The Dark Night of the Soul
“Depression is a label and syndrome, while a dark night is a meaningful event. Depression is a psychological sickness, a dark night is a spiritual trial ...
It is a period of transformation more like a stage in alchemy than an obstacle in happiness.
Your dark night is your own invitation to become a person of heart and soul”.
Full disclosure, many of my words I have used from ~ THOMAS MOORE ~ and his book ‘Dark Nights of the Soul’ I will italic his words. This is woven into this longer blog with some of my wisdom and personal experience to help you understand or answer some questions or curiosity.
The concept of the dark night of the soul was first coined in a poem by Saint John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic and poet.
I share about the Dark Night of the Soul because I have personal experience having gone through my own in 2016 into 2017. In hindsight I believe it was my soul showing me the way. My own was a huge awakening for me and it was, in hindsight, because my soul was sending me messages (I was not listening deeply and inwardly enough). I was healing and learning healing modalities to heal chakras and what was not aligned in my life. This began by the way, at what was one of my happiest periods in my life. I think that space held space for the darkness to enter! I was healing and learning modalities and it had ignited a passion for the mystical, it activated my third eye and it was clear who and what was aligned with my life, my ego took a battering and many truths were revealed. But I tiptoed in some respect. I knew what was working, who was lying to me and also who was rubbing me out of the picture (confirmed by a Reiki healer at the time) and what proceeded to allow me to heal and reconnect consciously with my light and the light of Spirit and Goddess (Source, nature) was a massive cleansing, deconstructing, exposing of my truth which only taught me to trust in my intuition more and life renewal. My dark night was a mini death. As a Scorpio rising , I now believe it was my shamanic initiation of mini ego deaths that helped me rebirth and step into the role of Healer, Shamanic therapist and Priestess today. It was not easy. But, I am now happier, freer, more content and living my life of sovereignty. I believe it helped me here.
Some say we have more than one dark night. I feel my one was enough but know the power and healing in it. I heal and consciously make choices now that are more aligned so that the same process does not happen. I trust my soul is always guiding me so … for my highest good and the highest good of all.
I hold space and witness this happening to others. I work with clients who call me forth to support their spiritual healing for that is how we heal from it. These challenging times collectively are like a dark night for the collective as we move into the Age of Aquarius. The shedding of old ways, habits and ego is how we heal and become more heart-centred, it is not easy when going through the dark night and why it is important to ask for and get help, support, therapists, etc because to do this alone would be even more challenging.
WHAT IS THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL?
IT’S WHEN YOUR PERSONAL LIGHT DIMS AS YOUR INNER SPARK FEELS LOST AND LOW. During a dark night there is no choice but to surrender or to control, and give into unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal. It is more than a learning experience; it’s a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares for us.
It feels very different from other periods in your life when you feel down, low, depressed, challenged. These times are normal and often not spoken about enough but they are real for everyone. The dark night feels lower, darker and the most challenging fear of all.
It calls for a spiritual response
NAVIGATING A DARK NIGHT
A real dark night cannot be dismissed easily. It leaves a lasting effect; and in fact, it alters you. It can be profoundly upsetting, offering no conceivable way out, except perhaps to rely on pure faith and resources far beYONd your understanding and capability. It calls for a spiritual response, not a therapeutic one. it pushes you to THE edge of familiar and THE imagination about how life works and who or what controls it all. It serves the spirit by forcing you to rely on something beyond human capacity. It can open you up to new and mysterious possibilities.
A spiritual response is your free will. There is no doctrine or organisation that can help because your soul is calling to be free (amongst others feelings) so how you pray, meditate, heal, dance, sing, cry, cleanse, ground is individual and unique to you. And it is may also mean you are spiritually awakening and that includes a hunger to learn more about who you believe God/Goddess to be. It is a period of unlearning as much as learning.
