Into the Cocoon: When Everything Familiar Dissolves
If you read the first piece in this series, you might be interested in exploring the emptiness that settles in when spiritual content (or practices) fail to satisfy. We unpacked the traps we can fall into including algorithms designed to exploit your attention, parasocial relationships that trick your brain into one-sided bonds with strangers, and the Barnum effect that makes generic advice feel profoundly personal.
In this piece, I want to take the conversation somewhere a bit different. Because here’s the thing, any spiritual practice can enter a period of dryness, a period when it no longer quenches your inner thirst, and that feeling doesn’t only show up for people who watch too many tarot videos. It shows up for people who have been genuinely engaged, often for years, in a consistent self-care and spiritual practice.
It happens to people who meditate everyday, have a regular journaling practice, go to church every Sunday, practice yoga, you name it. It happens to folks who have spent years seeking, learning, and finding deep fulfillment in their devotion, only to wake up one day and realize the things that used to feed their soul just don’t anymore.
What this shift feels like is simple to name and hard to live through. It’s often the realization what I’m doing isn’t working anymore. Or, just as often, my connection to it is changing, and I don’t know into what.
If you can relate, I want you to know this is not a sign you are failing, or even that something is wrong. It’s a sign that you’ve changed, that you might have outgrown whatever it is that you’ve been doing. Mystics, poets, philosophers, and psychologists have been naming this exact threshold for centuries, and though they’ve approached the topic from different angles, they often arrive at some version of the same recognition — the falling away is not the end of the path. Instead, its the path doing what it was always going to do — change.
A quick clarification before we go further. The shift I am describing is the dryness that settles in while you are still inside a practice or tradition, when something you have kept doing simply stops feeding you. I am not talking about the harder work of leaving a tradition, institution, or community altogether, especially one that has harmed you. That’s a distinct and often more difficult (in my opinion) journey, and it deserves its own conversation. Some of what follows may speak to it, but that is not what this piece is intended to address.
You’ve probably encountered the phrase “dark night of the soul,” maybe through Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, where it shows up as the ordeal a hero faces right before transformation. But the phrase didn’t start there. It comes from the text Dark Night of the Soul written by 16th century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross. In this work St. John writes of contemplative prayer, but I feel he was also mapping the anatomy of deep transformation.
He named two nights:
The first is the night of the senses, where the warmth and meaning drain out of things that used to nourish us. Practices that once felt alive go flat. It’s tempting for us to read this as failure, like we’re doing something wrong, but St. John saw it as a kind of weaning, a release of our reliance on good feelings as proof that something real is happening.
The second is the night of the spirit, and it goes deeper. This is the loss of our footing and our foundation. The beliefs and structures we engage to to hold ourselves together start to give way, and our very sense of who we are feels like it’s crumbling. This is the night that maps most closely onto what we now call ego death or a full collapse of worldview.
Both phases feel like absolute abandonment. Both feel like an ending. But St. John believed this darkness was the very engine of deepening. When we begin any practice, we live on its consolations: the warmth, the quiet joys, the sense of being held. That sweetness is how we find our way into any practice. But eventually, the tide goes out. The ego must let go of needing a reward before something truly sacred can take root. When it feels like your practice is dying, it is simply traveling to a new depth you have yet to explore.
If St. John mapped the anatomy of that darkness, Teresa of Avila, his fellow reformer in the same Carmelite world, mapped what to do while you are inside it. In her book The Interior Castle she treats the emptiness not as a failure but as a crucial boundary line. Her counsel is to stop trying to think our way through the dark and simply sit within it. She describes what she calls the Prayer of Quiet, a state of infused peace that no amount of human effort can force or manufacture. Her suggests the barrenness you might be feeling is not a sign you have lost your way. Instead, it is a sign you are on your way to something deeper.
But spiritual drought is only one pillar of St. Teresa’s legacy; she knew rapture just as intimately. It was this ecstatic side that piqued my interest while working on this piece. When Tori Amos released her album In Times of Dragons, I was immediately drawn to the track “St. Teresa.” The song evokes the imagery of the interior castle and transverberation — Teresa’s famous vision of an angel piercing her heart with a fire-tipped golden spear. It was an experience so painful she moaned, yet so sweet she prayed it would never end.
This fusion of agony and ecstasy is deeply human; most of us know what it is to be undone by a love that wounds even as it opens us. But while Teresa named this sensation five hundred years ago, Amos introduces a modern urgency. Her song shifts focus from the physical wound to the shame so often wrapped around desire. Singing of a woman mortified by her own longing, Amos wonders if “God’s honey” might heal the trauma of that guilt. In this contemporary retelling, the angel’s piercing becomes a blessing on desire rather than a punishment for it. Encountering a centuries-old mystic through Amos’s vivid perspective collapses time, making the five-hundred-year gulf between Teresa’s world and our own feel beautifully thin.
What strikes me most about St. Teresa is her plainspoken honesty about experiencing a spiritual drought and her account of transverberation. She made room for both the agony and the ecstasy, and trusted that everything living between those two extremes belongs to the journey. She trusted the ecstatic piercing as fully as she trusted the long, hollow silence beside it. That trust feels important. Her work resonates with me because it was not written from a perpetual mountaintop. It maps the shadow-filled caverns just as deeply.
