The Dark Night of the Soul – Personal Crisis and the Process of Transformation
What has come to be called the dark night of the soul, occurs naturally through a life altering personal crisis of some kind that seems to abruptly rip away the very foundation we built our life out of, where we suddenly realize it was all a delusion of our own making. Personal Transformation, which is often referred to in spiritual texts as alchemy and resolving karma, and in Biblical texts as redemption, is usually described as a thinning, sorting, and filtering process of calcification, dissolution, distillation, coagulation, and so on, which is the process necessary to separate out all moral corruption, false beliefs born out of our formative conditioning, and self-induced delusions, returning our mind to what seems like an empty, yet purified state. Transformational processes are described as a step-by-step procedure that provide us with a metaphor for understanding how this process plays out in our life as a dynamic series of actual life events and experiences that take us through this same type of process naturally. Transformational processes occur naturally in our life as experiences born out of challenges, problems, hardship, tragedy, trauma, despair, and desolation, all of which serve to push us to the point of hopelessness where the very foundation of our life is torn away and beyond repair.
Transformation only takes place through a crisis of some sort that not only pushes us beyond existing limits, but also shatters the belief system holding our life in place, and supporting what is in fact a delusion formed as an error in how we think and perceive the world around us. While this is often experienced as deeper forms of pain and suffering, the kind that usurps our morality and personal values, destroying the image of ourselves that we’ve build out of various illusions, and pushes us not only beyond our comfort zone, but leaves us in a tail-spin spiraling downward with no sense of control or possibility of recovery. Eventually we find ourselves plunged into an abyss that seems like a bottomless pit, dark and unknown, while we frantically search our heart and mind over and over for ideas, possible solutions, things to try . . . and there’s nothing. We pray, we ask for guidance, we cry until we can’t cry anymore, and still . . . nothing. The emptiness is almost unbearable and overwhelms us with a sense of hopelessness and being abandoned by our only true inner source. This absence alone becomes the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and we eventually hit a point that’s referred to as the ‘dark night of the soul’. This term can be a bit deceiving because it’s not referring to one night, week, or brief moment of what seems like total despair, but rather to a phase or stage in our life that can last for weeks, months, or even years. During this process we encounter the parts of ourselves that we’ve repressed (our shadow) to the point where we no longer recognize them as being our only true adversary.
The ‘dark night of the soul’ is experienced as being totally lost in a complete state of despair, of devastation that’s life sweeping and all-encompassing. In this moment as you plummet and hit bottom, you’re steeped in the realization of it all, and your world is shattered beyond repair. And in that moment, you honestly let go of everything that put you there, your beliefs are dismantled and scattered like dead debris on the wind, no longer cohesive and meaningful, and you experience a form of ‘death’ in the most literal sense. Everything you built your identity around becomes apparent as a lie. Not a lie perpetrated by others that you were foolish enough to believe, but the lies you told yourself and agreed to as a means of building an illusion around others and your life situation so you could rest in a false sense of security and stability. Life as you have known it up to that point, will never be the same. Your fears surmount and overwhelm you, no longer able to deny or repress them, you give into them, allowing them to express freely and surrender your will to them. And in that final moment of complete dissolution and defeat, you let go, no longer trying to resist them or hold them in, and they leave you. And in the very same moment that you feel completely distraught and beside yourself with grief, a strange feeling of calm relief comes over you.
In the aftermath of a complete emotional meltdown, the disintegration of your entire belief system and the reality it created and served to maintain takes place, an experience known as ‘shedding or killing the false ego’ as your ‘false sense of yourself’, and you feel a kind of cleansing, an emotional purging, and a new kind of open spaciousness as a calm feeling comes in its wake. Like having a clean slate, where you’re ready to begin again. In these moments, we come face-to-face with our own demons, and we’re forced to look with full awareness on our own lies and false prophesies. We have to encounter and recognize our own shadow nature playing a part in everything else, with the realization that what we thought was being done to us by others and by life, was actually being done to us, by us. This is a rude awakening. We were always negotiating away our dignity, compromising our morals, bartering with sex and affection, manipulating by persuasion, and surrendering through acceptance and agreements of some sort. No longer able to project our own issues and tendencies onto others, blame or defer responsibility for our own conduct, we are forced to turn inward and look directly in the mirror. We have to willingly visit and spend time in the darkest corners of our mind, where danger is always lurking, scary and powerful, because it’s unknown and mysterious, even (or especially) to ourselves. We see things about ourselves that we spent years hiding and denying.
