The Dark Night of the Soul and the Path to Awakening

The dark night of the soul isn’t just words for me. It was a dark period of my life that stripped me of everything I thought I knew. If you’ve been through it, you know it is not poetic or romantic. It is a brutal undoing.

What I learned is that the dark night of the soul is not only a spiritual crisis. It is also a neurological storm, a psychological unraveling, and at the same time, an ancient universal passage.

For me, it began when the first taste of awakening faded. I had touched states of ecstasy where the whole universe was pure consciousness, where everything shone with a sacred glow. But the months passed, and those states slipped away. What replaced them was not peace, but a deep darkness that kept growing.

This is the part no one warns you about. When bliss comes, the ego secretly whispers, “Yes, this is mine now. This will never leave.” I started chasing the bliss. More meditation. More retreats. More teachers. Every moment I wasn’t in bliss, I felt I had failed. I became the most miserable kind of seeker: the one who has tasted nectar but keeps finding only dust in his mouth.

The dark night of the soul was not only spiritual, it was social. People around me could not understand what was happening to me. To them I was wasting my life. Some thought I had gone mad. At one point, a rumour spread that I was in rehab for drugs, when all I had done was attend a meditation retreat. The isolation cut deep. I remember walking through my town and hearing whispers. That loneliness was its own kind of dark night.

I also began to see the psychology beneath it. Old wounds I had buried were surfacing. Childhood fears, the need to be loved, the shame of not fitting in. The dark night is not only cosmic emptiness. It is the subconscious knocking on the door, demanding to be felt. I sat in my room and cried for hours.

Looking back, I see why it happened. The mind is built to cling. The brain is wired to repeat what brings reward. When bliss came, every circuit of my nervous system wanted to hold on. But reality is fluid. No state can stay forever. The dark night comes when the nervous system realises it cannot control the truth. It panics.

What made my night darker was the idea of enlightenment itself. Every glimpse I had was rejected as “not it.” Bliss wasn’t enough. Stillness wasn’t enough. Only some permanent enlightenment would do. I became blind to what was already here.

Dark Night as a Teacher

But here is something people don’t write about: the dark night is also a teacher of compassion. When you are broken and you can no longer pretend to be strong, you begin to see the silent suffering in everyone around you. You look into someone’s eyes and realise they too are carrying hidden pain. Before the dark night, I wanted to be enlightened. During it, I just wanted to understand why life hurts so much. That shift was important.

Another insight: the dark night burns away spiritual arrogance. Before it, I thought I was special. I thought I was progressing. After it, I saw that life does not care about your timelines. 

How to Overcome the Dark Night of the Soul

People often ask, “How do you get out of the dark night?” My honest answer is you don’t escape it. You let it do its work. It is not a prison. It is a fire. If you try to run, you only burn slower.

For me, the turning point was when I gave up. Truly gave up. I remember sitting one night, exhausted by years of seeking. I said to myself, “I can’t do this anymore. If enlightenment comes, let it come. If it doesn’t, I don’t care.” In that surrender, something shifted. It was simple. A sense of arriving where I had always been.

What followed was a deep ordinariness. Life was not split into “spiritual” and “worldly” anymore. Washing dishes felt the same as meditation. Talking to a friend carried the same silence as sitting in a cave. I had been looking for the extraordinary, but what I found was the simplicity of being here.

Here is another thing rarely said: the dark night may visit more than once. Life is like layers. Each time you think you have arrived, another veil might fall. And this is not a failure, it is deepening.

So if you are in the dark night, know this: you are not broken. You are being dismantled. What you think is loss is actually space being made. What feels like meaninglessness is the death of false meaning. And what seems like abandonment is life removing every crutch so that you stand on what has always been unshakable.

Common Spiritual Traps that Make It Harder

The dark night of the soul is already heavy enough. What makes it unbearable are the traps we fall into without realising. I went through most of these traps myself.

Something has gone wrong
The first mistake is thinking something has gone wrong. The seeker assumes they’ve failed. You tell yourself, “I must have done something wrong, I have lost my way.” That voice of self-blame is like throwing stones into an already sinking boat. The truth is, nothing has gone wrong. The night is part of the path. It is not punishment, it is purification.

I need those spiritual states back
The second mistake is trying to get back what you had. I remember those months after my first awakening, desperate to bring back the ecstasy. Every day I measured myself against that past high. And every day I came up short. What I did not see is that chasing the past is the surest way to blind yourself to what is here now. If bliss wants to come, it comes. If silence wants to fade, it fades. The dark night of suffering is asking you to stop clinging to memory.

Escaping the darkness
Another mistake is running away. Some try to numb it with work, distractions, or spiritual bypassing. They escape into constant activity or collect teachings like souvenirs. But the pain sits patiently. I learned that when I kept busy with music projects just to avoid being alone with myself. The dark night still caught me, and when it did, the weight was doubled.

