The Dark Night Survival Kit (Part One)

6 Inner Practices

Listen to Andrew Harvey describe the 6 Inner Practices here:

In your darkest hour, when all seems lost, and your last vestiges of hope are sinking beneath the waves of a tumultuous sea of sorrows…

… when everything familiar and right and good has been stripped away, leaving you nothing real or imagined to cling to…

… still, there are great forces at work conspiring on your behalf, ensuring that no matter how dimly the light of the Divine flickers in the darkness of your despair…

… that light carries with it the promise of rebirth.

In the powerful audio recording below, mystic scholar Andrew Harvey explains that the Dark Night of the Soul “is the great ordeal and the greatest mystery of the authentic mystical path. Without the Dark Night, there can be no birth of the divine human, just as without the crucifixion there can be no resurrection.”

The Dark Night of the Soul is the title given to a poem by 16th-century Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross, a poem which Andrew says offers “the clearest, most accurate, most devastating account of the Dark Night that perhaps we've ever been given.”

Out of Andrew’s own Dark Night, which lasted a full decade, he discovered six powerful inner practices that fortified his spirit and helped him survive.

While these practices are valuable for anybody going through trauma, loss, betrayal or deep depression, none of those things are the authentic Dark Night. The phrase Dark Night is used very casually in the modern world, but the real Dark Night refers to the mystical passage from dying to the false self into dying into life.

Only when you emerge from the Dark Night, says Andrew, will you realize, “Oh, my God, what I thought was annihilation is resurrection. What I thought was death is eternal life. What I believed to be the end was the end of one life and the beginning of one unimaginably more beautiful and more powerful.”

With that context in mind, Andrew offers this caveat: “These are the most powerful practices I know, and it is very important to approach them with humility and awe and deep devotion. Do not play with these practices. They have the power in the spiritual realm of napalm. Don't pursue them without truly devoting yourself to the Divine as you understand it because if you do play with them and if you don't do them with devotion they will, in fact, be less helpful to you. They could even be dangerous.”

1) Practice the presence by repeating the name of the Divine, by whatever name you love the Divine, “again and again and again so that every time you breathe in and out, your breath is perfumed by the name.” Authentically practicing the presence, which requires tremendous faith in and tremendous love of the Divine, helps you prepare the ground for the revelations of the divine presence.

2) Immerse yourself in the protective embrace of a mantra. This extension of practicing the presence is like “holding a lens before the flame of the divine grace so that it can concentrate on healing your own suffering, your own despair.” In the audio below, Andrew shares the carefully crafted mantra that helped him “love without reason” and survive his personal Dark Night.

3) The first kind of prayer essential for getting through the Dark Night is praying to survive the intensity of the process. “The best way of finding that courage is not relying on what you have experienced of your own courage, perseverance or endurance, but flinging yourself on the mercy of the Beloved in prayer and, begging to be brave enough, begging to be strong enough, and begging to persevere in deep faith deeply enough.”

4) The second category of prayer is the prayer of protection — “protection of your whole being as it goes through the crucifixion, resurrection, death and rebirth process.” The great glory of prayer is that “if you pray in the agony of humility to the Divine for protection, you will be protected in ways that will astound you by that grace.” In the audio, Andrew reveals the 8-word prayer of “negative protection” he uses himself at least 40 times a day, as well as a great prophet’s prayer of “positive protection.”

5) The third type of prayer enables you to align yourself with the birth of your future self even as you’re experiencing the terrible process of the death of your present self. It’s crucial to pray in such a way as to build in yourself the virtues of the consciously embodied divine human you are destined to become. Here Andrew offers a well-known, centuries-old prayer that calls forth your future self’s deepest consciousness and commitment.

6) While lying down on the ground with your arms outstretched, imagine that all of your suffering is being released from your psychophysical body as little iron nails, and that the golden light of the Divine Mother is pouring down into every part of you and irrigating your entire heart, mind, soul and body. Andrew promises that if you intensely inhabit this visualization for 10 minutes, “you'll be astonishingly stronger and calmer and clearer, whatever the situation you are going through.”

May these inner practices provide comfort, support and inspiration if and when you find yourself in the throes of your own Dark Night. Immersed in sorrow, the idea that time will heal your pain may be inconceivable. And yet, the voice of Spirit continually whispers to you this promise:
 

However long the night, the dawn will break.
— African proverb
 

Look for
The Dark Night Survival Kit
Part Two: 6 Outer Practices
In the next issue of The Shift Catalyst

Andrew Harvey is an author, speaker and founder/director of the Institute of Sacred Activism, an international organization focused on inviting concerned people to take up the challenge of our contemporary global crises by becoming inspired, effective and practical agents of institutional and systemic change in order to create peace and sustainability.

Andrew has taught at Oxford University, Cornell University, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The California Institute of Integral Studies and the University of Creation Spirituality as well as at various spiritual centers throughout the U.S.

He was the subject of the 1993 BBC film documentary, The Making of a Modern Mystic, and appears also in Rumi Turning Ecstatic and The Consciousness of the Christ: Reclaiming Jesus for A New Humanity.

He is co-author of the best-selling The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, and has worked with the great Iranian Sufi dancer, Banafsheh Sayyad, in producing a film, In the Fire of Grace, which marries Sufi-inspired dances to the stages of Rumi’s understanding of the path of Divine love.

Andrew’s many books include Sun at Midnight, The Essential Mystics and The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism.

Andrew's new 7-week course, Reclaiming the Fierce Feminine, begins November 20.