[4.3] The Year I LEARNED to Dance with Darkness
so what? now what? on making meaning & my infinite dance with life
Let’s re-cap The Year I Learned to Dance with Darkness.
In [4.1], I shared the story of how my healing journey began, deep in the darkness. They lied to us!! Healing may be a privilege, but it is not all spa retreats and juicing. I hate to report that if it’s not gnarly and unpleasant, you’re not healing, you’re bypassing 😩
In [4.2], we explored ancient philosophies of the metaphysics of reality, including Maya and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. TLDR we live in a simulation and everything is god. The illusion is one of separation (duality) and reality is one of wholeness (non-duality).1 Learning, Enlightment and Awakening are inherently disorienting experiences.
So What? NOW WHAT?2 These are the questions we explore today in [4.3] The Year I LEARNED to Dance with Darkness.
What happens after a Dark Night of the Soul? 🌚
The Dark Night of the Soul is a concept that shows up archetypally across mythology and in psychospiritual approaches to healing. Echart Tolle says,
“It is a term used to describe what one could call a collapse of a perceived meaning in life…an eruption into your life of a deep sense of meaninglessness.”
Many have said that the collective has been experiencing a sort of Dark Night of the Soul, a crisis of meaninglessness.
As a reverted spiritualist, it can be hard for me to fully wrap my head around the idea that EVERYTHING IS GOD. How can that be true in the face of such conscious cruelty that exists in the world? Man-made violence, inequality, terrifying horrors. In childhood, we are raised to believe in rules, the righteousness of authority, the strict boundaries between good and bad, and the promise of freedom in adulthood.
Instead many in my generation are inheriting a planet that is literally on fire, rapidly spiraling towards our self-destruction.
In the face of such immense cruelty and unending devastation, it can make sense to want to unplug and yeet ourselves out of this simulation. So why stay?
On Making Meaning
Victor Frankl was an Austrian psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor. During his time navigating the chaos of anti-semitism in the culture AND spending 1942-1945 in concentration camps, he developed a series of strategies to stay steady and survive. After being liberated, he dictated in 9 days to assistants what would become Man’s Search for Meaning, eventually selling millions of copies worldwide.
Frankl (2000) explained: I can see beyond the misery of the situation to the potential for discovering a meaning behind it, and thus to turn an apparently meaningless suffering into a genuine human achievement. I am convinced that, in the final analysis, there is no situation that does not contain within it the seed of meaning. To a great extent, this conviction is the basis of Logotherapy. (p. 53)
His theory had three prongs.
We find meaning in life through the ATTITUDE we hold.
How we interpret our EXPERIENCES
How we alchemize our gifts and pain through CREATIVITY.3

Frankl’s theories align with what we have covered and learned through exploring ancient Hindu/Buddhist philosophy of Maya and Plato’s allegory of the cave. Frankl posits that part of our dance with our human experience requires both transcending out of it *and* remaining connected to it in order to make meaning of it.
Remember in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, that the philosopher who escapes and is living life outside of the cave eventually comes to realize that escape means nothing without the effort to go back and liberate the others. He goes back excitedly to share news of the beautiful world that exists beyond their wildest imagination, but the prisoners become angry and call him crazy, choosing the reliable comfort of the shadow puppet show over the fear of pursuing the uncomfortable trek outside into the sun.
The choice to leave ultimately belongs to each of the prisoners. It’s painful watching people choose to stay committed to the illusion. Sheep who choose willful ignorance rather than the slow, painful, yet necessary process of awakening to be a responsible and compassionate global citizen in the world.
The irony is so painful as many millions of us try to make meaning of the senseless scale of violence across Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo. We’re trying to understand how and why politicians won’t listen to the cries and demands of the collective to STOP this violence once and for all. We watch in abject horror as everyone from elected officials to military to everyday regular people do absolutely bonkers things to maintain their Maya, their illusion of self-protection and isolated sense of identity.
