The term dark night of the soul dates back centuries to the written accounts of mystics and spiritual revolutionaries from diverse religious backgrounds.

These sages described the dark night as a metaphorical passage in the desert. Many report similar journeys of deconstructing their identification with the ego, limiting beliefs, and religious, social, and cultural conditioning of their time.

What exactly is a dark night of the soul? Does everyone experience this phenomenon? What happens on the other side?

Let’s explore this further…

What initiates a dark night of the soul?

The phrase “dark night of the soul” is used to describe what happens when the conceptual frameworks of our life, and the associated meaning we have ascribed to it, falls apart. 

Dark nights are common when the activities, achievements, and the known direction of our lives collapse.

Dark nights are often triggered by a catalytic event such as an illness, the death of someone we love, the loss of a job, relationship, or significant way of contributing that previously brought fulfillment and purpose to our lives.

During these times, who’ve we known ourselves to be may no longer feels resonant or recognizable to us.

It’s difficult to know who we are when we’re no longer orienting to our sense of self through our achievements, material possessions, status, financial success, sense of belonging. Or through a particular role we’ve been playing — entrepreneur, parent, spouse, boss, teacher and so on.

Have you experienced a dark night after the demolition of a dream that you were attempting to build (or had built) falls apart?

My dear friend slipped into a dark night for years after being unable to carry a baby full term — since childhood she had dreamt of being a mother. And, after many miscarriages, she remained childless. She felt unable to access her sense of belonging or purpose without the role of motherhood. Now, years later, her pain and healing journey have become medicine. She’s transformed the grief of her experience through writing a book for other women who are motherless and heartbroken.

Death and rebirth: An immersion into the unknown

Not everyone encounters dark nights of the soul — but if you have, then you know how devastating these times can be.

This process can feel disorienting, confining and devastating to our sense of self. It’s often described as a form of hell.

For example, if someone is preoccupied with being successful and having it together all the time, then this brittle persona will collapse when they lose their job or encounter a health challenge. When their ability to keep it all together is destroyed through addiction or other influencing factors the core of their identity is threatened.

Dark nights guide us towards more wholeness, yet, initially, when we’re in one it can feel like utter obliteration.

A dark night invites us to embrace a metamorphosis process of deconstruction and resurrection. This becomes a heroic journey of death and rebirth through shedding outdated ways of being in order to re-birth into a brighter and more authentic version of ourselves.

Sometimes ways of operating need to die. Through navigating our dark nights we are given the opportunity to integrate core wounds and reclaim a more authentic version of ourselves.

What initially is perceive as a significant loss often turns into an integration of a more sovereign and awake version of oneself.

A gateway to spiritual awakening and transformation

Dark nights are common occurrences when we hit our next threshold of evolution.

In Brené Brown’s TED Talk on vulnerability, she laughingly recounts telling her therapist that she thought she was having a nervous breakdown — and much to her surprise her therapist responded with, “no, Brené, you’re having a spiritual awakening.” 

Dark nights are one of the cornerstones of a spiritual awakening. A passage through which we survive the darkness and deconstruction of our conceptual reality as a journey of expansion and embodiment.

Often, the results of a dark night are transformed states of consciousness. These periods include a death and rebirth. An old, egoic sense of self dies, and from the ashes, a more integrated self is reborn.

Dark nights often involve wrestling with the darkness of our fears and personal conditioning in order to free ourselves and access love and self-acceptance. When ego-identification, and wounded parts of ourselves, are welcomed home rather than continually banished and shamed for existing we embody more love.

My personal experience of a dark night of the soul

When I was thirteen, my brother died and my entire world went dark for days, which turned into months and extended into years of compounding despair, isolation and unresolved pain and trauma held in my body.

My whole world had collapsed. I had lost my protector and playmate, and plunged into a visceral confusion about the purpose of existence, love, and a higher power.

I did what I was taught to do throughout my childhood: be strong, get busy, and move on.

Instead of going inward, I got busier going outward.

