How To Recognize The Dark Night Of The Soul – Soul Initiations Series

In this Soul teaching on the dark night of the Soul you will learn:

• What is the dark night of the Soul
• How to recognize the dark night of the Soul in your own life
• The true purpose of being initiated into the dark night of the Soul
• How to best support yourself during the dark night of the Soul
• And more…

The Soul Initiations series is a collection of Soul Teachings on the various Soul Initiations we can be led through in our current incarnation. These initiations serve to bring us to the next evolution of our Soul journey and the embodiment of the truth of who we truly are on a Soul level.

Click here to see the other Soul Teachings in this series, offering you the Soul’s perspective on these initiations and how going through them as messy and as painful as it can feel, serves your personal growth and spiritual evolution. In the end, these are processes happening for you, meant to bring you to the next level in your Soul journey and help you strip away all that is not the truth of who you are. They are an invitation to let go of all your ego’s misunderstandings, false beliefs, and false self-identifications to bring you face-to-face with your true self.

What is the dark night of the Soul?

It’s pretty hard to miss going through the dark night of the Soul and yet because it’s up to us to recognize it ourselves in our own lives we can have difficulty seeing it for what it is. Although there are schools of thought that believe we can have multiple dark nights of the soul throughout our lives, I believe we have only one and that other difficult times (or spiritual challenges) we go through belong to different Soul Initiations that I will discuss in the different teachings in this series.

The dark night of the Soul is like the Tower card in the tarot. The Tower is one of the clearest cards when it comes to meaning. False structures, false institutions, and false beliefs are going to come
(or have already come) tumbling down, suddenly, violently, and all at once.

The dark night of the Soul is not one situation or event, it’s when our whole life as we know it is being burnt down to the ground to make place for the life the Soul wants to live.

Burning down the life we built from our egos is simply the way that the Soul gets rid of the old to make way for the new. The new life built on the rock-solid foundation of our Soul truth, rather than the shaky foundation of the ego’s misinterpretations, false beliefs, and false identifications.

Why it should actually be called the dark night of the ego

It should actually be called the dark night of the ego instead because that’s the part of us in crisis during the dark night of the Soul. Everything that it held to be true, everything that it believed about itself is being challenged to the core, but above all the idea that the ego is in charge is crushed as we wake up to the truth that there is a higher power inside ourselves seeking to move us through our lives.

The dark night of the Soul is not just one event or situation but a deluge of circumstances designed to bring the ego to its knees and accept that it is NOT the one running the show.

No amount of positive thinking or manifesting can turn this process around, simply because whether you want to admit it or not these actions are ego-driven as well and the whole dark night of the Soul serves to wake us up to the fact that we are not just this body, this mind or this personality, but that we are in fact so much more.

The dark night of the Soul is the first step in waking up to the truth of who we are on a Soul level, and although the ego is not bad nor does it need to die (read this Soul teaching on the ego as our ally), it does need to know its place. The dark night of the Soul serves to get the ego to bow down and begin to surrender to the Soul, our own divinity.

How to recognize the dark night of the Soul in your own life

Because the dark night of the Soul serves to have the ego bow down and begin the surrendering process to the Soul, the challenges you face during the dark night of the Soul are often felt as an attack on the ego and a challenging of who you believe yourself to be.

It will also force you to relinquish your deepest misconception about yourself. Because we tend to think of the ego as all bad, we may think that this is only about our selfishness or narcissistic traits but that is not true.

Some of our deepest ego identifications are based on the trauma we endured and the life experiences that shaped us, for me the dark night of the Soul taught me how much inner strength I actually possessed. Before I had bought into the idea that I wasn’t strong enough to stand on my own two feet something my first husband had spent years telling me from the age of 15 when we met till I filed for divorce at 28. After the dark night of the Soul, I knew that life could throw everything it had at me but that I would keep standing nonetheless.

The dark night of the Soul serves to help us strip away the illusions we hold about ourselves and some of them can very well be about feelings of superiority, grandiosity, and selfishness. But they can also be on the other end of the spectrum about our feelings of inferiority, our not being able to speak up for ourselves, or the tendency to be other people’s doormats instead of being able to see our own worth. This is because whether we see ourselves as superior or inferior, they are both ego states and not our Soul’s truth.

The dark night of the Soul will manifest differently for each and every person, but what remains the same is that it will be multiple challenges at once pulling the rug from under your feet.

During my dark night of the Soul, I was essentially homeless. I was living in a two-room apartment with my mother and two youngest kids, while pregnant with my fourth child. My daughter was then born with a rare birth defect that remained undetected during pre-natal care and she died less than two weeks after her birth. I was broke because I was told that if I applied for welfare I would cut off my non-European citizen husband at the time from being able to enter the country and then I found my husband with another woman, one month after our daughter died.

