Hello Lenka and Tomáš,
that week in the dark was very hard for me; a few times I wanted to give up, but each time I told myself “what if something pleasant comes along today or tomorrow”.
Expectations on a dark retreat
The unpleasant part was that my original intention of spending the dark retreat mainly meditating didn’t work out. Somehow I just couldn’t sink into meditation, so instead I mostly relaxed and exercised and slept and ate … round and round. After two or three days it was pretty boring, then the visual hallucinations came, maybe some people would call them visions… They unsettled me because my sense of orientation in the space, which I’d “got the hang of” by then, disappeared completely; the walls and the ceiling changed in bizarre ways. Well, at least there was some excitement, even if sometimes I couldn’t even find my way into bed.
“Sometimes it was better than television”
Sometimes it was better than television, but I didn’t find any meaning in those images. As for thinking about my life, I’ve been doing that all my life, I’m a psychologist. On a conscious level I don’t have any problems right now, nothing to sort out; in fact I’ve never been as happy in my personal life as I am now. And my subconscious offered me nothing in the dark, apart from that strangely shifting space…
For example, I found myself in front of a huge bathtub, or hundreds of lamps were hanging from the ceiling… And that’s how it went right to the end.
Thank you, Lenka and Tomáš, for your care, and for the excellent food and drink.
