Episode 36: The Dark Night Of The Soul

Part of the journey of alchemical personal transformation involves going through what is known as “The Dark Night of the Soul". Some will argue and say it’s not required and that you can attain enlightenment and knowledge without it. But I’ve noticed that the ones who proclaim those statements, are also terrified of experiencing emotional and mental pain and are extremely uncomfortable with expressing that pain in a way that discharges it and could potentially allow for actual enlightenment. To understand your own light and power, you must also walk through the darkness of your own mind and discover that you not only can pull yourself out of it after going through what it needs to teach you but that because of doing that, you are not weak like you thought you were. You are not powerless. Because to go through a Dark Night of the Soul requires strength, bravery, spiritual, mental and emotional intelligence and so much more. Today’s episode goes into detail about how the Dark Night creeps into one’s life path, how it expresses itself in various stages, and how it gives you the tools to dive into the dark corners of what you have always resisted and eventually, discover the freedom you have always craved. 

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Transcript

            Welcome to Episode 36. Today’s topic is: “The Dark Night Of The Soul.” 

            If you haven’t listened to the last show, “The Tentacles of Trauma,” please do before you listen to this one because it’s an entry point for this episode and it will help you to understand this episode better and answer questions you may have that may not be covered in today’s show. Also, today’s show has a language warning so if you are offended by certain language and it prevents you from enjoying or hearing the information, this episode is not going to work for you.

This podcast is about the alchemical process of what true healing means and should involve if one is to become healed on all levels, body, mind and spirit. And part of that journey of alchemical personal transformation involves going through what is known as The Dark Night of the Soul. Some will argue and say it’s not required and that you can attain the enlightenment and knowledge and so on without it. But I’ve noticed that the ones who proclaim those statements, are also terrified of experiencing emotional and mental pain and are extremely uncomfortable with expressing that pain in a way that discharges it, and could potentially allow for actual enlightenment. In my opinion, there’s too many people who claim to be enlightened who are very scared of their shadow and darkness, and still harbor tremendous ache and grief inside them but put on this façade of “I’ve got my spiritual shit together.” And when you ask them, as I have, have you gone through your dark night of the soul, they either have no clue what I’m talking about or they say that they were able to bypass it because they were so enlightened or The Dark Night of the Soul is just an archaic belief system and because we’re all ascending into the collective heartbeat of consciousness, Dark Nights of the Soul are just so twentieth century. That’s a red flag right there. I have never known anyone who is truly enlightened who got there on the happy-dappy pathway of pretty flowers, beautiful music and love and light. Never. True enlightenment has a price and it costs you everything you thought you were and everything you believed to be true and so much more. It comes from excavating the deepest and darkest parts of yourself and bringing all of that into the light so you can see it, acknowledge it and begin to heal it instead of allowing that buried whatever, to drive your life and not allow you the opportunity to get past that burden so you can become the actualized intention of your soul’s desire. 

So if you are truly seeking whatever you think enlightenment is, eventually you will have to go through a dark night of the soul. Because to understand your own light and power, you have to also walk through the darkness of your own mind and discover that you not only have the ability to pull yourself out of it after going through what it needs to teach you but that because of doing that, you are not weak like you thought you were. You are not stupid. You are not worthless. You are not powerless. You certainly are not powerless after you successfully go through a Dark Night of the Soul. Because to go through a Dark Night of the Soul requires strength, bravery, spiritual, mental and emotional intelligence, because you’re going to need all of that and more when you go through the spiritual transformation that is baked into the cake of the Dark Night of the Soul. You will be required to build an inner fire that will stoke the flames of your buried power that has been lying dormant beneath all the debris of how you used to be able to handle life – usually through avoidance. 

