The dark night of the soul.

[IndigoSalvia]

Thank you for sharing. Did you have the spiritual awakening and then feel suicidal, as a result of an intense spiritual awakening? Or reverse? 

Dark nights of the soul are hairy beyond belief. Not to make light at all, because mine was almost 20 years long. Ugh, that's a long time in human years. And it is like a slow crawling out of a dark hole ... the darkest and deepest hole.

Everything seems to crumble away, all of what I thought I knew about myself and the world around me. The 'rules of the game' no longer held sway for me. And the harder I grasped at my 'perspective', the longer the dark night lasted.   (ha ha, I laugh now)

And as you so wisely point out, there was, within me, a hanging onto some semblance of reality (firm ground that I could stand on) that it took me a very long time to 'let go' of. (Still am.) 

I had my way of viewing the world, and then there was the world as it is. And I wanted the world to be: loving, compassionate and collaborative. And, it wasn't going to be my ideal, no matter how hard I tried to make it. So, here I see that I was making a choice and was hoping to manifest my choice. Yet, I would say this choice was of non-acceptance: I was not willing to accept that the world - those about me - wasn't a loving and cooperative place.

And, there's a paradox here that I can't quite articulate.

It was only by letting go of the way I wished the world would be; accepting what is happening within and about me, and then seeing, oh there are choices here in this new landscape. And it seems that after the crumbling down, and as one is walking out of, there is a more expansive panorama. There is more acceptance.

My words hardly capture.