Writing Memoir After Spiritual Awakening

Advice for when you're no longer a character.

- BY SARAH CHAUNCEY

For millennia, spiritual awakening has been shrouded in secrecy behind monastery walls and inside Buddhist temples. Yet an increasing number of humans are waking up to a deeper reality, and many people want to write about their experiences.

The phrase spiritual awakening is used to describe an awareness that there is a deeper reality than we can perceive. This transformation might be initiated by crises that leave your life unrecognizable or a “glitch in the Matrix” moment, among other initiations.

At its deepest and rarest, awakening refers to the collapse of duality and narrative. We stop perceiving ourselves as an isolated individual oriented to the stories that defined us. Instead, we become part of what in Hinduism and Vedanta is referred to as the divine game. Many people call this experience enlightenment, though there's no operational definition for that word, either.

MY STORY

For nearly 30 years, I was a writer of many stripes, including comedy and personal essay. I'd built a career around taking a collection of facts and creating entertaining stories and punchlines that showed how hilarious or awful or humiliating a situation had been.

During a survival-level crisis 15 years ago, I began meditating out of desperation. One day, I woke up and I knew that I was love, that everybody was love, and that love was the fabric of the entire universe. My ego had been so depleted from multiple crises that the animating force of life had been able to break through and look around.

My old snarky, intellectual snob voice didn’t fit any more, so I stopped writing creatively. For a while, I didn't even want anything to do with language, because I had begun to see words as simply a series of sophisticated grunts and symbols that had no innate meaning.

FIVE POINTERS FOR WRITING A SPIRITUAL MEMOIR