The Awakened Journey
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Why You Feel Disconnected From Reality during Awakening
24 April 2026
There's a particular kind of disorientation that can arrive during a spiritual awakening — a sense that the world has gone slightly out of focus, that you're watching your own life from behind glass, that the ordinary feels suddenly strange and distant.
If you've experienced this, you're not losing your mind. You may be catching a glimpse of something much larger.
My Introduction to Disconnection
My most profound experience of disconnection from reality didn't begin gradually. It arrived all at once, in the recovery room of a cardiac intensive care unit, following eight hours of open-heart surgery.
In August 2021, a spontaneous aortic dissection — a catastrophic tear in the main artery of my heart — required emergency surgery using a technique called the Frozen Elephant Trunk. I have Marfan Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, and this was my second open-heart surgery in two years.
When I came around in the ICU, I couldn't speak — I was still intubated — and I couldn't immediately piece together where I was or what had happened. But the most disorienting thing wasn't the pain, or the tubes, or the machines. It was this: everything was repeating over and over again.
I would hear my husband's phone ring. I would hear his side of the conversation. And then, what seemed like a little while later, I would hear the whole thing again — exactly the same. Not as a memory. As an event, happening in real time, for what felt like the first time.
I knew the movie Groundhog Day. And so when I finally had enough voice to say anything, that's what I said.
"Groundhog Day. Everything happens over and over."
At first my husband didn't understand. But after a few more loops, he did.
What Was Actually Happening
My first instinct was that it was the medication — the morphine, the anaesthesia, the sedatives. And that was probably part of it.
But something else was also true, and I could feel it even then, even through the fog: my heart and my mind had not been connected. During surgery, I had been on a heart-lung machine. My heart had been stopped. And somewhere in that extraordinary interval, something had come uncoupled.
I didn't have the kind of near-death experience people often describe — no tunnel of light, no out-of-body vision of the room from above, no encounter with a deceased loved one. What I experienced was something quieter and stranger than that.
It felt like a waiting room that didn't observe time, or space, or vision. No fear. No peace. Simply an awareness. A knowing. Without a self.
(Even now, writing that, I notice how strange it is to use words like I and me to describe a state in which the concept of "I" barely applied.)
When I came back — when consciousness began returning — it felt like being pulled back into my body. Like my soul, my spirit, my awareness, was being drawn back through a threshold. The Groundhog Day looping, I came to understand, was part of that recalibration. My brain and body catching up with each other. My human self reassembling.
The Anchors That Held Me
Two things kept me tethered to life during those early days in the ICU.
The first was the nurses. Their presence, their gentleness, their quiet attentiveness — they were the human thread that kept connecting me back to being here, to being a person among people, to embodied life. I will never forget them.
The second was the pain.
That might sound strange. But the intense physical sensation throughout my body was, in its own way, an anchor. Pain is undeniably present. Pain is undeniably now. It pulled me into the moment in a way nothing else could.
What This Taught Me about Disconnection
The experience of my heart and mind decoupling — and then slowly, painstakingly reconnecting — gave me something I hadn't expected: a felt understanding of what continues.
When I was in that neutral, timeless state during surgery, there was no body. No pain. No fear. No sense of self in the usual way. And yet there was something. Awareness. Presence. Whatever we want to call it.
That's when I began to understand, not intellectually but experientially, that the spirit, the soul, the consciousness — whatever language resonates with you — continues. The body is a vehicle built for living an embodied life. When the vehicle stops, that energy doesn't disappear. It simply returns to the state it was in before it inhabited a body.
There's nothing to fear in that. Nothing bad can happen to us — to that energy — in that state.
What This Means for Your Awakening
You may never have had surgery. You may never have been anywhere near a cardiac ICU. And yet if you're moving through a spiritual awakening, there's a good chance you've felt something that echoes what I've described — that strange glass-wall feeling, the sense of unreality, the world looking the same but feeling fundamentally different.
This is one of the most common and least talked about aspects of awakening. And it frightens people.
Here's what I want you to know.
That disconnection isn't a malfunction. It isn't a sign that something is wrong with you. In many cases, it's a sign that your awareness is expanding beyond the boundaries of your ordinary, embodied sense of self — and that expansion can feel deeply disorienting before it feels like anything else.
The "you" that feels untethered, unreal, slightly outside your own life? That may be closer to your essential nature than the busy, anchored, task-completing self you're more used to inhabiting.
The disconnection passes. The recalibration happens. And what remains, on the other side of it, tends to be a quieter, clearer, more grounded sense of who — and what — you actually are.
You Don't Have to Navigate This Alone
If you're in the disorienting middle of this — the glass-wall feeling, the unreality, the sense of being pulled between worlds — I want you to know that what you're experiencing has been experienced before. By others. By me.
The Awakened Journey Collective exists for exactly this: a community of people who understand what it means to move through awakening, including the difficult and frightening parts that don't get talked about enough.
Before I go — I'd love to know: have you experienced this sense of disconnection during your awakening? What helped you feel real again? Share by reaching out to me via the contact form below, or bring it to the Collective.
Explore your journey with the Awakened Journey Journal, Oracle Cards, or join us in the Collective.