Turning Point: How Spiritual Emergencies Can Be Catalysts for Growth by Dr. Dom.
A few years ago, a young couple went to their pastor to have their child baptized. The pastor asked them, “Take your child of sin out of this church.” The couple was distraught. They felt utterly dehumanized.
The couple’s faith in God and humanity was shattered. “I felt abandoned by the God that the pastor represented,” the wife confided. However, their crisis became a catalyst for reflection, healing, and growth as persons.
According to Grof and Grof (1986), traditional psychiatry views all unusual states of consciousness or transpersonal experiences as pathological. Hence, individuals who have such experiences are suppressed through medications with tragic consequences. Furthermore, traditional psychiatry denies that consciousness can be therapeutically healing and transformative.
A spiritual emergency can be triggered without any contributing factors or due to reasons such as emotional stress, disease, death, or accident, to name a few. I recall a young woman whose spiritual emergency or transpersonal crisis was brought about by the death of her mother. Her grief was so intense that she was diagnosed as schizophrenic because she reported to her doctor that she kept ‘seeing’ her mother. What was labeled as a mental illness was a spiritual emergency or transpersonal crisis.
Despite its challenges, spiritual emergencies can be transformative. Experts are of the opinion that spiritual practices or meditative exercises are a catalyst for a spiritual emergency or transpersonal crisis. An individual once told me that a sermon triggered a spiritual emergency, becoming a turning point in his life.
Spiritual emergencies are challenging, but they are an opportunity for personal transformation.