It has been 4 years since my world was turned upside down with the passing of my dear dad and my own cancer diagnosis.  Surprising as this might sound, I am filled with gratitude and awe when I think of that summer of 2010, and particularly the 2 week period from late June through mid-July.

My Dark Night of the Soul

During that period in 2010 I juggled the need to be with my dad in Albany, New York with getting multiple MRIs, blood work and the dreaded spinal tap in the Boston area.  I let me sisters in on my issue to help cover my tracks but kept my mom in the dark because I wanted her to focus on my dad.  I can best describe my mood as ‘dazed’.  It truly felt as though life would never be good again.  Not only did I feel like I was losing my rock but it seemed as though my kids and my husband would be moving on without me.  In the words of my oncologist it was ‘pretty shitty’.

A couple of years ago I became familiar with a term, ‘the dark night of the soul’ which is a vehicle for rapid spiritual awakening.  We all live in a box of our ego’s construct.  We grow up, get a job, find a partner, have children, build a life and typically never experience anything beyond our self-created world.  If we are happy in the world we create it’s pretty good but if we aren’t happy, if we feel unfulfilled in an area of our life, most of us still can’t see a way out of the box.  We assume that the box keeps us safe even if we aren’t very happy in it.  We will fight to keep the box together even if it keeps us unfulfilled because it is all we know and we construct it out of fear.  The truth, as I see it, is that we are never truly safe until we are our authentic selves.  Our souls will not allow us to have our lives dictated by the ego’s fear indefinitely because we are all here to experience life in a highly personal way. Many souls ultimately choose to experience a complete collapse in the box that their ego has built around them.  The more rigid the box we create the more necessary it is to have a major upheaval manifest to tear it all down.  This isn’t about the Universe messing with us but rather a powerful vehicle of transformation.  When everything that we have built our lives around comes crashing down we are allowed to rebuild in a way that is truly authentic to us.  Crashing down could mean the loss of a job that wasn’t right, disease that ensures life will not go on as usual, the loss of a loved one, a nervous breakdown, or the end of a dysfunctional relationship that we just couldn’t seem to leave on our own.  These events occur to propel us to immense personal growth and empowerment.  The transformation that we undergo during a dark night of the soul changes the way our daily life functions.  We can’t stop it and it’s no use fighting it.  What happens next is miraculous if we can muster the courage to surrender to it.  When we surrender to it, we begin to know our power and consciousness on a deeper level.  That knowing propels us to transform everything else in our lives.  Eckhart Tolle has described the dark night of the soul as bringing us to this state:

“You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness.  Or one could say a state of ignorance – where things lose the meaning that you had given them, which was all conditioned and cultural and so on.  Then you can look upon the world without imposing a mind-made framework of meaning.  It looks of course as if you no longer understand anything.  That’s why it’s so scary when it happens to you, instead of you actually consciously embracing it. “ 

I’m sure all of you know someone who has had a life-altering event such as a cancer diagnosis.  So many who have been through that journey consider it one of the most influential of their lives.  Sure, they didn’t enjoy the journey while in the midst of it, but after, their appreciation for what really mattered to them is altered.  They don’t let societal conventions dictate their lives like they probably used to.  They feel freer because they know this is their life and their journey and they are now ready to make the most of it.  They lose their fear.  That 2 week  period in the summer of 2010 was my dark night of the soul and also the beginning of the most magical and exhilarating journey.

We all have the ability to transform ourselves in every moment but mostly we fight it.   I know I sure did.  That’s why I am so grateful for my dark night.  I love and respect myself now on such a deeper level.  Not all the time, I still feel inner doubts, but so much more than I did before.  I live fully outside the box.

