To start right from the beginning… I found out about darkness therapy about 6 years ago in a newspaper article. It caught my interest straight away and I immediately started toying with the idea of trying this “cleansing” method for myself. I say cleansing because that’s how darkness therapy was presented in the article. Over the last 6 years I came across another article now and then, and later I also read a book about dark retreats. Even after all this extra information, I associated “THE DARK” only with sorting out my thoughts and, of course, with an unusual experience. At the beginning of the year I plucked up the courage and booked a date. Later, because my holiday clashed with the date of my dark retreat, I tried to swap it for a date that had come free, which worked out, and I was due to go in on 18 June. I was looking forward to my dark retreat, and on the day I went in I was in a strange state of apathy from the morning onwards.
A dark retreat starting right after sunset
After sunset I closed the cabin door, had my last shower in the light, sorted out my things and paced out the distances. I took a breath and it was dark… I slept through the first night, and from the morning I tried to create some kind of schedule to fill the week I expected to spend in the dark. I got up and got my energy flowing “à la” tai chi, then breakfast and washing, a short rest (which usually turned into sleep), yoga practice, a short rest, then usually Lenka came with excellent food, and nothing could follow but exploring all the delicacies and eating some of them (my favourite part of the day), after eating a longer rest, exercise and a shower and again a short rest. During the day I tried to meditate, but mostly I fell asleep, which didn’t throw me at all, and I accepted it. The next night I slept a bit worse; my back started to ache a little, maybe from the soft bed, maybe it was caused by my body cleansing itself, who knows… The next day I carried on with my schedule and moved from the bed to the floor, where I made myself a more comfortable place to lie.
In the dark I saw light effects
The second day flew by, nothing special happened, and I got used to the very pleasant darkness and experienced intimate, even loving feelings of solitude (all perfectly respectable, of course :). The third day didn’t seem any different from the previous ones in the morning, but after my morning exercise I saw the gaps between the wall panels flickering, this went on to glowing chocolate, and during the day a kind of bright circle with a regular grid started appearing to me. After eating, clouds made of little pebbles were already drifting over my head. I took all these “light effects” as the brain’s reaction to the lack of light, so I carried on with my daily schedule. But while I was exercising, lights and unfamiliar faces were already flying round my head… So I had a shower, lay down on my bed and just watched what the darkness was giving me. I don’t know how long it lasted, but on the grainy screen in front of my eyes a story played out, or rather the end of the life story of a person from a time long gone. Three times over I watched what he went through (or what I went through) before he reached the place where we will all go one day. And where I too peeked in for a few seconds and felt boundless happiness, peace and such an abundance of love that words can’t even come close…
This whole story was on the black screen in front of my eyes, as if broadcast from a part of my brain I don’t use, and after the third repeat my head was aching so much that I tried to stop the “projection”, but whatever I did, I couldn’t.
So I decided to leave the cabin. Outside, although it was around 2 in the morning, I was dazzled by the moonlight, and it took a few minutes before I could take a few steps back into our world. After a while of getting my bearings I went to fetch a sleeping mat and lay down under the starry sky. I’d never seen stars like that before…
I didn’t close my eyes until morning, and with the first rays of the sun, which I welcomed with tears in my eyes, I was born again.
I’m different… …the world around me is different… now I know where I’m heading, what I want…
There are still a lot of events in my life where the reason they happened isn’t clear to me. But now there are more of them that have fallen into the empty spaces, and I’ve understood why they happened.
Every day I’m changing my life for the better… And I believe not only my own…
Thanks for everything!
Kamil
