Moving Through a Dark Night of the Soul: A Spiritual Director Holds Space for Obscurity

White text on a photo of grey cloudy sky with dark silhouettes of trees reads "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"

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 God

  • We may be mad at God for not responding to our deep and desperate cries, 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 to an invitation to be loved where you are, as you are?

  • For a moment, can you imagine this season as a sacred opening that could be the ground of your deepening freedom?

  • Is it possible your senses are being recalibrated, forming the capacity to attune to a deeper frequency of Divine Love? 

  • 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 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.”

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 dark night takes the time it takes. In my experience, respite has only ever arrived as a deepening appreciation for and familiarity with the felt sense of “unknowing.”

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, and movement accompany me in the unknowing. Here, I’m more attuned to patterns, synchronicities, and the wisdom of my body.

I heard Cynthia Bourgeault say something profound that has been stirring in me:

“Belief is in the head. Hope is in the body. Trust is in the body.”

In my recent dark seasons, these practices have helped me slip into rhythm with the divine and my soul:

These practices (and many more) offer new ways of engaging with the inner landscape. They are prisms that illuminate timeless truths in new ways — making the invisible visible. Follow your curiosity and experiment with the ones that draw you.

Sometimes these practices call me home to Self — the inner ground where I have access to perspective, curiosity, and compassion — the place where I can perceive the ways I am always, already home, ever connected to God/Spirit/Love and all other beings.

Sometimes they offer intuitive guidance for my next step or help me glimpse the faint outline of a new possibility

A collage of a living room with a woman wearing headohones, sunglasses, her hands folded. Opposite her, a golden dove hands her a small fire. There is. Other items: moon, passport, and text

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.”

Spacious Spiritual Accompaniment 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.

They may even help us access the permission we need to let go of our usual ways of connecting with God so we can be present with what is instead of what was or what will be.

Belonging As We’re Becoming

I’m participating in this great cosmic unfolding by bearing witness to the complexity, by naming and normalizing inner and outer experiences that — in the absence of a steady guide — are disorienting and nearly unbearable, and to the ways we are held by a beautiful, loving, creative force that longs to be known.

I journey alongside others in accompaniment as they get a feel for what moving with mystery is like for them.

The process of becoming is a slow, steady, non-linear process — finding fluency in our particular ways of knowing, getting a felt sense for what it’s like to relax into unknowing, and falling through fear into Love over and over again — is the very heart of spirituality. Mistakes, detours, tangents, ruptures and repairs, and course correction are non-negotiable elements of becoming.

There’s no “out-of-bounds” in the spiritual landscape — in the brilliant and deeply reassuring words of Richard Rohr, “Everything Belongs” — and 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

While no one else has a trail map for our particular spiritual landscape, we do have access to the wisdom of those who have “learned to walk in the dark.” 

  • Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a memoir about her experience with darkness and the accounts of others who have written about their dark night seasons called Learning to Walk in the Dark. There is a free study guide you can access 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.”

  • Sue Monk Kidd tells of 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.”

  • This moving poetic reflection on the dark night of the soul by Dr. James Finley has been a balm for my soul in seasons of spiritual disorientation:

Spacious Resources for a Dark Night of the Soul

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.

  • In this 18-minute podcast episode of The Zeitcast, Jonathan Martin delivers a sermon called “Deep Darkness.” Martin’s style of preaching is a unique combination: he brings the energy and passion of a Pentecostal/charismatic preacher and a deep love for Jesus and the Bible, without diminishing pain, darkness, and the reality of the harm and injustice perpetuated in the name of Jesus. 

  • I created a playlist to meet us in our dark nights of the soul.

Holding Space for You + A Blessing for Moving Through Your Dark Night of the Soul

I hope that these reflections offer you a tiny bit of consolation, not by relieving the pain of your dark night of the soul, but in the reassurance that darkness is normal, and it’s a part of the way we “become.”

I’ll leave you with a blessing from John O’Donohue, a soul friend across space and time, from whom I’ve received words that come mysteriously near to describing the indescribable.

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

If you find resonance in this post and would like to read more about spacious spiritual direction and accompaniment, please visit my offerings page.

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