Leadership and the 2nd Dark Night of the Soul

There is a part of the leadership path that I felt to share something on, as I have come across a few beings recently navigating its challenges and wondering if they are in the verge of breakthrough or breakdown.

Of course any deeply challenging time in our life could be described as a “dark night of the soul”, but in the mystical literature that phrase means something quite specific.

The first dark night of the soul happens when someone is making the transition of living from their personality with its basically self-centred ambitions, desires, and goals (not judging, that’s just how personalities function), to living from their soul and its impulse to give, love and serve.

Suffering is most people’s first teacher, and for all of us there comes a time when our capacity and interest to live a life with our personal self at the centre disintegrates.

That generally leads into a crisis of meaning where people feel deeply existential, lost, and struggle to find what truly matters to them.

In this, the suffering is so great that the person is willing to break through their layers of conditioning, and this leads them to start to experience and then align their life with their soul.

But there is also a second dark night, which happens once the individual is quite well established in living their embodied soul expression.

Perhaps they have become a leader in some area. Their soul purpose is stable, and they have learned the lessons of integrating soul and embodied life, including their relating, er0s and how they earn their money.

And then comes a new time of disintegration.

The life and energy fuelling their soul work starts to fall away, and often the money stops flowing so freely too.

It’s clear something isn’t alive in the way it used to be, and often the individual starts to question whether this is a step into a new breakthrough or whether they are regressing back into old personal patterns that would sabotage their fulfilling soul-centred life and work.

The piece I sense is worth illuminating here is that this second dark night isn’t a regression (though it does bring up even deeper layers of the wounded personal self than when the soul started to come online).

Rather, it offers the opportunity for a new breakthrough, this time to the life force of spirit (also known as the monad, divine darkness, or the void).

The challenge here is that spirit has a fundamentally different operating system than soul.

Soul downloads / uploads stable visions of / longing for the world our hearts know is possible, which our embodied self can put into action as a leader of change in the world.

Spirit works differently.

It is dynamic, like lightning, oceanic waves, or the rising fertility of the earth.

It is the dark mystery of the black hole.

It doesn’t call us to vision and create pathways into the future so much as to surrender and die into the Life of our core to BE a transmitter of it here and now.

Just like soul did earlier, now spirit – the new great unknown - asks us to make it the centre of our life.

And this means taking risks, again.

By this time often the soul-embodied leader has set up stable flows of business, organisation, and money around their soul purpose.

Now, if they choose to say yes to this deeper layer of their being that is beckoning them further into the mystery, they need to find ways to say yes to the call of spirit while not making themselves financially dependent on the result of this process.

This generally means they need to keep their soul-based business ticking along in some way, while also making themselves truly available to the call their core. Spirit doesn’t do half-heartedness.

There are various challenges in this process. What I see most often is unclarity in the leader about whether to trust the new call they are feeling and listen to the pulse of life through their being, or stay with the stable and clear plan of service they have entered into but that no longer feels so alive.

If they are willing to jump this new abyss though, just like they did at an earlier stage from personality to soul, what they find is an inexhaustible source of divine life that starts to penetrate their heart, soul and body with a dark ray of God.

At first, this adds entirely new levels of power to their soul work. Indeed, it provides their soul with the energy to breathe its gifts fully out into the world.

Then, once that is complete, the soul turns 180 degrees and starts to allow itself to be absorbed into its dark core.

Paradoxically, while this entails the leader’s focus turning away from the world, it actually increases the power pouring through them.

But that’s a whole other stage of the leadership journey.