Many of us hit circumstances in our lives where things go dark. This can be brought on by particular circumstances that thwart our personal will and resources, or can seem to appear through no external cause whatsoever. The dark can last for months or years. The dark can be about shedding some small aspect of one’s personality or mask that one no longer needs, or it can be about shedding the personality or mask altogether. Suddenly life energy and positivity drains out of even the activities and things that used to bring us the most joy. Our positive qualities can be eclipsed and the gnarliest of shadow material can come and take us over. I write here to tell you: take heart. Once you address any physical/health issues (and certainly many dark sojourns are accompanied by these), it’s time simply to hang out and find what comfort you can while the Holy removes a big ol’ sliver from your foot. My daughter screams and cries when that happens, and she can see it’s her loving mama who is doing the job. When the Holy goes for your sliver full-tilt, it is done in the dark, in silence, and you cannot see the face of that which stalks you.
Forget normal. It’s too late. You are being recruited by Love and any thought of normalcy will only be a further abuse to yourself. You are disintegrating. From the perspective of the culture and all of us being like well-mown grass, all the same, and all doing it according to the program, you stand out like a sore thumb. You are plain ol’ weird! You just fell off the train and can’t figure out how to get back on again.
You are not alone, and the Holy knows what it’s doing. There is really not a perfectly graceful way to make it through — a dark night experience is messy. As my friend Kim said to me, “If you have a nice spiritual perspective in a dark night of the soul, it’s not a dark night of the soul.” All that is required of you is that you live through it.
Inside the cocoon the caterpillar changes into a pupa. …the caterpillar digests itself from the inside out, causing its body to die. During this partial death, some of the caterpillar’s old tissues are salvaged to form new. This remnant of cells… are used to create a new body. Using its digestive juices, the caterpillar turns his old larval body into food which he uses to rebuild its new body.
You are a caterpillar turning to liquid on her way to butterfly-hood. You are an ugly duckling, about to realize she is a swan. You will not believe these words, but nevertheless may you at least consider considering that they might be true. All is not lost.
In nature, there is a beautiful cycle, as a seed rests in the dark, then slowly pushes it’s green head up through the dark earth toward the sunlight. Growing, growing it becomes a shoot, now a young plant, now a mature plant. It flowers, bears fruit. And then, the fruit falls, or rots. The leaves fall to the ground. A bare stalk is seen against the sky, and then even the stalk falls toward the ground, and everything is rotting and composting and returning to the soil. Between the rotting and the green head pushing up, there is a period of time where nothing appears to be happening, and yet, in the dark, in the invisible, plenty is.
Here is T.S. Elliot’s experience of it.
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing.
But the faith and the hope and the love, are all in the waiting.
I-don’t-knowers. Those who have not traveled this path will find your travels strange at best, terrifying at worst. They will try and cheer you up, give you lots of suggestions, tell you to get a life (usually in well-meaning ways), get sick of you, or send you to a doctor.
Some of the hard-won and simple things that were useful to me were: 1) friends who didn’t need to fix me and had room to simply listen to the depths of my agony without leaving, judging, or freaking (I had two of them, you know who you are, thank you very much); 2) hot water of any sort (hot springs, baths, etc.) 3) darkness 4) sinking my attention into simple things like fluttering leaves or rippling water 5) lying on the earth 6) attending meetings (such as satsang), reading poetry or books or listening to tapes that gave me any sort of hint that someone else had gone through what I was experiencing, and that it might be alright to just let it take its course. It still was a nightmare (and then afterward a long, wearing down trek), but these things helped.
Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who kept me company — a true champion of the dark. Here is his description (from Robert Bly’s translation, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke) of the rock and a hard place aspect of the dark night, as he calls on the Holy to help him out.
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone.
There was nothing that at the time felt redeemable about the years I spent in deep angst and suffering. Every possible attempt was made by my mind to understand what was happening in an effort to solve it, but the mind spectacularly failed. It seemed there was nothing I could do to alleviate the tremendous anxiety in my body, the way the world looked like Hades, or the way that I had gone from a giving, highly functioning woman, friend and lover to a dark-filled desperado.
One of the most challenging parts of the experience is that the alchemical process of dissolution forces one’s shadow to the fore. For me, gone was the woman full of generosity and energy for others, gone was any sense of humor (except later a defeated gallows sort), gone was the light, the bright, the perky. Anyone who implied that I should move in that direction I felt like growling at, or maybe biting, or maybe even tearing the flesh off their bones and having them for dinner. Did they think I hadn’t already considered that 10,000 times? Did they think that if I could raise my miserable bones out of the swamp to perk that I would? I was already miserable at my plight and reminders that I might not be trying hard enough while giving it everything that I had were maddening.
This part of the process is humbling to say the least – that despite one’s best efforts, one is dark and not that fun to be around, irritable and nasty. Of course we must do our best to not make our misery about anyone else nor dump venom on the innocent sweeties that surround us, but know this: this is simply a feature of the grinding. All of your energy is in the basement with the Mad Scientist who is working to disassemble you. Give yourself a break and require less of yourself. Find solitude and those who need nothing from you as best you can. Anne Sexton says it like it is in this poem.
Rilke’s poem “The Man Watching” (from the same Robert Bly translation) was comforting – to see that someone else had been wrestling with his angel, as Rilke put it, and that there was something deeper that might be going on besides my failure to master the situation with my strategies.
At first I searched for the mistakes I had made that perhaps led to my predicament. I went over and over the months leading up to my descent. I analyzed old journals, my mind dashing about like Gollum in search of his precious lost ring. I consulted doctors and web sites and herb store owners about depression and pregnancy, then post-partum depression, then nursing hormones. I read the DSM V to see if I could diagnose myself with a mental illness. When I came up with nothing (no problem, therefore no solution), I simply searched for anyone who could normalize or bless the wretched experience I was having, looking for any news that conveyed to me that this wasn’t all about my failure at doing something right, that this wasn’t about the Holy punishing me for being bad in some way. Rumi was another pal during this time, and his use of words like “devastation” comforted me, since it told me that he was no stranger to the experience I was having.
They fall, and falling, they’re given wings.
The dark night of the soul is a cleansing, a purification, a burning. At some point, whether consciously or unconsciously, your soul said a dangerous prayer. Some pray, “Make me only love.” Some say, “All I want is God.” Mine was “Give me nothing that I want.” And then when the burning shows up, we have second thoughts, we do not recognize it as an answer to that prayer. However, it is this burning that leaves us clean vessels for the Holy to move in and set up housekeeping. I like to say that She’s going to completely redecorate. Like Rilke, Rumi celebrates those who long for and understand the beauty of this burning in this poem.
On my right, a cool flowing stream.
And the other towards the cool flowing waters.
No one knows which is blessed and which is not.
That face appears in the fire.
And make it their devotion are cheated by this reversal.
David Whyte has some beautiful poems that reflect his own experience of the rotting and composting separate self. Particularly useful was his tape called “Poetry and Self Compassion” – see David’s web site for availability.
David Wagoner’s translation of an old Native American elder’s story gives some great guidance about being lost, and standing still just here, now, giving up trying to solve the dilemma with your mind, letting the Holy carry you on its back.
You are surely lost. Stand still.
When the former identifications are dissolving, and all that is old, obsolete or false is leaving you, it can be difficult to find guidance for living in a true way. Many times the dark will not allow you to do things the old ways — they start to feel dead, they make you sick, they make you anxious, they hurt. And yet, what now? Mary Oliver offers some clues in this poem (from Dream Work), turning away from being “good” and into what the “soft animal of your body” loves.