Dark Nights of the Soul

... give yourself what you need at the deepest level. Care rather than cure. Organize your life to support the process. You are incubating your soul, not living a heroic adventure. Arrange life accordingly. Tone it down. Get what comforts you can, but don’t move against the process. Concentrate, reflect, think, and talk about your situation seriously with trusted friends.

The sea is the vast potential of life, but it is also your dark night, which may force you to surrender some knowledge you have achieved. It helps to regularly undo the hard-won ego development, to unravel the self and culture you have woven over the years. The night sea journey taken you back to your primordial self, not the heroic self that burns out and falls to judgement, but to your original self, yourself as a sea of possibility, your greater and deeper being.

... there is no loss too great or challenge too overwhelming, provided you are anchored in your vision and your values, while following your destiny.

Poetry is sea-language; it keeps you in the water of your life as you articulate your experience.

In this dark place you may ask the basic questions: Who are you? What is this world? What kind of family do you come from? What are your origins, your early experiences? Deep down, what do you want? What do you fear? In the belly of the whale you are given the chance to start over. The sun-fish rises once again in the east. You get another morning in your life.

The world that has come of age,’ he [Bonhoeffer] writes, ‘is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age.

You need dialogue so that you can work out a livable connection with this challenging but ultimately creative power.

You may be blind to the very thing that will make your life feel worth living. You may be repressing the very source of your deepest satisfaction. You may be gullible, taking in the world’s insidious lessons in superficial satisfaction. Therefore, you have to dig deeper. Discover who you are and who you want to be. Don’t be dissuaded from that objective by the illusory promises of commercial life. Instead, be yourself.

Your dark night is forcing you to consider alternatives. It is taking you out of the active life of submission to alien goals and purposes. It is offering you your own approach to life. You can sit with it and consider who you are and who you want to be. You can be fortified by it to stand strong in your very existence. You can be born again, not into an ideology that needs your surrender, but into yourself, your uniqueness, your God-given reality, the life destined for you.

We can’t understand what is happening to us, and if we are in the habit of always wanting to know what is going on, this aspect of the dark night will be maddening. We can find meaning in these times of change, but we have to think differently about our lives, be less psychological in our approach, and more philosophical and spiritual.

In a key letter, written to his brother and sister-in-law when he was twenty-three, he [Keats] said that being intelligent is not enough. Your intelligence has to be converted into a soul. “Do you not see,” he wrote, “how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?...Call the world if you Please ‘The vale of Soul-making.

Today many blindly follow their clergy, their ideologies, their political leaders, and the press. Many get their life guidance from television and rarely have original thoughts about their experiences. Others may have many opinions based on the latest studies but generally have not worked out a deep vision. They are informed, but they haven’t thought deeply enough.

How do you create a supportive and livable philosophy? First, you take your life seriously. You don’t have to be morose about it, but you must realize that you can’t pass on the responsibility for your life to anyone else.

A philosophy of life begins to take shape when you educate your heart and cultivate your life. You read, you talk, and you think; you don’t just act. You consider your experience and take lessons from it.

A philosophy of life is a bundle of wisdom you have gathered from your reading and experience. It is not a rigid ideology that allows no development and complexity. It’s a living thing, a developing idea about life that belongs to you alone.

A philosophy of life elevates and airs out what might otherwise be an emotional swamp. Feelings are wet and damp, inundating us and preventing us from thinking clearly. Ideas are drier and allow a vision to emerge from a sea of feelings.

The spiritual life is not abstract. It thrives on ritual, art, good words, and symbolic acts. These concrete actions bring the transition home physically, emotionally, and intellectually. In this way, you know you have gone through a change, and you can adjust accordingly.

