Dale Pond

That experience is what is called Dark Night of the Soul. It make us doubt everything to the point of despair. Then, seeming miraculously, the energy switches to positivity. It's a cycle. Happened to me many many times over the years. Each time the intensity of it lessens to where now such is barely noticeable but it still does occur. The first intensities were quite startling and dramatic. An article someone wrote: https://fractalenlightenment.com/28187/spirituality/7-signs-you-may-be-experiencing-a-dark-night-of-the-soul

Ram Dass

"The dark night of the soul is when you have lost the flavor of life but have not yet gained the fullness of divinity. So it is that we must weather that dark time, the period of transformation when what is familiar has been taken away and the new richness is not yet ours." [Ram Dass]

Thomas Moore

"The dark night of the soul is a profoundly good thing. It is an ongoing spiritual process in which we are liberated from attachments and compulsions and empowered to live and love more freely. Sometimes this letting go of old ways is painful, occasionally even devastating.
But this is not why the night is called ‘dark.’ The darkness of the night implies nothing sinister, only that the liberation takes place in hidden ways, beneath our knowledge and understanding.
It happens mysteriously, in secret, and beyond our conscious control. For that reason it can be disturbing or even scary, but in the end it always works to our benefit." [Thomas Moore]

Hazrat Inayat Khan

"There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in and thought that you were." [Hazrat Inayat Khan]

Herbert Stanley Redgrove

"The first stage is called “the dark night of the soul,” wherein it seems as if the soul were deserted by God, although He is very near. It is the time of trial, when self is sacrificed as a duty and not as a delight. Afterwards, however, comes the morning light of a new intelligence, which marks the commencement of that stage of the soul’s upward progress that is called “the illuminative life." [Herbert Stanley Redgrove, Journal of the Alchemical Society, 1913-1915]