Hello everyone , i am going through a very bad phase in my life , like there is nothing wrong in my life but stil i am filled with negativity and cannot enjoy life , i tried everything from meditation to shadow work to counselling but nothing seems to work , i feel a deep pain whic I cannot describe and a longing to go home , like i don’t belong in the society , could it be the dark night of the soul and how can I handle it , also i am doing integral mindfulness daily on the levels of development and my relative self like i am disidentifying from all the labels which i and the society have imposed on me , so can this sense of despair be the last ditch efforts from my ego or relative self to pull me back to my relative sense of self ?
Yess that’s true , even when I’m busy i dint get time to think , but that won’t heal the core issues
Dear Neil, I hear your despairing felt sense of ‘not belonging’ loud and clear amongst other machinations of your mind and propensity to look outwards for relief from suffering.
What is arising is simply asking for your care and attention.As recently deceased Zen teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “Dear one, I am here for you” turning to welcome your suffering part, has been a helpful starting place for me. Patricia
What you describe is similar to what I experienced prior to 2019.
I think what you need is a huge purge of emotions. Even though you are doing shadow work, it might not go “deep” enough - or you may still be trying to control it or divert it away from the root emotions. You might have a fear of touching those rot emotions, and when you get close to them, you panic and cleverly divert the shadow work to something that doesn’t delve into that panic.
Or I could just be projecting my whole experience onto you. Like I said, your situation sounds exactly like me prior to 2019.
I’d recommend you find facilitators who are really able to confront you and who you trust to drag you deep down and go through that panic. For myself, I did it with psychedelics. I kept hitting a panic wall doing them without a guide, so I by chance met a guide just at exactly the right time and took a enough of a dose that there was no going back, lol. Then after that the other methodologies fell more into place.
I also think mindfulness meditations tend to be a bit too mild for transformative work. Find an actual Guru who has many levels of trainings that each take you up to a different step of transformative “waking up”.
Lift the heaviest weights you can. Keep lifting until your body tunes out your mind.