Dark Nights of the Soul
If you’ve found your way into personal development at some point in your life, you may have noticed that the focus is on growth. After awhile it might seem like it’s supposed to be a linear steady climb to heal your wounds and overcome your challenges. The beginning of my journey was like this. I found my way into personal development on my journey of healing an eating disorder. First it was positive thinking, then it was positive feeling and high vibes only. It was about achievement, overcoming, conquering, ascending, expanding. More, more, more.
As I began to learn more about feeling, it inevitably brought me to the nervous system and relationships. You see, our nervous systems develop in relation to other, which is also known as our attachment system. I started to see how all the previous ‘work’ was bypassing emotional pain and turning away from the very real human experience of struggle. It was even creating shame around the fact that I wasn’t getting this growth thing right. And as I continued to learn, I found the medicine was actually in going through the struggle and being with the emotional pain.
It was in the experiences that I was able to go through, that I gained clarity, felt connection to my soul, and was able to anchor myself in a deeper trust of the path. There’s actually great beauty offered in some of our most challenging periods, and I say this with a tenderness and not expecting anyone to see that in the moment. There are horrible, horrendous things we as humans can experience in this life and I’m not bypassing the very real pain that comes from these experiences. As with anything, I’m not stating this as absolute truth, but as part of my own life philosophy in which I wrestle with myself. I invite you to wrestle with these thoughts and ways of seeing challenge too.
In Thomas Moore’s book, Dark Nights of the Soul he says, “Many people think that the point of life is to solve their problems and be happy. But happiness is usually a fleeting sensation, and you never get rid of problems. Your purpose in life may be to become more who you are and more engaged with the people and the life around you, to really live your life. That may sound obvious, yet many people spend their time avoiding life. They are afraid to let it flow through them, and so their vitality gets channeled into ambitions, addictions, and preoccupations that don’t give them anything worth having. A dark night may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return to living. It pares life down to its essentials and helps you get a new start.”
I really felt this after my mom died. Death and grief have a way of removing all the fluff and distractions. You’re left with what’s really most important in life. The thing is, I was already entering an inner death cycle before my mom’s death. I was seeing an identity and way of being, begin to fall away. I didn’t know yet what new identity would form or way of being would land. Life was creating space for me, as I entered an incubation. Then my mom’s cancer journey turned a corner in which there were no more treatment options, and my mom chose quality of life over quantity. After her death, there were a couple more losses I experienced in a short period of time and the intensity of the dark nights of the soul I had slowly entered the year before, ramped up.
As I share this, I’m also very aware not to bypass the real impacts these experiences have. Losses like this have a way of bringing up old, unhealed traumas, and I saw my own attachment system become activated. I understood what was happening in my nervous system, and yet that didn’t help me make better decisions or support myself during this period of time. For some time, it felt like an enduring. That also speaks to the capacity in my nervous system and lack of community support I felt during this period of time. There are layers, and yet I find certain spiritual beliefs to be resourcing during challenging times like this. The journey of dark nights of the soul is one of those beliefs.
Dark nights of the soul are challenges that can be seen to lead us to deeper wisdom, character and meaning in our lives. It’s nights because they actually tend to be an extended period of time, and in my experience it’s been years. In Thomas Moores book, Dark Nights of the Soul he states, “In your dark night you may have a sensation you could call “oceanic”- being in the sea, or immersed in the waters of the womb. The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved. It helps to regularly undo the hard won ego development, to unravel the self and culture you have woven over the years.”
I just want to take a deep breath here. If you’ve experienced this unraveling, these words might feel supportive or normalizing. I know, I went through an initial phase of judgement towards myself in the unraveling. But to be almost forced into a place of no longer knowing, is to be with everything in you that fights, avoids and crumbles with uncertainty. It’s to be with the parts of you that have adapted to manage the experience of uncertainty. The parts that give you a false sense of control. That carefully and so subtly, manage yourself and how you’re perceived or what you experience. There’s almost an inability to hide from all of it anymore. I mean, you can still hide from some of it but there will be things you’re forced to see or experience in yourself, until you have to reside in the not knowing. And if you’re open to it, you can turn towards and mine the experience of the dark nights of the soul for more gold.
Moore also says, “You may be so influenced by the modern demand to make progress at all costs that you may not appreciate the value of backsliding. Yet, to regress in a certain way is to return to origins, to step back from the battle line of existence, to remember the gods and spirits and elements of nature, including your own pristine nature, the person you were at the beginning. You return to the womb of imagination so that your pregnancy can recycle.”
What an invitation. To let the backsliding bring you back to the beginning in which a rebirth can occur. A month before I read this I had made a note in my phone that read: Beginning again, but from a place that feels like it has deeper roots.
I believe this speaks to this paring down that happens during the natural death and birth cycles we experience in life. During the phase of death, we are brought to a liminal space in which what we thought we knew comes into question. It’s disorienting and we might try to fix it. Solve it. Maybe medicate it. Push past it.
I’ve learned that going through it, provides a kind of soul nourishment that is missed when we see it as a problem. Of course, this requires a lot of nervous system support, which is slow work. But if we’re not fixing it, what is the rush? As I’ve found myself going through it, I can sense my soul again. It’s in the simple things. A desire for nourishment. Soul nourishment. Through quiet mornings and hot tea. Baking with chocolate and cooking with spices. Forest walks in the rain. Melancholy music. People watching while I’m grocery shopping. Watching the wind make the trees dance. The smell of the forest as late summer begins to transition into fall.
My hope for you, is that if you find yourself experiencing dark nights of the soul, you let the death and rebirth happen. You engage with it, and let it be a remembering of a more soul led life. Here’s to finding our way through life’s dark nights of the soul.
I’ll end with sharing this video From Sorrow to Soul: Finding Meaning in a Time of Loss.