Why do a dark retreat? At first glance, dark retreat may seem to be an esoteric practice, beyond the reach of the common person. My charter is to make it accessible, to demystify dark practice, and to reveal its extraordinarily potential for growth. Starting with easy home practice, I will guide you step-by- step, at a pace that works for you, and show you how applicable this practice is for daily life. Once you get the hang of it at home, you can progress into dark retreat proper and reap the rewards of a deeper dive.
From Esoteric to Everyone: Making Dark Retreat Accessible
Dark retreat is just a concentrated way to work with your mind and heart. Anybody who has one of those may be interested in how darkness helps you explore yourself at the deepest strata. On one level (because there are many levels of dark practice), dark retreat is simply meditation on steroids. Anyone interested in meditation will find it to be a treasure, and anyone already practicing meditation will realize how darkness ramps everything up. As NBA superstar Rudy Gobert put it after doing three days in the dark, “Dark retreat is meditation times a thousand.”
Physicists work with particle accelerators to study the nature of the physical world; dark retreat is like a meditation accelerator that allows you to the study the nature of the mental and spiritual world. But they work in opposite ways. Particle accelerators work by drastically speeding things up, dark retreat works by radically slowing things down.
Dark Retreat 101: A Deep Dive into Your Mind and Spirit
The spirit of dark retreat is akin to what happens when you step outside of a brightly lit room and into a pitch-black space. At first you can’t see a thing. Your pupils are so contracted by the light that you’re temporarily blind. But if you’re patient and keep your eyes open, your pupils will relax, and you’ll start to see things previously hidden in the dark.
Darkness represents the unconscious mind, so in a similar way, when you step out of your brightly lit and speedy world into a dark cabin, at first you can’t see a thing in your dark mind. Your mind’s eye is so contracted that everything inside is black. But if you’re patient and keep your mind’s eye open, your mind relaxes, and you’ll start to see things within yourself that you’ve never seen before. You’re opening the aperture of your awareness and perceiving a wondrous new world.
The Power of Darkness: How It Reveals What Lies Hidden
The more time you spend in the dark the more open and sensitive you get, the more you dilate your consciousness, and the more you see. When I first step into my dark cabin I can’t see a think with my physical eyes. But if I stay in there long enough, I’ll often see a pinpoint of light leaking in. I’ll fumble around to block it out with duct tape. Darkness again! But after a few more days, when my eyes dilate even more, I’ll see tinier light leaks coming through the tape, which I cover up with more tape. (Scientists say it’s possible to see a single photon.)
It’s not just my physical eyes that dilate, but my mind’s eye, and eventually my entire body. I’m opening my mind, heart, and body and seeing deeper into the previously dark recesses of my being. Unconscious processes are coming into the light of consciousness.
Phenomenology is the study of experience, and micro-phenomenology is the study of microscopic experience. Because you’re slowing down to such an extent in the dark, you’re putting yourself under the most powerful microscope and revealing dimensions of your being that were previously lost in the full light of day. Dark retreat then becomes a recovery and restoration project.
At physical levels, you’re going to rest and recover as never before, restoring your health. At psycho-spiritual levels, you’re going to restore your relationship to fractured dimensions of your being and recover from a splintered mind and heart. But mostly, you go into the dark to restore your sight and recover a lost way of seeing.
Excepted from my upcoming book on Dark Retreat. For more information on a dark retreat center, visit skycaveretreats.com