10 Days in Total Darkness

I have spent fifteen years studying the body. I have trained as a D1 athlete. I have completed feats of strength that landed me in the Guinness Book of World Records. I have studied under Dr. Gabor Maté and devoted myself to understanding how trauma lives in the tissues. And none of it prepared me for what happened when I turned off the lights and did not turn them back on for ten days.

A darkness retreat is exactly what it sounds like. You enter a room. The room is sealed so that no light can get in. Not a sliver under the door. Not a glow from an outlet. Nothing. You stay there. You eat meals that are delivered through a light locked passage. You have a bathroom. And you wait.

I had read about darkness retreats for years. The Tibetan tradition calls it yangti. The idea is simple: remove every external stimulus and see what is actually there. No phone. No music. No faces. No sunrise. No way to tell what time it is. Just you and whatever lives inside you when there is nowhere left to look.

The First Three Days

The first day was almost pleasant. I felt adventurous. I meditated. I stretched. I told myself this would be a profound experience and I was ready for it. That confidence lasted about eighteen hours.

By day two, the boredom was physical. Not the kind of boredom you feel waiting in a line. This was boredom that pressed on my chest. My body wanted to move, to see, to do something. Every cell seemed to be asking the same question: why are we just sitting here?

Day three brought the first real challenge. Without any visual input, my brain started creating its own. Faint geometric patterns at first. Then colors. Then faces. Not hallucinations in the clinical sense, but my visual cortex doing what it does, trying to make sense of the signal it was not receiving. The patterns were beautiful and also deeply unsettling, because they reminded me that so much of what I "see" on a normal day is constructed by my brain, not received from the world.

The Middle: Days Four Through Seven

Somewhere around day four, the internal noise got loud. Not auditory noise. Emotional noise. Every unprocessed experience I had been carrying seemed to rise to the surface without invitation. Memories I had not thought about in years arrived with full emotional charge. Arguments I thought I had resolved turned out to still be living in my body. Grief I thought I had moved through was apparently still moving through me.

This is the part that most people want to hear about, and it is also the part that is hardest to describe. When there is nowhere to put your attention externally, it goes inward. And what it finds there is everything you have been too busy, too stimulated, or too afraid to feel.

As someone trained in somatic work, I knew intellectually that the body stores experience. I teach this. I help people with this. But experiencing it at this depth, without any escape hatch, without being able to go for a walk or call a friend or check my phone, was something entirely different. The knowing moved from my head into my bones.

By day six, something shifted. The resistance softened. I stopped trying to manage the experience and started letting it happen. The emotions that had felt overwhelming became something more like weather. They arrived, they were intense, and they passed. Not because I processed them in some therapeutic sense, but because I stopped fighting them.

The Final Days

Days eight through ten were quiet. Not empty quiet. Full quiet. The kind of silence that holds everything. My nervous system, which had been firing on all cylinders for the first week, finally settled into something I can only describe as ground state. Not numb. Not blissful. Just present. Completely, unusually present.

I cried on day nine. Not from sadness. From recognition. I had spent so many years building a body that could perform, that could endure, that could impress, and in ten days of darkness I discovered that the body I actually live in, the one underneath all the performance, was tender and wise and had been waiting for me to stop long enough to listen.

When I finally walked out on day ten, the sunlight was so intense I could barely open my eyes. Everything looked oversaturated, like someone had turned the contrast up to maximum. Colors were almost painfully vivid. And the first thought I had was not relief. It was this: I am going to have to find a way to carry this stillness into a very loud world.

Then Came the Hurricane

The universe apparently has a sense of humor, because within hours of emerging from the most peaceful experience of my life, a hurricane hit the coast of Mexico where I was staying. Flights were cancelled. Roads flooded. I was stranded.

And here is what I can tell you: the stillness held. Not perfectly. Not without moments of frustration and fear. But the ground state I had found in the darkness did not disappear just because the world got chaotic. It was still there underneath the noise, like a note that keeps ringing even when other instruments join in.

That was the real test. Not whether I could find peace in a dark room with no distractions. Anyone with enough time will eventually settle. The test was whether that peace could survive contact with reality. With weather and uncertainty and disrupted plans and the fundamental unpredictability of being alive.

I have done hard things. I have pushed my body to its limits in public, in front of judges, with a world record on the line. But sitting in darkness for ten days and letting my own nervous system show me what it had been carrying was the bravest thing I have ever done. Not because it took courage to enter the room. Because it took courage to stay.