What's the REAL Path to Spiritual AWAKENING?

For years, we were told that the secret to spiritual awakening was simple: stay positive, think high-vibe thoughts, avoid negativity, and manifest harder. But what if that entire framework is backwards? What if the real catalyst for consciousness expansion isn’t escaping low vibration...but using it?
 
In this solo episode, Will cracks open the myth of “high vibes only” and exposes why so many seekers feel stuck, frustrated, or inconsistent in their manifestation progress. Drawing from a raw, paradigm-shifting conversation with spiritual teacher David Strickel, this episode reframes low vibration—not as failure, but as the entry point to real transformation.
 
If you’ve been trying to “stay positive” your way out of discomfort, suppress your shadow, or force your way into alignment, what you’ll hear today may just save you years of spiritual wheel-spinning.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode
• Why ‘High Vibes Only’ Actually Blocks Spiritual Growth
Will breaks down how bypassing your shadow stalls true spiritual awakening and stops manifestation at the root.
 
• The Spiral, Not the Ladder
Your awakening doesn’t ascend in a straight line. It winds up, down, and inward. Understanding this model can instantly remove years of self-judgment.
 
• The Hidden Beliefs That Sabotage Manifestation
Most people don’t manifest because they’re sending a signal of need, not alignment. Will exposes how fear masquerades as desire, and shuts the door on abundance.
 
• Detuning vs Letting Go
David Strickel’s groundbreaking concept of detuning shows you how to dissolve emotional charge without bypassing, sugarcoating, or faking forgiveness.
 
• Why Low Vibration Is Not a Problem—It’s a Message
Fear, grief, anger, anxiety...these aren’t spiritual failures. They’re invitations to examine the subconscious patterns shaping your reality.

The Three-Step Framework for Real Integration
A grounded, practical method to use immediately...no woo-only fluff, no 90-day shadow-bootcamps necessary:

1. Recognize When You’re “Down the Spiral” Stop mislabeling discomfort as failure; start seeing it as a signal.
2. Go Into the Basement Your subconscious has boxes you’ve never opened. Will guides you through how to begin...safely, intentionally, and without overwhelm.
3. Detune Through Appreciation Not toxic positivity. Not forced affirmations. Appreciation is the only emotional state that dissolves resistance without repression.

Why This Episode Matters Right Now
Spiritual seekers are burned out on polished, performative modern spirituality that denies half the human experience. This episode offers a grounded alternative, one rooted in intuition development, emotional honesty, and the true mechanics behind manifestation.
 
If you’ve ever wondered:

• Why does my shadow keep resurfacing?
• Why does manifestation work one week and collapse the next?
• Why do positive thoughts feel like a band-aid instead of transformation?
• Why do I feel worse the more I try to “stay high vibe”?

…then what Will shares here will land like a breakthrough.

Perfect For Listeners Interested In:

• Spiritual Awakening
• Manifestation (minus the clichés)
• Intuition Development
• Energy Healing & Emotional Regulation
• Shadow Work that Actually Works
• Soul Purpose & Consciousness Exploration
• Modern Spirituality Without Bypassing
• Life After Death Concepts & Higher Perspective Thinking
• Near-Death Experience-inspired frameworks
• Spirit Guides & Inner Dialogue with the Shadows

If This Episode Hit Hard…
Share it with someone who’s tired of performative positivity and ready for real transformation. And subscribe for more episodes that challenge assumptions, deepen awareness, and make spiritual growth practical, grounded, and honest.

Subscribe, Rate & Review!
If you found this episode enlightening, mind-expanding, or even just thought-provoking (see what we did there?), please take a moment to rate and review us. Your feedback helps us bring more transformative guests and topics your way!
 
Subscribe to The Skeptic Metaphysicians on your favorite podcast platform and YouTube for more deep dives into spiritual awakening, consciousness, spirituality, metaphysical science, and mind-body evolution.

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🌎 Website – SkepticMetaphysician.com
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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, I'm will welcome to a special episode of
The Skeptic and Physicians where I'm gonna call myself out
big time. See today, I'm gonna say something that would
have made my past self cringe. High vibes only might
be one of the most damaging ideas in modern spirituality. See.

