Extended suffering, emptiness, or despair as part of the process
The dark night of the soul is an extended period of profound suffering, emptiness, or despair that often accompany or follow major openings. Not depression in the clinical sense, but a process of deconstruction that can feel indistinguishable from it.
Several accounts describe the dark night as more intense than anything before the opening: a phase in which everything that was previously meaningful has dissolved, and nothing has yet arrived to replace it.
It's just heartbreaking how deep people can go into darkness and despair, and especially if they feel it's hopeless.
To welcome everything is to open so wide in unbounded acceptance that nothing is denied, no experience, no challenge, no darkness, no whatever we might label it, a sin or evil.
"It's not all rainbows and unicorns... suffering is the portal through which it happens. I know those people are lying. I know they're bypassing. They haven't gone through the darkness."
And even the little regression last year, although it was reimmersion back into that suffering, was nothing like before, and it was easy to recover from, so to speak.