Life is a continuous cycle of births. Imagine yourself as made up of three parts. One part arrives at birth and never changes, the eternal self. At that level, you are eternal, and throughout your life you recognize that unchanging self in the midst of developments, a quintessential star ever shining in the deep interior of the soul. A second level is so completely defined by events and environment that it changes all the time. This is the self that tries to survive and thrive in the everyday world, the practical self. Yet a third level is the caterpillar-and-butterfly part, the unfolding self. This self is always becoming, always evolving, unless it is blocked, and goes through deep transformations. It is the go-between that links the eternal with the everyday.

A person suffering a dark night might say, “Help me. I’m depressed. Get me out of it.” But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of life’s meaningful moments for a psychological view based on medicine. We would like to cure ourselves of the darkness. The resulting confusion of categories only makes things worse.

You are not complete until your relationships have been cared for. Your dark night is important not only for yourself but for those around you. You may not realize it, but they have been enduring your dark night, too. They need at least a small rite of return, some signal that night has ended and new life can get under way.

Ritualism, the fall into unconscious and often compulsive rituals, is a symptomatic form and usually does more harm than good. It’s interesting how people who lose touch with their souls become ritualistic in ways that are destructive. When you find yourself engaged in empty rituals—repeated patterns centered on certain objects and substances, such as alcohol or money—look for ways to restore solid, spiritual rituals to your life. Find a church where the ritual really raises your mind and heart. Go regularly into nature. You will be reminded what is important and essential.

It might help to concentrate on developing a vision and strong sense of values rather than on the usual psychological issues of emotion and relationship.

Spirituality and clarity go together. Spiritual practices aim at expanding the mind and the heart, and most spiritual teachers recommend some form of contemplation as the core of the practice. It may be yoga, sitting, insight, or a method more tangible and sensuous, such as music, painting, flower arranging, or dance. You can learn a great deal about contemplation from one of the ancient systems of meditation, but you can also be contemplative in ordinary ways adapted to your personal lifestyle.

...the philosopher Richard Kearney sums up catharsis as a matter of “acknowledging painful truths.” This is a simple idea, but it gets to the heart of what it takes to clear out the soul.

Contemporary writers often emphasize growth and advance. Someone should also speak for being still and not getting anywhere. The entire rhythm is crucial.

Ordinary conversation, too, is full of stories that play a central role in developing an imagination for life. The repeated telling of a story gradually allows the pieces of life experience to find their relation to each other.

Photography is a contemporary art form that has an extraordinary capacity to reveal the hidden soul. In a photograph you see things that pass by unnoticed in the flow of life. As you look closely at the images, fragments of stories come to mind—the past interrupts the present and is always the bearer of soul.

A society is like an individual: in the face of a dark night it can either become defensive and avoid the challenge of new life, or it can reform itself and discover in the darkness where it has gone wrong.

The jealous person doesn’t have to find it in himself to love without possessing. The spiritual person has found a way to be good and virtuous. The inferior one doesn’t have to be somebody and enter the fray of life with strength.

From prison he [Oscar Wilde] wrote one of the most remarkable testaments ever written, De Profundis (Out of the Depths), a letter a person suffering any kind of dark night might appreciate. The letter is apropos of our theme:

I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief; . . . terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. . . . Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is humility.

Psychology tends to be solar, wanting to bring all things to light, to overcome the darkness and make everything manageable. It wants to banish darkness with any means at its disposal. But no one needs such a harsh cleansing and brightening. It would be better to be deepened and darkened by an experience of the night. You would then become more complex, more interesting, less one-dimensional.

You can see that the point of staying in the dark is not to trick it into making you brilliant and germ-free, but to make you a more interesting person and to give you a more fascinating life. In therapeutic times like ours, these goals may seem odd. But they are ultimately more humane. Rather than giving you a spotless, well-adjusted personality, they give you substance. You become a person worth knowing, worth listening to, and worth loving, in all your dimensions.

When a woman’s soul is set to blossom, she may feel at first that she needs to be released from the nurturing, sensitive identity she has known for many years.

