The Dark Night of the Soul: When the Light Goes Out & the Dial Goes Quiet
Download MP3Hey you. Welcome to Medium with a Mic. I'm Teri, and I wanna open with a question. Have you ever woken up one day and just couldn't feel anything? Not in an emotional flatness kind of way, but, I mean, spiritually.
Kari Bandle:The thing you relied on to guide you, to reassure you, or to help you know which way to go, it was just gone. The dial was quiet. The channel was static, and you sat there wondering, did I lose it? Is it gone for good? What did I do wrong?
Kari Bandle:If you've been there, today's episode was made for you. We're talking about the dark night of the soul, what it actually is, why it happens, what it does to your intuitive ability, and how to find your way through it. And this is not a quick fix episode. There are no five step hacks or tricks, but what I can offer you is understanding. And in my experience, understanding is the first light you see in every dark room.
Kari Bandle:So let's get into this. The term dark night of the soul comes from the sixteenth century mystic and poet named Saint John of the Cross. He wrote about it as a spiritual passage, a period of profound internal darkness where the soul feels utterly separated from the divine, not angry at the divine or questioning the divine, just cut off, empty, like the line went dead. Over the centuries, the phrase got picked up by psychologists, spiritual teachers, and eventually the Internet. And like a lot of things that get passed around the Internet, it got a little watered down.
Kari Bandle:People started using it to describe a bad week, a rough breakup, a depressive episode. And I'm not going to dismiss any of those experiences. They're real, and they matter. But a true dark night of the soul is a specific thing. It's a period of profound spiritual disorientation, and the keyword is spiritual.
Kari Bandle:This isn't just emotional pain. This is the experience of your entire framework for meaning, purpose, and connection going offline. This is when the story you told yourself about who you are, why you're here, and how the universe works stops making sense. It often comes after an external trigger, loss, trauma, major life transition, but the dark night itself is an internal collapse. It's the scaffolding coming down.
Kari Bandle:It's the soul asking, who am I without all of this? And, yes, it is absolutely terrifying. But here's what I need you to hear. The dark night of the soul is not a sign that something went wrong. It is a sign that something is being stripped away to make room for something truer.
Kari Bandle:The mystics understood this. They didn't experience the dark night as punishment. They experienced it as a passage, a brutal, disorienting, sometimes months long passage, but a passage, not a destination. The destination is on the other side. Now let's talk about what this has to do with your intuitive ability because one of the most common things I hear from people who are going through a dark night or any major disruption in their lives is this.
Kari Bandle:I can't feel anything any... My intuition is gone. I used to get signs. I used to just know things, and now I'm just blank. And I want to spend real time here because there's a lot of misunderstanding about what's actually happening.
Kari Bandle:First, and this is foundational to everything we talk about on this show. So I'm going to repeat myself. Your intuitive ability is not a gift that gets given to some people and not others. It is not a super power reserved for the spiritually elite. It's a dial.
Kari Bandle:You were born with it. It's wired into your system. And like any dial, it can be turned up, turned down, or it can go into a kind of a standby mode when the rest of your system is overwhelmed. So when people say my intuition is gone, what I hear is my dial has gone quiet. That is not the same as gone.
Kari Bandle:So let me explain why this happens. The human body has a beautiful, intelligent, relentless survival mechanism. When you're in danger, real or perceived, your nervous system activates what we call the fight, flight, or freeze response. Cortisol floods in. Adrenaline kicks on.
Kari Bandle:Your entire system narrows its focus down to one question. How do I get through this? Now here's the thing about intuition. Intuition is a subtle frequency. It communicates through quiet nudges, body sensations, dreams, fleeting images, that inexplicable knowing in your gut.
Kari Bandle:It does not communicate through a bullhorn. It requires a nervous system that is at least partially at rest to receive the signal. When you are in chronic stress, the kind of stress that many of us have been living through for years now, That quiet channel gets drowned out. Your nervous system is so busy scanning for threats and managing the flood of cortisol that it has no bandwidth left to receive subtle intuitive information. The signal is still there.
Kari Bandle:Your dial is still working. You just can't hear it over all of the noise. This is why people who are going through an intensely stressful period job loss, financial crisis, relationship collapse, health emergency they often report that their intuition feels suddenly absent. It hasn't gone anywhere. Your body is just in a mode that prioritizes immediate survival over subtle spiritual perception, and that's...
