At its simplest, a spiritual awakening is a shift in consciousness—a moment, or sometimes a longer process, in which a person’s sense of who they are, and what reality is, fundamentally changes. The old story they’ve been telling themselves—about being a separate self, anxious, striving, defending—loosens its grip. And underneath it, something quieter and more spacious is revealed.

People often describe this as remembering something they’ve always known but somehow forgotten. Now, the feel of it varies enormously. For some people, it arrives like a thunderclap—a sudden, ecstatic flash of unity with everything, sometimes lasting only seconds, sometimes hours. For others, it’s the opposite of dramatic. It’s a slow dawn. A growing sense that the boundaries of the self are thinner than we thought. A softening. A coming home.

Common features show up across cultures and centuries: a sense of deep peace that doesn’t depend on circumstances. A feeling of connection—to other people, to nature, to something larger that’s hard to name. A loss of the fear of death, sometimes permanently. A sudden, almost embarrassing flood of compassion, even for people they didn’t like the day before. And, very often, tears. People weep, and they can’t always explain why, except that something inside them has been touched that hadn’t been touched before.

Is this real? Well, the statistics are surprisingly striking. According to Pew Research Center data from 2023, around 70 per cent of US adults describe themselves as spiritual in some way, including 22 per cent who say they are “spiritual but not religious.” Nearly half of all US adults—about 49 per cent—said they had had a religious or mystical experience, which they defined as “a moment of sudden religious insight or awakening.”

Let that sink in. Roughly half of your neighbors, your coworkers, the strangers in line at the grocery store—by their own report—have at some point in their lives had an experience they would describe as a spiritual awakening. And most of them, statistically, have never told anyone.

That’s the world we’re living in. Beneath the surface of ordinary life, there’s a quiet undercurrent of people who have glimpsed something they can’t quite explain.

So what do you do with a glimpse? How do you turn a flash of insight into a way of life? That’s a question that the elder nuns of early Buddhism answer in the Therīgāthā, a small collection of poems by women who became fully enlightened monastics.

They had completely freed themselves from craving, hatred, and the illusion of a separate self.

These are first-person poems. The nuns speak in their own words about their lives before awakening—their grief, their beauty, their marriages, the deaths of their children, the despair that drove them to the Buddha’s path—and then about the moment, often a startlingly ordinary moment, when everything finally fell into place.

Let’s consider three of those poems.

You might be familiar with the story of Kisā Gotamī, the woman who begged the Buddha to bring her dead son back to life. He agreed, if Kisā could bring him a mustard seed from a household where nobody had ever experienced death. Of course, she could not. As she realized the lesson that all are touched by death, she was able to let go of her dead son. Kisā asked the Buddha to allow her to become a nun, and in time she realized enlightenment.

Kisā speaks, without flinching, of the suffering of women in her time—childbirth, child loss, the loss of husbands—and then she says, very simply:

“I have developed the Noble Eightfold Path. I have seen the deathless. I have done what was to be done. The teaching of the Buddha has been done.”

What Kisā Gotamī shows us is that awakening doesn’t always come despite our grief. Sometimes it comes through it. The mustard seed wasn’t a trick. It was a teaching. Her suffering, once she could see that it was not uniquely hers but the suffering of every living being, became the doorway.

Paṭacārā’s story is even more difficult. The daughter of wealthy merchants, Paṭacārā elopes with one of their servants. When she is pregnant with their second child, she begs her husband to take her home to her parents.

While on the road, in the middle of a violent storm, Paṭacārā goes into labor. Her husband proceeds to cut branches to build a shelter, but as he’s working he is bitten by a venomous snake and dies. Paṭacārā gives birth alone, in the rain.

In the morning, she finds her husband’s body. With tears streaming down her face, Paṭacārā gathers her newborn and her older child and continues toward her parents’ home.

She then comes to a river, swollen by the storm, but is unable to carry both children across at once. So she leaves the older boy on the bank and wades across with her newborn. Placing the baby down on the far side, she begins to wade back to retrieve her older son.

A hawk, seeing the baby as prey, swoops down and snatches up the newborn from the riverbank. Paṭacārā screams and waves her arms. Her older son, on the opposite bank, sees her waving and thinks his mother is calling him to come — so he steps into the rushing waters and is swept away.

She staggers onward toward her parents’ city in a daze, only to meet a traveler on the road who tells her that the previous night, her parents’ house collapsed in the storm, killing her mother, her father, and her brother.

Paṭacārā loses her mind. The texts say she wanders naked through the streets, no longer knowing who she is, until she stumbles into a grove where the Buddha is teaching. 

People try to chase her away, but the Buddha says, “Let her come.” As she approaches, he speaks to her—gently, the texts say: “Sister, recover your presence of mind.”

Something in her, something deep underneath the shattering, hears him. Paṭacārā comes back to herself. The Buddha speaks to her about the long, long wandering of beings through countless lives; the oceans of tears each of us has shed. And she becomes, in that moment, what the tradition calls a stream-enterer—someone for whom awakening is now certain.

She is ordained as a nun. And then she practices. And practices. And practices.

Her full awakening comes one evening, a long time later, in the most ordinary way imaginable. She is washing her feet. She pours a little water from a jug onto her feet and watches the water trickle down the slope of the ground a short distance and disappear into the earth. She pours a little more. It runs a little further and disappears. She pours a third time. It runs further still and is gone.

And as she watches the water vanish, she sees that this is the nature of all things. They arise. They flow. They disappear. 

Her husband. Her children. Her parents. Her own thoughts. Her own self. All of it, water running into the ground.

And her grief, which had been the great unmovable mountain of her life, was simply, finally, gone.

Her poem in the Therīgāthā contains these lines:

“Taking the lamp, I entered my cell. I inspected the bed and sat down on the couch. Then, taking a needle, I drew out the wick. The complete release of my mind was like the quenching of the lamp.”

Then there is Ambapāli.

Ambapāli was so famous for her beauty that kings and princes paid extraordinary sums for her company. She was wealthy. She was powerful. She owned a mango grove so magnificent that, in her old age, she offered it as a gift to the Buddha himself. He accepted it and would stay there and teach.

Ambapāli had built her life on her beauty. And then her beauty began to fade. Rather than turn away from this, rather than fight it with cosmetics and denial, Ambapali did something extraordinary. She looked.

Her poem in the Therīgāthā is one long, unflinching meditation on her own aging body. She moves, verse by verse, through every feature she once prized. Her hair, she says, was once black as bees, beautifully fragrant. Now, in old age, it is like rough hempen cloth. Her teeth, once gleaming like buds of plantain, are broken and yellowed. Her breasts, once full and high, now sag like empty water bags. Her hands, once soft and adorned with rings, are now like rough roots. Her feet, once tender, are now cracked and wrinkled.

After each description, she repeats the same refrain, with absolute steadiness:

“Such is the body—now decrepit, the house of much suffering, an old house, with the plaster fallen off. Not otherwise is the word of the Truth-Speaker.”

Awakening doesn’t come from clinging to beauty, or youth, or pleasure. It comes from looking honestly at what is actually true, that all of this passes, including the body you have spent so much energy protecting. And the moment you really see that—really see it—you become free of it. Not bitter. Not depressed. Free.

If something has cracked open in you recently—a loss, a grief, a slow erosion of who you thought you were—these women are very old friends. They have walked through it. And they are saying, quietly, from a very long way off: Keep going. There is a deathless place. We found it. So can you.

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