Going Down
Mining for Gold in a Dark Night of the Soul
Soul work is not a high road. It is a deep fall into an unforgiving darkness that won’t let you go until you find the song that sings you home.
McCALL ERICKSON
On a chilly November morning, I got a Facebook message from a woman named Sarah, thanking me for a recent interview. What struck her was not that I had focused on the light, bright, high-flying parts of our femininity, even though they are vital. She thanked me for my courage in talking frankly about the down-and-dirty, dark descent parts of the death/rebirth cycle.
It’s true. To see that failed plans can also be part of the grand plan requires you to climb down from your high horse. Aligning with your cycles, to claim not only your rebirths but also your deaths, requires you at some point to descend. Opening the basement door to your shadowy emotions, digging up disowned parts of yourself, and welcoming each as a long-buried and long-lost friend, requires you to go deep. Likewise, finding gold in something so raw and brutal as a dark night of the soul is at first an unexpected, disorienting drop into unimaginable depths.
GOING DOWN
It was 6:00 a.m. I blinked, then opened my eyes begrudgingly. You are going down today, my inner voice informed me.
No, I decide. I’ll be okay today. I’ll just ignore my pesky inner voice and focus on the light. In fact, maybe it wasn’t my inner voice at all, but the voice of doubt, or fear. Yeah, that’s what it is, I reasoned, just illusory fear and doubt.
A natural hermit, I was then living in a house in a busy urban area with two toddlers and five adults who all worked from home. I was breast-feeding, a new mom, and I’d begun my sleep-deprivation marathon with an emergency C-section. My decade-long, rock-solid marriage was shaky. I also had recently returned to work. I was physically and metaphysically depleted; and the foods, supplements, and practices that had, throughout my life, kept me healthy and thriving no longer helped. I would try to breathe, meditate, focus on pleasure, and summon gratitude for my amazing life. But my time-tested tools for shifting my experience failed me. My tank was empty, and I was choking on that particular kind of sediment that is only found at the very bottom of an empty tank. And I didn’t know how to fill up.
My inner voice wasn’t messing around. Again, it portended emphatically: Listen. Today is not going to be a good day!
I just didn’t want to hear it. Not one of these days again, I prayed. Please.
For a year, one of these days had descended upon me like a dark swarm, moving swiftly across the horizon, leaving no leaf or twig standing in its wake. One of these days could often become ten, a wild pack of days that hunted me and took me down at the knees.
For a year, I had spent one of these days after one of these days, kneeling, wondering what poison I’d unwittingly drunk. Kneeling, as you do at a pew, an altar, a shrine, a toilet. “Please, God,” I prayed, “What is wrong with me? Where did I go? What did I do wrong to feel this, and what can I do right to stop feeling this? Please, God, make it stop. God, are you there? God?”
I wondered if I was having panic attacks. I would shake so fiercely that I had to put down the car keys. I would put on a sweater in midsummer to help with the chill in my bones.
I wondered if I was going through early menopause. I would wake in the dead of night from dreams of dying, the sheets soaked. I would stroll through an ordinary moment, then suddenly double over, sobbing.
I wondered if this was what it felt like to slowly lose your mind. Everything looked flat and lifeless. I felt nothing in my body when my husband touched me. I could remember, almost, that I was beautiful and capable. But then my conviction would slide, evaporate.
I wondered if I’d always had this ominous white noise on the inside, if I’d always felt so toxic and ugly, but just never noticed. Forget about getting through the day, how would I get through this next minute? Was it cancer? Chronic fatigue? A brain tumor? Was I crazy? Had my Feminine Genius forsaken me?
Yes. For a year, one of these days descended on me. Again. And again. And again. And no amount of kneeling or praying or focusing on the light would help.
In the physical, material world, I consulted doctors and healers who found that I was experiencing depression, low thyroid functioning, adrenal fatigue, an autoimmune disorder of my insulin, chronic inflammation, and toxic levels of lead and mercury.
