The Dark Night of the Soul, The Dark Feminine, and Emergent Inter-spirituality

This is an excellent interview about surrender and the end of your world. (Link at the bottom.)

Here's how her story begins:

I had a beautifully put together life in some ways. I lived in Paris, I had a beautiful healing practice in Paris. Perfect marriage, perfect family and all this. And underneath, there was this suspicion that things are not as they seem. You know it when you are containing, but you don't even know that you're containing. It's like this subtle holding of everything together. This subtle resisting.

Here's a great quote from somewhere in the middle:

At some point [your path] will take you to a place where you realize that you cannot save yourself from reality. You realize that you cannot take yourself from suffering. You realize that—as someone put it and I wish I could remember who—you find yourself at a crossroads, and you realize that the path to the right leads to hell, and the path to the left leads to hell, and where you came from was utter and absolute fucking hell, and that in front of you is hell. And when you come to that crossroads, you give up. You give up the self-improvement project. You don't stop healing, but you give up the immature idea that if I just do a little bit more I'll become awake, I'll become pure enough, worthy enough.... you stop having that misconception.

One of my teachers Jason Schulman says, "You become weary and tired." When you become weary and tired from that perpetual "I have to improve, I have to resolve"—and you have to resolve. It's not to say that you don't. You have to keep working on that place where you go to therapy and you go to healers and you try to improve, but at some point you realize that that comes to an end and you surrender.

Vera de Chalambert on Interspirituality and the Dark Night of the Soul (#47) – Chitheads Podcast