I’ve lived in the same house for several decades. This house holds memories. The stain on the carpet from my dog’s pen-chewing incident that could never be fully removed. The paint I chose and the photos of family lining the hallway. The way my brother turned to me as he was leaving and said, “I love you” that Easter Sunday, two weeks before he suddenly died.
This house has been a place of comfort, of familiarity – a container for joy and grief. It’s a place built over time, with care and intention.
In many ways, our beliefs are the same. We build them gradually, layer by layer, with memories and meaning soaked into their walls. The ideas we picked up from our family, our community, or our education. Ideas and perceptions we’ve held on to for so long that they seem embedded into our very foundation.
Like a house, our belief systems can feel stable and enduring. But over time, our beliefs shift.
Sometimes it’s like a fresh coat of paint or a rearrangement of the familiar.
But other times, it’s as if there’s been a natural disaster and everything needs to be rebuilt. Even if the house looks intact from the outside, on the inside everything may be rattled. Glass shattered. Frames tilted. The foundation cracked.
When that happens, you’re just trying to find your footing.
You’re trying to breathe. To think.
When the upheaval is internal – when it shakes how we see ourselves, or someone we once trusted – the impact is just as real. Disorientation. Heartache. A sudden, nauseating sense that everything has just changed.
Something is shifting inside you.
This inward break in how we see the world happens more often than we discuss. There’s a reluctance to admit that we change our beliefs, as if being open to new thoughts is forbidden in a society that’s seemingly polarized, with competing “camps.”
But that kind of disruption of belief happens. You’re moving through your life when, suddenly, a thought breaks through the pattern. Something penetrates from a headline or a conversation that makes space for a question you didn’t want to ask.
And now you ask the forbidden question: Is what I believed true?
The belief that once felt solid – maybe even sacred – starts to feel shaky, a dawning awareness that what you previously believed was not the complete story.
This is where magic happens. Awareness is where transformation begins.
When the shift is internal, invisible to the eye, it’s hard to explain to others, or even to yourself. You may still be going to work. Still making small talk. But inside, something has broken loose.
This is what many spiritual traditions call the dark night of the soul. Not because you’ve lost your faith, but because the lights you used to navigate by no longer clearly illuminate your path. This is not about abandoning your beliefs – it’s about being invited to hold them looser, more honestly. To ask deeper questions. To step into a space where certainty gives way to mystery.
Maybe your disorientation isn’t spiritual in the traditional sense. Maybe you’re wrestling with the realization that someone you trusted wasn’t who they claimed to be. Maybe the promises that once felt like hope now feel like smoke. You may feel ashamed for not seeing it sooner. Or afraid that speaking aloud your questions will cost you community, family, or identity. You may feel like a stranger to yourself – no longer certain of what you stand for, but still unable to let go of what first drew you in.
This, too, is a kind of dark night.
It’s the same ache. The same silence. The same question:
“What do I hold onto now?”
And that question is holy.
The dark night doesn’t ask you to immediately find answers. It asks you to be present. To find your own footing, even when you’re on uneven ground. To say, “I don’t know what I believe right now … but I will keep listening and seeking.”
This isn’t just metaphor. It happens in families when someone begins to question the values they were raised with. It happens in churches when someone starts to ask whether their God really demands what they were taught. It happens in political movements when someone realizes the thing they believed in … and fought for … may be harming others in ways they didn’t foresee.
It takes real courage to stay with the questions – especially in a culture that treats certainty as strength and doubt as weakness, a world that rewards ‘hot takes’ more than honest reflection.
If you’re in this space of upheaval, know this: You are not broken. You are standing on sacred, if unfamiliar, ground. The shakiness will pass. What you rebuild will be stronger because it will be more authentic to you.
Let this be your permission to pause. To listen. To resist the urge to plaster over cracks just to feel steady again.
The discomfort you feel isn’t failure. It’s your soul stretching to hold more truth.
As you slowly begin to rebuild your house of beliefs – room by room, wall by wall – know this:
Love holds you, even here. Especially here in the unknown.
Joni Miller, Ph.D. is a writer, researcher, spiritual coach, and speaker who uses her knowledge, education, and love of all things spiritual to help others find ways to live in alignment with love. www.SpiritualGeography.net
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