Kari Bandle:That is not a failure. It's an intelligent system doing exactly what it's designed to do. The work isn't to force your intuition back online in the middle of the storm. The work is to regulate the nervous system enough that the static starts to clear. Grief is one of the most profound and least understood experiences in human life, And when we talk about grief in the context of intuitive ability, I'm not just talking about the death of a person, though that is certainly one of the most intense forms of it.
Kari Bandle:I'm talking about any profound loss, the loss of a relationship, a role, a life you thought you were going to have, a version of yourself or a belief system, a home, a community, a future that no longer exists. Grief does something very specific to the energetic body, And in my experience, both personal and in the work I do with people in transition, grief creates a kind of numbing, a protective layer. Your soul wraps itself in a kind of a insulation to protect the raw wound, and that insulation, while completely necessary and wise, also dampens the signal. And this is especially true in the early stages of grief when the loss is new and the system is in shock. People in acute grief often describe feeling disconnected from everything, from their emotions, from their sense of self, from other people, and, yes, from their spiritual experience.
Kari Bandle:Signs that used to feel unmistakable now feel ambiguous. Mediumship abilities that once flowed freely now feel blocked. The knowing that you used to come easily just doesn't come. And here is something I wanna say. This is not a sign that your loved one has stopped trying to reach you.
Kari Bandle:This is not any sign that you've been cut off or abandoned by spirit. This is a sign that your receiver is temporarily overwhelmed. That's human. You're not broken. You are grieving, and grieving is one of the most human and most sacred things a soul can do in a body.
Kari Bandle:The connection is still there when the wound begins to move from a raw... From raw to tender, not healed but no longer in shock, the signal starts to come back. And when it does, it often comes back different, deeper, more personal because loss has a way of cracking open the parts of us that used to receive on surface level and carving something much more profound in their place. And when we're living too deep in the human, when the density dims the dial, this one is subtle, and I think it's one of the least talked about reasons intuitive ability goes quiet. I call it living too deep in the human.
Kari Bandle:What do I mean by that? I mean, there are periods in life where the demands of being human are so consuming, so all encompassing, that we lose our connection to the part of us that exists beyond the human. We get fully absorbed in the physical, the material, the immediate, not because we're bad at being spiritual, but because being human is incredibly demanding. Single parenting, caregiving, working three jobs, managing a chronic illness, rebuilding after a financial collapse. These experiences pull every single drop of your energy into the present moment.
Kari Bandle:Physical world demands of survival. And when that happens for a long period of time, the dial doesn't just go quiet. It gets dusty, not broken, and not gone, just unused. And there's something important I wanna say about that. It's about shame because I see a lot of it of of it in people who've been through this.
Kari Bandle:They feel like they failed at being spiritual because life got in the way. Like, they should have been able to maintain their practice or their connection, their clarity through every hardship, and I wanna offer a different frame entirely. Being human is part of the soul's experience here. The density, the distraction, the groundedness of full physical life, That is not the enemy of your spiritual ability. It is part of the laboratory.
Kari Bandle:And when you come back to yourself after a period of deep immersion in the human experience, you don't come back as someone who lost ground. You come back as someone who now has something real to say. One of the most dis orienting reasons intuitive ability goes offline is something I think of as identity collapse. This is when the self you knew, the role, the relationship, the belief system, the community, the body you lived in fundamentally changes, and the bridge between who you were and who you are becoming hasn't been built yet. So here's why this affects intuitive ability specifically.
Kari Bandle:Your intuition, especially in the earlier stages of developing it, is often anchored into your sense of self. It comes through the lens of who you are, what you know, what you believe, what you're available to receive. And when that lens shatters, when you're mid metamorphosis, uninformed between versions of yourself, the channel gets temporarily confused. Think of it like a radio station that changes its frequency. The old signal is gone.
Kari Bandle:The new signal hasn't fully locked in yet. And for a while, you're just picking up static. That's identity collapse. And it can it can happen for all kinds of reasons. Leaving a religion, ending a long marriage, losing a career, identity you built for decades, coming out, recovering from addiction, surviving a near death experience.
Kari Bandle:Anytime your fundamental sense of who you are undergoes profound restructuring, Your intuitive channel goes through a parallel restructuring. This is actually one of the most powerful reasons the dark night happens when it does. The soul uses the dark night to strip away the identities that were built on conditioning, expectation, and other people's definitions of who you were supposed to be. What comes out the other side is a self that is more authentically aligned with the soul, which means the intuitive ability that comes back after a dark night is calibrated to a truer, deeper version of you. It's not a loss.
