Dan Harris

This is super interesting.

Just to reset for the listener, we're walking through the seven aspects of the experience of being alive that we might not really fully investigate or even actively resist that we can use to be more awake and alive in our lives.

In other words, be more present.

One of the most venerable spiritual cliches, presence, but nonetheless extremely important, as discussed earlier with Rosa, like the gateway to what we might call the mystical.

So the third, we've worked through the first two.

The third is the dark night of the soul, which doesn't sound super fun, but what do you mean specifically by it?

It's the bad news that we don't often lead with when we're encouraging people to get into meditation or spirituality or allowing, to go back to that word,

That if you're truly letting stuff in, being more awake, taking off the blinders that our modern tech-obsessed world wants us to wear so that we're better consumers and scrollers, etc., etc., it's not all going to be bliss.

Much of what you'll take in will be difficult, and that's why they call it the dark night of the soul.

This isn't a malfunctioning.

This is a part of the path that has been recognized and described for millennia.

In the book, you describe an exercise for kind of leaning into the thing that we don't want to lean into.

I think it's called the life-death-rebirth cycle.

It's like a visualization to release stuck energy.

Can you walk us through it?

So if we start from the thesis that

life can be difficult and there can be lots of dark nights of the soul and avoiding it is not going to help us really.

It might be good for a minute or two, but it's not really an abiding strategy.

One portal into some deeper way of being alive is to

kind of let it in.