However, my coping strategies eventually caught up with me in my early thirties. I had finally driven myself into adrenal fatigue, and was now managing the corollary health consequences of chronic fatigue, intense diagnosable physical pain, digestive issues, and depression. This tsunami of unresolved trauma took me out for almost six years. I was forced to stop all my activities, including work, to look within.

I had been hiding inside of my social activities, my business achievements, my intellect, and even my athletic endeavors, because staying busy seemed to be the only option at the time. Feeling was not.

While clipping my need to express the layers of repressed emotions through busyness was a detour away from pain, it was also an obstacle to reclaiming my true power and vulnerability.

Through excessive doing, I had cut off the subtle, primal impulses pleading for me to befriend my heartbreak and emotional confusion. Busyness kept me distanced from my wisdom and healing mind-body intelligence.

I didn’t realize that if I could just stop, and tend to the impacts of unresolved shock and trauma in my mind and body, I would be able to re-establish a connection with my heart and soul.

I needed to interrupt the war against myself. To re-establish beliefs that were not based upon perceptions that love and life was untrustworthy and unsafe.

I didn’t know that if I had been able to connect with the wisdom within and lean into my experiences of grief, loss, exile, abandonment, and feeling manipulated, I would have found access to my power source of love and healing within.

But, finally, day-by-day, I made room for all the intense noise without filters. I committed to the path of welcoming everything, which is a lot easier said than done. 

What each of my “dark nights” continue to reveal to me

During a six-year illness, I encountered another dark night. Everyone around me continued to climb the corporate ladder, or start a family, while I lay in bed with physical pain and depletion that doctor’s didn’t’ know how to treat.

Eventually, after much loathing and self pity I stepped back and took a bigger view. I made space to witness the cascading beliefs, thoughts, and emotional patterns that often left me feeling powerless and forgotten. I sat in meditation for hours each day and attended silent meditation retreats as often as I could. There was something incredibly supportive and affirming when I sat with over 200 people in silence. Each person devoted to exploring their own conditioned mind and patterns of suffering. This is the lifeline that helped me to feel that I wasn’t alone and I wasn’t crazy.

I needed to feel part of something larger because for me, unresolved trauma had been a dark and solitary journey immersed in feelings of shame, self-hatred and isolation.

I studied the coping strategies I drew upon to manage my pain and lack of trust in life or healthy relationships. I chipped away, layer after layer, to the depth of my being. To the place that lives within every one of us. The precious inner space that quietly rests beneath all the noise and patiently awaits our remembering and return. 

As painful as my many “dark nights” have been, the fruition has been liberating and empowering. With each illumination and revelation, I started to see the source of my suffering more clearly. I began to dis-identify with the ways core wounds and collective imprints from the matrix had imprisoned me.

As the darkness lifted, something inside of me softened. I share more on this process in this blog article detailing my journey.

This process unfolded organically, as I began to realize that each limiting patterns of thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs were learned and inherited. They didn’t define who I am. They were fabricated constructs that I was unknowingly identified with. This realization felt revolutionary. 

I was now able to clearly see the complex reality of being innocently conditioned by external influences that, over time, had become internalized voices. This naturally allowed me to take responsibility for the ways I had given my sovereignty and power away to a seemingly invisible, but tremendously influential, power source outside of me.

What a relief it was to feel a break in the malaise, and to see things for what they actually were!

I still had a journey ahead of me, which of course I’m still on, but exposing the ways my unidentified traumas had imprisoned me generated freedom in my heart, and relief from the physical tension and inflammation in my body.

Embracing the vulnerability of being human opened the flood gates of self-compassion, and furthered my commitment to love, integration, and healing.

With each dark night, I pass through the other side reoriented towards more embodied clarity, love, and access to my essence despite my human messiness. Each time, I’m reborn into a more true and pure expression of myself.

What about you — what is your dark night healing story?

Our personal stories of triumphs and resiliency are often a light in the darkness for others who may be traversing something similar. Do you have a story of your own dark night that you want to share? If so, please contact me to be a guest on my Power Reclamation Podcast.

Or, if you have questions about navigating your own dark night and are looking for a guide, sign up for a discovery consultation here.

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