Dark Night of the Soul: Stages, Signs, and What Nobody Tells You

What the dark night of the soul actually is (not what Instagram tells you)

If you’ve been on any kind of spiritual path for more than a few months, you’ve probably heard the phrase “dark night of the soul.” You’ve seen the Instagram posts. The aesthetic suffering. The candle-lit journal entries about surrendering to the process. The implication that if you just trust hard enough, you’ll emerge transformed, glowing, hashtag-reborn.

I’m going to be blunt: most of what you read about the dark night online is either watered-down pop psychology dressed in spiritual language, or a genuine misunderstanding of what the term originally pointed to.

The phrase comes from St. John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic who wrote a poem called “La Noche Oscura del Alma.” He wasn’t describing a bad week. He was describing a specific phase in the contemplative journey where God (or if you prefer, awareness, the ground of being) withdraws all felt sense of presence. The sweetness and light that came with early spiritual experience goes dark. The consolation disappears. You’re left in a void that feels like abandonment.

That’s the dark night. Not “I’m going through a hard time.” It’s a structural phase where everything you built your spiritual identity on gets pulled out from under you.

And here’s the part nobody tells you: it has a function. It’s not random suffering. But to understand that function, you need a framework that goes beyond “trust the process.”

The stages of the dark night, mapped to the breath

I’m going to map the dark night of the soul stages onto the Breathing Infinite framework (see the free guides section of the website for more info.), because this is where things start to make sense in a way that generic spiritual advice never quite captures.

Think of your spiritual journey as a breath cycle. A single, vast breath.

Stage 1: The In-Breath (Awakening and Ascent)

This is where it starts. You have an opening. Maybe through meditation, maybe through a book, maybe through a moment of crisis that cracked you open without warning. Suddenly you taste something beyond the ordinary. Awareness recognizes itself. The separate self thins out, and for a moment, maybe longer, you’re just here. Present. Boundless.

This is the in-breath. Consciousness is drawing back toward its source. Away from form, toward the formless. And it feels incredible. Of course it does. You’ve just glimpsed what you actually are underneath all the noise.

People at this stage read everything they can. They meditate for hours. They feel like they’ve found the answer. Some of them start blogs about it. (I started a blog about it.)

Stage 2: The Held Breath (The Plateau)

The initial intensity fades, as it always does, because experience is movement and no experience stays. But you’ve tasted it. So you keep reaching for it. More retreats. More practice. Longer sits. Trying to recapture or stabilize what you glimpsed.

This stage can last months or years. There’s genuine deepening happening, but there’s also a subtle grasping. You’re trying to stay in the in-breath forever. Trying to live at the top of the inhale. And that’s not how breath works.

Stage 3: The Dark Night (The Space Between)

This is where things get disorienting. The practices that used to bring you to that open, boundless place stop working. Meditation feels dry, empty, pointless. The felt sense of presence that was once so vivid becomes a memory you can’t quite access. Your spiritual identity, the one who “gets it,” the one who had that awakening, starts to dissolve. And not in the blissful way dissolution felt during stage one. In a way that feels like dying.

Welcome to the dark night of the soul.

What’s happening, from the Breathing Infinite perspective, is that you’re stuck between the inhale and the exhale. You breathed in. You touched source. But you haven’t learned to breathe out again, to bring what you realized back into ordinary life, into form, into your body, into your relationships and your Monday mornings. You’re suspended in a no-man’s-land between the infinite and the finite, belonging fully to neither.

Stage 4: The Exhale (Integration and Return)

This is the stage most people don’t write about because fewer people have completed it. The exhale is the return to form. Not a retreat from what you realized, but the expression of it. You learn that awareness doesn’t need special conditions to be itself. It’s already here, in the noise, in the mess, in the utterly ordinary act of washing dishes or having an argument.

