Between Fires: The Sacred Stillness After Awakening

What if losing your motivation is actually finding your soul?

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They never warned me that spiritual awakening would feel like this.

For most of my life, I thought waking up would be a radiant ascent—an unveiling of purpose, a triumph of clarity. But when it finally arrived, it didn’t blaze like fire; it whispered like wind. It didn’t feel like knowing—it felt like forgetting. And it left me in a place I never expected: not enlightened, but emptied. Not driven, but disoriented.

The fire that once burned in me, the one that pushed me to perform, to achieve, to be somebody, simply… vanished.

I know now I’m not alone.

“Awakening,” they said. But what they didn’t tell me is that real awakening can feel like dying before you die—like everything familiar being stripped away in sacred silence. It was Paramahansa Yogananda who said, "When the soul becomes the master, the ego becomes the servant." Well, my ego didn’t go quietly. It kicked and screamed as it dissolved, leaving behind a strange, holy stillness.

I no longer cared to chase goals that once thrilled me. I didn't want to climb any ladder or polish any image. What used to matter became absurd. In its place stood a silence so deep it scared me. But it was Ramana Maharshi who reminded me, “Your own Self-realization is the greatest service you can render the world.” And so, I stayed.

This was not depression, though it could easily be mistaken for it. This was spiritual recalibration. Like Carl Jung’s negrido, the dark night of the soul, where all structure collapses before the true Self is born. And though Jung is not one of my spiritual gurus in the traditional sense, his vision resonates profoundly with what Adi Shankara declared centuries ago: “Brahman alone is real, the world is illusory, and the individual self is not other than Brahman.” The scaffolding of the false self had to fall.

I’m learning to rest in this liminal space between fires. The caterpillar is gone, and the butterfly not yet born. Like Lalleshwari once sang, “I plucked the petals of longing, and the flower of self bloomed within.” This stage, where nothing makes sense and everything seems still, is not a mistake. It is initiation.

Even Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj saw this plainly: “The real does not die, the unreal never lived.”
And it is only now—stripped of the unreal—that something authentic begins to stir in me. It is not ambition. It is not pressure. It is a whisper of truth, so soft it could only come from the soul.

My teacher Sri Yukteswar Giri taught that “Spiritual advancement is not to be measured by one’s outward powers or possessions, but by the depth of one’s realization of the Divine.” And if that is so, then these quiet, unproductive, inward-turning days may be the most spiritually rich of my life.

Even now, Babaji’s words echo within me—not in literal speech, but in vibration: Remain in silence and carry the light. The world will receive it in time. And perhaps this silence is the light.

Sometimes I sense Rumi nodding gently from the invisible realm, whispering the line I once read and didn’t understand: “Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you.” -- Rumi. Now I see: the real spiritual life isn’t made of fireworks. It’s made of sacred stillness, of allowing, of inward listening.