Eight Days in the Pitch Black
Telling people about my mystical experiences is a very intimate practice for me, but nothing inspires me more than the fact that miracles happen all around us... if you are open to seeing them.
And in 2022, I brushed everything in my life aside to answer the strongest and most undeniable call I had ever felt.
Dark Room Therapy:
You, shut into a completely blackened room - No light at all. No company, no sound, no phone, no net, no connection, no outer distractions, at all, just. you. in an untterly invisible reality.
(And just to add another potent synchronicity to the pile, I am writing this account in response to a question asked by a recent student of mine.
The question was: "They say there are 8 stages of grief, are there 8 stages of a dark retreat?"
...and here I am writing this on the 12-year anniversary of the motorcycle accident that killed my father.
And yes, these experiences have proven to be the two darkest initiations in my life, and they have both been the most impactful (dare I say rewarding) themes of my character arc.
Our lives have all been blotted with periods of darkness, but seldom do we think that it might be useful, even healthy, to submerge oneself entirely into the shadow realm.
That is exactly what I did, and this week I am going to take you through the fears I faced and the lessons I learned day by day, in real time.
The Rules
1 - Enter the darkroom and stay put until your time is up, or you’ve had enough, in which case you can walk out at any time. I signed up for 8 days, 9 nights, 202 hours.
2 - You get 2 meals delivered through a purpose-built slot each day, with double doors to keep any-and-all light completely out.
3 - No electronics, obviously. Aside from my clothes & toiletries I brought with me a large 100 page sketch-pad which I almost entirely filled by the end with curving, overlapping lines of notes, poetry, insights, and intentions.
Arrival - Night #1
I arrived in Guatemala 4 days prior to my retreat to give myself time to settle into the time zone and energy of the place. I spent these days alone, in a little cottage on gorgeous Lake Atitlan meditation, writing, hiking and pulling oracle cards, and imagining the journey ahead.
The specifics of those Oracle spreads are deeply personal, but I can say they were by far the most intense and profound readings I have EVER studied.
What I will share with you is that the days leading up to my introduction to the dark room were a difficult initiation of their own rite. I was alone facing the unavoidable fear of the unknown, like being in a sky-diving plane before the door slides open and you leap out.
At sunset I was taken into the cave-like darkroom on the far end of the property, and as the smell of Nag-Champa wafted into my nose I was both comforted and consumed by the energy of the candle-lit space. Inside are the bare essentials, bed, shower, compost-toilet, and meditation pillows.
I was left alone locked inside with a single candle on the altar, and no way of reigniting it. Once that candle is out, it's lights out for 200+ hours, so it was time to lay out my things and get to know the tiny space so I would be able to move about without my vision.
I thought back to about a month earlier when I had been taking a candle-lit shower and experienced a small miracle of confirmation. I was showering and mentally admiring the powerful ritual of going into a dark room with a candle that cannot be re-lit. The choice to either let the candle burn itself out, or the profound act of blowing it out yourself captivated me. And unbelievably, as I imagined myself blowing out my candle, the candle that was there in the bathroom with me spontaneously died, like it had been starved of oxygen, leaving me in total darkness.
And something strikingly similar happened with my candle on that first evening in the dark...
I had brought with me a single piece of flash paper to burn with my intentions using the candle, as an introductory ritual.
And about an hour into my dark-retreat, I wrote my intention: "Rising into love" and lit the flash paper, which rapidly ignited and rose into the air as it burned away, and just as it did, the loud triple-pop of fireworks banged outside the stone walls of my space.
Then, I watched as the small bit of ash from my intentions slowly floated down and into the candle, landing directly on the flame, instantly extinguishing the light, leaving my eyes grasping for light like hands grasping air as you fall through the air.
That first evening in the dark I started to feel the immensity of my choice, but also a subtle relief that at least I was IN the experience. I slept more deeply than I had in days.