In the metaphysical, soul world, my self-esteem had fallen and could not get up. My emotions raged and abated without me understanding why they started or when they would stop. The war inside myself had returned. I was inspired to do my work in the world, but my body wasn’t strong enough to hold my calling. My cauldron was cold, lacking fire to transfigure these dark ingredients.
I didn’t know what to do, and no one else did either. My husband and the friends I lived with tried to help, mostly by trying to fix it, fade it, lighten it up, attack it, reason with it, or turn and run for their lives — what anyone does who is uneducated in the ways of the dark. As I was fixed, faded, lightened, attacked, reasoned with, and run from, I became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more lonely I felt, the more I isolated myself. The more the war raged inside me, the more my husband and I fought. The more I doubted myself, the more my community became doubtful of how to help.
Utterly exhausted, my personal churches caught fire and burned. My connection with my husband that I had polished daily like a golden idol crumbled. My trust in my friends, community, and sisters to help when I needed it most went up in flames. My confidence in my intuition, my body, and my ability to speak the truth even when hard blackened and charred. I looked over the landscape of my heart and saw only ashes where cathedrals had once blazed with holy light.
The things I had called sacred went missing, trailing off into the twilight.
One friend asked me if she should worry about me hurting myself. I thought about how I wished to not be here, to stop being constantly reminded what a waste of space I was. I thought about how I longed for my days to be other than full of wracked pain. I wondered if I would ever feel good again. But the truth was I was too tired to research options for offing myself. I learned that there are different kinds of suicidal ideations and mine was the kind where I wanted to just make it stop. Not to do myself harm, but to just: Make. The Burning. Stop.
Apprentice to the Queen of the Dark
Unwittingly, I had become an apprentice to the Queen of the Dark — my affectionate name for the dark aspect of Feminine Genius, a weather witch of the highest order. The part of the path she pushed me onto was unpaved, unlit, and uncharted, littered with the wounded parts of myself I could have sworn I had already healed. Although I know now that it is part of the path that most of us are pushed onto at some point in our lives, at the time I felt alone, broken, and crazy.
When it comes to walking the path of Feminine Genius, what you knew yesterday is not what you need to know today. The Queen of the Dark levels everything, so you can know again and afresh.
“Excuse me, Queen? Um, how am I supposed to stay standing while everything is collapsing? How am I supposed to trade up who I was for who I am becoming? And um, Queen, how am I supposed to turn lead into gold when I’ve got no fire for my cauldron?”
She said nothing, just held my gaze and handed me a stick so I could stir the ashes.
The winter the Queen had pushed me into was different from any other winter I had previously made it through. Not only its duration and intensity — months stacked upon months — but its flavor. It tasted to me of spiritual wasteland. My familiar landmarks had disappeared. What had previously worked well was now of no use. I felt deeply alone, and not just separate from my fellow human beings, but separate from All That Is. I had fallen far into a bardo — a state of suspended animation after death yet before one’s next birth — where even the ever-present light of the Divine could not find me. This, I came to understand, is known as a dark night of the soul.
It turns out that a rebellious Spanish monk named Saint John of the Cross coined the phrase “dark night of the soul.” As Mirabai Starr, who writes about Saint John of the Cross and other Christian mystics, describes it:
In a dark night of the soul . . . all the ways you have become accustomed to tasting the sacred dry up and fall away. All concepts of the Holy One evaporate. You are plunged into a darkness so impenetrable that you are convinced it will never lift. You may flail about for something — anything — to prop you up, but you grasp only emptiness. And so, rendered reckless by despair, you let yourself fall backward into the arms of nothing.
This, according to John of the Cross, is a blessing of the highest order.1
During my year of hell, well-meaning friends would say, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” “Everything happens for a reason.” “This too shall pass.” “You’re going to laugh at this and have one hell of a story to tell.” “It is always darkest before the dawn.” “Keep your chin up. Just smile. You are strong.” I knew they meant well and were probably right, but I spat out their benedictions in disgust.
