For many years now, I have been longing to see what it would be like to really let my eyes relax. Whenever there are things to look at, I can’t seem to help but focusing, and with age I no longer have 20/20 vision, so there is always some strain, especially in my left eye.

I have talked about this with my girlfriend over the years, and expressed a longing to stay in darkness for an extended period to see what it would feel like. This Christmas she gifted me a 4 day stay in a pitch black room with daily food provided, saying “you can extend it if you want”.

I thought about it, and my experiences from meditation retreats is that for me, it takes about 4 days to settle the surface layers of my mind and start having deeper experiences. Really, I would have liked to stay even longer, but there is also every-day life to take care of, so I extended from Monday morning to Sunday morning, giving me 6 full days in there.

Somebody to talk to?

On the day of going in there, a friend sent me a message asking me if I would have somebody to talk to if I needed guidance.

Many years ago, on my first Vipassana retreat (which is a 10 day silent retreat), I started to have some troubles on the 6th day. I couldn’t focus at all, and felt very uncomfortable. I signed up to talk to the assistants in the afternoon time-slot. And then I sat in my room (you don’t have to sit in the meditation hall all the time, but you are supposed to do the technique all the time), letting my mind wander more than doing the practice. Sometimes I attempted to do the practice but generally I just wondered what was wrong and why it was so hard all of a sudden. Eventually, during the lunch break, as I was examining my experience, I noticed that it felt like I kept turning away from something, like there was something behind me I didn’t want to see.

I then did some kind of inner move that was “turning towards”. I don’t know how to describe it better. Suddenly the words “Why does nobody like me? Why does nobody want to play with me” appeared in my mind, and I was flooded by memories from being in first grade, having just moved from one town to another where everybody starting first grade knew each other from before, except for me.

Staying with the memories, and with tears streaming from my eyes, I went and walked in the little forest there. After allowing myself to remember and feel, I could meditate again, and I took my name off the list.

Since then I haven’t ever sought help on a retreat, except for receiving instructions or clarifying technique of course. Just turn towards, and feel the pain 🤷

In the dark

It took me 4 days in the darkness before there was anything to turn towards, somewhat like I had expected. The first days were just wonderful. I allowed myself to settle into a natural rhythm of sleeping when I was tired and doing whatever I wanted at other times.

Beyond just sitting on a chair, or laying, sitting or standing on the floor (all of which I did for many hours), over the days I had a few different projects:

Navigation

I explored what it was like to navigate a room without vision.

Could I keep track of orientation, and know how far to walk to get to a specific part of the room? It was a fairly small room, about 3 by 4 meters maybe, with a small adjacent bathroom. If I relaxed and trusted my instinct I was most of the time correct about directions, but moving quickly around, and especially spinning threw me off. The more turns, and the faster turns, the more off.

The most interesting experience of the days in relation to this was that I started to see the walls and the features of the walls, and the outline of furniture and of the carpet and yoga mat. I put a blind-fold on to see if it was because of leaking light, and I could still see it. I moved around a bit to lose orientation and could establish that the actual furniture or walls weren’t always where I saw them, so my conclusion is that my visual space was being repurposed to represent my best attempt to keep track of where things were. I did expect that to be a thing, for blind people, but it was quite cool to get to experience it and to see it happen so fast. I think it would become more accurate and more stable with more time.

I did bang my nose into a couple of things doing this, but no blood spill.

Feeling my body

I did my embodiment practice which is an intuitive (rhymes with undisciplined) exploration that sometimes looks like yoga, sometimes like tai-chi and sometimes it probably just looks weird.

Quickly I got an experience of my body in space that almost felt visual, but outside my field of vision. When I brought my arms into my field of vision it felt like I could see them as a slight shadow, but again, this persisted when I put on a blind-fold and wasn’t actual vision. I am used to experiencing a quite vibratory “inner experience” of my body, what I think people mean when they say “energy-body” or “subtle body”, but not having vision to pull my attention, I could now relax into it more stably, and this more visual sense to it was new for me. It allowed me to work on my posture and feel into and allow many tensions to soften and melt. This sometimes came with some light crying.

Boredom

On the fifth day I started to feel boredom. I don’t generally feel bored in my life these days. It’s never been a big thing for me as my favorite coping mechanism is thinking and I can always just put on interesting thoughts as entertainment if needed. But beyond that I have also come to be very interested in the felt sense of experience as such, just being endlessly fascinated by what it feels like to exist.

