Through the Darkness, You Can See the Light

Last November, I went to a remote place in southern Oregon called Sky Cave Retreats to participate in a darkness retreat.  This practice had been calling me for a while, and I decided to do this for my annual birthday tradition of a solo pilgrimage. The first response I got from most people was “Why?!” and then, “I could never do that…” As humans, we have such deep-rooted fears of the dark starting from childhood. The dark represents the unknown and a lack of control, two things most people avoid.  

Darkness retreats provide a conducive environment for deep meditation and spiritual exploration. Without external visual stimuli, you can turn your focus inward, facilitating profound introspection, insight, and spiritual experiences.  You are in a small room with a bed, bathtub, and reclining chair, and there is an attached bathroom.  The facilitator brings you food once a day through a two-way door system, like the kind they use in prison.  He also checks in by speaking through the wall to make sure you are physically doing ok and holds space for whatever mental or emotional wave you are going through simply by being a fellow voice in the dark.  You have no sense of time or space in the ways you are used to - many times I would wonder if my eyes were open or closed; that’s how dark and disorienting it was. 

In the absence of light, my other senses become heightened. I started to ‘see’ energy and could sense exactly where my water bottle was in the room or where I had left my socks.   I had a heightened sensitivity to sounds, smells, and bodily sensations.  I experienced a strange symptom of constant itching, which may have had something to do with my circadian rhythm being off, and gave me the opportunity to overcome a fear of bed bugs (which wasn’t the case, but I didn’t know that for sure until I was out of the retreat 5 days later.)

I saw this as an opportunity for solitude, to peel back another layer of myself, and to see what wisdom the darkness held for me.  And I was very surprised by the path it took me on. Darkness was very different from anything else I've done in that I took a surrendered approach. It had a feminine energy that guided me to just be with what was and not try to distract myself or change anything that was happening.  I kept thinking it was like water. It was very soft and subtle, but then it had this way of getting into the little cracks of your ego and then slowly opening it up and being this powerful force like water is.  I just sat in my feminine and allowed the emotions to come rather than trying to muscle through it or around it.  

I felt in awe. I felt humbled. I felt energized. I felt inspired.

Another benefit of the darkness is that it brings up unresolved emotions. I am a teacher of how the mind works and the spell we fall into as a result of negative belief loops; in fact, my whole methodology is based on uncovering and unlocking these limiting beliefs. I've done so much work on myself, but I've never identified that I have a core wound of “I'm not safe.” Looking back, it's obvious. But this belief loop was deeply embedded. And that's the power of negative belief loops, they can run so deep in our subconscious that we have no idea they are there. The darkness enabled me to get to a place to uncover this belief and to have compassion for all of my younger versions. I learned that there's always more. It doesn't matter how much you've explored, there's always different parts of your psyche that haven't been explored yet, ready to be opened up. 

If I had to sum up what the darkness gave me in one word, it was perspective. I reflected on this idea that we get so focused on more and more content all the time, but the content is only as good as the context that you view it through. Most people look at content with a lot of faulty context due to their negative belief loops. Taking a new perspective and looking at content in a different way, perhaps from a different context, really enables you to have an expansive human experience. I feel a greater expansiveness now when I'm looking at parts of myself and have a lot of compassion for each of them.

I’m often asked how I define spirituality, and I say it's getting to know yourself more. In my time in darkness, I reflected a lot about spiritual achievement and spiritual “doing” and how I've even been a sucker for it. There's a massive trend of people wanting to conquer spirituality; some could even say that me doing this darkness retreat was that.  I was very aware of this tendency and did not allow myself to fall into the trap of avoiding the discomfort.  I did not initiate meditation - although I ended up in a trance-like state at many different moments.  I did not do breathwork, pushups or any sort of routine throughout my stay - I allowed myself to be bored and just be. 

Martin Luther King Jr. said it best with his quote, “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.” When I came out of the retreat, I didn't have to get rid of the darkness, I just had to bring light into the darkness and the darkness disappeared. I now have such a greater appreciation for the darkness, it was a real (and natural) trip and I’d highly recommend it!