Why Does Meditation Suddenly Suck?

[Level 2: Mystical] A survival guide for the bullshit phase where God ghosts you

Have you ever spent time daily with someone and accidentally caught feelings for them?

Now imagine that person suddenly stopped showing up to where you were for no reason.

You can’t get in touch with them. You keep showing up, expecting them to make a return but... nothing.

Days turn into weeks... weeks turn into months. Yet, you can’t stop thinking about this person even though they’re not there. Thoughts plague your mind to the tune of:

• Are they avoiding me?

• Did I say or do something wrong?

• Have they moved on in life?

• Did they find someone else?

You feel jealous over what could have been. You would give anything for them to come back, to stop the mental torment, to just be with them again without feeling like it was a fleeting, ephemeral encounter.

Tears come unexpectedly when you stop to just breathe, when you lie in bed at night and try to sleep after a long day and the ache of missing them keeps you restless.

Now imagine: no one else around you has seen this person that you’re missing so viscerally. They were just a nameless background character that blended in with their surroundings like a chameleon. They never existed to those around you, or maybe only peripherally at best. But you noticed them—and you fell in love.

This is what the “Dark Night of the Soul” looks like. Strip away the poetic language, and it’s:

1. God gradually appears over time

2. You fall in love¹

3. God ghosts you

4. You absolutely lose your mind

I didn’t even know this was a thing for nearly a YEAR until I actually picked up and read a modern translation of Saint John of the Cross’s book. The entire time I had to hide the inexplicable feelings of loneliness, of profound longing, of crushing despair, because how would you explain it?

“I’m heartbroken because God stopped showing up in my meditations.”

Yeah, good luck with that, especially if you’ve been “keeping it casual” to keep up appearances. Good luck explaining to your spouse that you’re in love with the Divine, especially when you both aren’t religious.

So you suffer in silence.

You keep showing up to the cushion.

You keep hoping.

You keep crying at night.

You keep feeling crazy because how do you grieve someone no one else can see?

The phases

Let’s talk about the actual phases in a way that doesn’t require you to pick up a medieval-era book laden with religious jargon and antiquated language.

Phase 1: The honeymoon

At this point, meditation has stopped feeling like fighting your thoughts for the entire time and more like peace or even bliss.

Maybe there are experiences of tingling warmth like sunlight across your back, a sense of “aliveness” radiating from the center of your chest and down the arms, or a gentle flame behind your sternum.

Maybe you feel like you’re taking a step back from the screen of your mind and a refreshing space is opening up that puts your current troubles into perspective.

Maybe you have various “aha!” moments that make you feel like you’ve figured things out finally.

Regardless of the way it manifests, you find meditation to be enjoyable and fall in love with the practice, with the subtle Presence that arises in the space between thoughts. Meditation is no longer an obligation or a “thing to do”, but a natural returning as if coming home from a long day at the office.

Phase 2: The ghosting

Suddenly, the experiences you were once enjoying stop coming.

You feel like you’ve hit a plateau. Meditation has now become dry, empty, pointless, and uncomfortable.

“I feel like I’ve hit a plateau since I got serious with my practice and diet over 4 months ago now. I notice a sense of dissatisfaction with where I’m at…” (Journal Entry, February 26, 2025)

You try harder with your current practice. It doesn’t work.

You try looking for and implementing different techniques. It doesn’t work.

As days and weeks pass in this dryness, you wonder what you’re missing, what you’re doing wrong, why you seem to be “stuck”.

“Every dawn, every dusk I sit and wait for Divinity’s Grace only to be stood up time and again. Yet every day I return, a stray dog hoping for scraps given from a change of heart. Yet every day I starve. Every night I grow a little weaker. Every dawn I grow a little more bitter. Hope curdles, its sour stench betraying months without gain. Why am I still doing this? Why do I still care so much? Why can’t I just give up?” (Journal Entry, March 10, 2025)

Phase 3: The spiral

You feel like this is it and you’ve hit your “level cap” on meditation as a non-renunciate. You’re convinced of one or more of the following:

• This was all your imagination

• You’re going crazy

• You need to give up everything in your life and run off to an ashram to go any deeper

“Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I never truly loved You, only the experience of glimpsing Your Presence. Maybe I only loved how You made me feel.” (Journal Entry, June 22, 2025)

All the while, you feel abandoned, betrayed, and heartbroken. You oscillate between hopeless despair and indignant rage at God for disappearing when you’ve been earnest in your seeking.

“There was a quiet rage building within me, my soul screaming to be heard. I felt indignant that my wails and pleas seemed to dissolve into the void. […] I’m tired of being given the cold shoulder. I hate that my love for Him has gone so bitter that I can barely stomach it.” (Journal Entry, June 23, 2025)

Maybe you write angry journal entries, cry into your mat, or clear off your altar, shoving it all into the junk drawer or a closet because it brings pain just to look at it.

