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WHATEVER THE NATURE of our path,there will almost inevitably be a time when our essential identity begins to be challenged and we are taken through a process of death and transformation. We may descend into the pain of spiritual crisis, called by Christian mystics the “dark night of the soul.” These periods of depression and disintegration can be profoundly significant when we understand their meaning. Surprisingly, these psychological processes are seldom, if ever, described in traditional Buddhist teachings. The attainment of qualities and insights that arise as the fruits of practice are not spoken of in terms of the subjective emotional or psychological process that occurs. In my experience, however, any insights that emerge often follow a painful journey rather than a blissful awakening. While I was spending time in retreat, periods of depression would often lead to very deep experiences and occasional insights, which has led me to wish to understand this process more deeply.
In myths and legends, time spent wandering across vast plains, deserts, or oceans, through barren wildernesses, or down into deep, forbidding valleys is a recurring theme. These images depict a period of desolate struggle when the traveler, having journeyed far from a familiar homeland, enters a state of terrible psychological desolation, barrenness, and flatness. He or she is lost, wandering in territory that is wild, desolate, perhaps hostile, and almost certainly empty and melancholic. In many stories the hero struggles across wild seas or hostile mountains where brigands, thieves, and outlaws dwell. These are the doubts, fears and, delusions that haunt us on the journey. In the guidebooks to the magical kingdom of Shambhala22 the traveler passes though hot, windy deserts where “showers of diamond hail” and shrieking eagles descend to tear at the flesh. Here, nameless fears manifest as fiery-eyed demons to invoke terror.
These images depict a time of descent into the depths of our being to confront the Shadow, our fundamental aloneness, our mortality, and the nature of the ego. At these times, the traveler is challenged by feelings of depression and melancholy, of pointlessness and futility. He or she may feel lost, without refuge, and beyond hope, with little to do other than trust that this is what must come to pass. These periods must be passed through without knowledge of how things will turn out. The depression that accompanies this dark night involves a loss of vitality, enthusiasm, and meaning, a loss of what was secure and familiar, and a loss of our ability to control what is happening. In my experience, such a crisis will also challenge our relationship to the Buddha Dharma and our depth of understanding. We will discover whether we have the capacity to go beyond knowledge and open to true refuge.
The brigands and bandits on this journey are our own inner thieves that lurk in the shadows waiting to pounce. They are our insecurities, fears, and doubts; our aggression, self-denigration, and self-destruction. They are the emotional habits that can steal away our ability to remain centered and clear. As we wander in this wilderness of pain and desolation, we see the roots of our emotional wounds.
In crossing the wasteland, we encounter the darkness of our Shadow in a rite of passage, a journey of death and transformation. We enter into the dark valley and pass through a period of self-searching. We may repeat this journey at significant times in our lives; it is not necessarily a one-time experience. In our culture, however, we are never taught how to appropriately deal with depression and periods of crisis and descent. We are often afraid of them, both in ourselves and in others, and prefer to shut them away and deny or cover them up. Seldom are we willing to live with the pain of depression, recognizing its significance in our lives. We see depression as a curse that will disturb us if we allow it to get the better of us. We fight it and try to anesthetize ourselves against it by taking refuge in drugs, food, the television, or even work. Seldom do we want to see others in depression and so make remarks like “Pull yourself out of it” or “Pull yourself together.” Pulling ourselves together, however, is the last thing we need to do at this time.
The journey into the wasteland has a profound psychological significance if we are willing and able to acknowledge it. The descent, introversion, and withdrawal of energy characteristic of depression are often the psyche’s means of healing, if we allow the process to unfold. Depression can take various forms and be of varying depths, but there is usually a significant process taking place. It will occur when we have suffered some severe blow or shock that needs to be integrated and digested. We may have suffered the loss of a loved one, requiring time to grieve and heal. There may have been some crisis around work or financial matters that needs to be digested in order for us to discover how to move forward. We may have experienced some major disaster or accident or illness that is asking us to look at our life and see what needs to change both inwardly and outwardly.
