Alchemical Transformation Through The Dark Night Of The Soul

The Darkest Nights Produce The Brightest Stars.

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Have you ever had the feeling where you just feel lost? Where you feel completely out of place, lonely and sad? Where nothing in life is making sense, and you question the very reason for your existence? Are the things that once provided you with a comfort blanket suddenly not soothing you? If this resonates with you chances are your spirit is calling you home. But before you go back, you're going to embark on the most magnificent journey and act of self-love. You are going to face your own shadow and darkness, and in doing so, you will become your personal savior and hero. This is your hero’s journey back to who you truly are.

"For a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories." - Plato

Here’s why your darkness is a gift!

Much of new age scene is blindly guiding mass numbers of people into a false light. A false sense of positivity and unearned wisdom. If we think of the great thinkers and philosophers from the past, the wisdom and knowledge they gained were through a lifetime of study and practice. Now it's delivered onto our social media wall via a meme. One of the sayings we hear all too often in the new age movement is just ‘Let it go". With many in the new age movement talking about the Dark Night as a letting go of what no longer serves you. I would encourage everyone to question these oversimplified half truth teachings.

At some point in our lives, many of us have faced trauma 'pain in isolation”. - Gabor Maté. Through this pain we often put in place internal protectors to protect our vulnerable parts from further traumatic experiences. Usually, because these parts are wounded, they are viewed as dark and demonized, but it is these very demons that have protected you and that have served you. In the dark night of the soul, it is your job to integrate these parts of your beings, not to cast them aside blindly and wishfully deceive yourself from your own essence. They are your internal alias, and they are asking for your help.

Now, this is where the journey back to self can get both challenging and exciting. An alchemist turns lead into gold, and this is the role you are going to have to play in your own inner world. The parts of you that are feeling heavy,​ dark, lonely and sad are asking to be witnessed, to be held and to be honored​ for the courageous warriors they are. They are not asking to be let go of or disgarded because they don't fit the projected spiritual way. Your humanness is the way, the authentic way, and when you embrace this within yourself, you can then embrace this within others. This is the true sincere inner work of the alchemist turning wounds into wisdom, vulnerabilities into grace, slavery into sovereignty and darkness to the light.

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“All the hurts and failures, all the wanderings, losings, dyings and forgetting were but part of the gaining of the rich material of your life. By being wounded you became vulnerable and available: by being lost, you were able to be found; by dying you learned the power of new birth; by forgetting, you gained the joy of remembering. Now I call all parts of you back, a mighty crew, seaworthy and well stocked, to set sail for new continents of spirt, shores of incredible lands where fractual waves of many people and many times arrive at last, and you know that you have, gained your birthright.” Jean Houston

Navigating the inner world in the dark

Multiplicity is part of our nature. We are not single-minded we consist of many components each with their own story and role to play within our inner world. At the core of all these part is our self, our essence and our connection to our hearts and the hearts of others.

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The above model is taken from Richard Schwartz work with The Internal Family System Model (IFS). I don’t follow one modality or teaching singly because to do so would be to bypass my own vast array and thirst for knowledge. However, this model has helped me enormously to make sense of my own inner work. I will only work with healing modalities that I have personal experience of feeling aligned with, and I am now a practitioner of this work which I blend into other teachings and modalities I’ve trained in.

If we look at the model above we have what's called firefighters, things we use to distract us from the vulnerable parts our being. I’ve often thought that some new age teachings are a collective firefighter designed to guide us away from self. What greater distraction could we create than alien races that are coming to save us, collective shifts in consciousness and ‘events’ that promise a new world and teachings that are a half-truth that sooth us into submission? On the other side of the model are managers and I also have a sense that the new age is also projecting a program of spiritual managers, that run the system as a self like part. This would be seen as the classic spiritual bypassing. In the dark night, the spiritual bypassing part is also asking for transformation and then the self steps in and becomes curious about the real purpose of this part.

So if the Dark Night of the Soul is an integration of our inner world and coming home to who we really are. How do we do it? We go in, we don't chase the external light we go inwards. We use our internal light to heal our inner world part by part till they are aligned to our hearts. Once your internal alias are onboard its then easier for the spirit to start to show itself more and we become attuned to who we truly are. Rather than working from our wounded parts we can begin to work from self. What I noticed in my own experience with the dark night was that life was never the same again. I could no longer hide from my purpose or mission. I could no longer blame others for difficult stages in my life. I became responsible for my emotional world, and as a result, many gifts and alignments followed.

It can be a lonely slow process to go through but once your spirit shines through the darkness. You’ll come to see the great power in the dark and how it has helped you embody your soul's essence. Do not run from it but embrace it as you would a child, hold it as you would a lover and study it as you would a great mystery.

'The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.' ​- Carl Jung

Be More, Be Excellent, Be You.

Ana Stasia