What Is a Spiritual Awakening?

well-beingspiritualityphilosophyreligionhelpeducationsoulself
Written By Sajidah Kazmi

An Indepth Explanation

H. Sajidah Kazmi MA, MBA
www.sajidahkazmi.com

What is a Spiritual Awakening?

A spiritual awakening is a deeply meaningful and personal experience, a moment that opens new and significant doors of awareness for you, and which can ultimately transform your life and its direction—if you so choose.

Your awakening may be subtle, or it may be intense. It may come on abruptly or it may come on slowly over the years, but a few things are certain:

•    It changes how you perceive the world and your role in it.
•    It pushes you to shift your priorities.
•    It inspires you to dive deeper into yourself and explore the reality of who you are beyond your physical being and your personality.
•    It inspires you to refine yourself, your heart, and your soul to achieve ever increasing insight, illumination, and enlightenment.
•    It drives you to mature into your essential nature.
•    It draws you closer to the Divine.
•    And it can bring to you indescribable blessings

“A Spiritual Awakening encourages you to find the Deeper Truth about yourself, about the Divine, and about the relationship between you.”
— H. S. Kazmi

If you pay attention, spiritual awakenings can place you at the beginning of your spiritual journey, your spiritual quest.

A spiritual awakening can give you the confidence you need to step out of your normal perceptions, and put one foot in front of the other in a new direction, opening you to new experiences, new teachings, and new insights even if you don’t know what a spiritual journey is, where it will lead, or what it will look like along the way.

You might even receive occasional glimmers of insight, giving you the vision and courage you need to take those first steps along a new path of gaining the secret knowledges and experiences that have, up until now, been missing from your life.

Even the very lowest of these new spiritual knowledges and experiences, teachings, and insights will fill you with awe and wonder, bringing satisfaction to your soul, and making your life, your heart, and your soul luminous. These will encourage you to travel even farther along your spiritual journey.

As every one of the people who have successfully travelled the spiritual journey before you will say about your spiritual awakening, “Now that your eyes are beginning to open, there is no other choice but to move forward.”

How Do I Recognize a Spiritual Awakening? Have I Had One?

There are as many kinds of spiritual awakenings as there are souls.

Even so, spiritual awakenings tend to fall into one of seven categories. You may have a personal experience that clearly falls into one of these categories, or you may have an experience that fits into more than one category.

In whatever category your experience falls, an awakening can open the door to an internal and perhaps even an external adventure that arouses and embraces the many possibilities within you.

You could be standing on the edge of achieving the two most primordial and elemental desires within all humans—the desire for self-realisation and the desire for true connection with the Divine.

The Seven Categories of Spiritual Awakenings Include:

1. Behavioural or Psychological Awakening

Perhaps you’ve made a mistake…

…and now you realise your behaviours, your attitudes, the ways you’ve conducted yourself in a relationship, or the ways you’ve acted in the wider society must change for your own benefit and for the benefit of the people around you.

But how do you do this?

You start by paying attention to the ‘built-in moral regulator’ placed inside you. It’s your sense of guilt and remorse, and it’s invaluable!

In fact, it may be one of your most valuable inner senses. When it is finely tuned, it will guide you well throughout your life. It will warn you, through your feelings, when you have fallen away from your optimum behaviour. The warnings come in the form of gentle or strong feelings of guilt, regret, remorse, embarrassment, or a small voice inside telling you that what you did, or are about to do, is not a good thing, and you should avoid doing it.

So, how do you finely tune it?

By educating it. You have educated your mind and your intellect all these years, so it must come as no surprise that to educate your sense of morality it helps to read books and stories about morality (which includes nearly all of them), to practice improving your behaviour, notice the feedback from others, and then practice some more until you feel you have yourself under control.

By paying attention to the promptings of your moral regulator (feelings of guilt or remorse), just as you would the grumblings of your stomach, you can become aware and begin to control yourself, your thoughts, your emotions, and your intentions, and then avoid all kinds of miserable consequences due to your blameworthy actions.

Why would you want this?

Because shifting all your actions from blameworthy to praiseworthy is the most important change you can make to become a highly respected and honourable person—and who wouldn’t want that?
It is also the first and most important step of your inner journey.

2. Emotional Awakening:

An emotional awakening arrives through one of two contrasting sets of emotions.

In the first type, you might experience: A Type of Melancholy
•    Profound feelings of melancholy, sadness, spiritual or non-specific nostalgia, or (non-clinical) depression.
•    World-weariness.
•    A loss or absence of purpose.
•    A feeling of “is that all there is to life”. This usually comes after achieving all of one’s material and relationship goals.
•    A feeling of ‘running out of time’ to comprehend the lessons and inner meanings of life.

In this type of experience, your melancholy, sadness, or nostalgia may come on slowly. It might take years, and when it does happen, you’ll feel like you’re trying to stuff yourself into your old way of life, trying to make it satisfying, but your life no longer fits you, and you wonder what you can do about it.

Or you might feel there is an inner goal that is important to reach before you die, not a bucket list, but a wisdom or a depth of understanding that you’re missing out on, and that determines if your life is truly satisfying and successful. You may not know how to define it because it’s intangible, and you can’t see examples of it because it is rare in the material, everyday world. So, without being able to define it or see it, you can’t know how to accomplish it. You need help.

Or maybe you feel you’re leading a life you don’t like. You have lost your Self. You’ve become a person that is ‘not you’ because you are not acting from your authentic, true self. You may have forgotten, or never learned, who your true self is, but you are eager to know.

Or your life, up until now, has always been goal-oriented—finishing education, getting married, getting a job, creating a home, having children, raising them, providing for them, being a pillar of the community. However, you’ve now accomplished all the goals you set, and you don’t see anything ahead of you. What is even more scary is wondering; who are you without a goal to define you? You’re just left with you. If you are fortunate, you will realise that the only goal left, the only voyage worth embarking upon, is the journey within you. But how?

All of these situations lead you to question and search; in books, in groups, in retreats, talking to people, traveling, trying new things. You search, sometimes desperately, for the answers—for that wonderous, enlightening ‘soul water’ that quenches your spiritual thirst—because the answer must be somewhere. Right?

While searching for remedies to your lack of happiness and satisfaction, you will begin your inner journey. But of all the possible directions, it can feel as if you’re lost in a desert. How do you know which way to go?

You need a Guide. Why? Because you can’t teach yourself what you don’t know. You can’t lead yourself where you’ve never been. And you can’t teach yourself concepts you’ve never even imagined before.

And this is where you want to be careful.

Thirsty people lost in the desert, searching for a guide, searching for the beautiful, spiritual water to drink, will go to any source, whether it’s clean or not, whether it is deep enough or not. Many people on their spiritual journey are so thirsty, so driven, so desperate, that any source of ‘spiritual’ water seems better than no water. They drink from impure puddles, just because the feeling is’ unique’ or ‘powerful’. They drink from teachers who are not virtuous or principled, morally clean or ethical, thinking they’ve found the One True Source.

 

Remember this: You need a morally impeccable Guide, a spiritual Master who understands where you are on your journey and where you are going. It must be someone who holds the entire map for the journey, who understands the geography, who can help you avoid the traps and pitfalls, who can provide you with spiritual food and drink, and who holds the keys to the spiritual waystations, the stopping points, along your journey.

They must be someone who lives and understands the teachings to a very high degree, and who has journeyed down the path far ahead of you. When you meet them face to face, you will be reminded of the Divine in a simple and humble manner, and then, God-willing, you will find, in their guidance, clean and clear spiritual water drawn up from a pool deep enough to satisfy you. Begin looking among the Awliya-Allah, the Friends of God, the Saints, in the Sufi tradition.

 

In The Second Type of Emotional Awakening: Love and Beauty

Your heart feels the warmth and glow of a Great Love flowing through you, and it soothes your whole being when you tune into it. This feeling may have been with you from childhood, it may arrive within you during a prayer or meditation or sitting in nature. It may come to you after the birth of a child. Or it might even come when the stress and trauma from wounds of the past are healed and lifted away from you. Or perhaps it comes for the first time in a moment of devotion when your love and adoration for the Divine/God/Allah fills your heart, allowing you to feel utter joy and gratitude.

As a result, you begin to see or feel the Divine in everything and within you. You may feel connected to everything and everyone. You may feel more compassion, love, mercy, empathy, and loving responsibility for others than ever before. You might even notice serendipity all around you. This is a good thing.

It’s all good.

However, there are warnings that come with this type of awakening. First of all, it is decidedly not sexual or manipulative of others. Quite the opposite. Secondly, it could turn into an ego trap. Without an advanced and morally impeccable spiritual Master to guide you and catch you if you should stumble and fall, your journey could turn into an excursion into your own ego, your own desires, your own self-importance. Beware! Your spiritual journey should be about you learning and realising who you are as a pure, clean, devoted, and humble person, increasing your connection and nearness to the Divine, to God, to Allah through your heart and soul.

 

If you do have this kind of emotional awakening, you may experience a ‘crushing sadness’ after the ‘great beautiful moment’ when the beautiful feelings withdraw. It feels as if you’ve been abandoned. You may be disheartened as you realise you must return to your everyday life, the material world, a world where spiritual joy and connection are hard to find.

And in this grief and frustration, you may think that your only alternative is to abandon your current life and the material world in order to maintain this sublime feeling.

Some shifts may be needed. But wait. This may not be what you need to do. You have been gifted a glimpse of the Divine—an exceptional experience of Divine light and love—and then you suffered its withdrawal. Your sadness comes from the contrast. The mundane, material world looks very bleak indeed without that high level of light and love.

But do not despair. Don’t blame the world, at least not for this.

This is part of the process, part of the journey. It is you, realizing you are in the ‘classroom of life’ with all its most difficult lessons, tests, trials, and struggles.

And no one gets out of this ‘earth school’ without enduring and learning from them.

As you advance in your ‘lessons’, you will want to make adjustments in your life. Begin by adjusting your perspective. Find an advanced Master or Guide to help you. The writings in this blog are intended to help you with this.

Find opportunities for new or repetitive spiritual experiences to support your journey such as devotional prayers or perhaps weekly group activities, such as zikrs (chanting ceremonies for the Remembrance of God).

You may eventually find that your job or your relationships no longer fit you, and that they conflict with your new realizations about life. You may find that there are now things that are uncomfortable or morally incompatable with your new found realizations. It is then that you will want to make adjustments.

Remember: Life is a test. We are all put on earth to learn about ourselves and about the Divine. We are all here to learn and absorb what we can through our hearts, minds, and souls, to eventually understand our purpose and connect with the Divine. And then to turn around and help and serve others.

Your Divine glimpses and awakenings are gifted to you to encourage you, to influence the direction of your life, to set you on a path of real self and spiritual discovery so you can learn how to increase and sustain these experiences throughout your life. With guidance, you can flourish from this emotional awakening. There are so many exciting things to learn, especially about yourself!

3. The Humbling: When Pride Dies (The Ego Crushing)

Despite all your education, wealth, and pride in your position in society, despite your being sure you have always been right in your life, despite your high level of self-importance and self-confidence, you get knocked off your pedestal—which is deeply disorienting for you. You find yourself in a frightening ‘free-fall’ as you try to orient yourself and find somewhere to land. After all, if you’re not the expert, the king or queen of your life, if you’re not as entitled to that place on the pedestal as you thought, who are you?

What can cause this fall?

You can get knocked off your seemingly secure place on that pedestal by so many things: the ending of a long-term relationship either through scandal, divorce or death; serious illness or injury; mental or emotional breakdown; the loss of social standing; the destruction or loss of a career; financial destitution; loss of reputation; committing a socially or morally dishonourable act; committing a crime; or the revelation that you are abusing or oppressing someone, just to name a few.

Now, you have a choice.

You can scramble to climb back up on a pedestal, any pedestal, no matter how uncomfortable and precarious it is; or you can realise everything in your life has changed.

Because you must, you will live in fear and uncertainty for some time as your ego is crushed. This severe uncertainty is called ‘free-fall’. You have no idea when or how it will end. ‘Free-fall’ becomes a place where you will reside for awhile. In order to grow, you must eventually learn from it. The landing place, the only cushion at the end of ‘free-fall’, is humbleness.

If you learn humbleness as you fall, you will be allowed to enjoy the adventure of ‘free-fall’. It is only humbleness that will allow you to land gently, stabilise yourself, take a deep breath, and then fully explore who you are without the pedestal.

This is when it’s time to heal, to learn about yourself, to find out who you really are without the pedestal, and without other peoples’ opinions of you.

If you are lucky, your new-found humility will instill within you sympathy and empathy for others, driving you to serve others in a way that both help them and heal and open your heart. Your heart opening will then invite oceans of mercy, grace, compassion, empathy and so much more to become an important part of you and your perspective.

With all this self-discovery, it is a natural next step to undertake your spiritual journey, to discover even more about yourself, who you are, what you were meant to do in your life and how to connect, with humbleness to the astounding gifts and blessings from the Divine.

This journey will allow you to discover who you are on the deepest, most sacred levels of yourself, to learn about your sacred nature, to advance your soul, to increase your connection to the Divine, and to eventually have your prayers for deep satisfaction and soul fulfilment answered.

It is especially important for you to find a highly qualified and strong spiritual master. Since your ego is your nemesis, you must have a spiritual teacher who will not let your ego pull you off the path again. You may find it difficult to submit yourself to a spiritual guide, a master, but it is necessary in order for you to overcome your biggest obstacle, your ego.

With guidance, education, courage, and willpower, you have the opportunity to develop psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Then, the transformation of your Self and your Soul can occur. From a place of humility and obedience, and with strong guidance, you could set your sights on eventually entering the highest levels of spiritual achievement. This is the doorway to wisdom and a deeply satisfying life.

4. Philosophical Awakening:

Perhaps you hear a lecture, read a book, a poem, a play, or hear a discussion that awakens you to realise that your viewpoints, perspectives, and philosophies of life or of the Divine are too small. You realize there is a larger Truth, of which you are ignorant. And it dawns on you that you are unaware of some amazing ways of thinking about life, especially those from different cultures and religions, and you want to learn more.

Or, perhaps you realise your religion is lacking in answers to the deeper spiritual questions, or is devoid of providing personal spiritual experiences. When you ask your philosophical questions, the answers you receive are shallow or non-existent. No one can answer your questions, or you are told to ‘just believe’. Or, perhaps you realise your current religion or your current perspective is missing the keys to the deeper spiritual knowledges and experiences you have heard exist but cannot find.

So, you begin reading and exploring different philosophies from various countries, cultures, religions, and times in history. The more you learn about them, the more they develop and mature within you, giving you wisdom and the ability to judge between them. Some of these philosophies may open new doorways of understanding and for talking about spirituality and religion, giving you an entirely new perspective that deepens your spiritual journey. You may decide you want to practice some of these philosophies or religions, and you seek out expert teachers, guides, and groups to do just that.  

By exploring a variety of spiritual practices, philosophies, and religions, you will eventually decide which ones bring goodness into your life, deepen you, improve and fill your heart and soul, and which ones are unsatisfactory or turn you away from the good path.

As always, just make sure that the Guides you follow are wise, morally impeccable, deeply concerned for your well-being, are of those who understand the Truth, have successfully travelled down the good path far ahead of you, and are concerned with the clean and clear development of your soul.

5. The Awakening of Mental Perceptions:

You’re out in nature, walking along, you turn your head and look at something, maybe a tree or a river, and it looks very different than you expected. Maybe its colours are brighter than before, maybe you ‘see’, for just a moment, the individual cells within it. Maybe you ‘see’ a net of luminous diamond-like structures lying upon it. Maybe you ‘see’ its energy field extending out from it. Or maybe you can ‘see’ or feel that every cell within it glows.

Maybe you’re in a gathering of people. Suddenly, your mental perceptions shift, and you see, feel, or understand the people within the gathering in a whole new way.

Perhaps a tragedy has occurred. Perhaps a loved one has died and in your grief, when you are out in the world, everything looks different. You are more sensitive to sounds, colours, the reasons why people are rushing around, and the chaos around you. Perhaps you just want to take time, sit down, and reflect on how life has just dramatically changed for you. You wonder if life will ever be the same.

Perhaps one day you notice that your intuition has increased, you notice how things fall into place around you, or you notice synchronicities all around you.

Perhaps you have a severe illness, an accident, a near death experience (NDE), or an out of body experience (OBE), and a completely new understanding of life and your soul sweeps through you. The whole experience is deeply meaningful and impossible to describe fully to anyone.

Perhaps you have certain kinds of visions, inner visions, or new perceptions (not hallucinations or delusions*). In this type of spiritual awakening, the visions and perceptions are good, there are no feelings of negativity or evilness. In fact, the positive feelings are beautiful and soothing, something like being surrounded in the sweet goodness of angels, and it changes you. Perhaps it washes all the negativity out of you.

Perhaps your sensory perceptions become more intense. These would include extra sensory perceptions (ESP) of all types, interoception, and sensing the energy fields of places or people. And perhaps you have a mystical experience that changes your perceptions of reality in a good way.

Any of these experiences and many others can give you a glimpse, an insight, that our physical ‘reality’ is not what it appears to be, and that our mental perceptions can be misleading.

This new perception is a gift. Sit with the experience, learn from it, and allow yourself to open to new mental perspectives, new ways of sensing and of thinking, and allow these new perceptions to expand within you. Allow your perspective on life to move and shift into goodness. If you need a Guide, find someone who is morally impeccable, who has more experience than you, and who can guide you on a path of pure goodness.

Then, perhaps you’ll discover a new way of looking at the world and your part within it.  

* If you have troubling hallucinations or delusions, drug induced or not, that are negative, frightening, disorienting or evil, especially if they make it difficult for you to function in public, then seek immediate medical attention and/or professional mental health advice. These are not spiritual awakenings and must be treated seriously.

6. Intellectual or Reasoned Awakening:

Perhaps you realise, through your powers of intellect and reasoning, that despite all the scientific advances throughout time, there is still a problem. There are no reasonable explanations for anything prior to the existence of the universe; before time and space, before the existence of energy, before the universe complied with any physical laws, even before concepts existed. What existed before the ‘big bang’ or the first black hole? What existed before the first atom? The first idea? The first impulse? The first breath of the universe? And where did they come from? What was their cause? And if there was a void, a vacuum before anything existed, as some people say, how do we humans comprehend a complete void, a complete nothingness? And if, before anything existed, there was a vacuum, a void, was it nothingness, or do we just call it that? Was it something else altogether? Was it something so far beyond our comprehension or so subtle that we could never understand it? Furthermore, how could something come into existence from nothingness if there were no ideas or energy or elements? And Who or What managed to design and bring into existence everything or anything from nothing? What about all those unformed concepts that are either too elusive or too complex for human understanding?

There are infinite questions about the universe and about ourselves, and even if we know enough to ask the right questions, do we know enough to comprehend and then accept the answers?

With questions like these in your mind, you realise you want to ‘dive in’ to understand this creative and all-powerful Principle that initiated and perpetuates time, space, existence, energy, concepts, physical laws, creation, evolution, and all the elements that make up everything.

The vast majority of people across the world call this incomprehensible power and great intellect, God/Allah/The Creator of All That Is/The All-Aware/the Divine Presence. Perhaps you have your own word.

Or perhaps you realise that your rejection of the existence of God may come from a childhood image that God is an old man in the sky; an anthropomorphised and inadequate perspective of God that you wholeheartedly reject.

So, using your mature and well-developed intellect, you now reconceptualise, expand, complexify, and open your perspective and your willingness to discover new answers for your intellectual inquiries. Your focus shifts to exploring philosophies and religions that can withstand your rigorous intellectual interrogations. Your list of questions may be endless, but then so is the complexity of existence and pre-existence and the force that created it.

To take it a step further. You may agree that this Intellect or Force is so vast that it cannot be comprehended with one’s mind. Then you might turn to the Sufis.

Throughout history, the Sufis have said that ‘God cannot enter the mind’. It is far too small, but God can enter the heart of a believer. The heart is the only place where God can enter. The Sufis speak of the experience of God as a ‘tasting’ that cannot be described. So, perhaps you decide to join the Sufi Saints in their explorations and experiences with, and of, God to see for yourself. And perhaps you find that they, in their millenia and a half of intellectual and spiritual inquiry and writings, indeed have enough answers for you.

It is then that you may choose to enter into your own spiritual journey. It may start out as an intellectual enquiry, but may very well evolve into something deeply personal.

7. Sacred Awakenings:

When our minds are consumed by daily life in the material world, it is hard to realise, and then continuously remember, that we are astounding and complex spiritual beings anchored within our human bodies.

If we weren’t, if we were soulless animals striving to eat, stay alive and procreate, our minds, our imaginations, could not reach to the ends of the universes and then contemplate what is beyond; we would not carry within us, both individually and collectively enough love, inspiration, mercy, and compassion to overcome evil; and our hearts would never yearn for that all-consuming, inexplicable, and sweet, divine ‘something’ that feeds our souls.

It is imperative for the development of our ‘completeness’ that we wake up to and learn who we are and what we are actually connected to. Sacred spiritual awakenings can help us do this.

While listing all the individual types of sacred awakenings is not at all possible, below are some categories into which they may fall. Each one of your experiences (and you may have many of them) are unique, personal, and deeply meaningful, though you may not realise how meaningful until much later.

Types of Sacred Awakenings You Might Encounter:

  • Profound Moments of Intuition or Inspiration

An idea may come to you out of nowhere. Small or great, it carries with it the feeling of divine inspiration. You didn’t have a thought like that before, so where did the idea come from? All you can do is give thanks and proceed with the idea. Hopefully, more such ideas will come to you in the future if you keep your lines of communication open, remain receptive, implement the ideas to the best of your ability, and are grateful for such communications.

  • ‘Losing’ the Boundaries of Your Body, or Feeling That ‘All Is One’

This usually occurs when your mind and body are tranquil, such as during sitting meditation, contemplation, or prayer. A moment comes when you reach a stillpoint within yourself. Your body and heart feel they are expanding until you no longer sense the outer edges of your body. Your outer body awareness (proprioception) and your inner body awareness (interoception) disappear. Your perception of ‘what is you’ expands far beyond your body, perhaps miles beyond. As you breathe in and out slowly, your sense of ‘what is you’ expands enough to encompass all of Creation; and the feeling that flows through you and all of creation is Love.

And then, once you think about the boundaries of your body, you quite naturally snap right back into it. But for those few divine moments, you felt as if you were floating with the Universe and with Its Creator in Infinite Love. This feeling is a strong incentive to further develop your spiritual awareness, and to step onto your spiritual journey because the feeling is so beautiful, so deep, you never want it to end.

  • Visions 

It is not uncommon to have inner visions (with eyes closed or unfocused) of angels and holy people. However, it is rarer to have visions with your eyes open of angels, Prophets, and Saints, or other holy people.

If you, yourself, have not had this experience and you hear of people having visions of this type, you might think this means they see them as clearly as you might see a table or chair.

While this may be true for some rare people, for most it is more like an impression or a feeling—as if someone is ‘there, but not there’. They might be in front of you or next to you. If you look at them directly, you cannot see them with your eyes, but you can detect their presence with the ‘eyes of your heart’. Try un-focusing your eyes and looking past or near them. You might have a distinct impression that someone is there.

In some cases, you may feel them touching you, laying a hand on your arm or shoulder, or leaning against you*. If you then close your eyes, you might get a fuller impression of who it is next to you.

Make sure that this person is a holy one carrying nothing but goodness. Their holiness will hopefully inspire you to step onto or stay on your spiritual path to gain some of the holiness that they emanate.

*If the vision is uncomfortable and creepy, then reject their presence, tell them to go away. End your communication, reject evilness, and call for God’s protection.