But you don’t always need to be cared for. You don’t have to justify your existence by caring for others. Instead of making mutual care an absolute principle, you could understand that need, absence, and ignorance allow wonder and new life.

Professional men and women have their own parallel dark night. They may spend their days and hours making a living, keeping the needs of their family in mind. Then they, too, find that this is simply not enough to make their lives worth living. They, too, have to discover a deeper dimension, their own underworld. Unfortunately, they may collapse into alcohol, affairs, or excessive work—underworlds that are too literal and concrete. Instead of completing the myth by finding first the void and then some purpose in themselves, they fall into various symptomatic states that disrupt their lives.

The dark night of the soul may have a bardo quality. This is the state mentioned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that is a liminal period between the old life and rebirth. One of the many instructions in the book for preparing for your new life reads: ‘Meditate for a long time on your special guiding spirit, as if it were a vision without any real inherent substance, an illusion. This is called pure illusory body. Then let this spirit disappear, from its edges inward, and rest for a while in the inconceivable state of emptiness-luminosity, which is nothing whatever.

My way is lunar. I want to sit in the dark and listen to the sounds of night. I don’t want to be a solar hero battling monsters and racking up mighty accomplishments. I don’t even want to convince you that my way is best. I don’t think it is. I doubt that many would want to adopt my style. But I think it has value and may offer you an alternative for dealing with your dark nights.

The magus doesn’t try to overcome nature but to remain deeply in tune with it. To deal with the soul magically rather than heroically requires extreme sympathy with all that is taking place.

A dark night can toughen you and steel you, helping you to be a real presence in your world. In the realm of the soul, most of us are wimps at first. We have to deepen and strengthen our outlook and style.

During a dark night of the soul, it helps to have your imagination wide open, both active and receptive. But we live in a world charmed by studies filled with numbers and charts, and machines full of blinking lights and a steady hum. We reduce most of life to factual and technical language and feel satisfied with talk of genes and DNA. In this environment, imagination, wit, and humor seem soft and nonessential.

The people I trust most to be my teachers and guides can laugh at the human situation and at themselves. They can see irony in the most serious matters. Their laughter seems to free up their compassion and liberate them from narcissistic worry about themselves. Tragedy tends toward self-pity, while a more subtle and complicated view allows you to go beyond any preoccupation with yourself.

These strong-hearted men teach us how to deal with oppression and ignorance. You can’t always beat your persecutors at their own game, but you can turn the tables on them morally.

A dark night of the soul need not be depressing. Today we tend to think of all emotional negativity as depression, and so we imagine ourselves sometimes to be depressed when in fact it is only the world that is pressing down on us. You can be bright, thoughtful, creative, and imaginative during a dark night. You can use all your power to imagine your situation in your own way. You can reverse expectations and refuse to be literally defeated. And none of this has to be a denial of your tragedy or the repression of your feelings.

Moralistic judgments are always based in anxiety. They sound high and righteous, but they come from a small, worried, and barely concealed desperation.

No, you yourself have to take your life seriously. Feel its weight. Admit its complexity. And as Jungians would say, honor its shadows. Irony can come only from an awareness of the good and the bad, the successes and the failures, the areas of intelligence and the zones of folly and ignorance.

If you can’t think, reflect, and actively imagine your life into existence, you are condemned to a half-life of unconsciousness. You are mired in facts and information and opinions and slogans. In effect, you are imprisoned in the stale notions of a dead society.

Imagination is everything, because we can’t know or experience anything outside our imagination of it. But the imagination can be old, tired, and irrelevant. It needs to be revived continually. You need to reform yourself at regular periods. Otherwise you become soul-dead, and you live and act as though you were not alive. How many contemporary people feel that way?

It takes time for the soul, so deep and complex, to sort itself out snd arrange itself for a decision. My own way is to wait and wait until the apple of decision is about to fall on its own. No doubt, I am extreme in my patience or temporizing. When I counsel others, I feel no rush. I think it’s important to gather oneself together before making a move. Many people make decisions just on the principle that you should do something. I’m afraid it may take a while for the soul to catch up with them.

