Managing Overwhelm After Your Spiritual Awakening with Andra Dediu

Jennifer Norman: Hello to all of my beautiful humans. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. We are all about life lessons from beautiful humans and we are here to take a moment to be together. I really appreciate you listening.

Hit that subscribe button. It's wonderful to have your support because it energizes this podcast to get in front of more people so that they can see it, hear it and benefit from it. I believe in karma. Good karma will come back your way as we show each other all of this support. So I want to tell you a quick story.

I have had a couple of what I liked to coin as vertigo moments in my life. These are moments where I felt like everything just turned upside down and inside out and backwards. Several years back, I was at this point of my life where I felt like my life was in crisis. I had been twice divorced. Many of you know that my child, Kyle, is a boy who is severely disabled at this point.

He lives on life support, he's on a ventilator, he gets G-tube fed, he's got a tracheostomy, he's nonverbal and he's non-mobile and his health was not in a good place. I also was in a place because of my situation. It was hard for me to concentrate and focus at work, so my career was at stake and I was desperately searching for all of these answers. Well the universe brought me a gift. I've come across a wonderful woman, Andra Daju, who is a reintegration specialist.

And so I've invited Andra to come onto the show today to talk about what she does. So Andra does this very unique work. If you have had spiritual experiences that have felt more like a breakdown than a breakthrough, Andra is somebody who might be able to help. She supports individuals to integrate the highs and the lows of really far out experiences like spiritual awakenings, mystical experiences, insights from altered states of consciousness, which may come about spontaneously or from a spiritual practice. And so I would like to welcome Andra so that she can tell you a little bit more about herself and her work.

Thank you so much for being here.

Andra Dediu: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Jennifer Norman: Absolutely. So for those who may have, like myself, come to a crossroads in their spiritual journey. Tell me about how you started to get into this work because I think that might help set the stage for your expertise.

Andra Dediu: Thank you. I came to this work through all my own experiences. So I was really into yoga, particularly Hatha yoga and Zen meditation. And I came to a point where I was really quite intense in my practice and I loved it. I started feeling super blissed out in my body, connected in flow.

Jennifer Norman: We call yoga the gateway drug. 

Andra Dediu: It really is. And I mean, I initially was doing yoga and meditation because Western scientific research said that it was really beneficial for me and I was really trying to run away from depressive tendencies and potentially even idealizing the idea of suicide and committing suicide. So I turned to yoga and meditation and I started having these really beautiful experiences. There was a point, and It lasted for a few months where I was in this absolute state of bliss and joy. The sort of best way that I can define how I was feeling that anything, any irritation, any trigger that might come at me would just fall like water off of Teflon. Nothing stuck.

Nothing could take me out of my bliss. And that was really beautiful. Really, really beautiful. But then I crashed. I lost that sense of bliss after a few months.

And I hit this low, this absolute low where I felt lost and sad and depressed and confused and also quite guilty that I thought I hadn't been meditating enough. I hadn't done enough yoga. I hadn't done enough pranayama. I hadn't fasted enough because I thought that it was my fault that I lost that state. So then I kind of hit the ground running.

And I started going to looking at energy work and dance facilitator trainings and more yoga and more breath work and just a variety of different practices. And I was moving so fast through them And I basically became extremely destabilized. So I started seeing things, hearing things. I would have synchronicities and sometimes they were really beautiful and sometimes they were synchronicities of things that I couldn't understand. Like for instance, there was this period of time where I couldn't ground anymore And I kept having this image of this hexagon come at me.

And sure, now I understand it, but years ago, it just kept coming at me. And I was so lost and confused around the meaning. It was too much too fast. Wow.

Jennifer Norman: I think that you bring up an interesting point in that when we're not in flow, sometimes we're delving into spirituality, we're doing a breath work practice, we're doing yoga, allowing is part of the process. And then when we get to a point where we start forcing and we start feeling bad about ourselves and we start guilting ourselves, oh, I should be meditating more. Oh, I should be doing this more. I'm doing something wrong. And then we get ourselves into these fastidious places where, yeah, we might be forcing and taking ourselves into more of an obsessive place where sounds like it got perhaps a little dangerous for you.

It might have been from a darker energy.

