How did I come to a dark retreat?
I first heard that dark retreats existed about a year before I decided to do one. From the very first moment I liked the idea. I looked up all sorts of information and eventually tried a several-hour yoga class in the dark, which the teacher had devised precisely on the basis of her own experience of a dark retreat. Over time my resolve to actually do a retreat took on clearer outlines, right up to the moment when I was sitting in the office with my head in my hands, telling myself that I really needed it. A few minutes later the secretary knocked on the door with the form for the employer’s holiday allowance. I took it as a sign and booked the retreat straight away.
It was worth the wait
Although I had to wait three and a half months for my date, it was definitely worth it. I watched with amusement the reactions of those around me when I announced my intention to spend a week entirely alone in the dark. Most people found the idea distasteful and immediately informed me that “they couldn’t do it”; many people also thought the money for the retreat was money thrown out of the window.
I received several offers of being “locked in a cellar” for half the price. Countless times I explained that nobody was locking me anywhere; I was doing it voluntarily and could leave or switch on the light at any time.
“And what are you going to do there?”
To some people the idea of time so sinfully wasted was so alien that they came up with ways of doing the retreat while “cheating” at the same time, for instance with audiobooks. I think the responses resonate nicely with how used Czech society is to looking after its mental health, and how many of us are able to truly be alone with ourselves.
I chose to walk instead
Despite the option of sharing a car with another participant, I decided to come to Bykáň by train and walk the remaining 6 km. On the train I got lost in thought and missed my stop, which lengthened my journey by another two kilometres. The decision to walk, and to spend an hour and a half in daylight alone with myself among the fields and on lonely paths, was an excellent one. It gave me time to quieten my inner self and gradually detach from the bustle of civilisation. On the way back, the walk in turn helped me ease slowly back in.
I entered the cabin mentally prepared and with the necessary humility
After a shower, unpacking and eating something for dinner, I switched off the light just as I do every evening before bed. That took away the stress of starting the retreat. In the morning I simply didn’t switch it on again. Even though the darkness in the cabin was absolute, most of the time I had the feeling it was a dim light tinged with green. Then I would turn my head and be surprised at how dark it was. Likewise, moving around the cabin was easier than expected, and I had no trouble orientating myself by feel and avoiding bumping into the furnishings. Many times I reached out for a spoon or a bottle and found it at the very first attempt.
Keeping a routine
As the days went by I developed daily habits that I kept to without much effort, and which helped me not to lose my sense of time entirely (something I hadn’t felt up to during my first trial stay) and to maintain at least the semblance of a reassuring routine. From outside I could hear birdsong in the morning and frogs croaking from the pond in the evening, which, together with the food being brought between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., were the main markers of the day.
During the retreat, a rhyme from a poem in Stephen King’s book Insomnia became a kind of anti-mantra for me: Each thing I do I rush through so I can do something else.
The anti-mantra reliably managed to bring my wandering thoughts back to the present, to whatever I was doing on autopilot, whether it was eating breakfast or doing an exercise. I resolved to honour the anti-mantra after my return too.
I expected that I would sleep through almost all of the first few days in particular, because of my long-term sleep deficit. Yet the time I spent asleep wasn’t that extensive, and with each day it diminished. For the last three days I hardly slept during the day at all.
It was hard to cut myself off from the world
Especially during the first four days it was very hard to stay out of the world and not look at how it was reacting to my absence. I talked myself out of switching on my phone for a quick check only with the relentless logic that in none of the possible scenarios that would follow switching it on and (not) loading messages would this act bring me anything useful at that moment. Just as hard as not switching on the phone was not opening the door to take a walk around the garden at night and come back again.
I listened to what was going on outside the sanctuary
Part of each day I sat by the outer door, where the connection with the world was strongest, and listened to the sounds of life flowing by. How grateful I was for the sound of a lawnmower or the occasional shouting of children! I usually ate by the door, leaning against the frame, sitting on the meditation cushion and singing to myself. Interestingly, different songs came to mind from the ones I usually sing. Some I hadn’t remembered for years.
For the last two days I entertained myself with a song by the contemporary singer-songwriter Pokáč, Sám doma (Home Alone).
Without light, I thought differently
Apart from the fact that my thoughts were deeper and sharper, the whole process worked differently. As if I were half asleep. The whole time I was aware of the situation I was in (lying in the dark on the bed), but at the same time I had a far better connection to my imagination. The absence of distractions that would divert my attention and allow me to procrastinate certainly helped too.
On the fourth day another shift in my way of thinking occurred. I began to look at the same thing from a different angle; the experiences connected with it loosened up more and became easier to work with. I suddenly had access to places I had never reached before.
On the seventh day there was another deepening to a more inward level. That was partly why I was a little sorry that my dark retreat was coming to an end and I didn’t have time to explore the new dimension. In this respect I agree with other participants – a retreat shorter than a week makes little sense.
Some practitioners describe various hallucinatory experiences they had there. I didn’t think I had had any such thing until the moment when, asked about hallucinations, I replied that there hadn’t been any. It was just that occasionally it seemed to me that my bed was inside an ancient temple with carved rosettes on the walls, or that I was looking at a stone wall with a large crack in it.
It was always an image lit by a green light whose source was behind my back. From the reactions I realised that even such a perception is probably not entirely common and could be considered a hallucination. Apart from visual hallucinations I experienced a considerable number of incredibly vivid images or visions. Likewise, my dreams were very tangible.
