32 Blocks to Spiritual Awakening (and How to Avoid Them)

32 Blocks to Spiritual Awakening

Here are 32 things that will block or slow your spiritual awakening, and how to avoid them. Maybe you’ve been doing some of them without knowing the consequences?

1. Having an agenda when doing inner work. Thinking your ego-mind knows better than your soul’s inherent wisdom is a fool’s errand. Get out of the way (mentally), feel into your body, and see where it takes you. Your soul’s innate guidance will take you where you need to go.
2. Knowledge won’t get you there. Reading all the books and knowing all the things won’t change who you are. Your mind will be full, but it won’t impact your soul. I learnt this one the hard way. Healing, growth and awakening don’t take off until you start doing experiential inner work.
3. Meditating only in the mind. This just spiritualises the ego-mind, which gives the illusion of spiritual growth, but it actually just creates a spiritual ego. Focusing on only one of your three centres of consciousness (head, heart and belly) puts your entire system out of balance, which is detrimental to your nervous system, growth and awakening.
4. Spiritual Bypassing. Only focusing on the spiritual (the light), and ignoring the psychological (the shadow). Ignoring, repressing or denying your unspiritual parts. This is like blasting more hot air into a balloon and expecting to ascend, when you haven’t released the sandbags.
5. Not being honest with yourself about your issues, weaknesses, deficiencies, beliefs, etc. Spiritual awakening requires radical self-honesty, and avoiding the truth will keep you stuck. Until you bring subconscious patterns into the light, they’ll continue to shape your reality from the shadows.
6. Not being your authentic self. Pretending to be someone you’re not (and this includes people pleasing) cuts you off from your true nature.
7. Not having integrity. Integrity means living in alignment with your deepest truth. When your actions, words, and values are out of sync, inner conflict arises and your energy becomes scattered. Awakening requires coherence — a wholeness that comes from walking your talk.
8. Not having a love for the truth. True seekers are truth seekers, even when it’s uncomfortable or unsettling, because “the truth shall set you free”.
9. Putting all your hope in a teacher or guru, and expecting them to ride on their coattails. Your growth and awakening are 100% your responsibility. Your teacher can guide and support you, but you have to walk your path – in session and in daily life.
10. Blaming others instead of owning your “stuff“. If you aren’t mature enough to take responsibility for your buttons being pressed, then you certainly aren’t ready to awaken.
11. Holding onto grudges, resentment, anger or hatred. Let it go and forgive them, not for their benefit, but so you can move one.
12. Fascination with knowledge and concepts. Concepts are about reality – they are not the direct experience of reality. Concepts, especially identification with conceptual ego-self, maintain duality because the mind gets in the way of direct experience.
13. Fascination with complexity. Awakening feels wonderfully simple because it’s more about shedding what you aren’t (illusion, negativity, deficiency, overthinking, mis-identification), than adding to what you are.
14. Mistaking spiritual states for awakening or enlightenment. States are temporary – awakening is permanent.
15. Chasing spiritual experiences. Awakening isn’t about chasing spiritual experiences – it’s about becoming grounded in presence, here and now. The divine is in the stillness, not the fireworks.
16. Believing the ego can become enlightened. Your ego (conceptual-self) is “form” (psychologically structured), your soul’s essence is “formless” (misty essence). Form cannot enter the formless realm of the soul.
17. Thinking awakening is about self-improvement. It’s not about improving your ego; it’s about disidentifying from your ego (or conceptual-self). The ego’s rough edges will dissolve along the way, but that’s not what it’s all about.
18. Fear of the Fear. Inner work involves feeling into some things that feel scary. If you’re afraid of feeling through that fear, it will stop you dead in your tracks.
19. Not being comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. Growth and awakening require you to sit with discomfort rather than avoid or numb it. Emotional pain, fear and shame aren’t obstacles to healing and growth, they are gateways.
20. Not being comfortable with uncertainty. Not knowing is challenging for the conceptual mind, but transcending the ego (conceptual-self) isn’t possible until you become comfortable with not knowing who you are.
21. Putting it off until later. I don’t have the time now, because of [some excuse].
22. A judgmental mind. Judgment shuts down compassion, which is essential for healing and reintegration. It also creates separation, and awakening requires unity.
23. Believing enlightenment is the final destination. It’s an important milestone, but there is no end to the journey of awakening or the evolution of consciousness.
24. Believing enlightenment turns you into a saint, that you’ll no longer be triggered, and you’ll no longer face any difficulties in life. Enlightenment isn’t a one-off event – it’s an ongoing journey, and we grow through adversity and challenge.
25. Believing enlightenment is the end of suffering. Enlightenment does reduce suffering, but it doesn’t eliminate it. You still feel pain, face challenges, and feel shitty some days.
26. Feeding your negative thoughts and deficient feelings. Your true nature is naturally whole and complete, so don’t buy in to negativity or deficience – feel into them, but don’t buy into them.
27. Believing your thoughts in general. Beliefs are persistent thoughts, but thoughts are supposed to be transient – we aren’t supposed to hold onto them. Thoughts are conceptual representations, not actuality (which is dynamic), so holding onto them keeps us stuck.
28. Hoping enlightenment will happen soon. This creates separation from where you are now (unenlightened) and where you want to be in the future (enlightened).
29. Expecting a big “ta-da” moment. For most people, enlightenment creeps up gradually. You get little tastes of it, that last longer and longer, then one day you realise it’s become permanent.
30. Over-identifying with the seeker. If you are always seeking, you’ll never find. Attending all the workshops and retreats won’t help you unless you embody everything you learn. The “spiritual seeker” or “course junkie” identity can become a superficial distraction to avoid going deep.
31. Thinking you can do it alone. It’s simply not possible to do deep inner work on our own. Well, maybe it is, but it’s incredibly slow and arduous. Working with someone who has already walked the path, means they can guide and support you. But if you’d rather hack your way through the “psychospiritual jungle” on your own, I wish you all the best.
32. Denying your awakeness in this very moment. Awakening is not a future goal – it is the realisation of what’s already here. The present moment is the gateway – don’t miss it.