All the ways you have grown accustomed to acting and reacting will be completely useless to you once you finally face yourself and you will learn new methods of dealing with all the aspects of your life and much, much more. Some authors who write about the Dark Night of the Soul consider it a deep omen of internal change within oneself that shakes oneself to the core, and resonates this energy of “I can’t continue living the way I’ve been living any longer.” It’s more than a passing sense of uneasiness. It locks hard into your psyche and you can’t ignore it. It's the ultimate state of disillusionment. Not some college student’s disillusionment. That’s nowhere near a Dark Night of the Soul, even if the overly emotionally student thinks it is. It’s a disillusionment that comes from the sudden recognition that materialism holds no agency in your life anymore. That what used to fascinate or excite or distract you begins to carry no charge. External pursuits don’t carry the allure any longer. They don’t satisfy the ache inside that’s still too raw in the beginning to identify. It’s not that you sell your things or give them away, although that can happen once you are fully in your Dark Night. No, this is centered more on a strong internal yearning for something that is greater than you and that can fill the vast, empty caverns that feel as if they form and expand overnight with no connection to anything tangible. The Dark Night of the Soul feels catastrophic for a reason. You’ve hit a peak of experience that no longer makes any sense. Everything you thought you knew may not all be true or not exactly true in the way you perceived it to always be. 

You only have one true Dark Night of the Soul in your life. You will not go through it again. Once you break through the prison of your own mind and reality and see the light from within that has always been there, it’s impossible to experience your life and the world around you in the same manner as before. After you go through a Dark Night, you see everything, including yourself, with new eyes and a vastly different perspective. Your ego does not run your programming the way it did before your Dark Night because part of the process of going through this intense experience is a dissolving of the ego’s need to dominate you. It does NOT mean your ego dies. Don’t buy into that bullshit. You really do learn that all the answers you need lie within you, NOT outside you. You find your inner light within the darkness of the Dark Night of the Soul and when that light is ignited, magic occurs. Deep and meaningful and life-changing transformation occurs. You stop trying and forcing and fighting and hanging onto the desperation that doesn’t work. You discover, much to your shock, that you are indeed a spiritual being having a human experience and that realization changes everything. It changes perhaps, how you were brought up to believe in spiritual things. The Dark Night is a necessary psycho-spiritual surgery that eviscerates you on all levels, and demands that you alter your life direction and the way you perceive who you are and what you are meant to do in this life.   

The Dark Night is all about experiencing your own spiritual death and rebirth. It is the cutting away, often with a very precise cosmic knife, of anything and everything within your life that no longer serves your highest and greatest good. And it cuts without asking your permission or giving you a sense that you have any choice in the matter. Once you dive into it and stop fighting what your soul is craving, you basically are obliged to ride the current that you are put on. And sometimes that current is going to toss the living shit out of you and sometimes that current will give you a chance to take a moment and reflect and catch your breath before you are once again swept into situations where you must demonstrate both your courage and your willingness to become deeply in touch with who you are as a spiritual being living within the confines of a physical body. So the Dark Night of the Soul is really a spiritual crisis masquerading as one’s life hitting a wall where disillusionment of one’s entire reality becomes too difficult to ignore any longer. It’s not transient angst. It’s the deeper more probing questions such as, “What is the point of my life?” “Is this all there is?” You get to the point where you exhaust yourself in trying to avoid the Dark Night by constantly beating dead horses in your life and expecting to win your race. You get to the point where nothing is working out for you and no matter how hard you try to arrange the galaxy to make things work, they all fail. If you are ill or deal with various physical maladies, none of the treatments that may have alleviated your pain and suffering in the past tend to work any longer. They may give you temporary relief, but they don’t stick. And it’s not about the energy of “if I just try harder…” No, this is more of a wall you hit that cannot be penetrated or walked around or bypassed. It’s either take the journey into your Dark Night or stand there in front of a wall that will never move. 

