Forget About Enlightenment?

April 08, 2025•12 min read

This is a longer post on an unusual topic, but it's a topic that’s fundamental to my work (with some clients) and very dear to my heart because it was such a huge, hugely distracting, and frankly dangerous part of my spiritual experience. That topic is spiritual obsession and enlightenment chasing. I don’t hear or see this discussed often, yet I feel it is an exceedingly common phenomenon and an important one to talk about and bring to awareness.

The title of this post is taken from a poem called Forget About Enlightenment by John Welwood that resonates with me. I’ll include the poem at the end.

Of course, not all spiritual seeking or aspiration is dangerous or negative, and this post will not resonate with everyone. But there is a form of seeking that can be dangerous, and that is what I want to talk about. That form is an aggressive chasing of and pushing for enlightenment or any spiritual progress, specifically the pursuit of quick and dramatic energetic experiences or shifts using modalities like kundalini activation, intense breathwork, and Ayahuasca ceremonies, especially when done repeatedly.

I think this topic is not discussed often because spirituality is seen as a generally positive and helpful aspect of our existence, and it can be that. But like anything that is not used in moderation, and like other generally good and necessary things like food and relationships, spirituality can become obsessive and unhealthy, and it can lead to another phenomenon that is perhaps not discussed enough, and that is spiritual crisis or emergency, which I will also touch on.

If you recognize yourself in what I’m sharing here, I hope this post will give you pause and something to ponder. And I want to add that I am speaking from vast personal experience with this topic–I have done it all, so if you do recognize yourself in this, please know there is no judgment from me. I get you, and my goal is to help you avoid a lot of pain and lost time if I possibly can.

Why do people chase enlightenment?

Let’s start by talking about why people chase enlightenment, why people become obsessed with spirituality and chasing dramatic energetic experiences. From my experience and my observation of many other spiritual seekers, I’d say it is primarily from wanting to escape pain, the same reason people use drugs or alcohol or sugar to excess. Spirituality offers us the possibility of escaping our pain, pain that is generally born of trauma, trauma that we may or may not know is there. The idea of enlightenment, which has countless definitions and may not exist as a realistic option for most of us (depending on the definition you use), offers us a potential escape from our trauma-based suffering.

We might feel like if we meditate or do yoga or clear our chakras enough or do enough breathwork or Ayahuasca or other plant medicine, we will become clean and pure and permanently free of pesky human pains like desires and negative emotions. We might feel like by achieving the pinnacle in human evolution, enlightenment, we will feel important or special or superior such that we don’t have to suffer how small and insecure and inferior we actually feel deep down. We might feel temporarily high or lighter from some of the practices we do and want more and more of that feeling. The problem is that spiritual practices may or may not actually help heal our trauma (often they do not), which is the main source of pain for most of us. Spiritual practice may provide distracting and good-feeling highs that don’t actually move us toward healing. And worse, some of these practices can make our trauma far worse, or release it faster than we can handle it while offering no tools for us to actually deal with or integrate it.

More on how enlightenment chasing or spiritual obsession can be dangerous

When we start to evolve spiritually we may experience psychic and heart openings and synchronicities due to upper chakra openings that make us feel like we have arrived somewhere and that boost our spiritual ego. What we often do not realize is that our lower chakras, where most of our trauma is stored, usually have not been cleared. When we then chase big energetic experiences like kundalini awakenings and Ayahuasca ceremonies in the hope that we will expedite our awakening and our sense of union with ourselves and the Divine, in an effort to complete our spiritual and healing process (as if there is such a thing), these can backfire badly. These can cause our lower chakras to essentially vomit their content in one blow into our systems and awareness, leading to overwhelm and what is sometimes called a spiritual crisis or spiritual emergency. This can look various ways but common symptoms of spiritual crisis are extreme anxiety and emotional instability, trauma release and nervous system dysregulation, and in some cases, psychosis or hallucinations.

And I want to be clear that even if we know we’ve experienced some trauma, we can never be fully aware of how much unprocessed trauma we’re still carrying. We don’t know what we don’t know. Many of us have experienced severe early childhood trauma that we don’t remember either because we were too young to develop memories of it or because it was too traumatic for us to register. In addition to that, we can potentially be carrying past/parallel life, ancestral, and universal traumas that we have no conscious idea of and we don’t know how severe those are or how deep they go. So, if we go into a kundalini activation or an Ayahuasca ceremony, sometimes these hidden traumas are released faster than we can handle them, leaving us really struggling.

Another way that spiritual obsession can be dangerous is by distracting us from taking responsibility for our human lives.

