Uncovering Divine Femininity: The Dark Night of the Soul | Part 2
“No one knows what it has taken for you to arrive here. Home, with yourself. No one knows what you have had to sacrifice or let go of for you to thrive the way you do. No one knows the tears you have cried or the nights you have wrapped yourself in a lonely that was sometimes terrifying, sometimes comforting. Honor yourself. Honor all of your heartbreaks and all of your triumphs. Honor all of your wounds and all of your victories Because you have carried yourself so far. Honor that.”
-unknown
Yesterday I shared how true unconditional love for others and yourself can lead to healing and wholeness.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that before self love becomes a liberation, it will be a burden.
This work is not for the faint of heart. Eighteen months ago, once I realized I needed to release my masculine self in order to be returned to my true self, a whole, incorporated, soul, I had to walk through a darkness like I had never known.
Because in order to return to who you were made to be, you have to walk back through all the shit you’ve experienced in this life.
You journey into the darkest parts of yourself, facing every demon, asking why you are the way you are, why you choose the things you choose, do the things you do, numb the way you numb and avoid what you avoid. You will feel completely untethered. Unsecure. Unsafe. If you’re learning how to stop self-protecting, you leave yourself feeling vulnerable and open to attack.
These are not fun feelings. They do not feel good. And for many of us, they’re totally unfamiliar.
You may have to work through anger towards people who hurt you. That anger may turn toward yourself when you realize that you called in those experiences in order to get yourself to a breaking point where you finally learn how to go through life in a new way.
You will have anger towards those who neglected you before you come to the realization that you neglect yourself.
You will be in rage over those who abandoned you before you are self aware to see all the ways you self abandoned.
You will feel sad for the child inside you for the ways you were treated poorly yet didn’t have the words to ask for better treatment before you realize you still do this today through people pleasing even though today you do have the language to ask for better treatment. You’ll realize it’s not that you need better treatment from others; you need to treat yourself better. You will be angry at yourself for what you have allowed.
You will experience immense grief for lost time. You will beat yourself up for not seeing the truth sooner. You will feel like you’ve messed up in ways you can never recover.
You’ll feel whiplash from the startling contrast of going from wanting everyone to like you and approve of you to the strangling necessity to push– people, events, habits, limiting beliefs– out of your life because you are suddenly suffocated by the awareness that there is no room for them and they cannot have any more of your precious oxygen.
And even while that will feel liberating, you will also experience the loneliness that comes from isolation because the isolation is what accompanies self growth. In fact, self growth requires it.
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You will cut things out like a ruthless editor. This feels uneasy and wobbly at first. You’ll worry you’ve made a mistake. You’ll second guess your inner knowing. Every time you feel this fear, take it as a sign that you’re on the right track. Keep trusting your intuition. That’s the voice of your Divine Feminine.
You are so used to having your eyes shut. You’d rather have your eyes shut! But they’ve now been pried open. As much as you want to shut them, you can’t. They won’t shut. And even if your eyes could close, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not about what you see. It’s about what you know. Once you begin to remember the voice of love that sung you into life, everything else sounds like a siren’s song. And you realize that, in service to that love, you’re willing to tear down everything you’ve built because you’ve realized those walls aren’t just keeping the enemy out, they’re keeping you in. And you’re tired of being a prisoner to yourself.
I remember when I gave my Ted Talk, my whole focus was on growth through darkness. I figured, I’ve been through the darkest moments of my life now, and I’m ready to share what it takes to get through it.
I had no idea that I was about to embark on what can only be described as a Dark Night of the Soul.
That’s what this season looked like for me, when I first realized that to become who I was made to be, I needed to undo everything I’d spent the first 40 years of my life building.
The Dark Night of the Soul started when I finally recognized my soul. It was like meeting someone from a dream, or a memory I thought was a dream.