The one person who was my support system through it all, my mother, slipped with her bicycle into the tram tracks bringing the kids to school breaking her collarbone and leaving her bedridden until it healed. So five to six weeks after giving birth, still bleeding and processing the unexpected death of my baby and the huge betrayal by my then-husband, I had to get on a bicycle and bike my kids thirty minutes to and from school every day because there was literally no one else to do it.

Having the rug pulled out from under your feet is an understatement. Any one of those situations would be stressful enough but during the dark night of the Soul, it’s everything coming together all at once. It’s a test of fire, where your whole life is literally torched to the ground and you’re not able to do anything to stop it.

When you enter the dark night of the Soul you are hit left and right by the most challenging circumstances in all areas of your life because everything that is not based on your Soul truth has to be torn down in order to make way for a more Soul-aligned way of living.

For many, the Twin Flame experience can be part of their dark night of the Soul. These soul initiations overlap to various degrees, especially the Tower moment, which plays out across all the Soul initiations bringing one’s life in deeper alignment with the Soul’s plan for the current lifetime.

What is the true purpose of the dark night of the Soul?

From this place of everything being leveled to the ground, you can once again rebuild your life in alignment with what your Soul has intended for you. I applied for welfare, got my own place with a garden for my kids (which is not easy to get in a city like Amsterdam), and then used the internet to build an online business to get myself and the kids off welfare. I rebuilt my life so much stronger and in deeper alignment with who I am and what I came here to do.

That is what being initiated into the dark night of the Soul intends to do in our lives, to recalibrate us to our Soul truth.

As difficult and as painful as it is to go through the dark night of the Soul, it is a process happening for us, helping us awaken to our true nature and our divine essence. It is a deeply spiritual process. designed to start our journey back home toward our true selves.

The challenges we face are part of this Soul initiation to help us shed the parts we identify with that are not in alignment with our Soul truth. In this way, what we experience as our lived reality is a blessing in disguise helping us recognize and dismantle our false beliefs and the false premises that we built our life on.

You could say that our everyday life is our Ascension school, where in the olden days we would be initiated in Mystery schools now it is life itself initiating us through our lived experiences. The challenges we face are not something we ‘manifested’ by mistake, or our vibes being off, nor is it the Universe being cruel.

They are part of the initiation hand-selected by our Soul to spark our spiritual evolution. The end goal of this process is to not only unify the ego with the Soul, aka inner union but also start the process of getting the physical body ready for Soul embodiment which is the culmination of the incarnation process.

How to support yourself during the dark night of the Soul

Here are some ways that you can support yourself while going through the dark night of the Soul and any other part of the Ascension process. It is an intense spiritual process and your body needs all the TLC you can give it.

Allow your emotions

The most important thing during the Ascension process and therefore also during the dark night of the Soul is to allow yourself to feel what you feel and not suppress it through natural or chemical anti-depressants, anxiety medication, or addictions such as alcohol, drugs, food, gambling, sex and so on.

Obviously, if you are on prescribed medication do not stop cold turkey but discuss this with your doctor first. The suppression of your emotions keeps them on rinse and repeat while allowing yourself to feel them helps you release them once and for all.

Go out into nature

Nature is the best way to change your energy and get yourself out of your funk. It’s also very good for grounding, especially when you can touch the earth or grass with your bare feet. It doesn’t matter if you go to a park, a forest, a lake, the mountains, fields, a river, or the ocean. Spending time in nature and in the sun helps you reenergize yourself. This is important because spiritual processes such as these take a lot of energy, which can leave you feeling drained and depleted.

Move your body

Walking, yoga, dancing, or going to the gym are all ways to move your body which in turn moves the liquids including lymph and blood in your body. This helps in the detoxification process that you are in, in fact, much of the emotions coming up and out are old emotions stuck in the body.

Movement can help you move through them, as well as move through the physical detox symptoms you may experience. This is because there is no separation between the mental, emotional, vibrational, and physical body, which is why shifts in our thoughts, emotions, and vibrations affect our physical body as well and vice versa.

Sleep, rest & nap when you need to

Any growth process requires a lot of energy and the same is true for our spiritual growth process, people going through the dark night of the Soul tend to get tired more easily. This is because there is so much going on in the background, but also because as we open up spiritually we become more sensitive to things we perhaps weren’t as sensitive to before such as fluorescent and LED lights (which are known to cause fatigue), EMF exposure, large crowds and so on.

A shopping trip to the mall or dinner with friends can suddenly drain you because of the process you are in and your own level of sensitivity. Sleep, nap, and rest as much as you need, and if possible, your body needs the extra rest and sleep to support you through the process.

