It is ok to feel like crap while going through a negative experience in life. Negative experiences are the vicissitudes of life and sometimes they hit hard. They usually do. You would not be human to go through crisis, loss, and the crumbling of your steady state with a positive attitude.

The dark night of the soul refers to the journey you are on when the vicissitudes strike.

You might experience the sudden tragic loss of a loved one, a child, a parent, a spouse. You might experience caregiving a parent over a period of years through dementia, cancer, or Alzheimer’s disease. You might be going through a difficult divorce, the loss of a career, financial loss or the loss of your home. Maybe you are traversing through cancer or a severe illness. Maybe more than one of these experiences are happening at the same time. Maybe your life has been riddled with vicissitudes. You could be one of the people caught in war or the victim of a brutal crime or the victim of cataclysm.

From the soul’s perspective we go through loss and the vicissitudes to learn how to love, grow, transform, gain more compassion, forgiveness, unconditional love, acceptance, build resilience, bravery courage, be better versions of ourselves or become the true self. And while all of this is true, it is also true that going through the trials of life just sucks and it’s awful and hard and wretched. Going through tragedy leaves us empty, depleted, feeling ripped off and cheated, can take us into a place of deep despair, anger, and often be too much to endure. Both are real and true.

Learning to live with loss tragedy and to move through dark night cycles is tricky and hard. It is hard to know when focusing on transforming the self through loss is helpful medicine or when it’s an attempt to repress pain through reframing it, which only makes the body sick and psyche create neurosis, depression and anxiety. It can be equally hard to know how to honor negative feelings and let them out without creating negative narratives that trap the feelings in an endless neural pathway of suffering.

You feel empty, sad, angry, confused, despairing, to name a few and these difficult feelings are hard to sustain over a long period of time. But sustained difficult feelings is the reality. You don’t go through loss and get over it on a week or a month or a year or even fives years, or even a lifetime. Depends on the loss. Sometimes loss comes in bundles, just when you thought you were in the clear, another one strikes, or you go through five losses at once. Not easy to say the least.

The mind keeps trying to navigate through the dark night and narrate all of the changing feelings each day. You might go back and forth between experiencing negative thoughts and inspired thoughts, between questioning why and being straight up mad at the sky. You might flip back and forth between hopeful transforming and feeling defeated. You may reach a dead end like there is no way out.

One thing you can keep doing forever, is to meet the experience you are in without resistance. Hello, dead end. Hello, emptiness. Hello, I would like to not exist today. Hello, I just a need a dopamine hit. Hello, I am transforming myself. Hello, I have nothing to give. Hello, despair. Hello, numbness. Hello, hate. Hello, hope. It is OK to feel and experience all of this in heart and mind with openness and permission.

If actions and behaviors emerge that are unhealthily dangerous to yourself or others that is another story not for this blog. But that’s real too. It can be all too seductive to fall into an abyss of depression, or get triggered back into PTSD or a re-emerging of acute anxiety. You could take it all out on a loved one in anger or withdraw from your loved ones. Addiction can take over. It really does take effort to care for the self through a dark night and yet our ancestors went through so much grief pain and loss for us to be here. It is a part of life to understand better.

In my current experience of the dark night, I am learning that I get exhausted from trying too hard to transform through loss. This would be in contrast to the younger me of the past who steeped too heavily in the negativity, anger and sorrow. I guess you could say that I have explored the extremes and gotten stuck in both of them. I know what both feel like now. Now I am learning how to meet each feeling and experience with an open heart. I also am learning that channeling my mind works best.

Writing this blog is channeling my mind. I love to write. I find that when I am writing I feel equanimous, my nervous system regulates, my heart feels calm, I forget about myself for a while and I get super focused, for hours. I have come to understand that creative expression is my favorite channel for sustainability through the dark night. I wrote my first novel to heal shame from childhood abuse that lived inside of me. I wrote poems profusely as a young one to make it through each day when things were at their worst. The moment I am writing I find myself in a zone of being, This zone feels free of suffering as suffering lives in the mind.

How differently you can move through your dark night if you learn how to meet your internal experience with acceptance, feeling the feelings and channeling the mind. Skills make all the difference and also, it’s OK to be a mess and fall apart.