Darkness Retreat

An encounter

In early November, I went to SkyCave Retreats for a darkness retreat. For those that don’t know about it — this is a multi-day retreat where you spend an extended period of time in total darkness. In Tibetan tradition, this can last for 40 days, and sometimes your teacher would go in with you¹ and provide guidance and practices for you to do. At SkyCave, the entire experience lasts about a week, and they recommend you spend 3 days and 4 nights in the darkness.

What it looks like

Here’s what their specially designed cabins look like:

Note: I suck at taking photos

There’s a foyer with a fireplace where Scott, the director, comes in to check on you twice daily and bring you food, which he puts in the cabinet with a two way door. On the inside, you open up the cabinet after he’s loaded the food in, so no light can enter. The fireplace radiates heat into the space, though it’s pretty warm in there generally. There’s a fan that circulates air into the space. There’s a bathtub for ablutions as well. The ceilings are fairly high and it’s pretty spacious inside.

The miracle of being there

On a recommendation from a teacher², I had signed up in September and had initially received a slot in 2027 - they only have 3 cabins and demand is extremely high. Scott, the founder, told me that there is a shortage of retreat locations in the United States. The highest ratio of caves to population by country is the Czech Republic for some reason; if we had as many caves as they did we’d have close to 1,000. I’m not sure how many retreat cabins there are in the US, but it’s somewhere in the low dozens. Scott mentioned that slots tend to open up suddenly due to cancellations, and I had told him that I had oodles of free time and could come on extremely short notice. At the beginning of November, he reached out and let me know that a slot had just opened up and offered it to me. I enthusiastically agreed. When I got there I learned that even the cancellation list is over 3,000 people long! Given how perfect the timing³ was relative to all my upheavals, it felt like a magical synchronicity that I was able to attend. Thanks for the miracle Scott!

Preparation

The general structure of the retreat is:

• You get there, and spend a day hanging out and preparing.

• In the evening, you see Adrienne, a somatic therapist and all around wonderful person, who gives you some helpful tips, and then you enter the darkness.

• You spend 3 days in darkness. Scott checks on you every morning and evening from the other side of the door.

• On the morning of the 4th day, you put on a blindfold, Scott leads you outside and you sit on a chair overlooking a scenic wooded valley. You slowly remove your blindfold and acclimate.

• Several hours later, Adrienne does a somatic release session with you to make sure you don’t return to the world in too unstable a mental state.

I did my retreat a little bit differently. Fifteen minutes after getting there, I said, “fuck it” and went right into the darkness. So I spent 24 hours in the dark preparing for even more darkness. I came out of the dark for a few hours to see Adrienne, and then went back in. In total I think I spent about 100+ hours in darkness.

Adrienne and Scott offer some helpful advice before you go in. First, although some “visions” / hallucinations can and do tend to happen, they are NOT THE POINT. Second, the most important attitude to cultivate is a spirit of openness and sincerity - don’t go in expecting any particular TRANSCENDENT THING. Third, your body might start experiencing low level terror from being unable to resolve perceived threat, and it’s important to look for signs of Fight/Flight/Freeze and ground yourself in your bodily sensations to calm yourself down should that happen. And finally, and they cannot emphasize this enough: DO NOT WHITE KNUCKLE THIS. If you find yourself desperately wanting to turn on the lights for a moment, or walk outside, you should probably do it. There’s no medal for perseverance.

When I asked my teacher for advice, he offered this:

“You'll have the opportunity to be with some of the deeper patterns of your mind. (The longer you stay in the closet to the root you go). My advice is to just let everything be. Tracelessness is the optimal view to let all of the deeper karmic impressions play out. But don't make this something "you" do. Just rest. Allow everything to be as it is.”

Basically, let it rip, which is my core practice anyway these days. Prior to going on retreat my sleep had been severely disturbed for months due to my troubles, so I would have been fine with just sleeping a lot for a few days. I did get some really good sleep, but it was a little more eventful than that…

(I’m) Just Being Myself

⁴

Ok, now the tender bits. I cried, a lot. Each day had its own texture and theme. There were some rather annoying visual hallucinations, mostly a strobe light effect where periodically it felt like a bright flickering light was shining into my eyes (indeed, they were totally besides the point). Every night featured extraordinarily vivid and often violent dreams. I did a little bit of formal meditation in the morning and evening, but mostly spent the days rotating between the bed and the chair. Until the final day, when thought activity settled down considerably, there were some repeated thoughts that looped. Namely, thoughts about some troubling relationships with family and friends and ideas on how to talk to them⁵. Another thing that looped was certain songs, some relevant to my breakup, and many related to the spiritual journey in general.⁶

On the first day I experienced a huge wave of grief related to recent losses. That yielded into feelings of tender longing to be in an emotionally nourishing and healthy family. A lot of material related to my relationship with women came up as well. So many memories of flirtations and encounters came up and dissolved. When Adrienne came for my preparatory session, the tears flowed nearly immediately. 24 hours in, and I was already totally opened up.

