Healing During Crisis | The Dark Night Of The Soul

Listen to this talk if you are going through a hard time right now—emotionally or physically suffering. The goal is to understand how we can find healing and peace during any major challenge and crisis life throws at us.

These ordeals can be a call to reconnect with our soul, see past our contrived, small selves, and a reminder of who and what we really are. This talk will look at this through two core spiritual ideas: The Dark Night of the Soul and the Tibetian teaching of "bardo."

Transcript

Dear Friends,

Welcome back to Sessions With Self.

And in this edition,

I want to talk to you about an interesting concept that you may or may not have heard before.

And that's the Dark Night of the Soul.

I want to start out by sharing a little bit of a personal story.

Recently,

I have been navigating through a frightening health emergency in which I almost lost my right eye.

The details of the situation are irrelevant,

But let's just say it was a pretty scary and trying time.

I can honestly say it's been the biggest crisis of my humble existence thus far.

After the initial shock of this happening and needing to have emergency surgery,

It has become less about my eye and more about the irreversible path it has put my soul on.

It feels like this situation is changing me,

That the old me is dead and gone.

I'm sure you can probably relate to this in your own experiences.

During the first few weeks of going through this ordeal,

I can recall asking myself,

Can I hope to survive this?

Will I be able to see beyond this crisis?

Will I recognize what the universe is calling me to understand about my life and who I really am?

Can I put my money where my mouth is and finally fully let go?

Surrender to the path before me and truly live by the notion that I am not this physical body and that I am not even my mind?

Can I even see that these questions are being put to me for reasons beyond my current conscious awareness?

These have been all the things going through my mind as I try to navigate this situation in which it feels like the walls of my life are caving in.

But my eye is not the problem per se.

Yes,

It's taking time to heal and my vision is slowly coming back,

But all of that is fixable in some sense.

The real problem I'm faced with is the state of psycho-spiritual crisis this ordeal has left me in.

And what I mean by that is any understanding I once had about my existence,

My purpose on this planet,

And the certainty of my future has vanished.

This is essentially what the dark night of the soul is all about.

So let's define it.

Let's define the dark night of the soul.

The dark night of the soul doesn't occur when you lose your job,

Get stood up by someone you were dating,

Or when some condition in your outside world doesn't meet your expectations.

It's not the day-to-day inconveniences of life.

The dark night of the soul is something else altogether.

It's the dissolution of a part of your identity that's being held onto with dear life by the ego's death grip.

It can be characterized by a destruction of who you believed yourself to be or who you desired yourself to be.

It's like what you understood as the point of your life and the path you were on is totally being thrown into chaos and obliterated.

The dark night of the soul is a never-turning-back moment that shifts your current understanding about your existence and makes most things that forever seemed important not to matter anymore.

It's when old principles about life don't make sense anymore and you're stuck waiting for new ones to arrive to help you navigate reality.

It's as if you're in a state of limbo,

Psycho-spiritually naked within reality,

Waiting for a new sense of who you are to emerge.

The dark night of the soul is heavy and it's,

Well,

Dark.

And it's this type of uncertainty about who we are in our life that creates suffering.

And when you feel you lack power over your reality,

Over the very story of identity,

You worked hard in crafting,

It's the ultimate spiritual crisis.

This is because without even the slightest sense of control over your reality,

Who the hell are you?

Think about it.

If you lost everything,

Your job,

All your money,

All your Instagram followers,

And all the people around you and in your life that make you feel special,

What remains of you?

So in my case,

If I lost my vision,

Would I be able to write that book one day,

Sail the oceans,

Travel the world,

And accomplish all the other goals and dreams I built my identity around?

And if I can't,

Then who am I?

That's a scary proposition.

These moments of losing control over your reality break you down to the studs as a human.

All sense of identity vanishes.

Everything in the physical world that you ever sought refuge in becomes obsolete.

Because when there's nothing left for you to grab onto,

For your ego to latch onto,

What other choice do you have but to let it all hang out?

There's a Tibetan term for this called bardo,

Which means intermediate state.

While this term can be used as a reference to the afterlife,

It also refers to these moments in life that greatly interrupt our normal sense of certainty and control.

It's the feeling of having the rug pulled out from under us in which we lose all desire to keep playing the game of upholding an image to the outside world.

In these moments,

Our reality transform.

We go from a being who filtered every challenge through the lens of self-preservation and our ego,

To now we are finally able to fully let go.