Day 1: THE FEAR OF THE DARK
I gasped awake like I was choking, nauseous and seasick like a sailor lost at sea on a starless night. Every possibly rationalization for why this quest was pointless blitzed my mind; the first minutes of the day I spent laying in bed negotiating how and when I would justify leaving early...
I've never been afraid of the dark, or of heights, but when I opened my eyes and it somehow seemed blacker than when I closed them the night before, I feared both at once, like vertigo standing at the edge of a cliff of time. After nearly 10,000 consecutive mornings with the light of the sun and just one without, I felt myself drowning in a deep black ocean.
This was a shock I had not anticipated. Mindfulness & breathing kept my stress in check, but I watched helplessly as my identity began to unravel.
We humans are basically just loosely tied bundles of sensory experience, critical thinking, and emotion. And strapping all these parts together is a deep hollowness, sated only by movement; by foraging through the outside world for value, significance and meaning.
Unfortunately, often, all that holds us together is distraction; busyness, amusement and vanity. And on a dark retreat, you have none of that. You're on the home-turf of the shadows, and they can't wait to leak from the cracks, loosening the tangle of your identity.
They call it ego death, (which I have experienced and will share about in 2 days) but this time it was different; slow and subtle. This was less of an explosion and more of an implosion like my soul was finally deciding it was safe to shed the chrysalis of my identity.
But it wasn't as beautiful as that imagery makes it sound.
In reality, I crumpled like someone had poured a puzzle box on the floor, sending pieces of my character through the dark in all directions.
"The fear of The Dark" was simply the fright my soul felt as it cautiously slipped out of its confines and began to spread its wings. Few things in life have fascinated and perplexed me as watching my ego and soul begin to decouple. It may have been messy, but luckily I was equipped with the skills required to simply observe and be entertained.
And so on Day 1, I sat, I felt and I watched as I let it all come apart.
Notes:
"We are but a candle flame,
and not even the fire,
only the flicker."
"There is poetry here, but I cannot look for it.
There is light here, but I cannot feel it.
There is love here, I know it. "
Day 2: THE FEAR OF TIME
Normally you have a hundred ways of gauging the time at your disposal in any given moment... in the dark, I had just one; the cadence of breakfast and dinner, delivered in silence twice per day.
This quickly caused me resentment towards my body. See, the mind is timeless and emotions exist outside of space and time, but the body is stuck in space and so the mind spends most of its time stuck in the sensitive cycles of our physical nature.
We are effectively addicted to continuity.
But, one of the beautiful things about the dark is that you cut out many of the unstoppable distractions. I was surprised that I actually wasn't craving movement (my sprained wrist added to this effect), and my mind started to resent my hungry, achy body because it wanted to run off with my spirit and be free.
Not so fast..
I did my best to enable this, and on Day 2, I undoubtedly shattered my personal record of my longest meditation by at least an hour, maybe two or three. It was almost effortless, once my legs were finally numb!
Inspired by my 'success' of merely not chickening out on Day 1, and in direct spite of my fear of how much time lay ahead, I got to work, which at that point was essentially just trying to figure out what my work would even be... I came armed with an arsenal of knowledge from my years as a half-baked philosopher and spiritual inquirer. I had specifically spent the months prior working with a modality called the "Gene Keys", which pulled me into its whirlpool and swallowed me whole with contemplative obsession. However, once in the dark, my recollection of 1,000's of hours of study immediately went out the window. I took it as a great sign and smiled as I struggled to recall the intricacies. See, the purpose of the Gene Keys (and of all wisdom) is not analysis or intellectualization, which has a stranglehold on the spiritual potential of humanity in this scientific era.So while day one was proof enough that I had entered uncharted waters, day two was spent meditating on the subtle physiological shifts that actually allow spiritual progress to create tangible change in my life. I spent many hours watching doubts rise from the depths of my unconscious, which ultimately turned into confusion if I thought too hard. Confusion is, after all, the source of epiphany, and the dark provided a beautiful vector for embracing confusion & doubt (Which are 2 of my primary Gene Keys shadows). Contemplation is the subtle 'middle way' between meditation and concentration, slip two far to one side and you might reject what otherwise would have been a blissful epiphany. Sitting, (really, it feels like bathing) in those feelings, coupled with the immense fear of knowing that over 85% of the experience remained ahead of me... ...birthed one beautiful epiphany. In the dark, you are everything that happens. My entire reality was now my creation. This was simple but stupendously helpful, because it came as a reminder to own EVERYTHING that was "happening to me", because I was the one "doing the happening"! I went to sleep early on Day 2, still dazed, confused, and sometimes doubtful of my purpose for being in that dark room... ...but deep down my faith in the possibilities was the most alive it had been.
