Navigating Absolute Rock Bottom: Recommended Habits and Practices to help you Crawl out of Consciousness Hell, by Doing the Absolute Minimum
Let’s say you’re at a place in your spiritual awakening journey where you are at rock bottom. You’ve got nothing left, you feel hollowed out, like that moment in Braveheart where Mel Gibson’s intestines were ripped out before his death, and you feel as if you’ve being energetically feasted on by vicious harpies. Maybe you’re living moment to moment in the depths of despair, crawling around your filthy house playing hot potato with an assortment of addictions, consumed by dark thoughts, sitting in a swamp of your own shame and self-hatred. Perhaps you’re full of rage and simultaneously navigating cycles of terror as you wonder how you’re going to survive in this world where we need to have the physical and mental capacity necessary to earn our right to exist. Maybe your body hurts, and perhaps you suspect you have autoimmune issues but you don’t have health insurance or trust in our medical system or even motivation to improve how you feel because you don’t value yourself enough to take care of yourself due to patterns of self-abandonment from unhealed childhood trauma. You either can’t eat anything without feeling nauseous, or you’re binge eating foods or drinking things that make you feel nasty, like stuffing a garbage bag full of trash trying to keep from feeling empty, alienated, and alone. Maybe you don’t even know you’re having a spiritual awakening, but you just know you feel like shit. You don’t know how your options got so limited or how it got this bad, and you feel shame about how you’re living and your mental state of disrepair and feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start.
[Spoiler alert: This is a spiritual awakening journey! We are spirits operating these little meat suits, giant bags of dirty water with elaborate electrical systems constantly monitoring our environments, creating electromagnetic imprints of our data collections of this experience in real time based on parameters created from previous data collection experiences.]
I’ve been to all of these dark places, and in fact, *not to brag*, but I’m kind of a bit of a VIP member of the club. If I had the wisdom, knowledge and experience of crawling out of Consciousness Hell back then that I do know, below is a list of what I would have told my younger self to do.
Preface: In rock bottom mode, our mind has tunnel vision due to being in a survival state, where we constantly evaluate every choice made in the world around us through the lens of level of effort vs benefits attained. Because of this limited thinking, I’ll be sharing only low-effort suggestions for when you are in Survival Mode. The intention here is to make gradual, simple, low effort shifts in your routines, mindsets, and behaviors to create additional capacity for yourself. Then, you can upgrade to better routines, mindsets and behaviors to create even more capacity, and so on. Keep making slow, gradual, forks in the road until one day, you’re very far from where you were and your old trajectory (in a good way).
So here are my suggestions:
Support the Body
Start to cultivate the mentality that you’re a little creature that you need to take care of at a baseline level, like a pet. I found that mindset to be much easier earlier on my journey, when I lacked the self-love to take care of myself for myself’s sake. When I was at rock bottom, I thought of myself as a Tamogotchi that needed to eat, exercise, sleep, and poop. Here’s my human equivalent of that:
Drink 16oz of water in the morning, preferably with a detox binder. (Helps mop up the cellular debris and toxins your cells are releasing and unclog the detox pathways to help you feel better and keep things moving).
Find a basic form of exercise. This could be going for a walk, throwing a tantrum, screaming into a pillow, jumping on a trampoline, dancing. Pick something that is easy and fun (or at least as close to fun as you can get) that you can stick to.
Pre-packaged meals if you have too little energy to cook, preferably healthy foods that have protein and a vegetable source. Smoothies are easy and you can pack a lot of nutrients in them. The more you support your body, the less work you have to do to feel better in a spiritual/mental level.
Make sure you are sleeping each night- take melatonin or magnesium if you need to. See my page on supplements. Adaptogens are great to take and will support you during this time.
5) Create at least one space in your house that you can keep physically clean, and make sure it is also energetically clean. Energetically cleansing with sage seems to only invite in spirits; I have found a better method of clearing energy, that involves epsom salts and rubbing alcohol to clear negative energy from the corners of the room to be more effective. In this method, I can physically see dark energy escaping out of the room as the salt chases it away. This really helps support your subconscious mind and energy bodies, which are constantly responding to your environment and generating emotional and mental states, whether you are consciously able to sense energy or not.
6) Salt baths are excellent for cleansing your energy bodies and leave you feeling lighter; don’t forget to clean your scalp. Hair carries a lot of energy so cleaning it is helpful for clearing energy in the upper head chakras, which often have a lot of dark energy during these types of Consciousness Hell states. Rubbing your feet activates all the energy meridians in your body, helping get energy moving.
7) Consider something like a cold plunge for states of depression and low vagal tone. When one is in dorsal vagal shutdown, states of freeze, or dissociation, I find that being in nature is the best medicine. I like to sit in a hammock, pack a thermos of hot cacao, and listen to some uplifting binaural beats.
Create more Energetic Space
Imagine the story of Sisyphus, condemned by the gods for eternity to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill only to have it roll down again once he got it to the top, as a metaphor we face in the persistent struggle against the essential absurdity of life.
We are all Sisyphus, and the boulder we carry is the karmic load we brought in from past lives, our ancestral baggage, our childhood trauma, and the limitations of our societal programming. But— Imagine we can shrink the size of that boulder through collapsing ancestral patterns and programs and clearing trauma until eventually, the boulder becomes a pebble, giving us the capacity to walk up the hill freely. We are then able to operate our life from the vantage point of the top of the hill with full access to our gifts, abilities, and armed with the wisdom gained from lessons learned from our past. Such is the result of creating energetic space in the body and speeding up our spiritual momentum.