There are times in our lives when we become stuck in ways of being in the world that cease to serve us. We may have developed ego structures and emotional habits and strategies that have, in the past, enabled us to cope with difficult or intolerable circumstances such as emotional trauma. These patterns may have been necessary natural responses that protected us at the time, as Peter Levine explains so clearly in his work Waking the Tiger 23 on shock and trauma. Later in life, however, these same patterns become a problem; they prevent us from moving forward. They freeze our natural capacity to respond to the world in fresh and creative ways. If we are to grow and move forward, the feelings and emotions that gave rise to our coping strategies may need to be brought back to the surface to be healed. There may be a need to change some fundamental beliefs about ourselves—the view we have of our lives and relationships. Such a crisis, requiring change and deep self-assessment, is often precipitated by external events.
When our personality structure and emotional patterns have become too rigid and unhealthy, the process of change that begins to unfold is often experienced as what might be called a breakdown. In the journey of individuation our ego-identity may need to die to go beyond its limitations and free our natural capacities. This death will be important in enabling us to experience a deeper, more whole relationship to the psyche. The process of breakdown demands the death, disintegration, and eventual reemergence of our sense of identity. The consequent depression that occurs at these times can be both painful and terrifying, and how we deal with it can determine greatly whether we grow from it or not. Denial, avoidance, and anesthetizing the pain can prevent us from facing the journey we are on.
The early stages of this journey are often marked by an acute sense of fear and foreboding as we progressively lose what was safe and familiar and are drawn relentlessly into the unknown. We may feel we are losing our grip, falling apart, and are no longer able to maintain things as they were. Our familiar sense of self may be gradually eroded by events we could not avoid. We may feel lost and bewildered, as though everything is disintegrating. This breaking up is very frightening, and we may be tempted to try to consolidate and pull back from the brink of the descent. Some people are tempted at this time to cement up the cracks in their world and pretend that all is well. Personally, I have found that the more I have resisted falling apart, the more painful and frightening the experience actually was. Holding on at these times is not the answer, nor is taking some form of anesthetic to cover up the reality of what we are experiencing. The step we must take is to courageously begin to open and release the tendency to contract and tighten through fear. If we feel we are slipping relentlessly down and are desperately trying to claw our way out of a pit, it may be time to let go and trust. Trying to hold on will become even more painful.
The solid structures we have carefully constructed around our egoidentity can become an edifice that needs to crumble, as is depicted in the “Tower” card in the Rider-Waite Tarot, which shows a stone tower being split in half by a lightning bolt. The ego experiences this fracturing and fragmentation as a very frightening process. But as in the case of the chrysalis of a butterfly, only when the solidity is cracked open do we discover the energy and richness trapped within. While we tend to fear breakdown, and it is certainly stigmatized in our society, it may herald the beginning of healing.24 Breaking down frees us from the past and the solid, stuck history we have become imprisoned within.
Once the process is initiated, we may feel intense grief and sadness as we mourn the loss of the past security and dreams of a life we thought was stable. We may feel great loneliness and despair as we make the descent alone and without allies. Our world feels drab, lifeless, and pointless. Our vitality goes and we may have almost no interest in doing anything about it; we are uninspired and incapable of responding to life with anything other than an acute, painful pessimism.
Self-reproach, despair, and hopelessness are the demons that tear at us in this state. Depression will often bring out patterns of self-destruction such as being a victim or becoming chronically selfindulgent. These habits may be deeply entrenched and need to be challenged to enable healing to take place. When we get caught in them we are unconsciously blocking the evolution of depression. Even so, these tendencies may be part of the process of depression that must be recognized and faced.