SYMPTOMS OF THE DARK NIGHT
(SOME NOT ALL)
WAKING UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT IN FEAR UNABLE TO FALL BACK ASLEEP
SUPPRESSED ANGER OR WOUNDS ERUPTING
LOSS OF WHAT YOU KNOW IN AREAS OF YOUR LIFE
VEILS OF ILLUSION REMOVED AS YOU SEE TRUTHS THAT WERE NOT CLEAR TO YOU BEFORE
FEELING ISOLATED AND SEPARATING MORE
LOSS OF DIRECTION, POWER AND HOPE
FEELING VERY LOW, FATIGUED, DRAINED OF ENERGY
A TRIGGERING EVENT LIKE THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE AND DIVORCE
INTENSE FEELINGS OF ANXIETY AND FEAR THAT YOU CAN’T SEEM TO SHIFT OR GROUND
A SOUL DESIRE FOR DEEPER CONNECTION WITH SPIRITUAL PRACTICES, PRAYER AND SPACES
WANTING YOUR LIFE TO FEEL MORE ALIGNED WITH HEART-CENTRED CORE SOUL VALUES
CARING FOR THE SOUL
You need to get what comforts you can, but don’t move against the process. YOU CANNOT SPIRITUALLY BYPASS TO HEAL. Don’t deny it. The most difficult task of all, is to give yourself what you need at the deepest level of care (healing) rather than cure.
Hold space for all the processing to take place. It’s not about indulging in the suffering but surrendering to life, not to pain, and still you struggle to survive. The result is not a final victory not an end of suffering. You engage life more energetically and in that engagement discover a level of meaning that dissolves any discontent you may have.
It is your soul guiding you to heal
HEALING
A dark night of the soul can heal, where healing means being more love and more present to the world around you. It heals by opening you up, sometimes to the point where you might feel dismembered. It opens the doorways between you and the world that heretofore have been closed. It resonates the flow of life through you.
IT MAY SEEM LIKE A SHAMANIC DEATH. New life requires the termination of the old. You have to experience the dying. And that means surrendering to the process. And it normally lasts a while. A while for example 6 months to a year. Everyone is different but anything lasting a few weeks is most likely just a challenging period no matter how that feels.
A dark night can heal you in a way nothing else can. It can erase the false logic by which you have lived your life.
It will require trusting in myth, imagination and journeying . Spirituality offers imagination for the human condition it has its own poetic qualities. Themes and rhythms.
“If nature can handle the destruction and reconstruction of a caterpillar into a butterfly, why shouldn’t I surrender
and trust that it can handle what is happening to me?”
~ John Moriarity ~
You are nature part of same world. 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.
THE LIGHT IN THE DARK NIGHT
You become the wounded healer, someone who has made the descent and knows the territory. SOMEONE WHO HAS FELT THEIR COLOURS AND SHADOW. IT CAN FEEL LIKE GREAT DARKNESS YES THE SOUL IS ALWAYS FREE. LIKE NATURE, 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. The dark night is the soul shining through with its lunar luminosity. When you discover your own spark (LIGHT), hidden within you, many elements that you have felt are wounded will suddenly be healed.
Dark times, like enlightenments and achievements, leave their mark and make you a person if insight and compassion.
Scintilla is Latin the spark that lies at the heart of a person. Mediocrity dulls it. With an attitude of do only what is necessary and sufficient. It involves giving up on the possibility of living an outstanding life. The dark night transcends that. They force you to consider your situation and to feel the dark material out of which the spark arises. The numinous is that mysterious power of life, seen in nature, people, and works of craft and art, that inspires a sense of awe. This extraordinary quality also has about it a brilliance and light that you can’t overlook.
But the person alive to life and calling and live responds and shows herself. She makes every effort to let that light shine.
MEDICINE WISDOM
“I believe that the best way to deal with the dark night of the soul is to use the emotional and intellectual darkness to help you see your own luminosity, to discover exactly how you shine when you are at your best. Modern psychology is minimal in its goal of helping people adapt and feel normal. We have to press beyond Psychology to a spiritual vision in which your life is redeemed by the discovery of the spark of divinity in you ... It may be painful, discouraging, and challenging, but it is nevertheless an important revelation of what life is about”.
~ THOMAS MOORE ~
To work with email me at ciara@ciaramchugh.com