The dark night of the soul

It wouldn’t be hard to guess that you’ve had some ups and downs since Covid-19 touched our lives. Maybe you’ve experienced plenty of blessings, but let’s face it, we are collectively experiencing a global trauma, or dark night of the soul, that can’t help but affect us on all kinds of levels, even if you’ve personally managed to navigate the lockdown, restricted freedoms, reduced income, separation from loved ones, the lurgy itself and any other hardships.

I believe that what’s happening on the planet will ultimately be for our benefit, but we have to pass through this global challenge as part of the transformation process that will birth the new age we were born to help co-create.

As Lightworkers in these difficult times we are being activated. We have a very tangible sense of saying YES to playing our parts in the next higher level of evolution, even if we’re not clear how yet. We need to step into a new, higher frequency identity, which we cannot effectively do with our wounds in charge, hidden in the shadows of our psyches. So this pandemic is serving to bring light to our shadows so that we can finally process and integrate all that is unhealed.

It’s all part of the Divine plan and it’s happening to a lot of us!

So when my relationship ended in July and I moved back up north to my parent’s house I was in good spirits, surrendered to the discomfort of the transformation process, and curious about what the next phase of life would bring… after all, when one door closes another one opens….

But bloody hell, I wasn’t expecting what happened!

This door opened up a whole heap of unhealed pain, anxiety and trauma from my teenage years that I thought I’d dealt with long ago. And for a few weeks I was going through one of those very ‘dark nights of the soul’ experiences, feeling all the intense emotions of a teen who was isolated, couldn’t cope and didn’t want to be here.

Maybe you’ve been struggling with exhaustion, anxiety, depression, lack of clarity and momentum, freak accidents, illnesses, unusual negativity and triggering from your loved ones, and have had old habit patterns and limiting beliefs coming to the surface – all hitting you right now.

If so, let me assure you – YOU ARE NOT ALONE!

I’m sharing what I’ve been going through below in case it helps you better handle any crazy emotions, physical pain, dark shadows and memories that have been coming up for you.

Dark night of the soul

Moving back in with octogenarian parents, I was expecting to get triggered. But surprisingly, aside from a few sticky moments, it had been really lovely spending time with mum and dad and helping them out after not seeing them for so long.

My parent’s house is the home I grew up in. We moved here just after I was born, over fifty years ago. It’s always been an anchor for me, a place to return to after travelling or living abroad. And even though it’s temporary, this is the first time EVER that I’ve not had a clear plan about where I’m going next.

It’s an uncomfortable situation to be in, but if I’ve learned anything during the pandemic, it’s that plans don’t carry the same degree of certainty any more, and we’re all being called to surrender and relinquish what we can’t control. So, with much appreciation and gratitude for having this familiar safe haven, I was able to let go, and I feel very supported by Life.

But after a few weeks here I found myself in an uncommonly dark, shadowy place. 

Dark night of the soul

During September I was part of a fabulous project called, My Sensitivity Is a Strength. Every day, someone amazing, who is shining their powerful light in the world now, shared their account of overcoming the difficulties of life growing up as a highly sensitive child, where their true nature wasn’t recognised.

For most this meant growing up not knowing who they authentically were or what they really wanted, feeling unseen, unvalued, unworthy, feeling socially awkward and desperately wanting to belong, but not knowing how to, feeling isolated, depressed, anxious, not welcome, and that there was something deeply flawed in them that they had to hide at all costs.

So every day for a month I was reminded of how life had been for me as a socially awkward, anxious, empathic and sensitive teenager, which not surprisingly woke old pain, buried way down deep.

I wasn’t aware of it back then, but my strategy to not feel so much pain was to take off out of my body. With awareness now, I could see I was doing this again. But frustratingly, I couldn’t connect to the emotions in my body to properly express them. 

I started experiencing a bottleneck of emotional energy which showed up in strange physical ways, starting with an escalation of dizzy spells, brain fog, feeling surges of heat and feeling very ungrounded. 

The strange thing was that while I was going through the emotional chaos, I’d have periods of great clarity, big surges of creative energy and channeled downloads of information about what’s energetically happening on the planet as we move towards 5D – two polarised extremes!

I felt quite certain that other sensitives and empaths must be experiencing something similar, so I searched online and came across the term ‘spiritual, or multi-dimensional vertigo’. 

It described how, as your consciousness reaches into higher dimensions, your nervous system builds new pathways, but when some unhealed trauma is triggered from your unconscious mind, it kind of snaps you back down into your body, which causes your nervous system and inner brain-balancing mechanism (your vestibular system) to get thrown out.

Yep. Sounded about right. No wonder I felt so disoriented and discombobulated!

Disoriented - dark night of the soul

Getting some support

The author of the article said they went to a chiropractor to get adjustments when this happened to them, so I searched for one locally and made an appointment.