This is when some form of anesthetic will seem almost irresistible in our desperation to alleviate the pain. If we visit conventional doctors at this time, they are likely to respond to our cries for relief with prescriptions for antidepressants. Sadly, this solution is only an anesthetic, a means to alleviate the distress by suppressing a process that is unfolding. For some with more severely entrenched and debilitating depression, however, this may be the only solution.
Ultimately we have to travel this journey alone, for it is in our inward solitude that we learn the lessons depression brings. This does not mean we should not seek support and the help of those who have an understanding of the process we are going through, such as counselors or therapists. What we do not need are those who desperately try to make it all better because they fear where we are going. We need people who are willing to be there as we struggle, to hear our fears and distress and allow them to be. One of the most familiar images of depression is of a black pit of despair and loneliness. As we slip into this pit, our sense of hopelessness will often bring out in others the compulsion to be positive and compensate for our blackness and negativity. To be confronted with someone who compulsively has to make things positive in order to cope with our pain is not what we need. When we are in the depth of our despair and hopelessness, the last thing that actually helps is someone trying to make us “look on the bright side.”
I recall a period some years back when my life had turned a fairly dramatic corner and I was feeling desperately negative, cynical, and bitter about everything in my life, including my spirituality. One evening I was talking with a friend, and the more negativity I expressed, the more he tried to be positive. I ended up feeling extremely angry that he had failed to simply allow me to be really negative. It was as though my negativity was intolerable to him and had to be neutralized by his being positive. What my negativity needed was simply the space to be acknowledged for what it was. I needed a compassionate presence that accepted where I was and did not fear it, judge it, or try to make it something else.
Once we have slipped irresistibly into the descent, we will settle into the heavy grayness that characterizes the bottom of the pit. The nigredo as the alchemists would call this phase, is typified by a leaden, deathly melancholia that can feel intractable. 25 In this place we may need to face something in ourselves that has been left unaddressed. We must face it willingly and openly and surrender to its reality. We can no longer fight it and deny its power over us. It may be a deep childhood wound; it may be facing our mortality, our aloneness. It may be recognizing the emptiness of the ego we have held as fundamental to our existence. We may find something we have been holding on to that needs to finally die and be buried.26 A lost loved one, a dream, an ideal: our past may all still be with us as corpses we lug around. It may be our selfidentity that needs to die, or our youth that needs to be mourned as we pass into middle age. Most often, we find in this underworld the negative self-beliefs that have evolved from childhood. Painful though they are, becoming more conscious of them enables us to face them and see how destructive and limiting they have been.
While in the depth of the wasteland we discover the source of our wounds, we may also for the first time find the aspect of ourselves we have always needed to empower our lives and give them meaning. Often we bury important qualities to protect ourselves in potentially hostile environments. For some, this buried treasure may be the capacity to actually be powerful and effective; the capacity to engage in life fully and fearlessly. For others, it may be the capacity to open and love or trust for the first time. We may discover in the depths our buried rage and anger that hold our capacity to be assertive and true to ourselves. We may even find our real sense of self. Whatever we uncover, we have probably been aware of its absence and how this has affected our lives. Whenever important resources are buried, repressed, and inaccessible to us, we will often feel a sense of limitation, ineffectiveness, or lack of vitality that blocks us.
In Greek mythology, Pluto is the god of this underworld. He is the one who draws us into the depth of pain and death to prepare us for transformation. He is also, however, “the bringer of riches.” Lucifer, the Christian fallen angel, is also, as his name denotes, the bringer of light. However we understand the meaning of this dark god, we are living in his domain during the journey of descent. We may see him as terrifying and destructive and fear his power, but such is the power of death and transformation in the journey of the psyche. It will never be a time of light and laughter, but in the depths we will discover a potential source of renewal.
In the wasteland we may discover the “treasure hard to attain”27 that must be brought back to the light of day. It may be our creativity, our sexuality, our strength and confidence. It may also be a renewal of our relationship to our spirituality and a sense of meaning.
