Dark Night of the Soul: What It Really Feels Like (Round Two)

Your nervous system might be the reason your spiritual awakening feels like chaos.

I’m back after my second dark night of the soul—and this time, everything was different.

In this episode, I break down the real difference between my first dark night years ago and this one:
 control vs. surrender.

The first time, I fought everything.
 I tried to control my body, shut down the experience, and make the spiritual awakening symptoms stop—and it made everything harder.

This time, I let it happen.

After working with both an energetic coach and a nutrition/fitness coach, I finally started resourcing my body—and saw a pattern I had missed for years: chronic nervous system freeze states I had been writing off as “bad days.”

That awareness led to a full nervous system reset—and a week of intense activation leading up to it.

But instead of spiraling, I let my body lead.
 And what used to feel like a dark night… became a dark day.

We talk about:

• dark night of the soul symptoms
• nervous system regulation + freeze response
• spiritual awakening and embodiment
• and why the way you move through these moments determines how hard they have to be

If you’re in the middle of your own awakening—or feel like everything is unraveling—this will help you understand what’s actually happening.

You’re not breaking.
 You’re being rebuilt.

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Join the Unity Code collective to participate in experiments: https://mediumnicole.com/podcast

Nicole Pope is an internationally-trained Evidential Medium and Soul Integration Guide dedicated to helping others reconnect with their higher self, awaken their gifts, and remember who they truly are.

To connect with Nicole, book a reading, or access her social media accounts: http://mediumnicole.com/links

