STERLING ETHOS and the distinctive Sterling Ethos logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

Text © 2023 Sandra Ingerman and Llyn Roberts

Interior art © 2023 Eben Herrick

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4549-5085-1

ISBN 978-1-4549-5086-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934267

For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium purchases, please contact specialsales@unionsquareandco.com.

unionsquareandco.com

Cover design by Jo Obarowski

Cover image by Robsonphoto/Shutterstock.com

Interior design by Kevin Ullrich

We dedicate this book to the brave souls who walk through the darkness and into a life filled with beauty and magic …

And to Nature. We share honor, love, kindness, and respect with all in the web of life with whom we share this beautiful Earth.

Introduction

Sandra

There comes a time in everyone’s life when we go through a period where loss and tragedy bring us into the darkness. We enter territory where we feel lost, devoid of tools, and directionless, with no way to know how to move or where to take our next step. In many spiritual and psychological traditions, this time can be called the Dark Night of the Soul. In this book, I am referring to how the Dark Night of the Soul is experienced in the practice of shamanism.

This is not to be confused with psychological literature that talks about the Dark Night of the Soul. In this book, I am referring to the Dark Night of the Soul as a time of initiation where life brings us to a place of loss. It leads to us softening our ego, letting go of judgments, reaching higher states of consciousness, and changing our values. When we return to a full life after an initiation, we have more tools and spiritual strength to share in our community. But first our ego needs polishing to help chip away at our hard spots, open our closed hearts, and strengthen our spirits to carry us through all kinds of dark nights.

Our periods of deep suffering are important times in our lives. Yes, these are times of pain, but they also represent great growth and transformation. They are initiations that transform us into new people with a new desire to change and live a more balanced and healthy life. The losses we experience soften us and help to relieve the burdens of our past.

We would have hoped to have received a road map and tools from our elders. And some of us did. But for some, very little knowledge or training was passed down from previous generations. Most of the information on how to follow the path when the darkness descends on us has been lost. Throughout history, that has been one of the roles of grandparents, aunts, and uncles: to tell the stories that teach us how to get through suffering and how to get our lives back from pain while standing strong in our true power. We don’t tell those stories to children anymore. And they are so necessary. We need those stories!

I have had tough shamanic initiations throughout my life. Although I grew up in Brooklyn without any special training, from a young age I was naturally in touch with the spiritual forces around me, and I was blessed with a strong connection with Nature.

My life has been filled with one shamanic initiation after another: near-death experiences, illnesses, my suicidal ideation. I was hit by lightning at the age of seven. Before that, I had a life-threatening case of the measles and had to be kept in complete darkness for a time—a practice that is a common shamanic initiation. I drowned in Mazatlán at the age of nineteen. When I was twenty-five, I drove my car off a cliff when a huge blast of dust from the car in front of me blinded my vision. This event could have killed me and the other passengers in the car, but we were divinely protected and none of us got hurt. However, we all had the classic symptoms of a near-death experience … And if that was not enough, at age twenty-eight, a boulder careened off Mount Shasta and headed straight at me. I dropped to the ground, and the boulder missed me by five feet according to observers.

A priest I trusted told me I was called too early. My life has been a series of initiations, one after another, with only the support of my inner spirit and Nature. Even today, the initiations continue to break down my shell, teaching me about the power of love and how to tap into my full spiritual strength, which is the only way to survive during such trials.

In 2015, when I was sixty-two, a sudden moment changed my life. I was teaching a teleconferencing course, and when I hung up, I felt very strange. I felt like I was hit by lightning and had to hold on to the wall to keep myself from passing out. I drank some tea and went to bed. In the morning, I woke up to the fact that I had developed a very rare and mysterious brain disorder. It is a movement disorder that is not progressive, but at the same time it took away a lot of my ability to function in life.

I never had elders to guide me through my initiations. I only knew what to do from my shamanic studies, which told me that an initiate must find their inner spiritual strength to get through on their own. And I did!

But in these times, without any elders guiding me and having my back, I felt like I had been dropped out of an airplane in the middle of the night with no flashlight, food, map, anything for comfort or direction. I just felt lost.

I was determined to develop a road map using the tools I found to help me through all my life challenges.

