Flight from the dark infantilizes your spirituality, because the dark nights of the soul are supposed to initiate you into spiritual adulthood.

Arnold Van Gennep, an early expert on ritual, said that every rite of passage has three phases: separation, liminality, and reincorporation.

Medications may be appropriate, but they are always insufficient. Medicine plays an important role in all suffering, emotional and physical. The problem is that medicine itself has become materialistic and only recently has been searching for ways to include a spiritual dimension. It treats the body as only physical and neglects the full range of

Look deeply into your fears. Take serious note of your defenses. See where and how you elude the demands of your existence.

You may be blind to the very thing that will make your life feel worth living. You may be repressing the very source of your deepest satisfaction. You may be gullible, taking in the world’s insidious lessons in superficial satisfaction. Therefore, you have to dig deeper. Discover who you are and who you want to be. Don’t be dissuaded from that

One hundred years after Emerson, another New England poet, Wallace Stevens, described the poet, perhaps borrowing Emerson’s imagery, as “a man of glass, who in a million diamonds sums us up.” You have that capacity within you to be the poet to your experience. Your dark night may help make you into a person of glass, transparent and readable. You

In your dark night you may learn a secret hidden from modern people generally: the truth of things can only be expressed aesthetically—in story, picture, film, dance, music. Only when ideas are poetic do they reach the depths and express the reality. In his highly original essay “The Poet,”6 Ralph Waldo Emerson says that the poet “stands one step

The writer Lee Stringer tells the passionate story of his life on the streets of New York, where he was hooked on alcohol, cocaine, and crack. He had gone through a highly disillusioning failure with an import company and took to living on the streets. Eventually he discovered that he could write. He began writing for a newspaper for street people

A person suffering a dark night might say, “Help me. I’m depressed. Get me out of it.” But how can you get out of a natural process of change? How can you medicate self-transformation? The problem, of course, is that we no longer think in terms of passages and transitions. We have exchanged a spiritual awareness of life’s meaningful moments for a