Transcript

Two Coaches And A New Approach

Discovering Freeze States In Daily Life

Saying Yes To A Reset

Dark Night Round Two Begins

Letting The Body Lead

Round One And The Need To Control

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Unity Code. I am back better than ever, baby. I am. I went through my second dark night of the soul over the past few weeks, and it has been a fucking journey. So let's just grab a cup of tea, sit down, and talk about what this experience is like going through it round two, when anything and everything you've ever thought about yourself gets turned upside down for the second time in your life, and yet it's so right. It's so right. Oh my gosh. Let's let's get down into the dirty of it. This is this is like the under the sheets version of the podcast episode today. So starting in the beginning of this year, I have been working with a beautiful, amazing practitioner who is, I don't even know what to call her anymore. She's my energetic coach, she's my shaman, she's all of all of the different things. So what I did is I found the perfect opposite. Um, and and I'm working pretty exclusively with her this year as somebody who works quite frequently with energy and frequency and body, like energetics specifically, because I am all up in my head 24-7. And I know that in order to go higher with spirit, I have to anchor more in my body, right? I have to be able to ground more in my physical body if I want to access more levels of spirit. So I have been working on her doing just that for the past three months or so. And likewise, at the same exact time, I have also been working with a nutrition and fitness coach because I am a grown-ass adult that has forgotten how to feed and exercise herself. I'm blaming this back to COVID. I honest, true, honest to God, truly am, because I was totally fine up until about COVID. And then my mental health deteriorated, and then spirit came in, and then I was just in my mind 24-7, right? Um, my kids are much older now. The snacks are still vast in our house, and I would find myself eating chips. Yep, in Slim Gyms for most meals. Thank God I'm Italian and everything goes to my ass because that looks really good still. So around the same time, I have signed up for an energetic coach, essentially to help me gain access to understanding my energetic frequencies in my own body, and also, which is very interesting as a clairsentient person, isn't it? Is it not? Because then when I tap into spirit, it's all right there. But when I'm not tapped into spirit, I cannot tell. Um, usually when things are going on in my body that I should notice. I don't even know. I'm just gonna keep it generic like that. That wasn't an innuendo for something deeper, but it's just like I don't pay attention to my body at all. So body energetics and nutrition and fitness coach all at the same time. So this has been brewing energetic energetically for three months for me. And when I signed on for my nutrition coach, Spirit literally let out a sigh of relief that I was gonna finally resource my body in the way in which it needed to be resourced. Isn't that interesting? And so as I continued to eat better, drink more water, um, exercise or at least walk more than I ever have before. Oh my God, I didn't know how many, how few steps I got. If you work from home like me and you don't get up and like purposely walk, y'all, I got like 1500 steps a day in. Like it, like it was bad. It was really bad. So once I started getting into this new routine, what I noticed was my nervous system period in my body. And I noticed how often I would sit in freeze states pretty much 24-7. Um, it would happen absolutely yes, every single day. And also there would be probably about one day a week where my my freeze state took over my nervous system for the greater half of a day. Like there's no other way to put it. The only way I could reset it was by going to take a nap or going to bed. And so after a while, so here's here's the God honest truth. I had been doing this for years, and I never ever noticed the pattern because I'm always on to the next, I'm always on to the next, I'm always on to the next. I would chalk shit up to shitty days, and I would just move on to the next, right? And so I never resourced myself enough in my own body to know there was something going on that needed to be addressed. And that's exactly what feeding myself and watering myself, like a beautiful little plant that I am, effectively was able to do. And so once I got resourced enough, once I was getting enough sleep, I was like, oh shit, there's a pattern to these freeze states that I didn't see before. And so ring, ring, ring, called up my energetic coach. And I'm like, what the fuck is going on? And so she allowed me to see my energy in a completely different way than I ever had before, making me realize that this freeze state of mind has been going on pretty much my entire life. And that she could help me with a beautiful deep dive energetic session that essentially would reset and recalibrate my nervous system back to a normal functioning nervous system. Um it wasn't even it, it was amazing. It was like, and I was like immediately, yes, let's do it. I don't want to live in this constant state of freeze before for any longer than I had to. And so what was so interesting is the moment I said yes to that session, to when I had that session about a week later, I have never had my nervous system freak out as fucking bad as it was that week. And so this is when my dark night of the soul number two officially started was when I said yes to this nervous system reset. And the similarities of my energetic drama, feelings, reactions in that week leading up to my session was so fucking similar to the first time I had my dark night of the soul. Like I could not, I don't even know if I can put into words what was so similar about it energetically, but it was this feeling of inevitable change. It was this feeling of I can recognize something really big is happening and I don't know what it is and I don't understand it. That was all the same. But it felt just as scary. It felt just as God, crazy. I felt crazy. Like I could I felt like I was could be easily committed to an asylum, right? I felt sick, I felt tired, I couldn't sleep, um, I couldn't function. I mean, like, I don't think I functioned at all the week leading up to that session. Um, I was just like, it imagine your nervous system on full fucking alert for six days in a row. That is what my nervous system was like. All day, every day, couldn't sleep, couldn't really eat, couldn't really exercise. So I was just literally stuck in this super activated nervous system state for six days. My friends saw me that that week. So, what was really, really interesting is that I knew what I was going through, right? I knew what was coming up to change. And because I knew what generally what was coming, at least what I was gonna go through, even though I didn't really know what that meant in terms of my energy after the fact, after this nervous system reset, but I knew that this was gonna be hugely beneficial for me in my future. And so even though my nervous system was immensely activated, I was able to almost separate myself and observe myself, observe my nervous system freaking out and me as my human, like not judging it and just letting it go and just going with the flow and being like, well, today's a shit day, nothing's getting done. Oh, okay, I don't have anything on my calendar. I'm gonna go sit and watch Bridgerton because that's the only