The Dark Night of the Soul was coined by a Spanish Mystic, San Juan De La Cruz, who wrote a book in the 1500’s titled, “The Dark Night of the Soul.” I’ve read excerpts of the translated book and one passage jumped out that I’ll share with you. He writes about how the Dark Night is about your soul crying out to you and that this is such a frightening sensation that you’ve never encountered before and because it grips you so tightly, your first reaction is to become disoriented and then terrorized and that leads to suffering and periods of depression and alienation that drive all of your pain inward. And that’s because, as San Juan De La Cruz puts it, “it is called ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ because every individual seeking an internal life must pass through a sphere of psychic darkness. The soul itself must go through a mystery of death and regeneration; a mystery of the detachment of itself from its own objective nature. It must die out of its own confusion and be born again into the grace of God. This is a long, dark journey of the inner self.”

Most people will do anything and everything to avoid going through their Dark Night even when it’s staring them in the face….when they are up against that brick wall I mentioned. And if they are devoted atheists or agnostics, they are going to experience this resistance in ways that creates a lot of distortions in the way they interact with others as well as how they present themselves. There’s a lot of agitation, confusion, ego driven internal debates that have no resolution. So for agnostics or atheists, the first step would be agreeing to the idea that they are indeed a spiritual being and that in and of itself is a massive step they have to take before they can even dive into the pit of the Dark Night of their Soul. Essentially, they must agree that they have a soul and that that soul can indeed be tormented and require the attention and nourishment that it’s been starved of. But even people who have strong spiritual values will bypass their Dark Night. Even when they begin to question everything about their lives and often begin to question their faith entirely, they still fight the descent into the Dark Night of their Soul. But regardless of where you are within the spectrum of having a spiritual connection, the Dark Night will play out as a psycho-spiritual experience, full of deep and often painful death of what no longer serves your highest and greatest good. But it also holds the promise of a psycho-spiritual rebirth like nothing you’ve ever experienced. 

There is usually a prelude period that leads up to the Dark Night. Mine began a little more than three years before my Dark Night was fully engaged. There are many triggers and lots of signs along the way. Trauma often takes you there. The walls cave in to a point that you can’t pretend it away anymore. You can’t drink or drug it away. You can’t deflect it away. It’s staring at you 24/7, and waiting for you as it draws you closer to it. You don’t know what “it” is yet. But you keep being drawn into the sphere that you cannot ignore. Some people feel as if they are actually going to physically die. It’s that powerful. And while there is not a physical death, the death of everything within you that is no longer in Divine alignment with you, will die.

Other signs could be a deep sense of sadness, which is often felt as great despair but you can’t pinpoint the target of this sadness.  Another sign is you become less confident, more cautious and feel that you are no longer worthy or even capable of doing what you’ve always done. Lots of confusion and deep disorientation that creates states where you begin to question your sanity. I know I did. This then leads to feeling completely powerless and as if a hidden hand is destroying your life and you can’t do anything about it. And that feeds into hopelessness. You feel righteously condemned by that hidden hand and you may see it as something that demands you suffer and drown in emotional and physical pain and a sense of emptiness. And then all that drives you right into a feeling that you have no power, no direction, no motivation or ambition to create or build what you used to create and build. Nothing excites you. Nothing generates lasting pleasure. And in the quiet moments that precede the actual Dark Night, you feel a homesickness for where you came from even if you have no idea what that concept means. And you want to get back to that ‘home place’ because this physical world suddenly feels foreign and cruel and lacking in purpose or meaning. And that’s just the prelude to the big event!

