existentialBy DailyDestiny Editorial Team

The Stages of Spiritual Awakening: Which Map You Are On and Where People Stall

Spiritual awakening is described in stages by several maps that do not agree with each other: Evelyn Underhill's five, Teresa of Avila's seven mansions, the Buddhist insight knowledges, and the popular internet sequence. This guide compares those maps, shows how to locate yourself without a symptom checklist, explains why the middle is the hardest part, and names what makes people stall.

What are the stages of a spiritual awakening?

The stages of a spiritual awakening, in the maps that bother to name them, run in five broad movements: a disruption that breaks the frame you had been living inside, a search phase in which you go looking for an explanation, a stripping phase in which the beliefs and habits that held the old frame together come apart, a long flat stretch where meaning drains out of practices that used to work, and a return to ordinary life carrying whatever survived. Evelyn Underhill set out that sequence in Mysticism in 1911 as awakening, purgation, illumination, the dark night of the soul, and union. The popular versions circulating online compress or expand the same shape into anywhere from five to twelve steps. What none of the maps promise is a schedule. A stage is a description written after the fact by someone who got through it, which means it tells you what the terrain looked like from the far side, not where you are standing now. People read the list and expect a queue. What they get is a set of conditions that recur, overlap, and arrive out of order.

The vocabulary is older than the internet by about fifteen centuries. The threefold way, purification then illumination then perfection, comes down through the anonymous Syrian writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, whose surviving treatises are dated to around 500 CE, and later Latin writers turned his third term into union. That triad became the standard Christian frame for centuries afterward. Underhill added an opening awakening and moved the dark night in front of union. Those five are what most Western readers have inherited, usually without knowing where they got them. Teresa of Avila had already described seven dwelling places in The Interior Castle, which she wrote in 1577, and the Theravada tradition runs a separate map of sixteen insight knowledges, set out in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga around 430 CE, which predates both. The material behind these maps came overwhelmingly from people living under a rule: one doctrine, a fixed daily schedule, and a superior with the authority to order them to stop. They are now read by people practicing alone, mixing traditions, with nobody authorized to say enough. That mismatch explains a fair amount of what goes wrong, and none of the maps was written to correct for it.

Is there an agreed number of stages?

No, and the counts are not close. The threefold way has three, Underhill has five, Teresa of Avila has seven dwelling places, the Theravada progress of insight has sixteen knowledges, and popular online lists run from five to twelve. The disagreement is partly about granularity and partly about what is being counted: an experience, a change in belief, or a permanent shift in capacity. Treat the number as a stylistic choice, not a finding.

Does a stage model predict what comes next?

Only loosely. A map can tell you that a flat, meaningless stretch commonly follows a period of intensity, which is genuinely useful when you are inside one and think you have broken something. It cannot tell you when that stretch ends, how bad it will get, or whether the illumination the map promises afterward will arrive at all. None of these maps has been tested prospectively to a clinical standard, so prediction at the level of one person is not something any of them has been shown to do.

Which tradition wrote down a sequence first?

Early Buddhism has a strong claim. The four stages of awakening in the Pali canon, stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner and arahant, define each level by which specific fetters have dropped away, which makes it one of the oldest sequences to attach criteria other people could in principle check rather than descriptions of feeling. The Christian threefold sequence arrives several centuries later, and Underhill's five later still, built out of biography instead of doctrine.

Which stage models do people actually use, and where do they disagree?