thing that's gonna help me feel slightly better in this body right now. I'll go take a nap. So instead of trying to control, and I'll talk about that in a second, I literally just sat back in the energy and let it flow however it felt like it wanted to flow out of my body. It was a very divine feminine approach to my divine awakening, round two. On the flip side, round one, which was when I first started this work several years ago, I didn't know what I was going through. I did not know what the purpose and intention of it was. I didn't know what I was going through. I didn't know what was coming out on the other side, and it was fucking terrifying. When you were going through your first dark night of the soul, when you first start discovering spirit, and then literally the entire week, spirit is in your face, in your ear. You're seeing things, you're hearing things, like again, certifiable. And I approached that the only way that I knew how to at the time. And that was from a very divine masculine control perspective. As my nervous system ramped up, I tried to control it. I tried to stop it. I tried to do all the things that would help me feel better. So I was not a passive participant, I was not like playing the passenger role. I was trying to drive us back on track. I was trying to make the craziness stop. I was trying to make my nervous system stop freaking out. And so when you take a freaked out nervous system and you try to control that on top of your freaked-out nervous system, it's like you amplify the energy of your reaction. So a lot of the same things happened. I didn't have sleep, right? I couldn't control myself. I was in like free states, but I was trying to push myself through it, right? Um, it was a very unpleasant experience because not only was I having these massive nervous system reactions to all of these crazy spiritual experiences that experienced that week, but also I was trying to control it on top of it and failing every single step along the way. Can you imagine how much energy it was the first time that I went through my dark night of the soul? How much energy it takes out of you to have your nervous system reactions try to control it and then judging how you are unable to control it. Right? So, like you're failing every single step along this dark night of the soul, and you're getting crazier and crazier and crazier and crazier until you finally like jump off the deep end, which I definitely did. I definitely did. And there was a point that week where my clear audience turned on. This is a fun story, and I was hearing spirit for the first time ever, right? For a while, it was not my clear audience at all. But when my clear audience turned on, it was paragraphs. I mean, when it turned on, I could hear spirit in my head for about an hour straight. Couldn't shut it off. Couldn't shut it off. That is the experience of the Dark Knight of the Soul, everybody. Or at least it was for me. And so when you compare my first one, very divine masculine, toxic by the way, controlling, trying to stop it, trying to change the flow, trying to do everything you can to get back to homeostasis, versus my second one where I was like, oh, shit's about to change. All right, body, do what you gotta do. You get ready for it. I'll just sit back and wait for you to stop freaking out. And like, I literally let my body control the week instead of my mind. And the difference in that experience was night and day. So I'm not gonna, I'm not even gonna call it a dark night of the soul. There was a dark night of the soul first time, there was a dark day of the soul second time. Because I went with the flow. I didn't resist it. I didn't push back. I didn't urge it to move faster. I didn't try to pretend it wasn't happening because it absolutely was happening. And my husband, love, oh my God, I don't know what I did to deserve him. He just, he, he knew exactly. He's just like, oh, I, oh, this is round two. Okay, I'm just gonna take the kids. Didn't see him all week. I'm like, I'm gonna go sleep at camp, even though there's four feet of snow on the ground. He's like, okay, I'll go shovel the driveway so you can get there. So God, I just, oh, I'm so lucky. Um, and so that's what it was like for this dark, this day of the soul for me, this dark day of the soul. And I allowed the energy to just flow where it needed to. And because I let it flow up until the week before, something very interesting happened, literally the day or two before my session. And that was that my nervous system had all the reactions that it needed to have. What I noticed in my body is my body was already doing a lot of the reset for me that was going to happen on that Sunday night. Yeah. I could, I didn't know it at the time because I didn't know what I was experiencing and I was just letting it happen. But there were things that were going on in my body that I later learned were part of the nervous system deregulation process. It my body was already adjusting to the new norm once the chaotic energy of my nervous system disruption happened earlier in the week, and then it just started reorganizing itself in the way that it was going to on Sunday anyway. And so not only did I spend less energy resisting, but also I got a head start. I let my body do what it needed to do, and it naturally knew how to do that and naturally knew how to get back to its own nervous system homeostasis. Isn't that wild? Like, doesn't that just it blows my mind? And I know I'm not the only person that had gone through this type of a session because there have since been some coaching calls, group calls with other people who have gone through this nervous system reset that I was going through. And I'm I'm not, you know me. I'm not judging it. I'm not saying I'm better or worse, right? We all have our own journey with these things, but it was so interesting to see where I was sitting versus some of the other people who were going through the process as well. And seeing how much further ahead I was because I didn't resist it. And I don't know if the other people resisted it. I don't know. I have no idea, right? Maybe they didn't. Maybe this is me making up the story in my head, which I, you know, our brains will do anyway. But I know from my own experience that my dark night of the soul from my first time took me like two weeks to recover from once I finally broke. And I think that truly is the definition of what a dark night of the soul is that you break your own fucking system. You have an internal tower moment in your own energetic field so that you can break down the old structures and build new ones. And that's exactly what I did. And I want to talk about why. I mean, I talked about like why things were set up the way they were, but hindsight is 2020 with us, right? And now I know why it was so critical for me to go through this experience again, is because the work that I am meant to do is meant to go so much deeper than my nervous system could have possibly held for the clients that needed me to go at deeper levels. That's what she said. Um but it's true is that the types of clients I am finding myself with, the types of clients that I want to serve are people like me. Like, isn't that the truth of all of this work? Is that the journey that you go through is the journey that you're gonna teach to your clients. And I know my journey was not fucking pretty. I know that there's nobody who could have held space for me at all in both of my nervous system Dark Knight of the Soul moments.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