  • The ‘Tasting’

When you are fortunate to experience an ‘authentic moment’ of nearness to God, to Allah, it is indescribable. For millennium, poets and Saints have tried to describe it, but they have all fallen short. The Sufis have described this phenomenon as a Divine ‘tasting’; only possible to understand when you have personally experienced it; like love, or the taste of raspberries. By Divine blessing, you are pulled nearer to God for a few moments, or perhaps angels descend around you. How can anyone describe that? Al-Farid, Ibn Arabi, Attar, Rumi, Hafiz, and all other Sufi poets have tried to describe it. Their poetry stirs one’s heart.

This personal experience of the Divine might occur during a zikr (chanting ceremony for the Remembrance of God), meditation, intense prayers to God of adoration and love, or moments of divine solitude.

When the ‘moment’ ends and you slowly return to yourself, you have no words to describe it. ‘Very powerful’, ‘amazing’, or ‘so beautiful’ are words we tend to use, but they are completely inadequate.

The only way to communicate the experience is to encourage others to experience it for themselves — then they will know.

The experience is a gift from God, unique to each person, and only God knows the reasons for this indescribable blessing. It inspires you, fills your heart, and increases your intention to be more determined and lovingly disciplined in your spiritual practices, your life choices, your adoration of God, and in continuing the guided spiritual journey that prepares you for deeper and more frequent experiences like this in the future.

  • Transmissions from a Sufi Saint

Maulana Zainulabedin Kazmi

If you are in the presence of an authentic Sufi Saint, a wali, a Master, with a connection to the Divine, you will feel very different from your everyday self. It is said that when you are in the presence of such a person, you are reminded of God, of Allah.

Depending upon his or her spiritual station, merely being in their presence will raise your level of spirituality and you will feel nearer to God, to Allah, to the Divine Presence.

There is so much to gain on so many levels by being in the audience of the Saint that it could take a lifetime to understand and then describe it.

The Sufi Saint’s presence alone is a transmission of Divine Truths.

In an audience, their speech, touch, and glance is a transmission to you of Divine Truths, with everyone in the audience learning and gaining what they individually need at that moment.

However, when the Saint concentrates the transmission specifically on you and you are imbued with Divine blessings, it can bring you to tears, recognising that you are being brought near to the Divine and the Divine Truth of God.

Each transmission is unique, indescribable, multi-layered, and highly precious, and the transmitted knowledges and wisdoms that are poured into your heart open and are brought into your realisation over time.

Maulana Zainulabedin Kazmi


  • The Divine Embrace

Something within you has shifted. Your intention has changed and your focus in your life is now through your heart.

Your heart yearns for the Divine and your desire is intent upon connecting with the Divine.

Your prayers and devotions are no longer mechanical and absent-minded. They are deep and full of love.

Your meditations are no longer body or mind-centred. Your contemplations are no longer intellectual ramblings, but moments filled with love, gratitude, mercy, and grace. Now, you focus through your heart and soul, concentrating on the Divine and on the relationship between you.

There is then a special moment, often preceded by heartfelt devotion, prayer, fasting, meditation, chanting, contemplation, or a special religious ceremony.

That is when you feel it — a type of harmony, a beauty from the Divine, from God, from Allah, surrounding you. You might experience this as a tube of light that descends into and around your body from far above your head. It wraps around you and holds you in a holy embrace. You may lose the boundaries of your body for a few moments as you feel the blessings and power of the Divine, of Divine Light, flow through and around you. It is unfathomable and indescribable. Then, after some time, it releases you, and you are changed, maybe slightly, but maybe profoundly.

When you return from this moment/experience, you will face a turning point in your life, and you must choose. Do you want more of this feeling? Or will you ignore it as if it never happened? And if you want more, will you take your spiritual education and your spiritual journey seriously, even to the point of gathering your courage and determination and advancing it to a spiritual quest?

If you choose to enter into the spiritual quest, then you must find a highly experienced spiritual Master, a wali, a Sufi Saint, a Friend of God. Then, with obedience and guidance, with connection to the Divine, and with specific practices, these moments can increase and deepen for you over time. The beautiful possibilities are endless.

  • Hearing the Divine ‘Music’

If you spend enough time in quiet and solitude, you will eventually feel that silence feeds your heart and soul. And you might eventually realise that beyond the silence, there is an ‘unheard symphony’ playing all around you.

This is not auditory music. You can’t hear it with your ears. You cannot repeat it on a musical instrument. Earthly music pales in comparison. The Divine Sounds can only be heard through the ‘ears’ in your heart.

Once you do hear this, you will prefer not to hear recorded or performed music around you. It distracts you from the quiet you need to ‘hear’ or sense the nearly imperceptible ‘sounds’ around you, the sounds of the Universe.

For some people, it’s a little bit like a multi-harmonic, complex ‘whooshing’ with a resonance that’s just for you, that vibrates through your whole being. For some people, it is the sound of ‘hu’.

  • The Lifting of a Spiritual Curtain or Veil

You may receive a divine vision, experience or understanding that is far beyond what you have experienced so far. The only explanation may be that it is a thinning or a lifting of a corner of a spiritual veil. This is indeed a very great blessing.

However, most people don’t have this experience.

You may wonder, ‘Why can’t I see the Divine Presence? Why can’t I see God?’ ‘Why do I feel cut off from any Divine communications?’ ‘Why are there walls between me and God?’

While this topic requires a lengthy and advanced discussion, which I hope to cover in another posting, it can be said that without veils between us and God, we would perish at God’s Majestic Sight.

It is also said that there are as many as seventy thousand veils between humans and God, and there are just as many reasons for them.

Even so, we can each work to remove some of those veils if these veils are of our own making, which many of them are.

Simply put, the best way to remove veils is to be mindful of your thoughts, feelings and actions at all times in order to become the best person you can be; to do those things that God tells us to do; and to purify your soul. There are many teachings that provide these instruction. However, it also happens that the ego doesn’t like to do any of them. So, most people don’t do them, and then wonder why they feel cut off.

If you are having difficulty with purification practices, again, find a Master who can direct you.