Four families of stage model are in circulation, and readers usually mix them without noticing. The Christian mystical maps, Underhill's five and John of the Cross's two nights and Teresa's seven mansions, describe a soul's progress toward union with God and assume that God is doing most of the work. The Buddhist insight maps, above all the sixteen knowledges systematized in the Visuddhimagga and taught in the twentieth century by Mahasi Sayadaw, describe what a meditator observing bodily and mental phenomena will see, in a defined order, if the technique is followed. The developmental psychology models, the six stages of faith James Fowler set out in Stages of Faith in 1981 and Robert Kegan's subject-object shifts, describe how a person holds belief, not what a person experiences. The psychological staircase most readers already know is treated in Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: Complete Guide Through a Spiritual and Astrological Lens. And the popular five-to-twelve-step model, which has no single author and varies by whoever is posting it, blends symptoms, emotions and life events into one list. The disagreements are substantive. They differ on whether the sequence is linear, on whether the difficult middle is a stage or an artifact of the method, and on whether the endpoint is a state you enter or a trait you keep.

The deepest split is between ladder and spiral. Ken Wilber's integral model has each stage transcend and include the one below, so nothing genuine is ever lost by moving up, and he introduced the pre/trans fallacy in The Atman Project in 1980 to name the mistake of confusing pre-rational states with trans-rational ones. Michael Washburn argued the opposite in The Ego and the Dynamic Ground in 1988. The way up runs through a regression to pre-egoic material, on his account, so a descent belongs to the route and is not a failure of it. Zen has been arguing a version of the same point since the eighth century, when Shenhui used a public assembly at Huatai in 732 to press his teacher Huineng's sudden realization against what he characterized as the gradualism of the Northern school around Shenxiu. Neither side won. Inside Theravada, teachers disagree over whether the difficult insight knowledges are inevitable or are produced by the mapping itself, and Daniel Ingram's blunt treatment of them in Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha sharpened that argument rather than settling it.

What exactly are Underhill's five stages?

Underhill's sequence runs awakening of the self, purification of the self, illumination of the self, the dark night of the soul, and union. She drew it from the lives of mystics she had read closely, chiefly Christian ones with some Sufi and other material alongside, and she presented the five as a schematic abstracted from biography rather than a route with a guaranteed order for any individual. Later popularizers dropped the caveat and kept the list, which is how it hardened into a checklist.

How is Fowler's faith development different?

Fowler was measuring the structure of belief, not the content of experience. His six stages describe how a person holds faith, from the literal reading of a child through the conventional stage most adults settle in, to the individuative-reflective stage where inherited belief gets examined and often collapses. That collapse feels like an awakening from inside, which is why the two vocabularies keep getting mixed together by readers who meet both.

Do Buddhist maps mean the same thing by awakening?

No, and the difference matters. Bodhi in the Pali sources names a specific attainment defined by which of the ten fetters have permanently fallen away, and not by how transformed a person feels. Popular usage means an intense change in perspective. A person can have the second without meeting a single criterion of the first, which is a common source of inflated claims and of quiet disappointment later.

How do you work out which stage you are in right now?

You work out which stage you are in by looking backward at what has already changed, not by matching today's feelings against a list. Three questions do most of the work. What stopped working, and when? Something usually goes first: a job that no longer means anything, a belief you can no longer hold, a relationship that stops fitting, a death. What are you doing about it, and has that changed shape? Early on the search is about relief, and any explanation will do; later it narrows into one or two practices you keep returning to whether or not they feel good. And what is your actual capacity right now, measured in whether you can work, sleep, eat and hold a conversation? Capacity is the least flattering measure and the most reliable one. Symptom checklists are the worst method available, because almost every item on them is produced by a dozen ordinary causes as well. If your interest is specifically in the physical and sensory phenomena people report, the catalog belongs to Kundalini Awakening: Signs, Stages and Risks rather than here. Location is a claim about trajectory, and a trajectory needs two points.

