Your Rock Bottom Moment is Your Spiritual Awakening | Messages for the Empath Soul Podcast
When it feels like you are surrounded by darkness, in your rock bottom moment, all you need is one person to offer a hand, guiding you to see the light again. I am here to be that hand for you.
After experiencing my own mental and emotional breakdown, hitting what felt like rock bottom in my life, I learned a lot about the healing journey and what a spiritual awakening can do for you.
The main lessons I will unpack in this episode are, you aren't living your truth, and a soul retrieval is necessary. Throughout my own healing journey I've been able to understand the vital steps in how to move forward after your rock bottom moment. This is for you if you've recently experienced a rock bottom or even if it was several years ago and you are wanting to truly create healing for yourself.
Press play and begin the journey of understanding how Your Rock Bottom Moment is Your Spiritual Awakening.
The tenth episode is called Your Rock Bottom is Your Spiritual Awakening.
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Back to the blog - Your Rock Bottom is Your Spiritual Awakening
Here I will share the transcript of the podcast episode, and I highly encourage you to give it a listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
INTRO
Hello hello hello and welcome back to another episode of Messages for the Empath Soul. Today we are going to be talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart because of my own life experiences. I remember after I had my own rock bottom moment, several years later I had this recognition that I wanted to help people through their own rock bottom moments.
A moment where I felt like I was surrounded by darkness somebody offered a hand to me and it felt like a little bit of light that was able to guide me forwards. As I worked through my own healing and worked through my spiritual awakening, I got to the place of realizing how empowering that moment was, when that person offered that hand and helped me to feel safe as I continued to move forward in life. There was this calling on my soul that guided me to see that I wanted to be that hand for other people. I wanted to be a light in someone’s darkness so they could remember their own light.
When I bring today’s topic forward it’s difficult at times to talk about, it’s difficult to open the conversation up because we are being asked to recognize a hard moment in our lives. Whether you are somebody who has recently hit rock bottom, or maybe your rock bottom was in your past several years ago, it’s a hard moment in life and it’s a hard moment to move through. I bring this topic forward with a lot of compassion for you, a lot of support for you and I hope that either you have a community that surrounds you, that you can feel that love and support from. Or if you don’t have a community around you right now, I hope you can open yourself up to a community. There are a lot of resources in the world in this day and age that can support you and can help you.
Today’s topic is Your Rock Bottom Moment is Your Spiritual Awakening. Before we dive into the topic I want to take a moment to introduce this podcast and this space that I have created.
This is your soul journey and I am here channeling messages from the Universe to help guide and support you.
This is Messages for the Empath Soul.
If you’re new here, I’m Sydney a ⅖ generator, with a deep intuitive connection. My mission is to empower as many spiritual empaths in this community, creating a ripple effect of compassion and peace that is felt around the world.
That is why we are here and more specifically we are here today to talk about your rock bottom moment being your spiritual awakening. Sometimes in life we need to hit rock bottom in order to wake up and create change. We learn the most from the challenges and hard times. This is also when we become more resilient, strong and courageous. Your rock bottom may have felt scary, lonely and disempowering because you have now awakened to what is no longer working for you. You have awakened to the fact that something needs to change and it needs to change now. The important thing to know is that you cannot wait for your life to change, you need to choose to stand up and create the change for yourself. This is how you empower yourself.
I want to share about why your rock bottom moment is your spiritual awakening by covering two topics. The first, you haven’t been living your truth; and the second, a soul retrieval is necessary.
Let’s jump into the first topic…
YOU HAVEN’T BEEN LIVING YOUR TRUTH
The reason why your rock bottom moment is your spiritual awakening is because at some point in our lives we need to become conscious to our own choices; we need to become conscious of our own habits and behaviours; and we need to become conscious to the wounds that we carry, the energetic and emotional wounds that we carry, the trauma that we’ve experienced. More importantly, well also important, we need to become conscious of the societal conditioning and old programming that has been running our subconscious.
