by Chris Grosso
What are its qualities? How can we know when we’ve encountered one?
“According to John, there are two primary features of the ‘dark night’ landscape. One is that all our sensual or sensory attachments dry up and fall away. For instance, say we chant kirtan—and we chant and sing ourselves into states of rhapsody and ecstasy. Our sense of individuality begins to dissolve and we merge into this great field of love, and that’s wonderful. Perhaps we’ve come to rely on that as part of our spiritual practice because it gets us to a state of bliss that looks like we’re connected to the Divine, and I’m sure that’s true. But in a dark night, that bliss doesn’t happen, and the practices that used to reliably get us there fail us, including all the spiritual books that have knocked on the doors of our hearts and opened them, or whatever our methods were. Silent meditation practice has, for me, almost always been a way to feel as though I’m resting in the arms of the sacred.
“In a dark night, those connections are no longer happening. We often think that we’re doing something wrong. Or, if we’re believers in God, we might think that God has given up on us because we think we’re so bad and fucked-up. And when we’re no longer getting the juice, we’re tempted to look for the juice elsewhere. It’s like, ‘Fuck that, this spiritual path that I’ve been on. It’s bullshit. It’s not working. I’m going to go where I know I can get the juice, and see ya later, Maharajji.’ It’s very tempting to do that, but according to John, what is happening is that the holy one is weaning us from her breasts. He uses that language. All the mystics, at some point, use the feminine and masculine interchangeably regarding the Divine. The holy one is weaning us from her breasts because we’ve grown and we’re ready; we’re ready to ‘eat the crusty bread of the robust’ and walk on our own two feet. He uses the analogy of Abraham and Sarah having a feast in honor of Isaac’s weaning, which was a tradition in biblical times because it’s a great and wondrous thing: This child is now ready to grow and be strong on his own and go forth. And they’re all having a great time eating and drinking, but Isaac is sitting in the corner screaming his head off because he wants the breast; he’s not ready to be weaned, he’s having a tantrum. That’s what we do in a ‘dark night of the soul’ experience. We throw a spiritual tantrum. We want to be fed directly. We’re not ready to stand on our own, but the holy one feels that we are ready, and it’s a great honor to enter this period of dryness, a cause for celebration, even though we don’t feel it. Most people, according to Saint John, learn through their spiritual practices to endure these states and to stay with them, to quiet down the monkey mind and allow ourselves to rest in what is, even if what is, is very empty and dry. Usually, those states will pass if we can be true to them, show up for them, breathe into them, and soften and yield. Then we can get the juice back and go on our way stronger for having been through those patches of aridity and emptiness.”
That has been my experience. I’m still not sure if all of it has been the holy one weaning me from her breast. It could be, and maybe I’m just not on enough of the other side to see it as such. What I do know is that these experiences have always been a catalyst for growth. The duality that I’ve harbored—one part of me wanting desperately to live, while another part desperately wants the pain to stop, and what better way than to die—is crazy. I’ve always been grateful that the part of me that wanted to live was always at least a tiny bit stronger than the part that wanted to die, because that difference was a light that guided me out of the depths of despair.
“The deeper, more advanced version of the ‘dark night of the soul’ experience is the conceptual dark night. John calls the first one ‘the night of sense’ and the second one ‘the night of spirit.’ The night of spirit is rare and harrowing, John tells us, because in the night of spirit—the deeper dark night—not only are we no longer feeling our connectedness to the sacred but we can no longer conceive of any spiritual reality. God, Buddha mind, the guru—none of it serves us. Even our own spiritual goals—awakening, being of service—these things lose their meaning. It’s an existential crisis times ten, times a million, because the very foundation of our souls is shaken by this encounter with meaninglessness, this lack of reality regarding everything we’ve built our lives on as spiritual beings, spiritual seekers. The world stops making sense.”
I knew what she meant. When I look back at my journals from periods of heavy drug and alcohol use, one of the main underlying themes in them was anger toward God. Let’s just say the question “Where the fuck are you, you piece of shit?!” found its way onto more than a few of those pages.
“The conceptual constructs crumble in our hands, and the whole scaffolding comes tumbling down and we sit among the wreckage. Anything that we try to employ, any conceptual constructs that we reach for, even something like the teaching of the dark night of the soul, or Ramana Maharshi’s teaching of neti neti in the Advaita Vedanta tradition, or anything that seems to vaguely resemble what we’re going through, doesn’t work. It’s all empty. This, according to John, is the most powerful transformational experience—when we are truly walking through the darkness, because we have to walk blind; our eyes have failed us.” We can’t grasp at it or stumble our way through, because our hands and feet are useless in a dark night of the soul.
Mirabai told me Saint John liked to illustrate this with the Bible story of Jonah and the whale. “Jonah was the ultimate reluctant prophet. He was the one who tried to get away from God. God said, ‘Jonah, you go to this community where the people are being abused and you tell their leader that he has to stop treating people that way.’ Jonah says, ‘Who, me? I’m out of here. I can’t do what you’re asking. It’s too much. I don’t have the skills. I’m not resourceful enough to do this work, God, and so I’m going to get away.’ He got on a ship, hoping that if he went far enough out to sea, he could escape God. And he ended up in the belly of the great fish, and he languished there. John describes the way Jonah is suspended in the darkness as being like you’re hanging, you’re in a free fall, there’s no ground—there’s pure groundlessness in a true ‘dark night of the soul’ experience.
