What I Saw During a Total Darkness Retreat

All is not lost.

Preparation

My adult son gave me a book to write for my birthday. It’s called A Mother’s Story, and it’s over 112 pages of journal prompts about the past. Thanks, Kiddo. But doing an end-of-life narrative like that was the perfect way to approach a six-day encounter with the fade-to-black. I figured he wouldn’t pick it up until after I was dead. Then, he wouldn’t be able to put it down. So my tone was: speaking to you from beyond the grave.

I wrote about healing capital T trauma, my mother, my father, and the domestic violence that has propelled me to retreat after retreat. When he was 18 months old, I began leaving him for ten days at a time. “I’m sorry I had to go,” I wrote, “but I was saving my own life.”

When I told people I was going on a total darkness retreat, and they expressed fear, I’d joke, “Oh, I can hold my breath for four days.” But I was worried, too.

So imagine my surprise when the therapist encouraged me to light a candle if I needed a break, or go outside and look at the night sky if my nervous system became disregulated. She said that the simple act of choosing self-kindness is the whole point for some people, and perhaps the first time they have chosen themselves over some mind-imposed rules. With that, she disabled my own safety-craving rule follower who has spent her life developing… discipline - she who can endure.

The afternoon I arrived, I decided to take the darkness for a test drive before the official start. I turned off the lights and climbed into bed. The darkness had heft. Aliveness. Intention. It pressed against the length of my body. And it covered my face, too, my eyes, my nose, and my mouth.

Panic churned, a shortness of breath. Oh no, got louder. It rose in pitch. I can’t breathe.

I put my fingers to my face. Still here. There’s nothing suffocating me. It’s just dark. Phew. The panic resolved into peace, but I’d seen what my mind could do. I turned the lights back on to eat my dinner. Once I turned them out at bedtime, the total darkness would last four nights and three days.

A bed and a deep bathtub

Hibernation

The first time the brain wakes in total darkness, it dumps a boatload of melatonin into your system. The thick black sits on your eyelids. I could barely lift them, and, open or closed, there was no difference. So, for 24 hours or so, I slept, then woke groggy for a few minutes, then slept some more.

Because it was impossible to know how long I’d slept or what part of the day it even was, reality shifted. I entered the dreamtime. I woke-slept, like a bear gestating cubs. I saw things, heard things, and knew things as one does in sleep, even though I was very much awake after the first day. But the boundary was thin unless I was navigating the room. My guide came to the door for twenty minutes at 10:00 am and again at 5:00 pm. That was orienting. Otherwise, I was alone in the endless and formative dreamtime. I sang, did restorative yoga, and soaked in the tub.

Deaming

After two days, kinda bragging, I told my guide about my only experience of panic, before we began, when the darkness pressed on me. And he gave me an exercise.

“Go back to that moment. Feel the pressure on the barrier between you and the darkness, your skin. Then, let it penetrate your barrier.”

Let darkness in? I sucked in breath. Why would anyone do anything so…

Then I saw. I’d thought my body was a skin bag full of viscera, solid, pressing back against the dark, keeping it out. But there is as much space between the molecules in my body as there is between the molecules of a seemingly solid table.

So I lay down and focused on my skin barrier, that semipermeable membrane between me and death. The darkness penetrated. I took in a lungful, and it traveled to my toes. Then, it rose like mist through my pores like an evaporation cycle - in through my breathing, out through my pores; in through my skin, out through my exhale until I was the darkness. Inside and out. Balanced.

I heard the thought, “If thine eye be single…” And my whole body was filled with light. White light. But you can’t see anything in total light, either.

“Where did the darkness go?” I wondered. Then, I heard this thought: “If you want the darkness, just open your eyes, but not yet.”

So I stayed, eyes closed, flooded with light. It didn’t feel good or bad. It simply was. Then, my eyes popped open, and as predicted, the darkness hadn’t gone anywhere. I was in bed. Now, I think I might have been asleep, dreaming. Just as valuable either way. Awake and asleep were also interchangeable.

Waking

The third day, my body filled with gratitude. Wet, gushy gratitude. Spasms of gratitude ending in explosions. Long past the time I couldn’t take any more, there were volcanoes of more, and more. Between contractions, total rest, and stillness. A miracle to breathe into. Then another depth-charge of gratitude.

The first wave was for all the unanswered prayers, all the things that had never happened. If it weren’t for unanswered prayer, I’d be married to the wrong man. I’d have been lost in the trance of being the wise writer with several successful books on consciousness, the one who speaks at conferences and is adored for her insights - a platformed spiritual teacher. So glad that didn’t happen. I would have been trapped - being her, playing her, like a costume you can never take off, or an internal prison you are afraid to leave, even though the door is open.

