In Case of Global Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Our Awakening

by Catherine G. Lucas, author of In Case of Spiritual Emergency

Do you feel the intensity of the times we’re living in? Do you feel concerned, anxious, or even dread about where we might be heading? There’s no doubt about it. We are in a state of global emergency. But what if I told you that the chaos and collapse we see all around us is a well-known process, a recognized and researched process, a process called spiritual emergency?

I’ve spent the last 20 years living, working, and breathing spiritual emergency. I’ve spent two decades helping others reframe crisis as opportunity and written four books on harnessing the transformational power of crisis, including In Case of Spiritual Emergency: Moving Successfully Through Your Awakening, which has just celebrated its tenth year in publication.

I’d love to share with you some precious insights into how this process of spiritual emergency, of awakening through crisis, works. How it unfolds. It doesn’t matter whether that’s at the personal level or the planetary. It’s the same process, with a few nuances. Whether it’s the healing and growth that comes individually or the evolution and awakening of consciousness that comes collectively, there are discernible patterns to the phenomenon.

Make yourself a hot drink and curl up in your favorite, comfy chair. I’d like to tell you a story to show you how spiritual emergency unfolds and why those of us who have been through these kind of profound crises can recognize what is now happening globally. It’s a story that will help you make sense of the extraordinary times we are living in, a story that will enable you to see the bigger picture of where we are heading.

The story begins in 1984, which is fitting for a young woman who was a fan of George Orwell’s work. At the tender age of 20, I found myself admitted to an acute psychiatric ward. I spent a terrifying and bewildering month there. I then spent most of the following year in bed, sleeping, gradually tapering off the heavy-duty medication I’d been put on. I lost a year of my life.

At the time I had no idea of the complex relationship between mental breakdown and spiritual breakthrough. I knew nothing of transpersonal psychology or spiritual emergency. Little did I realize it would become central to my life’s work.

Fast forward to 2003, two decades later. I was 40. On a trip to Egypt things started to unravel fast for me. And this is one of the features of spiritual emergency, how very quickly it can unfold. What I went through emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually was so extreme that my legs gave way and I lost the use of them. I couldn’t even get to the bathroom of my hotel room. For a few days I was wheelchair-bound and ended up travelling back to the UK like that.

Within the space of that one short week in Egypt I experienced what felt like the entire suffering of humanity going back to the beginning of time. I was also blessed with unitive states of consciousness of bliss, joy, infinite gratitude, and love. I felt the boundaries of what I call “Catherine” falling away into a vast, expansive spaciousness. I touched into the truth of who we really are at the core of our beings. It was truly transformative. From there, after a period of recovery, I went on to completely recreate my life from a whole new level of consciousness and healing.

At the planetary level too, if we take the example of the coronavirus pandemic, it came upon us incredibly fast. One minute we were going about our normal daily lives. The next minute we couldn’t go to work, the kids couldn’t go to school, we couldn’t socialize with family and friends. This too is a key feature of spiritual emergency: everything familiar gets stripped away. Suddenly. All that is no longer serving us has to go. It can be brutal. Briefly, at the start of the pandemic, we saw all the pollution and consumerism that is not serving us stripped away.

Needless to say, it is an almost indescribably intense process. I shared the extremes of suffering and bliss I felt in Egypt, the rollercoaster of emotions. The pandemic too has been incredibly intense, especially the first wave of lockdown. Collective fear and grief have been extreme.

Fear is another recognizable feature of spiritual emergency at the personal level. We fear for our sanity. We fear for our lives. We are so identified with our ego -- and it is the ego which is undergoing a death, albeit in most cases temporary. So in our confusion, in our over-identification with the ego, we fear we are going to literally, physically die -- when in fact it is a symbolic death and rebirth. At the global level, with the pandemic, tragically, we have seen many physical deaths too.

How does the healing and growth happen at the personal level? How does the awakening of consciousness and collective evolution take place at the planetary level? This is where we come to one of the most challenging and painful aspects of the process.

All our shadow, all that has been buried and unacknowledged, all our wounding and trauma, all of this comes spewing up to the surface at once, like an exploding volcano, with molten lava pouring out, rocks and ash flying everywhere. At the personal level for me this had to do with sexual violation. It was horrific. Soul shattering. I was incredibly lucky to have the therapeutic help of Dr. Roger Woolger, working with his Deep Memory Process in group settings. I feel tremendously grateful to those who helped provide the holding in those therapeutic groups for such profound work. It was instrumental in paving the way for the happy, loving marriage I have today.

At our collective level, one aspect of our shadow that is now exploding into our awareness to be healed is the legacy of colonialism. The trauma and suffering resulting from the genocide, violence, and cruelty gets compounded down through the generations and plays out as addiction, sexual violation, crime, and a whole host of mental health issues. Hence the term transgenerational trauma. Colonization is as alive and present among us today as when it happened. This was brought home to me powerfully by Indigenous Aboriginal Australian researcher Judy Atkinson in a recent roundtable conversation, part of our Birth the New Earth series.

As Yeye Luisah Teish says in another Birth the New Earth dialogue, whichever side you sit on, whether, for instance, as the descendant of a slave or as the descendent of a slave owner, you have been impacted and wounded by that. Luisah does beautiful, deep work bringing these individuals together in healing circles. “The work is not easy,” she tells us. It now feels so appropriate that World Mental Health Day and World Indigenous Day sit right next to each other this year (2021), on October 10th and 11th respectively.

We are intentionally raising the voices of Indigenous Elders and leaders during our Birth the New Earth series, as well as donating to Indigenous non-profits. Why? Myself and the Co-Creating Our Future team take a systemic, holistic perspective. We see our ecological emergency, our racial emergency, and our spiritual emergency as totally interrelated. And when we explore each of these aspects we find ourselves inevitably led back to our First Nations.

When we look at the ecological crisis we see that they understand how to live sustainably, in harmony with nature, and have done so for thousands of years. They take the role of being guardians of our Mother Earth extremely seriously. When we look at the racial emergency we see the roots of that, as I’ve said, going back to how First Nations were treated due to colonization. And when we look at the phenomenon of spiritual emergency we see that shamanic peoples and cultures understand altered states of consciousness without pathologizing them. All of this is why it feels so important at this time to elevate Indigenous voices, to share their wealth of wisdom when we are looking for systemic solutions and healing.

Other Inner Traditions authors in our global online Birth the New Earth series are Paul Levy and Andrew Harvey. They take part in a spirited conversation on “The Dark Night of the Globe” with Caroline Myss. And Ervin Laszlo and Jude Currivan explore “Conscious Evolution: Within & Beyond the Quantum.” These are visionaries, all 20 of them, who are leading from the emerging future, to borrow Otto Scharmer’s phrase.

The intention with our Birth the New Earth series is to help shed light on the process of spiritual emergency at the planetary level. We aim to help you reframe crisis as opportunity, to see our global emergency as the driver for our collective evolution and awakening.

We also want to inspire and empower you to embrace your soul’s deepest calling. You don’t need to save the world. All you need to do is embrace your heart’s deepest longing. When you create the life of your dreams, guess what happens? We create the world of our dreams.