“Somehow, if we can learn to rest in that groundlessness, not only do we no longer feel a connection with the sacred, that bliss feeling we like so much that we are maybe addicted to, and not only can we not conceive of any kind of ultimate reality or spiritual truth, but we cannot feel the ground anywhere under our feet and we cannot sense any light penetrating this state. We let ourselves down into the arms of the mystery and we rest there. Or we do whatever we can to get away from it, like Jonah did. Usually that ends up causing great suffering to ourselves and others.
“A lot of people suffered because Jonah was responsible for this great storm at sea because he was trying to get away from his true calling. Afterward, when we’re spit back up on the shore, we’re able to see what the truth of our situation is and pick ourselves up and drag ourselves to Nineveh, or whatever the place is where we’ve been called to service. We step up in our broken state and say, ‘Okay, how can I help?’ And even then Jonah did not do it skillfully. He continued to make mistakes. It’s not like after having been through a ‘dark night of the soul’ experience, after having endured a relapse and reentered, humbled and broken open, we’re now enlightened beings who can dispense our holiness to the world. We have advanced on the path for sure if we’ve done it in a conscious way and we can be of service to others, but it doesn’t guarantee that we’re going to be masterful in how we manage our lives from then on. A dark night of the soul, when we’ve truly surrendered to the darkness, absolutely does change us. It transforms us: Our hearts are expanded, and we have more capacity to love.”
We connect with this by allowing it to soften our heart, and lay aside as much of the protective armor we’ve placed over it as we can in that moment. In that place of surrender, we’ve relinquished control, if even for just a moment or two, and when we’ve let down our defenses, it’s much easier for the divinity within us to do the guiding
. When we come from this place of divinity, it’s a state of true love not bounded by any causes or conditions. We’re living from that place of unconditional love and can’t help but share it freely with others. Again, this is often a short-lived experience, because as we come back from whatever hardship we’ve endured, we get stronger again—emotionally, mentally, physically—and that makes it easier for us to take control again. But if we can access even a small part of the softness we experienced, it can forever change our capacity to love, as Mirabai said.
“All my life I’ve been madly in love with a God that I don’t believe in. I don’t think it’s about belief; it’s about experience. I still have a hard time subscribing to any kind of established belief system about ultimate reality. Everything in me bristles at the effort by theologians and ‘true believers’ to codify mystery in any way. And many of the great mystical traditions tell us that the very effort to try to define God turns God into an idol, into a thing, and robs God of Divinity. That’s the foundation of Judaism and Taoism. ‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.’ Those are the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching, which to me is one of the greatest spiritual scriptures on the planet. Most mystical traditions affirm the absolute mystery of the Divine. Yet it’s not only this transcendent, formless suchness; the immanence of the holy is available to us in our bodies. That’s why we have them. That’s why we’re incarnated, so we can experience ultimate reality, which is love in form, and celebrate it.
“How do we establish a relationship with that when we’re not even sure that there is such a thing? Particularly a personified entity called God? As you guys say in recovery, ‘Fake it ’til you make it’; that’s been a lot of my relationship with God. My name is Mirabai. I was named by Ram Dass when I was fifteen after the great sixteenth-century East Indian ecstatic poet who was madly in love with Krishna, the lord of love. And I’ve always identified with that extreme, intense bhakti quality being the path of devotion in the Hindu tradition. And even as I access in my own heart this ecstatic love-longing, which has characterized my entire spiritual path for my whole life, this yearning for union with God, with the beloved, I also have this other part of me that’s drawn to the emptiness, to the formlessness, and they are equal in my spiritual being, in my soul, and they’re not in conflict at all. I’m very comfortable holding these two seemingly contradictory spiritual stances. But when I’m in a place of need in my life, I go to the bhakti place. I go there and drink from that well of longing and love—it’s called love-longing—to resource myself so that I can bear what’s often unbearable and so that I can continue to show up in the best way.”
I loved how Mirabai shared this, because it resonated with me in regard to how I approached this book in the first place, which was to offer different voices from many traditions, all guiding us on the same path. There’s no one right or wrong way to do it. The only right way is what works for you, and as Mirabai has exemplified, that’s subject to change depending on what life experience you’re having in the moment.
“In terms of recovery work, I would err on the side of pretending that God is my beloved and is available to me, and I would cultivate that relationship of yearning and resting, yearning and resting, that are the primary qualities of the dualistic bhakti path. And that’s what I do: ‘Beloved, what the fuck? Answer my prayers.’ It starts with the beloved. It doesn’t mean that I must believe in this beloved of mine, but it’s my doorway to the numinous reality that transcends all forms. I need it. With all my heart, I need it.”
