Have you ever just felt completely lost? Pushed to the point where everything around you just feels meaningless? If so, you might be a victim of what spiritualists call the dark night of the soul. Now, this is not something to cower back in fear from. The dark night of the soul has meaning and puts you there for a reason. Some may call it a spiritual rite of passage, one that tests your soul.
The dark night of the soul comes to all in certain stages of one's life. We are always told to try to be happy, to look to the brighter things in life to feel better, but true realization and happiness can't fully occur until we have lived and experienced the darkness.
Inside the dark night of the soul, our false ego and beliefs die in order to become our true selves, our true souls. Throughout life, we go through many stages of what are called "small deaths." Areas where we fall into this abyss, but not traps. How can one expect to grow as a person without first climbing out of that deep place? That deep place which challenges us against our own success.
At first, we might try and run from the dark, eagerly awaiting the embrace of the light. It is when we hide from the dark that it encompasses us, where it wraps around us. The darkness grows larger the more we try and pretend it is not there. We reach a point where we can't hide any longer, we must face the darkness, to grow, to become bigger than the person we think we are.
The darkness may seem painful and tough, but it is a gift to feel it. As humans, we try to suppress the darkness, but when we enter the dark night of the soul we are allowed to search through all of the emotions and thoughts we've hidden. A chance to face everything we've feared.
For many of us, the dark night of the soul occurs due to the emotions we attach to stories and experiences. These types of memories hold pain and suffering. On one hand, we must get rid of these painful experiences to escape the dark knight of the soul. However, we tend to keep our selves inside it. We fight with these memories because it keeps our ego alive. We don't always want to let go of these memories, for some of them do hold happiness. If we let go, we might lose a bit of ourselves, but its a loss that is necessary to grow. With this loss, a new person is created, the new you.
We must realize that this process is inevitable. Life is filled with constant ups and downs. The longer we try and hide from the darkness, the longer we stay still in a trap. The dark night of the soul doesn't happen by choice, it happens because your soul is truly ready to grow. Don't try and fight it, embrace the darkness and embrace the change that will occur.
You need to allow yourself to essentially stop fighting and let your ego die. Your ego will constantly try and make you worry and fear being in the darkness. It will try and get you to dismiss these feeling and emotions. We have to embrace them! simply sit in your feeling and watch them, Understand them!
When we stop fighting, we accept. We love the feelings and emotions. We love ourselves. We love the dark. The light has been on our path the whole time, we are just looking for it in the wrong place.
Sometimes, it's best to search in the darkness. For only then do we really appreciate the light.