Clearly, love is not about making you happy. It is a form of initiation that may radically transform you, making you more of who you are but less of who you have been. If you don’t realize that you are walking on coals and running the gauntlet and surviving the wilderness in quest of a vision—all within the confines of a simple human relationship—you could be undone by it. Love gives you a sense of meaning, but it asks a price. It will make you into the person you are called to be, but only if you endure its pains and allow it to empty you as much as it fills you.

We don’t understand that our passions have something to do with life making sense. We also tend to focus on the problem at hand, as though it were a mechanical issue in need of engineering. We often fail to see how all parts of life are connected, and how difficulty in one area may indicate change in another.

Marsilio Ficino frequently said that if you are faced with the choice of two or more things, always choose all of them.

Masochism is disguised control. My friend’s life had been on hold for years because she considered it important to keep all her relationships calm and ordered. This highly controlled suffering is full of ego and essentially blocks the natural flow of life. When that flow is finally released, a deeper source of strength becomes available, shattering the masochism and establishing the paradoxical condition of strength in yielding. Finally being able to let life flow through you, you discover a calm and courage you may never have felt before.

The relaxing of your will, however desperate, allows life to proceed. It may not go according to your plan, but whatever it makes will be more secure and ultimately more satisfying that anything you could force into existence. Such are the lessons of a dark night.

It’s tempting to become the hero and savior, but getting life in apparent order is not the same as giving the soul what it needs. It may need more chaos, deeper impasse, and increased darkness.

You can trust them [emotions and fantasies], not to arrange life the way you want it, but to arrange the elements of your soul in a way that will offer rich life in the future.

Love’s impossibility forces you to become a different person. You are forced to think and consider what love is all about. You believe you have to make hard choices, but, more important, in your deliberations you are educating yourself.

I remember a woman caught not in a triangle, but in a pen-tangle of new lover, old husband, children, her parents, and herself. They were all implicated in her love life, and each of them added pressure to the muddle. After a few years of struggle, she resolved the emotional geometry by discovering that she hadn’t been giving enough love to her own interests and abilities. Once her career blossomed, the other loves all took their highly original, unconventional places. It was a resolution she never could have imagined in the early days of her despair.

Part of the pain of love is that no person, however suitable and satisfying, completes the desire for love. There is always a remainder, because love takes us beyond the human sphere. It puts you in touch with the ultimate object of desire. It invites you to transcend yourself, to be more than you ever have been.

Your love expands to include the world and beyond. The Sufis, those passionate mystics of the Islamic tradition, say that our human loves form a ladder to the divine.

People still don’t know how to do several things at once or understand the importance of imagination in relationship. They suffer their unions because they think of them as unconscious, surface acts instead of deep developments of the soul. Many people aim for surface compatibility instead of deep, nonrational connection.

Your marriage participates in this cosmic pattern and has a wealth of meaning that you will never grasp.

Building a marriage can be a joyful experience, but surrendering to another person is never a happy choice.

Donald Hall is a good model of a dark night purifying the soul and opening up into insight.

Human marriage is part of a larger process of reconciling differences. It has social and cosmic implications, and, when entered deeply, can even contribute to world peace.

Most sacred literature suggests that the opposites that make life so interesting and painful cannot be resolved intellectually. You have to find some other means of getting differences in one place and letting them coexist or blend.

The ideal is not wholeness or integration, but marriage and love, not an overcoming of differences but creative coexistence and mutual influence.

We have to love our own complexities and contradictions, encouraging an interior marriage and eroticism of the soul.

Sex often becomes an issue when you are about to shift to a new level in your life. Couples are often thrown off by this tendency of sex to rise up out of its calm and cause embarrassment and conflict. You may confuse a sudden surge of vitality with the need for a change of partner or with sexual experimentation for its own sake. You may be confused about your feelings, knowing well that eros has stirred, but at the same time feeling that you don’t want to threaten your relationship.