We no longer care what others perceive of us in our moment of fragility.

We surrender to our circumstance,

Whether that means allowing ourselves to have an emotional breakdown or being willing to lie naked on the bathroom floor,

Unable to control our bodily functions.

We are no longer driven to maintain that sense of self-identity.

And the side effect of this becomes clarity.

Our near-sighted nature about who and what we truly are vanishes,

And we start to see ourselves clearly and maybe for the first time.

Our soul comes to the forefront,

The awareness of ourselves as merely a life energy takes hold and we now have the freedom to let go.

Of everything.

Warts and all.

Our human shadow we denied for so long and worked so hard to keep buried becomes clear.

We can now see deeper and further than ever before.

And in this brief moment,

We realize all the things we can't see are nothing compared to the things we refuse to see.

This whole time,

Our near-sightedness has just been a diversion,

At least in my case it has.

The crisis with my eyes started with fixating on what I was unable to see physically in my outer world,

But that was nothing more than a pathway to expand my vision onto what is going on deep inside my inner world.

There were tiny moments during this ordeal when I experienced such glimpses of clarity.

It all came down to basic spiritual practice,

Stillness,

Going within,

Connecting with my heart and the very life energies that give me the gift of life in every moment.

So when I was in my bleakest of hours during this whole ordeal with my eye,

For a few seconds I was able to relinquish control and find solace ironically by accepting the one thing I feared the most,

Which was living my life with only one working eye.

Briefly,

I became quiet and still.

I went inside myself,

And the panic and fear left me,

And I became just a presence.

But even more so,

I became an awareness of that presence.

I threw myself into the bardo,

As the Tibetans would say,

And detached from any sense of the identity of Anthony V.

Lombardo.

But then,

A few seconds later,

The phone would ring,

And it would be the hospital telling me about something I needed to get done for the surgery,

Where I would get distracted by something in my world of self-identity,

Whether it was something with my work,

Missing deadlines on projects,

Or plans that had to be canceled.

But these tiny moments of awareness during the dark night of the soul,

During moments of crisis,

Are powerful.

And while it brings suffering,

And fear,

And pain,

It also brings with it meaning and insight to our true nature.

It becomes the epicenter of truth and wisdom,

And of pure beingness.

And it starts with stillness.

When you can become still and get beyond the storylines of your body and your mind just for a few moments,

You will connect with tiny glimmers of peace within you.

You will hear the warming echoes of your soul,

Prompting you to stand tall,

Feeding you the strength and courage you need to navigate this ordeal.

So friends,

I guess my message for you today is this.

When it feels like life is pulling the rug out from underneath you,

Allow it to become a signpost,

To become still,

Go within,

And to commit further to your spiritual path.

I truly hope with all sincerity that if you are hurting right now,

If you are battling a crisis,

I hope this message can bring you a glimmer of healing and peace that you need.

Thanks for listening.

The light in me so dearly honors the light in you.

Reviews

Oh Anthony what a profound meditation. Thank u so much for bringing such peace in just listening to your explanation of The dark night of your Soul. The light in me truly honors the light in you.

This is so wonderful.. your words are truly spoke to me ✨

This was very powerful and touching and moving. It helped to remind myself to try have some faith in moments of difficulty. Thank you so much teacher

This talk gives me hope. I will keep it close to remind me that the sun will shine again. Thank you 🙏

This so resonates with me and I thank you for sharing this very personal experience. It all becomes clear and makes sense; thank you.

Most validating, thank you so much. Three years ago my soul broke after a jagged betrayal. The rug was violently yanked from under me by someone I considered family and loved very much. Without that devastating experience, I would have never done the self reflection and peeling back decades of layers of self protection that hid me from the outside. After deep dives of 1-2 hours of focused meditations over several, several months was I able to leave the broken parts of me and welcome and embrace the me I had hidden to protect. The heartbreak I went through was the soul contract my soul had with the soul of that other person. That person was put in my life to put my through the experience so I could learn that life lesson. So, they really did me a favor and I am grateful for it...now. Through the hurt that was done to me I was able to, was forced to be on the path of self healing to allow myself to be and live how a self loving and much more fulfilling life. I took a while to find gratitute and forgiveness. Find the lessons and make the hurt work for you. Love, light and blessings to you! 🙏🌄🐾😇

You said everything so perfectly. Right now I am going through a break up and of course it feel shattering. You words came to me at the right time. Thank you so much beautiful soul. The light in me thanks you as well.