5 Signs of Spiritual Awakening [Episode #513]

Today’s solocast topic is: 5 Signs of Spiritual Awakening

When we talk about our cornerstones, it’s much easier to see progress that we’re making with food. Maybe we’ve given up dairy or we’re having a GGS every day. Food is tangible so we can see it and we can measure our progress. 

Same thing with the body. If your goals are around building more muscle tone, improving your skin or your digestion, you can feel it in your body and you can see with your eyes, progress. This is the physical cornerstones, the physical parts that we can see.

However, when it comes to spiritual growth, how do we know we’re growing? How do we know we’re making progress? I’m going to give you 5 definite signs that you can use as a self-reflection tool to see how you’re doing. It’s not to make you feel like you haven’t made any progress, however, it’s to help keep in mind so you can be more aware of them.

Topics Covered In 5 Signs of Spiritual Awakening

#1. The first sign of spiritual awakening is, you feel more feelings of unity and oneness

#2. Our second sign is feeling more expansive love

#3. Next, having more self-awareness

#4. Fourth on the list is, an increase in your intuition

#5. And last but not least, our fifth sign is, a stronger connection with nature

I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:

• Comment below
• Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
• Follow the conversation on my Instagram
• Comment on my Facebook Page
• Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly

Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. It’s very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, it’s way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the “Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder”? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.

The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to well…help you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).

LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES

Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.

[❤️ FAN OF THE WEEK]

[RESOURCES]

• SBO Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Kimberly Snyder’s Books
• Four Cornerstone FREE Guide: Text the word GUIDE to +1-855-741-0602
• Additional resources in transcript

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• How to Easefully Increase Spirituality into Your Life
• Essential Oils for Clearing Space and Promoting Love with Charlynn Avery
• Boosting Your Mental and Emotional Well-Being
• Why Being Present Matters

Additional Research Resources:

• EXPLORING AWAKENING EXPERIENCES
• A Neurotheological Approach to Spiritual Awakening
• The Effect of Trait Self-Awareness, Self-Reflection, and Perceptions of Choice Meaningfulness on Indicators of Social Identity within a Decision-Making Context
• Spiritual health mediates the relationship between ego-strength and adjustment to heart disease
• Decreased Symptoms of Depression After Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction: Potential Moderating Effects of Religiosity, Spirituality, Trait Mindfulness, Sex, and Age
• How Do Spirituality, Intuition and Entrepreneurship Go Together?
• Nature Connectedness and Eudaimonic Well-Being: Spirituality as a Potential Mediator

Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne

Xlear: For better breathing, get Xlear today – You can find it at all major retailers, CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Sprouts, Whole foods, and everywhere else.

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Kimberly: 00:00 Hey, Beauties, welcome back to our Monday Solocast podcast, where we have a very special show for you today. This is a interesting topic that today we’re going to take a deep dive on, which is five signs of spiritual awakening. And when we talk about our cornerstones, which are food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth, it’s much easier to see progress that we’re making with food. Maybe we’ve given up dairy. Maybe we’re having a GGS every day. Again, food is tangible so we can see it and we can measure our progress. We can see what we’re eating, what we’re not right in front of our eyes. Same thing with body. If your goals are around building more muscle tone or improving your skin or your digestion, you can feel in your body, and you can see with your eyes, again, in many ways, progress. This is the the physical cornerstones, the physical parts that we can see.

Kimberly: 01:06 But when it comes to spiritual growth, again, the word growth, we’re meant to grow, how do we know we’re growing? How do we know we’re making progress? How do we know we’re not just sitting with our eyes closed and wasting our time and we’re not really meditating, we’re not really opening up. So I’m going to give you five definite signs today that you can do a little reflection and see how you’re doing, and it’s not to make you feel like, “Oh gosh, I haven’t made any progress.” But these are ones just to keep in your mind. So you can be more and more aware of them, and that can help you dial in to say, “Hey, you know what? I’m sitting quietly, but I’m not really following any meditation techniques, so I’m not really getting as far as I want to.”

Kimberly: 01:53 Now remember that I define spiritual growth as the path to more deeply understanding yourself and connecting to your true self. So your true self is beyond the physical body and it’s beyond your personality and your mind, even. Your true self is your core, core essence. Now when it comes to spirituality, obviously there’s a lot of different beliefs. We come from different backgrounds and different paths. The words can be different, so that deep connection to your inner self, you can just call your inner self, you can call it love, you can call it God, you can call it divine intelligence or the universe. Whatever feels good to you. But we want to connect to that deep, deep core, and today for the first time, I’m going to give you some real feedback to see if you’re making any progress in your growth. And again, we can adjust as necessary.

