Dark Night of the Soul: The Stages and How Long It Lasts

By DailyDestiny Editorial Team

If things feel very heavy right now, you do not have to carry it alone. If you might act on thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 in the US, call Samaritans free on 116 123 in the UK and Ireland, or find a free, local line at befrienders.org or findahelpline.com.

If prayer has gone dry or life has lost its color, this guide helps you understand what you may be going through. It covers what St John of the Cross wrote, his four stages, the two nights, how long it lasts, and how the modern meaning drifted.

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What is the dark night of the soul?

Imagine you sit down to pray or meditate, the way you have for years, and nothing comes. No warmth. No sense of being heard. The practice that held you up now feels like talking to an empty room, and a quiet voice asks what you did wrong.

The short answer: the dark night of the soul is a period when the felt presence of God withdraws, prayer goes dry, and the practices that carried you stop working. The sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite John of the Cross described it as God's own purifying work, not a failure of devotion.

On his reading, the dryness is not proof of wrongdoing or a withdrawal of God himself. It is what a mind reports when handed something it cannot process with its usual tools. Whether that is true is a theological question; this article describes it rather than argues for it.

In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, John gives three reasons for the word night. The starting point is dark, because the appetites are denied. The road is dark, because faith is dark to the intellect. The destination is dark, because God exceeds what a person can grasp.

Today the phrase covers almost any long stretch of meaninglessness. The two uses describe different things, which is why answers to how long it lasts vary so wildly.

If you wonder why your old way of praying stopped working, John has a mechanism. A beginner prays by thinking: reading a gospel scene, picturing it, drawing conclusions, making acts of the will. That relies on the senses and imagination, and works for a while. Infused contemplation, which he calls a secret, peaceful and loving inflow of God, works differently. Once it begins, the old method produces nothing. You reach for images and find none.

Think of stepping from candlelight into full sun. For a while you see less, because the light is too strong.

John names Pseudo-Dionysius, anonymous author of The Mystical Theology, four times, and takes from that tradition a divine dark that is dark by excess of light, not absence. Scholars disagree whether he read the Dionysian texts directly or absorbed the language through later writers, so the debt is clear while the route is not.

So night names a way of perceiving, not a verdict. Nothing in John treats it as punishment, and he is repeatedly annoyed with directors who say otherwise.

Where does the phrase dark night of the soul come from?

From the Spanish Carmelite friar John of the Cross, who died in 1591: his poem beginning En una noche oscura and the prose commentary published as Noche Oscura. The words of the soul are not his. Later editors and translators added them, so the English phrase spread through translations, not his own coinage.

Is the dark night the same as losing your faith?

No. In John's account you keep believing and practicing. What disappears is the pleasure and the sense of contact. Loss of faith removes the object; the night removes the feeling and leaves the wanting, which is why people describe the pain as longing rather than doubt. The two can overlap, and often do.

What does the word night actually refer to?

Darkness of the faculties, not a mood or a season of life. The intellect gets nothing to hold, the memory finds no useful images, and the will loses the affection it drew on. Book two, chapter six of The Ascent says each is given something it cannot see by: faith to the intellect, hope to the memory, charity to the will. The darkness is a property of the light, not a shortage of it.

What are the stages of the dark night of the soul?

If you searched for the stages, you probably found lists of five or seven. John of the Cross set out four: the active night of the senses, the active night of the spirit, the passive night of the senses, and the passive night of the spirit.

Sense and spirit name the level being purified: the outer appetites, or the deep habits of intellect, memory and will. Active and passive name who does the work. In an active night you cooperate, refusing comforts and disciplining desire. In a passive night it is done to you, and effort changes nothing.

His books split the same way. The Ascent of Mount Carmel covers the active nights, book one on sense and books two and three on spirit. The Dark Night covers the passive ones, book one on sense and book two on spirit.

Almost everything people mean by the phrase today is the passive night of sense. If you are in something like this, that is most likely where you are.

Please do not picture the four as a staircase you are failing to climb. John says many people who pray seriously enter the passive night of sense, and most go no further. He never calls them stages. His word is noche, and book one, chapter one of The Ascent divides that night into two parts, sense and spirit, not a numbered series.

Modern lists with names like dissolution, the void and rebirth are twentieth-century inventions grafted onto his vocabulary. They may capture how a long crisis feels, but they bring a personal-growth framework he would not recognize. His sequence describes purification aimed at union.

What is the difference between an active and a passive night?

