Ricardo Pereira describes a dark night of the soul as a decade-long period that pruned away dysfunctional patterns and misaligned conditioning. He argues most pain stems from unconscious thoughts and autopilot living, and that surrendering control means releasing the brake on life's natural flow, not passive resignation.
Chapters
I can imagine that if you are going through a dark night of the soul, if you are listening to the sound of my voice in this moment, You are probably feeling as challenged as you have possibly been so far in your life. And I really want to start by acknowledging how or devastating, to use a bit of dramatic words. Yet, some of the most profound and dramatic words, I actually found a meaning for them while going through my own dark night of the soul. And I recall that for a period that felt felt to me like almost infinity in a way that it did not seem that it was going to end. It literally felt like the most vivid experience for me of hell on earth. Oftentimes different people or different groups of organizations talk about hell, a hell that exists in a different dimension dimension similarly to heaven. And for someone like you who may be going through a dark night of the soul, and perhaps that's not the way for all of you, but believe me that I get it. If you do feel in many moments that you are literally and viscerally going through hell here on Earth, So I want to acknowledge you for having unconsciously chosen that experience. And the reason why I say that is that I have many or all reasons, so to speak, to believe that we do choose these experiences as crippling or devastating. But perhaps crippling is not the right word. Because crippling for me means that the person or the being is kind of being— what's the word— damaged, or that he is going to be less than after what is happening to you. And for me, the dark night of the soul cannot be anything but the opposite. The dark night of the soul for me is like if you imagine being a tree or a plant, but let's imagine this picture of a tree. The dark night is what is pruning our roots, what is pruning our branches. But the branches and roots that it is rooting are the grass and roots that I would call our sickness in a way. And the sickness, I would call it what comes from your conditioning, from our conditioning. So Many of us that are going through a certain experience or rite of passage, as I would call it, as we would call it, realize that our conditioning is where most of our dysfunctional behaviors come from. And many of us go through life— I know myself that I did that for the first 25 years of my life— in full automatic or autopilot mode. And what that means is that I'm just going with whatever flow is happening. But I realized later on, even before I got into my own dark tonight of the soul, that that flow was not a flow, if we call it a river or a stream, was not one that was really congruent with my deepest desires, my deepest or most genuine needs that I would call coming from my heart and soul. What I see is one of the reasons, or one of the intentions for a Dark Knight of the Soul that we believe is an archetype, or this experience that many before us have come And Experience This's main intention is to help dissolve the conditioning. To help deconstruct whichever it may be that is preventing us or preventing you from living from your most authentic self. And by authentic self, this is just a word. What actually comes from the softest and also most powerful and truest parts of your heart and soul. There's a lot of people that go through a dark night of the soul and say or believe that you cannot really influence a dark night of the soul, that all you have to do is surrender. And there's actually some truth to it from our understanding. There's actually some reality that is actually based on reality and not just on limited thinking or one-sided view. Yes, surrendering and letting go of control is actually part of it because control, the way that I experience or have experienced it oftentimes, is kind of like putting the foot on the brake. But actually, life is always flowing on its own. So for me, I see God, the universe, whatever I want to call it, in nature or in so many natural, quote-unquote, dynamics in the universe, like the birth of a star, the death of a star, And if you are part of that universe, you actually believe, you feel, and probably at this stage you may be having a visceral experience that life is flowing through you, but in a very struggling way. And that's okay. That is all You're so part of it. Because one of the reasons that you're going through so much pain is so that you really get the message. Because someone who goes through a dark night of the soul and actually gets into it and understands its purpose, there's no way of turning back. And that's the reason why the pain is so strong, so you get the message. And part of the message is you have been acting, you have been thinking And you have been feeling in ways which are not congruent with your highest purpose or your life purpose or whatever we want to call it. And we are already getting clearer and clearer that part of that is because of our upbringing, because of our conditioning. So the dark night of the soul, and I'm going to repeat a few messages here because we all know that sometimes the first time we hear it, we don't really get it. So we'll make sure to communicate with as much passion and compassion because I get it, how painful it can be. But at the same time, I will also be bringing humor in other moments. A lot of what gets us in trouble is thinking, judging— this is bad, that is okay, that is good— and having this this rigid, one-sided view about whatever it is. And even for people that go through a dark night of the soul, you get a lot of people saying, "You can't do this, you have to surrender, and you have to only let go of control." Yes, let go of control, and also learn how to do things differently. And for that to happen, from my experience, you have to learn how to feel differently as well. And I would probably say I have reasons to say that most feelings come from a thought in the first place. I won't say for sure that is 100% of all feelings, but most feelings Feelings for most of the time come from some unconscious thought. Have you ever realized that we are meaning-making machines? Human beings, isn't that what makes us unique? The meaning that we give to whatever happens in our life. Sometimes the difference between looking at something and feeling anxious, or looking at the same seeing things in a different moment and being moved to tears and opening our hearts. So you can actually do that now. You can actually allow yourself to step in a bit more into your heart and actually acknowledge yourself for going through one of the rites of passage, one of the most extreme right by passing that I was privileged to go through, even though it felt like a freaking hell of a bummer in such a way that I lost track of time, that I felt mentally unstable, that I had to take for almost 10 years medication every single day because I was not able to even feel And that's what usually happens, I would say, for many of people in dark nights. Not that actual phenomena, but being open to our upper energy centers, if you want to call it using those terms. So part of what helps you go through a dark night, and you probably already know that, but we know that when you know something,
