The Awakened Journey
Blog
Spiritual Awakening and the Nervous System — What's Really Happening
7 May 2026
There's a scene I've carried with me for most of my life, though I didn't fully understand what it meant until decades later.
I was around seven or eight years old. It was a warm, humid evening in Texas, and my step-mom and I spread a blanket out in the front yard and lay there looking up at the night sky. She had something important she wanted to share with me.
She asked me to sit facing her, legs crossed, and began to explain things I had never heard before — meditation, auras, the energy that moves through and around every living being. She told me to close my eyes and visualize bright white light streaming into the top of my head, flowing through my body. I didn't fully understand the objective. I remember sneaking peeks at her to check if I was doing it right.
Then she showed me something that stayed with me long after that night faded into ordinary memory.
She took a few deep breaths, rubbed her palms together briskly — the way you'd warm your hands on a cold morning — and then slowly pulled them apart, palms facing each other, moving them together and apart like an accordion. Each time, a little further. Until it looked as though she was holding an invisible basketball between her hands.
She said she could see the color of her aura and feel the energy of the universe in the space between her palms.
Then she asked me to try.
I rubbed my hands together. I made the same slow accordion motion. And whether it was imagination or something more, I felt resistance building between my palms — like squeezing a soft balloon. I didn't want to let it go. That feeling was fascinating in a way I had no words for.
She told me to keep practicing. I said I would, even though I wasn't sure what for.
I wouldn't understand what for until I was an adult, lying on a treatment table in a rehabilitation clinic, far from Texas, feeling that same energy again for the first time.
The Doctor Who Wasn't Quite What He Seemed
Toward the end of my four-week stay at rehab, my doctor asked if I'd like a couple of osteopathic treatments before I went home. I said yes without hesitation. I'd had osteopathy before — hands-on work for joint pain and healing. I thought I knew what to expect.
I didn't.
When I lay down on the treatment table, he closed his eyes, took a few slow breaths, and rubbed his palms together — briskly, deliberately. Just as my step-mom had done all those years ago on a blanket under the Texas stars.
Then he placed his hands on either side of my head, over my temples, and stayed there. Still. Quiet. No rubbing, no manipulation. Just warmth and presence.
his palms. And then something else — a gentle buzzing, almost a tingling, wherever his hands rested. He moved slowly through the session: the back of my head, my chest, my abdomen, my knees, my feet. Each placement carried the same quiet hum.
I left feeling something I still find difficult to name. Not just relaxed. Somehow more myself.
At the second session, the buzzing felt stronger. And at the end, he looked at me and said simply: "Your heart chakra is blocked."
I had no idea what he meant. I nodded. And I went home carrying a question I didn't yet have words for.
Back home, I fell into a deep rabbit hole — searching for anything that might explain what I had felt. That's when I first encountered the word Reiki. And with it came that rush of memory: the blanket, the stars, the accordion motion of my step-mom's hands, the resistance building between my own small palms.
I had already been introduced to this energy as a child. I simply hadn't known what it was called.
I found a Reiki master and began training. Not as a hobby — as a calling.
The Phone Call I Knew Was Coming
Around that same time, something else happened that I still think about.
I was waiting to hear back from my doctor about an outpatient rehabilitation application. Too much time had passed. I called the clinic — he wasn't available, and they said he'd call me back.
Then at some point, I had a quiet, sudden knowing that he was about to call. Not a thought exactly. More like a certainty that arrived fully formed. And in the same instant, I felt that familiar buzzing move through my body.
A millisecond later, my phone rang.
It was him.
So What Was Actually Happening?
I'll be honest: I didn't have a framework for any of this at the time. I still hold these experiences more with wonder than with explanation. Working in a scientific environment, I've occasionally wondered whether something like quantum physics might offer a language for what I felt — the sense of energetic connection across distance, the body signalling something the mind hadn't caught up to yet.
But a complete, tidy explanation? I don't have one. And I've made peace with that.
What I can offer is this: during a spiritual awakening, many people report that their body begins to communicate in ways it never has before. Sensations that feel vibrational or electrical. A feeling of energy moving through the limbs, the chest, the spine. A sudden whole-body knowing — before the mind confirms it.
Science offers a partial window here. The nervous system, particularly the autonomic nervous system, governs our baseline state — how safe we feel, how open or contracted we are, how much we allow in. During awakening, many people describe a kind of expansion, as though the body's sensitivity has been quietly turned up. What was once background noise becomes signal. What was once subtle becomes undeniable.
The vagus nerve — the longest nerve in the body, connecting brain to heart to gut — is thought to play a central role in our felt sense of inner knowing, our capacity for connection, and experiences of awe and compassion. Some researchers believe it may also be involved in what we call transcendence.
Whether the buzzing I felt was energetic, neurological, or something that simply doesn't have a name yet — it was real. And it was communicating something.
In the Stillness, the Body Speaks More Softly
Once I began meditating regularly after leaving rehab, something else emerged. In the quiet, I would often feel light, feathery sensations on my face — the gentlest brush against my skin, almost like being touched by something invisible.
Different from the buzzing. Softer. More refined.
I've come to think of these as the body's quieter language. When we slow down enough to listen, it turns out the body has been speaking all along — in warmth, in sensation, in that millisecond knowing before the phone rings. We simply weren't still enough to hear it.
Awakening, in many ways, is learning to listen.
If Your Body Is Doing Things You Can't Explain
If you're in the middle of an awakening and your body is behaving in ways you have no framework for — if sensations are arising that feel unfamiliar, if you're picking up on things you can't rationally account for, if your felt experience of the world has suddenly become more vivid and strange — I want to say this clearly:
You are not broken. You are not imagining it. And you are almost certainly not in danger.
The beginning phase can feel the most intense, because so much is happening at once. Everything is new. There's no map. And that can be frightening.
But try, if you can, to remain curious rather than afraid. Stay open to what arises. The body isn't malfunctioning — it's waking up. And the experiences it's offering you, however unfamiliar, are part of something far larger than fear alone can see.
You are simply becoming more of what you already are.
You Don't Have to Walk This Path Alone
If you're in the middle of something you can't quite explain — sensations that have no name, a body that seems to be speaking a language you haven't learned yet — know that you are not the only one feeling this way. Others have felt it too. So have I.
The Awakened Journey Collective exists for exactly this: a space where people who are moving through awakening can come together, share their experiences, and be truly understood — including the strange, the unexplainable, and the quietly extraordinary.
Have you noticed unusual physical sensations during your awakening? I'd love to hear from you — feel free to reach out via the contact form below or join the Awakened Journey Collective and share your experience.
Explore your journey with the Awakened Journey Journal, Oracle Cards, or join us in the Collective.