The Dark Night of the Soul: What It Is and How to Move Through It

The phrase comes from the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic John of the Cross, who used it to describe a specific, disorienting stage of spiritual life: the moment when the felt sense of God’s presence, the comfort, the certainty, the warmth that used to accompany prayer or practice, simply goes quiet. Not because you did something wrong. Not because your faith failed. Because, in the framework John of the Cross described, this silence is itself part of a maturing spiritual life, not a sign that it’s ending.

Why It Feels So Frightening

For most people who experience it, the dark night doesn’t arrive as a dramatic crisis of belief. It arrives as absence. Prayer that used to feel like connection now feels like talking to an empty room. Practices that used to anchor you feel mechanical, hollow, performed rather than felt. Scripture, ritual, community, whatever used to carry a sense of meaning, becomes strangely flat, and the fear that follows is usually some version of: what if I’ve lost it. What if this is permanent. What if I was never really connected to begin with, and I’m only now finding out.

That fear is understandable, and it’s also, according to the contemplative tradition this concept comes from, based on a misunderstanding of what’s happening. The dark night isn’t the absence of spiritual growth. In John of the Cross’s original framework, it’s often described as a necessary stripping away of the sensory comforts and certainties a person had been relying on, not because those comforts were bad, but because clinging to the feeling of connection can quietly become a substitute for the deeper, less visible reality it was meant to point toward.

It Is Not the Same as Depression, But It Can Overlap

This distinction matters clinically as well as spiritually. Depression is a medical condition with its own criteria, its own physiological basis, and its own evidence-based treatments, and it deserves to be taken seriously as exactly that, not spiritualised away. A dark night of the soul, in the classical sense, is specifically about the felt absence of spiritual connection, and it can occur in someone who is otherwise not depressed. But the two can also co-occur, and if the flatness you’re experiencing comes with hopelessness, loss of interest in nearly everything, or thoughts of self-harm, that’s a signal to talk to a mental health professional directly, alongside, not instead of, whatever spiritual processing you’re also doing.

Moving Through It, Not Around It

Stop trying to force the old feeling back. Much of the suffering in a dark night comes from grasping for a sensory experience of connection that has, for now, receded. Contemplative tradition suggests the more workable move is to stay present to the absence itself, rather than treating it as an emergency to be immediately fixed.

Practice without requiring a payoff. Continue whatever spiritual practice matters to you, prayer, meditation, ritual, not because it will necessarily feel good right now, but as an act of showing up regardless of the emotional weather. This is, in the tradition, considered a deeper form of faith than practice that depends on feeling something each time.

Find someone who has actually been through one. A spiritual director, a pastor, a mentor familiar with this specific territory, not necessarily a general source of comfort, but someone who can normalise what you’re experiencing as a known, survivable stage rather than a unique catastrophe.

Hold the possibility that this is not the end of the story. Across the contemplative tradition, the dark night is consistently described not as a final state but as a passage, one that, painful as it is, tends to lead toward a steadier, less feeling-dependent, more durable form of faith on the other side of it.

If you’re in it right now, you are not doing your spiritual life wrong. You are, by the account of people who mapped this territory centuries before you, doing something much harder and more real than staying comfortable would have been.

Recommended Reading

This title from the Strong Through Change library speaks to the deeper search for meaning this season can provoke:

• The Meaning Map – Finding Purpose and Direction After Loss

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