The Dark Night of The Soul is a common and necessary part of spiritual awakening to clarity and awareness. It is part of a larger purpose. Mariel Hemingway wrote "Sometimes you can't see your way out. The "The Dark Night of The Soul" - it's a reality for many, many people."
Although it feels negative it is a very positive shift in consciousness. It is a great opportunity for awakening. The term The Dark Night of The Soul goes back to the Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross. It is a collapse of a perceived meaning in life. It is an eruption into your life. It can feel very similar to depression. It is a sense of emptiness or meaninglessness. Nothing makes sense any more. This is what happened to me four years ago. It is usually triggered by an external event such as loss or grief over a loved one, or losing one's career or home for example. The meaning that you had given your life "This is what my life is all about: This is where I am going and this is what is important in my life" collapses and is extinguished. Your grief or loss of your achievements feels like you can't explain them anymore. Some disaster invalidates the meaning that your life had before. What has collapsed is the whole conceptual framework for your life and the meaning that your mind had given it.
In this article we are going to dive deeper into The Dark Night of The Soul. The night is darkest before the dawn, and so it is with the soul. Ram Dass wrote "The Dark Night of The Soul is when you have lost the flavour of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours."
The Dark Night of The Soul
Stephen Levine wrote in 'Who Dies?' "I can’t assuage your pain with any words . . . it must burn its purifying way to completion . . . For something in you dies when you bear the unbearable. And it is only in that Dark Night of The Soul that you are prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves."
What is The Dark Night of The Soul?
The Dark Night of The Soul has a sense of darkness, a dark place. You enter that dark place for a while. Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist and spiritual Master, wrote"The most repressed and denied aspects of our soul are often the treasure that lies buried in the darkness." There is the possibility of emerging from that dark place. This is usually with a transformed state of consciousness where life has meaning again. This is no longer a concetual meaning that one can explain. It's a deeper Truth. One emerges with an awakening out of one's mind's conceptual sense of reality, which has collapsed. One feels a deeper sense of purpose and connectedness, with a greater life that is not dependent on explanations or anything conceptual any longer. It's a kind of death, followed by a rebirth. What dies in The Dark Night of The Soul is the egoic sense of Self.
Death is always painful, but nothing real has actually died: Only an illusory identity. A new Self emerges which is a non-conceptual Self, a deeper BEing, with awakened consciousness. When one looks back, one realises that one had to go through The Dark Night of The Soul, as everyone does, but not everyone is ready to take this journey.
The Dark Night of The Soul has appeared in the scientific literature in relation to spiritual distress and its psychiatric implications. One paper is concerned with the way in which those going through periods of angst and disillusionment during The Dark Night of The Soul do not see them as pathological phenomena. On the contrary, through a process of attribution of spiritual meaning they view them as opportunities for reflecting on their lives and as agents for beneficial transformation. The paper summarises that The Dark Night has clinical implications owing to the risk of its being pathologised, serving as a reminder of the importance of incorporating existential issues into clinical psychiatric practice. Those experiencing the Dark Night of the Soul go through a process of attributing meaning to this experience: they consider it as a process of maturation of their spiritual life, as a natural – not pathological – process in their spiritual development. Therefore, in spite of the emotional distress experienced in this period of darkness, the Dark Night is perceived to be a divine gift in disguise, whereby the individual can be transformed and purified, their Faith deepened, renewed, and reinforced and the union of oneness with God brought closer. The paper states that those who have undergone The Dark Night of The Soul emphasise the important role of having an accompanying personal relationship during this time of spiritual suffering: Spiritual transformative coaches, mentors and Enlightened Witnesses can be inestimable companions and guides to give assistance during The Dark Night of The Soul as they can provide the orientation and the cosmic perspective of someone experienced and wise, and someone who is not still immersed in this darkness.
This comprehensive paper compares and contrasts pathological depression and The Dark Night of The Soul in the following table:
Similarities and differences between pathological depression and The Dark Night of The Soul from the paper described above
G.G. May argues in his book 'The dark night of the soul: A psychiatrist explores the connection between darkness and spiritual growth' that, to the serious detriment of the individual’s spiritual life, this difficult side of it has been often trivialised and neglected in favour of an easier and more superficial spirituality, whereas the encounter with The Dark Night of The Soul can be an enriching and healing experience that could lead to true spiritual wholeness and awareness.
