The Dark Night of the Soul Unwrapped

Li’s first dark night began when a relationship suddenly ended, and they found themself beset by heartbreak, their survival strategies stripped. Some time later, an abusive intimate relationship took Li even deeper in, splitting them open in what they describe as “a total unravelling of the wounded me.” They started to feel all the fear – and other emotions – that they’d been masking, denying, avo...

Mike recently completely his PhD on the empirical evidence for interventions in spiritual crisis. Always interested in myth, magic, and mysticism, he has extensively studied religious and spiritual phenomena through the lens of transpersonal psychology. His research brings much-needed academic attention to an experience so often overlooked by both the spiritual and therapeutic worlds, and is deepl...

Hany’s dark night began in earnest in his forties, although he’d been aware of feeling different since he was eight. As a child, he’d tried to express to the adults around him what he was experiencing, but it wasn’t until a therapist suggested many years later that he was in a dark night that he began to understand what might have been happening throughout his life. After going through countless r...

Following on from our first conversation, Jessica and I delve into the moment she first heard the term ‘spiritual bypassing’ and realised that’s what she’d been doing, and we explore the rejection or exclusion of the body which is central to spiritual bypassing. Based on our childhood experiences, we touch into cPTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder) and the extent to which many of the teac...

Jessica’s dark night began a few years after she became immersed in the teachings of self-negating nonduality as a way to silence her ruminating mind and disappear her intense emotional suffering. Initially, she experienced the dissolution of her sense of self described by the Neo Advaita gurus, and felt that she’d found the magic wand that would erase her, leaving only boundlessness. Gradually, h...

After many years of inner healing and therapy work, an inner knowing came clearly to Helen; “I have to keep my heart open, no matter what.” Recognising that she had been living in her head, disconnected from her heart, she took the risk of speaking what was in her heart. Doing so triggered a profound energetic and emotional reaction. It was as if she was looking over the edge of a cliff with no op...

Following on from our first conversation, Julianne describes how things began to change when she came to a kind of acceptance of the limitations of her physical health. We discuss the difference between the idea of surrendering, and the energetics of being brought to an actual surrender. Our conversation also covers how she sought order in the outer world as a way to control the chaos of her inner...

*Please note that in the first few moments of this episode Julianne mentions the sudden death of a child. If you'd prefer not to listen to this section, skip to 01.15. Julianne’s dark night began with a tragedy, and spiralled when a mystery illness took hold. She lost her job and her home, and had brain fog so bad there were times she couldn’t work out how to feed herself. Previously focused on a...

Welcome to The Dark Night of the Soul Unwrapped, a podcast for anyone who is going through or curious about spiritual emergency, existential crisis, or the dark night of the soul. My guests and I share our experiences of being in - and emerging out of - this lonely and sometimes terrifying terrain, without glossing over the realities. We discuss - amongst many other things - how it relates to trau...