Thoughts on Dark Retreat

by | Dark Retreat, Meditation

Dark retreat is rapidly emerging onto the self-improvement and spiritual scene.  NBA icons Dwight Howard and Rudy Gobert, along with a host of other elite athletes, are posting social media clips about their experiences in dark retreat, and inspiring a rush to see what the fuss is about. Movie stars, famous authors, artists, entrepreneurs, and other celebrities are going into the dark and starting to talk.

Dark retreat centers are popping up around the world. My friends who run some of these centers tell me they’re booked years in advance, with a waiting list of hundreds, and receive dozens of inquiries every day. A host of scientists in Europe and America are now studying dark retreat and darkness therapy. The word is getting out and it is fantastic. Or is it?

Is Dark Retreat Like Psychedelics?

Dark retreat is remarkably similar to psychedelics in its promise and peril. Numerous studies proclaim the benefits of psychedelics, as well as the proportional hazards. Without the proper set and setting, psychedelics can do more harm than good. Bad trips are not uncommon. “Set” refers to mind set, your motivation in taking the substance and your aspirations for the journey; “setting” refers to the holding environment, whether it’s caring professionals in a psychedelic assisted therapy session, or your drinking buddies wanting a new high.

When psychedelics surged onto the scene fifty years ago, the excitement stampeded over safety, and the drugs were banned. Decades of important research and beneficial use were lost due to impatience, misunderstanding, and lack of care.

Nearly every opportunity and obstacle in the world of psychedelics applies to dark retreat. With the proper set and setting, one good trip can change your life. Without the proper set up, one bad trip can leave you bruised.  It’s important to understand that darkness itself never hurt anybody. Like any mirror, it is completely harmless.

How you relate to the dark, and what it reveals, creates the damage. Darkness is a truthteller, just like dreams. It will show you what you’re made of and who you truly are. How willing are you to be so exposed? Truth heals, but how much truth can you handle?

Despite the hype and hope with psychedelics or dark retreat, nothing is a panacea. Don’t turn to dark retreat to cure all your ails, or view it as the newest self-help method in the New Age supermarket.

There’s a reason the formal practice of long dark retreats (versus informal home use) is historically guarded. It’s not because dark retreat admits you into a secret club. It is because such an exotic practice tends to magnetize spiritual thrill-seekers, reckless psychonauts, and poorly motivated explorers that then suffer the consequences of a flippant attitude.

Dark Retreat as a Return to Source

The world is deeply mired in what the Hindu tradition calls the Kali Yuga, or Dark Age, and what Japanese Buddhism refers to as “mappo”, the Degenerate Age.

This is the darkest hour of the dark ages. Disease, famine and warfare are raging like the fierce north wind. – Trungpa Rinpoche 

Political upheaval, ecological devastation, social injustice, cultural divides, gender inequality, poverty, homelessness, and endless conflict are just a few of the many crises that comprise our present meta-crises. Many reasons are given for this meta-crisis, with an equal number of suggested solutions. A broad-spectrum approach is needed to address broad spectrum problems.

The multitudinous display of problems can all be reduced to fundamental principles and solved by a return to our origins. Dark retreat delivers us to the reduction base and show us what’s really going on, not merely within ourselves, but within the world at large It may seem initially facile, and dismissive of the complexity of the meta-crise.

However, societies are comprised of individuals, and every individual shares the same fundamental principles of being. It’s not a tired cliché, but a ceaseless proclamation of the truth: despite our superficial differences, at the ground of being we’re essentially the same.

Dark Retreat Reveals the Dark Side of Artificial Light

But in this light- polluted and highly distracted age, we lose our shared essence in the display. We forget. The multiplicity effectively obscures the underlying unity. And multiplicity arises in broad daylight, when our most superficial and dualistic sense of sight splinters the world, dominates our perception, and then seduces us out and away from ourselves.

If left unchecked, outside light turns into a thermonuclear weapon of mass distraction. And with the advent of artificial light, the damage is getting worse. We’ve ironically lost our bearings with so much light. By going underground, dark retreat returns us to our common base, removes the divisive splinters, and initiates the healing. Dark retreat helps us remember.

Satellite data has revealed that artificial light is spreading and growing brighter, producing more light pollution and a “widespread loss of the night.” Because of electric light, outdoor illumination has grown three to six percent annually in the second half of the twentieth century. “While this has benefited productivity and safety, it has come with a dark side. The night is no longer dark enough.” We’re suffering from a darkness deficit disorder.

 From an evolutionary perspective, now, artificial light is a very new stressor. The problem is that light has been introduced in places, times and intensities at which it does not naturally occur, and many organisms have had no chance to adapt to this new stressor. – Franz Hölker,

It has devastating implications for the environment, for human health, and most importantly for us, psychological and spiritual (psycho-spiritual) evolution. Darkness deficit disorder is code language for an introspective deficit disorder. It’s a disorder because we think what we’re looking for is outside in the light, when it’s actually to be found in the darkness within.

Dark Retreat Reestablishes the Natural Curfew of the Night

Because light in general, and artificial light in particular, tends to pull us away from ourselves, we’ve lost contact with who we really are. We’re equally out of touch with this sacred earth, and we can no longer feel each other. Earth is losing its darkness, and we are losing our way. When I spend time in the dark, it is to recover the night, and to restore my sight.

In dark retreat, with absolutely nothing to seduce me out, with no trace of light pollution, I’m drawn deeply within and see things never seen before. I find what I’m truly looking for, and what really matters.

These retreats reestablish the natural curfew of the night and cure the darkness deficit disorder. They keep me from getting into discursive trouble, the inevitable turmoil that accompanies an insatiably outward-bound mind.

I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light. – Barbara Brown Taylor

Excepted from my upcoming book on Dark Retreat. For more information on a dark retreat center, visit skycaveretreats.com