The dark night of the soul is both an ending and a beginning. It is the end of rigid ideas about who we are and how we should be, and the beginning of a sacred unfolding, an inner rewilding, a coming back to ourselves in myriad ways. It is the end of trying to become a perfected version of ourselves, and the beginning of being with ourselves just as we are in each moment. It is a gradual, never-ending movement from denial, immaturity, insanity, and absence towards acknowledgement, maturity, sanity, and presence. It is also an initiation into an altogether different kind of seeing-sensing-knowing which slowly brings about a profound change in our relationship with ourselves, our experience, others, and life itself.

During my dark night, there were moments when I could do nothing but be in my raw experience, such as it was, without the usual overlay of judgement about how I should be with it, or what I should do with it. (Such judgement rarely coincided with reality, so I was often in a state of inner conflict.) In those moments, it was simply impossible for me to even try to get out of the pain or fear by means of a fix or cure, a method or strategy or practice or distraction. Inadvertently, I would find myself being present to whatever was here, and it would unfold as it did, often in surprising and revelatory ways. As the intensity of the dark night began to recede, and I continued to be brought back to this-here-now time and again, I started to discern the delicate and intelligent thread of my own unfolding. Once I realised that I had some kind of capacity to be present, I began to tend to this thread more intentionally and consistently, as I still do.

Being present is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Rather, it is a hit-and-miss affair, a matter of gradually becoming conscious of what’s already here. We start to notice aspects of ourselves and the world that have lain beyond our awareness, having been numbed, dissociated or distracted from, ignored, repressed, denied, hidden. (There are structures, both inner and outer that – for a variety of reasons – require or depend upon our avoidance, our being unable or unwilling to see, hear, feel, or know.) It can be a radical act to begin to sense that which has previously been kept out of consciousness; the missing pieces, parts, or voices, the proscribed knowings or impulses. Being willing to open ourselves to our (relative) ignorance also opens us to the complexity, nuance, and richness of the interwoven pluralities of ourselves and life.

To become present to or aware of something is to acknowledge its existence, to recognise it for what it is, and to move into relationship with it. This does not necessitate or entail trying to take a predetermined stance towards it. The nature of our relationship with what’s here varies hugely, and usually contains multiple and sometimes conflicting strands. Being present is not about contorting ourselves into being a detached witness or observer, or trying to be grateful or compassionate, or accept or welcome an emotion, when that isn’t what’s actually happening. It is a matter, rather, of becoming aware of whatever is coming to consciousness, and tentatively sensing into our relationship with it (and its with us, of course).

The notion of being present is often conflated with the idea that we should be in “the now” to the exclusion of past or future. But this view presupposes a rigid, linear view of time, in which past, present, and future can be neatly delineated and separated into silos. I think the truth is far more complex. Many times, I have experienced (and been with others as they experienced) a moment from the past being felt now in all the rawness that couldn’t be felt back then. Once there is space, time, and capacity for them, parts frozen in the past surface into the present to be known, seen, held, and felt. Then lives in us now, the ineluctable flow of time carrying fragments and debris and all that is as yet unseen or undigested from the past into the present, and onward to the future. We – our bodies included – are indivisible from our history, and what may yet come is intimately connected with what has been.

Over time, we hone the skills necessary to being present to ourselves. We might begin with realising that there is, for example, a particular thought loop going on, or a tightness in the abdomen, or a feeling of apprehension, or a visual memory. From there, we become more adept at noticing everything else that is at play in the moment, including the various responses and reactions – mental, emotional, imaginal, and somatic – to what we first noticed. This is by no means an intellectual process; it is instead what we might call somatic seeing-sensing-knowing, a kind of full-bodied recognition of what is here that is not dependent on the intellect.

Sometimes, this organic knowing accords with our intellectual knowing; at other times, it is at odds with it. It takes a long time to learn to trust the former, not least because we have usually been trained to mistrust it; it is often considered suspect, irrational, unreasonable, and we may previously have been mocked, undermined, or shamed for being in touch with it. Slowly, we recover our senses sufficiently to recognise that this is the knowing of guts, bones, and soul, a kind of wisdom. What emerges as we stay with ourselves is sometimes fragmentary, rarely neat or orderly, and sometimes difficult to understand from a rational perspective, yet we know the unmistakable truth of it in our cells. When we take the risk of being here, what surfaces can be unflattering, deeply humbling, and excruciatingly painful, but it is viscerally and unmistakably real, and that is a profound relief.