An active night can be taught; a passive one cannot. Book one, chapter thirteen of The Ascent of Mount Carmel gives the active counsels: prefer the harder thing to the easier, and go by the road on which you have no pleasure. John also drew it: Mount Carmel with the direct path to the summit marked nada at every step. The original is lost and today's versions descend from later copies, so it is credited to him on Carmelite tradition. No effort brings on, shortens or ends a passive night, so no instruction exists for it.

Are the popular five-stage or seven-stage lists from John of the Cross?

No. Headings like awakening, resistance, dissolution and rebirth come from twentieth-century popular spirituality. John named two nights in two modes and wrote about inner movement, not a timeline. A list that mentions manifesting or attracting a better life has no connection to the Carmelite material.

Do the stages have to happen in order?

Broadly yes: the night of sense prepares for the night of the spirit. But the second reaches very few, so most people never see it. The active and passive nights also overlap, so you can be working the counsels of The Ascent while the passive night is done to you. It is a logic of purification, not a schedule.

What did St John of the Cross actually write about the dark night?

It may help you to know how small the source is: one short poem and two unfinished prose commentaries on it.

The poem, eight stanzas beginning En una noche oscura, describes a lover slipping out of a sleeping house at night to meet the beloved. The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night both comment on it.

He was born Juan de Yepes y Alvarez at Fontiveros in Old Castile in 1542, entered the Carmelite order in 1563, and met Teresa of Avila at Medina del Campo in 1567, who recruited him into her reform. On the night of 2 December 1577, friars of the unreformed branch seized him and held him in a cell in the Carmelite house at Toledo for about eight months. There he composed the first thirty-one stanzas of the Spiritual Canticle. He escaped on 15 August 1578 and died at Ubeda in 1591. Benedict XIII canonized him in 1726; Pius XI declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1926.

The prose is technical, written for friars and nuns under his direction who already prayed daily.

Both commentaries break off. The Ascent stops partway through book three. The Dark Night stops in book two, after the first two stanzas and the opening line of the third, leaving five of eight stanzas without commentary and the night of the spirit abandoned mid-argument.

If you read him for help, you may feel another gap: he wrote at length about what must be given up and little about what to do meanwhile. That is why the tradition leans on a handful of chapters.

Nothing was printed in his lifetime. The first edition came out at Alcala in 1618, twenty-seven years after his death, and left out the Spiritual Canticle. English readers usually use the Kavanaugh and Rodriguez translation of the collected works.

Which of his books should you read first?

The Dark Night, the shorter and more direct. Book one, chapter nine, on the signs of the dryness, is the passage most often handed to someone in the middle of it. The Ascent is longer and reads badly as a first encounter. The poem takes two minutes and rewards rereading more than either.

Did John describe his imprisonment as a dark night?

Not in those terms. He composed much of the Spiritual Canticle in the eight months at Toledo, and biographers link the cell to the poetry, but his prose never calls the imprisonment the night. His night is interior and caused by God acting on the soul, not by circumstances, however cruel.

What does the poem itself describe?

An escape, not a torment. The speaker leaves a quiet house by a secret ladder, in darkness, guided by a light burning in the heart, and reaches the beloved. One stanza calls the night more lovely than the dawn. Read alone, it is a love poem about a night that helped. In a hard stretch, that may be worth sitting with.

What is the difference between the night of the senses and the night of the spirit?

If you are wondering which night you might be in, this is the distinction that matters.

The night of the senses removes the pleasure you take in religious practice and in created things. Prayer goes flat, meditation stops working, devotions turn tedious, and food, company and entertainment lose their flavor too. You usually conclude you have gone backwards and are at fault.

The night of the spirit goes after the deeper habits of intellect, memory and will, and John calls it incomparably more severe. What is stripped is the sense of being acceptable to God at all. He writes of souls who feel abandoned, who see their own poverty with a clarity they cannot look away from, and find no support in anything, human or divine. He compares it to purgatory and does not soften it.

The night of sense, he writes, happens to many, especially beginners. The night of the spirit falls to very few. A difficult year is almost certainly the first, if anything in John's sense at all.

Book one, chapter nine of The Dark Night is the most practical page John wrote: three signs that dryness is the passive night of sense.

First: you find no satisfaction in the things of God and none in created things either. That rules out boredom with religion.

Second: your memory turns anxiously toward God, with a painful sense of not serving him and slipping backwards. That rules out indifference, since the lukewarm do not much care.

Third: you cannot meditate by thinking, however hard you try, and trying makes it worse.

All three must be present together. John insists on the third because it looks exactly like laziness from outside, and he says confusing the two ruins people.

Which night is harder?