Kathleen Raine, now an extraordinarily articulate, subtle poet and literary critic, plainly confesses in her autobiography to the divine/demonic power of sex. About the man who finally set her afire after leaving her husband she writes, ‘What Alastair was like, as a person, I neither knew nor cared. I was not interested in him; a fact which does me no credit. I never noticed what kind of human personality he had; to have done so would have dimmed and obscured the image of the god he for me embodied. . . . For his immortal soul I did not care, only for his mortal beauty.

...the soul’s progress is both deep and dark and requires a descent as well as an ascent. “Growth” is entirely the wrong word for what ripens and matures us into people of substance and gives us a soul. Sex is integrally involved in that process, and it isn’t always “nice,” clean, uncomplicated.

There is a difference, however, between becoming more mature through dark sexuality and literalizing that darkness in actual violence. There, you have gone over the line, out of the ritual of sex, in which symbolically you visit the underworld of fantasy, and into actuality, which is not an initiation but victimization.

At a deep level, society’s challenge at the moment is to convert its infantile sexuality into a thorough life of sensual pleasure, beauty, intimacy, and community. We have to transform our materialism into soulful physicality.

We work too hard and too long just to have the pleasures we might better attain through a simpler way of life.

To create usually means to make or do something for public consumption. If the public accepts you, life is exciting. If it ignores you, your spirits may slump.

The vague feeling of being nobody is not exactly a dark night, but more a hazy evening of the soul.

No doubt, celebrity will always be part of life, because it expresses a need for myth, for a level of experience far beyond the normal and literal.

A theologian would say that a creative person participates in the Creator’s work. The creation of the world is an ongoing project, and part of the divinity of the human being—an idea cherished by Renaissance philosophers—is to add to that process.

In modern life we generally suppress the child, because childishness is an affront to the particular kind of ego we admire. We prefer an educated, controlled, adapted, and largely uniform person, someone who has learned how to fit in with our social purposes, which are largely shaped by our belief in capitalism.

The crisis took place at the start of World War I, a time of widespread and intense anxiety. Whether it was a dark night is difficult to say, but there is no doubt that it was a period of extreme confusion. Jung’s biographer Gerhard Wehr refers to it as his night sea journey.

Creativity is not just about making fascinating inventions or great works of art. It has to do with shaping your life and cultivating your very soul.

If you can stop fighting your history and find workable ways of staying connected to it, you might be free to respond to new opportunities. But if you’re busy struggling with the past, you won’t be available to the present.

The French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva says, making a fine distinction, that we should find language and images that are “lucid counterdepressants rather than neutralizing antidepressants.” You want to find a way to counter your heaviness without denying it or even escaping it. You don’t want to neutralize your sadness, but you want to find ways not to succumb to it. This is a fine but crucial line to walk.

From prison, Oscar Wilde wrote, ‘I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.’ Not all great art is possessed of the darkness we are probing, but much of it is.

Later these [tears and rage] turn into exquisite stories and subtle feelings. Her language changes as she gains insight. Depth of perception often leads to beauty of expression.

You use words every day. You can find the vital words that jar you into awareness. The way you talk to a friend could be your art.

Often our language is too technical, mechanistic, medical, and psychological, but falls short of our experience. Poetic speech is more personal and more adequately and precisely names the mood.

Over time, you may tell it more effectively, and its sheer beauty will help you and connect you to the people in your life. You will find unexpected pleasure in the aesthetics of your thoughts and words, and that, too, will keep you going deeper, looking for further insights and language.

The experience of beauty is not just one of pleasantness but of the power of an image to give order and to clarify your situation.

When you listen to strong, melancholic music or contemplate a sad piece of art, you are taking your attention beyond mere sensation to the interior meaning of your mood. You are educating yourself in your emotion, so that you not only get past it ultimately, but you gain from it from having penetrated deep into its nature.

