Disillusionment: The Devastation and Growth of the Disillusionment Phase in a Kundalini Awakening
When going through a Kundalini awakening, one can often find themselves in a liminal space that feels somewhat similar to depression or an ego death, a form of the dark night of the soul—where nothing feels meaningful, and everything seems flavorless. Despite the similarities to depression - the lack of motivation, life force, or inspiration - this can be a meaningful and nuanced part of the awakening, with its own significance in the journey of self-awareness and realization.
A disillusionment phase may happen once or arise multiple times throughout an awakening, as different layers of our identity and orientation to life are brought into awareness.
What Is the Significance of a Disillusionment Phase?
Disillusionment illuminates where fantasy kept us surviving and even fueled us with direction in life when we needed it most. Fantasy can serve as one of our most important coping mechanisms when we are faced with social or parental conditioning, developmental deprivation, or environmental starvation.
If what a child needs isn’t available in their environment growing up, they are powerless to change that reality. Their mind can create an imaginary world in which those needs can be met: a self that deserves love and approval, a home that is safe, a relationship that rescues and salvages them, and more. This coping mechanism can help a child flee a distressing environment; fantasy can become a form of the flight response—or detach from it, as a form of freeze or dissociation.
Why Do Fantasy and Survival Beliefs Dissolve During a Kundalini Awakening?
Fantasy can be deeply adaptive, offering hope for a better future and the fuel to keep engaging with life when reality feels too harsh. Over time, though, it can become intertwined with a child’s sense of self and their understanding of the world, shaping not only what they hope for, but who they believe they need to be in order to receive what they need.
For example, a child who never felt loved or truly seen may imagine that if she can just be perfect, good enough, helpful enough, beautiful enough—the world will finally give her the love and care she longs for so deeply. As she grows, she shapes her identity around achievement, appearance, helping others, or being “good,” no matter how hard she has to work to achieve it. This gives some relief to the part of herself that felt unloved. She may genuinely receive gratification from helping others, but deep down, she doesn’t know how to be without having to be “good,” “helpful,” “smart,” or “perfect.”
When Kundalini awakens, it shines a flashlight on this cross-wiring. This illumination reveals the painful truth that the belief that being good or perfect guarantees love is an illusion. The loss of that belief can feel truly devastating, as if the existential ground she has always walked on has disappeared beneath her feet.
She may not know who she is without her adaptive fantasy or how the world operates without it. And yet, being good to others may have come at a cost she wasn’t aware of. She may have self-abandoned countless times, unknowingly overextending herself because she was convinced this was simply the way she had to be. Even more painfully, it can reinforce a world in which love is highly conditional and her inner child never truly feels loved or met for who she is.
She is now faced with having to relearn how to be in the world without the old map that once oriented her.
What Does the Disillusionment Phase Feel Like?
In the example above, this woman loses her life orientation and adaptive sense of self during the awakening. She may no longer be able to do her work. She may have no energy left to help anyone else. She may not feel capable of putting on a full face of makeup each day or continuing to study, strive, and excel in the ways she once did.
Eventually, she is confronted with the illusion behind her life orientation and compensatory sense of self. To her, this can feel like a form of death—a deep loss, with a vacuum or emptiness left behind it and no familiar engine from which to operate in the world.
For a while, the process can feel cruel, as though it has taken away everything she cared about, everything she thought she was, and everything she knew. Life can begin to seem pointless.
It is as though the northern star no longer shines.
She is left baffled, disoriented, and frozen.
How Is a Disillusionment Phase Different From Ego Death or a Dark Night of the Soul?
A disillusionment phase can include an ego death, a dark night of the soul, or even a depression-like state, but it has a slightly different and more all-encompassing quality. An ego death can be looked at as a disillusionment of identity: a role, protector, or way of being that once felt essential to our survival begins to fall away or no longer feels adaptive. A dark night of the soul is when our access to light becomes temporarily obscured; we may no longer be able to feel the meaning, love, connection to self, or to life, to the universe, or the divine that once sustained us.
Disillusionment can contain both because what is being reorganized is the relationship between self and life. We are seeing through the contract we unconsciously made with life in order to survive, not only who I believed I had to be, but how I believed life would respond to me if I was that person. For instance: “If I am good, I will be loved. If I love harder, I can create love. If I do everything right, I will eventually be safe.” It’s how our identity and our perception of reality were collaborating within the same survival map.