God Makes Her Presence Known…Messages of Hope

On Monday, July 5th I said good bye to my father in the hospital.  I had a spinal tap scheduled for the next day and an MRI for the day after that.  My dad was mostly unconscious by this point.  For a few days he might say one or two coherent things and then he would drift back to what I now understand to be that transitional place in consciousness between our 3d world and the world of energy beyond and all around us.  I told my dad that I had to go back to Boston to take care of a few things.  I told him that I would be back in 2 days.  I told him that it was OK to let go and that we would all take care of my mom but I also told him that I would love to see him again two days later.  I told him I loved him.  Remarkably, he turned on his side toward me and reached out his arms to embrace me.  Now, I finally understand that he knew completely what I was going though.  His near-death state of consciousness was one that allowed him to experience a kind of extra sensory perception that made him aware of events and conversations that did not take place in front of him.  I know this through reading I have done involving near-death experiences, especially Anita Moorjani’s, which opened me to understanding the web of energy that connects us all to each other and to everything.   Although, I had intended to shield him from my dilemma because I did not want his last moments to be filled with fear for me, he knew.  He just knew.

I kept my head down as I made my way through the maze of corridors leading to the hospital exit.  I wasn’t crying, I was too far gone for that, and just walked in my daze.  I was stunned by the fact that I had just said goodbye to my dad, not knowing if I would ever see him again.  As I approached the exit, a full 5 minutes since I had left his room, a young man ran up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and said “Excuse me Miss?, God asked me to tell you God bless you.”  I looked back at him dazed but now stunned and simply said “thank you”.  Man, I wish I had asked him how he knew to say that to me but I was just too foggy!  It is truly one of my great regrets in life to have passed up that opportunity to connect with Divine energy.   Then he went back to his group and I heard him say “I think she thinks I’m nuts”.  Well, I didn’t think he was crazy but I also didn’t know what to think.  I had always believed in God in some form but never expected God’s presence to be made so directly available to me.  I pondered what the man had said to me and wondered if it meant my dad would miraculously recover, or the MRI was wrong or the shit storm was all real but God wanted me to know I was being watched over even if I was going to die.  Even though I didn’t know what it meant, it brought me the first real comfort I had felt since I was told about the ‘issue’ in my noggin.

Two days later, on July 7th, after the last of the scheduled tests, I jumped in my car and headed back to Albany where my dad was still hanging on.  I called my sister Sue from the car and she told me there was no change and that he had been unresponsive since I left 2 days earlier.  I told her I’d be there in about an hour and we hung up.  Within a few minutes, I felt a wave of the most blissful, peaceful and euphoric energy I had ever felt in my life.  It washed over me from left to right.  It transformed my mood from gloom, sadness and defeat to utter joy.  I turned on the car radio and started singing along and dancing to whatever came on top 40s radio.  I remember asking myself “why are you so happy?  You have nothing to be happy about going to your father’s death bed and dealing with a life-threatening diagnosis yourself” but there I was, driving along the Mass Pike without a care in the world.  I continued in that state of euphoria right into the hospital.  I was practically bouncing as I rounded the corner to my father’s room.  Just as I made the turn, I saw my sister Kristin’s face and knew that he had passed.  The euphoria was immediately replaced with dread and intense pain.  I had missed it.  I was not with him when he passed.  That was my first thought, but almost immediately I was told the time that he passed and I realized that he came to me!  That wave of euphoria in the car….yep that was my dad.  He wasn’t gone.  He was released from his pain and suffering but he was very much still with us.  I felt so honored, so humbled and so overwhelmed that I had been lucky enough to experience that blessing.  He shared his energy with me in the most profound way.  It felt like the greatest embrace of my life.  I have met a few others who share this experience with me.  The common denominator seems to be that we were not in the room with our loved one as they crossed.  I don’t pretend to understand it but I accept it because there is no other logical explanation.

In my darkest hour, my dark night of my soul, my self-imposed box, that I thought protected me, was burned to the ground.  I was left raw, homeless and left to pick up the pieces in the most beautiful way.  I honor that time as the most significant of my life.   I am so grateful for the moments of God’s grace showering down upon me to begin to soothe my raw wounds and to help me find my footing in this brand new world.  Each day I remember another aspect of myself, my true self and strip away all the crap I had accumulated over a lifetime.  Not all of us will experience the Dark Night of the Soul but many do.  Perhaps as a result of reading this, if it happens to you, you won’t feel quite so lost.  Perhaps you will be able to see the blessing and the gift that it brings and surrender to it.  I hope that sharing my own dark night helps you to realize that you are safe, loved and never, ever alone.