Why Spiritual Awakening Feels Like Losing Everything and Why That’s the Beginning of True Freedom
There comes a moment in life when everything you once held as certain begins to fall apart. The job you built your identity around suddenly feels meaningless. Relationships that once defined you begin to dissolve. Even your ambitions the goals you worked so hard for no longer hold the same spark.
It’s as if the universe is dismantling your entire life. And yet, this is not the end. This is spiritual awakening.
And yes it can feel absolutely devastating.
Awakening can be down right scary and devastating…but there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.
The Dark Night Before the Dawn
When I (Ronnie Yap) went through my own awakening, it wasn’t graceful or easy. It felt like I was losing everything my sense of direction, my identity, even my will to keep pushing forward.
But what I later discovered was this:
I wasn’t losing myself - I was shedding what was never truly me.
The spiritual journey begins with destruction the dismantling of the false self we’ve built through expectations, fears, and conditioning.
As Alan Watts once said, awakening feels like losing everything because you are losing everything false the illusions of control, identity, and separation.
This process strips you bare. It tears away your masks until you face the truth of who you are not as a persona, but as consciousness itself.
Why Awakening Hurts So Deeply
From the moment we are born, we are given roles: a name, a purpose, a path. We spend years building an identity around achievements, relationships, and possessions. But awakening burns all of that away and when the ego crumbles, what’s left is emptiness.
This is why awakening feels like death. You grieve the loss of your “old self,” the one that constantly sought validation, control, and security.
But what dies is only the illusion. The real you the eternal awareness beneath it all cannot die. It’s simply being uncovered.
The Science and Energy of Transformation
From a holistic perspective, this “spiritual death” is mirrored in your nervous system and energy body. When the ego dissolves, the body reacts you may feel anxious, restless, fatigued, or emotionally raw. But this is the nervous system recalibrating to a new frequency.
Trauma and conditioning are stored in your body’s energetic field - what I teach in the PMSE method (Physical, Mental, Spiritual, Emotional). During awakening, those stored frequencies begin to rise to the surface to be healed.
That’s why old wounds, memories, and emotions suddenly resurface they’re being cleared for integration.
It’s not breakdown it’s energetic rebalancing.
How I Healed and How You Can Too
My awakening was a journey through every layer of the PMSE spectrum:
Physical: I learned to cleanse my body through clean foods, fasting, and grounding rituals that reset my biology.
Mental: I began observing my thoughts instead of identifying with them. Meditation became my mirror, not my escape.
Spiritual: I surrendered control. Instead of asking “Why is this happening to me?” I began to ask, “What is this teaching me?”
Emotional: I learned to feel - truly feel - grief, anger, loneliness, without resistance. Only then could they transmute into wisdom.
Awakening is not about transcending your humanity it’s about embodying it fully.
It’s about walking through the fire and realizing that what burns away was never real to begin with.
Losing Everything to Find Everything
At the deepest level, awakening is a paradox:
You lose everything you thought mattered and gain everything that truly does.
You begin to see that love was never outside you. Peace was never something to achieve. And happiness was never dependent on circumstance.
It was all within you hidden behind layers of illusion.
When you finally let go, when you stop resisting the loss, what you discover is extraordinary:
You were never broken. You were awakening.
You are not the storm. You are the sky.
And the sky never collapses it only clears.
Final Reflection
Spiritual awakening isn’t glamorous. It’s not all light and bliss. It’s messy, raw, disorienting and profoundly sacred.
It demands that you die to who you were so that you can be reborn as who you truly are. This is the path I walked the path that healed me spiritually, mentally, physically, and emotionally.
So if you’re losing everything, don’t despair.
You’re not falling apart. You’re falling into truth.
And when the dust settles, you’ll find that what remains isn’t a new version of you it’s the real you - the one that was never lost, only forgotten. Finally, you are home!
