You will rise back up and bloom: a road map for endings and the dark night of the soul

Change and transitionSpiritual Emergency & Dark Night of the Soul

23 Apr

`Pink lotus rising from the mire and mud by Rui Xu from Unsplash`

This is what happens after life cuts you down to the ground, when change has been forced upon you, a relationship or job ends, health leaves you, a loved one dies, your dream is crushed or a combination of many stressors and pressures makes your life seem hopeless, untenable and you can’t go on.

You may feel stunned and startled, hollowed and halted, broken and dishevelled, cut off from everything you knew and were growing towards.

Daylight may have ceased, replaced by never-ending darkness.

You may find yourself in a deep dark cave or walking in the abyss of no-man’s land or standing at the end of the road pushed up against an unbudging brick wall panicking as you need to move forward whilst the wall of invisible forces, internal or external, or the systems of our society push back against you stopping you in your tracks.

Fear, worry, anxiety, grief, despair and depression may own your body or maybe numbness steps in to make it somewhat more bearable.

Your inner critics berate you, taunt you, shame you until you find the power within yourself and learn the skills to tell them to shut up and put them in their place.

The young protective parts that live within you may lock you down and stop you doing anything in their innocent way of trying to keep you safe and you must learn how to parent them so you can direct your life.

You may have well-meaning loved ones around you trying to offer you encouragement and positivity and reassurance that all will be well but they don’t sit with you in the darkness and disintegration and meet you where you are. Hopelessness must be embraced before hope appears.

Your night time dreams may be vivid, scary even, but powerfully encoded with all sorts of cryptic and mythic messages about your plight, what needs to be examined and known. Often they serve as keys to unlock doorways to your psyche, your dreaming, your life and the interior castle of your soul.

In times of change and unknowing, your nervous system may send you into fight or flight or, when you can’t flee your own life, it will send you into freeze. It may make you fawn and try to appease all that is not working. Your deep, loving breath and self-compassion will support you here, or you may need the help of a loved one or a therapist with a steady and regulated nervous system to help you find safety in the present moment again.

On this edge between old and new, in the midst of unravelling, uncertainty, loss and lostness, you must become intimate with your experience. Learn to tend to your feelings and hurt parts with sensitivity and care. Discover who you are in the ways you never knew before.

Look, listen, feel and learn. Avoiding this can cause you to get stuck here for far too long or if you do manage to move forward this untended material will appear again at another stage and maybe block your way once again. The intelligence of your life stream wants you to learn what it wants you to learn.

Here in the dark, liminal space you have much to shed and compost. Even if you don’t want to let it go, you must. Who you were got you this far but who you are becoming requires a new skin and way of being.

Not all will be lost, for you can weave a new skin from the threads of brokenness, wisdom, dreaming and new life. Ask any good gardener and they will tell you that compost is the rich material that feeds growing new seedlings and sustains plants and crops. Offer your old life as compost for the new.

If you find yourself stuck here for too long or that you are repeating unwanted patterns in your life then you need the help of a wise elder, a soul guide, a therapist to help you see what is hidden or out of your sight and track down the doorways and medicine to help you move through.

When life is too intense or you are rocked by changes that shock you, soul parts will leave and you will feel empty, depressed, powerless, sick or like something is missing inside you. You must become a safe haven and friend for your soul, so your soul parts will come back and heal. The soul loves and needs safety.

You must reclaim power and gifts including becoming the one who has been broken open by life so that your light and deep feeling nature becomes a beacon and gift for other souls here on earth even in the ordinary everyday ways you live your life, work, play, create and love.

Eventually nature will have her way. There is a season to all of life and endings must give way for new beginnings.

Your roots will be deeper and stronger having drawn sustenance from your tears and sobbing, the pain of desolation, the barrenness that breathed you when your dream or life as you knew it was snatched away. And from your willingness to be in intimate relationship with the full experience of life, to look, listen, learn and be honest with yourself, to reclaim claim gifts, qualities and powers that you never knew you had.

One day, maybe tomorrow with sunrise, maybe next week, maybe next month when the moon is full or in months to come when spring returns, you will rise back up and you will bloom more beautiful than ever before. Radiant with all your scars and all your new growth.

Despite everything, you endured. You risked, you loved, you lost, you got stuck, you shattered and died, you were reborn and you lived.

In the end you win, twisted, stretched, scrunched and moulded into intricate living wisdom that cannot be learned from reading books, only from embracing and bowing to life herself, no matter how willing or unwillingly you fell to your knees and plunged into the mud and the darkness.