I know the only person that could hold my energy was myself.

Hearing Spirit And Hitting The Edge

SPEAKER_00 20:32

But I know that I am very fortunate enough to have the capacity and strength and trust in myself to know that I'm gonna make it through both of these things, even though it was really questionable the first time. But I know not not other others are not as lucky. Others, some of you listening, may have been like jammed through this process because Spirit said, We're not letting you wait anymore. And it was like me, you don't know what the fuck you're doing. Everything is gray, nothing makes sense. I'm hearing dead people in my head, right? Like I'm seeing shadow people with my eyes, and you don't understand it. And I want to be the person that holds space for you in this journey. Whether it is a dark night of the soul, whether whether it is other parts, maybe it's a nervous system reset, maybe it's part of the transformation of who you're meant to become. But I know that I need to be the safe energetic space for people, and I know that my nervous system would not be able to hold the capacity that I need to. And so I needed the reset button. And isn't it beautiful how spirit set me up for that? Isn't it beautiful how in perfect fucking timing, I found an energetic coach and a nutrition coach and one. And the new Christian coach allowed me to see the clarity that I needed in my own nervous system. And I had the net already there to catch me when I needed the help with how to do that. And this is what I'm talking about when I say everything happens for a reason. And I know life is pr is not pretty sometimes, and it's messy.

SPEAKER_01 22:32

And I know there's times when we can't even fathom why the fuck we would sign up for something like this. But spirit has shown me time and again there are no accidents.

Dark Day Instead Of Dark Night

SPEAKER_00 22:48

I mean, I don't always understand them, but there are no accidents. And if spirit can show up for me in this big fucking way, I promise you spirit will show up for you in a big fucking way, too. Are you ready to expand? Are you ready to grow? Are you ready and willing to break down and have your own tower moment so that you can be built back up the way that spirit always intended? Without the old structures, without the amazing nervous systems that allowed you to survive everything up until this point. But it's not going to allow you to move forward in the way that you want to. Are you ready to break the old structures? Because I'll tell you what, that dark night of the soul in the second round, piece of fucking cake. Piece of fucking cake. And the people who saw me that week and the people who talked to me that week, you all know. Because you knew my energy was in chaos. And yet there I was in front of you, not resisting it, having coffee, having conversations, giving you spiritual advice, channeling spirit just like I always do, trusting that spirit has set everything up exactly the way that it was supposed to be. And there is the story of my second dark night of the soul. I am ready for the next version of me. And holy shit, just wait till you see what I have coming.