Waking Up vs. Growing Up: The Great Confusion of Spiritual Awakening

Have you met someone who claims a profound spiritual awakening — and yet still treats people the same way, still runs from the same fears, still cannot tolerate criticism? This isn't hypocrisy, necessarily. It's a confusion between two very different processes: waking up and growing up.

What Waking Up Is

Spiritual awakening — in whatever tradition — typically involves a shift in consciousness. A sense of expanded awareness. A moment of recognising that the self is not as fixed or as separate as we thought. Peak experiences, moments of profound clarity or unity.

These experiences are real and valuable. But they are not the same as psychological maturity.

What Growing Up Is

Growing up psychologically means developing the capacity to tolerate discomfort, to delay gratification, to take responsibility for your impact on others, to hold nuance, to repair rupture in relationships.

It means learning to sit with the parts of yourself you'd rather not see. To recognise the gap between your values and your behavior — and to close that gap, slowly, imperfectly.

Why They Get Confused

Spiritual experience can provide genuine insight. But insight is not the same as integration. You can understand something at a conceptual level while remaining emotionally and behaviorally unchanged.

Worse, spiritual language can sometimes be used to bypass psychological growth — to spiritualise avoidance, to use "non-attachment" as a reason not to commit, to use "consciousness" as a shield against feedback.

The Both/And

The most grounded people I know are doing both: the inner spiritual work and the relational, psychological work. They're not choosing between transcendence and therapy. They're using one to inform the other.

You can have a profound experience of unity — and still need to apologise to your partner. Both things are true.

Yours, Ksenia Trefilova