Spring 2010 Issue 53 of Alternatives Magazine

Insights at the Edge - The InnerView with Reggie Ray by Tami Simon

You recently came back from twenty-eight days in a dark retreat. Why don’t you tell people what a dark retreat is.

It’s a retreat that you do after you’ve been meditating a lot because you need a lot of stability, psychological and meditative stability, to do it. And you go into total darkness for periods of time—for a week, say. A month is a long time to be in total darkness. And somebody brings you your food, slips it in, and you have your meals. Other than that there’s nothing to do. There’s no practice. In the type of retreat that I did, all you do is you sit and look into the darkness, and you see what comes up. And what this does, in my experience, is that it removes much of the barrier between the unconscious and the conscious mind.

There’s always a pressure in the unconscious. C.G. Jung, the great psychologist, said the nature of the unconscious is it wants to be conscious. There’s a pressure, and to maintain our egos we’re always sort of pushing things down. What happens in a dark retreat is you’re not doing that anymore. Things begin to come up from the depths. That’s the practice, simple relating to what comes up from the depths, from the darkness. Sometimes it comes from very, very deep places and sometimes it doesn’t.

What happened in these twenty-eight days for you?

In meditation practice in general, we alternate between experiencing a tremendous peace and openness, and then there’s an upsurge of material to work with. That’s the nature of—at least in our tradition—that’s the nature of meditation.