We get from Zen this notion: Obstacles ARE the path. Without something to overcome, you are simply waiting for the next thing to overcome! And at the same time, if you truly believe that "we are one"... that this universe which contains everything is actually & literally one single creation with infinite parts... ...then why wouldn't you be willing to take responsibility for everything that happens to you? And why wouldn't you be just as willing to face the darkness and shadows as you are the light and good?
Perhaps I said it best in my favorite journal entry from Day 2: "Living Breathing Bardo. Catacombs of dense, hanging velvet.
Notes:
Thanatos himself is less deep, less Dark.
This Darkness is far more alive.
These are the depths of Apocalypsis.
The initiations of the underworld that give the shaman his glint,
and the warrior his discernment. "
Prana: life-force energy; think 'Qi/Chi'
Day 3: THE FEAR OF YOURSELF
"What have I done?" I asked repeatedly as I worked intimately with the energy of my Solar Plexus.
I could hear it raining intensely on the surface, and the energy that rode in on the storm allowed me to start slipping out of my body and deeper into meditation that I had ever experienced before.
As I drifted in the space outside of time, I gave up on trying to hold my identity together, and I pulled a lot of wisdom from a comparable (but relatively much deeper) experience of ego death that I experienced on a large dose of Psilocybin.
(That's a story for another time, but I want to take a moment to mention that on that trip I experienced first a personal ego death, pulling my consciousness out of my own identity and into a pure universal identity, followed by an ego death of the entire universal identity, which introduced me to the experience of PURE timelessness.)
This was different in that the death/rebirth wasn't being facilitated by any substances. On Mushrooms you don't choose it, you just go along for the roller coaster ride.
In the dark, you are the roller coaster and the rider, and you must constantly choose to go deeper.
It all started to make sense, how the dark works.
Two Days earlier I had slipped into a slow-motion ego-death that seemed to just inch closer to entropy and fear as the hours passed, but with the simple remembrance that I was in fact, in charge in there, I began to get a feel for the nature of the work to come over the coming days. In essence, it was time for me to rebuild my character from the ground up, healing and polishing every lackluster aspect of myself. On Day One, I crumpled like someone had poured a puzzle box on the floor, sending pieces of my identity through the dark in all directions.
Notes:
" First the dark shows you how silly you are; then makes you laugh at yourself
then makes you doubt the possibilities and your hopes fade
"The beauty is out there! Go enjoy!" It makes you say to yourself.
Then it brings the shadows. "Only darkness in here"!
Then it slowly emerges, like a person walking to you from behind a flat, black hanging sheet."
" To be reborn you must first elect to be unborn, or to be subjected to the cleansing process, or challenges, of the Bardo. You must choose to enter the darkness for as long as it may take to watch every shadow of your life flutter before your mind’s eye. Before your heart.
This is only the beginning, the Bardo's keeper, Thanatos, only provides the basin in which you will wash your soul clean. You must do the work yourself. There is no other way.
This is a process of gestation, incarnation. When you first landed into a body on Earth it was your mother who did such a favor for you. But now the task is all yours. "
Day 4: THE FEAR OF LOVE
As I take you through the day-to-day breakdown, I have to warn you that it becomes increasingly more challenging to conceptualize with words because I was sinking into deeper and more subtle realms of inner experience.