The trigger that trips you firmly into the Dark Night can be many things. It can the death of a child, or a husband or wife. Or it can be a series of deaths that totally break you down. It can be a divorce that devastates you. It’s often an illness or an accident that hits you like a brick and makes it impossible for you to evade or ignore it. The trigger event could be anything or the culmination of multiple things that formed a final volcanic reaction within you that triggered the dominos falling. That was my case. For me, it wasn’t one event. It was a lifetime of building it up but preceding my Dark Night, it was three plus years of chaos and this palpable sense of having no ownership of my own life any longer. That I was essentially losing control of my identity, and I didn’t really know what my identity was any longer to be honest, that people in my life who I’d known for many years were not who I thought they were, that I had gone completely off my soul’s path and required an aggressive re-set. That’s the best description I can offer. This is not something that is easy to describe because everyone will go through the same terror and darkness and then redemption and rebirth but will do so via different pathways. So nobody can predict for you how the Dark Night will express itself in your life when it happens. That experience will unfold exactly as YOU or perhaps your soul requires it to happen. Because I’ll stress this again, this really is a spiritual experience that your physical body must go through in order for your soul to grow. And I cannot begin to tell you how many times that message was drummed into my heart and spirit during my Dark Night of the Soul. It became fundamentally obvious to me that “I” being this being in a physical suit, was being put through something that was extraordinarily dark and terrifying that I needed to go through and if I chose to fight it, I would not win so it was probably a better idea if I went with the program and walked into the experience without resistance and without victimhood. VERY important one there. If you turn the Dark Night into a victimizing experience, all you’re doing is stabbing yourself with your own knife of persecution. Nobody is doing it to you! You are just hurting yourself because you can and the sooner you stop the pity pot and the “Whoa is me” and “why God?” desperate petitions to the sky. “Why meee?” You’ll figure out why many years later. So do yourself a favor and stop asking. It will be revealed to you Whyyyyyy years later after you’ve healed and aren’t run by your corrupted internal programming. Because it’s that programming that the Dark Night seeks to pull out of you and transmute into something greater and less self-destructive. 

Now, a lot of people tell you that they endured deep and dark depression but were able to come out of it and they use that experience as a kind of “checking the box”, so to speak, of already going through a Dark Night of the Soul. But the Dark night is not about depression or even suicidal depression. Depression is certainly part of it. But as it was articulated so beautifully to me years ago, the difference between chronic or even suicidal depression and a true Dark Night of the Soul, is that the depression is always a self-focused, self-driven, self-centric experience that leads nowhere. And when the depression is managed with drugs or therapy, nothing in your life is deeply transformed in relationship to your core beliefs, your internal and external perspectives, what you value and how you live your life from that point forward. You don’t gain any connection to your internal power, in fact, you often become weaker and more dependent on whatever therapy you are using to manage your symptoms. Successfully going through a Dark Night of the Soul does not just mitigate or manage depression. It teaches you that depression is only a symptom of a psycho-spiritual imbalance that you have agreed to be sucked into and that depression is a reaction to all the buried shit you have not faced head on and healed.  When you successfully traverse your Dark Night of the Soul and it ends, your entire life is transformed and reborn. Now, does that mean you don’t feel grief or sadness? No, not at all. You do feel grief and you do feel sadness when warranted. But it never grips you and takes you down again like it did before your Dark Night. You feel grief, you feel sadness but you have created a new template within you after you have healed through your Dark Night, that allows for the grief and the sadness to work through you effectively and then be released instead of holding it and harboring it and depressing your system. And you no longer fear it or feel shame by it. And it does not own you any longer. Because when you heal, you gain a new perspective on what depression is. For me, I saw it as a literal depressing or pushing down of what you are incapable or unwilling to face. And that’s when you have allowed your nature to invite depression for years or decades, you have simply trained yourself to push down emotions and situations that absolutely need to be expressed. Because all that does is create mountains of trapped emotions, undigested trauma and words unspoken and more that ferment and rot inside your psyche and your body. The Dark Night of the Soul when experienced fully and integrated completely, means not just facing your darkest fears and traumas, but releasing them so that they are no longer trapped within you. So, in essence, how I experienced it, you no longer depress your emotions, your needs, your expression of love, your creativity, your joy and you allow yourself to witness the true magic that has always inhabited this world but because of your depressed nature, you were never able to see it. Because again, depression is a self-centered experience which creates a tremendously myopic point of view. It doesn’t allow you to see solutions to your problems, many of which are illusions. Yes, ILLUSIONS. All created within your fractured mind. The Dark Night of Soul will shine a big, fucking light on that! And one by one by one, all those illusions that you have propped up within your psyche and allowed to frame your actions and reactions will be blown apart and dissolved. 