I fell back into the arms of nothing. A blessing of the highest order? This was like no grace I knew, thanks anyway.
What brings on a dark night of the soul, how long it lasts, and what a dark night feels like while you are in one varies from woman to woman, but it has a special seat in the salon of the underworld. A dark night of the soul can often show its face as depression, dissociation (feeling “out of your body”), anxiety, chronic physical and emotional pain, sudden change, the death of someone you loved, a betrayal, or a loss like that of your relationship, job, community, income, or home. What distinguishes a dark night of the soul from a garden-variety dark time is that it is about, well, your soul.
On the path to wholeness, your soul (also known as Feminine Genius) won’t stand for any bypassing and will instead route you deliberately through your shit. You can get ahead in life by ignoring and mistreating your body, but to be on the path of Feminine Genius requires you to embrace and venerate your body. What at first may blacken your interior landscape will eventually build new castles. What at first feels like an affliction or abandonment by your soul will eventually come to feel like fortification and a renewal of your soul.
Which is all admittedly damn near impossible to keep in mind while you are in a dark night of the soul.
If You Are in a Dark Night of the Soul Right Now
So if you, my friend, are mid-spiral right now, on your way down, or all the way down, know that the dark place you are in, where it seems God herself has forsaken you — I have been there. I may be there again. And I am listening. Even if I never get to meet you, I will meet you here.
Because the dark is a place where I made my home and found my Home, I can go there with you now, anytime. I can sit with you, and you will feel the metronome of my heart beating with yours. We can burn, together. I know how to burn with you, yet not go down in flames. I am educated in the ways of the dark. I made it out alive, and you will, too. And not just alive, but alive. Re-birthed. The parts of you dying in there, you don’t need them anymore, not where you are going.
If you are there right now, I know you can barely hear me. I know sound is muffled, and anything that tastes remotely of a platitude, you will spit out at once. But hear this: Where you are, is not a mistake. You are in the forge. The Goddess of Holy Blacksmithery knows what the hell she is doing. I myself have no map or script or blueprint to give you, but you will still make your way through.
But don’t worry about that now. It might sound like bullshit. Just put one foot in front of the other. Breathe in and breathe out. Again. And again. Don’t even try to imagine the sacred yet. I will not try to convince you there is any sacred left in your life. Just give me your hand and take one more step with me, and then one more. I know that where we are going is worth all of it, but you don’t have to believe me. All you have to do is trust me. You don’t even have to trust me — just stay with me.
Stay with me here. I know you want to go. I know you want it to end, and I know that things that would ordinarily horrify you are starting to sound good right about now, if they would just: Make. The Burning. Stop. I know you wonder if you are crazy, if this is what it feels like when a mind turns itself inside out, shakes itself of its contents, and returns to the wild.
Stay with me here. Let me show you what can help. Let me show you where the cracks are in the fortress without cracks. Let me show you the rungs on the ladder out of the cesspool you are submerged in. Let me straighten the crown on your head as you dodge arrows flying at you from your own mouth.
Stay with me here. Keep reading. Keep feeling. There will be at least one good, true, and useful thing you will find here that will work for you. Let me show you how to use pain as a life raft. Let me show you the wisdom of what feels insanely hard. Let me show you how to let your isolation drag you into the arms of the Beloved.
Apprenticing to the Queen of the Dark brings fresh humility to your heart. She will renew your confidence in your body, your desires, and your inner voice. Hanging out with shadows, where the maps have all been torn up and the signposts have all been torn down, letting the wisdom contained within every terrible thing show itself to you, allows you to chart a way through. You and I have more to do in the coming chapters, but now it is time to pull out your cauldron and your stirring stick.
In a dark night of the soul, you look out over your scorched earth, recognizing nothing, hearing only the loud absence of all you have held close. Let me show you how this is indeed a blessing of the highest order. Let me show you what the fuck to do when you go down into the dark night in the death/rebirth cycle.