To receive additional guidance, please subscribe to be sent notification when articles are posted on this topic and others.

_________________________

Practices That Can Prepare You for a Spiritual Awakening:

When you undertake any of the practices below, they may allow you to try new ways of exploring yourself and the world around you through your external and internal senses, understanding yourself and your emotions, and controlling yourself and your sense of well-being with your thoughts. While these are not necessarily spiritual awakenings in themselves, they might prepare you for your first spiritual awakening.

These practices open you to new experiences, healing you and allowing you to feel freer, but these experiences tend to be body-centered, mind-centered, or religious/dogma centered practices rather than uniquely personal spiritual experiences.

Under the right circumstances however, during these practices you may experience insightful glimpses, energetic or physical releases, and unexpected breakthroughs. They may be so profound that you feel that they are spiritual awakenings in themselves.

Why is this?

The reality is that we are so overloaded with physical and mental stress and stimulation and so distracted and pressurized by the world around us, that when we finally escape the chaos for a moment, and tune in to the holiness that we each possess, when we finally reconnect with the way we are supposed to feel — loving and compassionate — we interpret this to be a spiritual awakening.

‘What else could it be?’ we ask.

Well, it is an opening. A kind of re-tuning. A preparation.

And it is a confirmation. It is intended to encourage you and keep you moving forward in your development, step-by-step, healing you physically, emotionally, and mentally, and preparing you for Greater Spiritual Awakenings in the future.

Eventually, there may come a time when you advance the practices below to the next level, and then you might experience one of the awakenings above - a real spiritual awakening - one that creates a desire in you to pursue your spiritual journey. And even if that journey is delayed, the desire remains.

The practices below will help you prepare moment by moment for an awakening. Then, once you have a spiritual awakening, your journey has begun.

Jump to:

a.)  Changing Blameworthy Traits, Emotions, and Actions to Praiseworthy Traits, Emotions, and Actions.

b.)  Physical and Energetic Practices for Unblocking and Healing

c.)  Solitude, Quiet, Mindfulness, and Meditation 

d.)  Purification 

e.)  Devotional Practices 

f.)   Heart-Opening Practices 

g.)  Spontaneous Abundant and Unconditional Love  

h.)  Other Events That Might Lead You to Seek the Spiritual Path

a.) Changing Blameworthy Traits, Emotions, and Actions to Praiseworthy Traits, Emotions, and Actions.

On one hand, this is easy to understand—to try to become a better person. On the other hand, this topic could fill a book.

Let’s begin by suggesting you focus in on your feelings every moment of every day. Keep a journal and write down one word to describe that moment of feeling and what you were doing at the time. Then later in the day, try to describe each feeling in more detail.

You want to get to the root. For example, why did you feel catty or gossipy? Were you feeling insecure? Or jealous? Or envious? What is at the root of your insecurity, or jealousy or envy? And what is the opposite feeling or action of insecurity or jealousy or envy? And is greed and or selfishness at the root of that? Wouldn’t it be better, the next time you feel this way, to shift to acting or feeling compassionate, merciful, forgiving, generous, or kind? Try it out.

H. Sajidah Kazmi is developing a unique project that will, in the near future, dive into this topic and make it easier for you to identify and describe your feelings, their roots, and the solutions for them, moving you to a happier choice of feelings and their actions. We’re even going to try to make it fun!

If you would like to know more about the ‘Blameworthy to Praiseworthy’ Project please subscribe. If you would like to be involved in the project, please send an email to sajidah@sajidahkazmi.com.

Moving from Blameworthy to Praiseworthy thoughts, feelings and actions not only makes your life happier and more satisfying, it is a vital step for any type of spiritual advancement.

b.) Physical and Energetic Practices for Unblocking and Healing.

Many people these days engage in physical practices such as tai chi, qiqong, breathwork, yoga, sacred sound therapy, Polarity Therapy, massage, tapping, Reiki, Healing Touch, cranial-sacral work, five-elements acupunture, dance/movement therapy and many, many other energetic healing practices.

The purpose of these practices is to remove the energetic blockages in your body of fear, stress, trauma, and abuse, moving you closer to your natural, open, graceful, and loving state of being.

This is done by freeing and increasing the energy movement in your muscles, nerves, lymphatic system, heart, and in your greater energetic field, and then keeping the energy moving and balanced. The results of these practices can be quite profound.

However, many people quite understandably misinterpret these profound feelings of release and flow as a spiritual awakening. They are not, but they are an important preparation for a spiritual awakening making you more aware of the amazing being that you are.

With blockages removed or at very least reduced, you will feel more courageous. You will be more inclined to search for, learn about, and step onto your chosen inner and eventually your spiritual path.

If you are ready to or have previously stepped onto your spiritual path and you find you are not feeling your loving, natural, open, and graceful state of being, then these practices may help you. If you are already on a spiritual path or journey, but have not yet taken part in these energetic practices, they may assist you by helping to remove energetic blockages in your body and around your heart.

A Few Words of Caution: Some of these practices originated within spiritual and religious practices different from the one you may have chosen and you may feel uncomfortable with this. For that reason, realise that these can be seen as purely physical practices. You can keep your personal spiritual goals in mind as you practice these and thereby not be diverted by the spiritual goals of others.

If someone tempts you towards practices of a sexual nature, saying that you will gain great heights, or that it will ‘open you’ or any other such comments, know that this person is a false guide, a false practitioner, a guide who is not morally impeccable, and they must not be followed. It will harm you far greater than help you.

An additional note: If you are having an emotionally difficult experience, seek professional help. If you are having a crisis, as always, seek a professional mental health practitioner.

c.)  Solitude, Quiet, Meditation, and Mindfulness

Solitude and quiet are where you want to start, especially if you've never meditated or practiced mindfulness.

Choose sometime during the day when you would normally play music, play videos or tv, talk, or have other noises and electronic distractions going on around you.

Turn everything off.

Maybe you have a long drive or a commute and you normally play music. Try it in silence.

At first, your body and your ego will complain. You’ll squirm. You may feel nervous or irritable and want to flip the music back on. But stick with it.