And the more you bypass this experience or fight it, the worse it will be. You may use pharmaceutical medication to alleviate the symptoms of your psyche’s depression or on the other side, you may overindulge in sacred plant medicine therapy and take huge, what are called “heroic doses,” of psychedelics in the quest to heal your depression or “find the answers” you feel desperate to solve.  But I can tell you from my own experience, and from working with others and observing those who go these routes, both conventional and alternative, that bypassing the deep and meaningful introspection and the experience of that pscyho-spiritual surgery I mentioned earlier, does not check the Dark Night of the Soul box. And that’s because the Dark Night is a metaphysical experience that forces a person to actively and consciously grapple with their own meaning and purpose and then from that experience, leave the chrysalis with everything they learn and, when they are ready, transform into the being they now recognize and understand as their true self. And this process is not mediated by anything outside yourself. I want to stress that. No amount of pharmaceuticals and no amount of psilocybin, Ayahuasca, MDMA or any sacred substance will affect the outcome you require. In fact, and this is going to piss off a lot of the people in the alternative community that I’m a part of, many of the sacred substances when used and abused, often create walls instead of bridges toward one’s enlightenment. Just like pharmaceuticals, they become crutches that only serve to bypass the deep and probing inner work that needs to happen. You must go through it. There is no way but THROUGH it. It’s ugly and you must experience that. It’s terrifying and you must experience that. It’s soul-shaking and you must experience that. You must FEEL all of it. And in the center of it, you meet every aspect of yourself that you’ve run from or ignored or misunderstood. And often pharmaceuticals as well as sacred plant medicines, when done to excess and used irresponsibly, prevent this process from happening. If you emerge from what you believe is your Dark Night of the Soul and you are still maintaining a façade, or you are still engaging in people-pleasing behavior, or you still harbor great anxiety within your life, you did not successfully go through and complete a Dark Night of the Soul. Because a true Dark Night will cut away, burn up and dissolve the façade, the ego’s need to be seen or loved, and it will certainly extinguish anxiety about anything because you will be forced to understand the root causes of that anxiety and they will be healed. So if you successfully do go through a Dark Night and come out the other end, anxiety is sucked out of you and replaced with a grounded perspective of whatever it is you are having to face and you deal with it. And take it from me, someone who was always a nervous, anxious, hyper reactive individual, I cannot gin up that behavior anymore. And that’s why when people who used to know me when I was deeply unhealed and who I haven’t seen or talked to for many years, when they reconnect with me, they say things like, “I’m surprised you didn’t react to what I just said.” Or “Why aren’t you jacked up about this or that?” It’s not that things don’t matter to me. It’s that I fully understand now that “what will be will be” and I don’t inject anxiety or nervousness into the situation. Injecting anxiety into that matrix is non-productive and creates so many blocks and so much resistance to what potentially may be a better direction or outcome that you and your ego never imagined or considered. Basically, you don’t sweat the small stuff anymore once you experience and go through your Dark Night of the Soul. Things become exceptionally clear to you and you understand what methods of thought and behavior are needed and what is not conducive to the specific situation you are dealing with. One thing I will tell you is that you purge drama from your life. You don’t engage in it with others and you do not bring drama into your sphere. You reject drama because you have learned that drama feeds anxiety and none of that is necessary. Do you still get excited about events in your life? Absolutely! But you no longer betray true excitement and anticipation with heavy, unwarranted anxiety that always steals the inherent joy from the moment.

There is no road map to guide you through your Dark Night of the Soul. As one writer put it so eloquently, “there is only the flickering luminescence of your Soul to light the way.” I adore that comment. It’s so true. There are agreed upon stages, however, of how a Dark Night tends to progress. 

The first stage is simply the act of waking up to what I already covered. Waking up to the realization that nothing is working and you cannot continue. My waking up period and subsequent resistance to what I was experiencing and the pull back and forth lasted about sixteen months. Lots of confusion and disorientation as well an ungrounded feeling that only made it worse. 

