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How I Navigate the Dark Night of the Soul
It’s leading you to a better place but you have to let go.
As I steer myself through a dark cloud of existential dread, I brace myself for the turbulence I cannot avoid any longer. No surface-level, mundane activity seems to bring me joy anymore. It’s exciting because I am releasing attachments, but it’s scary because I have defined my life through these attachments for years. Who am I and what do I do now? This experience is unprecedented. There is no roadmap for transcendence. Ascension is a solitary journey.
We must stay humble as we journey through a vast expanse that we aren’t meant to understand. And when the path gets exceptionally hard to walk, the most self-aware of us sometimes fall into a void: a dark night of the soul begins. That’s where I’m at now.
Will you enter into the void with me for a moment so I can show you how I navigate the dark night of the soul? I have been here before. I have figured out why it happens and what it’s trying to teach me. I know a few things that have helped me as I go into the darkness again and again — a place I know that none of us are meant to stay.
Learning to Let Go
Life is a school, and the universe constantly sends us lessons. When they get very intense, they sometimes overwhelm us. That’s because often, the lesson we need to learn is to let go. If we hang on tightly, it becomes incredibly painful when we are forced to do so.
The goal is to surrender the attachment and live in the present moment.
We are shown repeatedly by the universe that we have very little control over our lives. The goal of the discomfort is for us to shed attachments to expectations of outcomes, relationships, and material possessions, but the ego fights back hard. If we could just learn to let go effortlessly, we would spare ourselves so much suffering.
So, I take my previous learnings from the darkness and try to be better each time I find myself there again. That means I have to release the attachments before I am forced to do so by the universe. I have to try to be more fluid and malleable — allowing anything to just be. Total acceptance.