Fan of the Week

Kimberly: 02:49 Before we get into it. I just want to give a quick shout out to our fan of the week. This is lovely vanessa in austin, and she writes, “My five-star review is long overdue as I’ve been a long time listener and fan of Kimberly’s. She has changed my life, and even when I get consumed by life, I always come back to her teachings. This podcast is full of helpful and interesting info on multi topics and also answers listeners’ questions. Make sure to check out her other resources too. There is absolutely something for everyone. Lots of love.” Vanessa in Austin, girl, I am sending you a huge virtual hug. I am so grateful for you, and I’m so grateful to know you virtually and to be in this community together. Lots and lots of love, honey. Thank you so much.

Leave a Review and Subscribe on Itunes

Kimberly: 03:44 And Beauties for your chance to also be shouted out as the fan of the week, please take a moment or two and leave us a review over on iTunes, which is free and easy and it’s just a really great way to support the show. And please, also, while you’re over there, be sure to subscribe to the show and that way you don’t miss out on any of these Monday Solocasts or our Thursday, Q&A shows, and that way you really keep this self care, you keep the flow going into your life, which is so important, and maybe now more than ever with everything that’s going on and all the shifts and changes in the world. You want to keep yourself care dialed in. You want to keep positivity dialed in. Which of course is something that I really love to… My intention to provide for you here with our podcast.

Solocast

Kimberly: 04:41 All that being said, let’s get into this. I am so excited for our topic. I have been talking about this more and more to you guys and one day I will dedicate a whole show to this about just how my work has shifted and really not gone from one thing to a different thing, but really expanded out. And for me, food has been the forward-facing part of my work for some time, but the way I’ve always worked with clients has been this holistic way where we meditate and we talk about feelings and emotions and how it relates to their bodies and so on and so forth. So for me, I just love being able to share everything now I really want to share the things that have worked the most. I’m really passionate about helping to show the bridge and to give more resources to you guys.

Kimberly: 05:34 And for me, the thing that has made the biggest difference in my life hands down is the spiritual growth component. It is the connection with myself that’s helped me understand myself and understand energy, and from that place, I actually did create the beauty detox philosophy, so it gave me access to a different way of looking at things and more creativity. It has just opened up everything and it’s given me so much more peace and joy inside of me. So it went from being a part of my life, when I was backpacking and I was first starting to learn about yoga and meditation in India, to coming back to the United States and then starting everything… Actually, my first book proposal was a… It was a memoir, but it was about lessons from the road and my backpacking and all these… There was a lot of spiritual stuff in there.

Kimberly: 06:34 But then my first publisher, HarperCollins, could see that there was a lot of interest on my blog for the food part, so again, that just became what was extrapolated from the work. But the spiritual part is where I think you can make massive, massive shifts across your entire life. I’ll intro this by saying that one of the ways, or the way, actually… There are other ways. But the main way to grow spiritually is to meditate and to meditate with some technique and some guidance. So I practice Kriya yoga, which is a specific type of yoga, which is… There’s breath work and there’s meditation techniques, and if you’re interested in going into that, you can check it out at yogananda-srf.org.

Kimberly: 07:30 If you want to dip your toe in and learn some beginning meditation techniques, then please go to mysolluna.com, where I have some guided meditations for you, and those are available to you at any time to get started. But what you don’t want to do is to sit there with no technique and no preparation at all for your body, so your body’s restless and your eyes may be closed, but your mind is racing. That may not really get you where you want to go. So please spend some time over on the website or finding some form that is guided, that will give you that guidance as you’re getting started. It’s like a baby learning to walk, and once you learn to walk, you can start to run and you start to go deeper and you start to learn skills, like running zigzag and running backwards and doing all sorts of things. So it’s just in the beginning stages, especially… You may always like guided meditations, but in the beginning especially you want that guidance.

#1 Sign: You feel more feelings of unity and oneness

Kimberly: 08:31 So how do you know that you are growing? I have five different attributes here. And the first one is you feel more feelings of unity and oneness. So when we grow spiritually, we start to feel less and less separate from other people, we start to feel less isolated, and we start to feel the truth, which is that there is this interconnected unity between everybody else. We are one big giant family. We have billions of brothers and sisters. So as you start to grow spiritually, that starts to go from being an intellectual concept that you can’t quite wrap your mind around, to something that you experience and feel as truth. You just feel the unity.