Anyone involved in a spiritual quest will be tested beyond the limits of faith and trust while crossing the wasteland. A dark night of the soul is almost inevitable at some point in the journey and represents a significant time because the roots of our faith are challenged. In Buddhist language, this can be seen as a “crisis of refuge” when we are truly confronted with the depth of our understanding and insight. If we are clinging to beliefs with blind faith, these may be utterly shattered. If we have intellectual knowledge but no depth of experience, this will become apparent. Conversely, if we have had no sense of meaning, this may be the time when we actually discover it. We may begin to recognize that there are forces at work in our lives that are greater than the ego, and that we must learn to trust and open to them. We may be forced to surrender the power of an over-controlling ego. To use Jung’s language, we are being confronted with the power of the Self, rather than the limited values of the ego, as the root of meaning in our lives.28 In times of death and transformation, however, the Self does not manifest its light, bright, positive side; instead, we encounter its destructive side that tears us apart and leaves us to gradually heal.
The experience of the dark night will challenge us to discover whether our spirituality is based upon genuine truth and wisdom or simply superficial faith or knowledge of doctrine. During a particular period of retreat in India, I descended into periods of intense doubt. I found myself railing at God, the Buddha, the universe, whatever name one gives it, for not taking care of me and giving me some sense of “grace,” a sign that would support my faith in practice. I felt totally abandoned and would scream with both grief and anger, “Why?” and, “What have I done?” I felt as though I was being punished for something. The feeling of alienation and isolation was intense. I recall on one occasion throwing all my ritual instruments around my meditation room in anger and desperation. I suppose I began to understand what Christ may have felt in that last moment of doubt when he said, “Why hast thou forsaken me,” or, as Coleridge put it in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
This time of letting go of expectation and hope is not easy. The ego wants something to hold on to to survive intact. If we are at a time in the journey when we must die and be transformed, then there is nothing to hold on to, not even hope. In the words of T. S. Eliot in “Four Quartets”:
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
In the wasteland we may feel the presence of forces at work which may be both awesome and terrifying. This terror is in part the recognition of the frailty and relative insignificance of the ego. Ego-grasping is a kind of inflation or omnipotence that holds the ego as the center of our reality. Whether it is the sense of being self-satisfied or a selfpitying victim, both are a kind of narcissistic inflation. This inflation alienates us from our Buddha nature, and in the time of the dark night, we may feel totally blind, lost, and out of relationship to our true nature. We are, however, being asked to let go of this inflated egocenter and finally surrender to the greater power of our Buddha nature. If we are able to truly open at this moment we may discover a depth of wisdom we have not previously understood or experienced.
During the retreat mentioned earlier, I suffered a terrifying sense that I was gradually being torn open and dismembered. I found myself on a number of occasions visiting a huge, flat rock surrounded by enormous rhododendrons high on the mountainside where I was living. I would lie down upon this rock and cry out for help only to find that as I did so, I would burst open and let go. It was as though something in me knew I had to die. This gradually enabled me to open to a space that seemed utterly free of any sense of who I was. I felt as though I had died and the pain of holding on to myself had been purged away.
During this period I walked down the mountain and visited my retreat guide, Gen Jhampa Wangdu, who had lived most of his life as a hermit in retreat. When he saw me in my forlorn state he just laughed and said, “You are so fortunate. Tibetans pray for this kind of experience; get back up the mountain and get on with it.” I was relieved by his confidence that dying was part of the journey, but also a little put out that he was not in the least sorry for me. A while later, when I met Lama Yeshe to discuss my retreat experience, he simply said, “Sometimes something has to die.”
In Coleridge’s epic poem the ancient mariner wishes to die so that his torment can finally end. Suddenly the moon rises over the horizon and blesses the situation. He eventually relaxes and falls into a deep sleep. Coleridge writes,
An orphan’s curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! more horrible than that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!
Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,
And yet I could not die.