As luck would have it, I found a chiropractor who is more than a chiropractor. She is a bodyworker and healer who uses a system called Network Spinal Analysis (NSA), and she teaches a programme called Somato-Respiratory Integration (SRI). Plus she works with the Divine Feminine, so I knew I’d found the right person!

I really don’t know what she does while I’m lying face down on the healing table for 25 minutes, twice a week. I’m aware of light touches to my neck and the base of my spine, I can feel waves of energy and she wiggles my feet two or three times. But whatever she is doing, it is having quite an effect!

After the first session it was like she’d flipped the lid that had been keeping all my teenage pain bottled up where I couldn’t fully feel it…

… and got totally floored by the symptoms of anxiety disorder! 

I couldn’t sleep, I felt stress, worry and fear in my body, causing tension across my back, neck and shoulders as solid as concrete. I had headaches, exhaustion, even more dizziness and brain fog than before so I couldn’t get on with anything on the computer. I felt overwhelmed by everything. I was very easily triggered and cried an awful lot, bursting into tears for no apparent reason.

Total meltdown for about three weeks!

But while it was excruciating to go through I knew that it was the old stuff finally having an outlet, and at some point I would get through it.

I’m so grateful that I’ve had the know-how of my own healing and transformation tools, my bodywork sessions, supportive friends, and my amazing parents. It was really important for me to nurture myself and ask for support, and it was a big deal to open up to my parents and share what’s happening for me now and what I experienced as a teen, without holding back or worrying that they might think I’m being over-emotional, irrational or crazy. My teenage self never felt able to do that.

My healing crisis has brought us so much closer, like I’ve got a second chance to meet all the painful events of the past and rewrite them with a positive outcome, whilst being completely supported to go through this transition in every way. It really couldn’t have worked out better!

Dark night of the soul

Are you taking on stuff from the collective?

Right now I feel so much lighter, more relaxed and embodied, inspired and more energised than I have for weeks. I may still burst into tears for no reason or feel anxiety spikes in my body, but those are getting less frequent.

In fact, now I’ve cleared some of this big stuff I’m more aware of the subtle shifts in my energy that seem to arise out of nowhere. When I look into these shifts, it often turns out that some news release about Covid has caused another wave of fear to ripple through the collective, and I’m picking it up.

If you’re highly sensitive or empathic like me, then this is very likely to be happening to you too. So if you’ve been struggling to clear unexpected or unusual emotional stuff, it’s worth checking in with yourself and your body to ask, “Is this (emotion) mine? Does it belong to me?” If it’s from the collective then it should dissolve easily simply by asking, and you’ll feel lighter and less burdened by it.

Moving beyond FEAR – False Evidence Appearing Real

I, like many, consider myself to be a Lightworker. I’ve capitalised the word because I want to stress the importance of the role.

Lightworkers have a natural compulsion towards healing, transformation and finding alignment with inner truth. We are used to alchemising and transmuting denser energies within. Every time we do this our energy frequency becomes higher and we allow even more light to shine through us. This light then radiates out and touches the lives of whomever meet, which in turn raises the vibration of humanity, the planet and all life.

THIS is the ‘work’ that we were born to do, and is needed now more than ever.

It takes courage, strength, faith and a lot of trust in yourself and your inner guidance to walk this path because you WILL be called into your shadows. This can be disorienting, stressful and scary because that’s where your unconscious fear lives; fear that feels very real. Real enough to have you running in the opposite direction.

Sometimes fear is healthy fear, and is an alert to true danger, but more often than not it’s the kind of fear you can think of as ‘False Evidence Appearing Real’, and is the ego’s strategy to avoid pain, change or the unknown.

The ego is not intrinsically bad. Its purpose is to protect us and keep us safe, and it helps us to grow stronger and more resilient by creating inner resistance to what we want, much in the same way that your muscles get stronger through resistance training at the gym.

However, the ego will try to convince us that we are small and limited. It fills the mind with negative and disempowering self talk and activates our emotional pain bodies, which in turn influences our choices and behaviours. 

This is the lie that we buy into about ourselves, and it is just a story.

Dark night of the soul

Embrace your hero or heroine within

Who you truly are is an individual spark of Divine consciousness experiencing its own expansion through your embodiment. As such, you have access to all the creative power of the universe (if you would allow yourself to believe it), and you are being called to remember this NOW, to choose to see beyond the fear that’s being broadcast in the media, and focus on the vision of the world you want to see co-created.  

It requires every ounce of resourcefulness and resilience to keep feeling one’s way through the shadowland because we don’t know how long it’s going to last. The deeper in you go, the more intense the discomfort could get, and you may begin to wonder if you can cope.

We individually experience a dark night of the soul at various points in our lives, but now the whole planet is is going through its own. 

It’s a time of huge transition and transformation; an opportunity to move past the old paradigms and structures of greed, and of power and control by the few over the many, over the planet’s natural resources and over our bodies, minds and health.

It’s our time to embrace the hero’s and heroine’s journeys that our souls brought us here to fulfil at this time in Earth’s history. Many people are suffering or struggling in a multitude of ways, but no matter how dark it gets, we can get through it if we keep heading towards the light. 