Kimberly: 09:29 And this happens to me… Again, there’s been junctures where I’ve had no big jumps in spiritual growth, and one of them was when I was on my around the world trip and I was starting to meditate and I was starting to just open up my mind. I say this now, too. I stopped seeing people as strangers. And of course we don’t know everybody’s name, but unless… Barring the really creepy person that we avoid. But just in passing people that you see around or on the bus or on the street or whatever, I just started looking at people and not feeling that I can’t couldn’t approach them or that they were so stranger or different. I just started feeling a lot more naturally comfortable with everybody around, I guess, and I did feel more unified.

Kimberly: 10:26 So oneness is the truth that is the core of most all world religions. Definitely Hinduism and Eastern religions and Buddhism, and oneness in terms of love that Jesus taught in Christianity and so on is… These are, these are big ideas that sometimes we don’t really feel. It looks good on paper. We say, “Yeah, of course we’re all united.” but a sign of spiritual growth is you’re starting to feel it in your body. So check in with that and see how that feels.

#2 Sign: Feeling more expansive love

Kimberly: 11:12 The second spiritual awakening study is feeling more expansive love. Love is our essence. Love is inside of us. And sometimes when we get caught up in the surface, spiritual growth, spiritual awakening is about going below the surface. It’s going deep, deep, deep down inside of us. So if we are feeling that we’re tapping into that expansive love, and it’s not just coming up when we see our partner, or not just when we see our child, or not just here and there, we get a compliment. But we feel love expanded through our lives. There’s just pockets where we just feel exponentially more joyful and loving, and even peaceful. And we can’t explain exactly where it’s coming from. It’s not tied to a specific outside entity or outside event. It is because of that expanding love inside of us. It is because we are growing spiritually.

Kimberly: 12:18 And actually a 2018 study from the California Institute of Integral Studies looked at neuro-psychological data of brain research, brain studies of people who had spiritual awakening experiences, and it concluded that these individuals experienced heightened states of joy, love, and an overall sense of wellbeing, and a higher state in which all things are one. So I’ve actually done neuro-brain feedback trainings myself in Arizona. It’s been a couple of years, but it is really interesting how they can really measure different states. Some of these are self-reported by… It’s amazing how I found, on this journey, just feeling more love, removing blocks to love, going deep inside and connecting with the truth, which again, can get covered over so easily, unfortunately, with the daily rushing around of busy, hectic, modern life. So when we feel more love, that’s a sign that you are growing and awakening spiritually. It’s wonderful.

#3 Sign: More self-awareness

Kimberly: 13:36 The third sign that you are awakening spiritually is that you have more self-awareness. Now according to… Where is this? This is a 2017 study published in the Frontiers in Psychology found that self-reflection was one of the key psychological mechanisms helping to develop our sense of personal meaningfulness. So that’s great, for Western research to know that it adds a lot when we can start to really look at ourselves and not look at ourselves and just beat ourselves up, or look at ourselves in disgust, but to look at ourselves and to just become aware, and again, in a compassionate way, in a loving way with ourselves and just start to reflect back on, “Huh. Maybe this was a habit, this stemmed from some kind of wound or trigger or reaction that I developed in my past. Maybe I do say things a little bit harshly, or wow, I can come off as being quite impatient.”

Kimberly: 14:59 So when you grow spiritually and you connect on the inside, you become less sensitive and less defensive about your worldly self, let’s say. The one that shows up and walks around and gets from point A to point B and is on the emails and part of the work culture every day. And you can just, again, start to look and see, “Oh, where can I be more loving? Where can I show up in the way that I want to be?” And this reflection is so hard if we haven’t grown spiritually, because we’re still identifying with the ego. We are identifying with our selves and the surface selves, the small self versus the bigger self. So it’s hard to separate. It’s hard to analyze and deeply self-reflect. But the more we grow, the more our spiritual life matures, this self-awareness becomes a very powerful tool for, again, just clearing up blocks, increasing positive communication so that we continue to grow spiritually and we continue to feel more lighter and more feelings of love and peace.

Kimberly: 16:15 This is an interesting research from the 2018 study from Health Psychology Open Journal, and it found that spiritual health mediated the relationship between ego strength and adjustment to heart disease patients who reported higher spiritual health, and they ended up having stronger feelings of peace and fulfillment. So what this means to me… Again, there’s an inverse relationship between increasing spirituality and ego attachment. So when we start to lessen that hold, and we say, “You know what? I’m more than what I look like. I’m more than my body. I’m more than my job title. My real self is unexplainable with words. My real self is pure energy, pure love. It’s beneath the surface. You can’t see it, but you can feel it.” And again, when we start to not be so tied up in the ego and the surface, that expansion feels truly incredible, and it feels very rewarding.