How did I find ways to travel through the darkness? What about my times of hopelessness? How did I transform that state? How did I learn to determine that there are tricksters who will tell you they can help but lead you off the path of healing and rebirth? And how did I learn that it is important to always take little steps forward and not sit down in the dark?

In our culture, we tend to focus on positive thinking and always on our greatest dreams. But from a shamanic and nature-based point of view, there is sculpting of our ego that needs to be done. Consider the waves that run through the Grand Canyon and how, through many eons, they carved out such a beautiful change.

In this book, I am excited to join with Llyn Roberts. As we did in our previous work, Speaking with Nature, we have chosen certain animals, plants, trees, insects, and other beings in nature to provide metaphorical guidance as we walk the path through suffering to renewal and change. Nature can be a guide and healer. Nature is healing balm.

Llyn and I, both elders, have been very successful in teaching shamanism and helping people learn how to find their way through the darkness. In this book, we offer the immense knowledge we have gained both through our studies and our life challenges, and we offer a path to finding meaning in difficult times. There is always a way forward and through when guided by our own spiritual light, strength, and power.

In shamanic cultures, it was only the initiates who survived who were welcomed back into the community. By adding to the community the knowledge they had gained from their experiences, it could continue to thrive. I invite you to really work with the material in this book in order to share with and inspire others in your community.

The Dark Night of the Soul is the portal into living in a different dimension of life. My reason for writing this book is not to tell my story; it is to give those who are struggling the benefit of what I have learned so they will be able to apply it to their own lives.

There are endless books and courses on how to stay positive, but this book is about the beneficial aspects of darkness. Darkness is filled with exquisite teachings for the brave souls who are willing to let go and travel to the depths of our inner world to see what states of consciousness and ways of behaving need to be removed, transformed, accepted, acknowledged, or discreated.

It was such a joy and honor to work with Llyn while we wrote Speaking with Nature. We had such a unique way of working and honoring each other’s process. Llyn is an amazing writer, and I am in awe of her abilities to work with metaphorical stories and teachings. We really came together again to write this book, allowing ourselves to show our vulnerabilities while also celebrating our spiritual strength and focusing on what was truly needed to cope with challenges.

While writing Speaking with Nature, Llyn and I decided to use circular storytelling versus linear essays. This is a feminine approach and an old-time way of sharing wisdom that feeds our souls. We are all full of information. Our essays show readers how to live what we have learned.

During these times, we can do more than survive. We can thrive.

We offer these lessons in finding your intuition so that you can move forward, no matter what challenges you face.

Llyn

We’ve all known difficult life passages, and anyone who is sensitive feels the immense suffering and fragmentation in the world. It’s impossible to ignore the challenges that nature and humans face now.

I have been working with ancient cultures since the age of twenty-five. Many of these cultures hold prophecies about our current times of upheaval. The South American “Eagle and the Condor” prophecy foretells the era in which we are living as one of peril yet also great opportunity. How we know ourselves can change. Living in harmony with the Earth, integrating our hearts with our minds, and blending the spiritual qualities of life with the material can reshape our reality. The Andean Quechua people call this current period “Pachacuti,” which means “transformer of the worlds.”

Although the idea of living in an era foreseen by ancient peoples as one that can transform us is auspicious and amazing, the experience of it is humbling. There is chaos, suffering, tragedy, and death. The path we all walk together through this initiatory gauntlet may take from us all that we hold dear. Life is precious and tender now, more than ever.

I am no stranger to challenge.

Half of my ancestry is Celtic, and the other half is French Canadian. I grew up in a working-class ethnic enclave in New Hampshire known as Frenchtown. My family did not have much money, and my beautiful and creative mother, who lost her own childhood to parental alcoholism and poverty, gave birth to me when she was just seventeen. My mother was emotionally unstable, which made our home life troubled. My sorrow was lifted when I lay on the grass to gaze at the sky, skated on rivers and ponds, played in muddy creek beds, and whispered to snow-dusted trees. Being in nature healed and soothed me. I was also helped by spirit presences both felt and heard.

Like Sandra, I have had brushes with death. When I was five, my three-year-old brother and I were lifted from our beds in the middle of the night by my dad and our upstairs neighbor when the small kitchen adjacent to our tiny, shared bedroom caught fire. The men threw blankets over our heads and carried us through an inferno to save our lives. The day before my fifty-second birthday, I nearly bled to death. I have known anxiety, depression, relationship hardships, and many other trials. After my son and I survived his precarious birth, my health grew fragile, and for years I endured a spiritual emergency, sometimes fighting for my sanity. This terrifying time compelled me to work with diverse indigenous shamanic peoples, some in remote areas, who saw my illness as an induction by spirit.