Andra Dediu: I don't like to sort of differentiate between darker energies and lighter energies. I don't necessarily think that that's what happened to me. I think it was just too much too fast. I had opened up my system, I had opened up consciousness, my own body to experiencing so much, but yet I hadn't landed in a stable place or my ego hadn't developed enough that I could integrate these experiences. I couldn't make sense of

Jennifer Norman: them. When you say your ego hadn't developed enough, Can you explain that?

Andra Dediu: Like my sense of I, who I believe myself to be, right? As a person, we go through certain stages of development. And at this point, I was at a place where I thought, wow, I'm having these beautiful experiences. I must be a spiritual teacher. I was so naive.

I was so naive, right? And to realize then basically like my egoic, my sense of I started taking these experiences and buffering myself up like, wow, aren't I so amazing? As opposed to, oh, this is just a part of our cosmos. This is just a part of living and life. This is experiences that are available to all of humanity.

Jennifer Norman: Such an interesting point. And I can completely relate where you feel like, oh, because I've gotten to this place, I must be this type of person. I must be almost like a guru or a shaman or somebody that is a healer. And so you wear that as your identity, which is only a subset or a part of you which might be emerging rather than it being you. And so then if it starts to wane, then your identity sense becomes lost again and you start feeling a little bit helpless because you feel that to your point, if your ego is not necessarily as evolved enough to understand that it's not that you're losing yourself, it's just an ebb and a flow of a part of life and the hindsight of it helped to shape your understanding of what was going on.

Andra Dediu: Definitely. Yeah. Because then once all of these experiences come at me, right, or any one individual, right, then we have to reconstruct our sense of self, our sense of how we relate to other human beings or even other life on this planet, or even to the planet itself, even to the cosmos, right? We need to be able to understand that I'm sure I am God, I am a goddess. And yet at the same time, so is everybody else.

I am not special. I am sure I'm special. I mean, I'm unique, but at the same time, I'm not special. I'm not unique, right? So there's this weird sort of interplay that happens because we break out of this shell that society, our family has put around us.

And then we need to sort of come back to ourselves with this new understanding, with the meaning that we've created out of our experiences.

Jennifer Norman: I've come to an interesting phrase. I'm sure I didn't coin it, but of course it just came to me where it's like people are searching for more meaning. They're searching for more purpose and seeking outside themselves for meaning and purpose. When truly whatever happens in life is devoid of meaning, it is devoid of purpose and it's like the meaning of life is to give life meaning. The purpose of life is to give life meaning.

The purpose of life is to give life purpose. And that's when it becomes so ironic. We are mystical. We are everything. We are mighty.

We are valiant, yet we are nothing. We are small, we are insignificant, and we are all of that at once. Yeah. And so coming to this sometimes it's too much for our minds to wrap around, and it makes sense that it's difficult. And the idea of spirituality is that yes, we recognize that we are more than the physical body.

We recognize that we are so much more and that the interconnectivity of ourselves and the cosmos and everything that is what we are here to explore and discover inside ourselves. And that journey can be overwhelming, it can be perplexing, and sometimes we need support.

Andra Dediu: Yeah, because sometimes there's these two terms that come out of transpersonal psychology, which is my field. There's the term of spiritual emergence. You said this word a couple of minutes ago, right, that there's an emergence to a new way of being a new state of being. And this virtual emergence really comes about when we have these experiences, and they're gradual enough that we can absorb them that we can transform and change. And we can do so with ease.

And then there's the other side of it when they become emergencies, so spiritual emergencies. And that's when they become crisis situations. When the experience is too much, too fast that it knocks us off our feet, like the earth is pulled out from underneath our feet like a carpet and we're completely destabilized. And then we don't know who we are. We don't know what reality is.

Our boundaries are shook. We aren't grounded. We aren't sleeping. We're having issues eating. Our relationships are changing.

Our career is changing. It becomes a crisis situation. Yeah. And traditionally mainstream Western psychiatric models labels these spiritual emergencies as psychotic experiences. Yeah.

Or manic episodes, even though individuals say, I think I'm actually having a spiritual experience. Like I did a Kundalini yoga teacher training and I think that this is what's happening here. Unfortunately, the Western psychiatric model doesn't appreciate these experiences as actually being positively transformative, right? It pathologizes them, it negates them, it says that they're bad and wrong. And actually, it's the same side of the scale, right?

It's spiritual emergence, spiritual emergency. It just depends on our own system, our own life path, our own ability to be flexible with these new experiences in how we move forward. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman: Some people might take the word spiritual and compartmentalize that strangely enough, as if spiritual could be compartmentalized. When you have a shift in what you thought was to be true to a dramatic sense where it becomes an emergency. In my case, I went the conventional route. I was diagnosed with PTSD. Like I had a traumatic experience.

