The Dark Night of the Soul Meaning: A Map for Spiritual Transformation

Searching for the true dark night of the soul meaning? If you’ve been trying to understand whether what you’re feeling is trauma or something more, you’re in exactly the right place.

I’ve been facilitating embodied healing and spiritual transformation for almost two decades.

Even longer than that if we count the way people have been coming to me since I was a kid telling me their deepest pain and asking me to pray for them.

Obviously, I’ve had a lot more study, training and experience since then. From broken backs to broken hearts, I’ve helped guide so many people on their unique and personal journeys transformation and healing.

At its core, the work I do is transformational and initiatory — whether it’s in INITIATE (my 1:1 coaching work) or the Goddess Church meets Pussy School of my MA membership. So, obviously, I facilitate and study about transformation all the time — both the soulish, spiritual components and the embodied, physical aspects. From fascia to fear, from pleasure to breathing, from myths to muscles, brom broken backs to broken hearts… I’m IN it. My work rests solidly on the foundation that these are interdependent, inseparable.

You can’t (really) heal the body without touching the soul. You can’t heal the spirit if you ignore the body.

Healing is an interdimensional reality that includes mystical truths running in paradox to embodied, physical laws.

They are both true.

This is why embodiment practices and nervous system healing sit at the center of everything I teach.

Transformation isn’t necessarily trauma

There are some widely accepted thoughts circling right now, all rooted in a disempowered way of relating to transformation.

This matters because transformation is always on offer because CHANGE — forms changing across to other forms — is the only constant. Said another way, transformation is always happening. One reality is always leaving. Another reality is always coming.

One of the most common misunderstandings flying around right now is relating to “all transformation as trauma.”

It is not.

Bless the Pluto in Scorpio generation for making mainstream the discussion, awareness and importance of trauma/trauma integration. It’s hard to remember the world before this knowledge existed in the bountiful complexity we have now, and I’m so grateful for that.

Is Everything Trauma Now?

AND… I’m noticing a trend where suddenly everything is trauma and everyone is traumatized.

If this is true, then no one is left to step into leadership, creativity, healing and power.

When “everything and everyone is suddenly traumatized,” we diminish the experiences and deprioritize the service of those who actually are.

Often, what’s really happening, is not trauma, it’s transformation (and the discomfort, pain and uncertainty that comes along with it).

For instance, this quote from LinkedIn I received in an email recently:

“So if you’re in it right now… losing sleep, losing savings, losing the version of yourself that used to feel anchored, listen to me: you’re not weak. You’re not dramatic. You’re not ‘taking it too personally.’ You are living through a medically, psychologically, and financially documented trauma.”

Listen, losing sleep, losing savings and saying goodbye to a chapter in which you felt the comfy certainty of yourself… can be hard, painful, and rife with grief. But things aren’t inherently traumatic just because they’re difficult, hurt and have grief. They are simply painful, hard and grieving.

This description is literally the definition of Transformation Step 1, which is The Underworld — a non-negotiable ingredient to change.

Is it uncomfortable? 100%

Is there grief? You bet.

And that is a part of the human experience, which may or may not be trauma.

Most people are positioning trauma as what happens when you don’t have “an island of absolute, complete certainty where my identity, resources, and energy stay forever anchored to how they are right now. I have secured warranties and guarantees for the foreseeable future and everything I want to happen in the world is happening and no one is upset or in pain. Everyone agrees with how I see the world and no one misunderstands my good intentions. Nothing unpleasant, violent or sad is happening.”

But this position is an imaginary fiction. It doesn’t make sense to position anything against this.

There is NO LIVING CREATURE on this planet who has this for their reality.

If this fictional scenario is our definition of what life is “supposed” to be like, then yes, I guess life will constantly be traumatic.

What’s the Difference?

The difference between trauma and transformation is in how you meet it.

This is why healing work is so important. This is why resourcing your system to hold more pleasure, awareness and strength is so important. This is why resourcing your spirit in connection to That Which is Greater Than You is so important.

When you have access to these wider capacities and supports, you can meet the transformation. When you can meet the transformation, you become a lighthouse, a powerhouse, a courageous beacon, an intimate lover, someone who feels gratitude. 

The difference between transformation and initiation?

