43. "You're like the goo in the cocoon right now." With Carmen Lau

Carmen’s dark night began after a significant spiritual shift. After a period of ecstasy, grief, and the dissolution of her sense of self, there was “a big readjustment process” during which she had “the embodied experience” of all the psychological content that hadn’t been felt at the time. She spent months journalling, “grappling with reality and what is,” seeing her defences and delusions, and feeling rage, grief and primal fear. Now, “nothing looks the way it used to look.”

Amongst many other things, we talk about riding the storms on a flimsy raft; letting our hearts break all the way; being shredded; and dying many times over. We touch on having the insides of our psyches rearranged; having to give up everything we knew in order to get through the gates; being a hermit; and opening up a gap where the light can come in. We discuss grieving the loss of our innocence, and how innocence, ignorance and naivete shield us; working through the psychological knots that previously contorted us; and becoming comfortable with awkwardness. We also mention having “an increased capacity to hold paradoxical emotions”; seeing god but also your demons; and the “striking aliveness that comes from living unarmoured.”

Carmen Lau is a San Francisco–based writer exploring meditation, consciousness, and the inner life. She has practiced meditation for a decade, including periods of intensive practice and profound shifts in experience. Her writing on advanced meditation has recently appeared in Asterisk Magazine. Her article on the dark night of the soul is on Substack.

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 for therapists and counsellors.

Connect with Fiona

Mentions

Carmen mentions The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector.

She also mentions the Buddhist conception of the six realms of Samsara, which includes the realm of hungry ghosts, which was not mentioned in the episode. More details can be found here.

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Music by James Waring / Design by Adam McKillop / Artwork by Stefan Armoneit