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The Dark Night of the Soul

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I am compelled to write about the dark night of the soul because I am currently journeying through a dark night myself. The recent death of my mother was my entrance, this time around. We all take our turn in the dark night journey. Loss is the entrance. This may be a loss of a loved one to death, to the break-up of a relationship, loss of health to illness, loss of a job, loss of a home, loss of youth, loss of a dream….loss.

In astrology the dark night of the soul would be associated with Pluto, the planet of loss that happens out of your control that takes you to your knees in surrender. It is through this surrender that the soul transforms. In tarot, you could associate the dark night of the soul with the Death and The Hanged Man archetypes. The former applies to the actual loss, the latter to the journey that comes with the loss. If you pull these cards, you know it is your turn.

The dark night of the soul is not fun, easy, predictable, or known. Each time a person goes through it, it is their own unique journey. At the same time, the dark night of the soul is archetypal, universal, and collective. There are key elements we all experience when going through it. It’s helpful to know that you are not going insane and that nothing is wrong with you when you feel…

Hopeless, like nothing can lift your heart out of the shadows.

Despair, like you’ve fallen into an abyss and there is no light to be found.

Confused, like one minute you are in your every day life with your usual struggles and pleasures (no matter how intense they may present) and the next minute you’re in a different place emotionally. You feel feelings you cannot name. Your life does not seem to make sense.

Angry because you feel as if life unfairly took something important from you.

Judgmental of yourself because you are not functioning like your usual self and being vulnerable makes you feel embarrassed.

Like hiding or withdrawing because interacting with others makes you feel worse. Maybe you are envious of what they have that you have lost. Maybe you try to explain yourself but it makes you feel worse to do so. Maybe the contrast of your life against their life is too much to bare. Maybe you need silence. You don’t laugh as easy. You don’t feel chatty. You cannot care about their lives the way you normally do. You have very little to give.

Like escaping self-destructively into food, drugs, alcohol, shopping, television, or whatever thing or activity will act like a balm on the harsh feelings. Maybe you have an addiction issue and the dark night takes you to a new level of needing to surrender to not partake in your addiction. Maybe you don’t have an addiction issue but keep over doing it and feeling bad about yourself and struggle to find balance.

Like you can’t sleep or you sleep too much, your dreams are intense, you wake up each morning in a fog, you never feel truly rested.

And these are just a few of the feelings and experiences I am tapping into that we all share when in the dark night. The dark night is not a depression. It is a rite of passage.

Just know you are normal for experiencing all of the above. This journey will take its own course in its own time. There is nothing you can do to stop it and it is enforced upon you.

Surrender is the key.

Surrender is all you can do but at the same time, you have a choice to continually make and grapple with every single day. I stress “grapple” because the dark night of the soul is an internal wrestling match on the regular.

You can surrender and radically accept all of these feelings and experiences that seize you, not identify with the feelings, let them pass through you and allow the dark night to mysteriously transform the myth of your soul.

Or you can resist the dark night by identifying with the feelings and telling yourself a story that creates suffering based upon these feelings.

This story can be that you are bad, guilty, wrong, fucked up, not good enough, or that you need to just pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get on with life, that your feelings can’t compare with those who are going through worse, that you don’t have the right to feel pain and loss as you push all your feelings down into the shadow, slowly making yourself sick either through seeming like a shining star of strength or through self destructing from escape into addiction or fleeing or doing something impulsive that makes your life fall into suffering. You get the idea.

Suffering is the story, not the feelings.

The internal wrestling is hard because the feelings that rise up in the dark night are unnamable and often intense. The key is to let them rise and pass through you like chemical storms.

Agony, loneliness, despair, anger, regret, every form of vulnerability where the ego feels like its fallen off the throne and lost its crown, can present in the dark night. Or maybe you feel a low level blah, a loss of interest in your regular activities, or you need to be alone. Depends on the temperament as we are all different.

The key though, is to allow the feelings and desires to present and be honored without buying the stories the feelings want to sell.

Sometimes the thoughts create the feeling but I think more than often, the feelings create the thoughts. You feel sad and then you tell yourself, “I am not good enough”.  You feel confused and you tell yourself, “I am lost.” You feel guilty and you tell yourself, “I am not lovable.”

This is why I am not a big fan of reframing thoughts to change the feelings. I think this winds up invalidating the feelings and then what you resist will persist and the feelings will find a way to express, often through physical illness or projection onto another. Feelings need to be recognized and felt to leave the body. Our culture has a morality around dark feelings being bad and it winds up making the self sick as a result.

