Stages of Awakening: From Seeking to Sacred Union – How to Navigate Your Spiritual Evolution

Are you beginning to feel that life—as—you’ve been living it—isn’t the whole story?

That, despite everything you’ve achieved, something essential is missing.

If so, you may hear the subtle whisper of your soul’s invitation to awaken. Not to a belief, a doctrine, or an idea—but to the truth of who and what you really are. This isn’t about bypassing pain or floating in bliss. It’s a radical unlearning, a deep remembering, and an eternal homecoming. It’s your turn.

This post is a heartfelt reflection on the Stages of Awakening, inspired by the beautiful and precise map offered in Dr. Angelo DiLullo’s book Awake: It’s Your Turn—a text that aligns with the same evolutionary current as the works of Ken Wilber, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Maureen St. Germain, and Howard Falco. It dovetails exquisitely with Wilber’s Spectrum of Consciousness, one of my earliest guiding stars, and continues to frame much of my spiritual science writing and teaching today.

So let’s journey through these stages, with context, corroboration, and plenty of soul food for those of you, like me, who have walked through fire, rebuilt from ashes, and are now asking…
What’s next?

Stage One: The Call – When Life Stops Making Sense (and That’s a Good Thing)

In this stage, life begins to itch. Maybe the relationship, career, or identity you’ve spent years cultivating feels flat. You can’t put your finger on it, but something doesn’t add up.

In my work with hundreds of women (and men) who have rebuilt their lives after divorce, estrangement, or coercive control, I’ve seen this moment arrive like a quiet thunderclap:

“I’ve survived. I’ve rebuilt. But I still don’t feel whole.”

This stage correlates to Ken Wilber’s egoic level of consciousness, where the separate self begins to realise it’s not the master of the house. It’s also where Barbara Marx Hubbard’s “Crisis of Meaning” begins, pushing us toward conscious evolution.

It is the sacred discomfort that precedes awakening.

Stage Two: The First Awakening – Seeing Through the Illusion of Self

This is not a concept or a philosophy—it’s a profound experiential recognition that the “self” you’ve identified with your whole life is a construct.

The mind may try to scramble back into control, but something irreversible has occurred. As DiLullo puts it:

“You don’t awaken as a self. You awaken from the self.”

In Spiritual Science Made Simple, I describe this as the moment when the veil begins to thin—when you perceive your true essence not as a role or personality but as pure awareness. This moment maps beautifully onto Wilber’s transpersonal band, when identity shifts from ego to soul.

Think of it as the “I AM” recognition that Howard Falco writes about: a direct contact with essence, not filtered through story. The sense of self is now awareness itself.

Stage Three: Integration – Embodying Truth, Facing the Shadow

Here’s where it gets real. Many people think awakening will fix everything. It brings everything up to be healed, integrated, and released.

Repressed trauma, nervous system imprints, grief, and karmic wounds can surface powerfully. This is where awakening intersects with the body, and where unprocessed survival strategies (especially for those of us with ADHD, developmental trauma, or adopted identity challenges) begin to unravel.

I call this the “Great Remembering.”

This stage is central to my upcoming book Echoes in the Field. I explore how inherited family trauma, morphogenetic fields, and pre/perinatal experience create energetic imprints that must be met somatically, not just philosophically.

It’s also where Spiral Dynamics (Clare Graves, integrated by Ken Wilber) helps us map the vertical development of consciousness from survival to self-actualisation, to self-transcendence.

Stage Four: Nonduality – Dissolving the Illusion of Separation

Here, the seeker dissolves into the seamless reality of Being. There’s no longer a separate subject observing an object. Experience is simply what it is—no separation, narrative, or filter.

Wilber would describe this as moving into casual and nondual consciousness, where all opposites reconcile. Maureen St. Germain calls it “Waking Up in 5D”—a frequency of perception where unity and peace are your native state.

You don’t believe in unity—you are unity.

This is the moment when the “divine marriage” of masculine and feminine energies begins to occur within, leading to profound inner stability and a coherent consciousness field.

Stage Five: Sacred Union – The Whole World Becomes God

Everything is divine. Everything is you. But you, as an ego, are no longer present.

The ego hasn’t been fixed or improved; it has been seen through. Life expresses itself through this body, this voice, these hands. You move without a mover, love without a lover, and know without a knower.

This corresponds to Wilber’s highest stages—Unity Consciousness, Turquoise and beyond, where spiritual realisation fuses with evolutionary expression. Barbara Marx Hubbard would say this is the regenopause moment, where the post-menopausal woman becomes a new archetype of consciousness evolution.

Beyond the Stages: Eternal Becoming and Spiritual Science

Even this is not the end. DiLullo points to a continued unfolding—an ever-deepening surrender to reality’s mystery.

This is where the teachings of quantum spirituality, evolutionary relationships, and spiritual science find their home. From here, we live as part of the emergent intelligence of the cosmos, no longer trying to be “someone,” but allowing life to be lived as us.

This is the realm of no-position, of ultimate surrender—where paradox, emptiness, and form swirl in divine choreography.

Why This Matters Now

If you’re reading this, you’re likely in transition. Perhaps you’ve left a difficult relationship and are now rebuilding your life. You’re learning to parent in new ways. Maybe, like me, you’ve been diagnosed with ADHD later in life, and the lens through which you see everything is starting to crack open.

This moment is not just personal; it’s planetary. We are undergoing a collective initiation into a new dimension of being.

Which is why I now speak of the Three Rs of Awakening:

Rebuilding – after trauma, loss, or disillusionment
Reclaiming your sovereignty, your power, your energy field
Remembering – your essence, your sacred self, your part in the whole

And the good news is—you don’t have to do it alone. Whether through the lens of Wilber, DiLullo, Hubbard, or Gurdjieff, the invitation is the same:

Wake up.
Grow up.
Clean up.
Show up.

You’re not behind. You are not broken. You’re becoming.

✨ A Few Soulful Suggestions

If this post resonates with you, here are a few next steps:

My book Spiritual Science Made Simple gives a grounded overview of all the dimensions of consciousness, evolution, and embodiment.
Journal through the stages – Ask yourself: Where am I right now? What’s asking to be seen, felt, or released?
Embrace community – Join me and others on the path in my Rebuild Your Life Facebook group or monthly coaching calls.
Study Wilber’s Spectrum – Especially if you’ve felt “too deep” for your surroundings. You’re not too much. You’re just early.

Final Words: You Are the Path

In the end, awakening is not something that happens to you. It’s what you are. Under the story. Beneath the pain. Before the thoughts. Beyond the ego.

You are the stillness you seek.
>You’re the Presence you pray to.
>You are the miracle, awaiting your own return.

It’s your turn.