You haven’t been living your truth, that’s why you’ve hit rock bottom. When you hit that rock bottom moment it’s because what’s been driving you forwards for the majority of your life, has been the conditioning that you have taken on from society, and the programming that you’ve taken on from your parents, or grandparents or whatever guardians that have raised you. You were taught as a child to be a certain version of yourself and in order to try and fit into society you have all this conditioning that is trying to fit you into a box. Oftentimes, when you hit rock bottom is when your box breaks open, or you realize you have outgrown the box and you no longer fit the box, or you realize the box isn’t fulfilling and you want to change.
Ultimately, you haven’t been living your truth, your soul truth. You’ve been living for someone else, you’ve been living based on societal pressures, societal conditioning. You’ve been living based on the programming you were raised in. That rock bottom awakens you to realize you are no longer fulfilled.
All of our rock bottoms are going to look a little different. It’s important to take the time to tune into yourself, to turn inwards, to look at what your rock bottom was. What your rock bottom was trying to teach you, or what led you to that rock bottom. I shared in the last episode a little bit about people pleasing versus being an empath. Those people pleasing tendencies are what impacted my journey and hitting my rock bottom. For myself I had a mental and emotional breakdown because for the majority of my life, up to that point, I had been living trying to please everyone around me. Trying to make sure that everyone else was happy, and I wasn’t living for myself, I was living for everyone else’s needs and everyone else’s desires.
When you are carrying the weight of everyone else’s needs and emotions, and you have no control over them, it starts to get really heavy. This is what led to my breakdown, everything compounded over time and I couldn’t do it anymore, I couldn’t carry it anymore.
When you look at your rock bottom moment, asking yourself, “do you have those people pleasing tendencies? Have you been prioritizing taking care of everyone else? Have you forgotten to take care of yourself?”
What societal conditioning or old programming has pushed you into those people pleasing tendencies? For instance, I grew up in the age where I was told that I was a “good girl” when I was a child for everything that I did. Every good thing I did, it was “good girl, you’re such a good girl”. You don’t realize how that can have a negative impact on you until you awaken to it, until you look deeper into it. For me, it began to have a negative impact on me because I began to live from a desire of needing other people to validate me. I needed to hear the “good girl”, I needed to hear somebody else’s approval of me, telling me that I did a good job or I was a good person. I began to be who I thought other people needed me to be in order to then receive their approval. Now I think I’m getting deeper into people pleasing versus being an empath, so if you haven’t already, go back and listen to the last episode in order to understand that.
Ultimately, your rock bottom moment was your spiritual awakening because you haven’t been living your truth. When you hit that rock bottom moment it can’t get any worse, the emotions are completely overwhelming you. It feels like life is over as you know it, you don’t know what to do, where to go, what to say, who to be. This is your spiritual awakening because your soul is literally coming into this space saying “we’ve been living somebody else’s truth. We’ve been living somebody else’s version of happiness. We’ve been trying to reach somebody else’s version of success.” And maybe not somebody else’s but this societal conditioning of what we’ve been taught success is, this old programming of what we’ve been taught the steps are to take to reach that success and happiness.
You’ve become so disconnected from your spirit and your soul by prioritizing a way of living that is not fulfilling and will not satisfy you. That is the societal conditioning and old programming that you’ve taken on. A lot of people recognize this when they look at their productivity levels, the hustle and go-go-go mentality. The pressure you feel to achieve everything and accomplish everything. When you are living from that state and you dig in deeper to your truth you have to ask yourself, “why? Why am I living this way? Why am I behaving this way? Why am I prioritizing it so much? Am I prioritizing it for fear of something or am I prioritizing it because I actually desire to reach this success and accomplishment?”
For people pleasers, oftentimes we are living from this state of fear, fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of judgment, fear of being misunderstood. We are not living from our soul truth because we are living from the old programming of “I need this external validation”. This is what ends up leading us to our rock bottom moment because either we are not receiving the external validation; we are now carrying the weight of so much fear, so much sadness, so much overwhelm, so much disconnection. We are living from this state of feeling like we don’t belong and that is what leads to the breakdown and the rock bottom.
