You've Cracked Open. Now What? The Part Nobody Talks About After the Awakening
By Emma Mulvany | Women's Empowerment Mentor
Everyone celebrates the moment the floor drops out.
The book that changed everything (for me it was Untamed by Glennon Doyle). The conversation that cracked something open. The moment you saw your entire life laid out in an uncomfortable sequence of suppressed knowing and subtle aches and it suddenly makes sense.
Self-help culture loves that moment. It gets the Instagram post, the tearful testimonial, the before-and-after. It’s sexy and inspirational and everyone loves a poetic moment of awakening.
What it doesn't get is what comes next.
The six months of confusion (or, in my case, 3 years). The strange discombobulating feelings of grief (is that really grief I feel for my old blissfully ignorant self? You bet it is). Or that feeling of being too big for the life you're standing in, but not yet inhabiting the new one. The extreme discomfort of feeling like you’re straddling two worlds but you can’t actually see where your other foot is planted.
But the most potent, uncomfortable feeling may just be the loneliness of waking up in a world that hasn't changed, when you have.
Nobody really talks about that part. And for women who are living it right now, I want you to know that that part has a name. And it's not a breakdown. It's a passage.
The Catalyst Gets All the Credit. The After Does All the Work.
There's an entire industry built around the awakening moment. Courses, retreats, books, coaches, thought leaders, and programs. These are designed to help you have the realization. To crack you open. To get you thinking differently and to increase your self-awareness. All good things, btw.
But cracking open is just the beginning.
What follows is something that doesn't have great marketing: The Disorientation. Or my preferred moniker: The Void. The very uncomfortable in-between where you can no longer go back to who you were, but you haven't yet become who you're becoming. (I personally think it’s less about becoming anyone, and more unbecoming everyone the world told you to be, but I digress).
This is where the old ways of moving through the world feel hollow, but the new ways aren't fully formed. Where you're asking a question you don’t quite have the language for yet.
Oof, that language piece may be one of the hardest parts. How do you ask for help, search for answers, find a way when you can’t even name what’s happening? I’ve been there, sister.
Now what?
This is the most important, but also the most neglected passage in a woman's growth.
And it's the one I've built my entire work around.
Why This Phase Feels So Isolating
Women in the After of awakening often describe a particular kind of loneliness: their world has gotten too small for the size of the change they're feeling.
The people who love them most can see that something is shifting and it makes them uncomfortable. A sometimes subtle, sometimes overt tension can start to build. Well-meaning friends offer reassurance that everything is fine. Partners wonder if they've done something wrong or if they need to be worried for you. Even other women in growth spaces sometimes skip past this part, eager to get to the integration, the clarity, the rise.
But you can't rush the river.
What's happening in the disorientation isn't a problem to be solved. You’re not off track.
It isn't evidence that you're doing this human thing wrong or that the awakening was a mistake. It's the very necessary and tender work of coming into contact with yourself - your whole self, with all the parts you may have pushing aside, pushing down, hiding from - perhaps for the very first time without the old scaffolding holding you in a shape that was never really yours.
The ache you're feeling is real. The confusion is valid. But what I really want you to hear is this: you are not lost. You are in the middle of finding your way home to yourself.
What Most Women Do in This Phase (And Why It Keeps Them Stuck)
When the disorientation hits, most women do what they've been trained to do their whole lives: they look outside themselves for the answer.
Another book, another course, or another expert who will tell them what they're supposed to do next. They hand their authority over to a framework, a system, or a five-step plan, because the uncertainty is uncomfortable and someone else seems so sure.
And, don’t mistake, this is completely understandable. This is what we’ve been trained to do since we were small children. Especially as girls and women, this is a powerful way to separate us from one of our deepest and post potent powers: intuitive knowing.
When we’re separated from our inner knowing, we lose trust in ourselves. We become uncertain and unsure if we know what’s best for us and this makes it extremely easy for others to exert their control.
I understand this impulse completely. I've lived it.
But here's what I've come to know from my own cracking open moments (yes, you can have multiple cracking open moments. Having one actually increases the chances you’ll have more) and from walking with hundreds of women through theirs: the answer to now what? cannot come from outside you. Not sustainably. Not in a way that actually frees you and feels right for you.
Because if someone hands you the answer, you've just traded one cage for another.
The work of the After isn't to find the right expert. It's to become the authority on your own life. To excavate slowly, with care, with the right support, the parts of you that have been making your decisions from fear, from conditioning, from the relentless training to be palatable. And to let something truer emerge.
That is the work. And it's the most important work you will ever do.
What IFS Has to Do With It
One of the tools I use in my work is Internal Family Systems (IFS). It’s a tool in my toolbox not because it's trendy, but because it gets to the root. Since my early days in holistic nutrition, I have always preferred root-cause approaches that deliver real, sustainable results.