I have many participants in presence training that express intermittent boredom though, and I have come to think of boredom as a cover and an avoidance of feeling one’s experience. Usually (I believe always) there is some part of their experience they can’t allow themselves to feel. I see boredom as the felt sense of a type of dissociation.

And there I was, feeling bored. Of course, I didn’t catch it straight away, not until I realized I was engaging in distractions, and I was impatient for the food to arrive, and I wanted to go home to my girlfriend and, and, and… Staying with it, I noticed I was driven by boredom. So I turned towards.

And then I spent a significant part of day 5 and 6 crying. The new words that came with this hidden experience were “I don’t even dare to be here”.

Oh, this all happened after I remembered why I was in the dark retreat in the first place. My eyes! Somewhere early on the 5th day I think, I noticed that my eyes weren’t really relaxing in the dark, and I had started to consciously try to relax them.

It was after that that I started to be driven by that boredom and couldn’t focus anymore. When I turned towards, felt and examined the details of this experience, I found that I have developed this strategy where I tense my left eye as part of a more intricate mechanism to project my awareness away from my body, particularly away from my chest and heart (not the pump, the emotional center). This has allowed me to gain the power to hide my feelings, both from others and from myself.

Relaxing my eyes grounds me in my body experience, and has me feel my heart in a way I have done before occasionally, but haven’t known how to allow at will. “I don’t even dare to be here” is both the voice of an eleven-year-old boy who didn’t dare to go to school but also didn’t dare to show that to anyone at home or in school and locked it off, and it is the voice of my heart in this present moment. It feels too overwhelming to just feel everything in real time, and I need to tense up and sort it through and see what the “correct” responses and emotions are before allowing them.

However, I do think I have the capacity to feel this now, and I don’t want to engage in this strategy anymore. Coming home and connecting with my girlfriend, and having body therapy clients with this deeper connection to my heart has been incredibly rich and wonderful. But the habit of dissociation is well established, so I tense up and exclude my heart again and again, but whenever I notice I relax and include it again, and I can handle that it feels like I don’t dare to be here. I’m here regardless of whether I dare to or not, and there is no reason to pretend to myself that I don’t feel what I feel. The charge of the fear will evaporate quite quickly, as every other such charge has.

Hallucinations

In parallel with everything else going on I kept having quite a lot of visual hallucinations. When I say I return from the dark, I didn’t actually experience darkness much. Whenever my attention wasn’t on some exploration and I was meditating or trying to sleep, there were many light phenomena happening around me. Sometimes lights came on behind me and illuminated walls where there were no walls, but I could clearly see them.

The details of the hallucinations were crisp and proper hallucinations. I had no conscious control of them however and they were more like looking at some random movie, with very little action usually. 95% of the time they were in black and white but occasionally they were in bright full color. Sometimes the details were stable and I could examine the intricacies, and sometimes it was more like an llm from 2024 was making stuff up for me: I was looking at a poster once and the text it had was just nonsense that kept shifting around, and some of the letters were not real letters. It was vibrantly puprle though.

Some hallucinations were like a movie in a VR-headset, they stayed in front of me when I turned my head; but some of them where properly laid out in space and I could look around in them, like I was in the room that was being created for me.

I swear I followed the guidelines and didn’t take any drugs 🙂

The food!

Going there I expected quite bland food, like at a vipassana retreat. When the first meal came I was blown away by how incredible it was.

Eating their food in the darkness was an amazing experience! The excellence of the first dish inspired me to a game:

Every meal I started by smelling it and trying to guess what it was. Then I ate it slowly, tasting it carefully and feeling the textures in my mouth. I nibbled different pieces and tried to get individual flavors and textures and then I tried to guess in as much details as possible what dish I was eating and I took notes of my guesses. Most of my notes are readable except for where I had written one thing on top of another 🤷, and when I checked them with my hosts coming out, it it turned out my guesses were pretty accurate 🏆.

I really enjoyed that part.

Summing up

I leave the darkness taking with me gratitude to the hosts for providing a very welcoming atmosphere, giving me excellent food and being very friendly.

If you get curious about being in darkness like this, the room is bookable at https://www.innerpatience.com/in-the-dark. I totally recommend them.

I leave softer in my body and eyes, and hopefully this closer connection to my heart will stay. “My heart” may even be part of my vocabulary from now on, though I wish the words for the emotional center and the blood pump were different.

To be honest, having my favorite coping mechanism be thinking, I also spent a lot of time in there thinking. Some pretty good thoughts if I may say so myself. Some of them will eventually be shared in other writing.

Stay tuned.