Dark Night of the Soul

You may find yourself having a “dark night of the soul” experience, where the existential pain is such that your life feels devoid of meaning and purpose. But this too is an opportunity to find a deeper truth, the truth that is at the heart of your being.

       

Hakuin, the influential Zen master who lived almost four centuries ago, referred to the dark night as “great doubt.” He said: “At the bottom of great doubt lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully.”

       

You have to be really present with these feelings, this deeper angst. You have to be very alert, watchful, almost like a scientist in your curiosity to discover what is true in you.

      

 If you look deeply enough within, past memories, usually of something traumatic that happened long ago in childhood, will often arise. When they do, you must learn to welcome them because they are showing you where you are not free, where you are not abiding in the peace and happiness that is your true nature. So, the secret is to learn to welcome them, accept them, embrace them—and then see that they are not real either!

      

They may certainly have once been true—after all, the traumatic event, whether it was getting separated from your mother in the store, or being molested by a relative, did happen—but the memory or story is not true now. It is only a thought, a story, which has surfaced from the past into your conscious mind.

       

The more aware you are of that thought, the more deeply and slowly you breathe, and consciously be present with it—and actually see it arising within your inner visual field—the  more it dissolves, and you find yourself experiencing a deeper level of release, of letting go. 

The old emotion triggered by the memory unwinds, releases, and you find yourself relaxing more into the present. You experience more ease, more inner harmony. You can see and think more clearly.

      

You realize: “Wow, I was really caught up in a past event just then, a prior traumatic experience that I believed was true, but now I see was just an unconscious memory that was running me, and preventing me from realizing an even deeper level of freedom.”

       

And then you’ll probably breathe even more deeply, relax, and let go—and look around you, and smile, and just enjoy your new-found sense of freedom. Maybe you’ll even congratulate yourself: you have just discovered your own way to inner freedom, to exorcising these demons from the past…