Self-location is unreliable in a predictable direction. On a good day people place themselves late in the sequence; on a bad day they place themselves at the beginning, or decide the whole thing was a delusion. The judgment moves with the state it is trying to judge. The cheap correction is a dated log kept for a few months: hours slept, whether you worked, who you spoke to, one line about what you did with the day. Reading that log after eight weeks tells you more than any amount of introspection, because it shows direction and not position. One confusion is worth heading off early. Rising perceptual sensitivity, to noise, to other people's moods, to what you pick up walking into a room, has a practice sequence of its own and gets read as proof of a late stage when it is proof of no stage at all; Psychic Development: Exercises, Stages and How to Practice Safely treats it on its own terms. The stronger correction is external. Ask two people who have known you for ten years what has changed about you, and keep the answer even when it is unflattering. Teresa of Avila built that principle into her own scheme, insisting that the reliable sign of progress is conduct and not the quality of anyone's prayer, and she wrote The Interior Castle in 1577 at a time when the Spanish Inquisition was scrutinizing women who claimed direct experience of God, with the manuscript of her own earlier Life already in its hands. She had a practical reason to prefer evidence that other people could check.

Can an online quiz tell you your stage?

No. These quizzes score self-report against a list the author wrote, with no external criterion and no way of ruling out a bad week, a thyroid problem or ordinary grief. The result reflects your current mood and your familiarity with the vocabulary more than anything else. Read the questions as a summary of what the author thinks matters, then throw the score away and keep the questions.

What tells you the first stage is behind you?

The search changes character. In the opening phase people consume everything indiscriminately, looking for the explanation that will make the discomfort stop. Later the reading thins out, one or two practices get kept, and the question shifts from what is happening to me toward what do I do now. When you stop needing a new framework every fortnight, you have left the front of the sequence behind.

Does a peak experience move you to a later stage?

Not on its own. Wilber's distinction between states and stages is the useful one here: anyone can have a temporary state at any point, including people with no practice and no interest, while a stage is a change that holds after the state has gone. Unitive experiences and what they actually feel like belong to Crown Chakra (Sahasrara): Spiritual Awakening & Connection, which handles the endpoint in detail.

Why is the middle of the sequence the hardest part?

The middle is hardest because the old structure has already stopped paying out and the new one has not formed yet. In the opening phase there is at least the energy of the disruption and the interest of discovery. In the late phase there is something that works. In between, the beliefs, roles and habits that used to organize a life have been pulled apart while nothing has replaced them, and the practices that produced results six months ago produce nothing. Underhill called this region purgation and placed a second, worse stretch after illumination. John of the Cross split it into the night of sense and the night of spirit, and he was describing people who were already committed contemplatives, not beginners. The Theravada maps put a run of unpleasant insight knowledges in the same position, with fear, misery and disgust listed as expected stations rather than as warnings. Each of the maps named here puts a hard stretch in roughly the same position, which is the best reason available to think the shape is not an artifact of one tradition. Modern documentation exists too: the Varieties of Contemplative Experience study, run out of Willoughby Britton's lab at Brown University with Jared Lindahl as lead author, interviewed more than sixty Western Buddhist practitioners and more than thirty teachers and clinicians about difficult meditation experiences, and appeared in PLOS ONE in 2017. It was a qualitative interview study, so it catalogs what people report rather than establishing how often any of it happens. The social cost lands here as well, which is why the middle is where most people quit.

Two things surface in the middle that people are rarely prepared for, and both arrive because the structure that had been holding them down has just been dismantled. The first is material the previous identity was built to keep out of view: old anger, contempt, envy, the parts of yourself you would not describe out loud. Jung's account of it, and the method for working with it, belong to The Shadow Self: What Jung Meant and How to Meet It. The second is childhood, which arrives as grief far more often than as memory, and Inner Child Work: Exercises, Prompts and When to Seek Help covers what to do with it. The classical writers were reporting this from inside it rather than theorizing about it. John of the Cross wrote much of the Spiritual Canticle while held in Toledo by Calced Carmelites who opposed the Discalced reform he had joined with Teresa of Avila, in a cell he escaped from in August 1578 after roughly nine months of it, and Teresa of Avila wrote in her Life of spending what she described as close to twenty years on a stormy sea of prayer before the change came. Neither of them was describing a bad season. Discrete episodes of self-dissolution land in this stretch as well, sometimes with no warning at all, and Ego Death: What It Means, What Triggers It and How to Integrate It handles those.