(00:27):
For years, and I'm talking years, I asked every spiritual
teacher the same question, how do we raise our vibration
and finally manifest what we want? And no matter who
I talked to, the answers all sounded eerily similar. They said,
think positive, stay high vibe, avoid negativity, just be grateful,

(00:49):
and don't feed your shadow. And like a lot of people,
I bought into it. I practiced it. I interviewed experts
who taught it. I tried to body it every single day.
But something was off. See. I thought, if staying high
vibe was really the key, then why weren't all of

(01:10):
us high vibe folks walking around enlightened by now? I mean,
why did manifestation feel sporadic? Why did our shadows keep
showing up like they didn't get the memo? And then
I had a conversation with someone who blew the entire
thing apart that you might have listened to the episode

(01:30):
just last week. His name is David Strickle, and he
walked onto the show with zero fanfare, zero theatrics, and
still managed to turn modern spirituality completely on its head.
So he said a single sentence that hit me like
a freight train. He said, stop trying to escape low vibration,

(01:52):
instead explore it. That that was the moment that everything
shifted for me. I mean, what if the goal isn't
to avoid low vibration but to use it. What if
your shadow is in some forbidden basement, but rather a
storage room full of truth that you've never unpacked. Now

(02:15):
this isn't rebellion, this is maturity. This is actual, grounded,
embodied spirituality. David introduced his practice. But get this, it's
not a stay positive system. It's a mindset rooted in
appreciation for everything, the joy, the discomfort, the polarity, the
messy parts of being human that we keep trying to

(02:37):
bury under gratitude journals. In eleven eleven affirmations, he said
something that I wish every spiritual beginner heard on day one.
He said, a lot of spirituality teaches you to bypass
you've heard that term before spiritual bypassing right. He's right. See,
instead of facing pain, mother it with positivity. Instead of

(03:02):
exploring in that fear that we feel, we try to
outrun it. And instead of listening to our shadow, we
cover it with vision boards. Well, David wasn't having any
of that. He told me that spirituality is not linear,
but rather a spiral. You spend some time at the
top and things are clocking well and everything is super chill.

(03:23):
Then well, your path continues, and as it continues, it
winds down the spiral and you suddenly find yourself in
the basement, doubting everything. I mean, it makes so much sense, right,
the up and down of spiritual awakenings, it can be
rough sometimes. So we do everything we can to climb
back up that spiral to get back to that chill feeling.

(03:45):
I know I do, And we think nothing but positive thoughts.
We deny thinking bad thoughts. We spout constant affirmation after
affirmation that are designed to get us back to a
feeling of AH. But what if that's the com please
we want approach? What if we've been missing a huge
opportunity for exponential growth so that the AH feeling is

(04:07):
more like ah when we finally climb back up the spiral.
If you find yourself down the spiral, try not to
race STI get out this time, Go see what's in
that basement. Low vibration isn't a malfunction. It's a message,
a nudge, an invitation to look at what's actually shaping

(04:29):
your reality. Now Here is where David completely contradicted mainstream teachings.
He doesn't believe in just letting go that phrase that
if you have kids you've heard a mizillion times. It's
almost sacred in some spiritual circles. But David, in one breath,

(04:49):
dismantled that entire thought process. Instead of letting go, he
teaches something called d tuning, And once he explained it,
I realized hand He's right. Detuning is removing the emotional
charge from painful experiences by understanding them through higher lens.

(05:09):
You don't pretend it didn't hurt. You don't deny what happened,
You don't fake forgiveness. You ask what did this teach me?
How did this expand me? What belief did this reveal?
We talked a little bit about those hidden beliefs before
with other people, but this one hit home. For some reason,

(05:30):
David told these stories from his own childhood, where his
stability was shattered, he endured emotional abuse and trauma, and
instead of carrying resentment, he reframed those experiences as the
training ground for his intuitive clarity. He says something bold
but deeply, deeply sovereign. He said that his borderline abusive

(05:52):
mother was his greatest teacher. You listen to that again,
his greatest teacher. Abusive mother, his greatest teacher. He turned
what sounded like a hellish childhood, one full of trauma
and drama and disdain, into a slingshot that propelled him
to heights he could never have imagined. That's not bypassing.