And yet on the second day an even bigger opening took place. I wasn’t expecting any kind of TRANSCENDENT THING, but the darkness had its own plan. I was sitting in bed and out of nowhere I started doing a practice: a person would come up from my life, or some person from the world, and to each of them I would quietly say, “I love you unconditionally.” I don’t know where this practice came from; it felt like it was implanted into my mindstream by some compassionate Buddha. But when I started doing it, an absolute floodgate of emotion was unleashed. Underneath the tears of sorrow and joy, of longing and grief, of love and compassion was the deepest well of okayness I’ve ever felt. Primordial purity and perfection. Spacious freedom. The capacity to be with anything. Peace - not the peace of the void, of nothingness. The peace beyond or underneath any surface turmoil. The quiet depth of the ocean underneath the choppiest of waves. Wow. I rested in that for the rest of the day. I continue to rest in that, even now.

Then on the third day of darkness my restless brain said to me: thoughts thoughts thoughts. I chanted my favorite mantra.⁷ I received a teaching on praise and blame that will be the subject of a future essay. I thought about relationships some more. When Scott came to visit, I had to tell him everything. I was a frenetic chatterbox. In response he suggested we do a meditation grounding me in bodily sensations. It was soothing. Then he left, and I started wondering, where was this overwhelming energy to connect with Scott coming from?

That question continued to rattle around in my mind through the last day in darkness. What was this energy of connection? The answer arrived — it was loneliness. I was feeling lonely, and I had a deep abiding fear of that feeling, going back to my very lonely childhood. I felt into that fear, seeing how much of that fear drove my behavior in both friendships and romantic relationships. I counted how many friends I had been texting with recently (a lot). I recounted experiences of sycophancy and self abandonment in early friendships, my fear of solo travel, all tied to a desperate desire not to feel lonely. And in the dark, with no one but myself, I could feel that loneliness without any distraction. It was beautiful, and tremendously healing. The next time Scott came to check on me, that desperation had evaporated. I have a lot more to say about the topic of loneliness that I’m saving for a future essay, but I will just say that in a profound way, that despite being “by yourself”, in another sense when we are in contact with reality we are never alone. The rest of that day also featured a life review of my marriage where I lived through every memory, good and bad, the details of which are private. I cherished all of it.

The next morning Scott took me out. I felt an outpouring of gratitude and sacredness upon contact with the world. I got a fantastic massage from an expert body worker. And then I had an amazing somatic release session with Adrienne. I laid face up on a massage table and she held my ankles while I narrated all of the difficult material that came up over the previous four days. Energy coursed through my body. It was cathartic and I felt a sense of release and relief. I also got some great advice on my practice edge, which is leading from intuition instead of my head. Grounding in the the felt sense of my body is so important for me.

Needless to say, if you feel called to do this, I would strongly recommend you do so. But if you do, I suggest you leave your expectations at the door and open yourself up whatever you encounter.

Finally, for those who enjoy the repeated use of swear words, here’s the moment I came out:

skycaveretreats

A post shared by @skycaveretreats

1. I cannot imagine how insanely awkward it would be to sit in a cave in total darkness with anyone for 40 days. The bodily noises alone…

2. When your life is being upended years into a profound spiritual awakening, it’s a great time to do crazy shit get really intimate with yourself.

3. Personal stuff aside, it also happened during the week of the election. I went into darkness on the day of the 5th, and didn’t come out until the 10th. I think spending every election week in a cave out of contact with the outside world is absolutely the way to go. Would recommend.

4. This is the title of a truly wonderful Dione Warwick song. (Also why doesn’t Substack let me add a footnote to section headers?) Check out these very apropos lyrics:

I'm just being, being myself
I'm just being, being me
And I can't be nobody but me
I'm just being, being myself
Don't try to make me somebody else
Gotta be, gotta be myself

I get the feeling
You're holding on to memories you can't erase
Now don't try to use me
To replace the dreams that have left a trace
Now, what I'm saying
May not be what you really want me to say
And what you're hearing
May not be what you really want to hеar

Look at me as a new beginning
I won't bе a part of an old ending
No, no no no, not me

Hey, I'm just being, being myself
I'm just being, being me
And I can't be nobody but me
I'm just being, being myself
Don't try to make me somebody else
Gotta be, gotta be myself

5. Those thoughts turned out to be extremely spot on - those imagined conversations took place afterwards and went far better than I had expected or hoped. Thanks brain!

6. A lot of them were from Van Morrison (note: this is not an endorsement of him as a person). Astral Weeks is amazing. You should listen to it. Also, oddly, Wild Night, which now makes me start crying whenever I listen to it. Specifically these lyrics, which to me sound like the grace of awakening:

And everything looks so complete
When you're walkin' out on the street
And the wind catches your feet
Sends you flyin', cryin'
Wild night is calling

7. “Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha.” My teacher Dan would translate this roughly as “gone gone, gone way beyond, gone totally beyond, ooooh what a realization”. Each “gone” is pointing out a different facet of emptiness. It’s fun to chant, too.