And then bam, the second stage hit, and that was the trigger that took me right into the Dark Night, even though I had no understanding of what I was dealing with. For me, it was multiple accidents and injuries that I could not ignore or pretend didn’t exist. This is the stage where you realize that you have lost something in your life, or many things, that you always considered consciously or unconsciously as being integral to your identity. For me, it was my lack of mobility where I quickly became incapable of doing ninety percent of what I used to do. And for me, it wasn’t just physical. During this time, I had to give up my writing career that had certainly been my identity for over thirty years at that point. Due to my multiple health issues, I didn’t have the energy, the motivation or the creative impulses that always had driven my writing career. So I became set adrift in what I perceived to be total and utter uselessness and a sense that it was never going to get any better. 

That leads to the third stage which is when one goes into the darkest of the dark night because everything you have been or thought you were, is being taken from you or is breaking apart and you have no control over it. And for myself and for many people I’ve spoken to, this is when the psychic terror engulfs them because you feel completely at the mercy of an unseen hand that seems to be driving this pattern in your life and you can’t stop it. And the more you try to stop it, the worse it gets. Believe me. This stage lasted fifteen months for me and it was like swimming in the darkest of the darkest pool imaginable. I would call this time the psycho-spiritual hibernation period because all outside elements in your life no longer make sense to you and they are antagonistic to everything you are going through. So this is when you really isolate and withdraw into the darkest of the dark parts of your Dark Night. And I can say from my own experience that it was made darker and more impossible due to my own resistance to the experience. And this is common to this stage of the Dark Night, I learned. There’s a lot of resistance that can happen during this stage until you essentially surrender to the experience. And by that, I don’t mean you give up. I mean this is when you recognize not just the Divinity above but the Divinity within. I remember the moment very well when I couldn’t sleep and it was around midnight and I went outside and stared at the stars and I said out loud, “My physical body is broken. My mental body is trashed. My emotional body is completely unhinged. And all I have left is a very tenuous connection to God.” And that’s when I realized, that in reality, that’s all I ever had. Because the physical, mental and emotional are easily subject to the winds and the whims of life. But that God energy, however you see that energy from a non-dogmatic point of view, was ever present and consistent in my life. And that whatever that was, wanted me to heal and prosper in all ways. That suffering for the sake of suffering was never an objective. Pain was inevitable, as the saying goes, but suffering was optional. And once I firmly understood that as I stared into the stars that night, and stopped feeling as though everything was happening TO me and not FOR me, everything changed. I handed myself to the Divine and trusted that even though I had no clue what I was doing or where any of this would lead, that a path forward would be shown to me and as long as I walked on that path and maintained forward motion and agreed to face what I never had faced before, that I would eventually emerge into a much brighter world than I was in at that time. That night is when I agreed to trust in the Divine fully. And for me to trust in what I could not see but only sense, was a massive moment in my life. It was during this period that I was told something that really stuck with me. And because I have a real understanding of plants and herbs and know what they require to grow and thrive, it made sense. I was reminded how all plants need darkness to grow a strong root base. Without a strong root base, the plant can’t stand upright and express itself in all its beauty. And while light certainly is necessary to produce outward growth, that growth can’t be sustained if there are no strong roots to hold it upright. Without strong roots to support it, the plant will grow spindly and fall over with the slightest movement or breeze. And it was that image I tended to repeat in my head during this period of my Dark Night. And I focused on creating that vital internal root structure throughout that period because I saw the validity of it and when I started to gain those roots, I understood completely how intrinsically valuable they were to the process. 