Being isolated
The last mistake is isolation. Many of us think, “Nobody can understand this, so I’ll carry it alone.” That makes the night darker. Sharing even a little with a trusted friend or teacher can soften the edge. The night is personal, but it does not have to be lonely.

So if you are in it now, watch for these traps. The night is hard enough. Don’t make it heavier by clinging, romanticising, escaping, or blaming yourself.

How to Walk Through It

You don’t escape the dark night. You walk through it. Slowly and sometimes with your knees on the ground.

The first step is to stop fighting it. This sounds impossible when you are in the middle of despair. But fighting your inner state is like trying to wrestle a shadow. The more you resist, the stronger it feels.

The second step is to sit with your discomfort. This is not just poetic advice but practical. Find a quiet space. Close your eyes. Let the fear or emptiness show up. Don’t try to fix it. Just say inwardly, “I see you. I am here.” When I started doing this, I realised my fear was like a child pulling at my sleeve. It just wanted attention. Once I gave it space, it stopped screaming.

The third step is to take care of the body. During my dark night I often forgot to eat properly, or I punished myself with deprivation, thinking it was a form of discipline. But the body is the ground of your experience. Rest, food, exercise and walks—these do not fix the night, but they keep you strong enough to bear it. Even Buddha abandoned extreme fasting when he saw it only weakened him.

The fourth step is to bring awareness into daily life. Don’t treat life as a distraction from your spiritual process. Treat it as the very field of practice. When you stop dividing life into “spiritual” and “worldly,” the night feels less hostile.

The fifth step is honesty. Speak your truth, even if it feels messy. Honesty cuts through the ego’s games. The night thrives on secrecy. The moment you open it to the light of honesty, some of its power dissolves.

Finally, patience. This is the hardest one. You cannot rush the dark night. You cannot schedule its ending. You can only walk through, one day at a time. It ends when it ends. And when it does, you will see that it was carrying you all along.

Ancient Traditions Saw It Too

The mystics of the past were not living in comfort. They risked exile, ridicule, starvation, even death for stepping off the beaten track. And when their bliss dried up, when God felt absent, when the mind itself felt like a desert, they had no therapists to reassure them. They only had their own hearts and their own raw encounter with mystery.

St. John of the Cross: The Prison Cell
The phrase “dark night of the soul” comes from St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic. His dark night was not just spiritual; it was physical. He was imprisoned by his own religious order, locked in a tiny cell for following what he believed was God’s deeper call.

Imagine the conditions: cold stone walls, near darkness, almost no food, beaten regularly, mocked by fellow priests. He spent months in this place. He was not meditating in a cave by choice, but chained and abandoned.

And yet, it was there, in that literal darkness, that he began to write about the inner darkness. He described how the soul first loses all sweetness and comfort. Prayer feels empty, rituals meaningless. God, once felt so close, becomes utterly absent. He called it purification. His poems came out of this agony. He turned despair into poetry. For him, the dark night was not proof of God’s absence but the beginning of union.

The Buddha: Collapsing Under the Tree
The Buddha went through his own dark night. Before his enlightenment, he tried every extreme. Years of fasting, self-denial, torturing the body. He wasted away until he could touch his spine by pressing his stomach. He thought suffering would lead to awakening.

One day, sitting by the river, weak and starving, he heard a music teacher instruct his student: “If the string is too tight, it breaks. If it is too loose, it does not play.” Something clicked. The extremes had failed.

But that realisation did not instantly bring peace. He sat under the Bodhi tree and faced Mara, the embodiment of doubt, fear, and temptation. That night was his dark night. Not just a battle with outer forces, but with the inner voices of fear and doubt. Every seeker knows this voice: “You will never make it. You are wasting your life. Who do you think you are?” The Buddha faced them head-on, refusing to move.

By dawn, the voices dissolved. Awakening dawned. But it came only after sitting still through the night of darkness.

Teresa of Ávila: The Dryness of Prayer
Teresa, another Spanish mystic, described long periods when her prayers felt like dust. She would kneel for hours, yet feel no devotion or presence. For a woman who had tasted ecstasies where her heart burned with love, this dryness was unbearable.

She wrote about the “prayer of aridity.” At first, she thought it was punishment for her sins. Later, she saw it as necessary. Without dryness, the soul clings to consolation. With dryness, the soul learns to love beyond feelings.

Her story is important because not all dark nights look like dramatic despair. Some are simply long stretches of emptiness, when what once nourished you no longer works.

Rumi: The Loss of a Friend
We often forget that Rumi, the great Sufi poet, went through heartbreak before his flowering. His beloved teacher and companion, Shams of Tabriz, disappeared. Some say he was murdered. Others that he left suddenly.

Rumi was shattered. He wandered, cried, searched, and raged. His poetry was born from that grief. The absence of Shams became the presence of the divine.

For Rumi, the dark night came as a personal loss. Out of that wound poured verses that still move people centuries later: “The wound is the place where the light enters you.”