Stay with me here. Let me show you how to grab another and another and another pearl out of the underworld and return to this world, alive. You are in a holy place, even though it feels like hell. This is where an aspect of your Genius is birthed.
WAKING UP IN THE DARK
Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.
WAYNE DYER
On one of my all-time worst days, I somehow drove across a bridge and through a maze of freeways to meet with a friend, a gifted poet and artist, Kate. Her mane of blond curls backlit by the sunset, she greeted me on the street outside the French bistro where she suggested we meet.
She took one look in my eyes and said, “Oh, sweetie. You don’t look good. You are really going through it, aren’t you?” She had simply named what was happening. I relaxed a tiny bit.
She walked alongside me as we made our way to the restaurant, listening. I could feel her heart near to mine, also listening. Occasionally, she would speak and ask me more about what I was feeling, what it meant to me, what had happened, who else knew? The clouds lifted a tiny bit. Over steak frites and a shared glass of burgundy, a deep red elixir shot with bright stars, she listened. A quiet, yet alive kind of listening. She stayed with me in my ravaged condition. She offered her curiosity about what I was going through. And sometimes she shared about when she had gone through similar times. She handed me tissues, but not advice.
Kate has a rare gift: the capacity to be with someone who is in the dark, and to listen. To meet them there, naked and innocent. To feel what they are feeling along with them, then burn with them in the full agony of it, but somehow not lose herself in the burning. To inquire gently into their experience, to ask questions powered only by curiosity, not judgment. To be so at ease with her own emotional range that she is okay to be with someone else who is at the bottom register of their own. Never did she try to fix it, fade it, lighten it up, attack it, reason with it, or turn and run for her life.
Kate, educated in the ways of the dark, silently assumed there was rightness and intelligence in my experience. She knew that this kind of intelligence never presents reasons first. It shows up as feelings, sensations, and intuition that can be ciphered into reasons only after they have been dosed with respect. She looked at my darkness yet still saw beauty. My demons and I stopped feeling so wretched. Kate was a balm. I received her grace. My shame and I took one long last pained exhale and slowly sat back in the chair, at rest.
That evening, a touch tipsy, a Feminine Genius named Kate spilled some dawn all over my dark night. She reminded me of everything I already knew but had forgotten. That just because something was wrong in my life, didn’t mean that I was wrong. That even though there were certainly things out of alignment inside me and in my life, I was still whole. That there was nothing about me to be ashamed of, and that even my shame was beautiful. She allowed me to see myself the way she saw me: precious, a wonder; utterly and joyously loved.
Ignited by the grace of my friend, a part of my self woke up.
A few months later, on a cold, brilliant New Year’s Eve night, my inner voice again spoke up clearly: This journey through the underworld is complete. You’re coming up.
As I see it, dark nights of the soul are a kind of soul software update. Your soul needs to remind you from time to time to see yourself as Feminine Genius sees you: precious, a wonder; utterly and joyously loved. The re-birth that can come after a dark night of the soul is designed to bring you more wholly alive, even if it does so by nearly killing you.
As a culture, we have huge resistance to going down. We avoid it, caffeinate it, and medicate it. Because down is where our shadow is, our shame is, our pain and wrath and greed and gluttony. Down is where we tossed our true selves when we learned they weren’t welcome, perhaps as far back as act 1. Down is where up is down and down is further down and we lose our eyesight and have to feel our way through. Down is where our creeping, crawling demons lie, where our disowned and ugly parts live still. Down is broken hearts and festering wounds. Down is death, down is dark, down is no life.
And yet.
Remember Riya from a few chapters back? Drunk on a rainy Friday night, holding a DUI ticket in her shaking hands? Feeling like she was dying inside, trying to numb with alcohol and food the pain she felt each day at work and with her family? That night and the year after were the hardest she had ever been through.