The night of the spirit, by a wide margin. John calls the night of sense bitter and frightening but essentially a weaning, like a child moved off milk. The night of the spirit brings a felt conviction of being rejected, and he says souls in it would sooner die. His comparison, purgatory, is meant seriously.

What image does John use for the night of the spirit?

A log being burned. In book two, chapter ten of The Dark Night, fire acts on damp wood: it blackens, smokes, hisses out moisture and looks worse, until it stops resisting and becomes fire itself. The ugly middle is the fire working, not failing. He applies it directly to the soul.

Can someone be in both nights at once?

Rarely. The Dark Night, book two, chapter one, puts years between them, in what John calls the state of the proficients, when prayer comes easily and the person assumes the hard part is over. He allows an overlap at the seam, with remnants of the first night present as the second opens.

How long does a dark night of the soul last?

This is probably what you most want to know, and the honest answer is hard: there is no fixed length. John of the Cross refuses to give one, saying God leads each soul differently and the night lasts as long as the purification requires.

The literature offers a range. John says some pass through the passive night of sense fairly quickly and others stay for years, and that years can separate the first night from the second. Modern direction manuals describe a few months to a decade or more, based on casework, not counting.

The best documented long case is Teresa of Calcutta. Her letters, published in 2007 as Come Be My Light, edited by Brian Kolodiejchuk, show a felt absence of God from around 1948 until close to her death in 1997, with one brief interruption. She and her directors used the Carmelite vocabulary for it.

No population data exists. Any specific figure quoted at you has no study behind it.

John does say what makes it longer, and the answers are unwelcome.

Resistance: fighting to keep the old way of praying, hunting for a technique to bring back the feeling, changing directors or traditions, piling on practices to force something loose. It is like pulling against a riptide. The harder you fight, the more worn out you get.

Poor direction. The third stanza of The Living Flame of Love compares a director who cannot leave a person in their given quiet to a blacksmith who knows nothing but how to hammer, and says the damage is hard to undo.

Reframing does not help either. You are not producing the state, so you cannot argue your way out. He recommends continuing quietly, with less rather than more.

Can a dark night last for decades?

Yes, on the evidence. Teresa of Calcutta's letters describe roughly fifty years of felt absence, and Carmelite and Jesuit direction literature holds other long cases, though few as well recorded. Long cases look like the exception. Most accounts reaching a director run months to a few years, and even that rests on anecdote.

What makes it last longer?

Two things, mostly. Treating it as a verdict on yourself, which stacks self-blame on top of the dryness. And isolation: Carmelite literature treats hiding it as a burden of its own, because alone, nobody tells you it is not your fault.

An untreated depression or thyroid disorder sitting underneath can keep someone flat for as long as it goes untreated, which is why a medical check belongs early rather than late.

Is there any research on how long it lasts?

Not for the Christian dark night. The nearest is the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project by Jared Lindahl, Willoughby Britton and colleagues at Brown University, published in PLOS ONE in 2017, documenting difficult and sometimes long-lasting meditation-related states among Western Buddhist practitioners. That is a different tradition and phenomenon; no comparable work on Carmelite desolation exists.

What does spiritual desolation feel like day to day?

If you are living this, you may be surprised how ordinary and quiet it is.

You keep the same schedule. You sit to pray at the same hour and get nothing: no warmth, no sense of being heard, no thought that goes anywhere. Scripture that used to open up reads like a phone bill. Outside prayer the flatness spreads. Food is fine, work is fine, nothing is wrong, and none of it lands.

What survives underneath is the wanting. People describe missing God so intensely the absence gets worse, with a low guilt about going through motions they no longer feel. Many hide it, because saying it aloud sounds ungrateful or like admitting they stopped believing.

Anger comes and goes. Boredom is far more common than anguish. The most frequent description is talking to a wall and continuing to talk anyway.

If that is you, you are not strange, and you are not alone.

The Jesuit tradition mapped the same ground. Ignatius of Loyola's rules for the discernment of spirits for the first week, in the Spiritual Exercises, define desolation as darkness of soul, turmoil, restlessness and a pull toward what is low and earthly, set against consolation. His rules run in order:

Change nothing you decided in consolation.

Act against it by adding a little to prayer or self-examination, not cutting back.

Hold on to the knowledge that it passes.

The ninth rule names three causes: your own negligence, a test of what you are worth without felt support, and a lesson that consolation was always a gift, not a wage.

Here the traditions part. Ignatian desolation may come from lukewarmness or the enemy, so it can be resisted. John's passive night is God's work, so it cannot. A director who confuses them gives you exactly the wrong instruction.