I know I am not alone in facing life’s hardships and losses. And although my life hasn’t been easy, each trial has had its gifts, which have sometimes taken me years to fully realize. The journey ultimately strengthened and deepened me.

The shamanic path is fraught with many tests. Likewise, within shamanic ceremony, traditional people expressed not only joy but grief, anger, death, fear, loss, and chaos through their movements, sounds, and rituals. All of life’s rhythms were embodied, witnessed, and integrated—not constrained by judgment or even by language.

Beyond shamanism, cultures the world over are steeped in story and myths that offer road maps for the “descent” into darkness. These acknowledge how hard life can be. They remind us of nature’s rhythms of gestation, hibernation, death, and destruction.

Within ancient traditions, as in nature, death is always followed by rebirth, renewal, and regeneration.

Life’s hurdles can strip us of the false ideas that we hold. As old notions of ourselves and our world die, we can take truer, and often surprisingly new, pathways.

As Sandra and I were putting the final touches on our previous book, Speaking with Nature, nature beings came to me in dreams as teachers. These allies helped me nourish my highly sensitive nature in the middle of a complex world. They guided me to forgotten inner places of love and creativity that my wounds concealed. I introduced working with these forces to my second-year apprentices. They experienced a deep sense of belonging with nature and a stronger bond with their soul. In being guided through their own obstacles and welcoming vulnerability, they became more genuine healers and teachers.

Nature-based spiritual traditions tell us we must seek the light in the dark. Maya elders taught that you could not have light without darkness. Druidic and other ancient systems instructed their initiates to retreat to the densest part of the forest or to the barren reaches of the desert to find their inner light.

As Sandra mentions, the part of modern spiritual culture that focuses primarily on positivity alone, casting darkness as bad, separates us from all of who we are—from our soul force and from the Earth. The dark that we perceive as bad is often a projection of the places within us—individually as well as culturally—that we have a hard time accepting. True power comes from embracing ourselves fully. As we do so, our outer reality may reflect less destructive extremes.

As we integrate more of the dark, it shines as richness. This wisdom is an age-old alchemy promising to forge us as fully human.

Though we may feel overwhelmed, lost, fearful, or angry as we grapple with uncertainty, every experience holds a treasure of spiritual light.

Allies from nature can guide us to the light, helping us touch what repels us and transform what makes us afraid. They also serve to remind us of archetypal, mythic, and creative forces that interweave throughout mundane life yet are so often neglected and denied. These include our innate intuition, as well as personal and collective healing opportunities our sorrows and illnesses can initiate.

Likewise, we can awaken to the intelligent force of our Earth Mother and the spirited forces in the land, water, winds, and cosmos. Nature’s dark and shaded places, its liminal times, are extremely rich. Beautiful, magical life can grow there. The denial of Earth-honoring ways cuts us off from the fertile, powerful places hidden within nature—and within us.

Some nature beings Sandra and I present are threatened. As you read, you may find some qualities of endangered animals and ecosystems reflect aspects of humanity that are minimized, suppressed, abused, or forsaken.

The animals, luminary bodies, landscapes, and myriad aspects of nature in this book, as well as others that call to you, invite you to explore and deepen your relationship to their energies. Their stories, like myths and legends from ancient times, illuminate dark pathways we must all walk for humanity’s wholeness to shine. Some beings are nocturnal, offering us vision in the dark, reminding us of the gift of being vulnerable and accepting guidance. They tell us that spirit and nature are with us in the darkest of times, even when we don’t feel this to be true.

There is a lot of suffering and grief in the world now. Part of humanity’s sadness comes from feeling separate from nature. With ecological changes and species destruction, many people fear that the Earth herself is dying. These events are heartbreaking, tragic. Yet, our sentient Planet Earth is an amazing, intelligent being. She knows how to renew herself, and so do we.

The essays in this book invite nature to help you cultivate strength, meaning, and beauty through the changes and challenges we face. We are one with the Earth, and she is here to love and to guide us. Let us also remember to give back to her all that we can.