The Messy & Blissless Parts of the Awakening Process

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Maggie Gilewicz supports those navigating the journey of awakening. Her work is devoted to humanising awakening by bringing honesty, nuance and emotional depth to a path often clouded by spiritual idealism and bypassing.

Through her one-on-one sessions, astrology and YouTube channel, Humanising Awakening, she offers a space where the personal and impersonal aspects of human experience are explored with honesty, curiosity and compassion. She holds a PhD in sociology and an MA in political science. She’s a lover of simplicity, learning and laughter.

Maggie offers a candid, often humorous portrait of awakening as a messy, deeply human journey rather than a clean escape into transcendence. She and Rick explore how growing up in an alcoholic family, a teenage glimpse of “Peace with a capital P,” and years in academia prepared the ground for a powerful perceptual shift that came not through formal practice, but through intense inquiry into the nature of thought. That shift opened into several years of profound equanimity and a sense of inherent wholeness, and then into multiple “dark nights” of depression, fear, and trauma surfacing that gradually forced her out of spiritual bypass and into fully embodied feeling.

Maggie describes later emptiness and “no‑doer” realisations, energetic/Kundalini‑like phenomena, and the slow integration of shadow, relationship, and ordinary life. Throughout the conversation, she emphasises that awakening is an innate capacity available to ordinary people, and that its true fruition is not leaving our humanity behind but discovering a deeper, kinder way of being human.

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Transcript of this interview

Interview with Rick Archer, Interview recorded January 17, 2026. You can find more interviews with Rick Archer at Buddha at the Gas Pump or https://batgap.com/ or https://www.youtube.com/user/BuddhaAtTheGasPump