The dark night of the soul–An initiation into spiritual adulthood

Introduction
I was twenty-two years old when I fell in love with Spirit. I had felt the presence of this mysterious, ineffable other dimension many times throughout my childhood and teenage years, mostly during times spent in nature hiking, rock climbing, or swimming in the ocean. During these times of communion with the natural world, I remember a sometimes vague, sometimes acute sense that there was something indescribably sacred, huge, and mysterious that permeated everything in the world. I would at once feel both a great longing to know it, as well as a deep knowing that even if I didn’t understand what it is, that it most certainly is.  Like a child fascinated by things in the adult world that I did not understand, I resolved to not try to figure it out, but to simply enjoy knowing it was there. Growing up not going to church and not having “Spirit” or “God” ever come up in conversation at home, I didn’t have much encouragement to pursue my personal relationship with this mystery. Therefore, my relationship stayed at this childlike level until, at twenty-two, after two years of teaching yoga in college, I began my national certification as a yoga teacher in order to deepen my own practice and my teaching.
Sitting on my yoga mat just a few days into the teacher training it struck me—here is a setting in which I can not only reliably come in to communion with this mystery, but the people around me are also talking about having the very same experience! And, there’s a whole language and ancient philosophy to describe it! I remember going home that evening and sharing with my then-husband some of the Sanskrit words that had ignited my heart and mind. Ananda. Niyama. Kleisha. Like a schoolgirl breathlessly describing a crush on the new boy in class, I kneeled on the foot of our bed and poured out everything I had learned and experienced that day.
As my infatuation with Spirit grew over the next few months, my marriage withered. Opening myself to being in relationship with the vastness of Spirit awakened a new sense of vastness in my self. And with that expansion of the definition of myself came so many questions and doubts, including the sinking feeling that the life I was living with my husband was too small a container for this new, vast me. Though I loved my husband, I had no idea how to be committed to him and to Spirit. What I did know for sure was that it was a matter of not living fully if I didn’t commit to my relationship with Spirit.

When my husband and I divorced less than a year later, I felt like I could at least seek consolation in my relationship with Spirit, but that began to crumble, too.  Practicing yoga—my form of prayer—lost its appeal to me partially because I blamed my practice as the cause of the pain of losing my husband, and partially because yoga’s affiliation with Hinduism did not speak to me. The Sanskrit words that had once sounded so romantic now just sounded foreign and altogether not mine. I hardly practiced yoga for the next year. I so deeply wanted my connection with Spirit back, but I didn’t know how to get to it, and I began to lose trust that it was even possible—or real.
I begin this paper with this personal story of how I first connected with Spirit and with soul because, as you will see, it is a classic “dark night of the soul” story, and because it helps me to understand what has been missing in my previous papers on spiritual education, relational spirituality and holistic spiritual mentoring: the soul (Fields, 2008).  Before I go into more depth on what the soul is to me, let me first revisit my definition of Spirit. Spirit, as I spoke of above, is the life force that permeates all things of this world and also exists within a different dimension. As it is a vast mystery beyond words, I will refer to it interchangeably as Spirit, God, and Mystery. This is not intended to convey a lack of clarity of the nature of Spirit, but rather to honor both its ineffability and its universality. The word spiritual refers to anything that evokes a sense of awareness or relation to the dimension of Spirit in a person, place or thing, and spirituality refers to the acknowledgment of and conscious relationship to this dimension.
The expression of this spiritual dimension within a person, place or thing is called soul. It is the meeting place of Spirit and self, of non-physical and physical, of infinite and finite, timeless and temporal. Soul is how Spirit manifests itself in the physical world, how it inspires a sense of the sacred in everyday life. Whereas Spirit is about oneness on a spiritual level, soul is about individuality on the earthly plane (Plotkin, 2003). As Gerald May, psychotherapist and spiritual teacher says, the soul is “who a person most deeply is: the essential spiritual nature of a human being” (May, 2004, p. 42). The soul is fulfilled by the ordinary; it is interested in depth, mystery, and shadow. As well-known spiritual teacher and author Thomas Moore says, the soul “prefers relatedness to distancing” and has a “penchant for the complications of life” since “relatedness means staying in life, even when it becomes complicated and meaning and clarity are elusive” (1994, p. 27).
Moore’s quote speaks perfectly to the role of soul in relational spirituality and invites us into a deeper look at the dark night of the soul and its significance in transforming our relationship with Spirit and ultimately with each other and the natural world. In this paper it is my intention to explain what the dark night of the soul is—and is not—and how its transformative qualities relate to the initiation of spiritual adults in the context of intimate relationships and within the larger landscape of a proposed spirituality of the soul.
1. The dark night of the soul
The dark night of the soul is a passionate seeking of divine union with Spirit; the classic love story of the romance between a person and God that includes a time of isolation that is painful but that ultimately leads to increased intimacy (Peers, 2003; May, 2004).  The term was coined by Saint John of the Cross, a 16th century Spanish mystic and member of the Christian religious order of the Carmelites. Imprisoned for his role in the Carmelite reformation, John’s passionate love for God fell into question (Peers, 2003; May, 2004; Moore, 2004).  His famous poem “Dark night of the soul” recounts how, “kindled in love with yearnings” he “went forth without being observed” into the darkness of the night (Peers, 2003, p.1). John describes the dryness of his prayer and his life during this time and how he felt a lack of desire to pray, and yet how, underneath it all, there remained a simple and pervasive desire to know and to love God.
Translating John’s experience more generally to find the essential signs of a dark night of the soul, my personal story fits perfectly: a person who once found joy in prayer cannot pray, does not want to pray, and yet wants nothing more than to be with God (Stollenwerk, 2006, p. 27). Of course our union with God has not left us during this time, it just feels like it has.  Our relationship with God always exists, but during the dark night of the soul, our ego self feels isolated from Spirit (Fields, 2008) (see Appendix A).  The dark night happens in order for us to transcend our egoic understanding of our relationship with Spirit, and thus to transform a childish or adolescent relationship with God into a mature, adult relationship with God.
John Coe, the Director of the Institute for Spiritual Formation, says these three relationships mark the stages of spiritual development that he believes St. John had in mind, from spiritual child to adolescent to adult (2000, p. 294). A spiritual child loves God for pleasure’s sake. It’s a romantic sense of love—one loves God because it makes her feel good. During this stage, the person will develop strong habits of prayer and spiritual disciplines because they create joy and “spiritual zest” (Coe, 2000, p. 297). In my case, this was the time of my initial love affair with Spirit through a disciplined—and delightful—practice of prayerful yoga.
A spiritual adolescent loves God for love’s sake. Coe says this is more like a marriage in which lover and beloved recognize the truth of each other, and make a commitment based on love rather than pleasure. It is in this stage that the honeymoon with God, as it were, ends, and we begin to doubt, argue, and even lose interest in the relationship we have with God. In my experience, this came as my practice began to lose some of its luster and became boring. I went to my mat everyday, sometimes only every few days, out of a sense of obligation or habit, not out of excitement. It’s during the struggle of spiritual adolescence that we begin to enter into the dark night of the soul, a necessary step for initiation into spiritual adulthood (Moore, 2004, p. 15).
St. John divides the dark night into two corresponding phases: the dark night of the senses and the dark night of the spirit (May, 2004, p. 52). He further differentiates these two phases into their active and passive aspects, which refer to a person’s sense of whether something seems to result from their own efforts or instead comes from outside oneself (May, 2004, p. 81).  In the active night of the senses, a person finds freedom from her attachments to particular sensory gratifications through no longer finding pleasure in the “things of God” through which she had previously attempted to encounter God (May, 2004, p. 59). The active night of the spirit is about releasing attachments to rigid beliefs and ways of thinking about God. During this time, a person uses spiritual practices such as prayer and spiritual direction to focus on her relationship with God, and does “all in [her] power to void, purify, and set in darkness all that is not God” (Stollenwork, 2006, p. 28). In my personal experience, this corresponded to the time in which I grew decreasingly interested in my yoga practice as a path to relating with Spirit, thus severing from my sensory gratification of doing yoga and feeling close to God. Finding little meaning in general in the life I was leading, I took to the road for an extended rock climbing trip in the hopes of being able to find and to “pray” to God again in nature away from the philosophy and teachings of yoga.
