The Awakening That Comes After Everything Falls Apart

There is a kind of awakening that doesn’t arrive through meditation cushions, vision boards, or inspirational quotes.
It comes after everything you trusted collapses.
After the body says no more.
After the soul can no longer survive in silence.

This conversation is about that kind of awakening.

In this powerful dialogue, Kathleen Flanagan and Birgitta Visser explore what spiritual awakening truly looks like when it’s born from abuse, grief, trauma, and the slow unraveling of a life that once looked “fine” on the outside. What unfolds is not a polished spiritual story, but a deeply human one.

Birgitta shares her experience of leaving an abusive, narcissistic relationship that drained her emotionally, financially, and energetically. Like so many high-achieving women, she didn’t leave at the first red flag. She stayed, questioned herself, and tried to make sense of behavior that slowly eroded her sense of safety. Eventually, she reached a moment of clarity: the door had to close, not out of anger, but out of self-preservation.

What followed was not instant relief. It was a healing journey that required courage, surrender, and deep inner listening. Through sacred plant medicine ceremonies and time spent in nature, Birgitta began peeling back layers of trauma stored in the body. These experiences weren’t about escaping pain, they were about meeting it fully, allowing the nervous system to release what words alone could not.

Kathleen reflects on her own parallel journey through grief and loss. After the death of her father, she found herself confronting emotional pain so intense it shook her will to live. Despite years of spiritual practice and awareness, the body still held unresolved memories, fear, and survival responses that demanded attention. This is an important truth many don’t talk about: awakening does not exempt us from being human.

Healing, as both women emphasize, is not linear. It doesn’t follow a neat timeline or a single method. It asks for honesty. It asks for responsibility, not blame. And it asks for forgiveness, especially toward the parts of ourselves that did what they had to do to survive.

Throughout the conversation, themes of energetic alignment, manifestation, and spiritual embodiment emerge, not as concepts, but as lived experience. True manifestation, they explain, doesn’t come from forcing outcomes. It comes from releasing control, calming the nervous system, and aligning the heart with truth. When the body feels safe, life begins to move again.

There is also a powerful reminder woven through the dialogue: we are not meant to heal alone. Much of the suffering discussed stems from isolation, being the strong one, the capable one, the one who holds it all together while quietly breaking inside. Healing happens when we allow ourselves to be seen, supported, and witnessed without judgment.

This conversation speaks to anyone who feels spiritually awake but emotionally exhausted. To those who have done “all the right things” and still feel disconnected. To those who sense there is more to life but are afraid to slow down long enough to face what’s been buried.

Awakening, as shown here, is not about transcending pain. It’s about integrating it. It’s about coming home to yourself, body, mind, and spirit, after years of living in survival mode.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s a reminder that nothing is wrong with you if awakening came through heartbreak instead of bliss. Sometimes, everything has to fall apart so the truth can finally emerge.

If you’re in that space right now, know this: you are not broken. You are becoming.