How to Get Through the Dark Night of the Soul: Letting Go and Heart Coherence

When people find themselves in the dark night of the soul, the first instinct is to reach for a list of things to do. Practices, techniques, strategies — anything to make the dark night of the soul stop. Practices, techniques, strategies. Anything to make it stop.

But here is what I’ve noticed in the people I work with, and in my own experience: the list becomes another way to avoid what’s actually happening.

There is a difference between enduring the fire and staying in it. Enduring is passive. It is white-knuckling your way through the day, gritting your teeth, waiting for it to be over. Staying is different. Staying is active. It is the conscious skill of being fully present to your own experience, without running from it and without drowning in it.

The practices I’m about to share are not exits. They are not ways to make the dark night stop faster. They are tools for presence. For learning what to do with what is arising.

That distinction matters more than any technique.

Four Practices for Moving Through the Dark Night of the Soul

These are not a menu to pick from. They are a sequence. Each one builds on the one before it. Used together, they are the most effective toolkit I have found for anyone asking how to get through the dark night of the soul without losing themselves in it.

1. Tuning in and Witnessing

The first thing to do when the Dip hits is the thing that feels most counterintuitive. Stop trying to change what you’re feeling. Instead, become the witness of it.

There is a part of you that is always present, always aware, that is not the emotion, not the thought, not the story. It is the one who notices all of those things. Moving into that witnessing awareness is where everything else begins.

The shift is simple but not small. Instead of “I am overwhelmed,” try: “I notice I am feeling overwhelmed.” Instead of “this will never end,” try: “I notice the thought that this will never end is here right now.” That cognitive shift, from being consumed by the experience to observing it, creates just enough space to breathe.

Become the witness first. Everything else rests on this.

2. Heart-Focused Breathing And The Neutral Step

Once you’re in the witnessing space, the next step is to create internal room. This is where the HeartMath Neutral technique becomes essential.

Neutral is not positive. It is not trying to feel better or coating a difficult emotion with forced gratitude. Neutral is the pause between reaction and response. And it is a physiological state you can actively create.

Place your hand on your heart. Shift your attention to the centre of your chest. Begin to breathe slowly and evenly, five seconds in and five seconds out. Simply hold a sense of openness. Not generating a feeling, not suppressing one. Just creating space.

What this does is regulate your heart rhythm. Your heart rate variability stabilizes. Your nervous system moves out of the threat response and into a state where you can actually be with the emotion rather than be overwhelmed by it. You may have heard Joe Dispenza talk about heart-brain coherence. What I’m teaching here is the HeartMath Institute foundation that the coherence work is built on. This is the entry point. The pause that makes everything else possible.

3. Three: Letting Go

This is the practice that requires the most courage. David Hawkins, psychiatrist and author of Letting Go, spent decades studying emotional release. What he found is simple enough to miss entirely.

Give yourself permission to feel the feeling fully. Not the idea of it. Not the story about why it’s there. The raw physical sensation in your body, without resistance, without trying to understand or analyse it. Just feel it until it has run its course.

Most of us never actually do this. We feel the edge of an emotion and immediately reach for a distraction, a thought, a story, anything to pull us back from the full intensity of it. Hawkins calls this suppression. And every time we suppress, the emotion doesn’t leave. It goes deeper. It stores itself in the body and waits.

Letting go means stopping that cycle. It means sitting with the feeling and allowing it to move through you the way a wave moves through water. You are not the wave. You are the ocean. And the wave will pass. It always does, every single time, if you let it.

4. Heart-Brain Coherence

Once the feeling has moved through, something opens up. A quality of quiet. Of stillness. This is the moment for heart-brain coherence. Not before. After.

Coherence practice is not about bypassing emotion. It is about completing the cycle, moving from release into restoration. Keep your hand on your heart. Continue the slow, even breathing. And now begin to generate a genuine feeling of gratitude or appreciation. Not a concept. A real feeling. Bring to mind a person, a moment, a memory that naturally evokes warmth. Let it grow in your chest without forcing it.

As you do this, your heart rhythm synchronizes with your breath in a coherent pattern. Your brain receives a stabilizing signal from your heart. The whole system begins to come back online. This is how you return to yourself after the fire has done what it came to do.