Now let’s look at another popular spiritual figure, Rumi. For quick reference, Rumi was a 13th-century Persian Sufi poet and mystic whose Masnavi opens with one of the most beautiful images (at least to me) in spiritual literature. A reed flute, cut from the reed bed, crying for its origin. Everyone who hears the flute hears their own longing in its music. And yet, the reed does not seek to have its longing answered, explained, or soothed. It stays open to it. It lets the longing move through its body as music.
This serves as the direct counter to what spiritual content consumption and the modern wellness industry offer: a temporary soothing of our deepest longings through the illusion of a quick answer.
The reality is, the longing was never meant to be permanently answered or subdued. It was meant to be sat with, breathed through, and allowed to become the opening through which something real can move. The Masnavi tells us that the ache of longing is itself the path — that your desire for the divine is the divine within you, calling you home to your own interior castles (to borrow from St. Teresa).
In The Republic, written around 380 BCE, Plato describes prisoners chained inside a cave, watching shadows cast upon a wall and mistaking those projections for reality. This is the only world they know, and they spend their lives interpreting the fleeting shapes. When a prisoner is freed, their transition to the outer world is agonizing and disorienting. This is because the actual world is far harder to look at than the comfortable illusion that was available within the cave. When the liberated prisoner returns to share the truth, the others resist, preferring the safety of the shadows to the blinding light of reality.
As a metaphor for entering spiritual deconstruction, Plato’s cave wall feels precise. The inherited beliefs, certainties, and structures we grow up with are compelling; they give us a familiar framework to live by. We accept them completely because we have never been given a reason to question what has always been “true” to us. When those structures begin to collapse, turning away from the familiar shadows and into a new phase of development feels deeply disorienting. The old definitions no longer hold, and the light of a deeper truth initially blinds us.
Now let’s loop back to Joseph Campbell who drew from world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces to argue that every genuine story of transformation follows the same universal arc: a departure from the ordinary world, a threshold crossing into the strange and difficult, a series of stripping ordeals, and a return with a gift that could only be found through the journey.
But Campbell also named the “refusal of the call,” the moment the invitation to go deeper arrives, and the hero turns back toward the familiar. Today, staying trapped in passive consumption is our ultimate refusal. And it carries a heavy cost.
Maureen Murdock, a Jungian analyst who studied with Campbell, gently but firmly departed from his framework. In The Heroine’s Journey, she mapped a different movement observed in her female clients. Rather than an outward conquest of achievement, the heroine’s journey is a descent. It is a reclaiming of what was split off or compartmentalized. It’s a return to the body, the relational, and the cyclical. Where Campbell’s hero goes out to slay the dragon, Murdock’s heroine goes inward to meet what she has been running from.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés extends this territory in Women Who Run with the Wolves, drawing from fairy tale, folklore, and the deep tradition of oral storytelling to map what she calls the Wild Woman archetype, the instinctual, knowing layer of the psyche that gets buried under performance, compliance, and the accumulated weight of not belonging to yourself. Estés writes about the cost of that burial and the long, unglamorous work of reclamation. Like Murdock, she is not interested in ascent. She is interested in return.
This distinction matters now, because the spirituality our algorithms reward is tilted almost entirely toward ascent: higher vibrations, portal activations, collective upgrades. Murdock and Estés point in a far more honest direction. Not up, but down. Not more, but less. Not out, but in. Not acquiring new spiritual experiences but releasing what blocks the experiences you’re already having.
Consider the cocoon. The caterpillar does not simply reorganize inside its casing; it dissolves. It enters a phase of genuine liquidity, a state where nothing of the old form remains before a new structure can emerge. If you cut open a cocoon mid-process, you would find nothing recognizable, neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just dissolution. This liquid phase is not a failure. It is the exact mechanism of transformation. It cannot be rushed, observed, or consumed from the outside. It must be lived from within.
If you recognize yourself in this discussion, or feel that your internal ground has shifted, consider these three truths:
First, this is a threshold, not a dead end. Every mystical tradition agrees that a sudden hollow dryness, the realization that what once worked no longer does, is not the end of the spiritual life. It is the beginning of its deeper register. The question is whether you can tolerate the emptiness, or if you will reflexively reach for something to fill the gap.
Second, you do not have to know what comes next. The threshold is not a doorway into a brightly lit room; it is the blinding disorientation of stepping out of a dark cave. It requires a different way of seeing.
Third, threshold practices require simplicity, not effort. If your current spiritual practices have stopped working, doing them harder is not the answer. You need slowness, silence, and the body. Return to simple practices (quiet time alone, breathing intentionally, journaling) again and again, not for what it produces, but for the quality of attention it demands.
You do not need more content. You need more contact, with yourself, with the living world, and with whatever it is you are seeking underneath all the seeking.
Navigating this liquid phase of seeking and deconstruction is profoundly disorienting, and it is almost impossible to do it entirely on your own. It is easy to mistake the structural collapse of your old beliefs for absolute failure. That is why I created my mentoring program. As an evidential psychic medium, ancestral medicine practitioner, and spiritual guide, my role is not to hand you a new set of rigid rules or tell you who to be.
Instead, I offer an ethical, grounded container to help you meet yourself exactly where you are. Together, we will sit in the dryness, listen to the wisdom of your lineage, and help your body tolerate the weight of the unknown. I am here to walk beside you through the descent, not to rush your transformation, but to hold the space securely until your new structure begins to emerge.
If you are ready to step away from passive consumption and enter the cocoon with trusted companionship, I invite you to join me.