Explore spiritual emergence as a rite of passage through the myth of Inanna and the stages of ending, transition, and renewal. Part 3 examines how spiritual crisis can bring disorientation, transformation, and a deeper sense of purpose.

Part 4 of the Spiritual Emergence/y Series explores James Fowler’s Stages of Faith and how spiritual emergence can involve a crisis of belief, identity, and meaning. It examines faith development, surrender, community, and the difficult transition from familiar worldviews into deeper stages of spiritual growth.

In trying to understand this experience, I have encountered many ways to describe it and work with it. In this paper, I'd like to present some of the paradigms I have found useful, with their corresponding courses of action (or non-action). I'll zoom out from my own experience and explore how these paradigms interact with a larger range of what I'm tentatively calling spiritual emergence/y.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I've been knocking from the inside! Rumi1 Living in New York City was its own kind of spiritual practice; a maximalist, ecstatic, tantric whirl that I had no preliminaries for. My outer world never stopped moving; between bedbugs, the art scene, landlords who didn't speak my language, commuting from Brooklyn to Manhattan to work under the table to make rent, and trying to write