Lights Out: The Mind's Glow

Yes and No. You can do whatever you like in the Dark room, by the way. Better to think of it this way: Darkness isn't really the absence of something. It's more like the presence of everything our light-saturated world has been hiding from us. Some traditions even consider artificially lighting up the Darkness to be sacrilegious. There's a reason for that reverence.

Everything your mind is creating as images. We think we are seeing objectively, but in fact everything we see is just an interpretation of the visual data coming to us. When you remove all light input - to the skin and eyes - and I mean all light, not just from the eyes with a sleep mask - the brain doesn't go quiet. It begins to project the same internal symbolism in any way it can. If we are able to transcend our own internal dynamics or shadows, we then open up to the objective reality beyond, which includes a whole host of data which isn't picked up by the classic five senses. This is enhanced as endogenic neurochemical releases similar to that which happens whilst dreaming. The boundary between waking and dreaming gets very thin. And in that liminal space, people consistently discover capacities they didn't know they had.

Great question, and there are many similarities. Closing your eyes in meditation also reduces visual input, but your brain is still in proximity to exposure to light, in most circumstances, and still anchored to your waking state. Total Darkness removes that anchor entirely. While individual experiences vary considerable, many people who experience long-term Darkness immersions begin to experience a state comparable to a psychedelic experience. This may also be available to meditators in some similar fashion if they were to stay in a meditative state for very long periods of time. Darkness allows this altered-state to persist through periods of eating, sleeping, washing etc. Darkness aids maintenance of the dream-like state and so helps to deepen and deepen the experience.

The timeline is one of the most remarkable things about Darkness work, and it maps quite cleanly onto the chemistry. It's worth noting that studies of brain chemistry are difficult to study, so what we think we know is based on a combination of educated theory corroborated by experiential reports. The theory goes: In the first few days, your pineal gland ramps up melatonin production dramatically - as would be normal from exposure to Darkness. Normally it would then use its tryptophan - the precursor to melatonin - to make serotonin which is stimulated by light. Because no light comes the melatonin levels raise far beyond your normal sleep cycle. That alone has measurable effects on sleep quality, immune function, inflammation. But if you stay beyond day three or four, something more unusual happens. The brain appears to begin producing pinoline, a beta-carboline with its own psychoactive properties. Beyond day seven, there's evidence of the endogenous production of dimethyltryptamine, commonly known as DMT. First 5-MeO-DMT, and from around day ten onwards, N,N-DMT. DMT is famous for its intense and short trips when isolated and smoked. It's worth saying that the DMT experience in Darkness is nowhere near as intense as smoking it though. 

Yes! Endogenous DMT, meaning DMT produced by the body, has been found in human cerebrospinal fluid and blood. The question was always when and why does the body produce it in significant quantities. Darkness immersion seems to be one of the triggers, as well as potentially sleep, birth and death. It's as if the brain has been waiting for the right conditions.

Exactly - and this is what I find so humbling. Tibetan monks and yogis in  caves, Sufi mystics in Dark retreats, All the chambers under the pyramids all around the world used by initiates, Kogi Mamas in multiple-year Darkness immersions in the mountains of Colombia, Christian mystics in hermitages. We can see purpose-built underground caverns and chambers on every continent of the world devoted to isolation and Darkness. Every wisdom tradition found this same doorway, independently, across cultures and centuries. They didn't need the neuroscience vocabulary we have now, because they had the direct experience of it.

Yes. Measurable ones, if we just wanted to look at what science has conducted. Data seems to suggest statistically significant improvements - Lowered blood pressure, improved sleep architecture, reduced cortisol and inflammatory markers, more balanced hormone profiles, enhanced immune responses. On the cognitive side it seems to improve memory, increase creativity and enhance what you might call expanded neuroplasticity - the ability for the mind to change. Emotionally and psychologically we have seen many reports of relief from depression and/or anxiety, a better resilience which comes from a rested nervous system. And these are just the changes that show up in the data. When you meet people who come out of the Darkness the individual reports themselves range from mild improvement to radical shifts in perspective and wellbeing. 

We have a spectrum of evidence. At one end, decades of peer-reviewed research on sleep, melatonin, and sensory deprivation. In the middle, clinical work on Darkness specifically, which is growing but still relatively limited. And then the vast, millennia-long record of human testimony - which doesn't carry the statistical weight of an randomised control trial, but represents genuine lived experience and has guided healing traditions for thousands of years. I don't think we should dismiss either end of that spectrum. The transformative shifts people report - in perspective, emotional healing, spiritual insight - are real experiences even when they resist easy quantification. Science itself has its limitations in its reductionism and generalisations whereas shamanic or spiritual practices like these are by their very nature holistic and individualistic. When we release ourselves from expectation and follow what is present in front of us in the moment instead, we tend to get a much deeper benefit which defies even language or definition.

And that reaction is worth paying attention to, because it's telling you something true about yourself. Darkness touches both ends of our most primal safety spectrum simultaneously. On one side, there's a deep unconscious comfort - some part of us remembers boundlessness and safety - like being in the womb. On the other side, our survival instincts fire hard. We fear the unseen and unknown - which plays a role in most of the spectrum of our deepest fears. We also fear what we might find in ourselves and the implications of finding it. Some part of us believes so deeply - often with the mind and heart of the child who created the fear - that our very survival might be compromised by even acknowledging it. But that's precisely the territory where the work happens. I fact its the basis of all trauma work - bringing lucid consciousness and genuine safety to those deepest fears, people find they can regain a kind of agency over their own reactivity that nothing else had quite given them.

The three things that matter most are set, setting, and time. Setting is the physical environment - total Darkness, silence, clean air, good food, comfort, temperature control, spaces to move and meditate. We take that seriously. But set - your internal environment - might matter even more. We do screening and one-to-one consultations before anyone arrives. It's important we meet and get to know people in advance of coming, and are able to support them in the way they need before, during and after the retreat. We design the immersion individually for each person. We have trained staff available around the clock to support with any needs that may arise, and we support the emergence and integration as much as the immersion itself. The Darkness is often only the beginning.

That depends what you're after. Even a short immersion - one to three nights - can be profoundly restful and restorative, primarily through the melatonin shift, although often people tend to sleep a lot for the first 48 hours. If you want to go deeper and have conscious time, into the pinoline territory, you're looking at four to six days. The deeper experiences require longer. But Darkness tends to bring up a lot of fear for people and so it's better to do a little than none. If it helps to dip your toe in to begin with, then start with what you're comfortable with. We offer support in this decision in the consultation call before the booking.

The Tao Te Ching never fails to inspire. As with all great texts, the meanings offered by each phrase hold many layers for each individual to project their own meanings onto. The image created by the poetry of words contains a thousand meanings beyond what language can hold. For me there are multiple meanings. Our visual imagination comes alive in the Darkness could be a simple meaning. Light could also refer to a harmonic and structured outcome such as purpose, focus or clarity. Lightness itself is embedded into the term 'enlightenment' - the liberation from our unresolved survival responses, our personality, our limitations, our suffering. It reminds me a bit of the classic 'Dark night of the Soul' - where it is only at rock bottom where we find the energy to reframe our human existence and break free from the algorithm of our personality