Riya found me six years later, well into her work with healers and therapists, and on her way out of her dark night. She had spent a lifetime stomping out not only her intuition but also her real and natural desires that deserved to be honored. She examined her restrictive beliefs and was able to see that “I’m bad, I’m crazy, and I’m wrong” were false beliefs, never true. She realized she was able to become someone she never thought she could be: herself.
With her dark night of the soul in her rearview mirror, Riya could see that without her descent, she would still be in a soul-sucking corporate job, ignoring the problems in her marriage, and trying to be who she felt she was supposed to be while rebelling against it all. She wrote to me recently, “My dark night gave me the kick in the pants and the courage I needed to step into who I came here to be. I had to change. If I didn’t change, I would have destroyed myself and maybe others, and that is not okay with me. I needed to evolve myself as though my life depended on it, because it did and does.”
One wish that Feminine Genius — the collective soul — has for you is to heal any split you have within yourself. As Riya found, the more you gaze into your shadow, the less potential you have to unwittingly hurt others. Since a cage doesn’t always look like a cage at first, a dark night of the soul can pry open your eyes to whatever cage you find yourself in. It can act like a detox program, removing the crutches of addictive behaviors and strengthening your own legs to work again.
Some blessings only feel like blessings way after the fact. Sian describes her dark night of the soul as having demons pour hot tea on her, turn into angels, and then put ice packs on the sore spots. After the death of her father, she found herself in her own midlife, childless in a close circle of friends with lots of babies, without her own clear direction, and feeling lost inside. She felt she had been here before, was lost again, but this time couldn’t shake it. On the outside things looked amazing — a loving husband, a beautiful home in a beautiful city, all her needs met. But for two years she could barely tolerate being alive.
Sian shared with me, “I do not embrace the dark times while they are happening. There is a cloak, a shield, that comes over me and I can’t see clearly.” And yet, the perspective of embracing rather than rejecting not only her demons, but also all parts of herself, gradually brought her some power and peace. Her rebirth has been her consciously choosing to stay alive and do more cool things with her life. Her main understanding is that even though there is so much darkness on this material plane, she doesn’t actually have to be afraid of it. The dark night may come multiple times. It is dirty, messy, and it hurts. And we are okay after. We are better for it. We are not alone.
She says sagely, “I definitely am not taking things as seriously anymore, and I see most of our human experience as an illusion, a game, a play of Leela for our souls to learn what they need to and keep moving on and evolving into more light. I am so grateful to know this. And” — she smiles wryly — “it is a lot easier to see this when we are out of the dark time and back in the light.”
There is nothing spiritually superior about experiencing a dark night of the soul over a straightforward heartache or a really bad mood. They all belong in the emotional season of winter. All are a stripping away, a going within, a desperate swimming through cold waters. It often takes a great time of darkness to spawn a great beginning. All bulbs take root in the fertile void of wintertime. But a dark night of the soul stands apart because of the feelings of abandonment by life itself that you suffer — and then reconcile.
Battered, breathless, wild-eyed because we have seen some shit, we — Riya, Sian, and I — are able to write home about it because we have been mercifully tossed back on the shore of the living. For now.
Mining for Gold in the Dark
The dark is the fertile void, the Earth herself, a womb, a cauldron, where creativity gets its start. After a heroic lap or two on your Heroine’s Journey, you reach a hand — or your whole body — into the fertile void, and the hand of the Divine reaches back. Oh, the descent, it’s a tricky business, the Divine Darkness says. Here’s a pearl, and here’s another. Now, go, string these together and offer them to the world.
What is a blessing of the highest order? What or who is at cause for the moments of grace that propel our darkest times into their eventual completion?
Maybe for Sian it was a woman she didn’t even know in West Africa or Pakistan or Paris who had pulled herself up by her own bootstraps out of her own dark time and placed a self-made crown on her own head, and these actions undulated throughout space and time, piercing Sian’s frozen heart.
Maybe for Riya it was her own future self, who had already and completely integrated the understanding of her dark time, and who had traveled back in an altruistic quantum leap to play the role of personal guardian angel, whispering truth so that Riya could build herself a new North Star.