The dark night ends when you stop trying to get back to the in-breath and learn to exhale. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Why “more meditation” can make it worse

This is the part that will annoy some people, so let me say it clearly: during the dark night, intensifying your meditation practice can make things worse.

I know. I can hear the objections. “Meditation is always good.” “You just need to sit through it.” “The darkness is purification.”

Maybe. Or maybe you’re doing the equivalent of trying to inhale harder when what you need is to exhale.

Here’s what I’ve observed. During the dark night, meditation often becomes a subtle form of avoidance. You sit down to practice because you’re trying to get back to that felt sense of openness. You’re chasing the in-breath. And each time you sit and it doesn’t come, the void feels deeper. The dryness feels more absolute. The sense that something is wrong with you intensifies.

This doesn’t mean you should stop meditating entirely. But it might mean you need to change the kind of practice you’re doing. Less reaching toward the formless, more grounding in the physical. Less silence and stillness, more movement and engagement. Less transcending and more showing up.

The dark night is not asking you to go deeper into the inner world. It’s asking you to bring the inner world out. There’s a huge difference, and confusing the two is what keeps people stuck in this phase for years longer than they need to be.

The incomplete circuit: you breathed in but forgot to exhale

Let me put this as simply as I can.

Photo by Zehra cuşkun on Pexels

The dark night of the soul is an incomplete breath cycle.

You breathed in. You touched the infinite, the formless, the silent ground. Beautiful. Real. True. But then you got attached to the in-breath. You made “awareness” or “presence” or “the absolute” into a destination. And you kept trying to live there, up at the top of the inhale, holding on.

But consciousness doesn’t work that way. It breathes. In and out. Formless to form and back again. Source to expression and back to source. The whole movement is one thing. The inhale isn’t better than the exhale. The formless isn’t higher than form. They’re one breath.

The dark night is what happens when you interrupt this cycle. When you try to make the inhale permanent, the system eventually rebels. The felt connection to source goes dark, not because source has abandoned you, but because you’re gripping so hard that you can’t feel what you’re holding.

Think about it physically. If you inhale and hold your breath, at first it’s fine. Then uncomfortable. Then painful. Then your body forces the exhale whether you want it or not. The dark night is that uncomfortable middle phase where you’ve held the in-breath too long.

Letting go, in this context, doesn’t mean letting go of awareness. It means letting go of your position as the one who is aware. It means letting realization flow into life instead of hoarding it in meditation. It means becoming ordinary again, with full knowledge of what ordinary actually is.

Signs you’re in the dark night (vs. depression or burnout)

This distinction matters, and getting it wrong has real consequences. People mistake depression for the dark night and refuse treatment. People mistake the dark night for depression and medicate away a process that has genuine spiritual dimensions. Neither error is harmless.

Here are some markers that suggest you’re in an actual dark night of the soul, not clinical depression or burnout:

You had a genuine opening first. The dark night follows awakening. If you’ve never had a clear experience of awareness recognizing itself, what you’re going through might be hard, but it’s probably not the dark night in the classical sense.

The suffering has a specific flavor of meaninglessness. Not “life is hard” meaningless. More like “I saw that everything is consciousness, and now I can’t make that matter in ordinary life.” Existential vertigo from having seen through meaning’s usual structures without finding how to live from that seeing.

Spiritual practices feel hollow, not just hard. Depression makes everything flat. The dark night specifically empties your spiritual practices. Meditation, prayer, reading, whatever used to connect you to the deeper dimension. Those things lose their juice. Other parts of life might be fine.

There’s a quality of searching that doesn’t resolve. You know something is incomplete. You can feel it. But nothing you try satisfies the itch. Spirit seems to have gone quiet.

It’s not situational. If your distress is clearly linked to job loss, relationship breakdown, or grief, those are real human difficulties that deserve real human responses. The dark night tends to arise independent of external circumstances.

If you’re unsure, see a mental health professional. Seriously. A good therapist who understands contemplative experience can help you discern what you’re dealing with. And if it turns out to be clinical depression, getting appropriate treatment doesn’t invalidate your spiritual journey. Taking care of your mental health IS the spiritual path in that moment.

