Acceptance is the key to Exit Hell / Dark Night of the Soul
Navigating Dark Night of the Soul. Genuine acceptance ‘of the unacceptable’ heals all wounds (and is the doorway out of the hell realm)
“I think I know how to navigate the Dark Night of the Soul”
I see it as a hell dimension – the ‘hell on earth’ – a hellish realm, that ‘everything that worked for you – no longer works for you’; every advice, thought, positive thing – tool, anything that you’ve ever used before in your life no longer works.
Nothing makes you happy. Everything leaves you in doubt, fear, and ‘wrongness’. And you don’t know what to believe anymore, and you can’t trust yourself and you can’t trust anyone else – and noone understands what you’re going through, it’s agony.
I think, even without knowing it, that apart from using ‘new tools’ that I’ve never used before, that you have to accept this is your life now – for eternity.
That until you accept this newness of however you got there – until you accept that life is never going to be the same, that you can never go back, that you don’t know your way forward, until you accept that you don’t know how to get yourself out of hell. That you have absolutely no idea and this could be your life for eternity, that life may never get better than this.
Once you accept it completely. Then, the exit door opens, it’s just like magic.
And it can’t be “I’m just accepting this so that everything gets better”. By ‘accepting it… everything gets better’.
Funny little paradox.
I don’t know if it’s as easy as that, as far as… it’s not easy anyway – you “can’t accept it” – that’s the whole point. You can’t accept it. You can’t accept what’s happened, you can’t accept your new normal, you won’t accept it, you refuse to accept it.
You have no idea how you got there in that you ‘knew’ in yourself when you were going through things that you were doing ‘right’, you were following your own conscience. You were following what felt true to you at the time given the information you had, and then you end up in hell and you’re like “How did I get here? I don’t want to be here! How do I get out? What happened? How did it go so wrong?” blah blah blah x a million different ways of saying the same thing “I can’t accept this”.
And now you’re in this hell, and everybody else can’t see. They think it’s normal depression (and depression is hard enough – depression is a kind of hell too). But Dark Night of the Soul is when – you can’t get out. Dark Night of the Soul is every fear, every shadow, every undealt with thing inside you, everything that has ever been suppressed, everything comes up”. It’s just a definition, it’s not like “oh, dark night of the soul’ – it’s a definition of all that encumbers – that nothing works, and having to accept something that you can’t accept, and you keep trying to ‘fix it’ – but you can’t fix it, and everything about your identity – your whole identity has to be adjusted – everything you know about you is forever changed, every cell is changed.
I never knew this place existed. I say this place but it’s a metaphor. I didn’t think this place existed especially after I had so much that I could offer from my ‘life of depression’ before and I never thought – I didn’t know what Dark Night of the Soul was until I experienced it. It’s hell.
And you have to go through it alone because noone except what you are going through – noone except you knows what’s going on in your mind, noone understands, not even you.
And I think that life is better now.
I didn’t consciously go “I accept this forever”, but unconsciously I have accepted that ‘ok – this is my new normal forever’, and then, what I mean by the exit door opening is.. that the exit doors opened to realizing ‘oh hang on..’ like all of a sudden, I saw that it was good thing that I no longer carried around pain, instead of going ‘where’s my pain? I no longer feel compassion, I no longer feel my heart, I no longer care – what’s going on’. That’s once I accepted this is it, and not in a miserable way.. but ‘ok, this is how I’m going to have to navigate life’ and accepted it unconsciously, then I started to see that the pain no longer served me, I got to have a reset of all my beliefs, I got to work on all my past traumas which I never would of done and complete lots of things from the past, that I actually do feel compassion for people, and I do understand what people are going through and I do have this more expanded awareness of different viewpoints. I am going through life with a much better emotional body because it’s no longer carrying around 40 years of undealt with trauma. I am going through life a lot more stable, just seeing the benefits of where I’m at – I don’t know how to describe it. Before I accepted it, I couldn’t accept it. Even though I knew I had to accept it, not through anyone else telling me, inside I knew. But I kept on trying to find a way out, I kept on trying to find a way where I didn’t have to accept it.
But then once you accept it as your new eternal, like, for eternity, this is you, this is now your life, this is how it is. Then, the exit door opened, and I could step out of hell.. it was just like that. Some kind of ‘go to sleep one night, wake up the next day’ and all of a sudden, you’re navigating reality through this newness of who you are, and realizing hang-on, it’s actually serving me a lot better, and then I could take on people’s views with more discernment without just taking it on, I could see different sides, seeing it all as ‘thoughts/ideas/people sharing their experiences’ and you taking on what serves, what resonates, and what feels like from your own conscience, following your own inner truth, following your own sense of what’s right’. Hard to describe, but just driving along thinking these things. Randomly thinking that we are unique, diverse, ‘collections of thoughts’, coming together to share our ‘unique collection of thoughts’ and we don’t have to be in agreement. In fact it’s part of it. It’s not about making everyone fit into one box for you to be happy, it’s about accepting that each of us has wisdom.