Is dryness in prayer always a dark night?

No, and assuming so is the usual mistake. Exhaustion, grief, burnout, untreated illness, a new baby, alcohol and plain neglect of the practice all produce the same flatness. John's three signs exist because he expected most cases to be something else. A few flat weeks after a hard month is ordinary and needs no theology.

Does it affect life outside prayer?

Usually. John says the loss of pleasure covers created things too. People report work going gray and conversations heard as if through a wall. Relationships often hold up, because obligations still get met when nothing is felt behind them.

Once the flattening reaches the point of not functioning at work or at home, it has crossed into territory a clinician should look at.

Do people report physical symptoms?

Fatigue, disturbed sleep and appetite changes often, the same symptoms low mood produces in anyone. Heat moving up the spine, involuntary movements, internal sound and sensory overload are a different phenomenon, covered in Kundalini Awakening: Signs, Stages and Risks.

Persistent physical symptoms deserve a medical opinion before anyone interprets them spiritually.

How did Carmelite directors tell the night apart from melancholy?

You may be asking what they asked: is this spiritual, or am I just low? Carmelite directors watched what survived in a person rather than counting symptoms.

John of the Cross gives desolation positive marks. You cannot meditate by thinking, yet you want to sit still in a quiet, general attention, and would rather be left alone there than given something to do. Under the dryness sits a settled peace the misery does not reach.

Directors leaned hardest on his second sign, the anxious, painful care about God. The melancholic person, he says, is not turned toward God at all, just flattened. Effort makes the night worse. Melancholy, in the sixteenth-century reading, drains the wanting too, and responds to food, sleep and rest, which the night does not.

None of that is a modern clinical test, and it was never built to be. For the differences between an awakening, depression, burnout and an ordinary life crisis, see The Stages of Spiritual Awakening: Which Map You Are On and Where People Stall.

The question is twelve centuries older than the Carmelites. Evagrius Ponticus, in the fourth-century Egyptian desert, put acedia among the eight thoughts that attack a monk and called it the noonday demon: a listlessness arriving in the heat of the day, arguing the cell is unbearable. John Cassian carried it into Latin monasticism, and the medieval West merged it with tristitia and later the physicians' melancholia, black bile in the Galenic scheme of four humors.

So John's directors had three explanations for flat prayer: a fault to resist, a bodily condition to treat, or God working under the appearance of loss. Book one, chapter nine of The Dark Night tells them to weigh sin, lukewarmness and bad humor or bodily indisposition before concluding anything about God.

Teresa of Avila was blunter. Her Book of the Foundations gives a chapter to melancholy in the convent and tells prioresses to manage it with food, occupation and shorter hours, not more prayer.

What did melancholy mean in John's century?

A bodily condition, not a moral failing. Galenic medicine blamed excess black bile, one of the four humors, and prescribed diet, sleep, warmth and rest. It covered what clinics now split into several diagnoses. Robert Burton gathered all of it, religious melancholy included, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.

Is acedia the same thing as the night?

No, and the remedies are opposite. Acedia in Evagrius and Cassian is a temptation to resist by staying in the cell, keeping the hours and doing manual labor until it passes. John's passive night is done to you and cannot be resisted. Pushing against it is what he spends most of his pages telling directors to stop.

What did a director do when the signs were unclear?

Treat the body first and wait. Teresa's instructions: restore food and sleep, cut the penances, shorten prayer, give the person work, then watch for some weeks. A state that lifts under rest was never the night.

That sequence now starts with a doctor, and thoughts of suicide, not eating, or weeks without sleep mean one today. If that is you, please reach out to a doctor or therapist now. It takes nothing away from the spiritual side of what you are living.

How does the modern use of the term differ from the Carmelite original?

When you hear someone call their divorce or burnout a dark night of the soul, they mean something different from John.

Modern usage covers any long crisis of meaning. The Carmelite original names one stage inside a Catholic contemplative life, caused by God, aimed at union, and identified by three signs. Divorce, burnout, bereavement, addiction, a collapsed career or belief system: all take the phrase now, with no prayer, director or God required.

The drift came in steps. Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, in 1911, made it one stage in a general mystical way across traditions. F. Scott Fitzgerald borrowed it for secular use in The Crack-Up in 1936, with the line about it always being three o'clock in the morning in a real dark night of the soul. That sentence probably did more for the phrase in English than the commentaries ever did.

Self-help and popular psychology took it from there. Western vipassana teachers later applied it to the difficult insight stages of Theravada practice, now a widespread usage in meditation circles.