How to complete the breath: the way through

So you’re in the dark night. You’ve recognized it. You’re not going to medicate it away, and you’re not going to sit on a cushion trying to force the light back on. What do you actually do?

Photo by Mikael Dubarry on Pexels

You learn to exhale.

In practical terms, here’s what the exhale looks like:

Come down into the body. Get out of your head, get out of awareness-as-concept, and get into your physical body. Walk. Swim. Garden. Cook. The dark night often involves a subtle dissociation from embodied experience, a hangover from the in-breath’s movement toward the formless. The antidote is matter. Dirt. Weight. Texture.

Engage with the mess of ordinary life. Stop trying to maintain a spiritual altitude. Say yes to the dinner invitation. Play with the dog. Have the boring conversation with your neighbor about their fence. The infinite doesn’t live only in silence. It lives in the mundanity of a Tuesday afternoon too. But you can only discover that by being present TO the mundanity, not transcending it.

Let your identity reform, but differently. The dark night dissolves your spiritual identity. Your job isn’t to rebuild it. It’s to let a new kind of selfhood emerge, one that’s transparent to awareness rather than organized around accessing awareness. You stop trying to be someone who is awakened and start just being whoever you are, while knowing what you know.

Be patient, but not passive. The dark night has its own timeline. But you can cooperate with it. Each time you choose engagement over withdrawal, embodiment over transcendence, ordinary life over spiritual special-ness, you’re exhaling. You’re completing the circuit.

Find someone who has been through it. Not a teacher with techniques. Not a guru who will tell you your ego is dying and that’s a good thing. Find someone who has been in the dark and come through, someone who can say “yes, this is real, and yes, it passes.”

St. John, the Cloud of Unknowing, and what they understood

I want to circle back to where this all started, because the original contemplative writers understood something that the modern spiritual world has largely forgotten.

St. John of the Cross didn’t see the dark night as a problem to be solved. He saw it as a purification. Specifically, he described it as God removing the training wheels of felt experience so that the soul could learn to relate to the divine without depending on emotional consolation. In his framework, the dark night burns away attachment to spiritual experience so that what remains is naked faith, love without reward, devotion without feeling.

You don’t have to share his theology to recognize the structural insight: the dark night removes your attachment to the experience of awakening so that awakening can become the ground of your life rather than a peak state you visit.

The anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing,” writing about two centuries before John, pointed at something similar. He described a “cloud of forgetting” that must be placed between the practitioner and all created things, and a “cloud of unknowing” between the practitioner and God. In that double negation, in that space where you’ve let go of both the world and your concept of the divine, something wordless and direct emerges. But you have to tolerate the darkness of not-knowing first.

Both of these writers understood that the path isn’t a straight line upward into light. It curves through darkness. The darkness isn’t a detour. It’s the place where the deepest transformation happens, precisely because there’s nothing left to hold onto.

From the Breathing Infinite perspective, John and the Cloud author were both describing the pause between inhale and exhale. The moment of maximum disorientation, where the old way of breathing has stopped and the new way hasn’t started yet. They were teaching people how to be in that pause without panicking. Without grabbing for the familiar. Without concluding that God (or awareness, or whatever you want to call it) has gone.

It hasn’t gone. You’re just learning to breathe differently.

The dark night of the soul stages aren’t a ladder you climb. They’re a breath you learn to complete. You breathed in, touched the infinite, and now you need to bring that back into the finite. Into your life. Into your body. Into Monday morning and dirty dishes and all the gorgeous, maddening ordinariness of being human.

That’s the exhale. And it’s just as sacred as the inhale.

If you’re in the thick of this right now and looking for a framework that doesn’t sugarcoat it, I’ve written about these themes in depth. Grab my free eBooks on nonduality and awareness and see if they speak to where you are.