As a Spiritual Director, I have the unique opportunity to be in communication with people often when they are at their worst. In fact, I joke all the time that nobody wants to talk to me when things are going great.
In the course of reading and healing people over the last 20 years, and because of my own experience and process healing the artist and the psychic within myself, I've made a couple of observations that I think really speak to the nature of the "dark night of the soul", how it comes about, and how one can clear the energy to take a next step into the unknown - onto the Path of the Mystic.
1) The darkness always come upon you when you're not looking.
Because we are so wrapped up in the ordinary daily details of our lives, we don't see the little signs and omens along the way warning us of impending change - or we willfully deny and make ourselves unconscious to them. One day you wake up and realize - "How did I get here?" or "How did I become this unhappy" - but it didn’t happen in a moment; likely it was happening for a long time before you became conscious to it. This is totally normal, and finding your sense of humor with getting broadsided by this feeling of being "lost" is the only tonic for it. How did you get here? Well, that's what you're about to go on the journey to find out.
2) Constant disillusionment and disappointment is almost always part of the process when you are growing and seeking yourself.
On the journey, you will constantly find yourself to be "wrong". You will find others to be "wrong". People and things you once thought you loved will become unwanted, unneeded, and unacceptable. This is one of the most difficult stresses that a mystic faces, and yet, if you can find the inner fortitude to survive this bombardment of disillusionment, this process of shedding what seems "wrong" is exactly the healing that you seek. For each time you find yourself living in an illusion that is now un-liveable, you get to reset your energy closer to their truth. It is an incremental process by nature and by necessity - the explosion of all of the "wrongs" at once would leave you incapacitated!
3) The path to healing starts with self-forgiveness - and it ends there too.
The only way out is through. The only way to truly come into the present moment is to get real with the situations, circumstances, and the reality of your own life. In a way, you have to fully step into the picture of the present in order to change it from the inside out. This requires an increased capacity to forgive your foibles, errors, and disillusionments. It requires you to make peace with who you were and who you are, in order to create a space where you are becoming. This is the Path of the Mystic.
4) It's important that you find a community, but also that you recognize it is a solo journey.
While the Path of the Mystic can be compared to the great hero journeys of Western Literature (Ulysses, Odysseus, Finnegan, etc) - there is a also a need for community, help, kindness and rest along your journey. It is helpful to find a community of like-minded, committed seekers - for the most direct way to create growth is by receiving kindness from those who can say hello to you, your struggle, AND your desire to heal, without imposing an agenda onto you. Of course, one must not fall into the trap that the community is the end of the journey; it is merely a stop along the way, or a place of healing before continuing on your path. No matter how kind, how generous, how giving a teacher or a group of seekers is, they are that - seekers - and if they are true to themselves, they are also seeking and must move forward on their own paths, too.
5) It's important to understand what the end goal really is.
At the end of any journey of self-discovery and self-healing is not some utopian paradise where everything goes or looks perfectly; rather the end of the dark night is when you emerge from the disillusionment and loneliness of the journey inward into the presence of yourself - and you are the only one who will ever understand that. It is a coming home to yourself, transformed by the journey, weathered from the storm, but more truly yourself than you were when you started. Nobody else can tell you what that looks like, what that feels like, or if it's true. You have to verify that for yourself.
For one on a mystic path, which takes many forms, the only noble truth is that you could become master of the entire world, but gain nothing if your soul is left in a state of despair and darkness. There is no external cure for your dis-ease, the only path to freedom and wellness is inward.
The Path of the Mystic is a year long, Advanced Graduate Training that I teach with students who have been engaged with Art of the Seer for a minimum of three years. It’s an extraordinary inner journey, and you can read more about it here.