(06:12):
That's mastery. That's choosing your own evolution. David also explained
why manifestation is so inconsistent and honestly, this one hurts
the Apparently I've been activating the vibration of need. In
other words, when I want something so desperately that I
really needed to happen. It turns out I'm broadcasting one

(06:34):
message and one message only, and that is I don't
have This need is lack. Lack is fear. Fear blocks
manifestation all of a sudden, all those episodes of me
talking about how badly he wanted to ask project and
me not being able to do it comes into clear focus.
But is that just about that? We're talking abundance. We're

(06:57):
talking about the things that keep happening that may go
what the heck? I'm a good guy. Why does this
keep happening? Why can't I manifest a life that is
happy and care free and less stressful? Well, now I
think I know why. It's funny on the show, he

(07:20):
told me this time he left a high paying corporate
job with no safety net. He burned through almost all
of his savings and finally hit a moment of surrender.
He was seeing his downward spiral continue over and over
and over again until that moment when he finally released
the fear. Well, can you guess what happened? Yep? His

(07:41):
business started churning again. Because manifestation can't happen from hunger.
It has to happen from neutrality, from non attachment. And
if we really want something too badly, well we're really
attached to that. And that has been the problem all along.
And this is where everything finally clicked for me. Consciousness

(08:04):
expands not through perfection. But through contrast, think about it.
Joy doesn't challenge your beliefs, right A life of ease
doesn't push you inward and comfort. It doesn't expose your patterns.
It just keeps you repeating them. But low vibration, fear, grief, anxiety, anger,

(08:28):
those emotions they force you to investigate the beliefs you've
been building your life on. Low vibration is unraveling your
creation to show you what you might want to look at.
So when you look at it that way, when you
see the things that happen to you as the universe
giving you an opportunity to take a look at the

(08:49):
things that are making you not live the life you
want to lead, instead of just denying that that's something
you have to look at, dive into it, see what's there,
see if you can detune it, accept it, understand why
it's there and how it's helping you, benefiting you, and

(09:12):
then at that point when you let it go, it
will be a much easier process to move that good
life forward. Here's the part that really matters, the actionable
steps shadow work. It doesn't have to be long, dramatic,
or traumatic. It's just three simple, grounded steps that's it.

(09:32):
Step one. Notice when you're down the spiral. Then you're
down the spiral when everything feels heavy, when you're looping
negative thoughts, when problems feel permanent, or when solutions feel pointless.
Now this isn't an emergency, it's a signal. The step two,
go ahead and go into the basement. Picture your subconscious

(09:54):
as a basement full of boxes. When low vibration hits that,
it's time to pick up what belief is speaking here?
When have I felt this before? What story am I
still living from childhood? And listen, you don't want to
start with a big trauma box, right, start with something small,

(10:15):
build spiritual muscle. Momentum comes from clarity, not from force.
And in step three you detune through appreciation, not toxic positivity,
not pretending the pain was for the best. You could
still be irritated with it. Appreciation simply means this shaped me,
This expanded me, This taught me something. Real. Appreciation dissolves resistance.

(10:43):
Resistance is what feeds suffering. And this is why appreciation
beats affirmation. Every single time affirmations try to cover pain,
appreciation transforms it. I know it's hard to wrap your
mind about it. But after that conversation, I realized something uncomfortable.

(11:05):
I've been trying to escape low vibrations for years, I
mean years, and I thought that climbing out of the
spiral meant progress. But the truth avoidance is growth bypassing
isn't mastery, and staying high vibe isn't awakening. The real
question is not how do I avoid low vibration, it's

(11:28):
how do I use low vibration. Maybe spiritual awakening isn't
a journey upward after all. Maybe it's a journey inward
into the basement, into the shadow, into the very place
holding the roots of our expansion. And maybe it's time

(11:49):
to stop chasing the light and finally understand the dark.
Not because suffering is noble, not because pain is required,
it's not, but because integration is real, and that that's
where true awakening begins. All right, thanks for joining me today.
If this episode hit home for you, share it with

(12:10):
someone who's tired of the high vibes only and ready
for something deeper, something real. And if you want more
conversations like this one, make sure you're subscribed, because we
are just getting started. We'll see you next time here
on the skeptic Benevosians. Until then, take really good care
of yourself.