This journey will heal your wounds. As Tori Amos said "To heal the wound, you have to go into The Dark Night of The Soul."
Clarissa Pinkola Estes wrote in 'A Prayer':
Refuse to fall down
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you from lifting your heart
toward Heaven
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote "Only Grief still learns; she spends the whole night counting up our evil inheritance with her small hands. She is awkward, but all at once she makes our voice rise, sideways, like a constellation into the sky."
In some spiritual traditions they even try to recreate The Dark Night of The Soul in order to bring about a spiritual awakening. That was part of the 'mystery schools' of Ancient Greece and Egypt, which were designed for this purpose. The process was shrouded in secrecy. In this article we bring the process into the light. The Dark Night of The Soul is sometimes called the 'night journey' in mythological tradition or 'descent into the underworld. They are all pointing to the same experience and are all essentially metaphors for this rebirth of the psyche. It seems negative when you are in the middle of it, but it has a larger purpose as part of the awakening process. This is the death of the old egoic self and the birth of the True Self - your soul.
Many saints and those seeking union with God, including Saint Augustine, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Therèse of Lisieux, Saint Teresa of Jesus, and Mother Theresa of Calcutta, speak of similar experiences of spiritual darkness and struggles. Even Jesus, during his own passion and death, was the most important sufferer of The Dark Night of The Soul, experienced a sense of 'abandonment' by God: ‘‘Why have you forsaken me?’’ (Matthew 27:46; Mark 15:34)
Saint Teresa of Jesus said ‘‘Let nothing trouble you. Let nothing scare you. All is fleeting. God alone is unchanging. Patience everything obtains.Who possess God nothing wants. God alone suffices.’’ All is well. This too shall pass.
The key is that the more you surrender to the process, the more quickly you go through it. To surrender to it means not to judge any more. You accept whatever it is that you experience at this moment. At some point you finally break through to the other side. Allow life to do what it does. You don't need to seek the breakthrough. It will just happen if you have surrendered. You don't need to recreate it in some artifical way.
The Spanish Roman Catholic Saint John of the Cross wrote in 'The Dark Night of The Soul' ('La Noche Oscura del Alma'), a poem and its theological commentary, written by the Carmelite priest, “No matter how much individuals do through their own efforts, they cannot actively purify themselves enough to be disposed in the least degree for the divine union of the perfection of love. God must take over and purge them in that fire that is dark for them, as we will explain.” Saint John described the arduous path, appropriately called a ‘‘Dark Night,’’ which the soul travels to reach mystical love: The union with God is described by the poet in passionate joyous verses such as the following:
Saint John of the Cross wrote in 'The Dark Night of The Soul':
"I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face against my Beloved's face.
Everything fell away and I went out from my self,
Leaving my cares
Fogotten maong the lilies.”
The first lesson in 'A Course in Miracles' says "Nothing I see in this room means anything." And you're supposed to look around the room at whatever you happen to be looking at and say, "This thing doesn't mean anything. That doesn't mean anything. This table doesn't mean anything. This hand doesn't mean anything." This is part of The Dark Night of The Soul as the collapse of mind-made meaning mentioned above; the conceptual meaning of life. So with 'A Course in Miracles' in lesson one, it's a voluntary relinquishment of the human mind-made meaning that is projected. You wipe the board clean. You arrive at a place of meaninglessness. Things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on. And you can then look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning.
The Dark Night of The Soul is like a tidal wave of grief
Many people experience the emotions of grief as a series of waves interspersed with troughs of calm. These waves can come as unpredictably as they do in the ocean. For survivors of long-term abuse, there may be a great many waves. Sometimes there are long periods of tranquility between them, and sometimes it feels as if there is nothing but wave after wave. And sometimes the waves are small and relatively easy to ride, and sometimes they are big “dumpers” that keep us submerged in grief much longer than we would like.
Perhaps the most difficult experience of healing and recovery is what some survivors experience as a tidal wave of grief – a prolonged plunge into emotional pain in which grieving can only procure brief respites from hurt. Some therapists call the first long immersion in the grief-ful reexperiencing of childhood pain The Dark Night of The Soul; others call it the 'abandonment depression.'