I am more of a fan of mindfulness practice. When a big scary or dark feelings rise, instead of trying to change the feeling into something positive, witness the feeling, feel it, and do not identify with it. You are not your feelings. If you do this, the feeling will rise like an internal storm, express, and leave the body like waves that roll through.

When you identify with the feeling that rises inside, you create a story from it. If you identify with despair in your dark night, you may create a story that says, “my life is always painful and I never get a break.” This traps the feeling by perpetuating it over and over inside of the story. This causes suffering.

If you don’t identify with the despair rising in you, the feeling will storm, express and leave the body. This is where the magic happens. Somehow, from letting feels express and leave the body, you slowly begin to transform.

This is the soul journey of the dark night. The essential nectar. It’s in the meaning making. It is spirit playing the role of you and making a myth out of your life. It is you finding forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation for yourself and for those who have hurt you. You let go of the clinging, you release the suffering, you release the karma. Your heart purifies and you remember who you are. Love.

This is how the soul transforms. Through loss.

The dark night of the soul is an archetypal rite of passage that is meant to transform your soul. Grief is the medicine. But you have to allow this to happen.

If you resist the feelings by over-identifying with them and creating stories of suffering that perpetuate the same patterns in your life, you wont transform. You will petrify. You will grow more resentful, guilty, bitter, defensive, untrusting. You may get sick if the stories turn into physical aliments from all the trapped feelings.

If you don’t identify with the feelings that rise within you and you learn how to let them express and pass through, you will mysteriously begin to feel differently about yourself, your past, those who hurt you or who you hurt in your past. You will begin to find forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation.

Forgiveness. Redemption. Reconciliation. Big words, big topics. I will save digging in for another blog.

This is the power of of the dark night of the soul. It is soul medicine and to understand the medicine you must remove judgement on light being good and dark being bad. You must remove the perspective that happiness is good and sadness is bad. That gain is good and loss is bad. You must allow the full spectrum of life experiences and feelings expression within you, without identifying with them. You must be willing to heal, grow, and evolve. It’s very hard!

If we collectively (and we are starting to) understand and educate about the medicine of the dark night of the soul it would be easier because no singular human would feel isolated in their experience and they would have a map for how to traverse through the pitch black dark night of their soul journey. Perhaps many of our ancient elders experienced this collective wisdom in their earth based cultures?

I am only giving a brief summary here and I am writing this mid-dark night of my soul. Figure I have another year left. I am internally wrestling my ego’s compulsion to identify with the feelings and tell myself negative stories about self. My witness is strong and although the negative story maker is busy as work, I am not identifying with those tales.

It’s important to understand that not identifying often means saying “no, I wont believe this story about myself,” not necessarily being free of the negative stories blabbing away in the psyche every time a hard feeling rises up. It’s learning to ignore the blah blah blah while allowing the feeling to swell and express without thoughts. Eventually the thoughts and meaning-making return but as a wise soul myth, and not a false negative self story.

I am just now beginning to enter the realm of forgiveness. More to come. I am in the dark night with you and if you are not in the dark night, hello from the darkness.

The Archetypes in the Collective Shadow and Self-Parts in the Personal Shadow

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Understanding from a Jungian perspective, depth perspective, internal family systems perspective (all of which root to the indigenous shamanic perspective), the psyche is made up of many “parts”. Integrating these self-parts brings healing. Each system of thought may have its own specific map and set of methods but they all stem from the fundamental idea that the psyche is made up of many aspects and that the conscious self, or ego, is only a tiny portion of the entire psyche.

Ego is our aware self-part, the part of the psyche that is literally conscious of self on a basic level of knowing you are a person. The unconscious contains the aspects of the psyche we are not aware of and do not identify with as a result and yet the workings of the unconscious deeply effect our conscious lives.

Jung made a distinction between the personal and the collective shadow. Shadow is another word for the unconscious. A poetic and metaphorical word, as Jung was quite the poet in my opinion!

Shadow refers to what cannot be seen. Many people think the shadow is the negative or “bad” traits of the personality, such as the desire to harm, steal, self-destruct, cross boundaries, take selfishly, etc. Although such traits may exist in the shadow or as a shadow personality, the shadow is a neutral term. The shadow is simply what is hidden from the conscious self.

