2 | Spiritual Emergence / Emergency: Paradigms of Crisis & 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.

What I Mean by Spiritual Emergence/y

By spiritual emergence/y, I mean any experience that could be understood either as spiritual growth or as spiritual crisis, any experience that seems to fall into the blurry area between a positive transformation and a negative decomposition, and which is experienced as spiritual. They may be spontaneous, or induced by practice. Some experiences that may be a spiritual emergence/y to one person may not be on that line to others. It may be firmly an emergence or emergency, or it may not feel related to spirituality. I imagine this would depend on the person's disposition, training, and cultural context, among other factors.

However, I believe that the number of people who have had experiences that fall into this area of spiritual emergence/y is large, and the amount of discussion on this topic doesn't adequately reflect the number of people who want to be talking about it. I believe that the more we encourage conversation around this sticky area of spiritual practice, the safer and more supportive spiritual communities of all kinds can become.

Spiritual Emergency as Crisis and Opportunity

The term spiritual emergency was coined in the 1980s by psychiatrist and psychotherapist Stanislov and Christina Grof, who explain:

Some of the dramatic experiences and unusual states of mind that traditional psychiatry diagnoses… as mental diseases are actually crises of personal transformation, or “spiritual emergencies.” Episodes of this kind have been described in sacred literature of all ages as a result of meditative practices and as signposts of the mystical path.

When these states of mind are properly understood and treated supportively… they can be healing and have very beneficial effects on the people who experience them. This positive potential is expressed in the term spiritual emergency, which is a play on words, suggesting both a crisis and an opportunity of rising to a new level of awareness, or “spiritual emergence.”¹

Holding Both Light and Dark

The brilliance of the term lies in its multivalence, the fact that in such an experience we see both light and dark.

In this thesis, I aim for a polyvalent approach to experience, exploring paradigms not for their truth-value, which I can make no claim to, but their use-value, which I can test through experience.

To that end, in Part 3, I will discuss spiritual emergence/y as a rite of passage, as a three-part transition from one life situation to the next. In Part 4, I will investigate spiritual emergence/y as part of a faith stage developmental shift, working mainly with James Fowler’s model of faith development. In Part 5, I view the phenomenon (as best I can) from an animistic, indigenous, or shamanic point of view. Can an experience like this be an initiation, and if so, into what? Finally, in Chapter 6, I provide the Tibetan medical perspective of a disorder aptly named Meditator’s Disease.

For each of the four paradigms, I will provide a quick sketch of the inner experience, a possible outer form, and a potential medicine. Within each part, I will flesh out what these mean and how to work with them.

A Pragmatic and Pluralistic Approach

The choices I've made about what to include and where to draw the distinctions seem to me the most pragmatic or accessible at this time, but I make no claims that they are comprehensive, that there are hard boundaries between them, or that they will not completely contradict each other. I aim to work from a theologically pluralistic model, or a philosophically paradigmatic/pragmatic model, to explore what is most skillful, acknowledging that people’s needs, values, and aims differ.

Thank you for reading this outline, and I look forward to seeing you in Part 3: Spiritual Emergence/y as Rite of Passage.

If you have not yet read Part 1 (my story of spiritual emergence/y), you can find it here. If you're ready for the next part, read the Part 3 here.

Would you like to learn more about our approach to spiritual emergency?

¹ Stanislov and Christina Grof, Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1989), x.

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Emma Sartwell, MDiv, CYT | Emma is a registered psychotherapist and adjunct professor at Naropa University, where she earned her Master of Divinity degree. She combines Somatic Experiencing, parts work, holistic healing, and mindfulness into her sessions, which focus on nervous system regulation, trauma integration, attachment patterning, inner critics and inner children, and ancestral healing. Her deepest joy is helping people feel more integrated, authentic, and connected.