People say, “You never get more than you can handle.” Or “God never gives you more than you can handle.” Really? Nice story, but total bullshit. What does it even mean?

That you won’t die from a difficult situation? Is that the marker? That you won’t lose your mind, tear off your clothes, walk into traffic, have to be institutionalized? Is that the marker?

Surely those are things I do not desire, but in my experience the soul throws you more shit than you can handle all the time. How else do you grow?

I think what people mean when they say that to someone going through a difficult time is, “This situation feels bigger than your usual ways of handling life and your usual sense of self, but you really do have it in you to handle it, even though it doesn’t feel like it now.” That’s nice. And maybe it’s true. But if you’re in this life to grow beyond the known, you’re going to have times when you get more than you can handle. Count on it.

During most of the 1990’s, I was going through what I surmise was alot of intense spiritual transformation all at once. Even now, I can only guess at what it was or what to name some of it. We’re not a spiritually-literate culture, so I couldn’t just look it up (no Google) and say, “Oh, yeah, that’s what this is.” Even if I could, there was nothing I could do about it. Spiritual transformations are triggered by the soul. You just have to cope. And, at times, that is no small task.

One of the processes I was likely experiencing during that time was the Dark Night, more commonly known as the Dark Night of the Soul. I’m not sure why it is called that since the soul seemed just fine, thank you. But the rest of the human? That’s another story.

Sometimes I’d hear accounts of the Dark Night from others, but the reports I heard were superficial and inaccurate. That is not to say those people weren’t actually going through a Dark Night. Maybe they were and they didn’t articulate it well. More often than not, though, I suspect they were not actually going through the Dark Night.

There’s not much I can say about it because, well, it is the Dark Night after all. Ok, there’s a little I can say about it. First, it was not short. I cannot tell you how long it was, but in linear time, it was long.

Possibly the hardest part was the loss of my connection to God as I had known it and relied on it. For years prior, I had pleaded with great sincerity to have God, Spirit, bring on intense spiritual transformation. Not because I’m a masochist, but because I longed for an inner freedom I knew was possible. I didn’t have to conjure or dramatize that desire, it was straight from the heart.

Then I got my wish. The intense transformation part (I’m still waiting for the complete soul freedom part). Also, like I said, there were other things going on spiritually too, some of which made my physical, mental and spiritual bodies feel like they were in a vise. That too was not short. But going back to the Dark Night (DN), in the DN, the lights go out. Your inner world of spiritual phenomena disappears.

Maybe you have a sense of the Divine, of God. Some sort of connection you rely on, that makes you feel good, safe and to which you turn when things are troubling. A childlike inner connection in which a sweet story about God taking care of you and never giving you more than you can handle would make sense.

In the Dark Night, that disappears. You can beg and plead and cry – and I did – and it changes nothing. It is a process of becoming a spiritual adult. I suppose, spiritually-speaking, we’re never really alone in this life, but in the DN the ways you would know and feel that, disappear. Those “ways” are what I’m calling the lights, the knowable phenomena. They disappear and you must see in the Dark. Your ego freaks out night and day (well it does that anyway, but you can imagine…). It has none of its favorite toys to play with, including Comfort-God. They gone.

The world is one big “No.” Just about everything in your world is empty. It’s not quite as nihilistic as it sounds. In fact it is not nihilism at all, what it is, is spiritual fire. Nihilism is still an ego/intellect construct. The Dark Night is a burn. It’s the soul burning down your sense of self and your childlike relationship to Spirit. To the ground and beyond.

So some dopey saying like, “Oh God will never give you more than you can handle” is ridiculous. You come to see alot of things in this world are ridiculous.

So what to do? All you can do is distract. I can’t speak for others who maybe want to sit in meditation practice and bring mindfulness to the process – although I did a fair bit of mindfulness meditation during that time, but I didn’t push it – but it’s not the nature of the Dark Night that you work harder at it. That fucker knows precisely what to do and does not need a single thing from you to do it.

I was living in Canada at the time and for awhile had no legal working papers – don’t ask me what I could have done for a job anyway, though I did eventually get one. During those times, I would take the Oak St bus in Vancouver down to the Starbucks. Starbucks was new to me in 1992 (it was still more about actual coffee than theme-park style sugar-bomb drinks) and it was without a doubt my Coffee Dream come true.

I would go to the Oak St Starbucks and get a cappuccino and a gorgeous chocolate-dipped peanut butter cookie. At the time, Starbucks still sold really nice confections, locally-sourced, not the mass-produced garbage they sell now.

The cookie was almost as big as my hand. I would slowly savor each smooth, sweet, velvet chocolatey, crunchy peanut-buttery bite as I sipped my superb strong-roast cappuccino and for a short time, my world would be easy.

While there are many…many.. spiritual tools and insights I have to share with people, some of the dearest and most profound – the ones that kept me sane, literally – are humble, simple, everyday things that sweetened my day and were not esoteric in the least.

Stories about how easy God is on us humans were useless and silly during the Dark Night. It’s not supposed to be always be easy and you’re not supposed to be a spiritual child forever. But a good cappuccino, a nice table at which to sit, a friendly barista and a beautiful handmade chocolate-dipped peanut butter cookie can give you a moment of desperately-needed sweetness in the midst of fire.