The Seeker’s Journey: Awakening, Getting Lost, and Discovering True Self

Wiping the steam from the mirror, there was a set of hollow eyes looking back. The reflection was a mere ghost, a shell of a person that felt completely broken, unworthy of love, laughter, connection, and even life. 

But now I knew that the image and person I was seeing wasn’t the real me. Only thirty minutes before, I had spontaneously been shown a vision of the “real” me, a light that was so alive, vibrant, and emanating waves of joy and love. It was hard to imagine that the vision I saw was the true me; the gap between the image and the set of eyes looking back seemed almost impossible to bridge.

Yet, an inner flame had been lit; I wanted to know, touch, feel, and embody that version of me. 

As an inner determination to find her locked in, there were questions and thoughts rooted in self-doubt and fears bubbling up from what felt like the wastelands of my inner world. Without thinking, I spoke out loud a sacred vow to myself, “I don’t know how to find you, but I’m going to. I am not broken, I am not lost, I will remember who I really am.” 

Igniting the Inner Flame

I didn’t know it at the time, but the power that flickered within me, which gave me the courage to set out on the journey of finding my own light, came from the archetypal pattern of the Seeker. It erupted within me, like a siren’s call, pulling me into a now twenty-plus-year journey of sacred remembrance to see how much of my true Soul’s light I can experience and embody in this lifetime. 

Meeting the Seeker Within

The archetypal pattern of the Seeker is a universal roadmap for empowerment that organically guides you on your journey to know thyself.

The Seeker will travel through five distinct stages, each cultivating a core area of developing our willingness to consciously see and interact with different levels of self-knowledge, wisdom, and power. Ultimately, the Seeker discovers the hidden promise held within this pattern; what we are seeking outside ourselves ultimately lies within us, “The power, my dear, was within you all along.” (Wizard of Oz). 

While we can’t hop over the stages, having a trusted Guide or even a grounded roadmap with the general outline of the journey can make all the difference. Rumi, a great mystical Seeker, is quoted as saying, “Whoever travels without a guide needs two hundred years for a two-day journey”. 

Here is a quick overview of the Seeker’s archetypal pattern to help you orient yourself on your own journey. 

Soulful Practice: While you read through them, I invite you to reflect on your own life’s path up to this point. Additionally, you might ask for guidance on where you are currently in your journey so that you can both honor how much ground you have traveled while also giving yourself a little grace for what part of the journey you are walking through at this time.

The Five Stages of the Seeker’s Journey

Stage One: The Awakening That Disrupts the Status Quo

At this stage, you find yourself suddenly jolted from the rhythms of everyday life and recognize that something is missing or is now fundamentally different in your life; yet you don’t know at this point what you want or are searching for. You only know that you have a burning desire to break out and find “it”, whatever it might be.

Stage Two: Naming What You Are Seeking

Once you set out on a search, you begin to gather different ideas, wisdom, and new perspectives on life. With each new discovery it strengthens the burning desire to try and “label” your destination, “When I get here then I will finally be/get _____.” This naming gives you a lifeline of deeper purpose that you can hold onto, like the thread in a labyrinth; it helps you begin to focus in a direction, fueling yourself so that you don’t slip back into the habitual rhythm of your “old life”.

Stage Three: Trials, Shadows, and the Tests of Commitment

At this stage, the Seeker begins to encounter initiations of your inner strength and wisdom in the form of:

• • Powerful crossroads choice. Moments where you can choose to take leaps of faith into the fray of the unknown or try to control the journey with choices that feel more familiar or logical. 
  • Meeting unseen obstacles that feel like hardships or impossible asks.
  • Traps of complacency, feeling, or trying to convince ourselves that we are close enough to the promised land that all is good, and we can take off our boots and rest.

This stage is the “work-horse” of the pattern, where you are asked to continuously turn toward and illuminate your own shadow protective programs that, while they might give the illusion of safety, are really rooted in choices of wounded Parts and even hidden expectations and desires that would undermine your true empowerment. 

This is probably the trickiest part of the journey because we often don’t know that these invitations are happening until afterwards. This is also where understanding the pattern gives you a huge advantage that can help liberate you from excess and unnecessary prolonged suffering, challenges, inner shame, and getting caught in these tricky traps over and over again.

Stage Four: Reorientation, Uncovering True North

I love this stage of the Seeker journey and wish I had known about it this one WAY earlier so that I didn’t have as much shame and self-rejection that often happens with this stage.

This stage of the Seeker’s pattern awakens when you have truly healed and recovered so much of your own inner strength, power, and wisdom. With each trial or obstacle, you have found different lost and fearful parts of yourself and liberated them. You now see yourself differently, and therefore see the world and your relationship to it differently, too, from a more “empowered” point of view. Feeling a sense of comfort and confidence in meeting life on life’s terms, and even starting to believe that you can begin to dance with life. You start to feel like maybe you have reached the promised land and can finally “be home”. 

Yet, the universe doesn’t want you to settle for just surviving or being good enough. It wants to help you continue to wake up to and embody even more of your true self. Therefore, there is a moment of another “awakening” to help you reorient and liberate yourself from every subtle way you are “cutting” yourself off from your true destiny. Because the version of dreams you had when you first set out is now bigger, and your ability to believe in yourself and take bigger leaps of faith has grown, too. 

While this stage can feel like a significant relapse or falling backwards to stage one, it isn’t!  

You are refining your search, uncovering a true North Star guiding your next level of “purpose” and calling in a way that you never would have believed in earlier in your journey.

Stage Five: You Are Your Own Guru-Empowerment

Eventually, after a few rounds of dancing between the stages, you realize that the drive or need to seek has softened. While you still have a desire to be a lover of learning and expanding, you no longer feel that you have to “go find” yourself. The drive to seek outside validation or to reach a destination has quietly been replaced with a deep knowing and humble honoring that the power you set out to discover really, truly is already within you. 

At this stage, you can surrender to divine timing and trust that life unfolds as needed, and you can simply “be” with that unfolding. There is a level of inner joy that is always present with you at this stage, and you know that your own inner guidance is always present.

The Quiet Arrival Home

I hope this roadmap and the practice of reflecting on your journey helps you connect with the fourth and fifth stages of the Seeker’s journey, unlocking the promise held within it. You are an amazing Being of light, love, and joy! Within you lies a beautiful gift that only you can offer the whole. Even though you might not know what that is or how to believe in your own inner light, it is there, and the path, support, and guidance you need are already here. All you need to do to activate it and claim your inner Seeker is to say yes! “Yes, I am open to my light, my wisdom, my power. I am on a journey of remembering who I am.”  

TAKE ACTION: To continue on your Seeker’s journey, I have the perfect free master-class video series, Finding Balance in Transformation. It is especially helpful as a guide for Stage 3 and the different types of trials and initiations that you will encounter in this stage. Additionally, if the Seeker’s Path is calling to you, I have a three-part On-Demand healing course – the Path of the Seeker that you can explore along with a discount code AWAKENED for 20% off as an Awakened community member.