The personal shadow contains what the ego represses in order to be liked and valued, or in order to survive. Hence, the personal shadow contains personality traits the ego thinks will cause shame and also wounds and feelings the ego could not process consciously, stemming from childhood trauma, abuse, or anything too harsh.

The spectrum of what gets relegated to the personal shadow by ego is different for each person because we all have our temperaments and that factors into the mix just as much as the events that take place. Nature and nurture.

The collective shadow is not personal. It is the root of the personal. If our individual selves are the flower, the personal shadow is the seed and the collective shadow is the soil. To understand, think in terms of all of life living symbiotically and interconnected at all times. We are always attached to every living cell of the universe and we would not exist as individuals without the collective holding us here.

Ancestral patterns, wounds, and karma live in the collective shadow and so do the archetypes. The archetypes are the collective instinctual drives we all share in common. Jung took this a new level and defined these archetypes as have their own sentience. We do not create the archetypes. The archetypes are our human foundation.

This concept is hard to grasp and requires the right brain to do so, which is of equal value to the left brain. The ancient and indigenous cultures engaged their right brained skills and understood the archetypes as the many gods and goddesses that ruled each particular collective human function (agriculture, fertility, truth, sexuality, mothering, fathering, morality, etc).

It is important to understand that no matter how you connect to the archetypes, the relationship is cultivated by the imagination or right brain. The imagination does not mean what is being imagined is false (though it might when turned to fantasy). Imagination allows us to communicate with levels of sentience that are not detectable by the five senses. Just as real but cannot be seen, touched, heard, tasted, or smelled.

In tarot, archetypes are imagined as the 22 major arcana. Jung imagined his own list of major archetypes. Internal family systems imagines its own essential model of archetypes living in the psyche. Astrology imagines planetary archetypes to map out the psyche.

I am not here to convince you that archetypes are real, sentient, or needed to heal. If you think this is all bullocks, no worries mate. If you feel drawn to this information than this concept and understanding of the psyche may be very healing for you. I also find it to be fulfilling spiritually and creatively to connect with the archetypes and I do so daily though using tarot, astrology, painting, and journeying.

Healing using archetypes involves becoming aware of the archetypes. Becoming aware brings the archetypes into conscious life. Integration means to bring what is unconscious into conscious life through bringing conscious life to the unconscious. Say that ten times fast!

Much of who we are is collective and not individual. As westerners we tend to avoid the collective level of reality culturally speaking and also psychologically speaking. When you take your ego into the unconscious to integrate with the archetypes you transform into a more balanced, healthy, fulfilled, and happy person. Nature makes it so. By reconnecting with your natural roots, you will experience well-being.

For example, integrating with the Animus (the masculine archetype of the conscious feminine ego) will make a feminine identified ego take authority over her life, set healthy boundaries, make good decisions, partner with an equal who values her, differentiate herself from family, and contribute her ideas to the world as a unique person.

If her Animus is not integrated and lives unconscious and ineffectual in the collective shadow of her psyche, she may see men who do not value her as holding all of the power, she may lack boundaries and give too much of herself away, she may feel lost inside, she may be overly critical and judgmental of her partner, she may be filled with unconscious “shoulds” that she projects onto those she loves as if they are be-ll end-all truths.

In this woman’s personal shadow may live a lonely and desperate character who feels not good enough to be loved and valued by others. Let’s call this character the disempowered girl. This disempowered girl is a mirage living in the woman’s personal shadow, made up of repressed energy from childhood trauma. 

The Animus is sentient and an essential foundation of this woman’s psyche. The disempowered girl is not sentient. The disempowered girl is a character made up of a narrative made up of repressed feelings that never integrated with the woman’s ego.

The disempowered girl emanates the negative vow, “I am bad” (understood through the lens of  cognitive-behavioral work). The disempowered girl is the wounded inner child when understood through inner child work but the inner child is also the child archetype.

Jung used the term “complex” to describe when an archetype becomes the center sun that personal shadow characters orbit around. The sun being the archetype and the planets being repressed energy in the personal shadow make up a galaxy of dysfunction.

In in this example, the child archetype would be the sun and the disempowered girl would be the negative narrative orbiting around it. The child sun would want to integrate with the conscious ego through expressing curiosity, following wonder, experiencing innocence, play, and newness but it’s pulled the disempowered girl into its orbit.