The Healing Journey Is Not Linear

Here is something nobody told me when I was starting out, and I want to tell you now.

The dark night of the soul does not arrive once and then leave forever. The healing journey moves in cycles, like the rings of a tree, each one marking a season, a passage, a layer of growth.

In my own journey, the first major cycle was grief. Grief for the loss of my youth, for friends left behind when I moved countries, for a version of life I had imagined and never lived. I went into that grief, I stayed with it using these very practices, and I came out the other side. Not without scars. But with something new. A spaciousness, a softness, a strength I hadn’t had before.

And then, after a period of flow, something triggered the next cycle. For me it was shame. I was making videos, putting myself in front of a camera, and suddenly I was confronted with a deep discomfort about my own physical appearance. An old wound that the light of all this inner work had finally reached. I had to go through that too.

And then the next cycle came. And the next.

This is not something going wrong. This is exactly how deep healing works. As the heart continues to open, the light reaches places that were previously in the dark. Emotions that were disowned. Parts of the self that were set aside. And one by one, in their own time, they surface to be seen and freed.

What changes over time is not that the cycles stop. What changes is your relationship to them. Every time you move through a cycle and emerge from it, something in you begins to trust. The part of you that used to panic when the fire arrived starts to recognize familiar territory. I’ve been here before. I know how to do this. I know how to stay.

The tools get stronger. The practices deepen. The movement from living in your head to living from your heart becomes more natural, more established. Until one day you realize that you are not just surviving the dark night of the soul. You are becoming someone who knows how to work with it.

Four Additional Suggestions

The inner work of moving through a dark night of the soul needs outer conditions to support it. These four are not optional.

Ground

Get your feet on the earth. Walk barefoot on grass, sand, or soil. The body needs to discharge what it has been holding, and the earth receives that discharge. This is not a metaphor. The earth carries a negative ionic charge, and direct skin contact allows the body to release built-up electromagnetic stress.

In the dark night of the soul, the system is running hot — more energy moving through you than usual, more activation, more sensitivity. Grounding is how you let some of that energy move out of you and into something that can hold it. Even ten minutes of bare feet on the ground each day can shift your nervous system in ways that are difficult to explain but immediately felt.

Move

Walk, dance, shake. The emotion that the mind cannot process, the body can move through. Give it a way out. The dark night of the soul is not only a psychological event. It is a somatic one. The emotions that surface carry energy, and that energy needs somewhere to go. I

A slow walk in silence, hands swinging freely, awareness in the feet. Shaking the hands and arms for five minutes, letting the tremor move up through the body. Dancing alone in your kitchen to a song that holds the feeling you are trying to avoid. The form matters less than the intention: move so that something can move through you. The body knows what to do. Trust it.

Hydrate

Deep emotional work is also electromagnetic work. The body needs water to process and discharge that energy. Drink more than you think you need. The heart generates the strongest electromagnetic field in the body. During periods of intense inner work, that field is highly active. The nervous system is under sustained load. The cells are processing and releasing stored charge. Water is the medium through which this electrical activity flows.

Most people in a dark night of the soul are running dehydrated without knowing it. Stress and emotional intensity both accelerate water loss, and when the body is depleted, the whole system becomes more reactive, more brittle, less able to hold the intensity of what is moving through.

Connect

Find people on the same path who can offer resonance, validation, and support. This was never meant to be walked alone. Isolation is one of the most consistent features of the dark night of the soul — not always physical isolation, but the interior sense that no one around you understands what you are going through. This is why the quality of connection matters as much as the quantity.

One conversation with someone who has been through their own fire, who can say “I know that place, and I also know the other side of it,” is worth more than a hundred conversations with people who are simply trying to comfort you back into ordinary life.

Final Thoughts

The dark night of the soul is not a detour from the path. It is the path going deeper. And understanding that reframes everything about how you move through it. Every tradition that has ever mapped the inner journey has described this passage, because every genuine awakening moves through it.

Before you close this page, I want to leave you with a few questions worth sitting with:

Which of these four practices is calling to you most right now?

Where are you in your current cycle — at the beginning, in the middle, or beginning to emerge?

What would it mean to stay, just for today, without needing the fire to stop?

If you want support and a clear map for where you are, the Heart Mastery Starter Kit was built for exactly this moment.

From my heart to yours,