I had been thinking about a dark retreat for two years, but it took me a long time to find a date that suited me. I was afraid that my cycle, which is not entirely regular and not entirely painless either, would catch up with me in the dark. In fact, female cyclicity and my relationship with my own body were the main themes I was carrying with me. By an irony of fate (or of my own hormones), my cycle shifted completely unexpectedly by two weeks, so even though I had timed the dark retreat perfectly, I ended up being confronted with my fear anyway. But it was precisely because of this that I could see for myself that the fear was not justified at all. This time the pain didn’t come, keeping myself clean in the dark was nowhere near as complicated as I had feared, and on top of that I could finally have a proper rest and let my body relax.
Preparing for the dark retreat
With my usual thoroughness, I prepared intensively for the retreat, including by reading the impressions and experiences of previous participants. Perhaps I was then slightly disappointed that no groundbreaking spiritual experience came, as I had rather hoped. In the end, though, I realised that, given the main theme I mentioned above, it was actually necessary and beneficial that my retreat took place mainly on the physical level. Even in this area the retreat brought me a lot that was new. I found out what it is like when I can truly and fully perceive my body and its needs. For example, not eating when I’m not hungry – just because someone has brought me food and it is somehow expected of me. Or, on the other hand, sleeping whenever I feel like it – regardless of what time of day it is. It may seem trivial, but I believe I’m not the only one who has become so disconnected from her body that she sleeps and eats according to the numbers on a clock face rather than her inner clock.
In the dark, I welcomed sounds from outside
Because I have worn glasses for short-sightedness since childhood, I think I rely on sight a little less than most people. I believe this is one of the reasons I felt good in the dark. I “looked around” the space with my hands and surprisingly quickly began to find my way around it safely. Thanks to this I also realised that using my eyes mainly makes my life much faster – in the dark it was possible to do a surprisingly wide range of things, it was just a bit slower. Besides touch, I made a lot of use of my heightened hearing. (And I admit I’m glad that at least some sounds from outside reached me, because absolute silence would certainly have been far harder for me than absolute darkness.) Thanks to this I could at least tell whether it was day or night. And whenever I heard a dog barking or a horse neighing, I suddenly felt joy that there were other living beings around me too – that even though I couldn’t see them, they were present and letting me know about themselves on another level.
A week-long dark retreat ending in the morning
When I left the cabin after a week, I felt as if I was flooded with white light, even though I opened the door in deep darkness at four in the morning. And when, after a week, I felt wet grass under my feet again and a light breeze on my face, it was like a caress. Then came an unexpected bonus: when I put my glasses on, I immediately had to take them off again, because they were suddenly too strong for me. My eyesight didn’t fully recover, but it improved enough that an optometrist’s test confirmed it, and – for the first time in my life – I was buying new glasses because my prescription had gone down instead of up.