Some have described a four stage model of The Dark Night of The Soul:
The four stages of the Dark Night of The Soul explained
Surrender to your painful feelings
The Dark Night of The Soul is like an extended emotional flashback. Recovering survivors who have experienced prolonged abuse or extreme emotional disconnection from their parents often have at least one long encounter with their unresolved childhood abandonment depression. I have had a few such experiences that seemed to keep me under a tsunami of grief for months. At such times, I felt like I was permanently stuck reexperiencing the brutal loneliness of the years when I had absolutely no one to turn to for protection or comfort, as my father had left when I was two years old and my mother was emotionally abusive.
The most difficult task in navigating The Dark Night of The Soul, and in becoming effective grievers in general, is fully surrendering to our grief. Some call this surrender 'bottoming out'. Bottoming out occurs when we finally stop struggling against our painful feelings and let them wash over us.
Most of us have to weather many titanic struggles before we learn to gracefully bottom out. In the beginning we typically resist our emerging grief with the frenzy of drowning swimmers, often going down more than three times before settling into the depths of our pain.
It took me a number of attempts to work through my abandonment depression because I never fully surrendered to it. I apparently needed to completely exhaust myself before I could sink into its depths and fully feel it. When I finally did, I found the truth in Galway Kinnell’s words: "Crying only a little bit is no use.You must cry until your pillow is soaked; Then you can get up and laugh." Now I laugh many times a day.
I have since had a number of experiences in which I yearned to, but could not, bottom out into the pain I felt about new losses in my life. At these times I felt desperate for the relief I knew would follow a submersion in grief, but I could not easily turn off my reflexive struggling to stay afloat.
Most survivors need considerable grieving practice to stop automatically resisting their pain. Even with a number of experiences of fully bottoming out, we may revert back to feeling-phobic behaviours. The relief procured from any episode of bottoming out is usually so wonderful that we are tempted to believe we are, once and for all, finished with our emotional pain.
This belief is one of the last vestiges of denial. When we have grieved enduringly, we cannot help but yearn for an Elysian grief-free future. Yet everyone, dysfunctional childhood or not, faces a modicum of painful loss and calamity in their lives. In the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "Into each life some rain must fall; Some days must be dark and dreary."
The learned habit of automatic self-abandonment in the face of new hurt is not easily deconstructed. Pain-avoidance has become second nature to us as childhood trauma survivors. Nonetheless, we must renounce this false nature or our pain will reaccumulate and eventually burst forth as a new tidal wave of grief.
Fighting emotional pain may be the ultimate old habit that dies hard. Yet with an extended practice of grieving, we learn to bottom out more gracefully. As The Dark Night of The Soul comes to an end, our waves of grief come less frequently and feel less overwhelming. Each time we surrender to our feelings and feel the sweet relief that comes when our tears suddenly pour forth easily and copiously, we become less resistant. I didn't cry for four decades, but now I cry often during surrender and also tears of joy. Without resistance, the grief that accompanies life’s smaller losses and briefer emotional flashbacks is inordinately less painful. The anxiety that we feel but cannot name was in my experience simply the sensation that one experiences when one is keeping a lid on a lifetime of unexpressed emotion as it's unbearable.
For seasoned grievers, bottoming out eventually feels like coming home – coming home to a place of incomparable healing within the Self. When we learn how to bottom out, we share in the reality of Helen Keller’s discovery that "Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I may be in, therein to be content."
Bottoming out in my abandonment depression once seemed like the hardest and longest journey of my life; yet the actual time and energy involved was scant compared to other long-term ordeals like surviving working as a surgeon and earning a Master’s degree from Cambridge and a PhD at University College London. As I look at it now, what could possibly merit more perseverance than breaking the habit of fleeing and living outside the centre of one’s BEing?
Depthful grieving allows us to break the habit of self-abandonment and to become so loyal to ourselves that we automatically feel empathic toward ourselves in times of difficulty.
The Dark Night of The Soul typically ends with the dawning of a new enthusiasm for life: A new aliveness. As the waves of old grief cease, we discover that we have become far more vital than we ever thought possible. We are often shocked to realise that we were stuck in a low-grade depression all our lives since childhood. I certainly was.
