April was like a thirty-day thunderstorm that wasn’t in the forecast. The anxiety rained down and the shelter I'd built was beginning to leak. The thunder barreled through the walls and into my chest, and the lightning, full of its charge, was threatening to strike us at any time. 

There was a persistent underlying terror that surrounded me that month. Talking about it now, I feel somewhat removed from it, but at the same time, my body remembers.

The descent into darkness was marked by a consistent pattern – feel fear, meditate, feel fear, meditate, feel fear, check out because meditating isn’t working, feel guilty about checking out, meditate….and repeat. 

The more the fear and anxiety rose up, the more I fell back into old patterns that were unhealthy. The more I fell back into unhealthy patterns, the more fear arose. 

It was all a big game my ego was playing, and I knew it intellectually, but I couldn’t escape it. The anxiety was getting worse by the day, and no amount of meditation was relieving me. I had a persistent sense of dread, a tightness in my chest, and a feeling that the bottom was dropping out.

One spring morning, things came to a terrifying head.

I was on the freeway driving to our favorite grocery store, which is about an hour from our house. Yes, it's a long way. It's one of the tradeoffs of living in the woods and being miles away from civilization. I was listening to my favorite podcast, enmeshed in a story about sisters reconciling when suddenly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My windpipe began narrowing, my heart started racing - I could feel it beating in my chest, and everything began tingling. Waves of terror passed through me and I thought I was going to pass out. I began trying to take deep breaths, but that made it worse. There was a police officer on the side of the road, should I stop and get help, I thought. Do I need to go to the hospital, I thought. What should I do? How can I make this stop?

There I was, having a full-blown panic attack driving down the freeway at 70 miles an hour.

It was one of the most terrifying moments of my life. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably only a few minutes, the panic slowly began to subside. The prickly tingles wore off, my heart slowed down and my throat opened up.   

What the f*ck? Why is this happening to me? I started to think. And that thought started to get me worked up again, so I tried to distract myself. 

I turned on the radio and started belting out whatever horrible song I could find. I rolled down the window. I chewed a piece of gum. I drank some water. Desperately hoping I could make it to the store without the panic rising again.

I made it to the parking lot of the Whole Foods, parked the car, and began to cry. 

How could this happen after all these months of meditating? What was going on?

I knew I had experienced a panic attack because I had a stint in my late teens that was filled with nightly panic attacks. Each night at bedtime, they would begin, and many nights I didn’t think I was going to wake up in the morning. This went on for a few months.

But I hadn’t had a full-blown panic attack since then, almost 30 years ago. This was truly coming out of nowhere. 

The worst part was, I still had to get groceries after this, and then drive myself the hour back home. 

The shopping took my mind off things, and that went smoothly, but on the way home, on the same freeway, at 70 miles an hour, it happened again. And this time, it was worse because I couldn’t talk myself out of it. I had to call my husband so he could talk to me and distract me the rest of the way home. 

Thanks to my husband, I managed to get home safely. He met me in the garage and hugged me, and I just cried in his arms. Tears of relief that I made it home, and tears of bewilderment about what had just happened. I felt like a failure. I felt like all the months of studying and meditating were for naught. I lay down on the couch and sank into a deep sadness. 

How could this have happened to me? Why now? I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

I tried meditating. It didn’t help. I couldn’t escape the sadness and the existential ache I was experiencing. 

So, I turned on some reality TV, poured myself a glass of wine, and I checked out for the rest of the day. 

The next morning, and each morning after that throughout the month of April, I started anew - hoping it would be better. I wouldn’t get very far into the day before I realized yet again, it was not going to be better today.

The tentacles of doubt were burrowing themselves into my mind, unearthing the seeds of peace I’d so gently placed there in the preceding months. The doubts were my own hell on earth, and to list them all would be impossible. Some of them sounded a lot like the following:

-          Maybe this awakening thing is all BS.

-          Who are you to think you can be enlightened anyway, I mean who are you kidding?