I was labeled, okay, you've got a diagnosis of PTSD. We're gonna give you this medicine and that's what we're gonna do because it'll help you feel better. You just have a chemical imbalance and that's the way to address it. Maybe therapy, some sort of talk therapy or some way to like get it out. And so that's the way that typical life, I would say modern life will handle a situation like that.

But I know that in learning about you, Andra, you're like anything like a yoga, a breath work, something that gets into your body and you get to a different evolution of what you were before can be considered a spiritual experience. And if that shifts your feeling of reality of what you had known before of your identity, what you perceive the world to be starts to not make sense to you and you don't know what to do with it. That's when it gets to emergency. And that's what Andra I believe is sharing with us today.

Andra Dediu: Yeah, basically, it becomes a crisis. Yeah. And in these crisis situations, people can have a multitude of experiences. Yeah, it's not just about seeing things or hearing things or having experiences of synchronicities, But it can also be about intense sensations in the body. Yeah.

Huge awareness of the flow of energy throughout the body. That is a new experience. Yeah. For whatever reason, society, family, culture, we think that we're just kind of from the Mecca, right? And then an experience like breath work that you mentioned can really bring us into our body.

Yeah. And for some individuals, it can be come overwhelming because then it's like, oh, wow, I can feel the energy traveling from my womb into my heart, through my shoulder, into my elbow. Well, I can feel it so strongly right now in my thumb. I have never experienced that before. What just happened, right?

Like it becomes scary. Versus if there's somebody there that can hold the space and just say, okay, this is a new experience for you. Here's a model of acupuncture that speaks to these meridians and this flow of energy in the body. Here's another model of qigong that says that this is possible, that you're not going crazy, that you don't have an entity stuck in your body, but that this is actually just your own life force energy co-creating with the environment and playing around and that this is okay. Right?

Like what is it like to just have somebody say to another person who's having this crazy experience is to just actually it's not crazy. It's okay. It's totally normal.

Jennifer Norman: Yeah, it's a normal response to what is happening to you. And certainly I know that a lot of people feel shame. They don't know how to talk about what's happening to them. They feel like they'll be judged. They feel like other people will label them crazy.

And so a lot of people keep these things inside and that's even harder for them. What are some of the steps that are helpful for when you are introduced to people who say, you know what, I think I need help dealing with this? Yeah.

Andra Dediu: So one of the biggest things is grounding. So practicing grounding.

Jennifer Norman: And so tell us what you mean by grounding for those that might not be familiar with what grounding is.

Andra Dediu: It can be a walk in nature. It can be gardening. It can be if they're quite energetically open and aware of the energy in their body, it could simply be allowing the energy to travel down their body into their root or down into the feet, bringing the focus of attention away from head, mind, thoughts down into the feet. Yeah, that's a simple practice. It can be movement sometimes, but for other people, even meditation can be grounding.

Yeah. So it really depends on the individual. There is no sort of cookie cutter approach on what grounding practice is going to work for any one individual, because it depends one on the type of experience that they're having and the type of skills and openings and awarenesses that they already have to their own system, whether that's energetic, whether that's like they're hearing things and aware of things, right? So there's gonna be different practices for different individuals, but grounding is a huge one. And then it's finding safe places where they can relax and feel calm.

So nature tends to be extremely important for individuals in crisis situations. Quiet places, sometimes they need to retreat from society and social obligations to just have more quiet time around more people that are more calm, more relaxed, more connected, just a little bit more settled because there's this thing in therapy where there's co-regulation. If I feel calm, relaxed, grounded, and I have a client who's kind of dysregulated and scattered, that my nervous system can have an impact on their nervous system and help to ground and relax them. There's also a necessity for sort of what's called catharsis, so releasing. These tend to, from my understanding, and maybe it will change over the decades, but from the people that I've met and from my own experience and also from my academic research, this is a healing experience.

So if there is a strong energy for healing that is happening throughout the system, then that individual who's experiencing these states needs to be able to release it, needs to release things that may be stuck in their body, needs to release things that might be stuck in their stories, may need to release and let go of things that their ancestors have passed down to them. So there needs to be a release of energy, a catharsis, a letting go that can be screaming, it can be through dance, it can be through movement, it can be through big emotions, lots of crying, it can be through body shaking. And some individuals can do this on their own, And some need a caring other to hold a container for them. Some other things that are really, really important are that individuals to know that they might need a large network of support. So they might need a therapist, they might need a bodywork, right?