Indigenous Wisdom has a perspective on this too.
Throughout history, there have been brave individuals who made it to the books (and now our feeds 😫) and many many more who were lost to time, who despite everything still resisted, still survived, still continued to live with hearts wide open, still never lost their humanity.
The horrors persist, but so do we.
To Be Human is To Make Meaning
Frankl may have captured brilliantly captured this theory in terms of psychotherapy and healing, but if there’s one thing that humans have been doing across space and time to make sense of this confusing, chaotic world it is make meaning. From our gossiping that was key to our evolutionary growth, to the first depictions of life on cave walls, to the rituals and wisdom traditions that have been passed down through time— what has endured is the meaning we’ve made out of life.
We make meaning through story, song, and symbology.
Tragedy, comedy, metaphor, mythology.
We make meaning through art, prose, dance, ritual, tradition.
We make meaning through culture, community, family.
We make meaning through memes!! In my darkest moments, when I was ready to exit this illusion of separation and return to merge back one with void, I’d run into a meme or an anonymous tumbler screenshot that would so accurately, piercingly, and hilariously capture my pain and the human condition, reminding me that the feeling of being so alone was the illusion winning.
I write because words are spells and language shapes the meaning I give to the world.
Meaning is something we construct actively, but it also simply emerges. It doesn’t exist in a material way— it is the subtle essence we find behind the material experiences and events we have.
Shakti is meaningless chaos without Shiva. It is with our conscioussness *and* intuition, our human-divine reason *and* creativity, our wise discernment, that allows us to do this magical task of reaching out behind the illusion to find divine meaning in it.
We make meaning through taking action, through play, through making a mess. Perfectionism and either/or thinking entirely inhibits our ability to make meaning. We must throw ourselves at life, experiment, fail, change our minds, try again.
My problem with philosophy prior to the emergence of critical philosophy4 has been that opining how and why the world is the way it is means absolutely nothing without the crucial step towards taking action and learning from it.
I have been returning to this framework for years Developing a Liberatory Consciousness (Dr. Barbara J. Love, 2000) to situate myself in my learning and unlearning journey, and to remind myself that the learning never stops. We just keep spinning and spinning towards our highest vision for collective liberation.
No one can make meaning for us. They certainly have tried! The Church tells us one story about how the world is and how we must operate within it. School, Work, & People in Positions of Authority tell us another set of stories and rules about how we are to find our place in this world. Our Family & Community has its own set of values and ideas of what a meaningful life is, and we don’t always agree with the way our ancestors have made meaning of the world.
The most singular and sacred task for each of us, now more than ever, is to take a look at our tiny pocket of the world and learn to make meaning of it, to find purpose and connection in it, to fight for wholeness and integration rather than the dehumanization and isolation that our systems relentlessly perpetuate.
We make meaning by realizing that the darkness we find ourselves in is the ripe fertile soil in which change, growth, transformation must begin. We have to choose not to succumb to despair. We have to hang on long enough to see if it might get interesting.
The point mes amis is NOT TO STOP at the point of disillusionment, disorientation, and despair in the Dark Night of the Soul.
THE POINT after our descension, after the confrontation with our Shadow, after we trudge up and out of the cave and are blinded by the light of expanded awareness, is to gather the guts and put on our big girl pants to make meaning out of what we encounter.
The Year I Learned Making Meaning is an Infinite DANCE 🌀
A few nights ago, I marked Mahashivratri for the first time. While I’ve always been drawn to nataraja, the dancing image of Shiva or Kali when thinking about Dancing with Darkness, I was so SO pleasantly surprised and comforted when I saw this specific interpretation— “[Shiva’s] swirling dance [of consciousness] breaks Maya aka illusion.”5
For as long as I can remember, dance is when I felt most wild and free.
