There is no pressure here

Want to know what it is like to stop for a week and disconnect from the entire outside world? We bring you the candid account of a man who spent seven days with us in absolute silence and solitude.

His open story shows how deep a transformation a person can go through when they find the courage to look into their own inner self. Read what this experience gave him and how it changed the way he sees himself and the people around him.

The road to a new stage in life

I found myself at the start of some new stage in life. One in which I will no longer have to let myself be ruled so much by my psyche. It wasn’t only me who suffered from it, but plenty of people around me too.

Thanks to having completed a dark retreat, I was finally able to look into my psyche. I was also able to feel it deeply enough to gradually move away from it. I began, little by little, to free myself from it.

In short, I had to come to terms with myself. I needed to work out, as far as possible, why my life’s troubles kept happening over and over in a similar way. I was looking for the source of that inability to deal with my own life and finally to love myself.

In more than one place I had come across what forms the entry condition for a happy life. You have to have balanced relationships with those around you and with yourself. You have to love yourself, be grateful and not give in to self-deception.

A week as the bare minimum

I doubt that anyone could really experience something like this in half an hour in church. That is simply not enough. A week, at the very least, is the time it takes for the workings of the ordinary mind to finally change.

The human mind gets out of that constant preoccupation with the stimuli around it and with itself. In the sense that you perceive what you are doing and what others are doing to you.

Darkness genuinely pulls you out of your normal, everyday way of functioning. In that darkness you experience a completely different sense of time and space, and nothing disturbs you.

In the little cabin you put at my disposal I was warm, clean and comfortable. I came across nothing that could cause fear or that should disturb me in any way.

So I don’t think there is any reason to worry about a retreat. People often wonder how they will feel when they can’t function in the normal way. They are afraid they won’t see what they usually see. They miss the social contact they normally keep up. On the contrary, only an environment like this could allow me to look at myself.

The safety of the inner self instead of outer extremes

At last I got to how I actually think and what I actually feel. I was finding out where it comes from and whether those feelings belong to me. Perhaps I had merely adopted them, taken them over, or created them myself.

Actually, I don’t think there is a better place to start dealing with self-knowledge at all. You could go to the seaside, say, or spend a month in the desert. Those are all extreme conditions. Those paths don’t offer the safety that I had here with you.

On the road there would certainly be plenty of stimuli I would react to. I mean travelling, discussions and above all sadness or longing. Everything I had until now considered part of myself, I was able, thanks to the darkness, to see differently. I experienced these things as something I had actually created myself. That is why darkness therapy is an experience I recommend with all my heart.

The courage to forgive and live freely

I sincerely wish people would find that courage. Even if it turned out to be, so to speak, too much for them, they can break off the retreat at any time. There isn’t even that pressure here of having to endure something.

People usually see a retreat as: if they can’t go outside, they are effectively imprisoned. But surely that too is part of the state you find yourself in. For me personally, it gave me the chance to simply be in that darkness for those seven days. I didn’t have to merely endure it.

It was certainly one of the longest weeks of my life. I value that, because these exceptional conditions are what I like best. Darkness therapy helped me make peace, as far as possible, with myself. I accepted the way I was, so to speak, or thought I was.

Thanks to that I felt reconciled with the people close to me, whom I have been meeting all my life. I managed, to a certain extent, to forgive myself. Thanks to that I felt that the others were being forgiven too. Because in a certain way I perceive the others as myself.

There really are many benefits to a retreat. You are able to deny yourself your usual pleasures and social contact for a week. If you can afford to switch this off for a while, you gain a lot. You can concentrate on your consciousness, your inner self and your heart. That is exactly the right gateway to another, freer way of living.