My Boring Spiritual Awakening

An Everyday Illustration of Awakening via Letting Go

On the afternoon of my spiritual awakening, you’d never have known I was having the most mind-blowing, trajectory-changing experience of my life.

I was just sitting on my couch… frowning slightly.

My brain had performed a full-blown trapeze act—from anguish to bliss—in the blink of an eye, and nothing about my situation or surroundings had changed.

From the outside, the event had all the flair of a paper towel soaking up a spill.

But internally, I was reeling from shock at what was being evidenced to me—the fact that our happiness has way more to do with the state of our mind than the state of our life. It was funny, mind-blowing, and at the same time, kind of boring.

But that’s why I think it’s worth talking about.

The Inciting Incident

It was mid-2021, and I’d been on a months-long campaign to impress a man.

What began as an elaborate cool-girl act—highlighting my best traits and concealing anything inconvenient or imperfect—quickly escalated into full-blown social theater. Soon, every word I spoke or texted was carefully crafted to sound breezy and charming.

This was at a time when I had no idea how to just be myself. I was all strategy, no sincerity. My whole identity was curated, optimized, and exhausting.

So when I slipped up and broke character, it felt catastrophic.

One night at this guy’s apartment, I made a mildly snarky comment. It hurt his feelings for maybe three seconds—he didn’t even care.

But I was steeped in perfectionism.

And so his brief expression of hurt felt less like a momentary crack in my facade and more like watching a priceless vase shatter in slow motion.

I apologized immediately, and he accepted it. By all accounts, the moment should’ve passed. But in my head, the curtain had dropped on months of carefully staged theater.

So, naturally, I doubled down and burst into tears right in front of him.

I was truly losing my mind.

(And to his credit, he was very nice about it.)

A Visit to Hell

The next day, I spiraled. The embarrassing scene of the previous night replayed endlessly. Every glance. Every syllable. My brain wouldn’t shut up.

Six months of meditation practice had given me just enough self-awareness to witness the spiral I was in, but not enough skill to stop it.

I couldn’t go more than 30 seconds without thinking about what happened, and all my attempts at distraction didn’t work.

So there I was—slumped on the couch, staring blankly off my balcony, while the world went on like nothing had happened.

By 4pm, I was in hell.

It felt like I’d reached the emotional equivalent of a dead end—no more thoughts to think, no more ways to reframe.

But then, from somewhere deep in my fried brain, a thought surfaced.

“That’s it. I give up.”

It was a mental surrendering—spurred by my exhaustion—to the worst-case scenario my mind had already scripted: The guy thinking I was unhinged and slow-ghosting me.

Months of effort wasted.

With those three words, I accepted the possibility that months of strategic personality curation had earned me nothing.

And then it happened.

The Most Australian Awakening Ever

I’m going to try and describe this as precisely as I can.

Some people’s awakening stories include some dropping of the “self” or sense of merging with the universe.

Mine wasn’t like that.

Instead of emptiness or everything-ness, I was flooded with the most specific sensation: Waking up in a hotel room with a week left on my vacation and a breakfast buffet waiting in the lobby.

I do not mean this as a nice-sounding metaphor.

I literally felt the exact feeling I'd had during my last trip to Bali. The identical sense of luxurious possibility—of having nothing demanding my attention except my own preferences.

I was still on my couch in my ordinary apartment, but I’d somehow accessed a completely different emotional state—one usually triggered by tropical locations and complete freedom from responsibility.

It was like my brain accidentally dialed the wrong number and connected to some parallel life where I was on holiday.

Just moments earlier, I’d been experiencing emotional bankruptcy—like the sinking regret after blowing a chunk of your net worth on something dumb and irreversible.

But, in the moment that I dropped the pain by accepting the worst-case scenario, the psychological upswing catapulted me from ego death to Balinese breakfast buffet.

If that’s not an awakening befitting of an Australian, I don’t know what is.

Why This All Clicked

The feeling of freedom lasted the rest of the evening and quickly mingled with fascination at the mystery of what I was experiencing. Thanks to my dabbling in meditation, I had just enough context to make some sense of it.

First, I understood that positive states—happiness, peace, even ecstasy—could theoretically exist independent of external circumstances. This was my basic grasp of why anyone would bother with spiritual practice.

Second, I kept seeing "surrender" described as key to spiritual growth, although I had no idea what that actually looked like in practice.

I’ve been forced to learn a lot about surrender since these days and have summarized those learnings in one place. You’re welcome in advance:

This accidental vacation suddenly illuminated both of these ideas with startling clarity.

The suffering I'd endured all day had been purely mental construction—my mind generating distress about a resolved situation. But the bliss that followed surrender? That was equally mental, just in the opposite direction.

I'd just experienced proof that consciousness could generate profound wellbeing completely independent of external circumstances. And I'd accessed this through the most basic surrender imaginable—giving up control over someone’s impression of me.

The pieces clicked with satisfying precision.

“Oh fuck,” I muttered to myself. “I think I just had an awakening.”

And from that day on, using my background in psychology as a launchpad, I devoted myself to learning everything I could about spirituality—because who wouldn’t want to spend the rest of their life sipping Bintangs on a beach?

Why Your Boring Awakening Might Be Perfect

Here's the thing about spiritual awakening stories: We've mythologized them into these grand, otherworldly episodes where people commune with machine elves and download universal truths from the ether.

I love these stories, almost as much as I love synchronicity tales.

But I’d never shared my own up to now because it lacks the narrative drama we’ve come to expect from spiritual transformation.

Then I realized that was dumb and that I should tell this story—so that people don’t dismiss their quiet experiences.

Your awakening doesn't need special effects to count. Sometimes, they arrive in your living room, mid-tantrum, holding a white flag and a bottle of beer. If you’ve ever had one of those ordinary-yet-undeniable moments where everything just clicked.

That counts.

And if you haven’t had one yet, you might not need to go chasing enlightenment on a mountaintop. You might just need to let go of something you’re white-knuckling.

Who knows? Maybe your buffet breakfast is just one surrender away.¹

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Thanks for reading The Aussie Mystic—where we normalize the quiet and deeply human parts of awakening. If this post made you feel seen, made you laugh, or just made you grateful you don’t cry over men the way I do, consider subscribing for more.

1. My biggest tip, if you haven’t done so already, is to simply start meditating. A great zen master said: Awakening happens by accident, but meditation makes you accident prone—and this proved true for me. This experience occurred six months after practicing for just 20 minutes a day.