Maybe for me it was my husband and close friends. Not the obvious day-to-day parts of them that were in just as much pain as I was, but the metaphysical parts of them that came into this life and created our relationship “contract,” not just to stand for fun times but also to stand fiercely for my freedom, my self-love, my sovereignty. In fact, their stand for me was so fierce that they were willing to construct a gauntlet that would nearly kill me, but didn’t. It was one that required of me to become the woman I was aching to become.
Maybe for you it will be a stanza of a poem or a line from a book that lodges like an ember in your heart at the appropriate time in your misery, and fireworks its medicine throughout your dimmed insides, warming you again.
My prayer is for all of us to audaciously assume that miracles are always aimed in our direction, to recognize them where we used to walk right by them, and to remember that grace comes in many forms, including homemade soup on your doorstep, a smile from a stranger, kind listening, a scalpel, a dark night of the soul. As Nisargadatta Maharaj, an Indian teacher of non-dualism says, “The other world is this world, rightly seen.” It is good to remember that we need as much schooling in navigating the dark as in cultivating the light, to help us wipe away the film over our eyes so we can rightly see.
The Queen of the Dark knows that often, as writer Mirabai Starr notes, “pain is the cure for pain.”2 A dark night of the soul removes all facsimiles of power so you can taste the real deal for yourself. Going down fortifies your body and psyche so that you don’t scare easily from your truth, and helps you build stamina for another lap on the path of Feminine Genius. The descent drops you off, naked, in a dark forest in the middle of the journey of your life, and helps you find your way home.
Whatever the name of the catastrophe, it is never the opposite of love.
MARY OLIVER, “SHADOWS”
GOING DOWN PRACTICE MINING FOR GOLD IN A DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Note: If you are in the middle of a dark night of the soul now, you might want to skip this practice and come back to it later. Really. Don’t get me wrong. It is a great practice. But if, as you look it over, you notice your middle finger raising in my direction, you are likely too deeply in a current dark time to have any useful perspective on your current dark time. So either pick an event further back in your past, head back to chapter 7 to the “Feel It, All of It” exercise, or skip to the next chapter, “Navigating Storms: A Cheat Sheet,” for bite-sized help, instead.
Otherwise, take a moment to sit quietly and put a hand on your body. I always favor my low belly not only because it brings my awareness out of my head and into my body, but also because many consider the belly to be the place in the body where the soul is most concentrated. It is here, to your very core, that you ideally will direct the following questions; and it is from here that you’ll ideally feel you receive answers. Notice your breath as it travels inside your body, almost as though it is giving your insides a gentle caress.
Ask yourself the following questions, one by one, and then write or record the answers you hear:
1 Describe a dark night of the soul in your past. If you can’t locate one, a great disappointment, heartbreak, or personal rock bottom will do just fine.
2 When it was at its most painful, in what ways were you most challenged?
3 Looking back, what can you see now that you couldn’t see then?
4 What aspect of your strength and your authority has only become available because of going through it?
5 In what ways is it a blessing?
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation, can that which is indestructible in us be found.
PEMA CHÖDRÖN, When Things Fall Apart
Sister, when you find yourself in that dark place, where there is only shadow, and the walls are too tall to let in light, know that I have been there.
Yes, it can feel like you are dying, because you are dying.
Yes, it can feel like you can’t do it, because you can’t.
The part of you that got you here to the door of the dark is not the part of you that will jailbreak you out. That part of you that brought you here will be burned alive. Ashes. That part is surely dying, and a new part, beaten and shaped by the black flames of the bellows, is emerging.
And she — she is resplendent. Refined, sovereign, two feet planted authoritatively on the Earth. She has seen some shit.
And her diamond eyes are clear and flashing.
I would not trade this burning for all the wine in the world, for it has transfigured me, and now I am made of holy fire.
MIRABAI STARR, Saint Teresa of Avila: Passionate Mystic
