Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions.
If you’ve typed “am I having a spiritual awakening?” into Google at 2am, you’re in good company – and you’ve probably come back with a list of 23 symptoms and a lot of talk about ascending from 3D to 5D. Let me offer you something more grounded. A spiritual awakening isn’t a magical event that descends on you from the heavens. In my experience it’s far simpler, and far more useful to understand than that.
I’ve watched this process in myself, and in hundreds of people I’ve worked with. There is a real shape to it, real signs, and real stages. There’s also a lot of confusion – because most of the “symptoms” people panic about aren’t awakening symptoms at all. They’re something else, and once you see what, the whole thing gets a lot less frightening.
Let me walk you through it.
In this post:
What a spiritual awakening actually is
For me, a spiritual awakening starts the moment you begin asking a particular question: what am I here for? What’s my purpose?
Plenty of people never ask it. They do the job, book the two weeks in the sun, see the family at Christmas, and run a perfectly pleasant rinse-and-repeat life with no particular pull to grow. Nothing wrong with that. But if you’re reading this, that’s not you – something in you has woken up to the sense that there’s more.
That’s really what a spiritual awakening is: an awakening to the idea that there’s more than the human walking around in this skin-sack. More than the material. Maybe you start sensing there’s a spirit world; maybe you’ve lost someone and feel them around you. Alongside it comes a pull to be more, and a quiet hunger for inner peace – to actually be at ease in yourself rather than forever trying to escape yourself.
That last one is the tell. When you can’t bear to be alone with yourself, you are not at peace. When you can sit with yourself, you are. A lot of the path is simply the journey from the first to the second. And no – it’s not a magical experience. It’s more honest than that.
Two ways it begins: you reach for it, or life cracks you open
An awakening tends to start in one of two ways. Either you choose it, because you want more from your life than rinse-and-repeat. Or you get thrown onto the path by something that happens to you.
Mine was the second kind. My spiritual awakening was losing my mum. We found out she had cancer – nine tumours on the brain – and six weeks later she was gone. I sat with her as she died, at thirty years old, and had some very powerful experiences in those weeks. Something that traumatic cracks you open. I came out of it seeking: wanting to know if I could still communicate with her, looking for meaning, looking for answers. Grief put me on the path. The awakening didn’t cause the pain; the pain called in the awakening.
That’s incredibly common. When something difficult happens, people reach for the spiritual to help them make sense of it and find some acceptance. And it’s exactly why the psychological and the spiritual belong together rather than apart – you’re processing a human experience and reaching for something larger at the same time. (I go into that both/and properly in the psycho-spiritual path.)
The “symptoms” everyone googles (and what they really are)
Here’s where I part company with most of the internet. People search for “spiritual awakening symptoms” and get told that their anxiety, insomnia, crying for no reason and sudden sense of not belonging are signs of ascension. I don’t see it that way.
Those things are real. But they’re not awakening symptoms. They’re signs of where you are on the ladder – and specifically, what it feels like to move up a rung.
I map healing across five stages, what I call the Ladder: Conker, Washing Ball, Bouncy Ball, Snooker Ball, Glitter Ball. The unsettling stuff people describe lives almost entirely in one transition – the climb from Conker to Washing Ball.
A Conker sits at the bottom with everything locked away inside a hard, prickly shell. Tightly defended, a persistent grey cloud of anxiety, not much leaking out. Then you start to grow, the shell cracks, and you move into Washing Ball – and suddenly everything you’d packed away is loose and sloshing around. That’s the home turf of anxiety. The looping thoughts (round and round, like a washing machine). The insomnia. The crying that seems to come from nowhere. The raw, close-to-the-surface emotion. It feels like falling apart. It’s actually the lid coming off.
So is anxiety a spiritual awakening symptom? No. Is insomnia? No. Is crying for no reason, or suddenly not fitting in with your old crowd? No. They’re the signs of a system that’s started to move – usually off the bottom rung – and hasn’t yet learned to process what’s surfacing. The “not fitting in” is just as ordinary: as you change, the people around you may not, so you stop feeling aligned with them. Real, but not mystical.
This matters, because if you believe these are glamorous ascension symptoms, you’ll wait for them to pass on their own. They won’t. They’re a signpost telling you there’s charge to clear.
The stages: where you are on the ladder
The five stages give you a map of the whole climb, so you can see where you are and what’s next. (I unpack each one fully in the Ladder explained, and the measurement behind it on the Map of Consciousness.)
- Conker – hard shell, defended, low and prickly. Everything locked away. A constant low cloud of anxiety.
- Washing Ball – the shell’s cracked and it’s all loose. Anxious, looping, tearful, insomniac, easily stressed, safest with the familiar. Most of the “awakening symptoms” live here.
- Bouncy Ball – lighter and more cheerful, but reactive: fine one moment, flipped to irritation the next. The emotional weather still swings.
- Snooker Ball – steadier and more confident. You meet things head-on. Far less thrown by the day.
- Glitter Ball – in flow. Grateful, authentic, magnetic, genuinely at peace inside. The people who’ve cleared enough that they bring out the best in everyone around them.
Most people spend their lives somewhere in the Washing-Ball-to-Bouncy-Ball band, mistaking the wobble for their personality. The awakening is the dawning sense that you’re not stuck there – that there are rungs above you, and a way up.