It helps to share this little detail. My dreams were the only time that I "saw" anything in the dark up until this point. Normally dreams feel like ethereal versions of reality, but in the dark the dreams are more normal, and the waking state feels like a dream.
Day four was a day of raw, heart healing. I entered a flow-state of automatic physical-emotional processing that would run for a few hours at a time.
It was there, deeper into my darkness than I thought possible, that the image of two hands pushed through the darkness toward me, cupped around a tiny flame, protecting it from the wind.
My humble inner light.
And I immediately knew that I had arrived, and there was going to be no stunning light show of spiritual revelation like some might expect.
I had trekked to the bottom of The Well not to achieve or attain, but to be humbled, and to rescue the little flame at the bottom of the well, and in doing so, to assume full responsibility for protecting, nourishing and sharing my inner light.
Notes:
"Born tangled in a thread that has no color.
We grow and grow and the knots grow tighter.
And as we stumble and choke through the affairs and feelings
we often make the whole mess worse.
And in our failure and fear
we pull and gnaw
but this thread does not rip
we must gently, slowly, curiously,
follow it back to the original trouble"
Day 5: THE FEAR OF TRUTH
100 hours behind, 100 ahead and with the mirror of my old reality now shattered, I began the long climb back toward the light.
This meant it was time to reverse the process. Instead of letting myself come apart, it was time to build myself anew so that I would be ready for rebirth.
My practice of choice was an ancient shamanic initiatory breathing technique called 'Recapitulation'.
In essence, I spent day five mending the truth. Again I meditated all day, only moving to transition from sitting to laying. The work of raising myself out of The Well went as follows:
My body would release a completely random story; some memory or feeling that needed to be healed.
I would relive the experience in fragments, draining the energy from the memory using my inhale, and exhaling to free the energy
Sometimes it would only take a few breaths, others were countless, but when it was complete I knew because the pain of the memory would naturally turn into compassion and love.
That was all I did on day five. I faced the 'fear of the truth' hundreds of times, and each time watched it reveal its hidden potential - love.
At this point, time was a nuisance and I was barely sleeping; maybe three hours per night. I would wake up after every dream to a flood of emotion that required my effort to process.
Notes: " The Pain Body”
My pain body has come to drag me through
his hall of infamy, a hall of dark mirrors,
in every reflection the shadow of our life of struggle
his gleaming moments of weakness, unworthiness
every simple misstep, spells of inadequacy, dreams of
mistakes you didn't have to make."
Day 6: THE FEAR OF HOPELESSNESS
I knew from reading the only other account of a dark retreat (by my mentor) that day six was the day he was overcome by overwhelming and unstoppable visions.
Not for me. Day six was still more of a fight, but exactly the same as day 5.
I titled this day "The Fear of Hopelessness" because I began to grow hopeless, tired, and afraid that I would never be able to complete the process of healing what is literally a lifetime of memories.
Coming apart had just a matter of letting go, but if I wanted to truly be reborn I had to hang onto my life-raft of a body with all my might
Notes:
"When you wake up
on that first morning without the sun
when you no longer have that heavy body,
and you no longer get the whole wide world with it...
that's when you will finally know how much it
was all really worth.
Day 7: THE FEAR OF HOPE
One week had passed since I had seen.
It had been the week of my life that I had done the least, but also the week in which I had accomplished more than any other week in my life.
It began like the two prior days, but more hopeful. I could see the light at the end of the time-tunnel. As much as you might expect that to be a relief, and it was, it also became a challenge for several reasons.
First, I have never moved my body so little in my life. I had gotten used to it going almost entirely numb, using Wim-Hof breathwork in moments when I needed to give it a kick to stay deep in meditation.
Additionally, I could almost taste the sweet busyness of life in the light again, and I began to fear not being able to, or even wanting to keep up.
But most of all, on Day 7 I had to work with the fear of rebirth, a totally unexpected and new emotion for me; the fear of what had been my source of hope all along.