PRACTICE
Tonglen
Tonglen can help us to develop our compassion and ability to be with our own suffering, the suffering of friends and loved ones, and the suffering of the whole world. It’s worth noting that this practice can be rather heavy depending on the mental and emotional state you’re in. You’re breathing in the pain and suffering of others, and if you’re already in a dark place, this may not be the best practice to undertake during that time. If you find that you are mentally and emotionally up to Tonglen, it can be a powerful practice. It’s said that the Dalai Lama practices it every day. Here is the basic version.
• Begin by sitting in whatever meditation posture is most comfortable. Next, while focusing on your breath, imagine that you’re breathing in and out of your heart rather than your mouth or nostrils.
• Do your best to keep the in-breath and the out-breath evenly balanced. Don’t make the inhalations shorter because they’re unpleasant or allow the exhalations to linger because they feel good.
• Bring a sense of stillness and openness to the experience of pain throughout the world. Our typical reaction to suffering is to try to push it away, to distract ourselves from it any way we can. With Tonglen, we learn to stop resisting. We relax our mind and open our heart, and in the process, we cultivate a sense of trust.
• Once you’ve anchored yourself in this cycle, the visualized exchange begins: Continue breathing in the world’s pain and suffering, and breathe out an offering of peace, comfort, and relief to all beings that are experiencing pain.
• Now, on your in-breath, breathe in a textured visualization of thick, heavy, and hot black smoke or any other image that coincides for you with pain and suffering. On the out-breath, release qualities that are light and cool, visualizing something like moonlight, a gentle stream, or a soft cloud, or whatever imagery represents light and ease for you. Continue breathing in this way for a few minutes, and embody the experience.
When we do this, we’re flipping the script on the aversion we usually have toward suffering, bringing acceptance to what we’d normally reject—not just our pain and suffering but the entire world’s collective pain and dis-ease as well. Breathing out, we send an aspiration of love, compassion, and fearlessness to the world. We’re offering everyone, everywhere, every ounce of our own well-being, with the sincere desire that they may enjoy freedom from suffering.
16
THE GIFTS OF CRISIS
CONVERSATION WITH SALLY KEMPTON
Sally Kempton is someone I’d describe as a sought-after spiritual teacher as well as the author of an incredible book, Awakening Shakti, in which she gives readers a path for accessing the transformative power of the sacred feminine. When I worked with her, I found her approach to integrating meditative experiences within the framework of the practical to be life-changing. I was especially eager to hear how the energy of the Divine feminine can be accessed within the context of self-defeating behaviors and how to work with them and find true healing, but first, I’d read an article Sally wrote in Yoga Journal several years ago and I wanted to discuss her take on resilience:
The very sound of the word resilience captures its bouncy, rubbery quality. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines it as “an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change”; psychiatrist Frederick Flach describes it as “the psychological and biological strengths required to successfully master change [emphasis added].”
Resilience lets a writer like Frank McCourt turn the pain of a difficult childhood into a compassionate memoir. It carries a leader like Nelson Mandela through years of prison without letting him lose heart. It shows an injured yogini how to align her body so that her own prana can heal the pinch in her groin. Resilience is essential; without a basic supply of it, none of us would survive the accumulated losses, transitions, and heartbreaks that thread their way through even the most privileged human life.
But there also exists a deep, secret, and subtle kind of resilience that I like to call the skill of stepping beyond your edge. This kind of resilience has less to do with survival than with self-transformation. It’s the combination of attentiveness, insight, and choice that lets some people tune in to the hidden energy lurking within a crisis and use it as a catalyst for spiritual growth. Though psychologists can list the qualities that resilient people have in common—insight, empathy, humor, creativity, flexibility, the ability to calm and fo
cus the mind—this deeper resilience transcends personality traits.1
That seemed to me like as good a place to start as any. How do we find that resilience to bounce back during the difficult times in our lives?
Sally believes that resilience is something we develop throughout our lives—it’s not instantaneous. What I found fascinating was that she saw resilience in our most tender of places: our vulnerability. “Everybody is vulnerable. Everybody is screwed up. Everybody is recovering from something. Everybody is addicted to one thing or another. Every one of us is subject to having everything we’ve relied on taken away. We need to be able to say ‘Okay, I’m a vulnerable human being. My mind is subject to the same pain and despair and confusion as any human being’s. So let me just admit my vulnerability.’ From that place of recognizing our humanity, we can begin to develop what I consider real resilience: the ability to take one step and then another step and then another step toward a new way of being. For true resilience, we need to avoid putting on new armor, which means that we stop trying to escape from life’s natural pain.
“If we keep returning to the heart and we keep returning to the vulnerable self, we discover the amazing miracle of vulnerability. It’s the doorway into the sacred essence of ourselves. We find God inside ourselves by entering through the doorway of our vulnerability. Of course, there are lots of qualities that make us resilient. One of them is the ability to keep on truckin’, to keep on doing it, even when we’re knocked on our ass and we don’t want to get out of bed. At some point, we must get out of bed. It’s the ability to be strong without being brittle, without being masked, without being armored that is real resilience. It’s very hard to find our deep strength, our unshakable strength, unless we’ve been through losses, unless we allow ourselves to be vulnerable.”