The fourth stage is an interesting stage because you begin to come out of the darkness and while you still walk a somewhat thin line between the darkness and the light, you gradually begin to see the light more than the darkness. This stage lasted for me about eighteen months. And they weren’t anything close to the sheer self-torture I’d gone through in the darkest stage because by this point, I’d made agreements with what is being expected of me and I did not resist and never played the victim card. I did the work every day and kept moving forward. During this fourth stage, you begin to see wonderful glimpses of what the resurrection within yourself feels like. And it’s a real motivating factor, let me tell you. Because just like you never felt the type of darkness in your life, you’ve also never felt what it’s like to inhabit a body and psyche that is not burdened by all the dross that you have really unloaded and discharged by this point. So there’s this sense of “I’m going to get through this” and it carries one forward with tremendous positive energy. But I will say that this is when a lot of people believe that they are through their Dark Night, when in fact, they still have a few stages to go. You have to be brutally honest with yourself, which should not a difficult thing to do by this point and by that, I mean you have to recognize that yes, you’ve come far and that yes, there is a beautiful light you are moving toward but you are not yet fully formed and standing wholly in that light yet. If you fail to recognize this, you can make premature decisions in your life about your future and your destiny that are still gestating. The way it was explained to me so beautifully was that in this stage you are still in the chrysalis and it is breaking open so the light is shining through but you need to remain there to gestate and become accustomed to that new place because if you emerge from the chrysalis prematurely, you won’t carry with you the energy you really need to dive into the final stages of the Dark Night. Essentially, you as the butterfly won’t be able to fly where you need to go. It was during this stage that I was asked to write a book on my four-year experience to that point and I flatly refused the offer because I intuitively knew that I was not through it yet. And part of that was because I was still too close to the experience. Meaning, I didn’t have the space and time, and perspective needed beyond the Dark Night experience to be able to talk about it without becoming emotional. I learned that when you can tell your story and not break down in the telling of it, you have moved past the point where that story still owns you. Very important observation there. I’ve seen a lot of people in the media who think they are done with their Dark Night when they get to this stage, and they agree to either write a book or go on the lecture circuit and within about one year or so, they often have to withdraw again because the charge of their experience has not been fully exhausted. 

The fifth stage of the Dark Night is when you do emerge into the light and are able to make connections and sense of your experience but that can take one or two years, depending upon how you have taught yourself to live and engage in this new perspective that now runs your internal programming. During this time, you often discover aspects of your destiny but also, it’s a period of trying out new avenues that may not be your final destiny but certainly contribute to it. New people will come into your life at this time that infuse new energy and optimism into your life. It’s when your courage and power begin to ground themselves within you and you act and react from a completely different point of view than you ever have before. 

The sixth stage of the Dark Night is an interesting time because you are somewhat set adrift but it’s not a disorienting feeling or an isolating feeling like it felt in the beginning stages. During this time, you must depend on and work with everything you have learned over the period of time that preceded it and your guidance really comes from your intuition which you have certainly honed by this time, but also from your personal connection to your faith in the Divine. This is when you become the architect of your own reality and you gradually build a new life that you could never have built if you were still living in the old ways and the old paradigms before your Dark Night began. 

The seventh and final stage of the Dark Night is where you are grounded in the embodiment of the new you. By this time, you have said goodbye to a lot of relationships that were no longer compatible for you. You are no longer triggered or offended by much of anything because all that has been exhausted out of your psyche from the purposeful work you have done. You view life in a much more philosophical way and understand that focusing on fixed outcomes is denying you the magic of experiencing the Divine unfoldment of your life that you may never have designed for yourself but are much more interesting and fulfilling than anything you may have come up with. From this point forward, it really is a co-creation with the Divine and because you have learned and trusted the Divine up to this point and recognize that it was that co-creation that got you to this point, you are on board and that is the voice you listen to. You still have your ego and it still operates but it is put in a realistic framework where it belongs and where it can be tapped into if needed to create the ego’s need. Because even though you are part of the collective, you are still an individual having your own experience. And that experience demands individual needs and desires in respect to how those needs and desires affect others. You aim to create unity when unity is being offered to you without strings attached or control or manipulation. You aim to compromise, when necessary, as long as you are not the only one compromising. You respect yourself first and foremost and you respect others and if they are notrespectful, you withdraw yourself without drama from the situation. You are autonomous while also being part of something greater than you. 

