“In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” Theodore Roethke

Every once in a while, things fall apart. Sometimes it’s triggered by loss: a breakup, a divorce, a death. Other times, it’s a call from within suggesting that our choices and lifestyle that follow the agenda of the outer world are no longer working. No matter how externally successful we have been, if we are not living in accord with the truth inside us, our souls will rebel. Sometimes darkness is a call to shed what has previously worked for us in our hidden agenda to be loved and take a leap to find what is really true.

Carl Jung wrote that the “Night Sea Journey” shows up as a crushing depression and anxiety but is really the soul agitating for growth, change, and a larger life. Failure, dissatisfaction, and depression are not things to be avoided, or medicated. Some part of us is dying, sometimes to a culture distracting us with sensation, arousal, and avoidance, sometimes to something not working in our lives. See this as signs of your soul awakening and telling you that there is a deeper aliveness in you that your current life and its sureties no longer can contain.

First the fall, then the recovery from the fall, both the mercy of God. - Julian of Norwich

Sometimes crisis is the challenging and gifting experience of life-development. As Joseph Campbell says, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” Sometimes we seek that dark cave. More often, we stumble into it.

Reemerging, you may find the suffering was a necessary learning path to God, a form of dark grace. Not preferring joy and suffering, finding that they are really the same thing, you can embrace it. Without suffering, we cling to our egoism attachment to the worthiness treadmill. Suffering itself is its own spiritual experience.

I’ve spent many years learning how to fix life, only to discover at the end of the day that life is not broken. There is a hidden seed of greater wholeness in everyone and everything. We serve life best when we water it and befriend it. When we listen before we act. In befriending life, we do not make things happen according to our own design. We uncover something that is already happening in us and around us and create conditions that enable it. Everything is moving toward its place of wholeness always struggling against odds. Everything has a deep dream of itself and its fulfillment. - Rabbi Rachel Naomi Remen