Psychospiritual Healing & The Dark Night

Disclaimer: Possible Triggers Pertaining Mental Illness

The content of this article will be varied, if not somewhat scattered and hopefully intriguing, informative. These are ideas of mine and no way are they meant to trigger or otherwise deleteriously affect mental well-being.

When I was sixteen I experienced an intensely horrifying nervous, psychotic breakdown. This event was followed-up by a sensory episode lasting weeks, as well as a grotesque medley of psychotic depression, severe dissociative features and anxiety, fueled by OCD w/ Pure-O form that lasted 18 months. Long before this, I always knew that I had an OCD brain, yet except for various spells and flareups in my younger years it never really bothered me. Basically, long story short - because this is not what this article is about - a seemingly terrifying and all-consuming thought had gotten stuck in my head one night in my later high school years, and within hours I was in more pain, anguish and suffering than I ever believed imaginable or survivable; essentially brain exploded and life became a constant fight against suicide by the second, until I managed to achieve some healing just before going off to university, although I would continue, and still do, to struggle and suffer from anxiety and OCD, mainly Pure-O, mild dissociation and depression.

The rest of this article will pertain mostly to the place between suffering (mental illness) and self-actualization, catalyst of all healing, a little-known grey area commonly referred to as Dark Night of the Soul and the Void. There are better and more consummate resources to discuss what these processes entail (Youtubers Christina Lopes, Jamie Munday, etc). Also, allow me to add that there were many a day and night while stuck in illness, wherein I languished over the fact that I would never exit or progress out of my protracted, seemingly perpetual pain (Brainlock is a BIG BITCH). Yet, I have, and currently am, going through that coveted threshold, as I'm writing this to you 15+ months since the start of my own process (Dark Night). Even with the bleak, dreary days that I sometimes experience, protracted energetic changes and phasic egoic suffering I lapse back into, there is more colour, joy and peace in myself than I've enjoyed in the last decade.

There is no way in a few thousand words I will sum up the paradigm shift in your life after the triggering of spiritual awakening. It is inexplicable, and within years/decades will be happening for millions I deeply, truly believe. Let it be known as well, as we as societies in Western civilization begin to differentiate egoic mind from the reality of soul (true self), it is never the "I" constantly wreaking havoc in your mindscape that will be doing the healing. As Alan Watts says, LET IT HAPPEN ON ITS OWN. The ego developed as a natural evolutionary response to danger, fear and trauma - a way for us to cope with the continuous harmful realities of the primitive world. This is deeply primal, and so it must be understood that ego is not your enemy. Without the innate ability to process our surroundings from a negative, fear-based modality we would have never survived; Christina Lopes uses an analogy of a fruitful tree and a predator lurking in the bushes opposite. You're always going to turn your attention to the potential danger, in fact this is just rational, intuitively logical. Imagine all the light that we as souls carry at the deepest level, and on Earth humans never having developed the drive or necessary mental mechanisms to survive - in the aforementioned situation, as we blissfully skipped to collect a honeycomb the tiger would have torn us to shreds whilst we admired the pretty stripes on his coat. Seems pretty silly, right? Conclusively, DON'T FIGHT THE EGO. Maybe it's a natural response to the initiation of the spiritual path and ego-death, but I would've had a much easier past 15 months if I'd comprehended this fully.

What this means, and in fact necessitates, is the purpose of peaceful practice. With the ego, when bad feelings and thoughts are dredged up, or we notice something (a behaviour, impulse or action) that we've long held in disdain, we normally create a partly subconscious intention to destroy it. Perhaps you're a very open, filterless person, and after a while of getting on a tangent in conversation, you start saying things you *don't like*, talking and projecting your volume over others, being slightly rude, et cetera. Then, feeling badly, you retreat into a shell of quietness, self-reservation, agreeability. There must be a better way, right? (In fact, there is; it's called Middle Way). Many people go on long this for quite a long while, sometimes their entire lifetime, existing with burdens, self-doubt, buried traumas, oscillating back and forth from energizer bunny to wounded animal. This is, I think, a most basic and rudimentary example to underscore the refractory nature and, exactly, the place of the ego in the grander psychological scheme. It is meant to protect you; when the world is more a place of light and love instead of trauma and darkness it will dissipate from the DNA. So, peaceful practice would be things like meditation, breathwork, exercise, yoga, hiking, time spent in nature, w/ people who light your heart, et cetera. These functions, especially the ones considered temporally novel at this point - meditation, breathwork, yoga - are where progress genuinely begins and change will start to happen at all levels. They, most notably, bring you closer to your true being and inner light, and open the doors to the universe and necessary healing for curing your cellular machine (a Dan DeLuis term) and bringing your mind into balance with your authentic self and being. There is no need to battle ego though every reason to surrender to better practice, as well as negating our lives of the things which hold us back (alcohol, drugs, pornography, wrong people, inhospitable domestics, etc). In summation, it is much less about constantly challenging, beating up on yourself, forcibly questioning and "trying" to change, and it is simply letting go of the things our minds want to make us do, practically running our conscience out the door and far from our own hands, and from there surrendering to life, how it is, and the creation and sustenance of better practice to connect us to things beyond society, ego and its frustrating limitations. You are perfect the way you are, no matter how far that is from how you "want" to be or out of touch with the deep tranquility that it is you.

I will be back to write more, much more, until then carry on - NAMASTE.