Bipolar Spiritual Awakening: The Question That Won't Leave
The first time I heard voices, I tried to figure out if they were spirits.
Not a passing curiosity. A real, sustained attempt at discernment. Because if they were symptoms — chemistry misfiring, the brain producing noise — that was one problem to solve. If they were something else, if the mind had somehow tuned into a frequency outside itself, that was a different thing entirely. The two possibilities called for completely different responses.
I couldn't tell. I still can't, not entirely. That's the specific difficulty of a bipolar spiritual awakening: medicine and spirituality both reach toward it and neither fully wraps around it. You end up living inside a question that nobody hands you a clean answer to.
The Jesus Moment
Here's something I don't usually say out loud: during a full manic episode, I thought I was Jesus.
Not metaphorically. Not in some vague sense of feeling chosen or significant. I mean the conviction was complete — knowledge-feeling, not belief-feeling. The evidence was everywhere I looked. The timing of things. The weight of coincidences. The sense that I was at the center of something vast and that others would eventually understand.
That experience leaves a particular mark. Not just because of what you did or said during it, but because of what it raises afterward. I was that certain about something that wasn't true. What does certainty mean anymore?
It's a destabilizing question. I understand why some people work hard to never sit with it. But I've found that this particular destabilization is actually a doorway. You can't maintain a rigidly held certainty after experiencing what conviction without foundation feels like from the inside. You get more honest. You hold everything a little looser. The need to know for sure starts to soften — and that, in a strange way, is what eventually let me take spiritual experience seriously in a completely different way.
Following the Wind
I want to tell you about a moment that doesn't fit cleanly into either explanation.
During another elevated episode, I walked out of a building and decided to follow the wind. Literally — wherever I felt a breeze on my face, I turned that direction and kept walking. I was manic. The grandiosity was there. I believed I was being guided, that the universe had something to show me.
I ended up on a street I'd never walked before, bumping into a stranger. We talked. Somewhere in the conversation I found out this person was the next-door neighbor of someone I had been grieving — an ex-girlfriend, a loss I hadn't been able to move past for years. That conversation gave me something I hadn't been able to find through any rational means: closure. Not the kind that resolves a question but the kind where the question quietly dissolves.
Was it the mania that led me there? Of course it was, in the mechanical sense. My impaired judgment was what made me walk without a destination. My heightened state was what made the encounter feel significant.
But here's what I can't let go of: I found what I needed. In the middle of an episode that clinical language calls a period of impaired reality testing, something real happened. Something that mattered. The instrument was broken. The music was still real.
The Grey Zone of Bipolar Spiritual Awakening
A 2022 scoping review published in the Journal of Religion and Health looked at the research connecting bipolar disorder with religious and spiritual experience. The clearest finding was this: intrinsic religiosity — religion held genuinely inside, not performed — has one of the strongest positive correlations with improved outcomes across studies. The people who had a real inner relationship with whatever they called the sacred tended to do better.
That tracked with something I'd been noticing, especially in lighter elevated states — what would be called hypomania. In that register, intuition runs high. A sense of being directed. The right door about to open. I've learned to watch that feeling carefully, because I know it can tip into something more dangerous. But I've also learned that dismissing it wholesale is its own kind of mistake.
Normal people feel this too — the sense of being nudged toward what's right, a background faith that something is steering. The bipolar diagnosis doesn't automatically cancel that signal. It complicates the interpretation. It raises the stakes of getting it wrong. It doesn't make the signal false.
A Framework That Finally Helped
Somewhere in my reading, I found the Kabbalah. There is a sephira called Binah — which translates as understanding. Not knowledge, but understanding: the capacity to receive something vast and give it a form the mind can actually hold and use.
What I've come to believe — lightly, provisionally — is that the difficulty with a bipolar spiritual awakening isn't that the experience is fake. It's that human consciousness has limited bandwidth for spiritual input, and the bipolar mind's bandwidth is both wider and less regulated than most. Too much comes in too fast, without the filtering that would make it navigable. The signal is real. The receiver is overwhelmed.
Binah — understanding — is what gets built over years. Through practice, through honest grappling with what happened to you, through slowly learning to hold the input without being flooded by it. It's not a gift you wake up with. It's something you develop.
What the Research Actually Confirms
The most honest research on this question doesn't resolve it — it legitimizes the difficulty.
A 2024 narrative review in Religions examined how people with bipolar disorder actually explain their spiritual experiences over time. The finding that stood out: most people settle on a both/and model. The experience was real and it was shaped by the illness. Neither explanation alone was satisfying, because neither alone was true.
The review also noted that most of this meaning-making happens outside clinical settings — in private, in religious communities, in conversations with people who knew you before. Psychiatry, for the most part, doesn't have a framework for the question. The integration of the spiritual dimension of a bipolar spiritual awakening is largely left to the individual, without institutional support and without a roadmap.
That has matched my experience exactly. I have never had a psychiatrist ask what the episodes meant to me spiritually. The clinical and the sacred are handled in separate rooms, by people who rarely talk to each other. You do the bridging work yourself.
What to Do When You're in the Middle of It
If you're in that place right now — unsure whether what you're experiencing is a breakdown or a breakthrough, whether the voices or the visions are pathology or something more — here's what I'd offer.
Pray if that's meaningful to you. Get close to whatever you call the divine, not to explain what's happening but to find the steadiness that exists underneath the storm. And call your psychiatrist. Not because the medical explanation cancels the spiritual one, but because stable chemistry is the ground you need to actually process what happened. You can't sort out the meaning when the signal is at full volume.
Find people who won't make you choose — who can hold the reality of the medical experience and the reality of the spiritual one without flattening either. They exist. You may have to look. Lower the stigma by finding at least one person you trust enough to tell. That might be someone you already know, or it might mean finding new people. Either is okay.
And when you're through it — and you will be through it — don't leave the question behind. Bring it with you. The bipolar spiritual awakening question isn't a problem to be solved. It's a lens that keeps revealing things, for years, if you let it.
The instrument was broken. The music was still real.
I'm still figuring out how to play it.
If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.
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