I closed the door and leant casually against the wooden wall. There was no hurry. I looked into the darkness around me and confirmed that I could see nothing. The familiar song The Sound of Silence started playing in my head.
“Great, I’m here… Now what?”
Dark retreats have a long tradition and are organised all over the world. Unlike Tibetan monks, though, I didn’t spend four weeks in the dark but one. Even so, those seven days dragged on for at least a month.
I first read about these retreats in some magazine, possibly Forbes. I knew straight away that I would try it one day; I just somehow felt it. And you wouldn’t believe my surprise when, two years later, I found an envelope under the Christmas tree with a voucher that began with the mysterious words “I give you light, I give you darkness.”
The essence of darkness
On 15 April I arrived by train in Kutná Hora. Two hours of walking later, I reached a small village where I met Tomáš – my guide through the dark.
I climbed into the cabin, unpacked my things, memorised where everything was and switched off the light. Even after ten minutes I couldn’t make out the fingers of my hand a mere 15 centimetres from my eyes, and I had to come to terms with the essence of darkness – it’s dark.
The first question came to mind – what am I actually going to do here the whole time? Although in June 2017 I had completed a demanding ten-day meditation course, thanks to which I had almost unlearnt how to be bored, this was different. No routine to follow, no fixed dinner time to look forward to.
Nightlife
The point of the guides through the dark is that every day they bring food into the darkness and are there when you want to share your experiences or any problems you may run into in the dark. Tom or Lenka brought the food for the whole day at irregular times between eleven and three in the afternoon. That is so that you truly lose track of time.
The first 24 hours dragged on unbelievably
I had expected to spend the start of the retreat catching up on my sleep deficit, but my body decided to be awkward and stay awake. So I had to come up with an alternative programme.
I meditated, finished off my snack from the train, exercised and noted down the most interesting thoughts. (Yes, you can write in the dark too – you just tear the edge of the page at the point where you left off.)1
At last there was a knock at the cabin door – the food had arrived! Apart from the first day, I could always tell exactly what I was tucking into and enjoyed a tasty feast. Showering and brushing my teeth were a great adventure. The best way to use toothpaste in the dark is to squeeze it straight into your mouth!
How did I spend my time in the Dark?
Among the activities I passed the time with, memories of childhood crept in too – of how full of enthusiasm I had been at primary school, and conversely how grammar school had drained my energy. I thought through new business strategies and my visions and plans.
I also practised lucid dreaming and leaving my body, but that is a chapter in itself. The dreams I had were incredibly colourful and vivid, as if my brain were compensating for the absence of light while awake.
Doing nothing
I realised that thinking about time, and about how much of the day or the retreat I had left, was stressing me. I felt best during meditation or at any other time when I wasn’t thinking about the past or the future.
In practice this confirmed for me the rule that all suffering is caused by thoughts. I was reminded of how bound we are by our alarm clocks and deadlines, and how little we enjoy what is happening right now.
My favourite exercise in the dark became doing nothing. You simply sit down and do nothing – no thinking, no physical exercise, nothing, you just are and stare ahead of you. It doesn’t seem like it, but it is far from easy. If you can keep this exercise up for even just 20 minutes without jumping up with the feeling that you have to do something, you can pat yourself on the back.
We have become so used to a constant stream of thoughts and activities. Over the last few centuries we have nurtured and perfected our ability to think critically and analyse, and we fail to realise that it is fine, and beneficial, to sometimes do nothing.
I saw the light
Once I had pushed out thoughts of time and truly immersed myself in the darkness, the rest of the retreat passed fairly quickly.
Based on other people’s accounts that I had read before the retreat, I was expecting all manner of hallucinations. All that came, though, was a flickering in my eyes, sometimes annoying, sometimes pleasant, which built up over the course of the retreat.
First I began to see a white light around my eyes, flashing intensely, like a strobe. In the following days the light turned yellow, and towards the end of the retreat it turned red and settled, no longer flickering. So when I lay down on the bed and wrote something in my notebook, it felt as though a small red lamp was shining from every direction.
Sometimes I also thought I could make out the outlines of objects in the cabin. I paid for that several times when, mid-step, expecting a good metre of space still, I banged my shin into the bed frame.
Rebirth
A week in the dark is, in my view, very beneficial, but definitely not beautiful – simply because in the dark you can’t see anything. Your dose of beauty and wonder won’t be denied you, though; you just have to wait seven days for it.
On the last day Lenka gave me an alarm clock set for 4:30 in the morning. The alarm went off, I got up, got dressed and, full of excitement and anticipation, opened the double doors leading out of the cabin.
Although the sun had not yet risen, after a week in absolute darkness the night outside seemed incredibly bright to me. A fresh breeze was blowing and the stars, unobscured by city smog, were shining beautifully. It was a gorgeous feeling, a kind of rebirth.
One by one the others came out of the other three cabins and we got talking. Then we sat down together at the edge of a nearby field and watched the sunrise. Moments like that are truly worth it.
My lesson from the dark
A dark retreat is an intense experience. I don’t know whether I should recommend it to you or not. I think it will come to you by itself, when the right moment arrives. And when the right moment does arrive, it will give you an awful lot.
Being alone with your thoughts for seven days is not something you experience in “ordinary” life. You become aware of things about yourself you had no idea of. You have time to go through and resolve your inner conflicts. You reset your body clock – you sleep when sleep comes to you and eat when you are hungry or fancy something. You recharge your bucket of energy and sort out your priorities.
Whether you are a lawyer, a cleaner, a traveller or a pilot, everyone takes something away from the dark – I believe that.
Into the dark with a wish?
People often go into the dark with a specific wish, and perhaps you too have something in your life that you want to resolve. I had nothing specific to resolve, and maybe that is why nothing specific happened; there was no major breakthrough. And that is precisely the lesson I was probably meant to take away from the dark – that I should be content with small steps forward and not expect experiences that will turn my life upside down.
So, will I go again?
That remains to be seen; I’m not planning it for now, but perhaps I will come to miss the deep calm of the dark… Thank you, Mum, for this extraordinary experience…