Is the dark night of the soul the same as the hard middle?

Not in the original sense. John of the Cross was describing the withdrawal of felt consolation from someone whose prayer life was already established, a specific and comparatively rare condition that he treated as a sign of progress. Popular usage has stretched the phrase to cover any prolonged period of spiritual misery, including plain depression. Both things exist. The term now covers too much ground to locate anyone precisely.

Why does it get harder after things have gone well?

Because progress removes the coping structures before it delivers the replacement. A person who has just had a period of clarity usually drops the defenses, distractions and small comforts that were doing quiet work, and then meets whatever those were holding at bay. From inside, the sequence looks like regression and reads as evidence of failure. It is a routine feature of every map that has a middle at all.

What helps most during the middle stretch?

The boring things, in roughly this order: protected sleep, three meals, physical work, one person who knows what is going on, and less input rather than more. Cutting spiritual reading and forums usually helps inside a fortnight. Both raise the stakes on every symptom you notice, so removing them lowers the temperature faster than any technique will. If the process has turned physically destabilizing, the stabilization protocol is in Kundalini Awakening: Signs, Stages and Risks.

How long does each stage last, and does it run in order?

No duration figure for any of these stages rests on measurement, so a number quoted with confidence is being passed along rather than sourced. What can be reported is the shape people describe. The initial disruption is usually short, days to a few weeks, and often attaches to a specific event. The search phase commonly runs months to a couple of years. The hard middle is where the reported range explodes: some people describe several months, many describe two to four years, and a minority describe a decade of it, frequently with the worst part concentrated in one bad year. Integration has no endpoint, because it stops being a phase and becomes how you live. Every one of those figures comes from self-report, gathered retrospectively, from people who chose to write about it, which biases the sample toward those who got through and toward those who found it dramatic enough to record. The people who stopped, went back to work and never used the vocabulary again do not show up in any of it. None of these stage models has been followed prospectively in a general population sample to a standard that would support duration figures, so read the durations as folklore with a large sample behind it rather than as data.

The ordering is a worse problem than the durations. Teresa of Avila wrote that a soul admitted to an inner dwelling place can be sent back out to the earlier ones, and Underhill described oscillation between illumination and darkness instead of a clean passage. The Theravada insight maps are explicitly cyclic: practitioners run the same sequence of knowledges repeatedly, at higher resolution each time, which is why experienced meditators talk about cycling rather than climbing. Underneath the ladder and spiral argument set out earlier sits a sharper question, which is whether a stage can be lost at all. The Pali sources answer no in the strongest terms available to them: a stream-enterer, sotapanna, is described as no longer liable to fall into the lower realms and as bound for full awakening within seven lives at most, which makes that first attainment a permanent change in kind rather than a run of good weather. The Christian maps assume the opposite throughout, since the apparatus of confession, direction and penance presumes that ground can be given back. The practical consequence is that a loop model predicts what people report from month to month, while something like a ladder is needed to explain why a few changes never reverse no matter how badly the rest goes.

Why do people cycle back to earlier stages?

Because different areas of a life come apart at different times. A person can be settled about belief and completely unreconstructed about money, sex or family, and when the unreconstructed area finally gives way the whole disruption phase repeats inside that one domain. It feels like starting over from nothing. It usually is not, since the second pass runs faster, with less panic and a great deal less reading.

Is a fast awakening better than a slow one?

Usually the opposite. Rapid, unprepared onset is the pattern most often reported alongside difficulty, because capacity has no time to build and the person has no framework and no teacher when the hardest part arrives. Slow processes are frustrating and rarely destabilize a life. The classical traditions all sequence the preparation first for exactly this reason, and they were not being cautious for the sake of appearances.

Can you be in two stages at once?