Another thing that can lead to the rock bottom or feeling like we haven’t been living our truth, is when we place our dreams and desires on the back burner. We are focused on somebody else’s dreams and desires; or we are focused on taking care of somebody else; or we are put in a situation where we quite literally have to place our dreams and desires on the back burner because we have to focus on something else. Over time that compounds and we fall further and further away from those dreams and desires. We keep saying to ourselves “one day in the future. One day in the future I will work on that. One day in the future I will do that thing.” We become further and further away from our truth, from the meaning, from the purpose that gives us drive, that gives us a reason to show up, a healthy reason to show up. Those dreams and desires are yours for a reason. They give you a drive, a purpose, and a determination to show up.
When you are working towards those dreams and desires you are not only feeling more fulfilled as you achieve step after step after step, but your spirit within you calls you forward and encourages you to keep going. You feel those glimmers of hope and belief and trust that everything is working out in your favour when you are working towards those dreams and desires. When you put them on the back burner, it’s so much easier to be insecure, to not have confidence in yourself and your journey, to not believe in your ability to reach those dreams and desires. It becomes so much easier to live from a state of fear, worry, doubt. That is why, when you hit your rock bottom it is your spiritual awakening because you haven’t been living your truth. You’ve been living somebody else’s truth. You’ve been living based on societal conditioning and old programming. You’ve been living based on people pleasing tendencies. You’ve been putting your dreams and desires on the back burner, prioritizing somebody else.
Your rock bottom is your spiritual awakening because you wake up to the fact that you are not living your truth. This is when a soul retrieval is necessary.
A SOUL RETRIEVAL IS NECESSARY
When you have lived the majority of your life based on societal conditioning and old programming, or people pleasing tendencies, or placing your dreams on the back burner, what you have done… without realizing this, this is unconscious, you have no idea that you have done this. So there is no shame, no guilt, no judgment. But what you have done is you have become disconnected from your soul, you have become disconnected from your spirit. The moment you have that rock bottom and you are now aware that something needs to change, this is the journey of your soul retrieval.
I remember a couple years after my mental and emotional breakdown, I got together with my parents and one of my brothers. Afterwards my mom sent me a text message and she said how wonderful it was to see me that weekend and my dad and her were talking about how they haven’t seen that version of me since before puberty. “It was so great to see the old Sydney again, we haven’t seen you like that since before puberty”. I remember I was triggered because I thought “well then who have I been? If you haven’t seen this version of me since before I hit puberty, it’s been almost 20 years.” Maybe it was 18 years, I don’t know when I hit puberty but you know what I mean, it had been a lot of years. It had been more years since puberty than the years I had lived before puberty. Puberty happens when you’re 12 or 13.
“We haven’t seen this version of you since before you hit puberty.” Well then who was I? Who had I been for the last 16, 18 years of my life? I didn’t realize it then, but now I can see how I moved through a soul retrieval.
When we lose ourselves as teenagers, as young adults, even as children, we lose parts of ourselves because we take on that societal conditioning. We take on the programming from the world around us. It sounds sad and it sounds disheartening that this is something we experience and yet I truly do believe that this is part of our human experience. We are meant to evolve our souls and we are here to expand our spirit. The only way to do that is to go through hardship. We have to lose part of our self to then awaken to the fact that we have lost part of our self, and then we have to do the work to parent ourselves, to re-find ourselves. Not just find ourselves, but uncover who we truly are, to uncover who we came here to be before society told us who to be. We have to discover who we want to become, not who we think we should become or who the world wants us to become.
When my mom had said that she hadn’t seen that version of me since before puberty, after I felt triggered I did some work and I uncovered why. Why haven’t they seen this version of me since before I hit puberty? Well, I became a people pleaser and I desired that external validation, again go listen to the last episode. In this, I had a fear of judgment and a fear of rejection, so I tried to become who I thought other people wanted me to be. So I lost myself, with each passing day and each passing year, I pushed my soul down, I pushed my true spirit, my true essence, my true nature, I pushed her to the side. I judged her. I judged her harshly because I didn’t believe she was enough and I didn’t believe she was worthy. I thought there was some other way to be enough, there was some other way to be worthy. I thought other people had to tell me I was worthy and that I was enough.
Your rock bottom moment is your spiritual awakening because you wake up to the fact that you are not the version of you that you came here to be. You are wearing layers of protection to try and not be hurt. You are wearing layers of protection because you are afraid that you are not worthy, you are afraid that you are not enough.
You are worthy.
You are enough.