Art can take up your experience and intensify it by deliteralizing it and submitting it to your intelligence and your imagination. The arts humanize the emotion and move it toward the sublime, where it can be brought to a level of perfection.

Contrary to most modern psychological approaches, which imply that the human soul is a major problem and host to a vast range of illnesses, an aesthetic psychology senses the soul as beautiful, even in distress.

You only have to understand this basic point: Beauty nurtures the soul. Expose yourself to the beautiful, and let it do its work. It will accomplish what you could never dream of. All you have to do is trust it and be open to it.

In the presence of a self deprecating person, it is often wise to look for signs of subtle control and almost invisible force.

Expressing and not expressing anger is a complicated business. Brian Keenan tells a dramatic story of how, after being taunted by a guard named Said, he had an opportunity to shove him against a wall. But his aggression merited harsh punishment for Keenan’s companion, John. The next time he was taunted, he felt his rage, but he reacted differently: ‘Anger roared up in me and I caught it by the throat, choked it and held it back. I said nothing, I merely turned and stared at him with my blind eyes as I had at Said, then turned away. He waited for me to speak. I would not.

Many people transform their anger into self-destructiveness—drinking their lives away or becoming oblivious in drugs or working too much. They make take it out on their children, employees, or animals. They may be passive-aggressive in a number of ways—being silent, uninvolved, offering insincere love and friendship, being available for people but making them suffer for it. When anger is clean, it can accomplish a great deal for a person and a relationship; but when it is camouflaged and indirect, its impact is just the opposite.

This phrase, “flexible control,” describes the reconciliation of strength and submission. The Tao Te Ching recommends wu-wei: achieve things by not trying to achieve. But another quality helps turn masochism into flexible control—intelligence. You have to know when and how to surrender, even to whom to surrender.

The safest surrender is to give yourself to life, to trust in yourself and in the laws of nature. Surrendering to a person or an organization is more dangerous and only makes sense when it is thoughtful, somewhat cautious, and never detached from surrender to your own need.

In his powerful book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker addresses the many complications and ambiguities, as he calls them, in this process, stressing the need of any person to enter life newly cleansed and liberated. ‘The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his ‘cultural lendings’ and stand naked in the storm of life.

It’s an illusion to think that most people are normal, rational, and in control of themselves. In fact, most people lose control frequently in anger or in brief periods of unreality. Sometimes a dark night of the soul takes the form of a passing madness.

One reason why you get into trouble like this is that you trust reason too much. Human life is rarely reasonable. You may believe that intelligent, well-meaning people can resolve any conflicts, but that assumption itself arises out of a cloudy image of how things work. Insight usually means discovering the madness hidden in an apparently reasonable situation.

It would better not to look for the one and only person to blame or the ultimate explanatory tale but rather to focus on the stories as narrative. The idea is for you to discover the play you are in, not a theory that explains your life.

It helps to know who is living through you at any given moment. The less you know about it, the more it dominates and keeps you from other adventures.

Mary Shelley offers an extraordinary model for responding to a world out of control and the resulting discouragement. At the turning-point in her life she wrote in her diary, “I must change.” And she did. The change didn’t come about automatically or at will. She had to work hard at making a life of her own, crafting a presence in the world and a sense of her own character and destiny.

Temporary insanities, like those of hard loss and grief, are always potentially creative, depending on how you deal with them. The temptation always is to sink too far into self-pity and to find relief in the compassion of others. It’s important to feel the sadness, but emotion is always only a partial resolution. Grief is complete only with a shift in being, in the way you live, think, and relate to the world.

At the very least, there is a definite moralism in our contemporary approach to health. Such things may indeed be dangerous, but maybe a completely safe life is not worth living.

