“You’re not depressed, but you’re going through something.”

These were the words said to me by a health professional when I was experiencing what’s known as the ‘Dark Night of the Soul.’

I felt like a part of me was dying, and indeed it was, a part of the egoic structure falling away made for the emergence of the authentic self.

I was, at the time, going through a major shift in perception.

What I had regarded as normal, was, I discovered, deeply dysfunctional. This resulted in a strong change in family relationship dynamics.

When the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ visits…

Your ‘soul’ starts to bring up everything in your life that needs to heal.

The old frameworks for understanding your world and yourself are no longer enough. It may come from nowhere, a sudden realisation that the status quo is unfulfilling and lifeless.

The depths of your consciousness begin to surface, memories stored from your lifetime and even a feeling of past-life times comes to the fore.

This stage brings up past trauma for healing, what you thought was done and buried, edges to the foreground for exploration and healing.

The 'Dark Night of the Soul' can also bring up ‘inherited’ emotions such as the fear of abandonment. Decisions, whether major or minor, become paralysing dilemmas, as the crisis shakes confidence in both your judgement and intuition.

However, the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ is not purposeless suffering; it is a point of profound transformation.

While the phase can be extremely disorientating, it’s an invitation to drop outdated beliefs, to engage in deep introspection and emerge with a renewed sense of purpose and meaning.

When you navigate this stage successfully, the rewards are significant: greater emotional resilience, deeper empathy, and a more meaningful engagement with the world, because you’re no longer so worried about what others think or burdened by old belief systems.

When you have moved through the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ you reach deeper into the awakening process and find yourself at stage 4, which is when you start to feel you’re suspended between two worlds.