Jul 14, 2026 · 28 min · 9 segments
There is a moment when the identity you have built your whole life around stops making sense. Old roles feel hollow, relationships shift, and you find yourself in a kind of no man's land where you…
Lorin KrennHost
The dark night of the soul can be described as a spiritual death, an identity loss.
What you once identified with or who you thought yourself to be no longer has the same meaning, or maybe no longer any meaning at all.
You start seeing things with a level of clarity that can bring a deep level of sadness.
Maybe you hoped things or people, a profession, or something to be a certain way, but now you can clearly see it can never fulfill that function.
You find yourself in this no man's land, where you realize you can never, ever fully go back to your old self, or you could, but you would just deceive yourself in doing so.
But at the same time, you don't yet know who you are becoming and what's on the other side, and this uncertainty feels intolerable.
Your mind is trying to latch on to a sense of, what is going on? You might have even beliefs that say, "Am I going insane? Am I crazy?" Because suddenly, you're filled with all these doubts.
The fabric of who you believe yourself to be, which is your identity, is being shaken, and the darker the night of your soul, the deeper you are meant to serve.
Why? Because in that shaking, something deeper is meant to come through you, to be born through you.
So many things that we believe who ourselves to be or what, where we believe we need to go or to do in this life come from conditioning.
They come from a place of wounding, and by everything being shaken, what is revealed is what is true, and everything else, you're stripped of.
John of the Cross, a mystic, wrote about exactly this, and he defined the dark night of the soul as the soul being stripped of everything familiar in order to find union with something greater than yourself.
And why specifically service? Because you cannot truly serve someone if you haven't descended into your own underworld, if you haven't faced your own darkness, your own confusion, your, your moment where everything is breaking down, and the only thing keeping you somewhat stable is trust, is surrender.
That experience, that breaking down is something all the great mystics had to face, and so do you.
You cannot guide another through the depths of this or whatever they might be facing if you haven't gone through these depths yourself.
So this is your process, to serve, and we'll talk later in this episode about what this service actually might mean.
The dark night of the soul can be described as a spiritual death, an identity loss.
What you once identified with or who you thought yourself to be no longer has the same meaning, or maybe no longer any meaning at all.
You start seeing things with a level of clarity that can bring a deep level of sadness.
Maybe you hoped things or people, a profession, or something to be a certain way, but now you can clearly see it can never fulfill that function.
You find yourself in this no man's land, where you realize you can never, ever fully go back to your old self, or you could, but you would just deceive yourself in doing so.
But at the same time, you don't yet know who you are becoming and what's on the other side, and this uncertainty feels intolerable.
Your mind is trying to latch on to a sense of, what is going on? You might have even beliefs that say, "Am I going insane? Am I crazy?" Because suddenly, you're filled with all these doubts.
The fabric of who you believe yourself to be, which is your identity, is being shaken, and the darker the night of your soul, the deeper you are meant to serve.
Why? Because in that shaking, something deeper is meant to come through you, to be born through you.
So many things that we believe who ourselves to be or what, where we believe we need to go or to do in this life come from conditioning.
They come from a place of wounding, and by everything being shaken, what is revealed is what is true, and everything else, you're stripped of.
John of the Cross, a mystic, wrote about exactly this, and he defined the dark night of the soul as the soul being stripped of everything familiar in order to find union with something greater than yourself.
And why specifically service? Because you cannot truly serve someone if you haven't descended into your own underworld, if you haven't faced your own darkness, your own confusion, your, your moment where everything is breaking down, and the only thing keeping you somewhat stable is trust, is surrender.
That experience, that breaking down is something all the great mystics had to face, and so do you.
You cannot guide another through the depths of this or whatever they might be facing if you haven't gone through these depths yourself.
So this is your process, to serve, and we'll talk later in this episode about what this service actually might mean.
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