I had spent the last week giving myself a complete inner-makeover, and it had felt like I was literally rebuilding my identity as I relived pretty much my entire life, changing and implanting love into each memory that lacked it.
Who was I after all of this? Would it even be possible for me to go back to the life I had left behind?
I feared even my hope itself, but there was literally nothing else for me to do but face it head on. I started to wish that hallucinations would come to distract me, but I was stuck in manual mode.
But then, at some point in the middle of the day, I recognized that what the fear was telling me.
It was delivering the message that I had reached the other side, that my work was almost over and I had crossed the vast expanse of darkness. This realization felt like coming to consciousness after washing up on the shore of a deserted island after having been lost at sea.
I was wobbly, trying to get my land-legs back after so long adrift. I was reminded to put my trust in my body again, as I had countless times in the dark.
I then spent several hours repeatedly dropping my awareness from the mind into the belly region, and my fears subsided.
I slept better on that eighth night, not so often interrupted by dreams demanding integration
Notes -
"The deepest darkest chamber.
Whatever this experience is.
Continuity withdrawal.
Day 8: THE FEAR OF REALITY
I awoke at one point in the night, and I can remember feeling a sense of peace that was obviously different from the subdued, quiet peace of meditation. I knew it immediately.
It was the fresh peace of being entirely human, the lofty peace of a clean slate.
I smiled until I dozed off again, knowing that in one day and one night I would watch the sun rise.
One day and one night felt like forever. Despite feeling completely emptied and frail, I was brimming with hope and excitement. I begged my yearning heart to let me sleep to pass the time, but it made no difference, time expanded out again quickly, making just the morning hours feel like days.
I felt the way the spirit of an unborn fetus might right before its birth-day. I remember how I was born several days after my due-date, and noticed a subtle remnant of that comfort. Honestly, now that I had become familiar with life in the dark, I felt comfortable there. In fact on that day, I felt more comfortable in the dark that I did with the idea of returning to the light. I accepted that feeling as my last challenge.
I have to admit that the excitement of completing the journey won me over, in fact, I didn't even fight it. I was done, ready to climb back out into the world. I wrote letters to my loved ones, finished the last of my carefully rationed bag of nuts, made lists of everything I would never take for granted again. It was a heavily boring day, except for the looming fear of reality.
What would it be like to see again?
Would I be able to interact with people normally?
Would I be overwhelmed for days as I attempted to reintegrate into life?
Would anything change at all?
The only resolution, as always, was to simply face the fear. The only difference being that to face this fear I would have to face the world head on.
As I fell asleep early on night 9, I smiled as I truly felt complete and ready to emerge as what feels like the truest, lightest version of me.
Notes:
" No matter what, we're in the middle like an ocean-crossing vessel seems to float forever at the exact center of the horizon circle. The ocean goes unchanged as you sail across the day, and each night the night swallows everything, presenting an opportunity for you to correct course in pursuit of uncatchable stars. It begins to feel like running in place on ice, and faith within yourself is the vessel that seems to be moving, bobbing in the waves, undulating on the currents.
"This Eight-day-night will soon break; not into a new day, but a new life.”
That night I slept like a kid on Christmas eve, and I must have gotten out of bed at 2 or 3AM for one final meditation after packing my things and writing some finals thoughts. But every cell in my body was carefully listening for the gentle knock that would let me know sunrise was about to begin.
Day 9: Return
Crawling out of the dark after the ninth night was like pushing myself out of a cosmic birth canal. I was weak and dizzy like a baby deer.
It wasn't the vision that hit me first but the sound, like taking off ear-muffs after over a week the early birds and jungle ambiance seemed to be inside of my head! The first thing I saw was the half-moon, and as it came into focus it beamed directly into my chest and cradled my tender spirit. Everything still dark, just shades of gray.
With tears in my eyes I staggered down the hill and around the bushes where I looked out over the lake at the glimmering town of San Pedro nestled into the base of Volcan Atitlan, and when my eyes met that 12,000 foot towering masterpiece of a mountain...