Most personal development approaches work at the level of symptoms. They help you change your thoughts, reframe a story, or implement a new habit. There’s a place for all of that, and sometimes it works - in the short term.
But beneath the thoughts and the stories and the habits are parts - early-formed, protective, incredibly loyal pieces of you that developed in response to what your childhood self needed to survive. Parts that are still running the show, even when you consciously want something different. Parts that are working very hard to keep you safe inside a cage they built a long time ago.
IFS allows us to go there. Not to eliminate or override these parts, but to understand them, honor them, and gently invite them to update. To show them that you, as an adult grown woman, can handle what they've been protecting you from.
This is root-cause work. It's not quick. It's certainly not a formula. And it's the only thing I've found that creates change that actually lasts.
What It Means to Be Held Through the After
I want to be transparent about what I offer and what I don't.
I am not here to fix you. I am not a savior, and I would ask you to be suspicious of anyone who positions themselves as one.
What I am is a space holder and a sacred mirror. I create the conditions - through one-on-one mentoring, through women's circles, through gathering spaces where women who've never met discover they were always connected - in which you can finally cultivate a relationship with yourself based in trust, compassion, deep connection, and care.
The transformation belongs to you. Every answer you'll find in our work together already lives inside you. My job is to hold space that is structured enough to direct the current, and safe enough for you to wade in.
One of my favorite metaphors is about banks on the river. Water flowing without banks is chaos. Water overflows, leading to floods and drowning. And, in the times of low tide, makes the water less impactful - a trickle. But when you put banks on the river, you direct it. You harness the power of the current and transform the landscape.
I am the banks. You are the river.
The Women I Walk With
If you're reading this and something in you is leaning forward, I want to describe who usually finds their way to my work.
You've already had the cracking-open moment. You're not looking for a catalyst, you've had yours. What you're looking for is someone who knows what to do with the aftermath.
You're self-aware and have done some deep, powerful work. You keep hearing words like sovereignty and inner authority and something in you stirs, even if you don't fully have the language yet.
You feel a conflict between who you want to be and who you've been expected to be. You've spent a long time handing your authority over to partners, to experts, to the relentless inner voice that sounds like everyone who ever told you to be smaller. And you're tired. You’re tired of bending and contorting to fit in. Tired of second-guessing yourself and overthinking your every move.
You're waving what I call the SOS flag: you know something isn't working. You just don't know what's next.
And you want to find out, but not by following someone else's map but rather by finally learning to trust your own.
If that's you, you're exactly who I'm here for.
What Women Say About Moving Through the After
Women who've come through this work describe a particular shift that’s equal parts dramatic transformation, and something deeper: a homecoming.
They describe their lives as juicier and deeper and richer and more full. They describe finally being able to speak up in rooms where they used to stutter or stay quiet. They describe a relationship with their own knowing that feels solid in a way that borrowed certainty never did.
They describe feeling held, but not because someone was holding them. But because they learned to hold themselves.
That is always the goal. That is the work.
If You're in the After Right Now
If you're in the disorientation - if you cracked open and you're sitting in the confusion of what comes next - I want you to know a few things.
You are not behind. There is no timeline for this passage. The women who try to rush it often find themselves back at the beginning.
You are not alone. The isolation of awakening is one of the cruelest parts of it. Finding women who are in the same river - not ahead of you, not behind you, but in it - changes everything.
You already have what you need. I know that might be the last thing you want to hear right now. But it's the truest thing I know. The answers you're searching for in the next best selling book from our latest guru, or in another online course, or another person's certainty, they live in you. The work is in learning to access them.
You don't have to do this alone.
Working With Emma
I offer one-on-one mentoring for women who are ready to go deep. Who want to dig into the root causes, the parts, and the particular shape of their own conditioning, and to come out the other side with a relationship with themselves that no one can take away.
I also hold monthly women's circles and entrepreneurial gathering spaces for women who need the mirror of community alongside the inner work.
If you're empowerment curious - if you keep circling back to this kind of language and feeling something stir - I'd love to talk.
You don't have to have it figured out before you reach out. The not-having-it-figured-out is, honestly, exactly where we begin.
Emma Mulvany
View my Bio
Book a Free Connection Call with Emma
Emma is a women's empowerment mentor, IFS-informed circle facilitator, and the creator of one-on-one and group containers for women moving through the after of awakening. She works with women who have already had their cracking-open moment and are ready for what comes next.
Keywords: women's empowerment mentor, spiritual awakening what comes next, after awakening confusion, IFS coaching for women, women's circles, inner authority women, sovereignty coaching, women's empowerment 1:1 coaching, personal development for women 40s 50s, what to do after spiritual awakening, women's mentorship, empowerment curious, cracking open awakening, IFS internal family systems coaching women