J. Press: Dark Night of the Soul (2018)

Am 19. Oktober 2018 schrieb Joshua Press in The Apeiron Blog einen Beitrag zum Thema Dark Night of the Soul: Understanding Amidst the Absence of Meaning. Den Beitrag finde ich empfehlenswert. Hier nur ein kleiner Ausschnitt:

You can put off the dark night of the soul in a world that can cater to your every sense with addictive pleasure, or engage in over-analysis, but the beginning of a way out of this dreary underworld is to be conscious where you were once naïve, as well as letting go of the old parts of you that were conditioned, assumed, or habitual that really isn’t in alignment with who you are. This usually must be accompanied by personal realization that can only come through contemplation, meditation, and relaxation.

Proper contemplation must occur in the context of radical honesty. You can no longer lie to yourself about how you feel or tell yourself how you should feel; meditation helps with the distractions and illusions of the mind; relaxation is required because tension will not reveal how you feel, only that you are refusing to feel.

Relaxation will allow openness and surrender — without these things the pressure of trying to figure everything out simply with tireless thought can easily burn you out, make you feel even more hopeless and fill you up with a sense of dread and overwhelm.

The dark night of the soul can convince you that it’s just because you aren’t doing enough. Your peers certainly might enforce this idea. They don’t understand that there are feelings you need to feel and hang-ups you need to overcome in order to be functional again. Whipping yourself into submission won’t work as the mental pressure you are already under will fast lead to burnout. One thing to remember here is that for now, you don’t need to ‘be more’, you need to ‘be’ more. You need to be able to switch off from everything external and come back to the basic experience of you being alive in the present moment.