Initiation is when you willfully cooperate with change from your place of Power.

Goddess Wisdom Maps for Transformation

Everyone loves telling the story about Inanna and the Underworld. Poor her, hanging from the meathook.

Listen, that doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. We’ve all had and will have moments in life that feel like we’re a carcass on a meathook dying a slow, dramatic death.

But Inanna, resourced from her own pleasure and hot pussy, walked up to the door of the Underworld and said: LET. ME. IN.

She was not a victim in her experience. She was the fucking Queen.

We can tell the story of poor Persephone who was abducted and taken to the Underworld by mean, bad man of Hades.

Or we can tell that sexy smutty story everyone loves where sweet baby good girl got initiated into her Queenhood through the transgressive kink of darkness, pussy and “pomegranates.”

These are your sovereign invitations. These are stories about transformation that reveal a Mystery for you to unravel: your spiritual and sexual capacity are inherently, inextricably linked to your Underworld sovereignty — this feeds your ability to meet transformation as transformation rather than trauma.

These are ancient maps for what many now call the dark night of the soul, and what mystics have long called spiritual initiation.

If everyone is traumatized, who’s being responsible?

Signs of a Spiritual Transformation

Transformation can be intense.

Transformation can be confronting.

Transformation can be unpredictable.

Transformation can look like disorder, chaos and upheaval.

Transformation can bring up your shame, fear and survival.

Are some people experiencing trauma right now? Yes, definitely.

Is that you? Maybe.

Does that mean everyone is traumatized who can’t stop doomscrolling and sleep well. Nope.

Can we get more curious about the healing opportunity our discomfort gifts us? Yes.

Can we get interested in the interstellar resourcing we can do through pleasure, pussy and Goddess so you can take what is confronting and meet it with passion and power? Obviously, I think so.

If everyone is acting like they’re traumatized… then no one is left to be a shepherd, a Queen. And your life, your family, your community, deeply desire (and probably need) the care of your Queendom.

So if you are hurting, how can you get radically devoted to your healing, your pleasure and your pussy? They all have gifts for you and want to take you on a journey where you become a loving leader — a leader whose pleasure, peace and power reigns/rains on all who come into your presence.

Identity Crisis or Spiritual Awakening?

When we heal what could be trauma (but could also be a dysregulation pattern, pain and discomfort), we meet a massive identity shifts — from maiden to mother, from child to sovereign. Rather than looking for Reality to make us feel ok all the time, you become the Sovereign who makes it her pleasure to resource and care for others from your well of deep abundance and connection to All That Is. Said differently, we stop blaming everyone else, looking for things that aren’t there (e.g. saviors and more ‘safety’) and we take responsibility for life.

The Underworld is not punishment.

It is your liberation come knocking.

And all transformation has an Underworld phase.

If we meet life as a healing journey, we learn that these pains are GIANT arrows pointing to where the treasure can be found, where Eden can sprout from Hell — that is, if we’re willing to become the Queen in Hell who goes down to get it.

I’m not saying it’s easy. It will certainly bring up things in your life that comfy-in-certainty you would prefer to avoid.

But, if Our Lady Queen of Heaven Inanna is a map for anything —

if you meet The Moment with vulnerability, pleasure, pussy and faith in the Darkness whose name is Goddess…

then you also meet a Mystery that cannot be solved, only entered…

then you enter a Story that has Resurrection as part of the narrative arc…

then you find your true Power again…

then you realize, you’re no longer afraid.

That is the dark night of the soul meaning worth remembering: a doorway you are meant to walk through.

 

Want a Map for What Comes Next?

If you’ve read this far, some part of you already senses that this season is a Doorway. Knowing that with your mind and actually living from that steadier, more resourced place, the kind that doesn’t flinch at the next wave of change, are two different things.

Every myth in this piece is pointing at the same truth: your pleasure is the doorway to your power. Inanna didn’t survive the Underworld by shutting down. She walked through it resourced by her own pussy.

EROS is my free class where I teach exactly this: how to use your erotic aliveness as resurrection power, the actual mechanism that carries you through the Underworld and back out as Queen.

Consider it a companion for the season you’re in. A little more fire, a steadier claim on your own pleasure, and a reminder that resurrection has always run through your body first.

Join EROS Class →