It didn’t matter if I was sasheing across the floor in a ballet studio, grinding on someone at a school dance, making up choreo with friends to Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys in the basement, or just getting the wiggles out in the kitchen - dance has always always been my happy place.
me and my wild little sister at great america in 2002
For a long stretch of time, I stopped dancing. Fear, Shame, Pain all stopped me from experiencing the magic in my body.
So this year in my descent into darkness, when the world made no sense, when my Body was revolting against its chains, when my Heart had unending oceans of grief pouring out of it - at the bottom of my descent, I found the treasure in my bones.
I remembered that I inherited my love of instinctual connection to music and dance from a line of wild women.
Through music, dance, creativity, writing, storytelling, art-making - my ancestors have channeled creativity through their bodies to find respite, self-expression, survival.
These women alchemized their feelings through their small art made purely for their own delight. Their truest wisdom was in the creativity and resourcefulness they brought to Mothering - the fantasies they created, the music they played, the folktales they regaled with wise lessons, the dancing they encouraged - these were the humble tools of resistance they had in facing the inevitable difficulties in life.6
At my lowest, darkest points, I remembered. I remembered I’m not alone, I remembered I’m connected to everything, I remembered as fallible as I am there is a tiny spark of divinity in me too. I remembered the treasure in my bones.
I found God in Me. I find God in the nooks and crannies of my Body as I stretch and expand and move to music. I remember what it means to be ALIVE.
Making meaning is knowing we’ll never have all the answers, I’ll never understand why WHY WHYYYYY things are the way they are in this mad world we live in.
But rather than succumb to despair, I remember I have my Head, my Hands, my Heart. I remember I can’t think my way through everything. My Consciousness has to come work in tandem with my Body, my sacred Energy.
So when my Mind comes humbly to the Mat or the dance floor, turning down the volume on the cacaphonous chaos in my brain, allows my Body instead to take the lead, Mental Calm and Clarity inevitably follows. Simple solutions to chronic problems find their way to me after some flopping around on the Mat. Sometimes it comes after a good sleep. Sometimes it comes after a few good sleeps.
Dancing with Darkness is ebb and flow, push and pull, listening and responding.
I’m the first in living memory of my lineage to be an INDEPENDENT WOMAN. To be crafting a purpose and life entirely my own. To be a Woman who Works for Herself, a Warrior and a Healer, a Lover and a Fighter. I’ll be damned if I don’t Dance my way through it all.
How are you making meaning of it?
The Horrors Persist, But So Do We 👹🔮🦋

One of the simplest and most profound frameworks for shaping learning I return to over and over again - What? So What? Now What?
Check out this piece on how we make meaning from our pain.
“To change the world: the ambition of critical philosophy since its inception in the 19th century has always been to transform human existence.
Not just to make the world more safe and secure for private posessions or for the free pursuit of self-interest like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, or Adam Smith
Not just to make it more rational, self-conscious, or orderly, with Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Weber
Nor simply to make men more virtuous or life more pleasurable as Aristotle, Epicurus, Seneca and the ancients envisaged milennia before
BUT RATHER, to create a more just and equal society, with less domination and social differential, and to materialize the opportunity for each to flourish and achieve our greatest potential. To realize a world of equal citizens in which all human beings can fulfill their talents and aspirations in which all are nurtured, educated and cared for generously and respectfully by each other, tending not only to their dreams and ambitions, but also humbly to everyone else’s.” [Critique & Praxis, Bernard E. Harcourt]
Critical Theorists: Marx, Foucalt, Gramsci, Kant, Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Gayatri Chaukravati, etc.
Remember - Maya is the illusion of separation, of binary, either/or. When the truth is, EVERYTHING IS GOD. Everything is vibrating energy, and all we can do is surf the waves, dance with the vibrations, shape change, make meaning, create anew. That’s our divine power we hold as Man, with our Head our Hands our Heart, as our highest selves, witness the unbridled chaotic man-made shitstorm that has gone far beyond the inevitable chaos of Mother Nature’s storms, and do something about it.