Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals - Hardcover

Moore, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592400671 ISBN 13: 9781592400676

Publisher: Gotham, 2004

Synopsis

A continuation of his best-selling Care of the Soul explains how to use times of challenge, disappointment, illness, and dissatisfaction as an opportunity to explore the soul's deepest needs in order to provide healing and a new understanding of the meaning of life. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed—but this is perhaps Moore’s best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher. --Gail Hudson

About the Author:

Thomas Moore, Ph.D., wrote the phenomenal #1 bestsellers Care of the Soul and SoulMates as well as many other successful books. Moore was a Catholic monk for twelve years and later became a psychotherapist, earning degrees in theology, musicology, and religion. Moore now lectures extensively throughout North America.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gotham
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1592400671
• ISBN 13: 9781592400676
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 329