You strive to embody a kind of diplomatic point of view that allows for all parties to be heard as well as what works for you and what doesn’t. Sometimes the spotlight must be on another and you are fine with that. You celebrate the other in the spotlight. Because it no longer takes away anything from you. Because you have learned about the light that burns within you that is much greater than any outside spotlight of validation that is always transient and often filled with jealousy and bitterness. 

From start to finish, my Dark Night of the Soul lasted through all the stages, eight and a half years. And that’s not including the prelude three years. But remember as I’ve outlined already, that wasn’t eight and a half years of hell. But it was eight solid years of massive growth that did turn my world upside down and inside out. The Dark of the Soul is not a river that needs to be pushed. It needs to be fully experienced and explored and consciously inhabited but never pushed. You have to keep moving forward but you don’t require intense forward movement at one time because every bit of forward movement is new territory and it has to be explored, experienced and then integrated into the framework of your new life. You cannot rush the Dark Night. It will experience itself within you on its timing. There are ways to help move and release tension during the Dark Night.  Bodywork is great. Myofascial release therapy is fantastic. Nourishing the nervous system and parasympathetic fight or flight is mandatory in my opinion because it allows you to discharge the static energy you accumulate with everything you’re experiencing. Moving energy gently and with an understanding that too much is not what’s needed. This does not require explosive therapies. I’ve mentioned both the myofascial release oil and parasympathetic oils from Vibrant Blue before as being an integral part of my own healing. And for anyone new to my show, if you go to the show notes, you will see a direct link for those oils. 

In closing, I want to mention a song that in my opinion is worth listening to, especially if you are about to go into your Dark Night or if you are smack dab in it right now. Many of you probably already know the song but it encompasses the lessons and attitudes that you will need and also what you will learn after you have successfully moved through your Dark Night and into your inner light. The song is, “Thank You,” by Alanis Morrisette. I encourage you to really listen to it and copy the lyrics. It was inspired by her trip to India where she dove into her own darkness and her internal growth from that experience. It became my anthem of my dark night. Because in the end, you thank that dark night because it delivered to you the freedom from who you thought you were, what you thought you believed, it softens you and strengthens you simultaneously. You give yourself the grace that was never given to you. You give yourself permission to be. To be. Just to be. No explanations. No petitions. No nothing. You’re not asking for a seat at anyone’s table. And you’re only willing once you go through the dark night, to share your table with those who harmonize with the “you” that you’ve become. What you have whittled your psyche down to. You only bring into your life people who you resonate with and that may not be a whole lot of people, let me tell you. But those who you do attract and keep in your life, are meaningful and you nourish those relationships and feel blessed to have those people in your life because they provide an emotional or mental food for you that you now require. And if you don’t have anyone in your life, you are okay with that too because you’ve learned to feed yourself. You may have your dog, your cat, your horse, your goats, your whatever to share your life with and they too are nourishing elements in your sphere. 

I hope that anyone out there who is listening to this show right now, and who is potentially going through their own Dark Night of the Soul, will have gained better perspective on what’s happening to you and not feel like you are the only one in the world who is going through it. Because I guarantee you, that you are not alone. And that when you surrender to the experience, and agree to walk through the fire, eventually you WILL walk into the light. And that light will penetrate you like it never could before when you carried all those barriers to that light. Give yourself the grace and know that you will endure and find your way forward. 

That’s all for this week. Thank you for choosing to listen to this show. If you like this show, help me get the word out. Share this show or any other episode you like with someone right now who you feel needs to hear it. Check out the notes for this episode where you’ll see the links to find me on Instagram and X @laureldewey or thealchemyofnaturalhealing. On the show notes, I’ve included the companies I support and have helped me in my healing process, so check that out and look for the coupon codes. Looking forward to you joining me in two weeks where I will discuss a very important element of alchemical transformation and that is Gratitude. Until then, remember that “Awareness is a demanding mistress. Once she wakes you up, she won’t let you go back to sleep.”