Like they're aware that they're holding on to something, but they don't have the know-how of how to like go with it. So they go to a practitioner to help them release that. I'm just pointing to my shoulder because that's what's something that happened to me is I remember I had this point here from my yogic practice and finally it's ancestral. My dad has the same point of pain. My grandmother has the same point of pain.

And I knew it was there and I didn't know how to release it. And I thought I was just going to be with it. And then I was in Nepal with a healer and he was just flowing around my body and then boom, he just touched it and I could just feel it just leaving my hand, right? I had the awareness that there was something there, but I needed somebody else's skills to help me release that. Yeah.

So joining a conscious dance community and allowing the integration of what is experienced, the emergence of all these new ways of connecting to self, other and cosmos to be expressed through the body to allow the body to begin to hold itself differently, to move differently, to have different experiences. Because ultimately, as much as one expands their consciousness, they need to come back to the body with this new understanding. So that it's not either or it's not consciousness expanded. I don't have a body. I don't need to eat.

I don't need to sleep. Yeah. It's consciousness expanded and I'm a human being with a body. So coming back to the body, using the body to express and to emote. Some other things as well is finding templates of development.

So like the work of Abraham Maslow and his whole notion of self-actualization and self-transcendence or the model of Stan Grof, who is the initiator of breath work, right? And he's the, him and his then wife, Christina Grof, are actually the ones that coined the terms spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency, right? So having these templates, these maps that these experiences are normal and that there's actually a pathway to move through them. And then also to another map, not just from Western psychology, but from Hatha yoga. Oh, there's an energy called Kundalini, right?

Or from Zen meditation, oh, there's a thing called Zen sickness, right? If people meditate too much, they have this Zen sickness, spiritual emergency, Yeah, so there's these things.

Jennifer Norman: Never heard of that before.

Andra Dediu: Yeah. Yeah. There's all these different maps that can help individuals to contextualize their experience, to normalize their experience.

Jennifer Norman: Wow. It sounds like you are able to come at it and see into a person and intellectualize it for those that might be a lot more logically minded or also be that somatic therapist in something that in the body and care and comfort and grounding is needed. And I love that you are able to approach somebody based upon where they might be in their field.

Andra Dediu: Wow. And both of those aspects are really, really needed. Yeah. It's not, it's never going to be either or it's never going to be fully and just intellectualizing the experience.

Jennifer Norman: It's mind, body, soul. Yeah.

Andra Dediu: All together. Yeah. All together. Yeah. There's also stories as well, right?

Like there's this beautiful story that I love to share and it's called The Four Rabin. And the story goes that one night there's four rabbi who are woken up in the middle of the night by an angel and they're taken up to the seven gates of heaven and they're shown the wheel of Ezekiel and the four rabbi, wow, wow, right? Like they're completely overwhelmed by this mystical experience of unity, of oneness, of peace, of bliss, of love. And wow, right? But then, as journeys do, they come to an end.

So they come back down to earth. And in the morning, all the four rabbi wake up and they all have a different response to their experience. One rabbi says, nope, that was just a dream. I dreamt it. I saw nothing.

There was no angel. There was no wheel. There was no bliss. There was no peace. Denial.

Complete denial. The second rabbi wakes up frothing at the mouth. He's lost. He's confused. He doesn't see this reality anymore.

He can't eat. He can't sleep. He's completely, completely lost. He can't come back down.

Jennifer Norman: Right.

Andra Dediu: He needs support the rest of his life. The third rabbi comes back and wakes up in the morning. Oh, I need to tell people about this. I need to write books. I need to write articles.

I need to do presentations. I need to tell the whole world that this is what I experienced, that there's this reality, I need to talk to people. He travels the world giving lectures for the rest of his life. Maybe I can see myself in the third drive-by.

Jennifer Norman: He's capitalizing on that experience.

Andra Dediu: Yeah, Well, just the idea of wanting to speak about it, to share it, to allow his own experience to impact society, to change society, right? Like, hey, this is real. Let's look at it, right? Like, that's where he was coming from. Fourth Rabbi, he lands back down, and it's still nighttime.

