Losing Friends On Your Spiritual Awakening

Nobody tells you that stepping into who you are actually meant to be is going to cost you some people.

Nobody warns you that the deeper you go into your own growth, your own truth, your own light, the more some of the people you love the most are going to quietly start moving away from you.

And nobody prepares you for how much that is going to hurt.

In this episode Jenny Shanks gets honest about the part of spiritual awakening nobody talks about. The isolation. The grief of friendships falling away. The integration period between the past version of you and the future version of you. And the exact moment the isolation ended and the freedom began.

If you are in the middle of this right now, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Seriously Dead. I'm Jenny Shanks, a spiritual medium, and I talk to dead people for a living. This podcast is your beyond the grave look at what your loved ones in spirit actually want you to know. And spoiler alert, after 10 years of doing this work, here's the truth. Your spirit family wants you to know they're okay and you are too. How do I know? Because the dead are a lot of things, but one thing they're not is quiet. So get comfortable before you press play because we're getting seriously dead with your loved ones in spirit right now. Nobody tells you that stepping into who you are actually meant to be is going to cost you some people. Nobody warned you that the deeper you go into your own growth, your own truth, your own light, the more some of the people you love the most are gonna start quietly moving away from you. And nobody prepares you for how much that's gonna hurt. Today we're talking about that because I've lived it. And I think there are people listening right now who are in the middle of it and wondering if they've done something wrong. You were not doing something wrong. You are doing something right. And in Seriously Dead today, we're gonna talk about understanding the difference. I'll first start by saying that as we shift and go through a spiritual awakening, the step to get us to trust our intuition and connect with spirit, things have to shift. It's only natural. When I started stepping into my own spiritual work, something began to shift around me. Not dramatically at first, but gradually, quietly. The way that a tide goes out, and you don't even notice it until you're happening to look down and realize how much has changed. Friends who had been anchors in my life started to distance themselves. Family members who I loved deeply became harder to reach. And the corporate career I had built, the one that had given me structure and identity and a very clear answer to the question, what do I do for a living? Started to feel like something I was wearing that no longer fit. And at first it felt isolating, sad, confusing in a way that was hard to articulate even to myself. Because I had not done anything wrong. I had not hurt anyone. I had not changed in a way that felt like a betrayal of who I was. If anything, I felt more like myself than I ever had, more aligned, more awake, more connected to something real. But the people around me were not always comfortable with that version of me. And watching someone you love pull away when you are becoming more yourself is one of the loneliest feelings in the human experience. If you're in that place right now, I want you to hear this. You are not losing people because you're doing something wrong. You are losing people because you're doing something right. And those two things can feel identical from the inside when you're in the middle of it all. Here's what I think happens. And remind you, this is my perspective. It's my experience as Jenny Shanks, and what I've come to understand through living it and through sitting with spirit, when a person starts to grow, and I mean really grow, the kind of growth that changes something fundamental about who they are, about how they move through the world, they start to shine differently. And not everyone is comfortable with that light. Not because the people who pull away are bad, not because they don't love you, but because your growth holds a mirror up. And sometimes what a person sees in that mirror, the gap between where they are and where they're going, is uncomfortable enough that the easiest thing to do is distance. It's not about you, it's about them and where they are on their own path. But knowing that doesn't always make it hurt less because the heart doesn't care about the spiritual explanation when it's grieving the loss of people they've loved. And here's the thing I really want to say clearly: what you go through when friendships fall away during a spiritual awakening, it's grief. It's real grief. The same kind of grief we've been talking about all throughout, seriously dead. The loss of a relationship, the loss of a version of your life, the loss of a community that felt like home at one point, that deserves to be honored as the loss that it actually is. You don't have to spiritually bypass your way through it. You're allowed to be sad. You're allowed to miss the people who have moved away. You're allowed to grieve the version of your life that's falling away as the new one takes shape. And you're allowed to keep going anyway. There's something I wish someone had told me when I was in the middle of all of this. And that's that there's an integration period, a space between the past version of you and the future version of where everything feels uncertain, where the old life is falling away and the new one hasn't fully arrived yet. Where you're too far from who you were to go back, but not yet settled enough in who you are becoming to feel completely at home. The space is disorienting. It can feel like a loss, it can feel like failure, it