Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity
What Is A Dark Night of the Soul?
A “dark night of the soul” is a season of obscurity in the spiritual landscape when what we “knew” is no longer accessible. It is a season of disorientation.
When I’m in the dark, my mind forms all sorts of conclusions about why. Those conclusions often have a similar ring to a Taylor Swift lyric: “It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.”
Common Inner Experiences of a Dark Night of the Soul
We may be utterly confused about what we believe and why we believe it
We may forget what it felt like to be connected to what was once the source of our hope and spiritual nourishment
We may be mad or sad that our deep and desperate cries have gone unheard, leaving us with a felt sense of abandonment or betrayal
We may notice a confusing shift in our desires — unable to muster desire for the things we think we want to want and instead be drawn to imagine pleasure or relief in things that don’t sound at all like us — what Dr. Gerald May calls “a desperate flailing around of the mind in the attempt to find gratification somewhere”
Because the usual pathways of connection with our life force seem to dry up, we may turn toward anything that makes us feel alive, even things that don’t align with our values
We may feel totally paralyzed or deeply resolute to try harder
We may feel ashamed and try to hide our distress because it doesn’t feel safe to speak of it
Normalizing Spiritual Disorientation
I’m hoping to hold an interesting balance for you here, to normalize and contextualize the ways our conclusions about the dark night of the soul may add to our suffering without minimizing the very real pain and disorientation of your experience.
First, I want to validate this darkness.
Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s confusing. Yes, it’s lonely. Full stop.
There’s no sugarcoating it. If and when you are ready to hear more, you can keep reading, but please take your time.
What if Obscurity Doesn’t Mean Something is Wrong?
What if moving through this season of disorientation doesn’t require your effort, striving, or virtue, but your consent?
Could this be a sacred opening?
Are your senses being recalibrated—your capacity to attune to a deeper frequency of Divine Love being tuned?
What if in this spiritual obscurity, your soul is being aroused for deep intimacy — a longing that is not meant to be quenched, but stoked — the energy for your participation in our collective story?
The Voice of Ourselves Calling to Ourselves
I came across Peter and Maria Kinglsey’s words this week and was somewhat startled to read the exact words I used above to describe the role of longing in the spiritual journey.
“Sometimes it appears as depression, calling us away from everything we think we want, pulling us into the darkness of ourselves. The voice is so familiar that we run from it in every way we can; the more powerful the call the further we run. It has the power to make us mad, and yet it’s so innocent: the voice of ourselves calling to ourselves. The strange thing is that the negativity isn’t in the depression but in running from the depression. And what we imagine we are afraid of isn’t what we are really afraid of at all.”
Being Dislodged By Love
The way Dr. James Finley speaks of these seasons of spiritual disorientation as a “divine strategy” strikes me as profound (in a way that is not for the mind to understand — it’s a koan, I think). He says…
“The dark night of the soul is the process of being dislodged by love from the perception that the point you’ve come to is deep enough for you.”
-Dr. James Finley
The Default Question for Most of Us…“WHY?”
Finley’s poetic description of the Dark Night of the Soul has long captivated me, and this shift in my perception invited me to ask a new question. In my experience, asking why keeps me in a circular pattern — at arm’s length from my distress.
“Why” feels contracted and stiff in my body. Here, where I see the dark as bad, I am tempted to take total responsibility (shame) or deflect responsibility to someone else (blame). It’s exhausting because, even though I’ve bumped up against the edges of my control, I’m still exerting energy.
These are normal inner tensions, and there is no shame in letting them work in you for as long as you need to. There is no rush.
Resistance is our body’s intelligence calling to us — it brings what’s unconscious above ground — inviting us to consider the choices we have.
If you’re feeling stuck, I’d like to invite you to ask a different question with me — literally — this is the posture my heart is continually surrendering to…
Getting Curious with a New Question…“HOW?”
In my body, asking “how” feels a little bit softer. I don’t have more clarity, but I am holding the obscurity differently. Each season of obscurity takes the time it takes. In my experience, respite has only ever arrived in a deepening felt familiarity with “unknowing.” While the inner gesture this unknowing invites me to is familiar, each time it is clad in a new set of circumstances. There’s no hack.
Not being certain, not being sure, invites me into a rhythm of curiosity and presence. Asking “how” helps me shift the weight I’m carrying to reach for different handholds.
How, today?
How, here?
While we cannot think or reason our way out of the dark, we can ask:
How do I hold this darkness?
How do I tend this restlessness?
Spiritual Practices for Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul
When the darkness thickens around me, I ask “How?” by turning to practices — art, music, poetry, nature, attention, and movement accompany me in the unknowing. Here, there is attunement to wisdom beyond intellect. In practice, I engage with my direct experience.
“I must beg the reader to remember that the inner perception of truth, or knowing by understanding, is something quite different from external truth, which is lodged in the outer mind and related to the size, position, weight, etc., of objects.
Such facts as the latter never really influence the spirit of a man. They never can change us. They are essential in all of our external relationships to life but they do not fill those inner cisterns which, when they run dry, make life entirely barren and meaningless. The kind of knowledge which we get from such facts does not have the power over us that understanding from the active mind has when there is a moment of insight or revelation.”
- Maurice Nicoll in Living Time and the Integration of the Life
Practices are prisms through which timeless truths are illuminated, making the invisible visible. Cynthia Bourgeault said something that rings true in me…
“Belief is in the head. Hope is in the body. Trust is in the body.”
-Cynthia Bourgeault
Here are some practices that help me slip into rhythm with the wellspring of Being. Follow your curiosity and experiment with the ones that draw you.
Collage Wisdom Cards: Listening for resonance and resistance, gathering and arranging images, letting what you have created be a guide.
Walk a Labyrinth: Entering a spiral walking path designed to lead to a center point and back out again without relying on the intellect
Write What Your Soul Already Knows: “Listening from the depths” with this simple, grounded format for writing a poem for obscurity
Listen Deeply in Contemplative Curiosity: Entering the heart through the poems and evocative imagery
Practice Presence with Abstract Art: “Contemplating abstract artwork is a way to wake up our hearts and find a doorway into the inner landscape. It offers us something quieter, deeper: a wordless language.”
Behold the Sunrise/Sunset: A Spiritual Practice for Awakening a Weary Soul: Joining the Earth’s rhythms—behold the sky in silence and stillness (Inspired by John O’Donohue!)
Align Your Centers of Intelligence in Group Practice: “The Gurdjieff Exercises are seated attention practices that work to relax our three-centers (intellectual, emotional, sensation/body) from their automaticity and bring them into coherence.”
Engage with Contemplative Path Through the Mystics: Karl Rahner spoke a shocking truth for his time and context that rings true: “In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.” Dr. James Finley & Kirsten Oates offer an entry point for apprenticing with mystics like St. John of the Cross, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Merton, Meister Eckhart, and many more. Journey in story and guided practice with the “Turning to the Mystics Podcast.”
It's sometimes in the most unusual places that you actually discover the gift of the Beautiful.
-John O’Donohue in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
In this wisdom collage, I was asking the question, “How do I hold this darkness/restlessness?” Practices like this one help us rest in our “unknowing.” Here’s a Faint Outlines Substack post with more about my personal experience.
Spacious Spiritual Direction for a Dark Night of the Soul
Who will accompany me in the dark? Spiritual Direction is never about answers, but a spacious orientation toward all I’ve said above. We can find deep solace in the presence of “someone who knows the dark and is no longer afraid of it.”
Spiritual Direction is about presence and curiosity — holding space for what is actually happening for you without judgment — trusting that deep, subterranean movement is happening, even when we don’t see it.
We can temporarily anchor into a spiritual director’s hope and orientation when we cannot access our own. They welcome us wholly and hold a wide space for our experiences.
When we can’t get our spiritual bearings, being held in truth with kindness is a tangible way to care for ourselves well.
If We’re All Alone, Then We’re All Together In That
Leaving the Light On
A book I return to time and time again is The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth by Gerald G. May, MD. May has helped me move through my dark nights of the soul like the spiritual director he was. His words draw on the writings of St. John of the Cross and his spiritual mother, Teresa of Avila.
May writes of “three spirits” that are common to experience during a dark night of the soul — things I don’t hear talked about often. He reassured me that the things I was experiencing — things very difficult to voice — have been components of dark night of the soul experiences of saints through the ages, of his life, and of the lives of those he’s accompanied as a spiritual director.
This post is, in large part, a distillation of May’s work that has slowly trickled through my own life and soul. He left the light on for me, and I hope to do the same for you.
I created a playlist to meet us in our dark nights of the soul.
A Great Cloud of Witnesses
While no one else has a trail map for our particular spiritual landscape, we do have access to the wisdom of those who have left the light on for us…
Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a memoir about her experience with darkness and accounts of others who have written about their dark-night seasons called Learning to Walk in the Dark. There is a free study guide on her site. She writes…
“I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again... I need darkness as much as I need light.”
-Barbara Brown Taylor
Sue Monk Kidd recounts her experience of “active waiting” in dark seasons in her memoir When the Heart Waits. She writes…
“Whenever new life grows and emerges, darkness is crucial to the process. Whether it's the caterpillar in the chrysalis, the seed in the ground, the child in the womb, or the True Self in the soul, there's always a time of waiting in the dark.”
-Sue Monk Kidd
A Blessing + Holding Space For You
This is the time to be slow,
Lie low to the wall
Until the bitter weather passes.
Try, as best you can, not to let
The wire brush of doubt
Scrape from your heart
All sense of yourself
And your hesitant light
If you remain generous,
Time will come good;
And you will find your feet
Again on fresh pastures of promise,
Where the air will be kind
And blushed with beginning.
- John O’Donohue, To Bless The Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings
Let’s Anchor Into Presence Together…
My name is Kirsten. I practice spiritual direction online and in person on Vashon Island, WA If you find resonance in this post and want to explore anchoring into presence together, visit my offerings page to read more about this spacious accompaniment.
There’s a new offering coming — Spiritual accompaniment by mail or voice memo. You write (or speak!) about what’s stirring, what you want me to hold with you. I’ll give my loving attention to what you share and respond in the same format. In addition to my words, I’ll include some other goodies (e.g., questions, quotes, breadcrumbs that may be interesting to follow, and I may even read you a poem or a chapter of a book).
You can find me on Substack at Faint Outlines:
