Tony Stratford Oct 5, 2019 · Medium.com
Today we have a smorgasbord of spiritual teachings and psychedelic experiences for us to choose from. We have Burning Man and similar festivals all over the planet. Celebrities like Joe Rogan and Graham Hancock promote participating in ayahuasca ceremonies. Terence McKenna was an exponent of ingesting mushrooms and smoking marijuana to achieve his insights. Microdosing LSD is becoming trendy to help with performance enhancement and creativity. Opinion is polarised on reality perception altering drugs due to all types of personal beliefs. The legal system in the western world is draconian at best when dealing with this issue.
What we call normal reality, working, paying bills, traffic, etc. etc. can seem so mundane that it seems logical that we should seek something more supernatural from life. Personally I have nothing against taking substances to expand and alter our perceptions of reality. But is there a better and more empowering way to have these experiences? Without traveling for miles to an event or buying substances that you really have no idea how they are made. I eventually stumbled across how our own bodies can create chemical changes naturally that open you up to amazing insights.
Ladies and gentlemen I present to you: The Darkroom Retreat!
This has been a practice done by humans for thousands of years across all cultures and geographies. It is one of the reasons hermits lived in caves. Unlike the temporary spiritual adventures listed above this experience will stay with you for a lifetime and alter you view of reality forever.
The science : absence of light and how it affects the body
By immersing yourself in a totally dark environment your body undergoes chemical changes naturally. Basically your normal melatonin production regulated by the pineal gland is altered. This gland creates melatonin in the dark while you sleep at night then stops producing melatonin as the natural light of day wakes you up in the morning. However if you stay constantly in a dark environment over a few days your bloodstream is already adequately supplied with melatonin. The pineal gland recognises this feedback and switches its production process from melatonin to DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT or N,N-DMT) is a chemical substance that occurs in many plants and animals and which is both a derivative and a structural analog of tryptamine).
DMT was made popular by author Rick Strassman and is also the reason people flock to South America to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies.
Why Darkroom retreat is superior to directly ingesting DMT
Strassman’s subjects were injected with pharmaceutical grade dmt and experienced rapid changes in their reality often causing a shock to the subject. Ayahuasca participants often feel very ill, resulting in vomiting and sudden bowel movements. Strassman himself was counselled by spiritually adept Buddhist monks who told him subjecting people to these altered states was not a good idea. With a darkroom retreat your body naturally already knows what to do so there is no sudden shock to the system.
The downside of a Darkroom retreat: Time
In todays fast paced beta brainwave world we have become accustomed to a quick results feedback world. The people of ancient times had the opposite type of lifestyle. To achieve natural DMT production in the body takes around 5 days to fully take affect and to really benefit from the process you need about 12 days of immersion in darkness. To our over stimulated chattering brains this is a nightmare.
My personal Darkroom Retreat:
Now some scientists may dispute the chemical changes caused by the pineal gland so there really is only one way to know if its all true — do it yourself!
Due to my spiritual immaturity and history of quick fix weekend workshops my conscious awareness had absolutely no idea on what it was in for. I booked 3 weeks off from work, card-boarded the windows out in a room of my house and informed my wife and 2 daughters of my plans for the next 2 weeks. Off course my family thought I was crazy and rightly so, they had seen me heading off to various retreats for years and this was just another one of those events. Only this time it was happening at home.
Days 1–3 Blindfolded in a Dark room
Being blindfolded meant I had to adjust to eating, washing and going to the bathroom. Boredom is the first hurdle to overcome. For my family it was like living with a blind person. When the kids went off to school and my wife to work I just sat in silence all day.
Days 4–6 Body detox and the loss of time
The concept of time disappeared other than the noises my family made. This was also when the detox started and I was totally unprepared for this. It felt like I had a fever and I lay in bed shivering with hot and cold sweats. Intuitively it felt like part of the initiation into the process my body and mind were entering. We use our eyes constantly whilst awake and out bodies become so rhythmically attuned to day/night cycles. When this process is interrupted your whole state of awareness changes. My appetite dropped and I only felt like having vegetable soup most of the time.
Days 7–10
The fever passed and I felt wonderful. This is when the magic truly began to happen! Lucid dreaming is off the charts and I don’t just mean dream recall and lucidity. Its the colours and vibrancy that truly amaze you. The statement ‘the kingdom is within’ is spot on here. You do a lot of traveling ‘out of body’ but it occurs within yourself so it more of inner world traveling whilst still connected to the body. Almost like being on a water slide only you are in a wormhole within yourself. While awake your inner vision seems to be streaming geometric shapes constantly.
Days 11–17 The deep dive
Now I had only planned to do this very weird experiment for 12 days. I had already told close friends and family I would ‘see them’ within 2 weeks before starting this journey. Well that all changed when my inner awareness became my primary focus. Now I understand why the Daoist monks would undergo this process for 30–40 days. Once you ‘switch over’ from outer awareness to inner awareness you realise that your previous view of reality was so limited. It’s very difficult to describe unless you experience it yourself and also why it’s so superior to the short term experience of dmt via ayahuasca or other methods.
The Unified Field
Once your awareness is primarily an inner perspective your viewpoint changes. During the latter stages of my retreat I became acutely aware every time somebody thought about me, even people I did not deal with much in everyday life. For example, a person in my town wanted me to help fix their laptop which I saw in a dream days before I finished my retreat. Sure enough they phoned me asking for help a few days later. We truly are all connected in a unified field.
Increased connection from your spirit guides
Your guides are really higher conscious aspects of yourself, not separate beings, its all you. My ‘guides’ would often communicate with me via music or songs. The one song that impacted me the most was a few lines from Elton John’s ‘Yellow brick Road’ it goes:
‘When are you gonna come down?
When are you going to land?
I should have stayed on the farm
I should have listened to my old man
You know you can’t hold me forever
I didn’t sign up with you
I’m not a present for your friends to open
This boy’s too young to be singing the blues
In short, I was becoming too detached from reality, once again using spirituality as escapism. I was also so mentally enamoured with the experiences I was having that I was not heart centered. I was like a kid at an amusement park. The very issues that the Buddhist monks tried to warn Rick Strassman about when doing his experiments. It was time for me to finish this experiment and get back to my daily responsibilities.
Finishing the Darkroom Retreat
I removed my blindfold in the morning after waking up. As my eyes had not been used for 17 days I nearly walked into the bedroom door, not ‘seeing’ it until I was inches from it. My daughters thought I actually looked younger, my eyes had just had a nice holiday too. Then I went outside into the nature park across the road and was just in awe of what nature expresses for us to enjoy. It was truly humbling. It took me a few days to adjust to normal life again but the experiences altered me forever. I highly recommend this for everyone to try, you can attend professional retreat centers that will cater to your every need or, with a little help, do it yourself at home. All mind altering substances produced by your own body and no laws broken in the process!