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It was immediate. It was anointing. I felt the truth and woke up from my sleepwalking. And just as soon as I felt the relief of that homecoming, I just felt like everything I knew was a lie. I realized I had been conditioned to perform, achieve, to seek external things.
That I had been comforted with the promise that achievements would bring success which would bring happiness. That having a degree would guarantee the good job which would guarantee the money that would guarantee that success. That getting married and having kids and a home would lead to happiness.
More security. More success. More. I truly believed that once I did all the things, the retirement account, the life insurance policy, the savings account, that the happiness would come. Once we get them, we are worthy of love.
I’d eventually realize the freedom and true joy that comes with realizing that I was worthy all along, created in love and for love, but first was this explicit grief that came from realizing that all the things I’d been told would make me happy didn’t fulfill me. I had achievement without happiness. I did the work and still felt vulnerable to loss. This powerlessness, this realization that everything promised to protect and provide meant less than nothing.
Despite all the dark seasons in my life, I had never experienced depression, but in late January and into February 2022, I felt depression like I didn’t know existed. I questioned everything: my life, the people in my life, my existence, God. I was waking up to the fact that our culture is built around dysfunction and how we’ve inherited limiting beliefs and generational traumas from our family systems, from society, from our environments. It was horrifying to face my own shadow, my core beliefs, my conditioned patterns, my internal shame, my trauma, all while realizing I didn’t trust the value system society had given me.
In darkness, even your thoughts can feel so loud.
So I began the process of turning the volume all the way down on the noise of the outside world. And once I began unplugging and disconnecting from what I had known and believed, I could begin the process of quietly going within, where truth was waiting for me.
And once I saw the truth and knew it for what it was, I could take my old life, tear it down, set a match to it, watch it burn. And then slowly begin a new life with clearer purpose, deeper connections, self awareness, compassion for myself and others, empathy, and Divine Love.
I wasn’t building something new. I was returning to something true.
But in order to get there, it felt like parts of me and parts of my life were crumbling away.
Because overnight, without any warning, I saw my life, my relationships, myself, and the entire world around me through a completely different lens.
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I felt deeply called to make major life changes, but I didn’t know exactly why.
I no longer resonated with things or people I used to. I could no longer watch the television shows I thought I enjoyed. I’ve always been a go-getter and suddenly, overnight, I wanted to be in bed all the time. I was surrounded by some amazing people, but I had zero desire to be social. I had no desire to work because work didn’t feel “real” to me anymore.
I was either taking care of the bare necessities, sleeping, or I’d find myself, thought or intention, with my fingers typing in the google search bar, leading me toward spiritual teaching and information about awakening.
I felt like I was in The Truman Show. Like everything I had ever been told was a lie, and that everyone around me still believed the lie. I know now this isn’t true, but I felt like I was the only one that was having these feelings, thoughts, experiences. I thought I knew what it meant to feel alone. But this truly showed me. No one I knew was experiencing what I was experiencing.
Which was the way it had to be.
This was a road I knew I had to take alone. No friends. No family. No partner. Just me and God. And it was scary as hell.
My spiritual awakening led to the biggest growth and transformation of my life, because it made me realize that I do not have to experience life the way I have been told to.
When you stop allowing yourself to be a victim, you realize that you are only beholden to yourself. You can genuinely sink deep inside yourself and listen to your own knowing. You can recognize that all our paths are uniquely different and trust that the way you’re made is unique, so the way the Creator speaks to you will be unique as well. You realize you don’t need anyone else to understand or approve, because you trust the still, small voice inside of you.
If you’re ready to come home to yourself but you’re scared of the Dark Night of the Soul, I want to encourage you that we don’t grow by avoiding things that trigger us. We don’t grow by carpet sweeping our insecurities. We grow by self witnessing. We grow by becoming self aware.
Two questions I would often ask myself were:
“What do I believe is true about this?” and
“Why do I feel shame around this?”
Self curiosity always leads to growth.