...I felt the horizon explode out in all directions, as if Earth had quadrupled in size right in that moment. I was made queasy by remembering how big the world truly is, and how directly I could sense it in that moment. I felt smaller than ever, but I loved it.
Feeling like a little ant, I slowly made my way to the lakefront where I remembered color. I thought of the way a newborn slowly develops the ability to perceive the full color spectrum as I watched the western rim of the mountains begin to glow orange, throwing blues and pinks into the cloud, and skipping the same colors across the water.
No tears came, which surprised me, although my whole being felt like a waterfall on ecstasy.
Attempting to describe that sunrise, my words fail. Alone on the rocky beach, fresh and raw in every way. Like coming up on and down off of psychedelics at the same time...
I watched the dawn of a new life, my own, like holding my newborn self before the sunrise, whispering "Welcome to the world buddy".
-
Of course. It is literally a dark place and it only takes a few hours for it to absorb your mentality. It takes a practiced spirit to navigate those waters, let alone learn from them. I called it "The Trophy room of my Pain-Body". You think you don't harbor pain.
You think you don't have regrets.
You think you've cleared your karma.
You think you have mastered positivity.
You think you've done enough shadow work.
You think you don't have unconscious programs holding you back.
Until you step into the dark and stir up all the silt, and it comes rising to the surface.
The light is a world of numbing, distraction, intellectualization.
The dark is the world of sensation, being, feeling. It's not bad, in fact, it's incredible and beautiful to be free from the bustling world of light, color, beauty, noise... without input.
But first you have to face the purification process of the divine feminine. She won't let you be reborn until you have relearned what it means to give pure love, to be truly innocent, to forgive all in the name of freshness and beauty.
When you come crawling out into the light, you will know that same day if you've finished the job or not.
-
Mind/body/soul connection changes? Daily routine in detail? How was time? Fast or slow?The mind is timeless and emotions exist outside of space and time, but the body is stuck in space and keeps us addicted to continuity. Plus, emotional trauma is physical memory. One of the beautiful things about the dark is that you cut out many (not all) of the most unstoppable distractions. I actually didn't crave movement, and my mind started to resent my hungry, achy body because it wanted to run off with my spirit and be free. I'll say this:
The most important skill that you can enter into the dark with (which you learn through all shadow work) is the skill of "Pendulation".
Pendulation is the practice of freely associating and disassociating your awareness from your perspective of yourself & your problems.
If you can do that, and intuitively remain aware of the subtle bodies, or at least your mind, body and soul, you won't psyche yourself out.
The dark is akin to a survival situation, like being lost at sea in an ocean of your past; memories and conditioning...
...you need training to make it - you need to know what's healthy and how to catch it,
and what's dangerous and how to avoid it,
when to build shelter and when to keep moving...
You need all of those skills in life, the dark just puts it all to the test and gave me access to more subtle layers.
-
Is this something you would ever come back to again? Absolutely, although I'm not sure that it will be necessary. For me, the experience was an opportunity to get through my 'backlog' of nonintegrated memories and experiences. It was an incredible chance to develop the skill of finding love in non-love, worthiness in unworthiness, adequacy in inadequacy in every single part of me that still lacked it. It's the skill of fluently seeing the individuality as well as the totality in all.
You don't have to go into a dark room for 8 days to learn that skill. And honestly, I think it's important to point out that most people need to start with just learning to see themselves differently first, which is THE skill from which all others naturally flow.
Deprogramming and reprogramming your mind into a simple, healthy state should come first. Come back to the beginners mind, and then you will have a foundation to build a masters mind upon
Based on my experience, the dark is for those who
A) Can recognize their own pain body and it's patterns
B) Have done the work to de/reprogram their consciousness so that mindful awareness truly runs the show, NOT the body (e.g. Stress, trauma, compulsions, fight/flight)
C) Are ready to submerge themselves in the deeply humbling initiation of truly rebirthing yourself