When that map dissolves, our identity may begin to dissolve with it, while our relationship with life or the universe can become obscured at the same time. This is why a disillusionment phase can contain both an ego death and a dark night. But underneath those experiences is a deeper disorientation: If this is no longer who I have to be, and this is no longer how life works, then who am I in relationship to life now? This is what gives the disillusionment phase its particular flavor. It is not only a reshuffling of identity or a temporary loss of access to light; it is a reshuffling of our orientation to life itself.
How Do You Navigate a Disillusionment Phase During Kundalini Awakening?
In the depths of disorientation and disillusionment, context can be incredibly helpful. Try to name what is being exposed as an illusion. This can help your mind recognize that this adaptive fantasy isn’t the only truth from which the world operates, while also honoring the survival role the illusion once played for you.
Ask yourself:
What was I lacking in childhood that this fantasy compensated for?
Could I have survived or thrived without it?
What was my contract with life? What did I believe I had to be or do in order for life to give me love, safety, goodness, belonging, or protection?
If that contract is no longer true, what am I afraid life will become without it?
If I don’t yet know a world outside of this fantasy overlay, could I stay curious and open to discovering one?
Recognize that your GPS—your map of yourself, life, and the relationship between the two—is being reworked. Although you may not be able to mobilize in the world from this liminal space, this isn’t a permanent destination. It is a pit stop on the way toward greater freedom and authenticity.
What Comes Next?
In another example, a girl grows up unprotected in a chaotic or violent household. She dreams of someone who could rescue her and take the place of her immature parental figures. As she grows up, that rescue fantasy becomes cross-wired with her idea of love.
She doesn’t consciously seek to be rescued, yet subconsciously, romantic love has become intertwined with salvation. Throughout her awakening, that belief may slowly begin to shatter, leaving her feeling disillusioned with love and even with the idea of partnership itself.
What she may not know in that moment is that love isn’t what is being dissolved. What is dissolving is the illusion that love means her inner child finally being saved.
Connection and romance may suddenly seem bleak. She may even feel that life or the universe has betrayed her, particularly if that belief has manifested through a painful or distorted relationship.
The disillusionment is sacred, not a wrong turn she took.
It connects her with her inner child in a deeper and more intimate way and helps her begin to save herself. It purifies her idea of love—not as salvation, which can become a disempowered subconscious cross-wiring in which she must remain small and incapable to be rescued, but as an expression and extension of a healed heart.
The Liberation of Disillusionment
Disillusionment brings illumination to what is true and what is a mashup we created out of survival needs. It frees us from false ideas, beliefs, and conditioning that once felt like the solid ground beneath our feet—the lenses through which we viewed reality.
Although these beliefs may have felt like our compass, they can also become distortions that keep us captive and in limbo, chasing our own tails. Life will eventually break our hearts if the contract we have with it is contorted and based on an illusion we once had to adopt as the ultimate truth.
And perhaps this is what makes disillusionment so destabilizing: we are not only grieving who we thought we were. We are grieving the relationship we thought we had with life. The old map is no longer trustworthy, while the new one has not yet been drawn. For a time, we are asked to live without knowing exactly who we need to be, what life will give us in return, or what rules will keep us safe.
Disillusionment frees.
It can hurt deeply, yet it ultimately means to liberate us—not only into a more authentic self, but into a more authentic relationship with life.
If you are going through a disillusionment crisis, feel free to reach out for support here. You don’t have to face it alone.
Common Questions About the Disillusionment Phase
Can a disillusionment phase happen more than once during Kundalini awakening?
Yes. A disillusionment phase may happen once or arise multiple times throughout an awakening, as different layers of identity, survival beliefs, and our relationship with life come into awareness.
Why can Kundalini awakening feel like depression?
A disillusionment phase can include depression-like experiences such as loss of motivation, meaning, pleasure, or life force as an old orientation to life dissolves. However, spiritual explanations should not be used to automatically assume that symptoms are part of an awakening or to rule out depression or other conditions that may need support.
Why do I feel lost during a Kundalini awakening?
When an identity or survival contract that once oriented you begins to dissolve, you may temporarily lose not only your sense of who you are, but your understanding of how to relate to life. The old map no longer feels true, while a new orientation has not yet formed.