So as I waded through these uncharted waters and learned to listen more to my own knowing than the world’s messages, I eventually reached a point where I simply could not pretend anymore. The need to be 100% myself was heavier than what anyone thought of me. The absolute only thing that could lift that weight off of my shoulders was to stop pretending and return to my true self. I’d rather lose people being me than gain people by pretending to be someone else. And this is when my life truly began…
And here’s the thing…once you’ve seen the truth, you can never unsee it. Once you reach that depth, you will no longer be able to wade in the shallow. Because once you’ve awakened you know with every cell of your being that mere moments in the abyss hold more intimacy than years on the surface. And once you become conscious of that, there is no going back to sleep. Never again.
This is why only the truest soul connections will do.
And if they aren’t available at the time, you choose solitude. You are simply incapable of faking connection. This is when you are filled with clarity. This is when you decide and take action to no longer be in relationships that cause drama, stress, or anxiety and instead ONLY accept true authentic love connection and passion.
Preserving my Divine energy became my highest priority. Not because I can’t be bothered by other people, but because I want to remain in connection with my truest self. I worked hard to find her again, and I’m not giving her up easily.
And with this means saying goodbye to parts of my old life. Maybe activities, conversations, even people. At some point I had to accept that I can love someone AND no longer be interested in the level of life they offer me. And because of that, I have to move on. It’s not my job to fix anyone. It’s not my job to ask anyone to heal or change. I simply need to take care of me.
After 18 months of as much solitude as I can get as a mom of three, it takes a lot for me to risk my energy to let someone in. My life alone is beautiful. I meditate a lot. I listen to high frequency music. I study energy. I want my best life.
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So that means that when I let you in, it’s not because I need you. Honestly, I stopped needing people a long time ago. If I let you in it’s because I want you. I don’t need a thing from you. I want YOU. And that is the purest love of all. No conditions.
Wholeness is knowing you don’t need anyone to complete you. Because you have balance and harmony and Divine Love inside you, complete unto yourself. Becoming whole within yourself will also attract wholeness to you. Like energy attracts like energy.
When it comes to relationships, I don’t need my ego stroked. I want my soul caressed.
There is a deep, healthy power that becomes available to us when we’re less dependent on other people or external things to feel worthy and whole. It’s the same sort of power that one has in a negotiation when they’re willing to walk away.
When you’re less dependent on something or someone else for your self worth, you can engage with people and things from a place of spaciousness and love, rather than constriction and fear.
It feels counterintuitive to state our own value, either personally or professionally. That's because we're brought up to look outside of ourselves for validation. Once we look inward for approval and start to trust in our own worth, we can stop auditioning for other people's approval and start confidently stating our value to the world.
And here is something truly beautiful. While the Dark Night of the Soul is truly a lonely time, you do get comfortable with being alone.
Those who are comfortable being alone can often love so deeply, so purely because they are not sharing to receive, but simply giving.
When we learn to access and acknowledge our wellspring of love within, we know we can never be without love. It is ever-present, omnipresent, and resides in the depths of our being. Whenever we return to it, we see ourselves as whole, blissful souls who naturally operate from this higher state of awareness.
In the next blog, I share what this kind of love does, how it led to growth and flourishing.
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If you’ve read other posts in this series, you know that about a year into my 18 month return to the Divine Feminine, I had a breakdown. And I thought, “okay, this is officially rock bottom.” I had called in experiences that left me with only two choices: to break down and heal repeated cycles of hurt, or to just stay broken. I wanted to be broken down so that I could then be restored. And I was.
But first, I spent a couple of days on the floor weeping, and I remember feeling despair like I’d never known. My immediate reaction was the one I’d relied on over and over again throughout my life– even though I had worked hard for a year to uncover my Divine Feminine, but in this moment of despair, I wanted my Wounded Masculine energy back.
I wanted to put up walls and tell myself the other person is the problem.
It’s easier to do that.