Dark Night of the Soul and a Bag of Potato Chips
It’s 4:30pm and I’m standing with a bag in my right hand putting one chip after the other in my mouth with my left while I watch another episode of the original Charmed series and move back and forth on my feet. For the last year and a half, I have been going through what could be called by a number of names, but we can try on a few here: ego death, reality dissolution, awakening and dying at the same time, a dark night of the soul.
It started on my birthday, when suddenly it felt like there was a tear in the fabric of reality around me. I could feel something inside of me break and I knew that I couldn’t properly explain what was happening because there was nothing I could reference in this reality to explain it. A couple months later, I was so deep in the dissolving process and did not know what was happening. All I knew was that I wanted to die. I had to disconnect from everyone and everything I knew, and be by myself to be alone for, what I thought at the time was only going to be, a week or so.
A year and a half later, I am still in this. It keeps changing, rapidly, but my health – my body, my wellness – has been deeply impacted. How could it not? I believed I was dying. I felt myself dying. I was dying. I think I still am. Of course my health has been impacted. Oddly enough, every book I picked up on spiritual or kundalini awakening, or spiritual emergency, or dark night of the soul gave generic advice about getting enough sleep, staying hydrated, exercising, and eating well, without any mention of how this very well may not be possible for some. Tell me, when you can hardly function and you feel like you are dying, do you think this is always feasible? Getting enough sleep – when your whole self is dissolving – are you kidding me?
Will is not always what it seems. Control and discipline could come at the expense of what you really need – perhaps some semblance of comfort while you are taking on the karma of thousands of people, perhaps, or your whole ancestral line is being processed, perhaps, or you are moving from denser to lighter by transmutation, perhaps, or perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps you just… can’t. And you have to play out whatever your insides are telling you you need, or just focus on handling whatever is happening in that moment, because even what you think is some detrimental coping mechanism or side effect of what’s happening is a vital part of this crazy process.
I reached strange levels of being unable to cope, but not in a typical way of being unable to cope. As my body was vibrating at night and my consciousness flooded with random memories, an awareness that absolutely nothing is real, that everything is simply remembering, and experiencing the patterns of humanity in my own body, to name a few, all I had sometimes was something tasty to eat. And so I actually coped well. I can see that I am incredibly strong to have survived this.
I had a torturous knowing that I am here to do something, but no access to what it is, and after spending my whole life trying to pick something to do and be, I knew that I couldn’t try to find it or just pick something, again. I had to just… stop. And wait. And wait. And go through this, and hope that someday something will flow from inside of, or through, me, out into this world.
In the meantime, I have hours in nature, at the base of a tree with a lizard at foot and the hummingbirds overhead, or in a hidden cove overlooking the ocean, and I have… potato chips.
