our Twitter (X) feedView our Youtube channelView our Instagram feedView our Substack feedView our Spotify feed Interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner Andrew Holecek describes how dark retreats can expand your Perception Box. Andrew Holecek is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions. Could removing light be a key to discovering who you really are?
That’s one idea behind dark retreats*, an experience that’s about as close to a complete sensory deprivation chamber as you can get. Participants spend extended periods in total darkness, stripping away the inputs and distractions of everyday life. Andrew Holecek, an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions, believes in the transformative power of dark retreats.
Holecek says in today’s society, we’ve become “light junkies,” addicted to the constant distraction of phones, tablets, emails, texts, and everything else competing for our attention. But beneath it all, many feel a sense of emptiness, as if something’s missing and whatever we have is never enough. Who you really are is revealed when you finally stop doing.
The very structure of the self is radically threatened when it's sent into the dark.” Holecek compares entering the darkness to a cold plunge for the psyche. The shock comes from suddenly doing nothing. At first, it can be intensely boring, even painful.
People aren’t able to distract themselves in the usual ways, and about 90% of people contract into a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response, Holecek says. But as they spend more time in the darkness, something begins to shift. They begin to relax, slow down, and surrender.
Then, Holecek says, the mind starts to fall into itself. In isolation, the mind may begin to surface experiences and psychological information that have gone unprocessed. It's going to come up to be, in fact, digested and metabolized in the dark.” The process isn’t easy.
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