For those who feel disoriented in the in-between.

When what was has fallen away, and what is coming has not yet appeared.

This may speak to you.

The Dark Night of the Soul is a period of profound spiritual desolation that prompts deep self-reflection and the potential for significant transformation.

The term comes from a 16th century poem by the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, and it describes the experience of feeling completely cut off from meaning, from God, from yourself, from the thing that used to animate your life.

It is not depression, though it can look like it from the outside. Depression is a flattening. The Dark Night is an unravelling. The thoughts, words, and deeds that shaped your life till now, no longer work. You cannot find your way forward by being who you were. There can only be now. It is in the present moment only, that the flicker of something new can appear.

The paradox at its centre is that the dissolution is the point. What is being stripped away is the constructed self, the identity built on thoughts and beliefs that were never truly ours; on external validation, roles, achievements, and the opinions of others. The Dark Night cannot destroy the truth of who we are. It dissolves the identities, attachments, expectations, and assumptions that once convinced us we knew who we were.

John of the Cross wrote it as a love poem: the soul moving through the darkness of perceived separation toward union.

In a more contemporary frame, it often arrives after a collapse, a peak that unmoors you, a loss that doesn’t match the grief you’re allowed to show, or the dawning awareness that the life you built no longer fits.

It is disorienting precisely because nothing is wrong in a way you can point to. And everything feels wrong in a way you cannot explain.

For some it lasts weeks, and for others, years. The journey is rarely linear. It may arrive as a brief Dark Night, triggered by a specific event, or unfold as a prolonged metamorphosis, where periods of darkness alternate with glimpses of light, each revealing a little more of what is being born beneath the surface.

There is no way around it; there is only the journey through.

What lengthens the journey is resistance. Like an oak in autumn, its leaves falling one by one until it stands bare beneath the sky, the Dark Night strips away what once concealed the centre. Or like a caterpillar within a chrysalis, there comes a period when the old form is dissolving but the new form has not yet emerged.

The deepest challenge of the Dark Night is that it feels disorienting: like the foundation of thoughts, words, and deed that your life has been built on is cracking. The knowing in your soul is that there is so much life and light beyond what you can currently see, but the path to get you there hasn't appeared.

There is no controlling it, no rushing it. There is only an invitation for surrender, acceptance, and faith, until one day you discover that what was dissolving was never your life, only the walls around it.

Standing in my own dark night of the soul, I stood patiently hoping for a glimmer of light to guide my way.

And there it was, a wee fairy light way off in the depths of the dark woods that I wandered within. It flickered as a thought. A new thought. I wonder if....

It started with fairy tales. Magical, kind, ferocious and terrifying archetypes.... all mysterious, but each a little light in the dark that kept my curious heart moving forward. And then tarot. Each card shared a story and more light, becoming friends that kept me company as I explored the ever-expanding land that is my inner world. Loyal, wise, and unconditionally loving friends, that showed me how to see myself in a new light. Then another thought... I wonder if these friends will resonate with the little lights that were the words I found in The Gene Keys, and they did... each whispering to each other in a language that made my soul smile. Each a tiny light that together illuminated a world I never want to leave. A beautiful world where knowing who I am from the inside out made me feel powerful, alive, and safe to be me. The world I’d always known, where who you are is shaped from the outside in, that world is exhausting, and full of lies.

Week after week, month after month, and now into years, this beautiful world has been sharing its lights, one by one, until now the dark woods is strung, branch by branch with long strings of fairy lights... each connecting and all creating the most magical patterns. The last to join the party was numerology... one tiny light after another blinked into focus, each so bright I couldn’t see all that it was at once, and even now I look through squinted eyes, trying to see all that it wants to show me. And the lyrical magical voice of my intuition tells me, don’t rush, all will be revealed... and it’s this voice that I now know was always the wisest voice of all.

Now this inner world is my outer world. The lens through which I see is an ever-deepening love for myself, for others, and the world around me... and this is the world I want to keep building.

And here is what the lights taught me. Notice what you notice. Life is always doing all that it can to guide you, but when you stop looking, you stop seeing. In a world obsessed with doing, we miss what matters most — that what we have been thinking, and what we have been saying, built the life we are standing in today. I found my way one thought at a time, and one word at a time. This is what turned the lights on so I could see what to do.

The lights were never random. Every breadcrumb, every book that found its way into my hands, every word that leapt off a page and broke me open, every system that whispered to every other system in a language my soul recognised before my mind could catch up — all of it was precise. All of it was purposeful. The dark night obscures what is not for you and reveals what your soul and spirit want you to see. What they lead you to, when you stop resisting and start following the lights, is the truth of who you are and why you are here — the self that was always there, underneath every identity you built to survive, underneath every belief you inherited about who you were and what you were worth. I found a word recently that cracked something open in me that years of searching had not touched. Worthless. The belief I have carried since I was thirteen years old, so woven into the fabric of how I moved through the world that I could not see it was the subconscious thought running everything. And its opposite — priceless — was waiting in the centre of my name all along. This is the nature of the work. It will only reveal itself when you are willing to slow down and follow the lights one at a time. Each connects to the last, slowly but surely revealing your mirror of truth and your map of becoming.

I am looking for eight women who are somewhere in the dark woods right now. Women who have built lives, raised children, held things together, achieved things that look like success from the outside while something essential has quietly gone missing on the inside. Women who know, with a certainty they cannot fully explain, that there is something more they are here to be, do, and have — and who are ready, truly ready, to follow the lights until they find it. Women who are done waiting to feel ready, done waiting for the right moment, done making themselves smaller so others feel more comfortable. If you are reading this and something in you just said yes — that is your intuition. Trust it. It has been right about everything.

I am opening the Illuminarium again. A twelve-month mastermind for eight women, built on the frameworks that strung my dark woods with light — Gene Keys, Human Design, Numerology, Tarot, Traditional Fairy Tales, and the unflinching practice of knowing yourself from the inside out. We begin when the eight are gathered. The investment is $11,111. If you are one of the eight, you will know it in your body before your mind has had a chance to talk you out of it. Reply to this email with the word lights and I will be in touch personally.

With love always,
Edwina