The year 2022 was a very dark, depressing, horrifying segment in the story of my life. For me, that time was filled with hopelessness, grief, depression, and a great disinterest in being alive. I felt that the universe had betrayed me. I lost faith in it.
Nothing made sense anymore. I’d lost faith in it all. I was grieving the death of a person I loved, but looking back now, I see that a large part of the grief was directed toward the shift in my relationship with the universe. I couldn’t trust it, myself, or life anymore. I wanted out.
I had lost trust and with it, a sense of purpose. That is something worth grieving. It was a loss of a big part of myself. But I did get it back eventually. Let me explain.
The dark night of the soul is a time in your life when you are so lost that you feel you’re in a black hole. You can’t see with your five senses any reason to keep going here. It is bleak on the physical plane in these times. But your soul knows the truth: it is all an illusion. The light never went away.
It is a test of faith.
When I felt betrayed by the universe, I lost faith in many spiritual concepts I once held dear. It was awful to have to admit to myself that I was wrong about many things. The universe doesn’t work like a machine with a program that you can predict. It doesn’t always give you the outcomes you feel that you deserve because sometimes, it has something better in mind for you. And that comes in the form of a huge soul lesson.
The greatest soul lessons cause you to question everything. They test your faith. They throw you into darkness so you’re forced to come back to the light on your own, blindly. It sounds like torture — and often it feels like it. But it’s all for your greatest good.
I fell into the black hole of my meaningless existence. I stopped trusting, so I didn’t pray anymore. Nothing I could pray for was reasonable or possible. You can’t bring back the dead. I felt that there was nothing left to desire. Anything I could wish for would eventually disappear.
I felt so lost. If I could gain “abundance” again, I had no faith that it would stick around. It would be taken from me as quickly as it was given. I felt as if there was nothing left to live for. I had nothing left to look forward to in my life.
Despite extreme hopelessness, the one thing I still prayed for was for there to be a reason for it all. I wanted the reason to be revealed to me. But sometimes the universe’s reasons are too monumental to be grasped by our small human minds. So, I tried to see the universe in a new way, because it was the only path forward.
At some point, I made the conscious choice that I wanted to live. But I couldn’t live in a world that made no sense.
I had to let go of all the things I once believed about the workings of the universe. When people talked about manifesting and the law of attraction, I called bullshit on them. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Things aren’t always that simple.
The universe has a mind of its own (it is literally a great mind) and it will change the course of your life how it sees fit. You are its part, and it wants to guide you toward greatness so that you can help the whole. You can’t do this if you cling to simplistic, naive views about universal laws, manifestation, and vibrations.
You have to get your hands dirty in the filth of your shadow. You have to bump around in the darkness of a terrifyingly lonely tunnel, not knowing why you’re there or if you’ll ever get out. It’s an initiation. It teaches you resilience. It makes you into a complex person. How else can you truly help the collective? You can’t do anything really meaningful unless you have a sophisticated and complex view of existence.
So, as you may have guessed, I made my way through the dark tunnel. I lost myself and gained back a new one. Confronting my deepest fears in terror, I battled with my shadow in silence. I allowed myself to fall into the abyss many times, and then I was lifted up again.
What lifted me up? Blind faith. I had lost it for most things in my little existence. I stopped believing that I would find lasting love, that people are kind, and that there are happy endings. But I never lost faith that something about all of this made sense in some greater mind’s version of reality. I held out for a purpose in it all. It was apparent the whole time and came together more and more as time passed.
The purpose of all of us is to be stronger. We must endure and persist so that we can help someone else do it. Those of us facing the most grueling soul tests are uniquely able to help the rest of the human collective. Our lessons are more valuable than gold. That was the purpose all along.
I exist now to serve others. And it is far more fulfilling than I ever imagined. And that is how I made it through the darkest night of my soul. I am glad I held out and that I am still here.
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