How to heal from the lowest point in your life
It was a dark night in every sense of the word.
My heart ached.
The start-up that I had built with my two co-founders over the last 2 years was coming to an end.
And we had chosen to kill it, rejecting our next round of funding.
A multi-millionaire dollar company crashing into obscurity and becoming a dream never to be realised.
My mental health was in tatters. My identity was in flux.
We had left our office after deciding earlier that day.
I didn’t know whether the damage to my friendship with my co-founder could ever be resolved.
My friend of 15 years. My friend whom I had known since primary school.
Not knowing if we would ever speak again.
This was the lowest point in my life, to date.
Welcome to the dark night of the soul…
The dark night of the soul is a term used for a stage in life that symbolises death and rebirth.
Death in an egoic sense.
It is usually brought about by the loss of something we deem profoundly fundamental to our sense of identity.
It might be triggered by the loss of a parent, a divorce after 15 years of marriage or the unexpected loss of your livelihood.
You experience deep meaninglessness and feel like an isolated fragment existing in a world that doesn’t care about you.
It’s easy to push oneself further and further away from people, deeper into reclusiveness.
There’s a dread that doesn’t go away, a heaviness that we carry.
These are the principles that helped me heal from a dark place, when all seemed lost.
Hell ceases to be hell when we are no longer alone
When we experience true hell, it is often on our own.
The feeling of separateness is one of the deepest forms of hell.
It is feeling rejected by the world and rejecting the world.
A complete state of mutual non-acceptance which categorises resistance in Buddhist terms and creates suffering.
The moment another person can enter our hell and even just watch us there with love, the suffering becomes bearable.
Incredibly painful and yet somehow bearable. It doesn’t minimise your depth of pain but it shows you that you are still of the world, that you are still connected.
However difficult things can become, if you can find even one confidant, one person who can just sit with you in these times, that can be enough to start the healing process.
Finding comfort in community
A profound realisation for me was that I was not special in my suffering.
There was nothing uniquely wrong with me. This liberated me.
Exercise 1
- Imagine that at this very moment in time, there are thousands of people experiencing the same situation as you are, however nuanced that might be.
- Imagine their faces. Their sadness. The days they are living are quite similar to your own, as they dissociate, suffer and sleep.
- Feel compassion as you imagine them. They are doing their best given the circumstances.
- Cheer them on in the same way that they are cheering you on, hoping that one-day things can get better.
When I imagined so many others like me, I gained a sense of great comfort, knowing that I was not alone. Just that someone else had sat with my pain too once upon a time. It created a feeling of love and compassion for that person, which helped me have compassion for myself too.
Exercise 2
- Imagine someone a few years older than you speaking to an audience. You can see the level of love they express, how grounded they are and the peace emanating from them.
- Hear this person talk with conviction about how they transformed the same situation that you are going through now into a stepping stone for healing.
- Hear them talk about how difficult it was, how they got themselves through it and how it led to huge growth.
- Listen to how this pain made them a better human being and inadvertently led them to live a higher quality of life.
Often, it is the meaning that we give our suffering that amplifies the pain. The story we repeat subconsciously until it becomes true. When we do this exercise, it connects us to the knowledge that often great light and learning emerge from our darkest moments.
That we cannot know the future.
It reminds us of the many people who turned their greatest adversity into their greatest strength.
Examples of negative stories
- After a breakup (I will never find someone like that again)
- After you lose a job/miss out on a promotion (I’m a failure and I’ll never achieve success)
- Losing a loved one (life is no longer worth living)
Some questions that I ask myself after something difficult happens:
- What if this is the best thing that could have happened to me?
- What lesson is this teaching me?
These questions rewire how we relate to what is happening.
It is not that something necessarily good will come from our suffering. That is just delusion.
The key word is ‘could.’
How ‘could’ this be the best thing that happened to me?
And as your brain generates answers, it de-programs the fearful part in you that believes with certainty that life will now be terrible and going downhill.
It reconnects you with possibility.
How to internalise that things can get better
The law of impermanence helped me profoundly.
Every experience, whether the most euphoric in the world or the most painful will pass.
It is the nature of life and what it means to be human, that the intensity of our feelings fades over time.
Things will change.
And while it may not feel better at the moment, it allows us to internalise that this pain is not eternal. It will change and dissolve.
Sometimes, it is the feeling that this is forever that drowns us in self-pity and victimhood. Move through it to the connection that lies just beyond it.