I thought I knew what I wanted to work through in the dark
I went into the dark with a fairly clear idea of what I wanted to resolve within myself and what I would focus on. It was a naive idea. With some of the matters I had been pondering over the previous weeks, I found that I had long since closed them.
Conversely, I discovered that some things trouble me more than I am willing to admit in the light of day. The darkness allowed me to be completely honest with myself.
The biggest worry I brought into the dark with me was what effect digging around in painful places would have on my mental state. Would I sink into deep depression? Were big mood swings waiting for me? Would I experience fear? The vast majority of the time I was in an excellent mood and enjoyed both the darkness and the solitude. Despite occasional moments with heavy topics, I managed to keep a positive outlook and more than once laughed at myself.
Food in abundance
As others describe, I too perceived the taste of food differently, and the wonderful herbal teas in particular tasted unbelievably good. I had the chance to experience the dried fruit both in the dark and in the morning in the light. What had tasted interesting and unusual didn’t taste good at all in the morning once I’d discovered what fruit it actually was. I didn’t like the pasta in the slightest. Likewise, tempeh was inedible for me. But the vegetable manna I savoured with delight down to the last morsel. Throughout the retreat I had the feeling that I had food in abundance and was eating my fill. Only on looking back did I realise that I hadn’t actually eaten all that much. Then again, my energy expenditure was minimal.
In the dark you need terribly little
All my clothes, a few supplies of my own nuts and fruit and a fairly large cuddly ferret fitted comfortably into my rucksack. Of the recommendation to bring “a good mood, a good mood, a good mood and slippers”, I unfortunately ignored point four and bitterly regretted my laziness. But I had packed warm socks, so the situation wasn’t lost. The two most important things I had with me were the aforementioned therapeutic cuddly ferret, which I could snuggle up to the whole time, and a glass water bottle. Throughout the day I would fill the bottle with hot tea from the thermos, so I didn’t slop it anywhere and could sip it even in bed as I pleased.
This wasn’t how I’d imagined the end of the retreat…
When the day of departure came, I couldn’t sleep any longer and was afraid I would miss the sunrise, which I had been looking forward to enormously. Eventually the alarm did start ringing and, following the instructions, I got ready to open the door to the outside. But alas, however I pulled on the handle, I couldn’t get it open. I remembered that when I arrived Lenka had said something about my being able to lock myself in the cabin. So I assumed there must be a key of some kind. Which wasn’t in the lock, however, and as far as I could recall, hadn’t been there when I arrived either. So I began frantically searching for the key along the corridor. In vain. In the end I gave up and decided to switch on the light in the next room. This was not how I had imagined my wonderful ending to the retreat.
I sat on the floor by the washbasin in the half-light, everything spinning around me, waiting to get used to the light. After a few dozen minutes I set off to look for the key again. In vain. The image of myself waiting another three hours for someone to come and unlock me made me laugh until tears ran down my face. In the end I tried the handle for the umpteenth time and the door opened. I had most likely been pulling in the wrong direction all along. I had completely forgotten about the existence of the other, outer door. That was the one with the lock in question.
I set out to meet the world outside
I flung the door open and stood staring in amazement. The whole garden, indeed the whole world, smelled gorgeous! Right in front of the entrance, buds of green cherries were forming on a cherry tree and birds were hopping and chattering along the branches.
I sat down in the doorway and watched the scene before me, fascinated. There was a thick fog that morning, so I wouldn’t have got much of a sunrise anyway.
I had breakfast, packed the little I had with me and set off on my way. There was something magical about walking through the waking morning.
The return from the dark was instructive for me
It was instructive also in terms of assessing the nature of my relationships with those close to me. From the messages that started loading when I switched on my phone in particular, it was clearly visible how each person perceives me. I was then delighted by the ones saying that the person missed me and hoped I was enjoying it, or simply welcoming me back.
Because I had gone on the retreat in the middle of considerable upheavals in my life, all the matters that needed dealing with had accumulated during my absence and threatened to bury me on my return. The week away was merely a kind of mortgage with a very high interest rate. So I spent the energy, inner peace and ease I had gained very quickly.
I should have taken a breather afterwards
Today I know that after my return I should have taken another day or two of rest in the sun, away from everything and everyone, to process the experience. As it was, I had to force myself to switch back into normal mode, and to the question of how the retreat had been and what I had taken from it (and whether I had found the meaning of life) I couldn’t answer even myself, let alone anyone else.
For the first few days, life outside seemed unbelievably sped up to me, and I completely failed to keep up with processing the impressions. Over and over I asked myself why this is so, what we are all chasing so hard, often without seeing any sense in it?
Even so, I regard the experience of a week of darkness as a very beneficial experience, which has moved me on a little further. Even though I came nowhere near fulfilling the retreat’s potential.
I’d like to come back next year
This way of connecting with yourself is definitely not for everyone. If a person doesn’t feel the need, the desire, to withdraw into the dark, they most likely won’t last there. I enjoyed every second of it and would like to come back next year in winter, this time for eight or nine days, so that I have the chance to go deeper.
Many thanks to Tom and Lenka for the chance to experience the retreat with them. They looked after me perfectly and have my boundless gratitude for accommodating my dietary requirements. They kept an eye on me and always came with a good mood, so even the daily contact when the food was handed over wasn’t disruptive to the therapy.
I’ll gladly come back again
Radka