Let your body, your thoughts, and your emotions calm down for as long as possible--even if it's just twenty minutes.

Then, try it again the next day until you find it easy to go for an hour or longer.

During that time, pay attention to what you think and feel. You'll learn a lot about yourself. Write these things down if you like.

After doing this for a while, you’ll be ready to practice Mindfulness.

Simply stated, mindfulness is the practice of watching and being aware of your every feeling, thought, word, and action—to be aware, for example, of how your arm is reaching for that plate in the cupboard, the way your hand twists the door handle, how you tense when you have to greet someone you don’t know, or how you focus on every step while you are out for a walk.

These days, there are many sources for information through the internet and in groups on how to do this. It will benefit you.

With the practices above well in hand, you may wish to go on to practice Meditation.

However, if you begin practicing meditation without first practicing solitude, quiet, and mindfulness, you will find that your body and mind are unable to quiet down enough while meditating, and you may have a difficult time continuing the practice. There are groups in nearly every city that practice meditation, and there are a wide variety of meditation styles available through the internet.

A rewarding outcome of meditation is the ability to reach a still point within where more advanced spiritual practices and experiences are possible. With that said, these are practices, and they take practice.

These practices may place your feet upon the beginning of your spiritual journey. These practices and their fruits, however, are not the end goals of spirituality. They are tools. Then, with an open heart, expert guidance, and with your intentions to move forward, these practices can ease your way into having one of the spiritual awakening experiences listed above. They may even help quiet your mind in order to be more receptive to divine inspiration if and when it arrives.

d.) Purification

What you do, eat, drink, think, say, or feel in your daily life directly effects your body, emotions, mind, and ultimately your soul.

Without purifying your body, mind, emotions and ego, you cannot achieve purification of the soul, you cannot reach your desired level of spiritual achievement, nor can you expect an expansion of your spiritual abilities and blessings.

If you’re serious about your spiritual path, then purification is absolutely necessary.

But what does purification look like?

Well, it’s a lifelong process, moment by moment, diving into deeper complexities and subtleties as you progress.

But let’s begin at the beginning. Physical purification.

Obviously, intoxicants (alcohol, mind-altering drugs, etc.) of any kind are incompatible with your goals; as are foods that are sacredly forbidden (pork, blood, meats without the name of God recited over them at the end of their time).

These are two places to begin.

Then, things that are not good for the health of the body; smoking, chemicals in food or water, over indulgence, lack of exercise, etc.

After this would be purification of actions, words, thoughts, feelings—in that order.

This topic is extensive and we hope to cover it in a future blog.

e.) Devotional Practices

Perhaps you believe in God. You pray. Perhaps you attend religious services and ceremonies, listening to every word of the sermon. But you feel there is something missing. You yearn for a true spiritual experience—something that satisfies your soul.

If this is the case, it is time to try a new approach.

Try the path of the mystics, the ones who connect with the Divine Presence through the heart.

Finding a living Sufi Saint to guide you will bring you to this experience usually through purification, prayer, zikr (Remembrance of God), and many other processes.

After decades of my own yearning and exploration into many, many religions and spiritual paths all across this world, I can confirm that while each religion or spiritual path may have a bit, some practice or philosophy that moves a person forward, there is no religion other than traditional Sufism* that has them all or that moves you so quickly towards the Divine Presence, towards intimacy with God. Maybe you know nothing about Sufism and you wonder if it is the way for you to follow on your journey. Then take note of this:

One of the world’s most highly respected and scholarly Sufi Saints, Imam Abu Hamid al Ghazali (lived 1058-1111), wondered the same thing. So, he left his teaching post and his family, and undertook rigorous spiritual exploration for years and years. He came to the following conclusions:

During my successive periods of practices, there were revealed to me secrets impossible to recount. All that I shall say for the enlightenment of the reader is this: I learned from a sure source that the Sufis are the true pioneers on the path of God: that there is nothing more beautiful than their life, nor more praiseworthy than their rule of conduct, nor purer than their morality. Their manner of life is the best of all, their way the most direct of ways, and their ethic the purest.
Were someone to combine the insight of intellectuals, the wisdom of philosophers, and the knowledge of the most learned scholars versed in the mysteries of revelations in order to discover even one way to improve their way, their doctrine, and morals, their conduct or ethics, it would be impossible.
From the time a person sets out, properly guided, on this path, revelations begin for them. They come to see, in the waking state, angels and the souls of prophets; they hear their voices and wise counsels. By following their foundation of revealed laws and practices, and by means of contemplation, especially of heavenly forms and images, they rise in the light by degrees to heights which human language cannot reach, which one cannot even indicate without falling into great and inevitable errors.   (From Al-Ghazali’s Path to Sufism and His Deliverance from Error (al-Munqidh min al-Dalal)).

*My indepth experience has been with the Naqshbandi-Haqqani Sufi Order previously headed by Maulana Shaykh Nazim al-Haqqani and now headed by Maulana Shaykh Muhammad Adil al- Haqqani ar-Rabbani. For lectures and more information, please see their official website www.sultanat.org for videos.

No matter what religion you belong to (or none), you can start with these devotional practices: 

Decide what your spiritual goals are:

If your reason and focus in your current religious or spiritual practices is upon ‘being seen’ by others, (e.g., being seen listening to sermons, singing hymns, kneeling, or raising hands in group prayer, sitting in meditation, group chanting, etc.), or if your main goal for attending the services or events is to make friends and develop a social network, you will never achieve any spiritual goals.

But if you yearn to connect through your soul with the divine, then you have the proper attitude to begin.

Open your heart to devotional practices:

Concentrate on those practices that focus on gratitude, love, hope, connection to the divine, forgiveness, clarity, wisdom, guidance, and the 99 Divine Names and Attributes of God.

Pray, mostly in privacy.

To achieve intimacy with God, open your heart, pray in desperation, yearning for the love of the Most Divine, praying that it will descend upon and open within you.

If you keep your heart clean (purified of morally questionable or negative thoughts and activities), and if you are responsive and obedient to the Will of the Most Divine (e.g., being a morally upright person, following the commands and the original laws of the Most Divine, etc.), your chances of a true spiritual awakening and a satisfying future of spiritual experiences have just dramatically increased.

