The Dark Night of the Soul Unwrapped
11. "I hadn't realised that it wasn't just me going through it." With Paul Currie
After fifteen years of disciplined meditation and spiritual seeking, Paul hit a brick wall. He got ME/CFS, lost his job, his ideas about spirituality crumbled, and he lost interest in all the teachings he had tried so assiduously to follow. With no role in life, and no sense of direction, he felt like he was falling into a bottomless pit. Occasionally, a deeper sense of peace came out of nowhere, but he doubted himself, calling himself crazy. Eventually, after several years, he found himself ready to have a role in the world again.
Amongst other things, Paul and I talk about the impossibility of “achieving” surrender; putting on a brave face and trying not to feel our feelings; the myth of enlightenment; and how therapeutic and spiritual interventions frequently feel like coercion or violation during the dark night. We also discuss drinking the "meditation Kool-Aid", and the blind alley of trying to be a detached witness to our experience. We run with Paul’s metaphor of Sisyphus endlessly rolling the boulder up the hill; we ponder what we’d say to our younger selves; we wonder at how the dark night stretched our capacity to be with ourselves; and we mull over the paradox of being grateful for having suffered.
Paul Currie worked as an actor as a young adult, before eventually becoming disillusioned and unfulfilled by performance and deciding to embark on a spiritual search. In his mid thirties he experienced a dark night of the soul process during which everything seemed to fall apart, especially all of his notions of becoming a spiritual person or an enlightened person. Following this experience he trained as a counsellor and psychotherapist and now dedicates his time to being with people experiencing challenging and difficult states.
Fiona Robertson is the author of The Dark Night of the Soul: A Journey from Absence to Presence, and Eve Was a Realist: Poems for the Untamed Heart. She works one to one with people who are going through a dark night or spiritual emergency, accompanying them in this challenging terrain as they rediscover and deepen into their real selves. She also offers a monthly dark night gathering group, and occasional workshops and a reflective space for therapists and counsellors.
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Music by James Waring / Design by Adam McKillop / Artwork by Stefan Armoneit