Life has been rough for me the past five years among it being rough for us all collectively. By rough I mean, there has been a lot of crisis and loss. Loss and crisis come for us all in cycles. The daylight cycle is when life is going smooth and easy, fun and stable. The dark night cycle is when loss strikes, the vicissitudes of life rain, and one way through is to turn ego inward toward the inner light of the soul.

This is a metaphorical quest for the holy grail.

We each have our own version of this with a different narrator, tone, actors and plot. You cannot compare losses nor can you compare how each loss feels to each person. Just like we all have fingerprints but each is unique, we all have dark night patterns and each is unique. Some people are in long dark nights that last for years while other dark nights may last only a year or less.

In my spiritual truth the soul’s blueprint for the duration, depth and amount of dark nights that will be experienced in a person’s lifetime can be mapped by the natal chart. But if you don’t vibe with astrology or mapping your dark nights, doesn’t really matter. There are many paths up the same mountain.

Dark nights turn the mud ball into a pearl (you being the mud ball).

Through my very difficult dark night these past five years (loss on many levels) my therapy practice has blossomed like a lotus growing through the mud. This makes me think of Leonard Cohen’s line, “there is a crack in everything, that is how the light gets in.” The light has been my healing work for others and myself. I have gained tremendous resilience, self reliance, self love, self worth, spiritual connection, wisdom, acceptance, and achieved a mastery level of self care.

I do not think I could even recognize the person I was in 2017 anymore and who I am now feels more fully ripe.

But it’s not all positive. Life is always light and dark, negative and positive. On the negative side, I struggle more with my mental health issues, I harbor disappointment, regret, and I feel weary much of the time (therapists are people too moment). This aspect is why I desire to write this blog. I am not alone in how I feel and I want to normalize disappointment, regret and weariness.

The expectation our culture promotes that if you work hard and stay dedicated you can have the life you want and get what you dream of is total and utter bullshit. There, I said it. In the new age the same toxic positive expectation is promoted through the “create your own reality” rhetoric. True, some do get what they want when they work hard and stay dedicated. True, some do create their desired reality outcomes with their thoughts. But that is only one tiny slice of the big diverse complex pie of life.

Many people’s lives turn out disappointing in certain areas. Regret is natural to feel. Weariness happens. A ton of us experience tragedy for no reason such as losing a child, never finding a partner, living in poverty you can never climb out of, getting stage four cancer, just to name a few. Lately so many are victims to the storms and fires emerging from climate change ( though mamma earth has been taking out swaths of humans throughout all of time).

War, famine, abuse, sickness oh my. The vicissitudes are real and ever present. Buddha spoke of this when he said “life is suffering”.

Happiness and joy may be too tall an order through a dark night. Maybe having peace, calm, equanimity, and keeping the heart open to love is more realistic when tragedy strikes or life is putting you through too much for too long. It’s perfectly appropriate to feel disappointment for how life has turned out due to what happened to you out of your control and the choices you made.

The pressure to be happy, fulfilled and have no regrets is all too much sometimes whether that be during a dark night or not. For some it is too tall an order for a lifetime. My father lately in his dark night speaks of mudding through being the most important thing. For some, serving others and being less in self may bring a certain ease. Many paths up the same mountain again.

What if fulfillment, happiness and joy were not the only emotions being sold by the narrative that we should always follow our bliss and go for our dreams? What if that was only one narrative out of a grab bag of many narratives about the meaning or quality of life that were all considered equal? Maybe then we would not fear disappointment so much. Maybe then we would not fear negativity so much. It’s ok to have your negative side.

Peace, calm, resilience, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance, humbleness, confidence, and self reliance are some of the treasures birthed out of a dark night and these qualities can exist right beside unhappiness or a lack of joy. I do not mean to suggest a black and white framework of no happiness or joy. I am only wanting to create space for the treasures only loss cultivates. I only wish to normalize negativity and allow joy and happiness to take a backseat for a country mile.

So what if you complain a lot or you see the glass half empty. Maybe that’s because life has been rough outside of your control and you’ve been managing so much just to survive. It is ok to muddle through, it’s ok to have regrets and disappointment. This does not mean you are a bad person who has no gratitude, you don’t need to feel guilty or write in your gratitude journal. You can accept the negativity as a part of being human too.

The pearl self that the dark night creates doesn’t mean being a positive ray of sunshine. Becoming the pearl can mean not having a nervous breakdown, being able to laugh, to love, to stay balanced, have some peace, wisdom, understanding, and to know you are stronger than you ever thought you could be.

I have much more to share on this topic for future blogs. My intention is to share my vulnerability in service to your vulnerability. The negativity, disappointment, and weariness in me honors your negativity, disappointment and weariness in you. Both are love.