can feel like evidence that you made the wrong choice or took the wrong turn, or that the growth you thought was happening was actually just you dismantling something that was working fine. It was not working fine, and that is why it needed to change. But the integration period is real and it's necessary, and it deserves to be named because most people going through it feel like they are the only ones there. Like everyone else has figured out how to grow without losing anything. Like there's something wrong with them because the awakening that was supposed to be beautiful is also kind of breaking their heart. You are not the only one, and nothing is wrong with you. The past you and the future you, well, truth is they're getting to know each other. That introduction takes time, it takes practice and patience, it takes a willingness to sit in uncertainty without rushing to resolve it. That period of being uncomfortable can be one of the most expansive experiences of your life if you'll let it unfold the way it deserves to be unfolded. The people who are meant to be in your life in the next chapter, just wait, they're coming. They are not the same people who fit perfectly into this last chapter. And that is not failure of a relationship you had. It's evidence that you've grown into something new. I remember the exact moment I stopped feeling so isolated and started to feel free again. It was when I got comfortable answering a simple question. What do you do for a living? For a long time, that question made me brace myself because the answer, the real answer, required a kind of courage I was still building. I connect with loved ones in spirit. I talk to dead people for a living. I'm a spiritual medium. In fact, just a few weeks ago, my neighbor asked me, now what do you do for a living? And I looked at his fiance, kind of chuckling, because I was pretty sure she knew what I did. And I said, Oh, have you not told him? And she's like, No, I did. And I said, Oh, I'm a medium. I talk to other people on the other side of the world. And immediately he started to get up and back up and tell me all about how they don't judge people. I couldn't help but chuckle. But when I finally got to the place where I could say that clearly, without apology, without softening it or qualifying it, or watching the other person's face to see if I needed to backtrack, something shifted. Because the response told me everything I needed to know. Some people lit up, their eyes changed, they leaned in, they had questions, or even a story that they wanted to share. And some people didn't know what to do with it. They changed the subject or stepped back and gave me a polite smile that means I do not know what I'm supposed to say. Both of those responses are okay. I'm not here to convince you that what I do you should believe in. Because here's what I realized in that moment. The people who could not hold what I do were not rejecting me. Spirit and the universe were simply redirecting me. Saying, this is not the person for your next chapter, and that's okay. Let them go with love. Keep moving towards the people who light you up. That's when the isolation ended. Not when I found the perfect community or the perfect friendship or the perfect version of my life. When I stopped needing everyone to be comfortable with who I was. That is the freedom that's waiting on the other side of this integration period. And it is worth every hard moment that it took to get there. If you're in the middle of a spiritual awakening right now and you're watching relationships change around you and wondering if you're doing something wrong, I want to say something directly to you. You are right where you need to be. The losses you are experiencing are not punishment. They are not evidence that you made the wrong choice or that the path you are on is the wrong one. They are part of the integration, part of the process of becoming. Every person who has stepped into their true self has walked through this. The uncertainty, the loneliness, the grief of the relationships that did not survive the growth. And every single one of them got to the other side and found something they could not have imagined from where they were standing in the middle of it all. A community that actually sees them. Relationships built on who they actually are rather than who they used to be. A life that fits in a way the old one never quite did. That is what's coming for you. Keep going, stay open. Let the people who need to fall away fall away with love. And trust that spirit's not taking anything from you that was meant to stay. The brighter that you shine, the more clearly the right people will find you. And the right people are always worth waiting for. If you walk away from this episode with one thing, let it be this. Losing people in your spiritual awakening is not a sign that something went wrong. It is a sign that something is going very right. The past version of you and the future version of you are in an integration period. And integration requires space. Sometimes that space means releasing relationships that belong to the chapter you're leaving. You aren't doing this wrong. You were doing this exactly the way it needs to be done for you. And on the other side of this season of loss is a version of your life that fits in a way nothing has before. Thank you for letting me share this with you today. This show exists because of you. If you know someone going through a spiritual awakening, feel free to share this with them. And if you feel inspired to share, tag me over on Instagram or leave me a review wherever you listen to podcasts. I'd be honored. I'll be back next week with another episode of Seriously Dead. Stay open, stay curious, and remember, the dead are not quiet. You just have to learn to listen.