#4 Sign: An increase in your intuition

Kimberly: 17:18 Our fourth sign of spiritual growth is an increase in your intuition. And what’s exciting about this is that intuition is one of the most useful ways that we can walk about the world, which means we tune in to a higher sense of knowingness, which again comes from that connection to the inner self. So it can mean that we make better decisions in our relationships, in our work, in our writing, in our creativity, in our handling of our family and our kids. We just become more intuitive beings because we’re not so isolated, we’re not bound up in the ego, which makes us feel energetically like we’re on an island by ourselves, away from other people. Intuition means we’re able to tap into and connect with the web, the interconnected web that’s all around, this oneness where everything really is all connected.

Kimberly: 18:19 So there was actually research here from the Philosophy of Management Journal, this is a study from 2016, that found that a deep sense of intuition indicates a higher consciousness and it’s tied to successful entrepreneurs. So that’s interesting, isn’t it? Higher consciousness. Intuition isn’t something that can necessarily be taught. You can teach someone to open up, remove the blocks to intuition. It’s more of a feeling that you tune into. So I found that my intuition increases the more that I meditate, the more that I separate, again, from the chaos of daily life, and I take that deep dive below the surface where intuition is the communication… It is the language. Because when we get to a certain point, it’s feeling, it’s energy. There’s no words to describe. It’s a state.

Kimberly: 19:23 And when we start spending time in that state in meditation, it means that we become more energetically sensitive. So we know it’s not just what people say, but something like 90% of communication is non-verbal, so what happens is we start to pick out more of what people are really saying with the energy of their voice and their eyes and their body language and the way they’re moving and the way they’re showing up, versus just what they’re saying. And we can tune into the right decision, the right step forward in your business or in your family life or whatever it is. It’s, again, connecting to something deeper than the surface. It’s very powerful.

#5 Sign: A stronger connection with nature

Kimberly: 20:05 So our last here, our fifth and our last sign of spiritual awakening is really feeling a stronger connection with nature. And what’s interesting about nature is that it comes from spirit. It is alive. It is part of us. So sometimes I talk about aryuveda and I talk about the importance of adjusting your practice per season, and being tuned into a larger collective and what’s going on in nature, because we’re part of nature, and the seasons and the weather and the shifts and what’s happening has an effect on our body as well. We are not separate from that nature. So when we start to feel deeply connected to nature, and we can feel that life force in nature, it means that we’re starting to tune in to the more subtle. We’re tuning into the interconnectedness more. We’re able to see that there’s a consciousness in a leaf, in a tree, even in a rock and all these different creations that come from nature become very profound.

Kimberly: 21:20 There was a lesson that Buddha taught where all he did was come out with a flower and he didn’t say a word. He just was looking at the flower and he smiled. And that was the whole lesson. And the lesson had to do with… There’s many different layers of this, just beingness. Nature teaches how teaches us how to be, instead of doing and running around. Each leaf and each blade of grass and each plant just stands in its natural state, in its natural glory. It doesn’t try to be something else. It doesn’t try to pack more in. It just is. And there’s a lot of lessons in that. And Buddha was also teaching about that connection with nature and that conduction with simplicity, and that that is where joy comes from, is just being able to really see.

Kimberly: 22:09 So when we start to feel more deeply connected to nature, and when we start to feel more drawn to being in the forest, we know that we are starting to awaken spiritually. This can mean you start to… You just want to be outside more. You feel drawn to going on walks versus going in the gym all the time. Or you feel drawn to grounding yourself and being outside and watching the sunset versus watching TV. You just feel more and more, and this is again, what I have personally experienced, you want less of the noisy screens, which are… It’s not bad to watch movies and shows sometimes. I like them too. But when it’s all the time, I find it very invasive.

Kimberly: 23:00 In contrast, nature isn’t screaming at you, it’s not all these bright lights trying to get your attention. There’s this power of the beingness of nature that emanates. And again, it’s very, very subtle. So you’re spiritually growing when you start to feel that connection and you start to feel more drawn to it and you start to feel more drawn to activities like, again, walking outside or grounding or gardening, or just being on your lawn, you want to read, you just want to be out there. It’s something that can’t be forced, but it is a natural sign, I think, and it’s wonderful when you start to feel that because you know that you’re going in the direction of expansion and limitlessness, and again, being connected to the whole.