Yes, and it is the normal case, not the exception. Wilber's term for this is lines: cognitive, emotional, moral and interpersonal development advance at different rates, so a person can be sophisticated about metaphysics and thirteen years old about conflict. Kegan's subject-object framing is compatible with this, since what a person can step back and examine, rather than be run by, tends to shift unevenly across the areas of a life.

Is it a spiritual awakening, or is it depression, burnout, or a life crisis?

You cannot reliably tell a spiritual awakening from depression, burnout or a life crisis from the inside, and the categories overlap enough that the question is often badly posed. All of them can produce the same flat months, and they frequently coexist. A few distinctions hold up. Depression tends to flatten interest in everything, including the spiritual material, so the appetite goes along with everything else, while the hard middle of an awakening usually leaves curiosity intact even when nothing feels good. Burnout tracks a specific load and generally lifts when the load does. Grief has an object. An awakening is more often marked by a change in what you believe than by a change in mood alone. None of that settles an individual case, and using it as grounds to refuse treatment is the wrong move. There are red flags that end the debate immediately: thoughts of ending your life, not eating, going days without sleep, being unable to care for yourself or your dependents, hearing or believing things that other people can check and contradict, or losing significant weight without trying. Any of those means seeing a clinician now, and the spiritual reading can wait until afterward.

Ordinary physical causes produce the same picture and are cheap to rule out. Thyroid dysfunction, anemia, B12 deficiency, sleep apnea, perimenopause, a medication change and the long tail of a viral infection all present as exhaustion, mood change and a sense that the world has gone gray. Bloodwork first is not a betrayal of the process. A body that is failing for a mundane reason cannot do anything well, including this. Burnout has a formal description worth knowing: the World Health Organization's ICD-11 lists burn-out at code QD85 as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, described by three dimensions, exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism about the job, and reduced professional efficacy, and restricted by its own definition to the work context. A clinician does not have to share your interpretation to be useful, and the better ones will treat the sleep and the eating without arguing about metaphysics. The category clinicians argue about here has a paper trail: Stanislav and Christina Grof coined the term spiritual emergency and set up the Spiritual Emergence Network at Esalen in 1980, and the DSM-IV added the V code V62.89, religious or spiritual problem, in 1994, filed among conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention rather than among the mental disorders. A filing decision is not a treatment, but it did make it possible to record the situation without calling it psychosis.

Can it be both at once?

Yes, and assuming otherwise is the expensive mistake. A person can be in a genuine transition and clinically depressed in the same month, with each making the other worse. Treating the depression does not cancel the transition, and people who wait for one explanation to win usually lose a year to the argument. Treat what is treatable and let the interpretation stay open. Nothing about accepting help closes the question.

Will a therapist treat this as pathology?

Some will and many will not. Clinicians vary widely on this, and the practical move is to ask directly in the first session how they handle religious and spiritual material instead of testing them with your most unusual experience. Describing function first, sleep and appetite and work, gets a better hearing than leading with interpretation, and it is the information they actually need to help you.

What should you tell a doctor?

Facts about function, in this order: when it started, how you sleep now compared with a year ago, what you eat, whether you are working, whether you are safe. Bring dates. You can say plainly that you have been through an intense change in belief and want physical causes excluded, which is a reasonable request that most doctors will act on without needing further explanation.

What makes people get stuck between stages?

People get stuck between stages for a small number of identifiable reasons, and almost none of them are a lack of effort. The commonest is identity adoption: the process throws up a question about who you are, and a ready-made answer arrives with a community attached. The labels themselves are described in Starseeds: The Types, Traits and Origin Stories People Describe and in Lightworker: What the Term Means and the Roles People Claim; what turns one into a stall is treating the label as the destination rather than as a description. The second reason is consumption replacing practice, where reading, podcasts and forums produce the feeling of movement without any. The third is bypassing, using the spiritual material to avoid the human problem underneath it, defined properly in Crown Chakra (Sahasrara): Spiritual Awakening & Connection. The fourth is waiting for a repeat of a peak experience, which can turn an entire year into a vigil. The fifth is refusing the ordinary demands, money, work and family, that the process needs to land in. The sixth is material that genuinely needs professional help and will not shift for any amount of practice. Each stall is structural, and each has a specific exit.

