Have you ever been through a “dark night of the soul”?

Perhaps you (or someone you love) are going through one right now.

In this wild and turbulant life, there are sometimes moments, days, months, or even years when all life seems to be suspended and we lose momentum, motivation, and a connection to meaningful activities and people.

This state of being is sometimes diagnosed as clinical depression.

However, going into a dorsal-vagal shutdown mode is often simply a protective response to trauma.

Our brains, bodies, and hearts can only take so much.

So our beautiful, wise nervous system goes into a sort of hibernation where we go through the motions of survival, but very little else.

Spiritual teachers and ancient shamans have called this “the dark night of the soul” or “soul loss” because it is almost as if the body is just a shell where the soul used to be but has lost its way.    

It’s like your heart has left your body, and everything that used to spark joy and life has grown cold and numb. It’s all you can do to get out of bed each morning and face the day.

In my own life, I have experienced this dark night of the soul more than once.

The first came in 1999, just a couple of years after my mom’s death.

I grieved her loss very deeply and over time found myself getting more and more physically ill. I believe this was in part a result of unprocessed grief and stress.

After seeing dozens of medical specialists looking for relief, I ended up being diagnosed with a pain disorder called Fibromyalgia. It was so horribly debilitating that I could not even lift my head from the pillow, drive a car, or stand up for more than five minutes.

This health crisis put me into prolonged sense of hopelessness and despair, but I was determined to get better. With support and radical lifestyle changes, I gradually recovered from over time.

I still have Fibromyalgia, but I know how to manage it and what to do when it flares up.

The second time I experienced a dark night of the soul happened several years ago when I was fighting hard on a daily basis for my son’s needs at school.

I felt so incredibly isolated and misunderstood by everyone who was supposed to be helping us but were just making things worse.

Some of you are dealing with this yourself right now, and you know exactly how the fear, frustration, and anger about trying to get appropriate support for your child can take hold of you and squash all your hope and energy.

Some of your are working as educators in schools that squash your hope, energy, and compassion, too.

My son Hiro literally almost died a few times during that period because of both physical and mental health challenges – and keeping vigil over his very life put a huge toll on my own sense of security and well-being.

We were also both re-traumatized by the system and its inflexible rigidity.

So… as a result of coming up against brick walls with school staff over and over again, followed by so many medical and mental health crises, I ended up deciding to pull him out of school completely to home school.

Opting out of the system and hunkering down at home kept him alive, and it also helped me to heal from all the pent-up disappointment and rage and feel my heart warming up to life and joy again.

The third most recent dark night of the soul for me happened just a few years later between 2020 – 2021 when COVID was raging and it felt like the world stood still.  

Many of you remember how this felt. Being cut off from other humans in the middle of so many unknown dangers put all our nervous systems in a heightened state of fear, freeze, and flight.

For me, the isolation part was not unfamiliar, as our world had already become much smaller and devoid of human contact with homeschooling and working from home online.  We rarely left the house except for medical appointments.

This time, I decided to use the darkness and isolation to go even deeper in my own healing journey.  

What I discovered was so profound that it literally changed everything.

Along with my ongoing study of the science of the nervous system and trauma healing, I also started exploring so many powerful healing modalities, including mindfulness, meditation, mind-body healing practices, somatic regulation tools, healing collective and anscestral trauma, energy work, EFT, joy potential imprinting, and others.

Over the course of three years, I completed three certification programs in mind-body therapy, meditation teaching, and joy potential coaching as well as multiple other trainings, workshops, and readings.

Throughout this process of exploration and learning, I began to create a daily morning meditation and rituals for my mind-body-heart-soul being. This daily practice helped to nourish every part that so desperately needed healing, and I have now been doing this consistently on a daily basis for over three years.  

This daily “workout for the soul” has transformed my very way of being in the world, from the inside out.  

By combining all these powerful healing tools and practices with deeper spiritual connection and wisdom teachings along with exploring the spiritual and religious practices of my own multicultural family lineage, I found myself feeling stronger, happier, and more full of life, enthusiasm, and hope.  

I was also able to handle stressful situations with so much more ease, grace, and forgiveness than ever before.  

A wonderful and unexpected side-effect of all this personal growth, healing, and transformation is that I also began to see my son’s life transform.

He was also starting to become more peaceful, happier, and more creative in his art work. Slowly he began to venture out of the house with me to do volunteer work and attend social activities, too.

I don’t believe that this was the result of any specific “trauma-informed parenting strategy” at all.  I believe is was simply that my being in a ventral vagal state of calm, compassion, and the energy hope and peace began to affect my son’s nervous system, too.

My own regulated and deeply nourished nervous system allowed the energy of our home to shift from constant crisis and chaos into a much more nervous-system protective state of joy and possibility.

And… the biggest “Ah-Ha!” parenting moment for me was when I realized that this nourished and regulated nervous system was the magical KEY to unlock everything else.  

Way beyond simple self-care, my deepening self-awareness, self-healing, self-leadership, and even self-parenting were making me a more deeply compassionate and powerful human being.

I call this “Heart-Strong Power”.

It is not power over my child.  

It’s not even powering through life….  or trying to be more powerful and in control of my own habits.

It is the power of surrender.

The power of acceptance.

The power of compassion and love.

Paradoxically, this kind of power changes everything.

It’s like the gentle trickle of life-giving water in the Colorado River that consistently and powerfully over time created the Grand Canyon.

It’s like the power that a small candle has in creating light to conquer the darkness … the kind of light that increases more and illuminates even more in the company of others holding small candles.

Heart-Strong Power moves mountains, heals hearts, and sparks joy in even the coldest heart experiencing a dark night of the soul.

We all need Heart-Strong Power now more than ever before.

I’m so excited to have a chance to share this personal story with you, as these healing, life-giving practices are not only changing my own life and the life of my young adult child… but it is changing the way we will be doing business here at HSI, too.

I can’t stand keeping all these tools and practices to myself any more!

The wait is over… IT IS TIME.

So… this holiday season, I’m going to start sharing more about what I’ve learned and how you can tap into your own Heart-Strong Power to come home to your own heart, support the healing of those you serve, and ultimately create a ripple effect of global hope and healing!

I’m so excited to share all this with you!!!

Keep opening these emails for more information and an announcement very soon….

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