By Tony James Simonetti
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Introduction
Every awakening comes with its shadows. When my own dark night of the soul arrived, it showed up as confusion, chronic pain, and the grief of leaving behind relationships that no longer felt safe.
I call my work trauma-informed because it honors both the nervous system and the spirit; healing requires more than ideas, it requires safety. By safety, I mean recognizing that fight, flight, freeze, and fawn aren’t flaws. They’re protective responses your nervous system uses to keep you alive. Healing honors those responses rather than pushing you beyond them. Often they show up as patterns like people-pleasing, over-explaining, or losing ourselves in others’ needs—habits that once kept us safe but now hold us back from sovereignty. In my own life, that meant molding myself to others’ moods (staying agreeable, staying small) until I could no longer hear my own voice.
This is the ground from which my course, The Sovereignty Sequence, was born.
The Dark Night
When the dark night of the soul arrives, it doesn’t ask for permission. It doesn’t speak in clarity. It comes disguised as disorientation, depression, betrayal, or a spiritual silence so loud it shatters everything we thought we knew about healing.
For those sincerely walking the path of awakening (especially those deep in trauma recovery), the experience can feel like failure. Like spiritual regression. Like nothing works anymore.
If you’re in that place now, I want you to know I made this map for you, so you don’t have to wander it alone. I built The Sovereignty Sequence for exactly this moment.
A Multidimensional Map for Multidimensional Awakening
This course was born from my own journey through the space between awakenings: the fog after the first insight, the heartbreak of exiting enmeshed relational systems, the nausea of stepping into the unknown. The course is for those standing at the edge of freedom, terrified they’ll slip back into old roles if they dare to rest. It’s for you who have seen too much to return to sleep but still feel too raw to take the next step.
Five years after my first awakening, and three years into a no-contact journey with family, I stumbled upon Spiral Dynamics, a model of human development that describes growth in colors:
- Stage Blue: rigid rules and moral absolutes
- Stage Orange: achievement drive and competition
- Stage Green: relational idealism and eventual disillusionment
- Stage Yellow: systems thinking and integration
I found myself living in Stage Yellow, moving toward integration, while carrying shadows from earlier stages. Seeing myself in this map helped me realize why we get stuck: not because we are broken, but because we outgrow the operating systems that shaped our identity without being given tools for healthy deconstruction. This course supplies those tools.
Around the same time, I also resonated deeply with the Hawkins Scale of Consciousness, which maps awareness from the lowest states of Shame and Guilt, through Courage and Love, into Peace and Enlightenment.
In many metaphysical communities, this spectrum is also expressed in dimensional language: 3D, 4D, 5D, and beyond. My own framing draws on Hawkins’ work and contemporary non-dual teaching, adapted here into a map that is experiential rather than doctrinal.
From the Hawkins Scale of Consciousness, here’s how I orient those stages in simple terms:
- 3D: Survival Self: dominated by fear, power struggles, and external rules
- 4D: Awakening Self: glimpses of compassion, intuition, and personal truth
- 4D–5D Bridge: the turbulence of deconstruction, shadow work, and discernment
- 5D: Sovereign Self: unity, presence, and creative expression anchored in love
- 6D+: Creator Consciousness: non-dual awareness and channeling, glimpses of the Absolute
Most people drawn to self-actualization and spiritual development hover at the threshold of personal truth in “4D,” where intuitive knowing awakens. This often correlates with Stage Green in Spiral Dynamics and the middle ranges of Hawkins (Courage, Willingness, and Acceptance). But stabilizing into sovereignty and creative expression (“5D”) often feels elusive. This is usually because of complex trauma patterns that bind us to the past.
The turbulence between 4D and 5D is real: our old identity dissolves, our nervous system resists, and people around us may pressure us back into familiar roles. We cannot bypass that pain; we must face and integrate it. Only then can we cross into unity, sovereignty, and creativity without massive regression or collapse.