The longing to become, though, had been real and very painful. But not the meaning I’d attached to it - the story about longing. I’d dodged a bullet when I gave up being a spiritual teacher and became a high school teacher in the real, physical world. Nothing transcended.

Then I was grateful for answered prayer, the biggest being my husband. Thirty-something years ago, I’d prayed for love to pick my husband, because trusting my intuition, my judgments, and chemistry, only landed me back in another relationship with the father with a thousand faces. While Tom was asking me out on our first date, I knew I would marry him. And I was surprised, and a little concerned because I didn’t feel the gizz of sexual attraction. Really? I asked inside. This one? Are you sure?

And there had been a parade of answered prayers. Grace. Big problems that took decades to resolve. Did I give up hope sometimes? Cry? Oh ye of little faith. Of course I did. Did it matter? Not one bit. I was grateful for it all, the whole human catastrophe. Bring it.

But here’s the thing. If something wiser was answering some prayers and not others, did I ever have to pray at all? And yet… and yet. There is a grace that responds to intention, that shifts me from ego to presence. All I’d ever had to do was ask. She was with me in the dreamtime. And I could feel her. We talked. And in that dark womb, we were fertilizing seeds and attaching them to her uterine lining together.

Emergence

When the day arrived, I was reluctant. I wanted to hit the snooze button. But who can overstay her welcome in the womb? I put on the eye mask, preserving the darkness for the big reveal, which is filmed, and my guide led me to the Adirondack chair. Wrapped in a blanket, I sat and waited, facing the gorgeous mountain view. “When you are ready,” he said.

Before I’d arrived, I’d seen lots of unmasking videos of tearful people in love with the sparkly miracle of being alive, and even back then, I knew that wouldn’t be me. I’ve had lots of peak experiences, scores, decades of them. Every retreat I’d ever been on had its own, usually lasting days. And that’s just the retreats.

I pulled the mask off, but in kindness to my eyes, I kept them closed. I didn’t want to stab them with sudden sun. Behind my lids, bright red faded to orange, then to yellow. When I opened them, the whole world reappeared. Just like the darkness when I was filled with light, it hadn’t gone anywhere. I followed the ridgeline, and there was nothing to say. No words. Inside was outside, and outside was in.

The gratitude was joy, and joy was love, and love was beauty, and beauty was grace. And it all became laughter. We are lucky to be here, lucky to be able to love each other, for this is what’s next: love without consideration of worthiness or cost.

I’d expected I might have a difficult time in the darkness. I made lots of jokes about it. I thought I’d have a death and rebirth experience because that’s how every retreat I’ve ever been on has gone.

But this time, the ego death didn’t happen. I slept-woke, dreamed, and saw. I gestated my next incarnation, a pregnant mother inside an earth mother, within our Mother Nature. All the push-to-talk, to be someone or to do something, ebbed. I was completely still. About ten days later, the order of operations reversed.

Integration

Contraction. Pressure. Pain. Judgment. Need. Attachment to a story. Discomfort. Maybe it was birth rather than death. They are so similar.

And I’m sobbing, mouth open, drooling, no breath to make sound. All the longing is there. Longing to be my next incarnation. Longing to give my gifts. Longing to be someone. Longing, just pure, painful longing. And then, all the more painful, why-not-me? Why don’t you ever break through? Do things big like other people? Why are you so stupid? Small? Invisible. You’re terrified. You don’t bring anything to the table. No wonder…

But I don’t engage. I don’t agree or merge with the Oh no, in horror, or the I can’t breathe. And I don’t try to stop it, either. While my body sobs, the voice runs on its own. Then, it starts making meaning. Telling origin stories. Creation Mythology.

That’s why… Because I grew up in violence. That’s why I’m a hermit. That’s why I retreat. That’s why I write novels and don’t publish them. That’s why I can’t find an agent. Won’t self-publish. Don’t bring anything to the promotion party. Why would anyone want to play with me?

When the story subsided but left a hangover, I knew it wasn’t done. I called my friend, Nan Tepper and she held space while my body cried. I folded into the arms of my husband and sobbed some more. He sent me flowers - with a haiku on Haiku Day. I am lucky to have such people who know that kindness is what matters.

But here’s the thing. The whole time, I knew I wasn’t that voice. It even addressed me as YOU. You are so stupid. That’s the same Victrola that always plays.

I used to hate it that the internal dialogue never changed. I thought I healed that. But it’s easier to recognize an old story. It rises up inside me, but it isn’t me. And, I can welcome it, and just cry, or laugh, or dance, or promote my events, and no one dies of shame. I can simply be myself, love what I love, and do what I do.