Jung recognized that the Self is not just light and positive but also terrifying, dark, and awesome. Even so, in both its light and dark aspects, the Self is solely oriented towards wholeness. In the tantric tradition the wrathful deity represents this dark, awesome face of the Self, our Buddha nature. This demonic, terrifying personification reminds us that the sole issue at stake is the death and transformation of the ego. The wrathful deities depicted in Tibetan icons are covered in skulls and bone ornaments to symbolize this death.
When the ego’s solid structures and limitations become a hindrance to wholeness, the Self can become ruthless in its power to effect change and break these obstacles down. In the process of death and transformation the Self becomes the dark angel, like Pluto, lord of the underworld, who demands that we give way. This inner archetypal intent can be felt as an awful and awesome relentless force that will tear us to pieces and dismantle our world so that we are transformed, even though change may be excruciating and terrifying. The fear that arises, however, does so only because of the ego’s disposition to cling to existence.
From a Buddhist point of view, when we have no understanding of our true nature, we may feel we are staring into the abyss of annihilation. If we understand our true nature, there can be a greater trust in the process of opening. Our essential nature is clear, spacious, and luminous, free of the dualities of good and bad, light and dark. While we cling to relative concepts about our self and our reality, we suffer and become torn apart. As we empty and release, we come to a place of ease and spaciousness that is beyond the ego’s limiting fears and identity. In Tibetan Buddhism this is known as the nondual ground of being, a quality of awareness where there is no person, no form, no struggle, and no suffering because there is no one to suffer.
The point of letting go is a special moment. It is the still, quiet pause of death. There is no movement, no sound to stir the quiet tranquility, like a silent morning on a lake when nothing stirs and there is not a breath of breeze. At this moment there is no horror because there is no one to be horrified. There is no despair because the worst has already passed and we have given up. In this moment there is only quiet presence and rest. It is a powerful moment to meditate upon the clarity of our innate nature. We can taste our essential totality—the complete absence of self in the experience of clear, present awareness.
As we pass through this dark passage, one quality of being is immensely valuable but often lacking—namely, compassion. In our darkest moments, it is almost impossible to see ourselves with compassion; it needs, rather, to be reflected from outside. This can be an important ingredient of any support we may get from those around us. In the myth of the descent of Innana to the underworld to meet her sister Eriskegal, Innana lies dismembered and waiting, having gone through a gradual stripping away of her upperworld identity. Eriskegal, the dark goddess, is pregnant, wailing and moaning in the pain of labor. At that moment Enki, the upperworld god, sends two little creatures whose task is to show a simple reflection of compassion. They respond to Eriskegal’s pain by saying, “Woe to your pain.” Their act of sympathetic reflection does not interfere or change the pain; it merely honors the pain so that it is possible for Eriskegal to surrender.29
As we begin to emerge from our descent and death, a glimmer of compassion and forgiveness for ourselves may also grow. Prior to this, we have probably been unable to see our pain objectively and recognize what we are going through. When we have the space to see our suffering a little more objectively, we can begin to respond to our situation with love and compassion.
Gradually something in our psyche changes and we become conscious that the dark foreboding has begun to lift. During these periods in my own life, I have suddenly become aware that the deep fear and hopelessness has gone and there is a seed of hope germinating. I begin to notice things again, as if I had returned from a land disconnected from my surroundings. I see plants and flowers again and start to notice their beauty and color with renewed enjoyment. It is the time when spring returns following a hard winter, as symbolized, for example, by the release of Persephone from the underworld, where she had been taken against her will by Pluto. At this stage, I have felt like someone walking on legs that had not been used for a while. I am not sure who I am and how to relate to the world from this new sense of myself. A rebirth is taking place, one that needs to be protected as we would protect fragile new shoots emerging after winter.