How elating to discard our habitual childhood despondency! How wonderful to rediscover the enthusiasm of the child! Free to adventure into more joyful and playful undertakings, cobwebs seem to peel away from our eyes and ears, and like unwounded children we are blessed by everyday miracles of sight and sound.
William Blake starts his poem ‘Auguries of Innocence' with:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
For more poetry in Nature click on my article:
Dr Nicole LePera explains The Dark Night of The Soul:
Dr Nicole LePera on 'The Dark Night of The Soul'
Conclusions
The Dark Night of The Soul is a period when you feel lost, disconnected, and maybe even in deep despair. This is deeper than having a bad day or going through a rough patch; it's a time of significant transformation and questioning, where the foundations of your beliefs and understanding of the world are shaken.
In his book, ‘Dark Nights of the Soul’, the psychotherapist and former Catholic monk, Thomas Moore, makes an important observation. He writes, “The dark night calls for a spiritual response, not only a therapeutic one.” The dark night calls upon the affected person “To remain in the present, not bound or deluded by the past and not imprisoned in a fixed and defensive idea about the future. The most difficult challenge is to let the process take place, and yet that is the only release from the pressure of the dark night.”
Mirabai Starr wrote about mental illness “I think that much of our depression, anxiety, and addiction has to do with what Saint John writes about: The soul's need and longing for transcendence. This need is instinctual and unavoidable.” Spiritual bliss resulting from transcendence is like oxygen to the soul. Vilayat Inayat Khan wrote "There can be no rebirth without a Dark Night of The Soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were."
Saint John of the Cross wrote in 'The Dark Night of The Soul' "And in suffering, the soul practices and acquires virtue, and becomes pure, wiser, and more cautious.” He continued “This is the first and principal benefit caused by this arid and dark night of contemplation: the knowledge of one's Self." He said “Before the soul is exalted, it is humbled; and before it is humbled, it is exalted... Having arrived at the summit, united with God, Who is at the top of it, and on Whom, too, the ladder rests.”
It is only by experiencing The Dark Night of The Soul that one can liberate one's True Self; one's soul. Saint John of the Cross wrote in 'The Dark Night of The Soul' “That is why it is said in Ecclesiastes “What doth he know,” asks the wise man, “that hath not been tried?... He that hath no experience knoweth little... He that hath not been tried, what manner of things doth he know?” Jeremiah also bears witness to the same Truth, saying: “Thou hast chastised me, and I was instructed.” The most proper form of this chastening, for him who will apply himself unto wisdom, are those interior trials of which I am now speaking. They are that which most effectually purges sense of all sweetness and consolations, to which, by reason of our natural weakness, we are addicted, and by them the soul is really humbled that it may be prepared for its coming exaltation."
Caroline Myss wrote "The Dark Night of The Soul is a journey into light, a journey from your darkness into the strength and hidden resources of your soul."
Saint John of the Cross wrote in 'The Dark Night of The Soul' “The soul (the True Self) must empty itself of self (ego) in order to be filled with God, that it must be purified of the last traces of Earthly dross before it is fit to become united with God... In the Dark Night of The Soul, bright flows the river of God."
Carl Jung summarises the process succintly "There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become Enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious."
Friedrich Nietzsche describes the journey with aplomb, vivacity and humour "Being human is a complicated gig. So give that ol' Dark Night of The Soul a hug. Howl the eternal yes!"
In times where modern medicine encourages us to regard emotional difficulties as illnesses rather than as spiritual questions (Littlewood and Lipsedge, 2004,), where psychiatrists have a tendency to convert patients’ emotional difficulties into diseases rather than opportunities for reflecting on their lives and as potential agents for beneficial change, The Dark Night of The Soul reminds mental health professionals of the importance of incorporating existential issues into their clinical practice. I myself have found that psychiatrists fall into two camps: Those that are modern and holistic in their approach, incorporating existential issues into their practice, and those who are ignorant of these concepts and remain outdated, treating everyone with lifelong medication and little else.
The Dark Night of The Soul is much like the Hero's Journey. Joseph Campbell wrote of The Dark Night of The Soul "When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed... The Dark Night of The Soul comes just before revelation." Trust the process. Have Faith and patience.
Namaste.
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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have published over 50 peer reviewed scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for four years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.