It’s like religion that has been passed down for thousands of years. There is some wisdom in each of them that has ‘stood the test of time’. That helps people, that is wise. That is available for people to draw upon. There are obviously truths in there that help people navigate life.
Even though the Tao really helped me through my Dark Night – something that I’d never heard of before. It was just lots of benevolent wisdom and facing myself. Even though it helped me it’s not like this ‘one truth’ for me, it’s just like ‘wise words from a wise source’. Wise words when noone else was providing wise words and when I didn’t trust my own mind.
I think that’s why some people go to any religion – they find in it the wisdom in it.
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I’m still pondering that ‘acceptance is the healer of all wounds’. Genuine acceptance. And that would also explain the cliche saying “Time heals all wounds”.
Because over time – you learn to accept that which you cannot change. You learn to accept the newness of your situation – that nothing can ever go back to the way it was.
So time heals all wounds because it takes time for us to ‘accept the unacceptable’.
I think a lot of my trauma through it and wanting to fix it. Like, I had to crucify myself, and now I understand the bible in that way – in a different way – in a metaphoric way.
Knowing that everyone is following their own guide – doing what they think is right. The people in jail would proclaim “I’m innocent – it’s not fair!” that kind of thing. They can’t accept because they know, from where they were, they were doing ‘right’ from their viewpoint. They knew they were doing the right thing, even if we perceive it from society as the ‘wrong thing’ just because of our experiences and our sense of what’s right. At anytime, most people I would say – not saying they all live out of their hearts or anything – but most people feel like they are doing the right thing, that they are in the right.
We’ve all got these different perspectives… *ran out of space on phone*.. lost 15 minutes or so of recording.
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I think I was saying – I really understood what they were saying about the Crucifixion process of the dark night of the soul. Is really making that ultimate sacrifice – your own ego – your own identity – your own reputation out in the world – the way you are – everything about you. You accept that everyone was doing what was right at the time. You accept where you’re at now because of it. You accept everything you think is “wrong”. You accept that everybody has a piece and a part to play in how everything plays out. You accept that there’s all these choice-points in our lives that led us to how life played out. You accept that your side will never be understood by anyone, ever, maybe not even yourself. You accept everything. You accept that wherever you are, that’s going to be eternity. And, then.. it is like… the burning fire that you’re walking in – ‘the fire goes out’. And then from genuinely accepting that it is what it is, you have walked through the Crucifixion. You have no need to ‘get your side of the story heard’ or anything like that. Because you are choosing ‘acceptance’ over EVERYTHING.
And then you get the peace.
And then, you get the insights, you get the stairway out of hell, you get all the “omg, how has this benefited me so much”, and all of a sudden, you’re able to put the pieces of the puzzle together and you’re not in hell anymore.
It’s really interesting. Because then, the things that have helped me over the years. These things that were never working during the dark night – nothing was working – nothing was working. Because I was still holding onto this “I want my old identity back, I want who she was”. I couldn’t accept the new me. That every part of me is different now because of walking through the hellfire. I couldn’t accept that at all. Because everything was twisted – nothing made sense. The new stuff and the old stuff was a mis-match. I couldn’t put things together at all.
Once I accepted, and it’s not like I it was just accepting. I did that many times: “I accept, I accept”. I did that many times, but there is some kind of point in the process when I actually… when it actually became genuine – even if I was genuine before – it actually became a genuine acceptance of who I am now. And then… all of a sudden.. I no longer saw myself in hell.
I’m getting the pieces of the puzzle myself. And if anything I say helps someone has a ‘less’ dark night of the soul if they are walking through it, knowing that you can get out of it but you have to accept – you have to accept the most horrendous things – you have to accept them. You can walk through lifetimes not accepting them, you can pass it down for generations not accepting them, and noone will ever understand – noone will EVER understand what you had to sacrifice, what you had to walk through, the hell you were living in – and you have to accept that too. You have to accept all of it, and your ego does not want to do that. Your old identity is still trying to hold on but you have a new identity now.
I’m sure I’ll find some perfect words for it one day but ‘it is what it is for now’, I accept that I don’t know everything, I accept that I don’t know, I accept that I don’t have all the answers, and I accept that I’m “at wherever I’m at” and that life will continue teaching me. I’ll continue to find challenges and obstacles and growth-potential levels, and be ever levelling-up, not realizing sometimes that I am levelling up. Even when I feel like I’m going down. That was definitely part of the Dark night of the soul. Because I thought that I had levelled-up and then fell in a trapdoor.
I did not see – I thought I would have to start from scratch, oh – I did, I did start from scratch. But it still was a levelling-up. It was like the ‘death of the old’.
I can actually see now that life is more improved from it, it’s just that ‘she was gone’. So I’ll have a little funeral for old Penny later, as she gets to know who she is now. Cya.
Original (Longer) Version: Acceptance is the key to Exit Hell / Dark Night of the Soul
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