My journey began after I lost someone I deeply loved. I had previously lost loved ones, including my parents to cancer when I was eighteen and twenty-one, but this loss was different. It wasn’t a death; it was a heartbreak. Though I had experienced heartbreaks before, this one stood apart. This individual mirrored me. We shared a profound soul connection unlike any I had felt previously. It felt as if we had known each other over countless past lifetimes. He was my soul in another body, someone I had envisioned spending the rest of my life with.
In the initial week of unbearable pain, I found myself questioning myriad things: Who am I? Is there something wrong with me? What do I need to change to be lovable?
I began experiencing the “dark night of the soul,” a term Eckhart Tolle uses to describe the collapse of perceived meaning in life—a sudden plunge into profound meaninglessness. Nothing made sense, and everything seemed devoid of purpose. Such feelings can arise when an inexplicable and shattering event occurs—in my case, the loss of connection with my soulmate. It felt like a catastrophe that negated the once-cherished meaning of life. In moments like these, what truly falls apart is the entire conceptual framework of one’s life and the significance one’s mind had previously attributed to it, leading to a dark and disorienting place.
However, some individuals have navigated this darkness, and from there, the possibility emerges to transcend into a transformed state of consciousness. Life regains its meaning, but it’s no longer a conceptual meaning that can be easily explained. Quite often, it is from this point that people awaken from their collapsed conceptual sense of reality, and I, eventually, came to this place.