-          You can’t just keep going on without some goal to aim for.

-          This is not going to work out.

-          Maybe you shouldn’t have left your job.

-          You aren’t a writer, and no one is going to care what you write.

-          People think what your doing is stupid.

-          You are a fraud.

And on, and on. The doubts created more anxiety and the balance of peace I had achieved was waning fast. As April wore on, I was spending more and more of the day feeling scared, feeling a tightness in my chest, preoccupied with the thoughts of doubt, and worried that another panic attack was just around the corner.

Until one day I had a thought that let a little light in. I started wondering, or rather hoping, that maybe what I was experiencing was a normal part of the awakening process. I mean, I couldn’t be the first person to have experienced this, right? Right?

So, I desperately began combing through my spiritual texts looking for some sign that this was normal, some light of truth to explain what was happening to me. I searched for at least a week, and then finally, on the last day of April, I picked up Michael Bernard Beckwith’s book called “Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul’s Potential.”  

The final chapter of the book is called “How to Make it Through the Night: A Luminous View of the Dark Night of the Soul.” I felt an instant sense of knowing that I had found what I was looking for. I didn’t know for sure I was experiencing a ‘dark night of the soul,’ but I didn’t have any other words for it – other than hell on earth. So, late one night, after laying awake with anxiety because the meditation wasn’t working, I began reading it. I cried through the whole thing. Tears streamed as I realized what was happening to me. 

Here's a bit from the chapter:
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“The spiritual path we’re following has become as dry as dust and clearly isn’t working.”

You may start thinking:

“Maybe God isn’t real at all, and enlightenment is just fiction. There is no inner direction in sight, and you feel completely alone. Agonizing emotions of the egoic structure convince you that you are not going to survive this hopeless state of being. That you are going to die, and if you did, it would be okay.”

“The dark night of the soul is the great spiritual catalyst that threatens to shatter the ego and a sense of self separate from the Whole. In such circumstances, all we want to know is how do we make it through the night?”

It’s a “profound purification of consciousness. Being caught between two worlds – we wonder if the spiritual benefits will even come close to outweighing the grueling pain of sticking it out.”

The dark night he was talking about was a:

“profound movement in consciousness that unravels the entanglements of the ego, experiences that literally or metaphorically bring us to our knees and take us through a seeming disintegration so that we may experience reintegration at a higher level of consciousness.”

“The dark night of the soul occurs within individuals who mean business with their spiritual practice, individuals who have made a profound commitment to evolve and awaken.”

“The dark night puts an end to your life as you know it, including those parts you would like to cling to and never have changed.”

The final passage I will share says,

“trust that it (inner knowing) recognized exactly what is needed to command forth in you authentic empowerment, unconditional love, compassion, clarity, humility, and strength. Resisting or trying to short-circuit this transformational process prevents us from reaping the fullness of its fruitage."

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All I could think as I read these passages was...THANK GOD I AM NOT GOING CRAZY!  

One thing this difficult life has gifted me with is straight-up grit. And at that moment, I decided that instead of abandoning the spiritual path and chalking it all up to a bunch of BS, I was going to stick it out. 

Underneath all the torture of the past month was the ego’s fear of death. My deepest fear was letting go of who I was. It was the fear of dying before I died by letting go of the person I had become.

The important thing that happened after reading that chapter was that I stopped resisting the dark night. I began to accept it as part of the process and recognize that it wasn’t going to kill me, well, at least not the true me. As I began to accept it, I began to get curious about what I was being called to release. That is the gift of the dark night, releasing limiting thoughts and beliefs so that we can truly embody our limitless nature.

I began asking my inner guidance, and it would take a few more weeks to unearth what I was being called to release. The unhealed wounds from the past were about to take center stage.  

Again I had hope, there was a way through, and I was going to remain on the path as long as it took to find it.

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Passages from “Spiritual Liberation: Fulfilling Your Soul’s Potential”  by Michael Bernard Beckwith.

Photo by Jordon Conner on Unsplash