When you take time to connect with your soul, your soul will remind you in every single passing moment how worthy you are, how deserving you are, how enough you are. But the voice inside of your head doesn't listen. The voice inside your head is so filled with fear, and anger, and sadness, because you have lost parts of your soul, because you haven’t been living your truth.
When you have this spiritual awakening after your rock bottom moment, you start to recognize that you desire to live with purpose rather than from pressure. Your life starts to change because you begin to realize that you haven’t felt fulfilled in your life and you want to feel fulfilled. You begin to realize that you’ve built a life from stress, and strain and pressure and forcefulness and rushed behaviour and it hasn’t felt satisfying and it doesn’t feel good. All of a sudden you realize you want meaning, you want to experience purpose, soul purpose. Why am I here? What am I here for? There is a whole episode on that question “what are you here for?”.
You desire to live with purpose rather than from pressure. This is the beginning of your soul retrieval. Your soul lives with purpose. When you are living from a fear based state you are living from pressure, when you are living from a soul based state you are living from purpose. Your spiritual awakening needed to happen in order for you to recognize that you are done with the pressure and you want more meaning in your life, you want more fulfillment, you want more purpose. When you begin to live your truth, your life starts to feel more purposeful.
The soul retrieval is necessary because you want to know who you really are and you want to belong. Your rock bottom moment, at least for myself, I woke up and realized I don’t like who I am and I don’t like who I’ve become. I realized I wanted to know who I came here to be and I want to become a version of myself that I really love. That is when you begin the process of retrieving your soul, reconnecting with your soul, awakening your soul. You want to know who you really are and you want to belong.
When you turn inwards, when you start to understand yourself, you start to understand your fears and your shadows. You start to understand the societal conditioning and programming that is deep in your subconscious, you start to bring that to the conscious level. You start to ask yourself “is this behaviour something I want to embody? Does this feel good for me? Is this the version of myself that I want to be in this world?” When you start to ask yourself those questions you are awakening your soul, you are connecting to your spirit and you are beginning to understand who you really are.
The only way for you to feel like you belong is for you to start to connect with yourself. When you connect deeper with yourself you start to recognize, of course you belong. Maybe the spaces you’ve been in and the people you’ve surrounded yourself with are just not the spaces and people that help you to feel like you belong. Or maybe they are, this could go one of two ways. When you start to awaken to your soul truths and you start to discover who you really are, maybe you can see that the people who surround you are not aligned with your soul. Instead they are aligned with the false version of yourself that you have created in order to try and fit in, but because it’s a false version of yourself you never truly belonged there in the first place.
When you do this work in your spiritual awakening through your soul retrieval, there are people that are going to leave your life, because they never belonged with you in the first place. That is one way that it can go. Another way it can go is the people that are in your life that you always did belong with, you could never fully appreciate that feeling of belonging because you weren’t living from your truth, you weren’t fully connected to your soul. So you could never receive their compassion, their support fully because you weren’t in a place where you were able to receive it. But now that you are desiring to live with more purpose, now that you are retrieving your soul and you are connecting with yourself on a spiritual level in a much deeper way, you are creating safety for yourself, you are understanding your emotional well-being, you are working through that old programming, the societal conditioning, you are working through that, you can now see the people around you who make you feel like you belong. You can actually feel that sense of belonging now because you are ready for it, you are open to it.
Your rock bottom moment is your spiritual awakening because it is the moment the universe grabs you by your shoulders and shakes you awake. It is the Universe quite literally saying, “life can’t keep going the way that it has been. Wake up and see that you need to create change.”
Your rock bottom moment you almost get tired of your own shit. You get tired of what life has become. You get tired of repeating the same pattern over and over and over again. You finally wake up and you say “screw this”.
Maybe the wake up period is not as beautiful as just saying “screw this”. Maybe you land in a puddle of tears, barely able to breathe because the weight of the walls crumbling down over you are so intoxicating and overwhelming and ugh. I put myself back in that place and I can just see the walls caving in on me, feeling like “I can’t keep doing this. I can’t live in this capacity any longer.” That rock bottom moment is a moment where you wake up and sometimes you say “the only option is to walk away, to walk away from what life has been. To walk away from this version of myself that I have created. To walk away from the pain.” Whatever that rock bottom moment looks like, ultimately you have awakened to the fact that something needs to change. You are tired of the same thing. You are tired of not living from that sense of purpose. You are wanting to know who you really are and you want to feel like you belong. That is your spiritual awakening. You have awakened. You are conscious and now you can't go backwards, now that you have awakened and you have become conscious the choice lies in your hands. How are you going to choose differently?