Virginia Woolf sets out the scope of illness in her brief essay “On Being Ill”: ‘Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness . . . it is strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Nurses especially will tell you that given two people with the same condition, one will improve and the other will fail, depending on subtle and mysterious factors that aren’t considered by medicine. Medicine doesn’t have a language for this invisible world that is implicated in illness and healing.

In a highly intelligent and sensitive book, Give Sorrow Words, psychiatrist Dorothy Judd tells the poignant story of Robert, a seven-yearold boy with leukemia, and his two years of painful treatment. In her conclusion she mentions the importance of a medical staff providing clear and honest information, so that people can decide whether agonizing treatment is worth a few more months of life. She also describes how important it is to care for the emotions of patient and family, noting that the ending of a life can be meaningful for everyone involved. Dr. Judd is clearly a doctor of the soul.

I recommend quality food, good relationships between professionals and patients, accessibility to nature, and the opportunity for patients to talk about their illness to family and professionals.

Globalization threatens to destroy what local culture remains, and one wonders if cancer, runaway cell growth, is not a mirror of runaway economic, political, and cultural ambition.

The dark night of illness sets severe limits on what you can do. It forces you to slow down and focus on the things that matter. It keeps you in one place and on your back. It prevents you from eating what you want and doing the things you are used to doing.

Jungian psychology speaks of a “split archetype,” a harmful distance between the one who suffers and the one who heals. The sufferer as well as the healer has to help heal this split. The gap can be bridged if each of us has alive within us the spirit of caretaker, friend, and healer.

She separated herself from life so that she could finally heal her soul. We have seen this theme over and over, how the dark night is fulfilled in some form of withdrawal from active life.

Remorse chips away at actions done from a place of insufficient wisdom and gives a fresh imagination to them. You discover, full of feeling, how to live your life differently. Remorse serves you. It doesn’t merely make you feel guilty. It tugs at the old way of understanding and allows a new style of thought and feeling.

It may be your fate to have, metaphorically, elephant ears, and yet, with the proper vision, you may see the beauty in your essential anomaly and understand that it comes from Heaven. You may be graced by it, whatever it is, even though it may seem to be entirely out of context. You may have to stretch your imagination to appreciate it, and yet you can base your life on it.

Many people claim to have integrated their shadow sides, but that effort is itself a work against the dark. To integrate it is to co-opt it into the light. The real task is to live in, and with, the darkness, appreciating its unredeemed value and loving its irreversible qualities. What is needed is a view of life that includes the dark.

Anne Sexton never won the immediate battle, but she boldly transmuted her suffering into poetry that will last for many generations and will help many deal creatively with their dark nights.

...new life always requires the termination of the old. Death is an appropriate image. And that is exactly what it is, an image. It doesn’t mean you are going to die, although you may feel the sadness of ending in the midst of your dark night. It means that life wants to go on differently. Real, vital life doesn’t repeat itself.

Anatole Broyard complained that when his witty and irreverent friends visited him in the hospital, they were too serious and too extravagant with their good wishes. “They looked at me with a kind of grotesque lovingness in their faces,” he says. He didn’t like the falseness in their optimism. They had become emotional literalists, fundamentalist friends. They had set aside their wit because they couldn’t deal with Broyard’s situation as well as he could.

James Hillman has observed that depression may be a special problem in a society hell-bent on happiness. But let’s examine this connection more closely. It is possible to imagine that the situations life offers may not be happy ones and yet may be the most desirable of all.

As a therapist, I often see my job not as providing options, but as educating the imagination so that solutions are visible.

It’s helpful, then, during a dark night, to constantly broaden your imagination of what is happening to you. If your only idea is that you’re depressed, you will be at the mercy of the depression industry, which will treat you as one among millions, for whom there is only one canonical and approved story.

When that inner genius shows itself in personality, way of life, values, and expression, mediocrity disappears. It is the cloud that prevents the spark from being seen.

When you discover your own spark, the god within you, many elements that you have felt are wounded will suddenly be healed.