My experience with enlightenment chasing and spiritual emergency

I'll share here a bit about my experience to illustrate what enlightenment chasing can look like and how distracting and detrimental it can be. My spiritual awakening process began in 2006 with the perfect storm of a chronic illness, a relationship ending, severe anxiety I couldn’t resolve, and long-term use of alcohol I knew I had to stop. All of this constituted a wake up call and I asked the universe for an explanation for why I had always struggled so much in my life and for help in healing. And the answers, help and motivation I was looking for started to arrive. Synchronicities abounded, I met the right people and received the right resources automatically, and I started to heal. I realized I wanted to do healing work and I retrained in yoga, reiki and holistic health coaching. I realized I wanted the experience of working with a guru in India and I met and fell in love with a man who had one.

But working with the guru, combined with observing the sense of flow and magic my life had taken on, created this idea that I was “called and chosen” for enlightenment, in the words of my guru. This went to my head, made me feel superior, boosted my spiritual ego and assuaged the sense of smallness I felt deep down (that at the time I wasn’t aware of). Then, while I was in India, a different guru, a female Divine Mother figure, gave me shaktipat, which is a transmission that supposedly starts or expedites the flow of kundalini (in short, an Indian spiritual term that refers to life force energy), and that boosted my ego more. I felt even more chosen. I then decided to leave my guru after four years of working with him and set out on my own to continue pursuing enlightenment by following the flow of the Universe through me and my environment. This was after reading some books that discredited the guru path in the extreme (which the Divine Mother figure also had done) and suggested that the pursuit of enlightenment was a solo job.

Long story short, I became so obsessed with enlightenment chasing that I left my partner, my home, my job and my new career aspirations and set out on a nomadic journey, did the Camino de Santiago multiple times, set about trying to analyze and discredit all of my beliefs with a journal, practiced a lot of magical thinking, started to release a lot of buried trauma, and after a year or so went flat broke, with a ton of debt, and had to file bankruptcy and scramble to find a new job. Because I hadn’t learned my lesson the first time, I basically did that all over again (minus the bankruptcy) with a different partner and job, and the second time went so far afield from my regular human life that I was afraid I might not be able to re-enter life. I thought I might have only been cut out for life in a monastery or as a houseless person. Once again, I scrambled to get a job and barely scraped my way back into life, with some major Divine intervention to support me. This is one way that a spiritual crisis might look. I neglected my finances to an extreme, became disconnected from my community and from meaningful work, and what I was doing didn’t further my healing process at all. What I needed most at the time was a good therapist, structure, and practices to help heal my trauma and regulate my nervous system.

My third spiritual crisis was of a different nature, much more serious, and this time not entirely my fault. In a nutshell, I had a massive kundalini awakening when I was alone in my apartment, which ended in psychosis and all manner of traumatic and cruel voices, body memories and beliefs about myself coming up from my blasted open chakras. I nearly died and had to be rescued from my apartment by the police. I was taken to a psychiatric hospital, where I was medicated and stayed to recover for a month.

The only explanation I have for why this happened spontaneously as it did (I was not using any substances at all at the time, wasn’t doing breathwork or kundalini yoga or even meditating), was that I had become very weakened from the stress of so much travel, so little structure and security, and the relationship with a narcissist I had been in and out of for several years. That combined with years of kundalini yoga, the shaktipat experience and some intense acupuncture treatments I had just had set the stage for my kundalini to go tearing through my body. I probably could have slowed down the process with adequate food, but once I realized what was happening to me, my ego got a hold of it and I wanted it to happen, was hoping a radical energetic experience would lead to a sense of union and peace and an end to my spiritual journey. I treated myself like an ancient Indian sage, not eating much and holing up in the cave that was my apartment, alone. I wish I had not encouraged this process and I wish there had been someone like me now, who had experienced this before, that could have helped me through it. It took me many years to recover from this experience, largely alone and through a lot of confusion and trial and error. In some respects I am still recovering.

If you’ve had a spiritual crisis, do not turn back to the modality that caused the crisis to try to resolve it.

For some of you this will be obvious, but for others, you might be so devoted to a particular practice that you turn to it again and again, no matter what. You might also feel you just had a bad trip or only partially cleared certain material and if you just go back and try again, you’ll get it all. But what has likely happened is that you have opened yourself too much too quickly, and trying again is only going to open you more, which is a dangerous game to play. What we need at a time like this is to mitigate the opening, close the system a bit and ground and regulate so the nervous system is not overstimulated and overtaxed.

What to do Instead

So, if we’re not chasing enlightenment and using familiar spiritual tools and practices anymore, what should we do instead? In particular, what should we do if we’ve had a spiritual emergency or painful experiences as a result of our enlightenment quest.

My advice is to get practical, focus on your body and your humanity for now. Focus on self care. Focus on healing over spirituality. Use somatic or body-based tools that can release and heal your trauma and regulate your nervous system. Focus on practices that help you to love and accept yourself just as you are rather than change or fix yourself. Remember that kundalini is intelligent, the body is intelligent, the universe is beyond intelligent, much more intelligent than our spiritual egos, than our minds. They will naturally support you to evolve spiritually and heal at a pace that is right for you. Even if we have good intentions, pushing our spiritual experience forward aggressively can be extremely problematic. Be gentle with your precious energetic system.