That is really what it ends up being, you have to make different choices. You have to choose to become aware of that societal conditioning. You have to choose to change that old programming. You have to choose to walk away from those people pleasing tendencies. You have to choose to no longer place your dreams and desires on the back burner because you are retrieving your soul. You are calling back that version of you from when you were a young child. The version of you that was unharmed and had so much spirit.
Maybe that version of you was only available for the first couple months of your life before society and the world around you came crumbling down. It can be hard to call back that version of you or to uncover that version of you. That is what I am here for, that is the work that I want to do with you. You are not alone and it is such meaningful and empowering work when you can retrieve your soul and you begin to live a fulfilling life. When you begin to create your life from a soul centered space rather than just barely surviving because you are in a fear induced state constantly. You have now awakened and you are beginning to move forward and this is how you empower yourself.
I want to take us into my favourite part of every episode and that is Self Reflection creates Soul Connection. These words that I speak and this wisdom that I provide, these channeled messages that flow through me, they do no good if you turn it off and walk away and forget what I said by tomorrow. I want you to take it and apply it to your life. That is how you create change.
SELF REFLECTION CREATES SOUL CONNECTION
Self reflection is a powerful tool that helps you to better understand yourself and strengthen your connection with the Universe. Which is where you build trust and find a way to surrender more easily.
Use these journal prompts to help support yourself through your spiritual awakening. Whether your rock bottom moment was recent or it was years ago, these four questions are going to help you. They are going to help you better understand yourself as a soul.
1 - What behaviours and habits do you want to change about yourself?
This question is really important because it makes you aware of the habits you have that aren’t healthy, that aren’t supportive. It puts the power back into your hands.
2 - What dreams and desires do you want to start focusing on now?
Stop putting yourself on the back burner. Don’t wait for the future because the future will never come. Your life is happening right now. What is important to you? What do you want to start prioritizing? Even if the steps are really small, start bringing them into your life right now.
3 - How can you start showing yourself more love and compassion?
Life is hard enough as it is. You don’t need to be so hard on yourself all the time. Let the light shine through. You are such a caring, kind and compassionate person and you easily share your light with others. How can you share that light with yourself?
4 - What is one lesson you’ve learned from your rock bottom?
Allow it to teach you. Allow yourself to grow from this. You got nowhere to go but up. Allow yourself to start taking the steps and moving up the ladder.
Your rock bottom moment is your spiritual awakening. This is the moment where you get to choose differently. I am here to help you to learn, to help you and to provide a safe space for you in this soul retrieval. If today’s message resonates with you or connects with you then I encourage you to continue to follow along because I am going to continue to share. Not only will I share these messages, but I will share tips and practices that can help you. They can help you to connect with yourself, I mean go and use those journal prompts because they will help you to connect to yourself.
GOODBYE
As I close out this episode I want you to remember, your life is happening right now. There is not some future moment you need to rush forward to. Be here, take a deep breath, know that you are meant to be in this moment.
Life will always bring more lessons.
Your soul will always guide you to more healing.
Your mind will always require support to see from a bigger perspective.
You will always desire to be seen, heard and understood.
Be here now for yourself. In time you will feel the call to share more light and compassion with the world.
I’m Sydney, signing off and saying thank you, thank you, thank you.
Take your spiritual growth journey to the NEXT LEVEL and start creating real, positive changes in your life now.
You want to live more authentically.
You want to feel more fulfilled.
You are tired of feeling like you’re in the wrong place, working towards the wrong things, or surrounded by people who don’t get you.
Access the FREE Spiritual Workshop - Embarking On Your Spiritual Awakening - by signing up for my email community at the link below!
Until next time, sending love & light on your spiritual journey,
Sydney Smith
Spiritual Mentor
Founder of Adventuring with Poseidon Wellness
