Dark Nights of the Soul & Pretty Beach Balls

Like most people, I have had times in my life that were extremely difficult. Times when I have struggled with deep, emotional, raw issues. During these times I have often thought they must be what’s commonly referred to as dark nights of the soul.

Now, I am not so sure.

As I have gotten older, and hopefully wiser, and have had the opportunity to quietly reflect upon these times from a different perspective I no longer think of them as dark nights of the soul. I now am of the mind that ‘dark nights of the ego’ may be closer to the mark.

I imagine that our self-concept, our story, our ego is like a beautiful beach ball we hold up for the world to see. “This is who we are!” we proclaim to everyone, although primarily to ourselves. It’s light, airy and colorful - easy to hold high. So easy in fact that we even forget we’re holding it up.

But we cannot physically hold anything up forever, even something as light as a beautiful, light beach ball. Likewise, I think the soul tires of the ego’s presentation and simply decides, “this is not all that I am.” And so the soul lets go. The ball, our ego’s presentation, starts to fall. This is disastrous to the ego and it begins to freak out. Our outer experience is that all heck breaks loose in our day-to-day world. Our life begins to unravel at the seams. Relationships, careers, health, our self-identity, etc. all begin to change. All the things that worked for us before no longer seem to be help.

A truly terrifying experience. But I am not so sure it’s a dark night for the soul. I have to believe it’s more like a relief. Because when the beach ball we’ve been holding up for so long finally drops we discover there was something behind it all along. Something that the ego was blocking, but somehow we knew in our hearts had to be there. See, when the beach ball drops what we now experience is the Sun.

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