn’t optional—it’s everything. When your body feels safe, your system can hold more. Your insights become clearer. Your relationships stabilize. Your perception sharpens.

Let your body become a place you return to, not escape from.

This means:

• Prioritizing nervous system regulation

• Slowing down your healing pace

• Creating routines that nourish, not just “align”

• Moving, resting, feeling, and feeding your body with love

Because the truth is, this isn’t just a recovery. It’s a transformation.
And it’s a process. A real, slow, human process.

You’re Not Too Much—You’re Becoming

If you’ve found yourself in the aftermath of spiritual psychosis—whether you’re still in it, climbing your way out, or sitting quietly in the wake of what just happened—there’s one truth I want to offer you:

You’re not too much.
You’re becoming.

You didn’t fail your healing. You didn’t “do it wrong.” You touched something vast, raw, and real—something your system wasn’t prepared to hold yet. And now, what’s being asked of you isn’t to go back or push forward. It’s to build capacity for what’s been revealed.

Because at the heart of all this chaos, fear, and disorientation… there is purpose.

Not the kind of purpose that gets tied up in neat little affirmations or soul mission statements. But a deeper current of evolution—a pull toward your most integrated, embodied self. One who can move through the world with more clarity, more discernment, more presence. One who no longer needs to escape the body to feel connected to spirit.

This isn’t just a recovery process. It’s an initiation. One that strips you of old identities, opens dormant parts of your consciousness, and—if supported properly—eventually allows you to stand in a kind of truth that isn’t performative or projected. It just is.

Mary Shutan, in her work on spiritual awakening, describes this journey as layered. There’s the personal unraveling, where all your trauma and illusions rise to the surface. Then there’s the existential phase, where meaning feels elusive and everything you once relied on collapses. And eventually—sometimes slowly, sometimes suddenly—you begin to integrate. You remember how to be in a body. You reenter the world, not to fix it, but to participate in it from a different frequency.

And that participation doesn’t have to look flashy. It might be the way you listen differently. The way you stop rushing. The way you speak more truthfully. Or the way you guide others who are just beginning to walk through the same fire you survived.

That’s the point of it all.

Spiritual psychosis is not the destination. It’s a disruption. A breaking of the dam. And on the other side of it is the slow process of becoming more human, not less. More rooted. More aware of your own nervous system. More able to hold paradox. More discerning about what’s actually sacred.

So if you’re wondering when this ends, or when you’ll finally feel “normal” again… pause. Ask a different question. Ask instead: What do I need right now to feel more in my body? What feels true in this moment, not forever? Where can I choose steadiness over urgency?

There’s no rush. The mystery can remain a mystery. Some answers may not come for years—and others may never come at all. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re learning to live in right relationship with the unknown.

And if your gifts came online during this time, they aren’t a curse—but they do need tending. Learn how to manage them. Learn your filters, your boundaries, your yes and your no. Get familiar with what’s yours and what’s not. You don’t have to open to everything. You don’t have to carry it all.

Your job isn’t to transcend this life—it’s to participate in it. Fully. Freely. With the clarity that only comes from surviving what almost shattered you.

And if you’re ready to be supported—if you want to work with someone who speaks the language of both spirit and somatics, who has walked through this fire and knows how to hold it—I’d be honored to walk beside you.

This work is sacred. It’s real. And it’s yours to define.

You’re not lost. You’re not too sensitive. You’re not falling behind.
You’re becoming who you were always meant to be—on your own timeline, in your own way, with both feet on the ground.

And you don’t have to do it alone.

If this post speaks to your experience, and you’re looking for someone who understands both the spiritual and the somatic layers of healing—I’m here.

I work with sensitive, intuitive, and spiritually awakening individuals who have found themselves overwhelmed by their experiences, unsure how to integrate them, and craving grounded support that doesn’t dismiss their inner truth.

Whether you’re navigating the aftershocks of a spiritual emergency, beginning to rebuild your relationship with your body, or learning how to manage your psychic gifts—I offer one-on-one support rooted in trauma-informed care, nervous system education, and practical integration tools.

You don’t have to go back.
You don’t have to go faster.
You just need a place to land.

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→ Or reach out directly with questions. I’m happy to talk.