The woman, in her waking ego life, feels shame all of the time and she is too scared to try anything new and express curiosity. She judges herself and others unaware that she is doing so. She sticks to a rigid routine to feel safe, all because of this complex.

But I don’t want to get too far into complexes. My point of this blog is to share the distinction between sentient archetypal aspects that make up the fundamental nature of the psyche and the self-parts in the personal shadow that are living as characters after being repressed by the ego long ago.

I have done a lot of work on myself and with clients on engaging with the self-parts in the personal shadow, treating these parts as valuable, giving them love, acknowledging their existence and letting them express so that they may be released. This work is effective. Using tarot is a potent way to unearth these parts, as are dreams and noticing what causes big reactivity in relationships.

When you suddenly become conscious of a self-part in the personal shadow and give the part love, acknowledgment, and freedom to express, the part will often dissolve. Dissolving means integrating because when the part is released from the shadow it has integrated with the conscious present ego self.

Sometimes the part dissolves all at once and other times the part dissolves slowly over years. I have parts that have taken twenty years to integrate and sometimes a switch in treatment is what brings healing.

Sometimes it is best to not treat the personal shadow part as a character that needs acknowledgment, love, and expression. It may be more effective to use the mindfulness practice of radical acceptance and not attach to the repressed energy as a character. This would look like allowing the expression of the repressed energy to exist with conscious radical acceptance while at the same time not engaging with the part as a character, essentially ignoring it, over and over.

So, if the disempowered girl living in the personal shadow of the woman expresses through her conscious ego as a perpetual feeling of shame, the practice is for her to allow the shame to present with radical acceptance, over and over, while she ignores the shame at the same time.

I like to use the example of the movie “A Beautiful Mind” where the main character overcame his severe delusions that showed up as a group of friends that did not really exist. He did this through a very mundane practice of mindful radical acceptance. By learning to accept the appearance of these friends while at the same time not engaging with them at all, he found integration. He healed.

Sometimes you will need to attach and lovingly engage with the self-part in the personal shadow. You will need to treat this self-part like a parent or therapist and give this part love, listening, honor, and expression. Maybe you’ll need to give this part a job or a role to fulfill. In this way, it is the relationship between ego and self-part that creates healing and integration.

Other times you may need to use radial acceptance and mindfulness to heal from a chronic issue, pattern, or block. You may need to heal by not identifying with what is in the shadow while radically accepting the conscious emotional expression of this shadow part without identifying with it.

We are not our wounds. We are not our thoughts. We are not our feelings.

Integrating the archetypes into conscious life, on the other hand, is necessary. You don’t want to not identify with your most fundamental human instincts. Well, unless you are a radical Buddhist monk. Otherwise, you want to integrate the archetypes so that you live with more health, balance, freedom, and happiness.

How do you know the difference between a self-part in the personal shadow and an archetype?

Usually the self-parts in the personal shadow leak through conscious life as chronic issues, negative narratives, and repeated feelings, whereas the archetypes tend to seize the ego and come on strongly as potent feelings or character traits, instincts or impulses.

For instance, in the personal shadow may be an “ugly girl” who was teased as a child and felt rejected by her classmates. This may show up in the adult woman’s ego as a chronic insecurity narrative where she is always trying to lose weight, look prettier, shop for new clothes, and improve herself because she never feels pretty enough.

The archetype that pulls the “ugly girl” into orbit may the lover, our instinctual desire to sexually merge with another. The lover archetype would seize this woman with erotic desire, feelings of love, seduction, a crush, a need to merge with another. Now we have a complex (usually there are more parts but for the sake of example, I make it simple).

The complex blocks integration of the lover with the ego of the woman because the “ugly girl” in her personal shadow shows up as the insecurity narrative in one form or another and she never allows herself to feel beautiful enough to merge with another. The lover remains shadowed and the “ugly girl” remains in the driver’s seat of her conscious life.

Does this woman need to engage with the “ugly girl”, listen to her, love her, and let her express all her wounds and pain? Does this woman need to give radical acceptance to the insecurity she feels while ignoring the chronic narrative of insecurity at the same time? Or does this woman need to do a little of both?

Intuition guides us and so does trying out different methods. I am naming only two methods and using only one framework of understanding the psyche. The important thing to keep in mind is to not compare yourself to others and do not treat any healer or therapist as a god who knows more than yourself. Results are real and methods work. Healing also may happen without any method. Keeping the mystery alive after all of this explaining! Do what works for you.