Something is lost in the widening, and it may matter to you. John's night is passive, and that carries an instruction: stop trying to fix it, stay put, keep the practice small and regular. Modern usage keeps the misery, drops the instruction, and often adds advice to do more, the one thing John says makes it worse.

The direction goes too. His night points toward union, and the pain has a purpose. A secular dark night has no destination. It is the difference between a tunnel and a cave.

Something is gained as well: a name for a state everyday words handle badly, and the comfort that someone described it centuries ago without calling it illness. The loss-of-self quality in deeper accounts overlaps with Ego Death: What It Means, What Triggers It and How to Integrate It, a distinct event with its own literature.

Is the Buddhist dark night the same thing?

No, though the shared name confuses people. Western vipassana teachers use it for the dukkha nanas, the stages in the Theravada progress-of-insight map where practice produces fear, misery and disgust before equanimity arrives. The map, cause and goal differ from John's. Both describe practice getting worse before anything changes.

Who made the phrase popular in English?

No single person. It renders Noche Oscura del Alma, already circulating in English devotional writing after David Lewis published the first English version of the complete works in 1864. E. Allison Peers's three-volume translation in the middle 1930s kept the works available, and after Fitzgerald the phrase broke loose into popular psychology and the recovery movement.

Does the loose modern usage do any harm?

Mostly no, and naming a hard state can help. The harm is specific and worth watching for. Calling a depressive episode a dark night can delay treatment, and framing a difficult stretch as a spiritual promotion can flatter someone into staying in it longer. Both happen often enough that directors warn about them.

You do not have to choose. You can see a doctor and keep your spiritual reading too.

Questions people ask

Can you have a dark night of the soul if you are not religious?

Not in John of the Cross's sense. His night is defined by its cause, God acting on someone who has been praying, and by the loss of a contact that was there before. In the loose modern sense, yes. People with no religion describe long periods when meaning drains out of everything they valued, and that can be real and severe. The Carmelite framework then offers you a description, not a diagnosis, and its advice about not forcing a change travels well.

Does everyone go through a dark night of the soul?

No. John says the passive night of sense is common among people who pray seriously, not among people generally, and the night of the spirit reaches very few. Many committed believers report decades of steady practice with no such episode. Outside religion, long crises of meaning are common but not universal. Nobody has counted, so anyone quoting you a percentage is making it up.

How do you know when your dark night of the soul is over?

It usually ends quietly. Prayer stops feeling like an ordeal, ordinary things regain some flavor, the self-blame drops away, and you stop needing the old comforts back. John describes what follows the night of sense as a calmer, less effortful attentiveness, not a return of the earlier warmth, which surprises people who expect the old feelings. Often the first sign is looking back and finding the anxiety gone.

Can a dark night of the soul happen more than once in a life?

Yes. In John's account the passive night of sense recurs, dryness giving way to comfort and returning, sometimes across years, and the two nights are separate passages a long interval can divide. Later episodes are often reported as easier, because you recognize the pattern and stop reading it as failure. A second episode is not proof of progress, and treating it as a milestone tends to make it last longer.

Should you keep praying or meditating when nothing is happening?

Yes, but differently and usually less. The Carmelite advice is to stay without forcing the method that has stopped working: sit, keep it short and regular, and stay quietly attentive instead of trying to think, picture or produce a feeling. In book one, chapter ten of The Dark Night, John tells the person to stay in peace, content with a loving attentiveness, and not to fret about apparently doing nothing. Hunting for the old experience makes it worse. Consistency matters more than length.

Is a dark night of the soul the same thing as a spiritual awakening?

No. Evelyn Underhill's map in Mysticism puts them at opposite ends of one sequence: awakening opens it, and the dark night arrives late, between illumination and union. Awakening points to an opening and expanded contact; the dark night names the withdrawal of everything felt. In John's account the darkness comes from an inflow too large for the faculties, so the two are related in mechanism but opposite in experience. Energetic accounts of awakening, with their centers and currents, come from a different framework.

Should you see a therapist during a dark night of the soul?

See a clinician if the state is impairing daily life, if it includes thoughts of self-harm, or if you cannot tell what you are dealing with. An assessment commits you to nothing and forecloses no interpretation, and a treatable physical cause turns up often enough that ruling one out counts as basic care. Gerald May, a psychiatrist and senior fellow at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, whose book The Dark Night of the Soul appeared in 2004, argued for treating the depression and taking the spiritual reading seriously at once. Many people see a therapist and a spiritual director together, which works best when each knows about the other.

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