What are your prayers about? Build your Divine Relationship.

If you are always praying for some thing (prayers of supplication), you may want to switch to and add prayers of gratitude, glorification, appreciation, and adoration. Afterall, you want a loving relationship with the Divine. Right? Build the relationship as you would a good strong marriage.

Review your old way of doing things.

If you have been doing the same prayers and practices for years and years without achieving satisfactory spiritual advancement, you may want to rethink the path you are on.

You may want to shift to a practice or a religion that can propel you forward and steer you towards realising and gaining nearness to the Truth of the Divine Reality.

It is, therefore, time to explore other religions, philosophies, practices, and pathways. For example, many Christians and Jews do not realise that there are hundreds if not thousands of practices within the Muslim/Sufi tradition that would help them become better Christians or Jews. The ancient teachings hold great truths for all of us.

f.)  Heart-Opening Practices

Is your heart tight? Traumatised? Broken? Afraid?

Your will undoubtedly wish to do what you can to heal it.

Perhaps you suffer from stress, anxiety, fear, abuse, trauma, or the like, and you now have what feels like armour around your heart. Your body feels as tense as a warrior’s shield. Maybe you’re constantly on guard with each person you meet not knowing how to make sure you’ll be safe physically, emotionally, mentally or socially. Maybe you have difficulty feeling and identifying your emotions, or maybe you overreact at the slightest thing.

Then, it’s time to concentrate on healing and opening your heart. It will help you feel better, improve how you react to everything in your life, increase your chances of having a spiritual awakening, and move you towards your own spiritual journey.

How do you do this?

You might benefit from professional mental health expertise to overcome past trauma.

There are also types of energetic practices (listed above) that can help.

Or, you might need to learn how to soften a bit and fall in love with yourself. Have mercy for yourself. Have compassion for yourself. To relax and breathe. Ahhh….now, that’s better.

While a person can enter a spiritual journey without an open heart, there will eventually come a time when an open heart will be necessary to move forward.

A major striving along the spiritual journey is to open and clean the heart, polishing it until it shines until it reflects the light of the Divine.

How do you do this? By building mercy and compassion, kindness and concern for others into your life. By listening to your ego and when you hear it complaining, tell the unruly child of your ego to ‘be quiet and go to your room!’ Then, you will be left in peace to feel merciful, kind, and more concerned for others than you are for yourself.

Hopefully, then you will be able to feel more gentle, vulnerable, relaxed, open, compassionate, and empathic. Maybe you’ll even breathe and smile more as you relax into yourself, and then take more steps along your spiritual journey.

g.)  Spontaneous Abundant and Unconditional Love in Your Heart

Your heart bursts open. It’s as simple as that. And when it does, you are filled with unconditional love, gratitude, mercy, compassion, grace, and every other good feeling.

h.) Other Not-so-Pleasant Events That Might Lead You to Seek a Spiritual Awakening

You may feel something entering your room at night, or lying on top of you as you sleep, or you find yourself in an unusually dark place (such as an attic, abandoned building, or a forest at night) that feels ‘creepy’ and you want to run away. (You should, by the way).

You might see or feel the terrifying presence or pressure of jinns, which are very real evil creations. Normally unseen beings, their ugliness, creepiness, and treachery arouses you to run into a lighted area, rush to your nearest holy person, or pray to God for protection, security, and salvation. Do this!

From then on, you vow to do whatever it takes to be spiritually protected, to surround yourself with goodness, and to live ‘in good graces’ in order to gain the favour and protection of the Divine.

To make sure you are protected, set your feet firmly on a spiritual path that is strong enough to protect you. Find a spiritual teacher who is strong enough to do this for you.


What Comes After Your Spiritual Awakening?

And after the awakening, then what?

Your awakening is not enlightenment, though it can sometimes feel like a tiny glimpse of it. It is an increased awareness. It is realizing that there is more to life than the sensory experiences or ego fulfilment and ego expressions around you

By now, you realise that you, your unique self, are much more than you had ever imagined before. You now can see how important your inner being and your relationship with the Divine is, and that your connection to the Divine is much more important to you than ever before.

Now, you are awake!

So, you have a choice. Either you stay awake and make a conscious effort to explore the beginning steps of your spiritual journey, or you go back to sleep, back into your old ways of seeing the world and your life, ignoring your awakening and ignoring any opportunities to grow and become more than you have been.

But, let’s assume you don’t go back to sleep. Though it may take time, maybe even years, you keep your ‘awakening’ in your heart, watching it and the events around you unfold, hoping for direction, praying for guidance and opportunities to move forward, praying for a morally impeccable guide who has travelled the spiritual road far ahead of you, praying for the next steps on your path to reveal themselves.

And then they do.

You may find books, listen to speakers, find new individuals and groups to meet and learn from, find opportunities for deepening through travel, spiritual learning, and most importantly, learning about yourself. Yes, some of it will be difficult, some of it will include a ‘falling away’ of things and people, but the challenges and the struggles will move you forward. You’ll soon see.

Each of these are steps along the way. Each of them will awaken and inspire you to search for more experiences because they are amazing, compelling, beautiful and satisfying. And you will know you’re on the right path because these experiences open you to what really matters in life, to the Reality of life, to the Truth of life. And the ‘rightness’ of it echoes within your heart, opening you to the Divine comfort, right where you belong.

And remember, these are the first steps to a greater and much more satisfying quest. Please subscribe to be notified when the next blog, “The First Seven Steps to the Spiritual Journey” is published.

I pray that you be blessed with the Divine Truth, to find your right path, to be rightly guided, to be protected from all negativity and evilness, to know what your spiritual goal is, to be protected from wasting time on useless paths, to be forgiven for any missteps, to swiftly be placed again on the right path, that you be guided to know your self and your Self, and that you be brought nearer and nearer to the Divine Presence. Ameen.

Enjoy the journey.

H. Sajidah Kazmi (c)

www.sajidahkazmi.com

Sajidah Kazmi