The passive night of the senses is a continuation of the severing from attachments we have made to possessions, relationships, feelings and behaviors toward God (Stollenwork, 2006), except this time it isn’t the individual who orchestrates it. Because we tend to think that we should be in control of our spiritual lives, we tend to react to the passive night with suffering; in her isolation, a person feels like she’s done something wrong or that she’s not worthy of knowing God, when in actuality this is simply God’s way of reminding her that she isn’t in control of her spiritual life and that when she feels isolated from God, she is actually closer than ever (Stollenwork, 2006). The passive night of the spirit is a process of emptying and freeing what St. John calls the spiritual faculties—intellect, memory, and will—and liberates a person from attachment to rigid beliefs, expectations and “habitual ways of loving and behaving righteously” (Stollenwork, 2006, p. 88).
For me, the passive night was the longest part of my personal experience of the dark night. For a number of years I dove in to what is considered traditional “soul work,” by going on annual vision quests and training to be a guide (Plotkin, 2003). As I sought out the answer to the questions, “who am I?” and “what is my soul’s work in the world?” I went through a number of years when I felt like I was in a constant state of longing for closeness with God, but not able to find a connection. Here I was teaching yoga and guiding ceremony and feeling like I must be doing it all wrong because I just wasn’t feeling like Spirit was giving me much support or confirmation. Little did I know it was during this time that the Great Mystery was working on me by putting me in situations that would give me new tools and a more complete understanding of how of to relate to God. In my longing, I found consolation in the poetry of mystics like Rumi and Hafiz, and learned how to be more conversational in my attempts to relate with Spirit. In my isolation, I became angry and finally gave myself permission to rage at God during a vision quest. In my boredom with yoga, I found ecstatic dance and realized that communing with God through my body didn’t have to be as prescribed and contained as yoga.
Eventually, and I can’t even name quite when, I got out of my own way enough to have it dawn on me that I wasn’t in control of my spiritual life and that all I had to do was stop thinking I wasn’t good enough in some way or that I was separate in some way and just be present with God in all parts of my life. Not in an enlightened, transcendent way, but in a conscious, down-to-earth way. For example, I begin each day by talking with Spirit like I would with a friend or a partner about how I’m feeling and what I’m grateful for, as well as what Spirit hopes for me for that day, and I continue to do so throughout the day. I hesitate to call it praying because that word suggests to me a hierarchical relationship, whereas my conversations feel more familiar, more mutual. If I’m angry, I yell, if I’m sad I cry, if I’m grateful, I say so. And I expect God to do the same. I resonate with the concept that Jungian therapist and author Jeffrey Raff posits, that even God is “in search of Its own truth and fulfillment,” and needs human beings in order to become whole just as much as we need God to be whole (2002, p. xii).
I’m not saying that I have an exemplary relationship with God, but I am saying that I feel like my experience of the dark night has certainly inspired a different way of relating with God, one in which I have committed myself to Spirit in body, heart, and soul, and in good times and bad. As both Coe and mystic and author Evelyn Underhill state, this type of union—loving God for God’s sake—is not possible without the dark night, and is the mark of an adult relationship with God (Coe, 2000; Kari, 2008). One must go through the time of severing from attachments and expectations to see God and her self as they really are in order to come to a place of wanting nothing for her self other than God’s will (Coe, 2000; May, 2004).
Thus, the dark night of the soul is an initiation into spiritual adulthood; just as our mother’s womb held us while we became a person, the dark night is the womb that holds us as we become a soul (Moore, 2004). Therefore, a spiritual adult is a soul-full person who relates to Spirit from a soul level rather than an egoic level, someone who is willing to let go of presumed control and to let the Mystery guide them. In this way, once one has entered into a dark night of the soul, the dark night stays with them throughout the rest of their life as an ongoing process of deep transformation in which one continually “is liberated from attachments and compulsion and empowered to live and love more freely” (May, 2004, p. 4). The dark night, then, is not just a one-time event, rather a commitment to continually release control of one’s life and be in conscious relationship with Mystery. When thinking of the dark night in this way, it is helpful to remember that the darkness of the night implies nothing sinister or evil, only that “liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding” (May, 2004, p. 5). In the original Spanish poem, St. John used the word oscura, which means dark, but also translates directly as “obscured,” implying the mysteriousness and unknowingness of being in a deep and committed relationship with God (May, 2004, p. 67).