And he has a little baby daughter. So he goes to her, and she's sleeping in her crib, and he picks up his guitar. And as he looks at the beauty of her face and remembers the beauty that he's experienced, they're all one in the same and he sees the full moon and he just sings a beautiful lullaby to her and he picks up his pencil and his notebook and he writes poetry of what he's experienced, but in a way that isn't something that's separate from his life, but so intimately connected to everything that's here and now, the full moon, his daughter, his music, words. He allows his experience to move through him in such a way that he creates beauty here on earth.

Jennifer Norman: I am pondering, am I number three or four? Maybe I was a little bit of all.

Andra Dediu: That's key, right? And using stories and maps to see where we are on the journey, right? To see a reflection, allowing it to speak to our unconscious bits and to find ourselves within these characters. And maybe we don't see ourselves just in one, right? Because I could definitely say that I've been Rabbi one.

Like, whoa, I could not have experienced that. That must have just been a vision, right? It must have just been a dream. I can also see myself in Rabbi 3, yeah, with my academic research and going on podcasts and talking about this kind of stuff, writing articles, actually writing a book, right? Like I can see myself in Rabbi 3.

I can also see myself in Rabbi 4 because the way that I like to bring my own spirituality and into my experience for me is through dance and movement. Yeah, it's allowing that expression of beauty and connection to myself and the cosmos to be expressed in that way. We can begin to see ourselves in all these different archetypes, these different patterns and stories and just to take the map and we can make it our own and take whatever is useful and eyes for us that we still have discernment around what we choose to let in and impact us.

Jennifer Norman: Super helpful. And it's one of those things where I believe like over the course of my life, I've seen a lot of archetype work, of course, Carl Jung being probably the most famous of them all, divine archetypes. And I have often been that person that can't figure out which one I am like, do I need to fit in? Like, am I supposed to be this? But I'm like, I feel bad.

I feel like, gosh, I feel like a misfit in so many ways, because I'm like, oh, gosh, maybe I should just make my own. I don't know.

Andra Dediu: Well, and that's the thing, they're just patterns, right? We can see ourselves in multiple archetypes, right? And even these experiences like spiritual emergency.

Jennifer Norman: Thank you, Andra. I feel seen. I really do. I feel seen right now. 

Andra Dediu: I wanted to say that there's this healer Malidoma Somé, who speaks of spiritual emergencies as being quote, the birth of a healer. Yeah. So because these individuals end up being so dysregulated, so shocked, but then they have to work really hard. Yeah, sometimes years, decades, this is a lengthy process of integration to then bring healing back to themselves.

And once the healer is healed, relatively speaking, right, because we're never really healed, Then that they can take their own lessons and bring them out into the communities. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman: Yeah. And that's the gift. That's the gift.

Andra Dediu: I don't impose my own beliefs. I don't impose my own experiences on another's. To take every individual that comes in front of us as a perfectly whole human being that is simply arriving at their own truth. Like, have this idea of like, oh, we know what spirituality is, right? We're spiritual beings living in a human body, we all say that, but really, we don't know what reality is.

We don't know what spirituality is. So we have no idea. There's no penultimate spiritual truth. There is no one spiritual truth. It just matters on our own experiences, the ways that we individually create meaning.

Jennifer Norman: Yep. The meaning of life is to create meaning and coexisting without judgment is a practice that I have been fast forwarded in, I think, as I've been going through a spiritual awakening journey because, oh boy, I was judgey-judge-judgmental. It's like being able to understand and allow and receive and support and come from a place of love is really what this is all about. The Human Beauty Movement is all about this. This is why I love having such diverse topics on this podcast because we have so many unique experiences And there's always something interesting for us to learn about others and their experiences and recognize that it's all part of what we are here for.

It's exploration, it's understanding. If you're on a spiritual journey, if you've found that you're interested in diving in and want to say, you know what, I want to be a bit more prepared on the back end this time than perhaps I was last time, or maybe you're coming into something new. Maybe there's a new experience coming your way. Understanding that there are people out there like Andra who can be wonderful receivers of your message and of your space and mindful of what you might need and help to be a very gentle and loving reflector of what you're going through to provide some tools and techniques and guidance along the way can be something that is of help for you or for anybody that you might know that's going through their own healing journey.

Andra Dediu: Yeah, thank you so much for having me Jennifer.

Jennifer Norman: Andra, it was a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for being part of the movement.

Andra Dediu: Thank you. 

Jennifer Norman: Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community-based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.