Recommended Content

Below, you’ll find some of the content that we would recommend reading / watching prior to doing a dark retreat.

Except from “Healing Our Deepest Wounds,” by Dr. Stanislav Grof

“Holotropic states (such as those experienced in dark retreats) tend to engage something like an “inner radar,” automatically bringing the contents from the unconscious that have the strongest emotional charge, are currently most psychodynamically relevant, and are currently available for processing into consciousness.

This is a great advantage in comparison with verbal psychotherapy, where the client presents a broad array of information of various kinds and the therapist has to decide what is important, what is irrelevant, where the client is blocking, etc.  Since there is no general agreement about basic theoretical issues among different schools, such assessments will always reflect the personal bias of the therapist, as well as the specific views of his or her school.

The holotropic states save the therapist such difficult decisions and eliminate much of the subjectivity and professional idiosyncrasy of the verbal approaches. This “inner radar” often surprises the therapist by detecting emotionally strongly charged memories of physical traumas and brings them to the surface for processing and conscious integration.

This automatic selection of relevant topics also spontaneously leads the process to the perinatal and transpersonal levels of the psyche, transbiographical domains not recognized and acknowledged in academic psychiatry and psychology. The phenomena originating in these deep recesses of the psyche were well-known to ancient and pre-industrial cultures of all ages and greatly honored by them. In the Western world they have been erroneously attributed to pathology of unknown origin and considered to be meaningless and erratic products of cerebral dysfunction.”

Excerpt from an interview with one of my primary teachers, Dr. Reggie Ray, in which he discusses his experience in a dark retreat 

So the second step on the spiritual journey, at least according to the Tantric tradition, is that we have to dismantle the patterns of pettiness that are activated when we’re in our ordinary life. We have to dismantle them. Really, what happens in the darkness is, once the mind . . . once the mind really starts opening up, you start meeting some very interesting people. These interesting people are people from your past, but they’re people who are affecting you and actually taking you over right now as you live your life. These people are what I call, or what I might call undeveloped or incomplete parts of ourselves. They’re what Jung called complexes. They are little bundles of response, of conditioned response, that have developed in relationship to all kinds of situations throughout our whole life going back to probably when we were in the womb.

For example, in my case, I go into dark retreat, and the initial few days are very interesting, wonderful, and there’s a part of me that would like to say, “Okay, fine. I’m out of here!” but I stick with it because of this next step. What starts to happen is I will begin to encounter emotional responses that are very limited and very petty, and they arise in relationship to specific situations. I’ll give you an example. (We’ll see how far we want to go with this. You know, I’m not going to necessarily go through an archaeology of my personal psyche, but I want to give some examples.) As children, all of us have this experience of being very little and having these big people in our environment. The problem with the big people is, in our estimation, they were supposed to take care of us, and they had the power to resolve things that we couldn’t resolve—pain, hunger, fear, whatever—and they often didn’t do it. That experience is in us, and amazingly enough, as we discover through darkness practice, that experience of people who are bigger than us, and who could help us, but won’t do it, and the resultant response of resentment and anger and even rage, is activated all the time in our lives. It comes up all the time in relation to anybody we perceive as big. The problem with that response coming up is that we shut down. We shut down, and we actually live in the emotional state of that two year old. That’s how constricted our world is.

In my case, I’ve identified about sixty-five different what I call inferior personalities—inferior not in the sense of being bad, but just limited—and different situations in my life activate them. That’s what we call samsara: that we live from one limited state to the other, going from one to the other, depending on which external situation is going on out there. Do we feel betrayed? Do we feel undermined? Do we feel undernourished? Do we feel abused? Whatever it may be, we never get out. That’s what the prison is: It’s the kaleidoscope of these inferior parts of ourselves.

What happens in darkness practice is something will come up, and the interesting thing about darkness is, when they come up, they really come up. They take over the field of consciousness, and I become the two year old. The interesting thing is, usually in life when that starts happening, we go call a friend, or we’ll turn on the TV, or we’ll eat some chocolate, or we’ll have a drink, or we’ll get in the car and go shopping, but in the darkness, there are no breaks. In other words, when it comes up and takes over the field of consciousness, there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re stuck. Amazingly enough, that’s how you resolve that person: by becoming that person and living through the experience that person had from the beginning to the end, and sometimes it takes a long time—six hours, twelve hours, three days later it comes back—but that’s how you resolve karma, by completing the experience that got started, but because of our infantile and weak ego structure, we couldn’t do it at that time, and now here we are and that’s what we’re doing. 

Excerpts from When the Body Says No, by Dr. Gabor Mate

• “Several decades ago, David Kissen, a British chest surgeon, reported that patients with lung cancer were frequently characterized by a tendency to “bottle up” emotions. In a number of studies, Kissen supported his clinical impressions that people with lung cancer “have poor and restricted outlets for the expression of emotion, as compared with non-malignancy lung patients and normal controls.” The risk of lung cancer, Kissen found, was five times higher in men who lacked the ability to express emotion effectively.”

• “Kissen’s insights were confirmed in spectacular fashion by a prospective study German, Dutch and Serbian researchers conducted over a ten-year period in Cvrenka, in the former Yugoslavia.”

• “Nearly 10 per cent of the town’s inhabitants were selected, about one thousand men and four hundred women. Each was interviewed in 1965–66, with a 109-item questionnaire that delineated such risk factors as adverse life events, a sense of long-lasting hopelessness and a hyper-rational, non-emotional coping style. Physical parameters like cholesterol levels, weight, blood pressure and smoking history were also recorded. People with already diagnosed disease were excluded from the research project. By 1976, ten years later, over six hundred of the study participants had died of cancer, heart disease, stroke or other causes. The single greatest risk factor for death—and especially for cancer death—was what the researchers called rationality and anti-emotionality, or R/A. The eleven questions identifying R/A measured a single trait: the repression of anger. 

• “Indeed cancer incidence was some 40 times higher in those who answered positively to 10 or 11 of the questions for R/A than in the remaining subjects, who answered positively to about 3 questions on average.”

Maté M.D., Gabor. When the Body Says No (pp. 85-86). Turner Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.

Notes: 

• Additional research presented in “When the Body Says No” suggests that excessive hotheadedness is also detrimental to health. Ideally, from the standpoint of this research, one should try to find a balance between allowing themself to feel their emotions, without becoming excessively overwhelmed by them / attached to them. 

Quotes worth considering:

“The unconscious insists, repeats, and practically breaks down the door, to be heard. The only way to hear it, to invite it into the room, is to stop imposing something over it—mostly in the form of your own ideas—and listen instead for the unsayable, which is everywhere, in speech, in enactments, in dreams, and in the body.”

• Annie Rogers, professor emerita of psychoanalysis and clinical psychology at Hampshire College

“The process of meditation involves gradually shedding our multitude of opinions-built-upon-opinions of how things are, and becoming more and more aware of the literal, non-conceptual substratum of all our thinking — the substratum which is reality itself.”

• Dr. Reggie Ray

“As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself… The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you already know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.”

• Dr. Bessel van der Kolk

“I think 99 times and find nothing. I stop thinking, swim in the ocean of silence, and the truth comes to me.”

• Albert Einstein

“Through embracing the shadow we discover its opposite.”

• Craig Holliday