In the wake of total devastation, with our morality cleansed, a feeling of hope, like a seed lying dormant in our heart begins growing, and a glimmer takes hold and begins to formulate, and we suddenly realize we’re free to begin anew. The beauty of hitting bottom is there’s no place to go but up. The more complete our fall, the more exalted our rising. Cleansed of all that caused our demise, like a purging and ripping out what’s not of us, emotional debris we’ve attracted and collected along the way, fall away, no longer in us as a part of us, and we suddenly realize we’re free of what was in reality self-imposed limitations. But like all cleansing that creates a kind of void that’s magnetic, our mind will act to unconsciously draw something into the void to replace it, and so in order to gain control over the creative process of our self and our life during this time, we have to decide what to employ in its place. Otherwise we could draw back in more of the same type of stuff that appears slightly different, or something of a similar nature that will send us on another side trip as a distraction from our main goal in life. In the most basic sense, we’re all here to realize that in every moment, whether through a conscious or unconscious state, we are the one creating ourselves and our life experiences. It’s our job as divine beings to heal ourselves of all self-inflicted errors in how we think and perceive the world around us, and take full responsibility for making our own decisions that result in deliberately creating who we are.
Once we clear out destructive beliefs and the emotional compulsions we’ve built around them, we have to intentionally choose what we’re going to replace it with. We don’t have to try and correct it by working ‘through it’ (our issues) as an outside event or actual memory, all we have to do is recognize the part of our character that caused it (undesirable character trait), and then strategically employ the opposing virtues in its place. Opposites always act to transform each other. We transform a vice (short coming or poor character trait), by realizing what we’re doing and choosing to embody the opposite trait in it’s place. After we do this consistently over a period of time through awareness and discipline, we build up and strengthen the new character traits until they begin taking hold, and as a result, we begin creating experiences of ourselves ‘as’ being that way. We transform our character by strengthening unused traits to the point where we begin experiencing ourselves in new ways. All of our life experiences flow out of the natural expression of our mental paradigm and our character. One sets the stage as a life theme, while other forms the main character of that life theme. To change how we think and act and what type of dynamics we naturally engage in, we must change our own inner nature as our core self, and build up new memories that act to upgrade our mental model.
To change the outer form, we have to change the inner state in-forming it. By changing our inner nature and intentionally cultivating desirable qualities and characteristics, we systematically change our vibration and what we attract and are attracted to, what and how we perceive the world around us, and what type of situations and relationships we’re willing to entertain. As we ourselves change, our experiences of life change accordingly. If we don’t change ourselves however, we keep on recreating the same ‘type’ of experiences over and over with different people and circumstances, until we begin recognizing what our part is in our own life creations.
The process we undergo because of life challenges and tragedies throw us head on into a full blown life crisis as an identity crisis. These extreme and intense moments force us to examine ourselves internally, hashing through all our experiences in order to gain some form of insight into the workings of our own unconscious mind, and as we separate out the impurities as flaws and poor character traits that foster unconscious tendencies, we either eliminate them altogether, or transform them into virtuous qualities that shape our true identity as a self-creating being. Undergoing this filtering, eliminating and reformulating process of self-awareness and realization, we reform ourselves to be more of who we truly are, and create ourselves and our life through a new character that naturally expresses in new ways, no longer creating the same type of delusions all over again, but creating a new version of ourselves that come as an expression of the qualities we intentionally cultivate in ourselves.
Personal Transformation coach and Spiritual Mentor