Kari Bandle:It's a recalibration. Here's another one, spiritual bypassing. This is what happens when spirituality becomes a way to avoid feeling rather than a way to move through feeling. And it looks like this. Something painful happens, and instead of sitting with it, you immediately jump to everything happens for a reason, or I've already processed this, or I'm not going to give that energy, or I'm too spiritually evolved to be affected by this.
Kari Bandle:It can look incredibly composed from the outside. The practice is intact. The words are right. The energy is high. But underneath it, the actual human wound is unattended.
Kari Bandle:It's sitting there in the basement piling up. And at some point, always, inevitably, the basement floods. When spiritual bypassing crashes, it doesn't come down gently. It often comes down in the form of a dark night because the soul, in its wisdom, knows that the bypass can only last so long before it becomes a wall between you and genuine experience. Genuine experience, including the painful, messy, unspiritual looking kind, is exactly what the soul is here to have.
Kari Bandle:When this happens, the intuitive ability doesn't just go quiet. It can feel actively hostile, like you suddenly can't trust anything or any of the signals you used to rely on because you're not sure anymore which ones were genuine and which ones were part of the bypass. That is a healthy and important confusion, and it means the system is recalibrating. It means the bypass material is finally coming through and asking to be felt. This is shadow work territory.
Kari Bandle:This is where the dark night and personal transformation overlap in the most profound way. And of course, I want to give a few moments to the empaths that are listening because the dark night of the soul hits differently when your system is wired to feel everything. Empaths often come to the dark night through collective grief, not just personal loss, but the accumulated weight of taking on what the world is feeling. If you are someone who absorbs the emotional environment around you, who carries the grief of others, who feels the suffering of strangers as keenly as your own. You know how exhausting the world has been for years.
Kari Bandle:And that kind of sustained, absorptive overwhelm can absolutely produce a dark night of the soul that looks less like a crisis event and more like a slow dimming. You wake up one day and you've been pouring out for so long that there's nothing left to receive with. The instrument is exhausted and the intuitive ability which for empaths runs on the same open receptive channel goes dark with it. What I want empaths to understand is this. Your ability is not separate from your nervous system.
Kari Bandle:Your openness is your ability. And when you've been open without boundaries for long enough, this system doesn't just get tired. It starts to protect itself. It shuts the channel partway, not as some kind of punishment or as loss, but as preservation. And learning to honor that, learning to receive the message that that shutdown is sending is actually one of the most important spiritual disciplines an empath can develop.
Kari Bandle:The dark night for an empath is often a profound invitation to learn the difference between being open and being unboundaried, between receiving and absorbing, between compassion and merger. When you learn that difference, when you build the container that lets you feel without being consumed, that is when your ability doesn't just return. It becomes something new, something with edges, something that serves both you and everyone you touch. If you are a medium or someone who regularly communicates with those on the other side, a dark night can produce one of the most frightening experiences in spiritual life. The connection goes silent.
Kari Bandle:People who have spent years communicating with loved ones who've crossed, who've built their practice around mediumship, who have made it a central part of their identity and their purpose. When that connection suddenly goes quiet, it can feel like abandonment, like the people they love have somehow moved further away or like they were never as connected as they thought. And I want to address this directly. The silence is not on their end. It is not the spirit world pulling away.
Kari Bandle:Those who have crossed are still exactly where they were. The love is still there. The connection is still there. What has changed is your receiver. Here's what I'll offer you.
Kari Bandle:Those who have crossed are extraordinarily aware of what you are going through. They're not confused by the silence. They're not hurt by it. In many cases, and this is something I've seen and experienced repeatedly, They are the ones initiating the dark night in collaboration with your higher self because they can see what you cannot. That the version of you that comes out the other side will be able to receive in a way the current version cannot.
Kari Bandle:The silence is not abandonment. The silence is preparation. And when the connection returns, and it does return, it often comes with a quality and a depth that was not possible before because you've been through something real. You have been cracked open, and what pours through a cracked open medium is something quite extraordinary. Alright.
Kari Bandle:Let's talk about what you can actually do when you're in it. And I... I'm not going to give you a list of spiritual practices to bypass the dark night because that's not how it works, and I refuse to feed that narrative. What I'm going to give you is a framework for being in it with some measure of grace. The first one is stop fighting the silence.