My prayer has always been: I’m willing to feel this. Now it might be: I’m willing to welcome this home, into presence.

For me, and for the culture at large, and the terrible dark night of the soul we are experiencing, the answer is the same. Love. Kindness. Space. Compassion. Stillness. We are meeting ourselves, willing or not. We can welcome it. The difficult bits, and the overwhelming, volcanic love. In the darkness, I felt that as gratitude, and now I feel it as joy. The horror rises within the joy. All the divine qualities flow directly into each other. My default mode is joy. Your results may vary. The distinctions are semantic.

It’s already happening.

Cultures grow like individuals; it just takes longer. We’re going to have to feel all the harm our taxes have funded - all the ways we’ve been lied to - all the betrayal we’ve sucked in because we were afraid. This death of the old way is as uncomfortable as birth, and just as relentless. But like birth, if all goes well, the pain resolves into love. Big love. Ecstatic love. Then we have to feed, change, and nurture our communities until they grow into womanhood. Don’t worry. She has a life of her own, a destiny, grace.

It’s already happening.

We are transitioning back to mother love. Community. Compassion. Caring. Freeing people. Feeding people. Supporting all life, not just human life. Everyone is a mother’s child. We can worship life instead of worshipping our fear of death. It’s a figure/background shift.

It’s already happening.

That’s why things look so dark right now. We are in it. Though the darkness will likely last years, we can integrate Love into our institutions, our politics, our worldview. No more every-man-for-himself, which of course, leaves out half of humanity. No more fear-of-death father-war-god laying down those “traditional” values which are only a fillip of recent history. There was never a god who wanted patriarchal dominance, anyway. He was a mythological invention of people taking power so we’d go along, a story to justify benefiting the few over the many. Now, we are seeing the dark side, or if you prefer, the shadow. But we can meet this moment.

It’s already happening.

We will make this transition, despite the misogynistic night terrors of the manosphere, in spite of the blackmail of the Epstein class, the manipulations of billionaire oligarchs carving the world into spheres of profit, regardless of the corporate-sponsored politicians paid to do the opposite of what’s right. All our stoic, death-terrified, rigid, easily manipulated people are going to have to thaw, even those who would rather die than feel helplessness or shame. It’s already here.

I shudder for those who won’t understand compassion until something terrible happens to them personally, for they will have experiences.

As a culture, we will learn to provide for each other, care for each other, and care for the earth as a mother would. Let our wise grandmothers (not biological, of course) make decisions, the ones who have already healed their lives, which is how they became wise. We have so many now. Let the ones who have been marginalized lead, for the last will be first. For they have taken the master’s class in compassion. Let’s center mother love.

I promise we can afford it.

What we can no longer afford is war, genocide, pollution, slavery, trafficking, misogyny, racism, classism, poverty, or this cannibal capitalism that eats its own young. The community replaces the shareholder class. We hold the controlling interest and Class F voting rights. If a policy debases or victimizes anyone, it’s too costly. Nothing is more expensive than war - internal and external - war kills victor and vanquished indiscriminately, inside and outside. The same. There are no precision bombs.

It’s time to admit we don’t know how to be at peace and let the mother-force show us. What if we did that? Just admit we don’t know? Let love lead. Let the divine feminine lead, whether it lives inside a female body, a male one, or anywhere on the spectrum between. Let our old, patriarchal system go. It’s done enough harm.

Here’s the key - welcome the seeing. Then, it’s a dance. A celebration of life. Darkness and light. It’s love in all its many splendored forms.

I’d love to know what you think about the ramblings of this mythological mind, how this hit you, or what it brought up. Please leave a comment. You are all my teachers.

If you read to the end, please leave your heart, so my heart will find it. It lets me know you were walking beside me. If you were moved at all, restack, please. Subscribe if you’d like to join me on this mythic journey of love and healing, or please upgrade to a paid plan if you can. Thank you for being here. You mean the world to me.

This Saturday, April 25th, I’ll be co-facilitating a retreat: The Awakening: Return to Self Day Retreat from 9:00-4:00 in Sherman Oaks, CA

Recognition is instant: I AM THAT.

In an instant, let go of all that’s keeping you chained. Realize the pure presence of truth. No years-long process of meditation, no arduous climb to the mountain top.

In deep, deep silence, held by community, there is an invitation.

Who you are is already here, has always been here. This simple recognition changes everything.

Come. Let it unfold. Let it be you. In that instant, you are free.

Message me if you want more information or click on the link.