Without boundaries, what looks like “oneness” is often just fusion: a pseudo-ocean that keeps us entangled in old systems. True presence emerges only when the self is clarified through sovereignty, and then surrendered into spacious unity.
To guide us through our journey in the Dark Night, I’ve created The Sovereignty Sequence:
The Six Phases of Remembering Who You Are
My course, The Sovereignty Sequence, moves through six archetypal phases. These are not rigid steps, but patterns I lived through and have seen echoed in others on this path that honor our stages of development, nervous system, and aura, offering a trauma-informed bridge between insight and action:
- The Fog: Where confusion reigns, empathy gets entangled in others’ needs, and compliance feels like the only way to survive.
- The Breaking: Where idealism dies and you cannot help but rage; it becomes sacred.
- The Exit: Where you walk away from the old systems (family, job, roles).
- The Eclipse: Where the void ceases to terrify you but becomes holy.
- The Return: Where you learn to re-enter life without losing yourself.
- The Rebirth: Where purpose and creativity emerge from the ashes of your old identity and self-perceptions.
Every phase is important, and the Eclipse phase is especially vital. Too many teachings describe the void as a black hole: a place of ego death that feels endless and irreversible. I see it instead as a solar phenomenon. The sun is still there. You’re still there. Something is moving across your light, asking you to pause before your next becoming. When I reached that pause, it felt like I had disappeared. Yet sitting in that emptiness became the first moment I could sense my own light without anyone else’s reflection on it. This emptiness isn’t failure; it’s a sacred pause. Slowing down is radical in a culture that worships constant progress.
The Sovereignty Sequence: A Course that Holds You Where Others Rush You
This isn’t a quick coaching program or a 30-day manifestation plan. It’s a lovingly structured container for people who already know what “letting go” means, but need help surviving the fallout of awakening.
It draws from somatic psychology, trauma healing, non-dual mysticism, and nervous system repair. But above all, it grants permission to move slowly, to not be okay, to loosen the grip of old pleasing patterns, and to reclaim your inner authority without explaining it to anyone. The course itself is already designed as a safe space for that inner journey to begin, with an embedded discussion channel where you can connect with others walking the same path. In time, there may also be opportunities for group dialogue and shared exploration.
I don’t share this map as an expert looking down, but as someone who stumbled through it—bruised, bewildered, and slowly discovering that each collapse was also a doorway. What I offer is simply the path I wish I’d had when I felt most lost.
Final Words
You can take this course in solitude. You can walk it in silence. Or you can use it as a springboard into your own higher service, once you feel more grounded and whole. Above all, know this: you don’t need to rush, you don’t need to prove anything, and you don’t need anyone’s permission. You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re not broken. You’re awakening. You’re right on time. Even if you’ve spent years giving yourself away to others’ needs, the return to your own authority is always possible.
If you feel the pull to explore The Sovereignty Sequence, trust that pull. And if you’ve already begun your dark night, remember: the eclipse will pass. The light on the other side won’t just be visible—it will radiate from within you. Not borrowed. Not performed. Not dependent on anyone’s approval. But wholly and magnificently you.
At whatever stage, you are welcomed.
About the Author
Tony James Simonetti is the creator of The Sovereignty Sequence, a six-stage course designed to support sensitive souls in reclaiming energy during spiritual awakening inside controlling relationships. The pathway guides participants from the fog of people-pleasing into clearer boundaries, grief integration, and spiritual orientation, without collapsing or performing.
Although not a therapist, Tony developed this purpose-driven project after a decade-long process that included thousands of journal entries, years navigating diverse healing modalities, and deep involvement in community. He has been a dedicated member and co-facilitator of multiple groups centered on narcissistic abuse recovery, inner child healing, detachment practices, and the Adult Children of Alcoholics steps framework pioneered by Tony A. The Sovereignty Sequence is also informed by extensive study of dozens of books and Tony’s own dark night of the soul, much of which unfolded during his previous career in marketing.
You can begin the journey today.
Visit sovereigneclipse.org/sequence to see if the course is a fit for you, or email Tony with questions or concerns at .