We might meet the deepest darkness before the dawn, but there will be a dawn, and we will individually and collectively break through to the next level of being.

Because, in spite of what the main stream media would have the people of the world believe with its fear-mongering, there is an outpouring of light and hope from souls everywhere. 

The global family of light is mobilising in all areas where we find our lives restricted. Truth-seekers are sharing resources, scientific research, information, support, guidance and wisdom. Connections and networks of amazing people are growing to help humanity through this time of chaos.

YOU, beautiful, powerful soul, are the solution to this.

 

Dark night of the soul

This is YOUR time, Lightworker!

All the chaos, confusion and distortion we are seeing in the world at large is intrinsically tied to our collective, and our own, unresolved trauma.

We have to be willing to see through the distortions of the truth we’ve believed about ourselves in order to reclaim who we are. The real truth is that we are sovereign human beings – part of the Divine Oneness, and we are wired for love, collaboration and co-creation, and born to live in harmony with all of Life on our beautiful planet Earth.

Reclaiming the truth of who we are, in all our shadow and light, and dying to our old selves is the necessary healing journey to wholeness we must all do – individually and collectively.

With your light, your love and your courage, when you hold the light of hope in your sights, you have the capacity to change not only your reality, but the lives of all of those you touch who are also going through the darkness.

Use all of your strengths, your gifts, your tools, your wisdom, your inner knowing and your resilience to be the guiding light you are – for yourself, your family, your community and for the world.

THIS IS YOUR TIME! And you are so valuable to life right now.

This is not so much about doing, but you are called now more than ever to BE who you are.

By having the willingness and dedication to meeting and transforming the shadows within yourself, and letting more of your light radiate to others, THIS will make a big impact on the collective consciousness and is more powerful than you can know.

So stand confidently in the light no matter how dense the encroaching darkness sometimes appears. 

Be your authentic self, grounded to the earth, connected to Spirit and to your heart, embodying the love, compassion and wisdom that you recognise at the core of your being – your true essence.

Trust THIS reality. 

We are in the greatest period of rebirth, collectively bringing forth the New Earth. Have faith that the Divine Intelligence that you feel in your heart is still leading us now, despite all appearances that we are shown through the main stream media news.

As I mentioned above, all the difficulties that are playing out in our lives are providing opportunities we need to meet the darkness within ourselves. When we take love, compassion and light into those shadows we are able to heal, reconnect with the parts of us that we rejected or were split off, and we become whole, healthy and empowered. 

When we return to love, fear has less control over us.

Divine Intelligence has orchestrated something phenomenal involving all life, so the opportunity for a monumental shift in reality has never been so good!

It may still get darker, but the dawn will come. The end of such a journey is usually marked by ease, flow, appreciation for life, integration, empowerment and creativity. Collectively, as we shift into higher frequencies of being we can anticipate life to be more loving, more abundant, more inclusive, more vital, more connected, more liberated and free. We’ll be stronger with greater conviction to live our truth and purpose more than ever before.

It really will be a Golden Age, and so whatever you are facing in your own life right now, the journey will be worth it.

So much light is pouring onto the planet. You have been here lifetime after lifetime purifying your multi-dimensional energy field, which is capable of holding enormous amounts of light. Just by your willingness to uncover and feel your shadowy negative emotions you dissolve them and lighten more.

I suspect I’ve moved through a difficult place relatively quickly because I’ve had many years of coaching people through the transformation process, and challenging myself. Big change always requires us to step up into a new level of being, which means going through the struggle of letting go of old ego identities. 

I really appreciate all the support I’ve had on my healing journey lately. I know I couldn’t have done it on my own. While we’re in transition we need other people to hold us and see us for who we truly are when we can’t do that for ourselves – reminding us that we are whole, perfectly imperfect, powerful and beautiful – and keep us on track as we navigate our shadows. 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at this time look for the opportunity to find a different point of view.

Hang in there, give yourself permission to surrender while you go through this. Buddy up with a friend, join a group, find a healer, but please take care of yourself by getting some regular support to hold you as you navigate the transition.

YOU ARE WORTH TAKING CARE OF BECAUSE WHO YOU ARE IS SO VALUABLE.

If you would like to talk to me about how I could help you through your own transition in a safe, supportive way through a bespoke programme of 1-2-1 sessions, please email me at cathy@cathyballard.com or follow this link to book a complimentary ‘Possibility Call’ where you can schedule a time for us to discuss options about how we might work together.

Dividing line

 

Cathy portraitCathy Ballard – Mentor and visionary coach for spiritual paradigm-shifters and sensitive empaths.

Cathy teaches her clients to develop and trust their connection to Source, master their spiritual power and reclaim their worth and value, creating more joy, satisfaction and abundance as a natural by-product of authentic alignment.

 

Email: connect@cathyballard.com

Facebook: Cathy Ballard Transformation Coaching

 

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