Kimberly: 23:45 So again, our signs of spiritual awakening are feeling more unity and more oneness with all others and all things, feeling more expansiveness of love, our natural, natural, true essence. So it means it’s… When we grow spiritually means we expand our energy. It means we get more expansive versus narrow and constricted and small. Narrow and constricted and small our energies of isolation and separation, which is the opposite of spiritual growth. So that’s another thing to be cognizant of. Are we feeling more connected or we feeling smaller? And if you are feeling smaller, it’s time to really nurture that spiritual growth cornerstone with more meditations and more effort and more attention.

Kimberly: 24:38 Speaking of attention, our third attribute today for spiritual awakening is more self-awareness, more of a heightened ability to separate our ego from our real self and to do self analysis, which is a huge success when you can get to that point. Means you don’t take yourself so seriously, and you, again, don’t identify with the ego. Fourth attribute is an increase in intuition, and this means we’re tuning in to energy. We’re going beyond the the so-called hard, solid things, the numbers, which are finite, and we’re tending more into intuition. This is where it becomes second nature to feel what decision to make or what food your body needs, or what is the best thing you can say to your friend or to your mom in that moment? And it doesn’t mean we’re perfect. It doesn’t mean we always say the perfect thing or we always choose the right decision, but the overall increase in intuition in your life starts to rise.

Kimberly: 25:48 And lastly, again, your interconnection with nature, your feelings of being interconnected with nature, your feelings of being drawn to nature start to really increase and it starts to feel really wonderful, and just part part of this expansion that is so hard to put into words, but it really is about… It’s a feeling, it’s an experience that you get from inside of your body. So if any of these resonate with you, great, keep going, know that you are having growth, you are making progress and it’s beautiful and wonderful, and it will undoubtedly benefit the whole of your life. And if you’re like, “Nah, I’m not really feeling any of that,” That’s okay too, because this is a good check-in, and it means that perhaps you, again, want to take a deeper dive into your meditation. Also check out Four Cornerstone free e-book over at mysolluna.com if you haven’t yet already. That’s a great foundational guide for really addressing all areas of the cornerstones, and also of course the spiritual one.

Kimberly: 27:04 Sometimes we need to set ourselves up in the other cornerstones so we can go deeper in spirituality because they’re all meant to work synergistically. So for instance, if there’s certain foods that make you so gassy and bloated that when you sit to meditate you can’t focus because you’re just focused on your belly, that’s something that we want to look at. If your body is so tight it hurts to sit when we meditate, that’s another thing to look at. So just take a look at that free guide and see if there’s anything that can help you on your path, which would be wonderful.

Kimberly: 27:37 I love this subject, you guys. I love talking about spiritual growth. I think it’s a huge key for a lot of us and please keep your questions coming, especially around this topic for the future. I want to leave you with the a thought of the week. This comes from our Radical Beauty book that Deepak Chopra and I wrote a couple of years ago. It’s just a really great lifestyle book, and I think that sometimes when I look back and I reflect, I think, “Oh man, I really want to call this out,” because even if you read some of my books, there’s a lot of words there, so we can lose some of the big the passages. And this is a line, this is from page 257, towards the back of the book.

Kimberly: 28:35 This is what I want to read to you. Because beauty is natural, so is spiritual beauty. There is no reason to feel that spiritual beauty must be something rare. We were born to live in the light. So when we’re talking about spiritual awakening, we’re talking about the truest truest part of beauty. Again, the formless, the wordless, the true beauty isn’t about your hair and your skin. The true beauty inside of you is your essence. And of course, we walk around in the world, we want to have great hair and great skin, and to an extent, this light inside of you comes out and it’s so glowing and magnetic that people can physically see it. But it doesn’t have to look a certain way. The beauty that comes from you is connected to your inner light. So there is a connection between what we’re talking about here with the spiritual awakening and beauty and all the ways that we use it at Solluna and the ways I’ve been using it in my philosophy. So I want you to ponder that.

Kimberly: 29:41 We were born to live in the light. Beauty is natural. So is spiritual beauty. And when we think about attributes like love and peace and joy, there’s so much beauty, there’s so much richness in there, and again, we all know that that has nothing to do with any sort of physicality. So I’m going to leave you with that thought and I send you so much love. Thank you so much for tuning in today. As always it is an honor to walk with you, it is an honor to be with you on this path. I love you so much. I am so grateful for you. I will be back here Thursday for our next Q&A podcast. Until then take care, take wonderful care of yourself. Think about some of these spiritual attributes, and also come visit me over on Instagram at @_KimberlySnyder, and of course at Solluna at @MySolluna.com where we have those free meditations and lots more offerings. So thank you, thank you, lots of love, and see you back here soon.