To protect this process, we will need others around us who understand and respect the fact that we are vulnerable and learning to relate again. We should give this reemergence time and not expect too much of ourselves. We will often need to restore some of our persona and protection before we return to the world, so that our sensitivity is not violated. We may need to choose carefully those people to whom we relate our experiences. If we are unskillful, we may disclose things to those who do not understand or respect what has happened. This can be very wounding when what we need is to be acknowledged and accepted. This care is equally necessary when we finish a meditation retreat, for very similar reasons. We may not have experienced the same depth of pain or disintegration, but the sense of returning from a deep place back into the world can be just as disorientating at first.
As we reemerge from the wasteland, we have been deeply and subtly changed. We may not fully understand the nature of that change, but we will have a deeper insight into our fears, wounds, and Shadow. Once we have faced these sides of ourselves, we will grow through the experience. As our vitality and creativity returns, time is required to rebuild confidence in ourselves again. One of the gifts that can come with this descent journey is a greater relationship to our inner resources and ability to accomplish what we need for ourselves in life. If we have been able to touch the “baseline” of our true nature, we can have a deeper trust and confidence in this reality. This may particularly enable us to start to live from a different center, in our true nature, free of the ego-centered habits and fears that limited us before.
In the dark night, our alienation is felt as a loss of or separation from our true nature—from the Self or God. The journey we have been through happens because, to use Jung’s language, the Self is trying to restore our relationship to its presence as the source of wholeness and healing. We may need to undergo this process more than once in our lives, particularly when we lose our way. Far from being a sign that something is wrong with us, this experience of descent or crisis is the natural mechanism used by the psyche to make us whole. In this respect, the journey of descent is not something to fear; rather, it is a natural process of healing.
I have learned to respect this journey of descent as sacred, rather than seeing it as something that should be hurried or perceived as an obstacle. Sadly, in our culture, we generally do not respect or appreciate the significance of times of transition, death, and transformation. Our working environment and the demands of Western life are such that we can seldom drop what we are doing and have the luxury of going into retreat or taking time to heal. Occasionally our body will demand that we do so, however, by becoming sick or incapacitated. We need to respect that this period of transition will require time and understanding. We need friends and relatives who will at the very least respect what we are going through and not criticize us and demand that we stop being indulgent. We will most likely be antisocial and wish to be alone, yet at the same time need the support of those who can genuinely help. If these wishes are not respected, we may feel others’ expectations to be an unbearable burden. Time, sympathetic understanding, and a healing, non-judgmental environment of acceptance and compassion are very supportive to the healing process. The last thing we need is someone trying to make it better or to get us to snap out of it.
Those who are used to being in control and having methods and techniques to deal with their problems will find periods of depression a major test. There are, however, few things that can make the process comfortable or manageable. What may help is some form of expression through writing or painting. It can be particularly helpful to use meditation as a means to stay with painful feelings and allow them to take their course. During times of descent and transformation, the two most important aspects of being with the process are to try to maintain a conscious awareness and to give the unconscious a means to dialogue. Meditation can provide a powerful basis for the former; the latter may need a means of support such as therapy.
In the journey of individuation, it is almost inevitable that at some point we will pass through a period of spiritual crisis. This may well bring us to the journey of descent, death, and transformation. If we are to grow on this journey, we need to understand the significance of what is taking place. When we respond to the psyche skillfully and discover the meaning and insight gained from crossing the wasteland, healing and transformation can take place. There are those who believe the spiritual journey should be one that brings only experiences of transcendence, light, love, and joy. For many of us, however, the journey involves a descent into the underworld where there is a depth of wisdom to be found that is not so idealistic and naïve. Liberation comes when we are able to touch the depth of our pain, allow ourselves to surrender, and reemerge transformed. This is not a journey for the fainthearted, but then, there is often little choice. In my spiritual path I have offered many prayers to be able to transform and grow to overcome my limitations and fears. I suspect that I often had a subtext, however, that was saying, “but please don’t make it be too painful.” It has only been with time that I have grown to genuinely accept the growth that comes through pain and turmoil.