Have You Heard of the Dark Night of the Soul?

It's a natural cleansing, a shedding of skin, a rebirth

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Have you ever had that experience when you learn something new, and it fits like a glove for something you didn’t have the vocabulary for before?

There was a time when it felt like the sun went out in my life. And while I didn’t identify with being depressed, I was certainly out of sync with who I was.

I had to create a new horizon for the sun to rise over.

It was as if I had cocooned myself in a chrysalis and withdrew from everything I knew. When I re-emerged, I was different, unrecognisable, if not by appearance but by spirit.

I’ve since learned this was my first Dark Night of the Soul. And suddenly, everything makes sense.

What is the Dark Night of the Soul?

While seeking a deeper understanding, I found an article by Eckhart Tolle, the enlightened leader and spiritual author. This sentence stands out to me.

“A collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.”

I’ve also heard it described as a crisis of faith or a particularly difficult period in life. An existential crisis even.

Often, a Dark Night of the Soul is triggered by something external, perhaps the death of a loved one, a divorce or separation, or the loss of a job. It can be instigated by surviving a natural disaster or living in a war zone.

When the Dark Night of the Soul settles in us, it has us questioning our conscious ideas and the concepts we’ve come to live by. We feel unattached to our purpose and sense of identity, leaving us feeling lost, unanchored, and drifting. Our whole belief system may be overhauled.

My whole belief system was overhauled.

It felt like an internal fuse had been lit, leading to an inner explosion, obliterating everything I once understood to be true and eradicating my concept of meaning.

I’m told that some people transform so dramatically that they are almost unrecognisable. For instance, they may either lose their faith or find a new one entirely. Our centre of gravity alters, and we interpret and perceive the world around us through very different filters — almost as if we are seeing things for the first time.

Eckhart Tolle goes on to say,

“The Dark Night of the Soul is a kind of death that you die. What dies is the egoic sense of self.”

For me, my whole world fell apart when I lost Jasper, my K9 soul mate. Her death started a domino effect of change and growth. I shed the person I was and became someone new. Someone who was less malleable, sociable or tolerant of bull shit.

I transitioned from an extreme extrovert to a socially selective introvert. Maybe I had always been an introvert but had suddenly lost the ability to mask and chameleon.

Life felt heavy.

I stopped running myself ragged in friendships and endeavours. I no longer tried to be everything to everyone, and I turned inward. This people-pleaser suddenly learned how to say ‘no.’ Stripping my life bare felt liberating. But I suddenly felt tortured by the question of what it was all for. What was the point of life?

What was the meaning of my life?

We can have more than one Dark Night of the Soul

If we are humaning right, we are always growing and evolving. I am a different person today to the person I was yesterday and this is a good thing. But these changes are micro and unnoticeable.

Jasper’s passing was sudden. She was only seven years old; by my calculations, we still had another seven years of companionship and love to share.

She was wrenched from my soul.

Over the course of one day, I became somebody else, someone I hadn’t yet had time to acquaint myself with. Everything lost meaning. Food lost flavour. Exercise lost its endorphin-fueled effect.

Suddenly I was wearing someone else’s clothes. Everything that was once familiar felt peculiar. And nothing made sense. A world without the rhythm of Jasper was hauntingly pointless.

This wasn’t just grief. It was the catalyst for an enormous inner shift.

While the passing of Jasper triggered a Dark Night of the Soul and helped me recalibrate my life, I feel I’m just coming out of a second encounter with it, triggered by one death and anticipating the impact of another.

Yet again, I emancipated myself from things that started feeling itchy, curtailed and no longer aligned with my belief system.

In this article, therapist and transformation specialist Thomas Moore suggests that when faced with a life-changing event, the Dark Night of the Soul can be considered the time of transition from who we are during one phase of life to who we become during the next phase.

That makes sense to me. We are not monotone canals. We are rivers, meandering and winding, twisting and turning, rushing and wavering, and even rerouting depending on external conditions.

Sure, it sounds like depression, but it’s not depression. Let’s unpack this a little.

This article in PsychCentral, describes how a therapist discerns whether a patient is inflicted with depression or a Dark Night of the Soul.

“After listening to a depressed person, he often becomes depressed, helpless, and hopeless himself. He feels the rejection of self, as if the depression is contagious. In contrast, he is not brought down when people speak of a spiritual aridity.”

The article goes on to outline that depression is associated with feelings of worthlessness, maybe guilt, apathy, sleep disturbances, even suicide ideation, and an inability to show compassion to others. There’s an overall loss of being.

The Dark Night of the Soul is more of a general melancholy without self-loathing, a despairing of the world outside, not our inner world.

A crash of faith and belief in all that once guided us.

Moreover, at least for me, my experience with the Dark Night of the Soul has been a journey of self-discovery.

How to Embrace a Dark Night of the Soul

For a long time, it felt like I was in a washing machine, going round and round, dizzy and confused, not knowing which way was up.

I was a stranger to myself on a quest to find myself again. I needed to reestablish my values and understand what made my energy rise and fall because the old rule book about my being had been shredded.

Who even am I?

Initially, I resisted. Almost fighting the inevitable changes happening in my psyche.

It was safer to stay in the familiar and keep trying to be the person I was, the person I knew—the person I could steer around my life with the safety of predictability. And yet, it didn’t feel like my life. It was more like I was wearing someone else’s mask and hiding behind who I once was, afraid of being rejected for who I was becoming.

But eventually, I listened to the yearnings of my heart.

And once I started listening, so much fell away. Like a hoarder spring cleaning, I overhauled my life. I left a 17-year career, shut down passion projects, moved countries, and lost some friends and family.

I lost everything I once thought brought me meaning. But I gained myself.

I suddenly felt like I was living authentically. I was living with courage and truth, streamlined by my values. I was awake, alive, and impenetrable to anything or anybody who didn’t wish me well.

Science and spirituality often intersect.

Interestingly, my experiences coincide with a theory by Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski. He suggests that when we experience complex emotions or endure an internal breakdown, we undergo a reorganization process that is conducive to personal growth and expansion. He termed this “positive disintegration.”

My main Dark Night of the Soul started almost seven years ago, and while it endured for a while before releasing me from its guidance, it still helps keep me on track.

Life is too short to waste time on things that don’t bring us meaning or fill us with purpose.

If we pay attention to our periods of darkness, the reinvention, or rebirth powers of the Dark Night of the Soul, will nudge us in the right direction.

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