The following reflection originally appeared in the newsletter I sent out on February 23rd, 2021.
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This past month, I did a 20-day darkness retreat at the Hridaya Yoga Center in Mazunte, Mexico. Below are some reflections on the experience.
What is a darkness retreat?
Speaking to my experience, I was confined to a 140 square foot room that was designed to allow absolutely no light to enter. There was a bed, a shelf, a couple yoga mats, some meditation cushions, a plastic chair, and a small bathroom with a sink, toilet and shower head. That’s about it!
It was held at a yoga retreat center, and there was a small “double-door,” where they would pass me meals twice a day. If I needed to communicate something, like, “Hey! Sewer water is backflooding into the bathroom floor drain,” (true story), I could write little notes in the darkness and put them in the double-door.
Apart from those notes, I had no communication, and of course with the darkness, there was a pretty radical lack of inputs. No talks, readings, journaling, nature walks, people watching, tea breaks or anything else.
As I see it, this is the essence of a darkness retreat — strip life down to a bare minimum, and see how this impacts the mind.
Why would one do this?
A simple google search for “darkness retreat” will reveal some of the various perspectives and purposes of darkness retreats, but my interest was first piqued several years ago, when I heard about a Tibetan Lama who had just done a traditional 49-day darkness retreat. In that tradition, a darkness retreat offers an opportunity to break through to profound levels of insight. Some of this is just from the radical lack of inputs and the usual seclusion of retreat; however, another part is that the mind tends to go crazy.
Supposedly, after 5-7 days, the mind releases a bunch of DMT, and people see visions, hear voices, and generally can start to feel a little mentally unstable. To an untrained mind, this is not good. To a Tibetan Lama, this is a great chance to see the fabricated nature of perception and to release subtle holdings onto the sense of self.
However, while some of that all seeped into my purpose, my primary reason for doing it was that I thought it would be interesting and a good challenge. And, even more so, I like to do an annual month-long winter retreat and I like to switch up the container to see the possibilities for insight & growth in different conditions.
How did it go?
The primary tenor of the retreat was in line with what I experience in a typical longer retreat done elsewhere. However, the darkness and seclusion definitely led to a stronger sense of inertia, lethargy and apathy than I’m used to; I have never slept so much on a retreat in my life!
I also noted that the conditions — a total lack of distractions and communication — really up’ed the ante on my ability to not get sucked into mental states, thought loops or afflictive emotions, as more so than usual, I saw the potential for them to spiral out of control. It required of me a really strong vigilance with how I was tending my mind. Fortunately, while there were definitely some periods I took a ride on the struggle bus, it never seemed to last very long or touch me all that deeply. Even amidst the heightened inertia, I saw it as a profound training in patience — right now, it’s like this, I told myself many dozens of times.
In terms of other challenges, it was really a very uncomfortable experience. The yoga center forgot to feed me a couple times, the showers were cold, I kept banging & bruising various body parts, and the bed was a past-expiration spring mattress that I found only slightly preferable to the concrete floor. I could go on and on, but I was actually grateful for the discomfort, as it was an opportunity to get really in touch with this provocative question:
“Do I want to be free or do I want to be comfortable?”
While sometimes a surface-level David would grumble about the discomfort, I generally found a way to settle into freedom, at least a little bit. It reminded me a lot of my teacher, Sayadaw U Tejaniya, and his continual teachings on “Right Attitude.” One of his quips was particularly on my mind:
“Problem? You have a problem? For an advanced meditator, change your attitude, no more problem.”
Even though I’ve explored this material for years, at U Tejaniya’s frequent prompting, some aspect of it seemed to sink in a little deeper. This go-round, I especially tuned into the importance of being wholeheartedly willing to change my attitude (really wanting to be free). It seemed like every time I could see just how much I was suffering from my “bad attitude,” the wholehearted willingness came quite a bit easier.
Finally, I used the time to go more into loving-kindness practice than I ever have on retreat before. Kindness & care towards myself when I wasn’t formally meditating as much as I’m accustomed to, kindness & forgiveness towards the yoga center when they forgot the meals, and going through the traditional “categories,” especially of directing loving-kindness to the difficult people in my life. I experimented a lot with different “entry points to care.” Maybe the one I just want to resurface is that when I noticed my “attitude” move into anger or resentment, I tuned into just how much I was suffering at that time. The stillness of retreat really heightens my awareness of suffering, and, in turn, my heart’s desire to be free & to love deeply.
Anyhow, as I’ve touched on, this was definitely not the most motivated or intense I’ve ever felt on retreat. However, I still found it to be a really rich experience that was interesting, challenging, and helped me step a little more fully into patience, right attitude, forgiveness and loving-kindness. More so than anything having to do with the darkness, these are the things I will remember from winter retreat 2021.
How did it end?
On the 20th morning, they knocked on my door about 45 minutes before sunrise, and I stumbled out of the room into the faint pre-dawn light. My steps were a little wobbly and it took an hour or so to regain a fluid sense of balance. It was probably a little longer until my eyes fully adjusted to the light, but within a few hours, I felt pretty well adjusted to normal living, and began a three-day period of reflection, contemplation, walking a lot, reading the aforementioned Ajahn Chah biography, and preparing to transition back to my urban, Portland life. I smiled often.
What now?
I am a big advocate of intensive retreats; however, as one Insight Meditation teacher famously said, “After the ecstasy, the laundry.” Returning to one’s life and skillfully applying the lessons one gleamed during retreat is equally as important as the depths that might have been touched in seclusion. So that’s my work for now: bringing the dharma into the laundry, the ecstasy, and every moment in between.
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