The ongoing renovation of old blog posts continues! This time around, I completely re-wrote posts on spiritual awakening and pain as well as the post about the dark night of the soul. Hopefully, they are clearer than they were before.
As a short aside, thanks to all my donors. All your donations help give me the time to work on projects like this tp improve the clarity of the spiritual teaching I offer to people around the world. This year, there are already more than 100 individual donors who have decided that my work is important and have supported it.
Thank you!
Confronted by Pain After Awakening
It’s a common occurrence that people are confronted by pain after awakening. Sometimes, they are immediately confronted, and sometimes, there’s a kind of flowing blissful, peaceful, loving, or some other type of enjoyable experience at first.
But the spiritual path is a lesson in embracing all of life! That includes our pain. Whatever demons and vices we tried to lock away in the cellar are coming out when the ego starts dissolving and can no longer hold them back. The process of meeting our issues and old wounds can be painful, and so this post is an attempt to help you consciously move through those pains.
Spiritual Awakening and Pain: The Torment of Internal Resistance
Resistance and Falling into a Spiritual Abyss
A dark night of the soul situation is no joke, and yet it’s laughable how avoidable it is. The reason any of us fall into a dark night is because of our ego resistance. We resist what is going on in life; we don’t like it. We fight our emotions. We try to stuff them down. We may also get lost wallowing in them. We do countless things to avoid truly engaging with painful feelings and sensations. Then that stuff gets crammed down into an inner abyss that can one day rise back up to create such a despairing state as the dark night of the soul. If we hadn’t resisted it all, we would not be in such a dark place, and consequently, the way out is surrendering to the resistance and letting go of the ego.
In this renovated post, I spent more time outlining steps that need to be taken to get out of a dark night of the soul. I also separated out the idea of when things are physically going bad (like a cancer diagnosis) versus when the ego is simply upset about life not going according to its rules (like a bad divorce where no one is in any physical jeopardy). Sometimes, in a dark night of the soul, things are going badly internally and externally, but not always.
Lastly, I emphasized community more in this piece. If things are really this despairing, then you absolutely need to seek support from multiple sources. Don’t rely on just one teacher, partner, therapist if you are in this situation.
I hope this helps!