A stall is usually met with more intensity, applied at precisely the point where intensity is the problem. Longer sits, harder breathing, another retreat, another teacher. What the classical settings supplied and what almost nobody has now is a supervisor whose job included saying stop, eat something, go home for a month. Spiritual directors in the Christian orders and preceptors in monastic Buddhism both held that authority, and both used it. Online communities invert the incentive: reporting phenomena earns attention, reporting that you got a job and went quiet earns none, so the visible population is weighted heavily toward people who stay in the middle. The other structural trap is that the middle stage is genuinely interesting and ordinary life is not. Some people stall because the process has become the most compelling thing they have, and finishing it means going back to something duller.

Is spiritual bypassing the most common stall?

It is the most discussed and probably not the most common. The psychotherapist John Welwood coined the term in 1984, in a Journal of Transpersonal Psychology paper on inner work, for the use of spiritual practice to sidestep unfinished emotional business, and he was describing the Buddhist community he belonged to rather than outsiders. Plain consumption, reading and watching in place of practicing, is far more widespread. It is also less flattering to admit to. Bypassing at least implies that you were practicing.

How do you tell a stall from a plateau?

By duration and by function. Plateaus are flat and quiet, capacity holds steady or improves, and life outside the practice keeps working normally. A stall shows up as a life narrowing around the process: fewer relationships, worse work, more time online, and the same conversation repeating for a year. If twelve months of the same content has changed nothing about how you actually live, it is a stall.

Does taking a long break set you back?

No, and breaks are standard advice in traditions that take the process seriously. Nothing that has become structural is lost by stopping for six months, and what is lost was a state and never a stage. People who stop for a year and return usually report that the material they had been struggling with had settled on its own while they were paying attention to something else entirely.

What does integration back into ordinary life look like?

Integration back into ordinary life looks unremarkable from the outside, which is the part most people find hardest to accept. The Zen tradition put the endpoint in the tenth of the ox-herding pictures attributed to the twelfth century Chinese teacher Kuoan Shiyuan, where the practitioner comes back down into the marketplace with open hands and nothing to show, and Jack Kornfield gave a book of 2000 the title After the Ecstasy, the Laundry for much the same reason. The visible markers are ordinary. You can hold a job again. The vocabulary drops out of your everyday speech, because you no longer need every conversation to carry it. You stop requiring other people to validate the experience, and you stop bringing it up unprompted. Relationships either repair or end without a scene. Practice gets boring and continues anyway. Money, sleep and other people are the real tests, and none of them care what happened to you. Teresa placed the seventh dwelling place at the end of her sequence and said its mark is works, not raptures. Two traditions that developed independently of each other arrived at a similar test. The state has become a trait when nobody around you can tell that anything happened.

Zen builds a formal stage for this and calls it post-satori training, on the reasoning that an opening is worth little until it has been ground into character over years of unremarkable practice. The Christian orders assumed something similar when they returned contemplatives to manual work. Two honest caveats belong here, and the popular maps rarely include them. Some people do not come all the way back: a minority report lasting reductions in tolerance for noise, crowds, alcohol or long working hours, and build a smaller and quieter life around that instead of recovering the old one. And a number of the beliefs picked up during the middle stage will not survive contact with a settled mind, which is uncomfortable, because they were load-bearing at the time. Integration includes an audit. Keep what still holds, drop the rest, and resist the temptation to write off the entire period because some of its furniture turned out to be temporary.

How do you know integration has actually happened?

