🪷 Spiritual Fatigue Is Not a Failure-It Is the Descent Phase of Awakening🪷
When Tiredness Is Not a Failure, but a Threshold If you’ve been feeling unusually tired, mentally foggy, low in energy, or unmotivated, please pause before judging yourself. For many people are on a genuine inner path, these experiences are not signs of regression or weakness … they are signals of a deep internal transition. Across psychology and spiritual traditions, this phase is well known. It appears when a person’s inner world is reorganizing at a fundamental level. In Jungian psychology, this corresponds to the Nigredo stage of individuation … a period of “darkening” where old identities, motivations, and self-concepts begin to loosen. Jung was clear that growth does not move in a straight line. Consciousness often deepens through periods of confusion, fatigue, and apparent loss of direction. Spiritual traditions echo this understanding. Christian mysticism calls it the Dark Night of the Soul. Eastern traditions describe it as a phase of emptiness or dissolution. Animist and esoteric paths recognize it as an initiation where the old self can no longer carry what is emerging. Different languages. The same human experience. What Is Happening Beneath the Surface During this stage, the psyche redirects energy inward. The nervous system softens its grip on constant striving. Motivations rooted in survival, proving, or external validation begin to fade … often before new sources of meaning have fully formed. This can feel disorienting. The brain fog is not a defect; it is a slowing. The exhaustion is not laziness; it is recalibration. The lack of motivation is not failure; it is a letting go of what no longer fits. As Jung wrote, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain.” But this pain is not punitive; it is formative. The Role of the Shadow When awareness expands, the Shadow naturally becomes more present. Unintegrated emotions, grief, fatigue, and old patterns surface not to overwhelm us, but to be acknowledged and metabolized. This is why people in this phase often feel: