Hello Tomáš and Lenka,
I meant to get in touch myself sooner, to thank you for the chance to experience the darkness and for the excellent, friendly care during my stay in the sanctuary…
I’ll try to sum up what the experience of a dark retreat means to me. If you find anything even slightly useful in it, feel free to use it on your website for others.
Books about Tibet led me to a dark retreat
I first learnt about the practice of voluntarily and deliberately spending time in darkness from books about Tibet, Nepal and yoga, but I only found out that something like this happens here too from the programme Duše K, where Jaroslav Dušek invited as his guest Roman Mlejnek, a caver who really did spend long periods in the dark in karst caves – that seemed a bit too hardcore for me. Then I browsed the internet for dark retreats in more humane conditions, and that’s where I came across yours. It appealed to me, so Evina and I booked.
In the dark, things came that I hadn’t quite expected, and the retreat didn’t really go the way I’d imagined it would. You probably can’t completely avoid having ideas about it in advance, but when they meet reality they usually turn out to be nothing more than a mental exercise. And not a very useful one 🙂
Yoga helped me through the crises in the dark
What did turn out to be useful was my experience with yoga (whether pranayama or asanas), qigong (mostly the Yellow Monk – it doesn’t take up much space and isn’t so demanding on your balance, which gets tested in the dark; doing the Eight Pieces of Brocade I kept hitting the ceiling with my hands), and meditation and concentration exercises; that helped me get through the crises, of which there were a few.
Some people say they slept through the first day or two – I slept normally, so if anything not much. With each day my sleep got shorter and more broken. Towards the end I hardly slept at all. Only on the last night did I nearly sleep through the alarm.
There was plenty of food and I enjoyed it. I was surprised how much I eat with my eyes, because in the dark I had no trouble telling when I’d had enough, even though there was still some left in the container. And I managed not to finish it. At least not straight away.
The feeling of the darkness – for example, I don’t perceive it as black.
Not being able to check things with my eyes meant that I only really managed to relax in the second half of the darkness therapy. Otherwise I was constantly in a state of mild panic, slight stress. Which, on the other hand, probably sharpened and deepened my awareness of the present moment. And at times it was intense.
It was different with my eyes closed or open – with my eyes open the visual images were weaker, less colourful and poorly structured. With them closed, though, there were whole constellations of colours, beautifully luminous fractal formations, models of worlds … But with each day the differences grew smaller, the colours faded, while the shapes became more finely chiselled and the details multiplied.
Sometimes I experienced touch turning into vision. In the shower, for example, instead of water, a beautiful golden-green light ran down over me; cold water was more blue, warm water more green. But that also only happened for the first two days and then stopped.
The space around me kept changing during the dark retreat
… As I lay there, the space around me changed smoothly from a Gothic chapel into a Hindu temple, then I was in a log cabin and straight after that in a cave … but on my left I always “saw” that the wall was densely overgrown with deep green, unusually shaped leaves. The wall in front of me, on the right-hand side, was overgrown in the same way. When I came out after a week, I found that in the places where the walls had been overgrown in my vision, there really are trees growing – an apple tree and a pear tree, I think. And now I don’t know whether I somehow connected with their existence mentally and energetically, or whether I registered them subliminally before I went into the cabin and then, like other contents of the unconscious, visualised them without meaning to and placed them in the image. I’d prefer the first option.
There were lots of visions of every kind – besides the euphoric ones, there were also some in which I suppose the dark sides of my personality showed themselves, the ones I push away without realising, because I’m not aware of them, and they gave me moments of sheer horror and dread, against whose raw brutality breathing exercises and attempts to rationalise the situation were practically useless. But living through moments like that led to self-acceptance.
One of the things (and probably the most important one) in the end was experiencing my own mortality, which still stays with me and gives me the luxury of being aware of the present moment almost all the time. Thanks to that, I more often enjoy things and situations that used to come and go unnoticed. Which was a shame. The day now seems longer to me, a bit like it does to children.
The dark retreat gave me the chance to meet myself, perhaps to understand something a tiny bit, the opportunity to use time purely for myself without feeling guilty about it – simply to experience a bit of freedom in spite of the limitations. So, with a touch of pathos, to look out for light in the darkness.
I tried to write as soon as you got in touch, but partly because I was busy with work and partly because I had to get some of my emotions and feelings about the darkness clear in my own mind and try to turn them into something more concrete – into words – it took longer.
As I said when we said goodbye: the dark retreat was highly inspiring.
Warmest regards and all the best
Honza
