The Most Important Step In Any Spiritual Journey (VIDEO)

Whether it's a change in careers, the death of a loved one or the end of a relationship, we all experience moments when our lives suddenly change direction. While it can be difficult to deal with, filmmaker Jonas Elrod says these moments of deep shift are the beginning of a spiritual journey. It's our choice to walk the path and grow from the experience, or ignore the lessons entirely.

Jonas Elrod, who chronicled his own mystical awakening in the 2010 documentary "Wake Up," now follows people going through spiritual transformations on the new OWN series "In Deep Shift with Jonas Elrod." In hearing their stories, he has found that most journeys have three basic stages:

1. Breakdown
"A breakdown is when the floor falls out from underneath you, when things go sideways, things just don't go the way you want them to go," Elrod says in the above video. "There can be a myriad of different ways that these present themselves, but for a lot of us, breakdowns are generally around loss."

2. Breakthrough
The breakthrough, Elrod explains, is when you have that aha! moment. "Breakdowns, not so fun," he says. "Breakthroughs -- that's the juice."

Do you have to have a breakdown in order to have a breakthrough? "No," Elrod says. "You can have a breakthrough whenever you're open and ready. But I will say, you're not going to have 10 breakdowns a day. You're not going to have 10 breakthroughs a day. They come when they come."

3. Integration
The final step, integration, is the internal work. "[For] some people, it can be meditation, some it can be therapy, yoga, whatever it may be," Elrod says. "You can have this over-the-top, divine breakthrough moment, but you got to do internal work to kind of bring that into the everyday."

Though Elrod says everyone's spiritual journey is unique, this final step is the most important. "Because you don't want to have just a cool story that happened to you 10 years ago that you keep telling," he says. "You want to bring that into your life -- that divinity, that good mojo is always coming through."

Watch: One woman shares her breakdown moment while battling addiction.

"In Deep Shift with Jonas Elrod" airs Sundays at noon ET on OWN.