DARK RETREATS FOR
Psychological Healing
For those seeking to catalyze significant change in their lives, dark retreat offers some valuable qualities to facilitate this kind of work. It gives us a chance to meet ourselves and our experience in a direct, undistracted, and inescapable way. It also provides a space in which we are freed from external expectations, boundaries, and definitions, allowing us to uncover and inhabit ourselves in a fuller way.
While some people have sufficient tools and techniques to accomplish this work on their own, it is our experience that such healing often proceeds more effectively with the assistance of compassionate, experienced support.
Because we are well-versed in a variety of skills that promote this kind of change, we offer a unique program combining witnessing dialog and targeted guidance in inner practices. For those interested in this style of retreat, we provide daily personalized guidance drawing on a range of therapeutic and spiritual practices that tap into your deeper potentials and can transform latent psychological material that lies beyond the reach of the conscious mind.
While we take an active role in selecting practices to match each retreatant’s needs, this is always a collaborative and exploratory process in which the retreatant’s agency is always foremost.
A list of patterns we have helped with includes:
● self-reliance to the point of loneliness and exhaustion
● neediness of or in relationships
● feelings of inadequacy
● lack of connection to self or others
● unproductive angry outbursts
● lack of self-assertion/poor boundary setting
● inability to establish a stable life patterns (marriage, career, personal routines)
● lack of inspiration or motivation
● restless dissatisfaction
● romance addiction
In our work with retreatants we have been able to facilitate personal transformation that has remained otherwise elusive, including the transformation of patterns that have been resistant to other therapeutic modalities and spiritual endeavors.
"Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living."
- Carl Jung
Our Philosophy, Methods, & Experience
The reason that people struggle with repeated unhealthy patterns even when aware of them, the reason that they are so sticky and resistant to change, often is because they live in a buried strata of mind where they are not accessible to daily operational consciousness. This is why you cannot just will yourself to change and why talk therapy is often ineffective at resolving these kinds of patterns.
In order to actually resolve these patterns we need special techniques to meet them where they live. In our approach, this involves entering specific altered states of consciousness. These can be considered immersive hypnotic states where one remains fully aware and in control; they are relaxed and open states of awareness that deeply inhabit the somatic experience of the body, and allow for clearer observation of our nervous system’s feedback loops. Being in the dark makes these states much more accessible and immersive. Once in this state, we also need to work with the pattern with nuance and understanding, applying a practice that brings reparative experience and healing wisdom to the underlying wound or conflict.
Our process, thus, is in three basic steps. First we engage in maieutic dialog or questioning to help make the emotional pattern and its underlying dynamics explicit. Then, once we are all in clear agreement about what the underlying dynamics are, we introduce some combination of the techniques listed below, guiding the retreatant into the altered state and leading a practice which brings the necessary antidote into the buried strata. From there, an organic process is allowed to occur in which there is an internal metabolizing and then reorganization, leading to increased access to one’s full dynamic range and potential.
In our dark room work, there is no time limitation on these sessions; they are allowed to develop for as long as they require. Additionally, this is often a cyclical process in which layers are peeled off, revealing new aspects of the inner conflict which are themselves asking for attention over the course of a retreat. In addition to producing significant change during the course of a retreat, this process also teaches important change skills that you can continue to work with when you go home.
Some of the techniques that we practice personally and employ in the dark - noting again that these are selected in collaboration with the retreatant and according to what they are comfortable with - include:
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Somatic awareness practices, including grounding, healing, activation, and opening
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Inner child/inner relational work
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Safety techniques for working with intensity
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Meditation techniques for building witnessing capacity (including concentration-building, single-pointed awareness, and open-awareness styles)
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Trance journeying/ “Shamanic journeying”
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Witnessed, supportive guidance into the roots of challenging emotions
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Discovering and working with guides or ancestors
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Inner reparenting
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Grounding into healthier and wiser spiritual/emotional archetypes for one’s life
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Personal narrative restructuring
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Dream work