I feel it’s important to clarify that the dark night of the soul does not necessarily have to be filled with despair and struggle—simply with the release of attachments to what our relationship to Spirit is, which, though challenging, does not inherently include struggle. It does, however, have to be spiritual, as the dark night is first and foremost about our relationship with Spirit. Also, the dark night does not simply refer to a difficult time in one’s life, as some secular sources suggest (Moore, 2004). Though challenge can induce a dark night, mental, emotional and physical struggle separate from a conscious spiritual perspective is not a dark night of the soul.   Therefore, in order to harness the potential for spiritual transformation inherent in times of struggle in our lives, we must bring our relationship with Spirit and with soul into our daily life. This requires recognition of our spiritual wholeness as souls in relationship with Spirit in self, other and nature, and an honoring of the sense of spiritual isolation or doubt evoked during the dark night. The dark night of the soul, then, has the potential to ground and bind together the concepts of Spiritual Education, the map of relational spirituality, and the concept of holistic spiritual mentoring into a relationally based spirituality of the soul.
2. Soulful spirituality
As I have explained above, to be an initiated spiritual adult, one must have gone through a dark night of the soul in order to enter into the mystery, to claim his individuality, and to be in relationship with all things from a soul level. He must also realize that the dark night is “the ongoing spiritual process of our lives,” not just a one-time event. (May, 2004, p. 186). Located in the isolation component of the map of relational spirituality, the dark night is a constant, regenerative dimension of one’s relationship with Spirit, and with one’s unique personal expression in the world (Fields, 2008). It helps a person to continually answer the important, soulful question, “who am I?” and thus to find and to claim her individual gifts that she has to contribute to the world over her lifetime. In this way, the map of relational spirituality encompasses spiritual wholeness by facilitating a person’s connection to soul and to Spirit, and to individuality and oneness—without negating the spirituality of shadowy, descent-oriented soul work.
There exist great resources for soul work: twentieth century depth psychologists like Carl Jung, James Hillman, and Robert Johnson, as well as depth psychologist, ecospsychologist and author Bill Plotkin’s series of experiential, nature-based soul-initiation programs called “Soulcraft,” (Plotkin, 2003). However, their emphasis is truly on the soul rather than on the whole of spirituality, both soul and Spirit. I am proposing that we not only need the relationship with Spirit to be in place before we can make the descent toward the soul, as our acknowledgement of Spirit is necessary in order to find the individual expression of Spirit within us, but that we also must acknowledge that our soul work is ultimately about our spirituality, not our psychology.  For this type of exploration, we need a soulful spirituality.
Thomas Moore is a prolific advocate for soul-oriented spirituality. He writes that a soulful person “sees the ordinary as sacred and everyday as the primary source of religion,” and he suggests “the soul needs a spirituality that is not at odds with the everyday and the lowly…and that creates a sense of relatedness to the whole” (1992, p. 204). He argues that “we can be the curates or curators of our own souls, an idea that implies an inner priesthood and a personal religion,” but to undertake this “restoration of soul means we have to make spirituality a more serious part of everyday life,” and that we “not advocate a particular tradition, but tend the soul’s need for spiritual direction” (Moore, 2004, p. 4; Moore, 1992, p. 229).
I could not agree more wholeheartedly with Moore’s call for a soulful, relationally based spirituality, and the need to find both our personal religion and a form of spiritual direction that can tend our soul.  Through suggesting the platform principles and apron diagram of spiritual education, the map of relational spirituality, and characteristics of holistic spiritual mentoring, I have been attempting to weave together a spirituality that does such a thing: honors our individuality, is applicable experientially in daily life, and does not disregard the centrality of relationship in our lives (Fields, 2008) (see Appendices B and C). Based on the concepts explored in this paper, I believe the keystone for this lived experience of soulful spirituality that has not yet been appropriately addressed in the collective is the acceptance of the ongoing nature of the dark night of the soul and its implications on intimate relationships.