Why an awakening can feel so bad
If this is supposed to be a beautiful expansion, why does it so often feel awful?
Two reasons. First, sometimes it isn’t the awakening that hurts – it’s whatever triggered it. The grief, the loss, the crisis that cracked you open in the first place. The awakening rode in on the back of the pain; it didn’t create it.
Second, and this is the big one: your eyes are open now. Before, ignorance was genuinely bliss. You didn’t know what you didn’t know, and there was a certain comfort in that. Now you can see the wood for the trees – and sometimes what you see isn’t pretty. The relationship that doesn’t work. The life that doesn’t fit. The truth you’d been quietly fooling yourself about. Realism kicks in, and realism can be brutal. That’s not the awakening going wrong. That’s the awakening doing exactly what it does: showing you what’s true so you can do something about it.
Want to know where you are on the ladder?
Before you can move up a rung, it helps to see what’s weighing you down. The free Head Trash Quiz tells you where most of your head trash is hiding – the themes keeping you on the lower rungs.
Take the free Head Trash Quiz →
Why people get stuck
People get stuck for one main reason: they hit a level their current tool can’t take them past.
Every method has a ceiling. Talk therapy is genuinely good at moving you off the bottom – Conker to Washing Ball, up into low Bouncy Ball. But it’s bounded by the conscious mind and your remembered experience, so there’s a point beyond which talking simply can’t take you. To climb higher you have to change tools. Head Trash Clearance will carry you comfortably up into Snooker Ball territory. But for the top of the ladder – Glitter Ball – you have to go deeper still, into the wound healing that clears the structural material the other rungs leave untouched.
There’s an uncomfortable truth in here that I’ll say plainly. When you’re doing inner work, three calibrations are in the room: yours, the tool’s, and the guide’s. For you to move, the tool and the person need to be higher than you are. If you’re the highest in the room, you’re not going anywhere. You wouldn’t hire an unfit personal trainer, or a stop-smoking coach who’s still on twenty a day – and growth is no different. Whoever’s helping you needs to have walked further than you have. It’s a bit controversial, but it’s true.
And then there’s the other classic way people get stuck: trying to skip the work entirely. You can’t think or force your way into an awakening, and you can’t fake it. It’s a spark; what matters is whether you play ball with it. Try to leap straight to the heights without clearing what’s underneath and you end up clambering up the trellis to the terrace – over and over, falling off, treading water, journalling forever and getting nowhere. That’s spiritual bypassing, and the trellis was never built for daily traffic. At some point you have to come back inside and take the stairs.
How to move through it well
So what do you actually do if you’re in the thick of one?
Stop waiting for it to be mystical, and start treating it as a climb with real rungs. The unsettling feelings are a signpost, not a verdict. Inner peace isn’t somewhere over the rainbow – it’s literally the next altitude up, on the other side of the anxiety. I’ve watched people get there startlingly fast: one client, a solicitor, came to me barely sleeping, stressed sending a simple email, struggling in her relationships. Three sessions later she said, “I just feel so Zen – this inner peace is incredible.” She found it on the far side of her anxiety, because that’s where it lives. (Her full story is here.)
The work is to clear what’s keeping you on the lower rungs, with tools and people calibrated higher than where you are. That’s the honest route up – the stairs, not the trellis – and it’s the whole reason I built the House of Growth as a map: so you can see which rung you’re on and what to clear next.
I’ll leave you with one more client, because she’s the version of “awake but stuck” so many people land in. She arrived mid-awakening – reading Joe Dispenza, deep into Hawkins’s work, doing all the programmes – and going nowhere. She’d genuinely woken up, but she’d plateaued. What drew her to me was that I measure this – she could finally see where she was and watch it move. We cleared what was holding the plateau in place, and she climbed. (Her full case study is here – she moved from 226 to 612 on the Hawkins scale.) That’s the difference between an awakening that stalls and one that actually takes you somewhere: you stop waiting to ascend, and you clear the rungs.
Where to go deeper
If something in you has woken up and you want to actually climb rather than stall, here’s where to take it:
- The free Head Trash Quiz – see where most of your head trash is hiding, and which rung it’s keeping you on.
- The Clearance Club (£49/month) – daily, guided clearing to move you up off the lower rungs and settle the system.
- The Ascent (£5,777) – the deep, measured climb: I clear the wounds holding your plateau in place and raise your baseline, with the Hawkins data to prove it’s moving. For those drawn to the fullest, most personal version of this work, there’s also my Untethered container.
If you’re not sure where to start, the Quiz points you to the right first step.
By Alexia Leachman · Method developed and refined since 2010 across 1,000+ clearance sessions
About the author
Alexia Leachman is the creator of the Head Trash Clearance Method and founder of Ladder of Growth – the consciousness measurement framework that maps where someone is on the path of becoming. She’s worked with clients to raise their calibration 200+ points on the Hawkins scale, and built The Ascent, a deep clearing programme for people who want measurable, structural change. Author of four books; host of the Fear Free Childbirth podcast (1.8M+ downloads); trainer of HTC practitioners internationally. Her work begins where insight-only approaches leave off: actually moving the baseline, with the data to prove it.
Head Trash Clearance is not therapy and is not a replacement for clinical mental health support. If you’re in crisis, or struggling with grief, anxiety or depression, please reach out to a qualified professional.
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