Phase 4: Exhaustion

Your emotions leave you feeling ragged and worn down.

At this point, you’re too tired to keep trying, to put in more effort. After all, more effort didn’t make a difference.

“I don’t know why I can’t seem to feel rested when I keep trying to rest in You most nights. I just feel like a zombie stumbling through my own life right now.” (Journal Entry, August 17, 2025)

Rather than surrender gracefully, you give up trying, thinking you’ve failed.

Maybe you decide to stop meditating for a few days, maybe even a week.

“First it started with no longer waking up early anymore to do my sadhana. Almost simultaneously I stopped doing dusk sadhana. Diet degraded over time to let back in coffee and substances. I grew too busy and tired to go to yoga daily and now it’s been a full week since I’ve been at all. All my discipline and motivation seem to have left me and all I can seem to do is watch in horror at my own insufficiency.” (Journal Entry, August 31, 2025)

But oddly... you feel something tugging you back to the cushion. It’s like something within is nagging you to go sit even though it seems to give you only grief. You’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.

You reluctantly sit at least to appease the tugging in your chest, but this time you don’t do anything.

Phase 5: The shift

Something subtly changes from the persistence through the exhaustion and dryness. There’s a sense of almost acceptance that arises as the seeker stops reaching.

“Not by effort. By grace through acceptance.” (Journal Entry, October 4, 2025)

Alternatively, something makes you realize you were seeking experiences, enforcing the sense of separation that was causing you such grief in the first place. Eventually, you let go of the seeking little by little until the “you” that was seeking slowly dissolves.

“What I thought was my love for You was simply me recognizing Your Love for me.” (Journal Entry, October 6, 2025)

Why this happens

This “ghosting” is a known phenomenon that arises not because you’re doing anything wrong, not because your practice is failing. It arises exactly because your practice is working.

The purpose of this period (which can last months, years, or even decades) is to break your addiction to the high. You were falling in love with the nice feelings, not the Source.

It’s like falling in love with someone’s gifts instead of them. The flowers they bring. The compliments they give. The way they make you feel. But what happens when the gifts stop?

If you were in love with the person—you stay.

If you were in love with the gifts—you leave.

The Dark Night is God asking: Which is it?

These early pleasant experiences are meant to entice you to start and stick with the practice in the beginning. However, growing attached to them prevents dissolution into union because for there to be an experience in the first place, there must be a subject to experience it.

The experiences are withdrawn to teach:

• God is not a feeling (feelings come and go)

• God is not an experience (experiences fade)

• God is not a “reward” for meditating “correctly” (rewards are conditional)

This isn’t a punishment, but a weaning so that you fall in love with the Giver, not the gifts. And returning day after day even when nothing is expected in return IS love.

Advice

Although I’m still very much in this myself—since the spiritual path is often cyclical rather than linear—here’s what I can share that’s helped:

• Know that this is supposed to happen. We’re human. We like pleasant experiences and hate when those are taken away.

• Know that you’re not alone. The Dark Night feels profoundly isolating. You think you’re the only one, that you’re failing, that everyone else is sailing through their practice while you’re drowning. But you’re not alone. Every serious practitioner hits this wall. It’s universal even though it feels like a “you” problem.

• Keep showing up anyway. Even if you feel nothing or think it’s a waste of time because “nothing is happening”. It’s not that nothing is happening, but that instead you can no longer sense what is happening.

• Stop chasing the feeling. Even the desire to want these experiences back pushes them away because it reinforces the lack. Expectations are the killer of experience. This is why the first encounter with samadhi is easy versus the second.

• Sit in the emptiness. The key here is not more techniques, other teachers, different books, or more searching. These create a vicious cycle of desperate searching that will cause you to feel more and more exhaustion until you collapse in despair. The void isn’t the enemy, it’s what liberates you from attachments.

• Trust the process. Easier said than done when you don’t know how long this is going to last. It will end faster when you stop needing God to show up in a particular way and realize that you were never separate to begin with. Even if a thick layer of clouds roll in for the winter season, the sun is still there shining beyond them.

Wrapping up

Finally, even if you’re allergic to religious jargon, I highly recommend giving the Modern Saints edition of The Dark Night of the Soul a read. It’s incredibly, even eerily validating. The original version was written in the 16th century and can feel inaccessible due to the outdated language from 450 years ago, but this modern 2024 translation is inviting without sacrificing the integrity of the original text. I read the Dover Thrift Edition first and can say the Modern Saints version holds up well.

I can’t tell you how long the tunnel is, but the key is to keep going. As was emphasized to me before: “the only way out is through.”

You’re not losing your mind. You’re losing the “you” that needed God on specific terms.

---

---

Footnotes

1. See my other post about this: