I lost the life as I knew it in 2015. Spiritual awakening is funny because you can have an initial awakening that is very blissful and love and light and then you come to have much more awakenings that are utterly confusing and disruptive. The Universe is serving you exactly what you need in each moment, and very much not according to the plans of the ego.
I was in the third year of filmmaking studies and I had already decided that I had got everything I needed and wanted out of it. However I didn’t know what my next plans would be. My soul was craving to move alone to the middle of the forest but I didn’t exactly know how to realize it so instead I moved to Portugal (for the second time) because I had a chance to do so. And pretty much at the same time something started stirring and opening in my energetic system, however, back then I had no clue what it was or how to call it. My system crashed, I burnt out, and lost the life as I knew it pretty much overnight.
It was confusing and painful. I didn’t really want to lose my life, my hobbies, projects, social life, health, creativity, and energy. I had a long to-do list of all the fun things I wanted to do in life. There was nothing wrong with that list in itself, but around the same time I did a 10-day silent meditation retreat and on the last day I experienced a blissful state; I dropped deeply into the beauty of the present moment, and I had this sense that my to-do list was completely meaningless. My mind freaked out, saying: ”These are fun things! Why can’t I have them?” It was not about that I couldn’t have them, ultimately, it was that my soul was calling me into deep inner union, deep embodied BE-ingness and experience of present moment. And I was very far from that as long as I was holding onto things that I felt I HAD to do. Like it was all doing, not being.
I had had this stress accumulating in my system for a long time. I got really bad skin scratches all over my body and I couldn’t sleep at nights because I was so itchy. It was hell. I was so tired I could barely leave my home at daytime. On top of that I was living in this old, moldy Portuguese house overlooking the river, like very bohemian but just not healthy. I had new friends and social gatherings where I couldn’t go because I was feeling so out of place. My system fully crashed and collapsed and I couldn’t do anything else but to rest and surrender. For years.
How to describe it. It was very dark. I knew it was happening for a higher reason and I also didn’t wanna go through it at all. My skin was hurting, my soul was hurting, everything was hurting. It was a dark night of the soul and it was a very disorienting experience to go through. My old life dismantled in front of my eyes. I couldn’t have stopped the process even if I had wanted to. Not that my life was that amazing, because many things definitely weren’t, and I had always a lot of stress, but I still didn’t want to let go and surrender to this process of complete letting go of everything I knew. I was also doing many things that I actually liked to do, and I was very attached to them. I didn’t know how much more there was available for me, and that I had to lose the old life in order to gain the new.
I knew I was meant to live a different life but I didn’t know that all this ”trouble” was indeed NEEDED for me to get to that different life. I was meant to let go of everything that wasn’t working in my life, but at that point I had already followed my soul for many years, so it was hard to see that I still needed to shed so many energetics and patterns and ways of being that didn’t serve my highest good. It was blind-walking. One step at a time in complete darkness. Hurting and feeling very isolated because people around me kept going with their normal lives doing their normal things and I just couldn’t relate to any of it anymore. A so much deeper journey had opened up within myself. A journey to my own psyche, into healing all of its fragmented parts and to becoming whole.
It was the biggest gift, obviously, but it didn’t feel like one back then. It felt eternal, and in many ways it was. I could have never known beforehand how much it would take to truly heal and integrate the energy my soul came to embody here (it’s still a work in progress!).
Throughout my dark night I always saw those glimpses of my future, and truthfully they were the only thing that kept me going, because nothing else made sense. I didn’t really have a blueprint anywhere around me for what was happening and where I was going, with that I mean a reference or reflection of that process and its outcome embodied by somebody I knew or followed on social media or something. I had to source all the information from within. That was one of the hardest parts, to be so alone in it, but I know now that it made my inner truth so unwaveringly strong, because me, myself, and my inner knowing were the only things I could rely on.
I knew where I was ultimately going, but nothing around me reflected that. You also can’t expect anyone else to understand, when they haven’t gone through anything like that themselves. At best they think you are depressed, but actually you are on a deep journey in your own psyche and soul and the whole universe really. You just can’t explain it to someone who doesn’t have their own reference point, or at least back then I couldn’t. That was very painful, because I felt that in so many relationships I could give less and less and less of my true self.
So I lost everything, because my consciousness was expanding, and the physical reality I had lived in was not a match anymore to that what I experienced within. Nothing resonated. Nothing made sense. There was this dissonance because the outer was not matching the inner. And that’s the whole point of the dark night. I turned from outside to inside, to my inner world. I explored my depths, emotions, heart, soul, truth, and reclaimed back the wounded and broken parts that I had abandoned for whatever reasons. It is like a light got lit within. Before I was seeking for that light outside of myself, but when everything got dark, and when everything was taken away, all I could do was to find the flame within.
Now all of this is very, very beautiful and it is easy to see why it all happened. It didn’t feel like that though when I still needed that light to come from outside! But when I truly got what was happening, and what a gift life was giving me, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. A true dark night will turn your life upside down, in the most amazing ways you could have ever imagined. I realized how whole and complete I am, and have always been. Even if the entire world would remain dark, it wouldn’t matter, because I am at home, eternally so. And that was the moment my physical reality started shifting as well, to reflect what I was actually feeling, knowing, and experiencing within. I started to live from inside out, not outside in. I am present and connected to the magic of life, inside and outside of myself. The inner is reflecting the outer. And that feels like peace.
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