Kari Bandle:This is the hardest one and probably the most important. When the dial goes quiet, the instinct is to grab for it, to try harder, to meditate more, to demand that the signal come back. And the harder you grab, the quieter it gets. The dark night requires a quality of surrender that is genuinely difficult for spiritually devoted people because you've been taught that spiritual practice means doing something, doing the work. Sometimes the practice of the dark night is doing nothing.
Kari Bandle:Being in the silence. Letting it be what it is. Number two, tend to the body. I know this sounds unglamorous, but I mean it. When the subtle signals go offline, the body becomes your primary channel.
Kari Bandle:So sleep, eat real food, get outside, move in ways that feel good rather than punishing. Get your nervous system regulated. This is not a detour from spiritual work. This is the spiritual work right now. The body is not a lesser vehicle than the mind or the spirit.
Kari Bandle:It is the instrument through which all of your experiences passes, and when it's depleted, the channel is depleted. When it's nourished, the channel opens. Three, allow yourself to be human. Cry, feel the feelings, be confused and lost and grief stricken if that's what's true. One of the most radical acts you can take in a culture that glorifies spiritual performance is to be authentically messy, uncomplicatedly human.
Kari Bandle:The dark night is asking you to feel what you haven't let yourself feel. Your job is to let the feeling move through you rather than finding a way around it. Four, stay close to what is real. The dark night has a way of distorting things. It can convince you that this is forever, that you're uniquely broken, that no one has ever felt this way, that the things that once mattered are now meaningless.
Kari Bandle:Don't make big decisions from this place. Stay close to what is real. The people who love you, the small moments of beauty, the simple evidence that life continues. You don't have to feel connected to everything right now. You just have to keep showing up.
Kari Bandle:Five, trust the timing. The dark night is not on your schedule. I know that's inconvenient. I know there are things you want to do and people who need you and a life that is waiting. But the dark night has its own intelligence and it will take exactly as long as it needs to.
Kari Bandle:What you can do is work with it rather than against it. Ask the silence what it is... What it's here to teach you. Ask the darkness what it wants you to see, and then be quiet enough to receive whatever comes. I want to close with this because I don't want you to walk away thinking that the dark night is purely a thing to survive.
Kari Bandle:I want you to understand what you're walking toward. When the dark night ends, and it does end, the intuitive ability that comes back is not the same as the one that went offline. The person who emerges from a genuine dark night of the soul has an ability that is fundamentally different in kind. It's more grounded. Before, for a lot of people, the ability lives in the upper registers, in the mental, the visionary, the ethereal.
Kari Bandle:And after the dark night, it moves into the body, into the earth, into lived experience, and becomes something that you don't just perceive. You inhabit. It's more compassionate because you've been through it. You know what it's like to sit in the dark and know the way out. That knowledge doesn't make you a better spiritual performer.
Kari Bandle:It makes you a more honest and more useful guide. It's less dependent on conditions. Before the dark night, the ability often requires the right environment, the right state of mind, the right amount of rest, the right spiritual alignment. And after, it's been tested. It's been stripped of the scaffolding it didn't actually need.
Kari Bandle:What remains is the real thing, and the real thing is much more durable. And perhaps most importantly, it's yours, not inherited from a teacher or a tradition or a community or a role. Yours forged in your own fire calibrated to the specific soul that you are in this specific life at this specific point in your evolution. The dark night doesn't steal your ability. It refines it.
Kari Bandle:Before I let you go, if any part of today's episode resonated with you, if you're in the middle of your own dark night right now or you've been through it and you recognized yourself, I want you to know you are not alone in it. This community is full of people who understand exactly what it is to sit in the silence and wonder if the light is ever coming back. It comes back. I promise you. It comes back.
Kari Bandle:If this episode spoke to something in you, the most powerful thing you can do is share it with a friend, in a group, wherever people gather who need to hear that their ability isn't gone. It's just going through something. Hit like so more people can find it. Leave a comment and tell tell me where you are in your own journey, and subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you ever wanted to support this show in a direct and meaningful way, head over to buymeacoffee.com/mediumwithamic.
Kari Bandle:Every cup of coffee keeps this conversation alive and this community growing. Ad free. I'll see you next time. Take good care of yourself and keep listening to those whispers of wisdom.
