How to Tell if You are Having a Healing Crisis

Feeling ISH after having a powerful soul awakening experience? You are not alone. In fact, this is common. Here is what to do about it.

A healing crisis can feel like completely having the wind knocked out of your sails, moving through ‘old’ energy on repeat in your head (body), feeling very (heavy, angry, sad) when you had been feeling generally ‘great’, existential questioning, and the passing of waves of emotion and deep realization. It is an all encompassing experience that, when managed properly, can end in as quickly as an hour. If ‘left’, these things can go on for weeks.

*I am keeping my words few for this one so as not to overwhelm any readers in a current healing crisis.*

What is a healing crisis?

A healing crisis is a moment in your life where you feel like you are absolutely on the edge of what you can take, energetically. It tends to come up when you have had a deep healing session (with a person like me), gone to a gateway or soul activating space on the planet, or when you have just lived through a powerful cosmic alignment.

What it means is that a combination of your own actions, those of someone else that you have worked with, and/or cosmic alignments have gotten you to a moment where you have either:

• activated or ‘turned on’ a part of your soul,

• retrieved or received a soul aspect or fragment that may have been caught up somewhere in a past life, or
  
• you are becoming aware of something like a past life or energy chain that is shocking to you,

• or you successfully did a cord cutting or reality stream adjustment.

• We just had a major cosmic moment

In general, you recognize that it is a healing crisis because you are participating in something that has stimulated you to have this response. You are able to identify that energy is being ‘shored up’ from these activities. Being able to have this recognition is part one of being able to ground yourself through one.

What does it feel like?

It can feel alternatively like melting, your head exploding, like remembering everything whilst also leaving it all behind.

• Pressure, like energy is welling up in you.

• As though you would like to run to the forest and never come back.

• Like your emotion that you are trying to deal with is welling up in a surge.

• Like you are going from realization to realization with naps or waves of crying in between.

• As though you are ‘at the limit’, even though you were doing fine just a few moments ago.

• As though ‘nothing is changing’ (even though if you step back and think about it, yes it is).

• Sadness and feelings of being forlorn (this is unprocessed emotion from the separation, the incident, or where the soul piece had to come from).

This is you meeting a wall of energy for processing, adjustment, transfiguration, and either upgrade or release. Rapid changing can do all of this. Here is why….

Why Does a Healing Crisis Feel Like a Crisis?

The good activities you have been doing and the planetary alignments that are going on have the power to stimulate rapid energetic shift, in your own personal body as well as your metaphysical presence throughout this and other realms. This is like a tidal wave, in moments. That can be overwhelming, exhilarating, exciting, and confusing to deal with. All at the same time. In pockets, you feel awful because there is rapid wave of energy to deal with that is unpleasant or surprising.

If you are brand new to the spiritual awakening game, or activating parts of yourself long-dormant, a healing crisis may be happening because your soul is shocked. It is a LOT for a little baby soul part to wake up here!! Earth right now is not at her best (but we are working on it). Part of what you may do to help yourself is learn to care for your soul/body relationship.

Hear more about this in ‘how to tell if your soul is activating: How to Tell if Your Soul is Awakening or Activating (crow-medicine.com)

How to Help Yourself in the Moment

The first thing to do is to help yourself get out of spin mode. This can be done by gong for a walk, getting out a book and ‘refocusing’ or doing something positive that helps you process the energy. DO NOT get yourself into arguments with people, do not allow your discomfort to cause more problems in your life. If you DO need to close down for a little while, do it – just remember to come back out.

I wrote this recent article on processing that has more information you may find useful: https://crow-medicine.com/2024/09/16/processing/

If you have advanced spiritual healing tools: use them. Remember that this is what you are training for. Meditation, energy alignment, soul communication and self-connection are there for you to use in this or any moment. This is what your training is for!

Anyone who has trained with me: I made sure that you have something you can use right now. Every single student I ever had has received a copy of ‘energy pillar’. That exercise is perfect for burning through dense energy AND calling in your next pathway. Staying with it for an hour + and really WORKING the energy will help you shift it more quickly. So too will doing things like speaking to your higher self aka your soul to ask yourself if there is anything you need. As my students tend to be amazed – your soul will answer back. Once you figure out that dialogue, you are on the way!

Ways to Prepare for (or Nurture Yourself Through) Future Big Healing Moments

I place a high onus on setting up a self-care routine that covers your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. One of the reasons I do this is — you guessed it — having these foundations in place helps you move through less pleasant moments with far more grace.

It can be very difficult to try to meditate, regulate, or align your energy for the first time on a day when you feel awful, versus learning these skills when you are stable, curious, and resourced. When you build the habit ahead of time — when you practice grounding, plugging in, and listening to your own system while things are relatively calm — those tools become like a reliable friend during the “ish” moments.

This is exactly why I teach people how to plug into Earth-based regulation and self-connection as a practice, not as a reaction. When you already know how to settle your system, feel yourself in your body, and draw support from the living world, you are far less likely to become overwhelmed when a healing wave moves through.

I also always speak about the energetic context and give advance notice of when “big energy” periods are approaching. I encourage you to pay attention to those updates and use them as preparation — not out of fear, but out of self-respect. These moments don’t have to knock you off your feet when you already know how to meet yourself with steadiness.

Stay the course and be good to yourself

My best advice to you is to stay the course, do not give up, and be good to yourself. I know how hard these moments can be. Trust that you are going to be able to get through this. As I shared above, part of this is working with energy tools to manage the tough moments and really thrive in the fun ones (in fact, the more you use the tools in general, the more fun you have because you are helping yourself).

Big love,

Katie IndiCrow