Whereas I believe Moore beautifully advocates a soulful life and the role of soul in intimate relationships, I believe he’s missing the point when he says about the dark night:
“The return to the marriage, the family, or the community is an important step in the process of transformation. You are not complete until your relationships have been cared for. Your dark night is important not only for yourself, but for those around you. They need at least a small rite of return, some signal that night has ended and new life can get underway” (2004, p. 43).
I agree that the dark night is important for those around the one experiencing it—especially her intimate partner—and that those relationships must be cared for, but implying that one can somehow go through a dark night in isolation from her loved ones and that the dark night has an end seems to be taking the secular perspective of the dark night as a challenging time in one’s life, rather than a lifelong engagement to a relationship with God characterized by mystery. So how does one use this love affair with Mystery to liberate himself to love others—simultaneously?  More specifically, if one commits to ongoing mystery and transformation in his life, how does he also commit to another person in an intimate, ongoing relationship?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that if we want a culture of initiated spiritual adults who have mature relationships with Spirit and who live out their individual soul’s purpose in daily life, for it to be in any way sustainable individually or collectively, we must be able to do so while in intimate human relationships. Learning how to be in soulful relationship with God and with an intimate partner at the same time is the heart of soulful spirituality. For this, we need to understand the dark night of the soul both as an acute and disorienting first experience of isolation from Spirit, as well as an ongoing dance with mystery—in the context of relationship. We need to grasp not just, as Moore proposes, how to apply the lessons of a dark night of the soul to understanding how relationship troubles can be a challenging initiation into intimacy, but also how to make sure that relationship troubles aren’t instigated by increasing intimacy with Spirit (Moore, 1994).
3. Conclusion and call for further research
We should not only secularize the dark night for the sake of intimate relationships, but also spiritualize relationships for the sake of soulful spirituality. What’s needed isn’t just awareness of how to apply the dark night of the soul to relationships, but also of how to apply relationships to the dark night of the soul—and not theoretically, but experientially. Though important, it isn’t enough in a spirituality of the soul, based in everyday life, to understand how times of doubt and struggle in a relationship, as in one’s relationship with God during a dark night, can increase intimacy. One must also comprehend how to enter into a conscious dance with Spirit without losing intimacy with his partner.
In beginning this paper with the personal story about my own experience with the challenge of increased engagement with Spirit on my intimate relationship, it was my hope to address how the dark night of the soul could teach us as a culture more about how to live spiritually and how to love our partner more deeply, authentically and soulfully. As I began to write the paper, however, it became apparent that I needed to first address how the dark night of the soul brings depth and ground to the map of relational spirituality as a means to developing a spirituality of the soul. In coming to the end of this paper, I return to my initial interest in intimate relationship as both a “container for the soul,” as Jung has suggested, as well as the birthplace of a spiritual child (Moore, 2004, p. 126; Fields, 2008).
I agree with Thomas Moore when he says, “commitment is a sentimental euphemism that lacks soul” (2004, p. 148). To really honor the sacred, complex, and mysterious nature of soulful relationships, one has to dismiss the notion of commitment as an obligation or allegiance that is a consignment of one’s self, and to think of it more in terms of a willingness to be present to the unfolding of one’s soul while being present to the other. Rather than speaking of “committed” soulful relationships, perhaps we should consider “engaged” relationships as the deepest form of soulful relating; engaged in the sense of participating with full attention, being present with what is.
Moving forward from here in both literature and practicum-based research calls for a holistic perspective on the spiritual promises and perils of intimate relationship. I would like to explore further the nature of intimate relationship, including the current trends of the deinstitutionalizing of marriage and the implications of the rise of marriage as an intensely personal and spiritualized “Super Relationship”  (Cherlin, 2004).  I would also like to begin to integrate the work of people such as Jung, Johnson, and Moore who espouse relationship as a place for soul work, with the work of people such as spiritual teacher and author David Deida and psychotherapist John Welwood who view relationship as a spiritual practice.  I believe that seeing relationships as spiritual and spirituality as relational is the key to creating a healthier and more sustainable society not only spiritually, but also environmentally, economically, and politically. Only through a path of integrating soul and Spirit, shadow and light, and individuality and oneness can we reach a truly whole spirituality with the potential to support a culture of spiritual, initiated adults capable of relating authentically to one another, to Spirit, and to the natural world.