Having a profound awakening can be like taking the lid off of a jar. All the karma that has been repressed, all the karma at the bottom of our misery that we aren’t conscious of, comes flying out because there is finally space in which it can emerge.
When it hits you in the face, you wonder where your freedom went and what went wrong. But understand that this is a consequence of the freedom; it is not a mistake.
Everything wants to come up into and be transformed by the freedom. If you let it come up into this aware space, which is love, it will reharmonize. This space that you are is unconditional love.
Unconditional means just that: everything is welcome, nothing is cast away or set apart from it.
– Adyashanti from The Impact of Awakening
For me, the “taking a lid of a jar” happened just a few years ago, and I seem to still be in the middle of it.
The first opening or awakening happened in my mid-teens, and was followed by several years of reorganization. A sense of being pulled apart, and put together differently. (I sometimes think of it as a dark night of the senses.) This initial awakening was of all as God (aka Spirit, consciousness, love), including anything that could be taken as a me or I.
A while later, and just a few years ago, there was another awakening. This one was very clear, simple, and without the bells and whistles. After about six months, the lid was taken off the jar. I sometimes think of this one as a dark night of the soul. First, a great deal of archetypal and apparently less personal material surfaced (heaven and hell etc.). Then, a great deal of personal material from my own life. It also included a collapse of body and mind, a sense that my inner resources went off line, and a loss of many of my external resources. (It may be that this collapse was necessary for the material to surface. The collapse did happen first.)