Function is the test, measured over a year and not over a week. Steady work or study, sleep that does not need managing, relationships that survive disagreement, and a practice you keep without needing it to produce anything. The internal marker is the loss of urgency. The process stops being the most important thing about you and becomes one of several things that happened to you, which most people find deflating for about a year and then stop minding.

Does the intensity ever come back?

Yes, episodically. It arrives with a life event far more often than out of nowhere: bereavement, illness, birth, the collapse of a career. People who have been through it once move faster the second time and panic a great deal less, because they recognize the terrain and stop treating it as an emergency. Meaningful coincidence clusters around these reopenings, and Synchronicity: Jung's Definition, Examples and How to Read It covers how to read it without inflating it.

What do you do with the practices you picked up along the way?

Keep the ones that survive a normal week. A practice that only works on retreat, or that needs a special state to feel worthwhile, tends to fall away on its own, and forcing it usually restarts the middle. Most people end up with two or three plain things done regularly: sitting, walking, writing, some form of service. The elaborate systems get shed quietly.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does everyone go through a dark night of the soul?

No. Plenty of people describe a long, gradual change with no acute crisis in it at all, and the maps that include a dark phase generally place it in a specific position and do not treat it as universal. Underhill was explicit that few people passed through her whole sequence. What comes closer to universal is a stretch where the practices stop working and the meaning drains out, which can last weeks or years and does not have to be dramatic to count as the same thing.

Is it normal to feel worse than you did before any of this started?

It is commonly reported, particularly in the middle stretch, and every serious map includes a phase that feels like deterioration from inside. That does not make it safe to wait out indefinitely. Feeling worse for a few months while still working, eating and sleeping is one situation. Feeling worse for a year, or feeling worse alongside not eating, not sleeping, or thoughts of ending your life, is a different one, and the second calls for a clinician, not another framework.

Can you stop a spiritual awakening once it has started?

You can usually slow it a great deal, and that is often the right move. Whatever is driving the intensity can be reduced: long meditation sittings, forceful breathing practice, retreats, fasting, short nights, isolation, and heavy consumption of spiritual content. Cutting those tends to lower the volume within weeks. What does not reverse is the part that has already changed in how you see things, which is why people describe the process as unstoppable when what they mean is that it cannot be undone.

Do you ever go back to being the person you were before?

Not exactly, and people who expect to usually spend a long time disappointed. What does come back is capacity: work, humor, appetite, tolerance for ordinary conversation. The reported change is in what you take seriously and what you can no longer pretend to care about, and it tends to hold for good. Most people describe the far side as recognizably themselves with a rearranged set of priorities and not as a new person, and their oldest friends usually say the same thing.

Why have my friendships changed so much since this began?

Because friendships run on shared assumptions, and yours moved. Some relationships were built around a version of you that has stopped showing up, and those thin out without anyone doing anything wrong. Others end because constant talk about the process is genuinely hard to be around, which is worth hearing instead of reframing as their limitation. A small number get closer. The advice that survives contact with reality is to stop recruiting and keep showing up for people in ordinary ways.

How do I talk about this with family who think I have lost the plot?

Lead with function and leave the metaphysics out. Family are frightened more often than dismissive, and what frightens them is watching you sleep badly, quit things and talk in unfamiliar language. Telling them you are sleeping better, still working, and seeing a doctor answers the actual worry. Save the interpretation for people who asked for it. If they keep pushing, saying that you are going through a period of reappraisal and would rather not debate it is a complete answer.

How do I hold down a job while I am in the middle of this?

Protect the sleep window above everything else. Almost every failure at work during this period traces back to it. Reduce discretionary load and not core duties, take leave ahead of a collapse instead of after one, and keep the process out of the workplace entirely, including the vocabulary. Routine work is stabilizing, and the people who quit their jobs to go deeper are heavily represented among those who stall. If capacity has genuinely gone, that is a medical conversation rather than a spiritual one.