My recommendation for immediate, rapid shifts in your current state is booking a session with a frequency/quantum healer (me). For a long term approach to tackling huge karmic loads and shrinking the boulder, consider involves investing in one of my mentor’s Awakening series. It doesn’t matter which series you buy because the purpose is to create energetic space in your body, which will allow you to expand the options available to you. Any of these series will create that for you. (My personal favorite is her Trust and Surrender with Time Series though— great for navigating fear and overwhelm). I suggest playing these sessions over and over (you can turn off the volume and play in the background as it’s the frequencies that are helping you). They will help you shift.
Our individual sessions can help clear big karmic blocks and childhood trauma that generate momentum to make this clear work happen much faster and more efficient.
Cultivate Acceptance of Each Moment
I’m trying to limit the Chicken Soul for the Soul type advice, because I remember when I was in my rock bottom states these sorts of platitudes made me want to hurl my laptop at a wall. This one is important, however. The fact is, most of the suffering we experience is in our reaction to a negative feeling, circumstance, or situation, and not to the circumstance or situation itself. I went to a hippie liberal Buddhist grad school and besides substantive college loans I came away with this gem of a parable from Buddhism about how our reaction to suffering can compound our suffering:
“In life, we can’t always control the first arrow. However, the second arrow is our reaction to the first. The second arrow is optional.”
In extreme moments, Ask yourself, “What, in this moment, am I avoiding acceptance of? What am I feeling in my body that I am I resisting fully feeling?” For this to be most effective, one should try to keep their awareness in their body space in order to fully feel their emotions. It is easier to do this practice after doing a Zero Point Meditation, when one is able to be in a more balanced and neutral state.
This way of thinking helps you take each moment at a time and stay present. You don’t have to think about what you’re going to do in a day, or even in an hour. Tell yourself over and over, “I only need to accept this moment”. And then ask yourself after you have acceptance for what you’ve been resisting, “How can I make myself more comfortable in this moment, and support myself more?” It’s ok to cultivate little, healthy treats for yourself to keep yourself motivated, just like you’re one of Pavlov’s dogs. You can gradually make the treats healthier and healthier as you increase capacity, until one day you don’t need treats because you’re generally happy and aligned.
Start Small and Focus on Yourself
It may be easiest to temporarily set aside the big concerns in your life— the job you hate, the marriage you know deep down is over, the crushing student loan debt, etc, when you’re trying to crawl out of a dark hole. This is because it is easy to become overwhelmed and paralyzed by negative emotions, keeping you stuck in looping thoughts, fears of the future and regrets about the past. It’s hard to make shifts and energetic space for new things when you tackle these big things first, and it’s easy to get discouraged and feel stuck. This is why it’s important to start with small things to increase your sense of self-efficacy, tenacity, and give yourself “wins”. Give yourself permission to prioritize yourself (which is within your locus of control) and focus on clearing the patterns and programs you carry as a first priority, and as you do, new possibilities and perceptual shifts will happen that will give you the bandwidth to tackle the bigger life issues that are more external to you. This strategy is especially important for people trapped in cycles of perfectionism, self-judgement, criticism, shame and guilt.
Remember Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s framework for understanding human motivation and progression is a generally good model for helping prioritize getting out of rock bottom. We see that at absolute rock bottom, our Physiological and Safety needs (the ones that have the biggest effect on our nervous system) are our highest priorities. Later, we can focus on connection, and self-actualization as we have more bandwidth. However, people vary in what they most need. During one of my rock bottom phases during the Covid pandemic, I subsisted on purely charcuterie-type snacks and had a friendship that met my emotional needs through the sharing of memes and jokes about how we were both suicidal, which was oddly comforting.
As yourself, “What do I most need to feel supported?” Prioritize creating that for yourself.
Forget about Timelines and Societal Programming
Pay attention to mindsets that revolve around timelines, other people’s opinions, comparison, and our default societal programming. You’re never too old to start something new and you’re never to old to change. What other people think of you is not as important as the relationship you cultivate with yourself. The people who are truly meant to be in your life, will still be there if you let go of the identities you’ve held for something more honest, and aligned. Think about the limitations in your mind and engage with people (either in person or through social media) who have newer shifts in thinking, oriented towards the direction you want to go in. Connecting with their energy during this time can be helpful and supportive to you.
Master the Mental Plane
During the dark thoughts times, put away the true crime podcasts and listen to positive and uplifting subliminal messages. I like the ones from Vortex Success on Youtube, however, I think it’s best to create your own using an app as some creators put subliminal messages that contain ads for their business. I also love to combine subliminals with Binaural beats, which shift your mind into positive and uplifting brain states.
Ask Your Higher Self for Help
This one is the most important. Don’t underestimate the power of asking your Higher Self for help. It’s really important to cultivate a relationship with your Higher Self and receive guidance and propel big life shifts if you ask.
“Higher Self, can you please help me find the strength or give me the support to make X change in my life?”
It may not seem as if it’s working, as it may take time for your Higher Self to clear the patterns blocking you from getting what you are asking for which is typically done at night. Keep asking.
Lastly, book a session with me to help dig you out of the hole and create some momentum and space for you, so that the boulder you’re pushing up a hill becomes smaller and you can push it up faster…until it’s gone.