If you find yourself being more sensitive, it can also be that you are responding to the Schumann resonance and solar activity. Read this Soul teaching on how Geomagnetic Activity impacts us physically if you suspect this might be the case.

Eat a healthy diet & hydrate

While you will read most people advocating a vegetarian diet, that is not the most important when it comes to a healthy diet nor does your Ascension depend on it. You can thoroughly wreck your health by going vegetarian or vegan and many people have had to go back to an omnivore diet because their bodies couldn’t handle such a restrictive diet.

What is important is to eat as clean and unprocessed as possible, preferably organic as this means fewer chemicals and no antibiotics entering your body through your food. In fact, changing your diet could have drastic effects on your mental and physical health with (hidden) sugars being one of the biggest culprits. Fresh clean water and herbal teas or coconut water will help you keep hydrated.

Breathe

Breathing oxygenates the body and is an important way to give your body what it needs. Doing Pranayamas or other breathing exercises can help counteract the so-called Ascension symptoms we can experience as we go through the various Soul initiations during the Ascension process.

The process of Soul Embodiment is hard on the body and therefore we need to do everything to help the body stay healthy and support it while it is cleaning out all this old pain, old false beliefs, and outdated self-identifications that are keeping us from embodying the truth of who we are.

Take Epsom salt baths

Epsom salt baths or foot baths (20 minutes) are the best way to quickly shift your energy when you are feeling off, purging, or feeling super emotional. A salt scrub along the spine can help as well, this is because salt can help draw out dense energy. I always advise my clients to do an Epsom salt bath after doing a session with me, this helps them release any energetic residue that is still lingering.

Clear your home and energy field

You can use sage, paolo santo, or certain types of incense to clear yourself and your home of any heavy energy that might accumulate as you face yourself, your false beliefs, and your ego identifications head-on. Like the Epsom salt, I encourage my clients to clear the room and spot they sat in during their session with me to remove any lingering energetic residue from the session. See it as a good kitchen countertop wipedown to start fresh. Agua de Florida is also a powerful aura and room cleanser.

The healing work that helps you through the dark night of the Soul

While the above can be soothing and nurturing to the body, it’s not the level of healing we need to work through the dark night of the Soul. Yes, implementing the above is going to help your body heal and also have a positive effect on your mind and emotions as a healthy diet, movement, and good sleep are the prerequisites for good health.

But, it doesn’t touch the repressed emotions, trauma, false beliefs and false self-identifications that are being brought to the surface as you PLAY them out in your lived experience.

It is important to understand that this is how the subconscious tries to bring them to our attention by pulling in the people, situations, and experiences we need to heal them once and for all.
The problem is that we often don’t recognize these people, situations, and experiences as such and even when we do, it can be difficult to understand what you’re actually playing out.

You need a healer/therapist and modality that helps you make these subconscious stories conscious and the reality is that most therapy and healing modalities don’t work that way. This is because many healing and therapeutic modalities are so-called feel-good modalities, but healing isn’t necessarily about instantly feeling better or good.

Healing is about accessing the root cause which may in fact, not feel great at all, initially.

But just as much as suppressing your emotions with food, alcohol, sex, drugs, etc. doesn’t make those emotions go away – they only give you a short relief in the moment, neither do feel-good healings solve your issues.

Instead, they tend to make you dependent on others for feeling ‘good’ which calls for regular tune-ups to keep feeling ‘good’ while in reality nothing actually changes.

This is why you should work with modalities such as Soul Embodiment® Therapy or with the Soulology method because they gently but efficiently help you pinpoint and heal the underlying root cause on a Soul Path level. Although there’s only so much we can do in one session, when you work with me you do not need to come back weekly or monthly for years on end because the issues we work on are cleared out at the root cause. You don’t need to do maintenance sessions to keep up gotten results.

I know this because many of my clients are healers, therapists, psychiatrists, and psychologists. They come to me because they have tried everything else and it has not gotten them as far as doing one single session with me. This is because Soul Embodiment® Therapy is the ultimate shadow work, it helps us make the unconscious conscious in a way that most modalities do not or cannot.

This allows us rather than PLAYING out our wounding to CLEAR it out at the root cause as well as reprogram ourselves at the ‘Source’ code because we work with the Causal body and our Soul Records.

The Causal body (also called the Karmic body) is the only subtle body that follows us from lifetime to lifetime and is the energetic database from which the mental, emotional, vibrational, and physical body is created before each new incarnation. All our experiences from our complete Soul journey are stored in our Causal body, making it the highest subtle body that we can do our healing work through.

That is why this work is so powerful because we are working at the deepest level of our psychological patterns and subconscious programming that we have been carrying with us throughout our complete Soul journey.

Although there’s nothing wrong with a good massage, a sound bath healing, a chakra clearing, a cacao ceremony or Reiki session and so on – such healing modalities cannot help you access your unresolved trauma, your false beliefs, and your false identification because that is not how they work.

But even modalities such as hypnotherapy and its various offsprings tend to work with a black box system where they try to force a new belief (script) on the subconscious mind. Rather than show the subconscious mind the Soul truth which triggers it to reprogram itself accordingly and signals the brain to rewire itself as well. This is how I work with my clients in a Soul Embodiment® Therapy session, I help them navigate past their defense, protection, and survival mechanisms to the Soul truth that their higher self wants to show them. Clients can solve more in one session with me than they have in years of talk therapy or other healing modalities.

Last but not least, you may be wondering about using the power of positive thinking and raising your vibrational frequency and how this can help you ‘heal’ during the dark night of the Soul. Although it is always good to be and stay positive, avoiding your unresolved pain does NOT make it go away. It’s a form of mental bypassing to attempt to ‘positive your way out’ of your healing work.

But what if I am not traumatized you may ask?

Because the emotions that come from trauma are the most dense vibrational frequency, there is no raising your vibrational frequency without facing them. It’s just another form of spiritual bypassing to think that you can raise your vibrational frequency through energy work without addressing the unresolved trauma that created the densification.

Let me explain why.

Every single human being carries unresolved trauma, the fact that we don’t consciously remember it doesn’t mean it’s not there. We can’t see germs and bacteria, but they are there as well even when we can’t see or feel them. The same is true for trauma, which is often hidden in the subconscious until we are mature and strong enough to face it. This is true in regards to current life childhood trauma, as well as ancestral or past life trauma that we were not able to resolve in the past.

As Souls, we have used trauma to densify our energy fields in order to take physical form.

I explain this in Part I of the Soul Path Series, hence everyone who is in physical form and has not reached Soul Mastery yet has unresolved trauma otherwise you wouldn’t be incarnated as a human in this lifetime. No one is born trauma-free unless you were born self-realized perhaps. Heck, just being in the womb and being born can create unresolved trauma.

In the Hindu and Buddhist tradition, we would call this karma, our human form is a sign that we are still bound to the karmic cycle of death and rebirth. Although karma has been greatly misunderstood, it merely refers to that which was left unresolved in a previous lifetime. In this way, our unresolved trauma is part of our karmic load. How this works I have explained in this Soul teaching on the truth about karma and this other teaching on reincarnation.

If you’re unaware of the level of unresolved trauma that you are carrying, you are not alone. Clients are always amazed at the things that they have been hiding from themselves but have definitely felt the effects of, playing out in their lives. This is because we hold almost all of our trauma subconsciously, even the actual trauma from traumatic events we remember or know about.

It’s one of the rookie mistakes I made in my own healing journey, I thought that because I had known for many years that I had been sexually abused and had already worked on it a lot throughout that time, I had healed it. It took a recurrent UTI during another type of Soul initiation to help me work through all the unresolved pain that I was still subconsciously carrying from this experience to finally heal it working with a small army of healers to access the depth of my deeply repressed pain.

If you are here reading this, there are unresolved issues from your past that have created these false beliefs and false self-identifications that do not reflect the truth of who you are whether they are from your childhood, your ancestral lineage, your past life, or current life conditioning. It really doesn’t matter when or how they were created, what matters is that these are now being brought to the surface through your dark night of the Soul because they are part of the false (ego) foundation that the Soul is in the process of tearing down.

Because the ego identifies so deeply with these false beliefs and who it believes it is, when it all comes tumbling down it is extremely painful to go through. It hurts like hell. But it doesn’t have to because when we work with the Causal body and our Soul Records, we are shown the Soul truth and this allows us to see and understand the ego’s misinterpretation which instantly sets us free from the pain and the attachment to who we believed to be because of it.

I pray this Soul teaching helps you identify the dark night of the Soul playing out in your own life whether it’s happening now or it happened in the past. If you are currently in the midst of your dark night of the Soul I hope this teaching helps you move through it with a better understanding and a powerful set of tools to navigate it more smoothly. If your dark night of the Soul happened in the past, I hope this teaching has helped you better understand the experience and has allowed you to make peace with it and the people, situations, and experiences that were part of your initiation.

Do you feel called to work with me?
Please check out the Soulology and Soul Embodiment® Therapy sessions to book a session.

I would love to hear from you in the comment section below, you can post your comments and any questions you have about the dark night of the Soul.

Don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter so you never miss a new Soul teaching again. And if you have any friends or groups that would benefit from this information, feel free to share it with them.