AMA | Dark Night of The Soul: How To Make Peace With Your Inner War

Wellness + Wisdom | Episode 697

Wellness + Wisdom Podcast Host and Wellness Force Media CEO, Josh Trent, shares how to navigate the dark night of the soul and create peace within yourself.

Today's Question

Jared Fekete: How can I understand the role of vice as a guide during my dark night of the soul and how do I integrate the wisdom it offers while moving towards wholeness? I feel I'm in a big moment in my life of self-discovery.

Is there a topic that you'd like us to cover in the next AMA episode?

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Listen To Episode 697 As Josh Trent Answers Your Questions [02:50] Dark Night of The Soul

Let's get into this question from Jared.

Hey Josh, thanks for re-inviting me to submit my question. How can I understand the role of vice as a guide during my dark night of the soul and how do I integrate the wisdom it offers while moving towards wholeness? I feel I'm in a big moment in my life of self-discovery.

I've had a crazy weird wild year divorcing my high school sweetheart and I met a woman in an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru in June and I love this woman and we've decided to take a separation just, she's been such a mirror and an amplifier for everything for each other, like for everything that she's going through, everything that I'm going through and I just realized like I have had a porn addiction since I was, you know, a child.

And I brought that into my marriage and, you know, hit it. And it's very clear how all that kind of manifested. And I just lost the respect, lost all the libido in my relationship. And then, you know, getting that back in this relationship, I've had like no draw towards it at all. But I have just been chasing women since I divorced.

But then I found this woman and Everything changed and I wanted to shape it up and everything. And yeah, I just realized now that we're separated that it just comes back. It's like I want to, I want to fuck, fuck and like not think about it. And, but then I don't want to ruin the chances of going back. So I'm just like so torn right now, you know, and it's just, it feels so childish, but it's also so important.

Wow. First of all, I can relate. I've shared many times on the podcast that I have struggled in my past with porn. It is a very, very deep black hole. So my heart goes out to you, Jared, for first of all, having the courage to even share this.

How amazing is it, Mar, that people that don't even know me, that just listen to our AMAs or listen to the podcast, have the courage to actually speak in the way that Jared just spoke. I mean, it's just so, I'm smiling and my heart is blasted open because y'all, this is what we need. This is what we're all thirsty for. Like, come on, what are we doing if we're not doing this?

So Jared, one thing that I heard you say that really flagged my consciousness is you said this porn addiction has been there. But one thing that you really said that hit hard, you said, I've been chasing women. I've been chasing women.

And this is actually a real big challenge because my intention today is to deliver my wisdom and Mara to deliver her wisdom so we can stop the war, right? So if we're chasing something or if we're battling should I or should I not, it can feel like a war, right?

Mar, I mean, have you ever had times in your life where you had a war in your mind? You're like, what is this war even about? Does that happen to you?

Yeah, it happens quite often. Actually, I remember I mentioned it to you last week in our meeting that I had this inner war between the motivation I wanted to have versus the actions I was actually taking to not do anything to avoid doing the things that I actually wanted to do.

So there's like this one part of me that wants it and the other part of me that's trying to sabotage me. So that's the inner war I've been dealing with lately.

Thanks for sharing because what you just shared is actually what Jared spoke upon and it's what we all do when we are suffering. We look for the meaning. I believe Jared even said, what is this all about? I divorced my high school sweetheart. I'm going through all this pain.

Now, Jared, I'm going to say this with respect. You are being called forth to be a man. That's what this is about. I'm 44. I'm still learning how to be an embodied man.

I don't have it completely mastered at all, but at 44, I can tell you that when I look back on my 20-year-old self and even in my early 30s, the reason that I was chasing women and I was addicted to porn, and I've said this many times, but it's borrowed wisdom from Gabor Mate, addiction is a disconnection from self or others, right?

Addiction is the opposite of connection. So it's the disconnection, it's the lack of connection to self that it's going to find pseudo connection by running outside of itself.

Well, meanwhile, your soul is sitting there asking for a connection. That's what this is really about, right? And so I'll speak with respect, but I'll also speak with conviction here. Your pain is the biggest tool for your growth.

So you're experiencing porn as an addictive nature, or you're experiencing chasing women and feeling hollow because every man has this biological drive to replicate. Women have it too.

But as men, it's been so normalized in our society by Instagram and Pornhub and all these aspects of how women are literally on such a deep level, such a deep level, the objectification of women, that it not only becomes normalized for men, The sad part is many women fall into thirst traps where they unknowingly normalize it with their behavior.

Maybe that's a whole separate podcast. What I'm getting out here is like when you are addicted to porn Jared and when going deep into the aspects of any addiction, you have to keep feeding it more.

I remember when I was deep in addiction, I had to keep going to more aggressive scenes. I had to keep watching really gross stuff that I went through a massive purging process over. And actually Mar, when we were doing breath work here during our retreat, there was still residue in there that I ended up sharing with the group at 44 years old that I didn't even know I didn't was there.

In other words, I had unconscious incompetence to the residue that pornography created in my signature that I got to belch out and burp out and breathe out through my breathwork ceremony. The reason I'm sharing this I chased women too. And I think it's just this really challenging thing that we experience as men because on one hand, you're a biological being filled with testosterone, right?

And so when you're in your twenties, like you're basically a walking testosterone stick where you're just looking to hook up and play and do all these things. These things, am I here to say that conscious sex from that place is wrong? No, I'm not.

If you really love someone and you feel like you respect them and you have a unique connection, I think that sex is a beautiful way to experience love or that's why they called lovemaking, right? That's the whole point of it all.

But what happens is, in uncertainty, myself and all of us as men, we fall into this trap where we reach for something that we can create as certain. And an orgasm or that deep breath after orgasm, or even the feeling of like the rush you get from catecholamines and epinephrine and norepinephrine using porn, masturbating with porn, or using women to masturbate, because essentially that's what unconscious sex is.

You're using a woman's body to masturbate with. The reason why this has been so normalized is because souls like you, Jared, are rare. Souls that want to reflect and go deep into why their behavior is showing up in a way that they despise is rare. Now we're making it less rare...

[15:30] Spiritual Maturity

I'm just so amazed that the layers of awareness feed into each other. I was on a beach in Maui this year with my mentor Margo, who's been on the show before, and she flipped open a Rumi poem. And Rumi says that the cure for the pain is the pain.

So the cure for your pain here is to go into the depths of this pain so fully and feel it so deeply that even in you feeling the pain itself, you can develop the skill set and the spiritual and mental maturity to be able to just lift your hand up to pornography and say no at any time.

But the only way you can be forged and you can really figure that out isn't from your head. And this is the part that messed with me more for so long. I put blockers on my computer. I did pornography programs. I even went to