People Tell Their Stories:
Healing/Illness/Caregiving

My Personal Dark Night Journey  From a talk by Joan Borysenko, Ph.D.
 
Note: You can read the complete transcript of this talk in Fire in the Soul, Parts I and II, under Doorways of Inspiration and Support, Healing Mind, Body and Spirit.
 
A little bit about my story now. I experienced a dark night of the soul pretty early on in my life when I was about ten years old. I was living in a suburb in Boston Massachusetts, where I was raised by an excellent Jewish mother—she was a character—and a very loving father. I had quite a nice family life. All of a sudden, I had a very odd experience. Out of nowhere I became completely insane. Over a period of about a week, I became psychotic.
 
I’d seen a movie called White Witch Doctor with headhunters and poison darts and snakes and scorpions and all the things that scare kids. I started to dream it, but then the dream started to go during the day as well. Finally I couldn’t tell dreaming from reality. This is called psychotic. The landscape that I was in was a landscape of primal terror. Can you imagine looking at the floor and thinks that a snake pit has just opened up and you’re the only one who can see it happening? It was really terrible.
 
Talk about a mind-body connection; I hallucinated a couple of headhunters down the corridor at school one day. I can tell you I was not popular with the school nurse. The poor woman didn’t know what to do. I came running in with two enormous welts on my arm, and I said I have been hit by poison darts. That is the mind-body connection. The ability of what we think to manifest in our body. That was the beginning of my healing because they didn’t let me come back to school again. Wise choice.
 
Over the period of time, not only was I psychotic, but I developed something called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which in a way I think was a very creative strategy of a child to deal with the terror. My obsessive thinking was that unless I did a certain number of rituals, the snakes, the scorpions and awful stuff would kill my family. So I became the caretaker.
 
This is big time caretaking—to feel like the lives of everyone are dependent on you. I did hand washing and rituals of self-mutilation. I would have to scrape the sides of my mouth until they bled. I had one where all of my reading had to be done upside- down and backwards and repeated three times. Some of these are quite typical rituals of this disorder. You can say that I was in a big time dark night. This is called being in a hell space.
 
I agree with John Milton that hell and heaven are states of mind. I know many people in very bad physical conditions who are in a heaven state of mind. I have a friend who is confined to a wheelchair with Multiple Sclerosis. She can barely move, yet that woman has transformed her life. She is a beacon of peace and love and is enormously creative although her body hardly works at all. This by the way is called healing—when you can be in a heaven state of mind, no matter what state your physical body is in.
 
My physical body at 10 year old was in great shape, but my mind was in a hell state. Hasn’t that happened to you before? Haven’t you been in a terrible dark part of the soul with a well body? That is part of it.
 
Spontaneous Remission
 
What happened to me is something very unusual called spontaneous remission. As a medical scientist and psychologist, I can tell you that when we don’t know what has cured somebody physically or emotionally, we open up the wastebasket called spontaneous remission. We drop their case in there, because we just don’t know. How can it be that somebody who has got metastasis of bone cancer throughout their body and lungs, could in a month be completely healed?
 
I know a person like that; he has been well for over 15 years. He runs a wonderful Australian cancer patient foundation. It’s interesting to note, his physician never asked him what on earth he might have done to support that kind of tremendous healing. He said actually, he had the strangest feeling that he was a big disappointment.
 
In any case, I had a spontaneous remission, and nobody ever asked me what happened. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I figured out what had happened. Here’s what went on for me. I’m ten, I’m in this terrible hell state, and I’m alone in the living room of our home one day. All of a sudden I had the oddest sensation of an electrical change in the room, of a change of perception. I looked around, and everything looked like it always looked, but it looked different. It looked more beautiful. I felt more connected to everything that was there.
 
Have you ever had that feeling? Everything is the same, but it’s different. It’s like you just woke up at some level. You see that the world is different, that the world is a miracle. Isn’t it amazing that we are actually sitting here? Here we are, we each have a different face, we each have a different history, we each come from somewhere else and we exist with all of our beauty, with all of our ability to create. What a miracle.
 
A State of Grace
 
From time to time we enter a little state of grace where we become aware that we are part of the miracle, and that is what happened to me. I was very clear minded. What usually accompanies that kind of shift in consciousness, is that you shift out of the normal fears of your ego, the fears of your past and your future, and you enter a state that is beyond the physical, a state where all wisdom becomes really available to you. There have been many different names for this state.
 
The astronaut Edgar Michael had one of these experiences when he was looking down at the earth from outer space, and suddenly he knew things that he couldn’t have known before. He came back and asked, “What is this kind of intuitive knowing that’s beyond the conscious mind?” He found there was a Greek word for it called “noes.” He came back and founded The Institute of Noetic Sciences to understand this kind of inner wisdom and knowing.
 
I, too, had a noetic experience. What I knew at that time was that I had a choice: I could remain mentally ill or through tremendous act of will I could chose to recover. Now I am not all saying that everyone who is mentally ill can recover through will.
 
It is the same thing with cancer. Some people can do everything possible; their bodies are not going to heal. I think we can get too carried away sometimes with thinking we have to cure ourselves. We get so carried away with cure that we miss deeper healing, which is entering that noetic state of mind. Entering the state of connectedness where we really feel the magnificence of the universe. And are able to stay in touch with that state of magnificence regardless of whether our mind functions the way we want, or whether our body functions the way we want.
 
What happened then in this particular state is that I said, “Okay I’ll use my will and do whatever I am required to. I want to recover.” The answer that came to me is, “You can never do another ritual. One more and you will stay stuck in this state forever. You have to simply stop.” Which of course was completely terrifying. At that moment, when I said, “I really need help, I don’t think I can do this by myself,” there came from inside of me, from that intuitive place a poem. This is my dark night of the soul poem which has stood me by through all the other dark nights of the soul and there have been many. The poem didn’t have much to do with the conscious mind of a ten-year-old child. It came from someplace much deeper.  

Somewhere in the darkest night
There always shines a little light
This light up in the heavens shines
To help our God watch over us
When a small child is born,
The light her soul does adorn
So when our only human eyes
Look up in the lightless sky
We must know, even though we cannot see
That this light burns far into the night
To help our God watch over us