{"id":25645,"date":"2026-05-25T22:16:59","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T04:16:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/?post_type=transcript&p=25645"},"modified":"2026-05-25T22:16:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T04:16:59","slug":"andrew-holecek-stop-drop-and-be-held-in-the-dark","status":"publish","type":"transcript","link":"https:\/\/resources2.soundstrue.com\/transcript\/andrew-holecek-stop-drop-and-be-held-in-the-dark\/","title":{"rendered":"Andrew Holecek: Stop, Drop, and Be Held in the Dark"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"image_print\"Print Transcript<\/span><\/a><\/div>

Producer: <\/b>A quick note before this episode begins. Tami and Andrew Holecek both use eye masks to shut out the light and explore the power of darkness for much of this episode. So you might want to grab your own mask and join them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> In this episode of <\/span>Insights at the Edge<\/span><\/i>, my guest is Andrew Holecek. Andrew is first of all a friend\u2014someone I admire. He’s an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism and other non-dual wisdom traditions who has a terrific gift for making deep and esoteric teachings accessible and practical, including Tibetan Buddhist teachings on the Bardo, the passage between life and death; teachings on Sleep and Dream Yoga\u2014how we can actually do spiritual practice while we’re sleeping; and the practice of dark retreat, full immersion in darkness, which is what we’re going to be talking about today. He’s the author of ten books, including his new Sounds True book, <\/span>Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation<\/span><\/i>. Andrew, welcome.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Tami, such a delight\u2014really. Every time I spend time with you, I just look forward to it so much. Thank you for the opportunity.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> You’ve been a meditator for fifty years. You completed the traditional Tibetan three-year retreat\u2014no easy feat. You’ve explored psychedelics, and yet this is what you write at the beginning of <\/span>Total Eclipse of the Mind<\/span><\/i>: “Nothing compares to my experience of dark retreat. Easily the most transformative practice I’ve ever done.” Okay. Big statement.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Yeah, it’s not hyperbole. I’m not exaggerating. The return on investment\u2014the ROI\u2014with this practice is ridiculous. You can go in for a couple of days, and a number of people have documented this extensively. People go in for two, three, four days and their lives are irrevocably transformed. NBA superstar Rudy Gobert said it quite directly after four days: dark retreat is meditation times a thousand. It’s the most concentrated, intense way to work with one’s mind and heart. And that’s precisely what makes it so transformative\u2014and also so challenging. When you’re in the dark, you can’t really get away from yourself. Every aspect of it is profoundly revelatory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> Let’s start at the beginning for someone who doesn’t really know what dark retreat is\u2014and then talk about how to bring it out of the retreat context and into everyday life.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Sure. Formal dark retreat is when you go to a specially prepared cabin or cave. There aren’t that many, but more are appearing all the time\u2014more cabins than caves, though the caves are quite special. These are rooms that are 100% hermetically sealed\u2014beyond dark, as dark as dark can get\u2014and also extraordinarily quiet. They’re in secluded environments, so it’s this intense sensory deprivation that makes it so transformative.<\/span><\/p>\n

In both Hindu and Tantric Buddhist approaches, they speak of <\/span>pratyahara<\/span><\/i>\u2014sense withdrawal\u2014which is a really critical point in the doctrinal framework for this practice: all the senses are withdrawn, retreated, and in a very real way, reeducated. This is a profound way to quite literally\u2014not metaphorically\u2014learn how to see and sense your world in entirely new ways.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you’re in a retreat, someone checks in with you once or twice a day, depending on the facility. I have to say, when I did my first retreats\u2014almost thirty years ago\u2014I had zero support. There was hardly anything out there at the time. I learned a lot through OJT\u2014on the job training\u2014and made a lot of what I wouldn’t call mistakes, because everything taught me something. But you have this incredibly precious, rare opportunity. There’s a wonderful line: silence is for bumping into yourself. Dark retreat is for slamming into yourself.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which is where most of my training is, dark retreat is considered a wrathful, semi-wrathful form of liberation. Because just like death itself, the darkness is uncompromising and non-negotiable. Eventually, it invites\u2014almost forces\u2014you to open and surrender. And right there, Tami, that’s where the magic comes from. The invitation, the demand, to completely open and relax. In a sense, you go into the dark to die\u2014where letting go is just a euphemism for dying, for death. You’re forced to let go of all your habit patterns: the way you eat, the way you move in the dark, the way you negotiate a completely unfamiliar environment. Some of it can be genuinely funny. But that environment provides a very powerful metaphysical mirror that allows you to see and feel\u2014it’s a highly embodied practice\u2014yourself at levels you’ve never encountered before. That’s what makes it so ironically, fantastically revelatory.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> Can you help me understand the mechanism that’s creating all of these changes? You’re in darkness\u2014true sensory deprivation from any form of light. How does this create such profound change?<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> You’re going right to the heart of it. In geek speak, this is called phenomenology\u2014what is actually taking place. And this is what we’re actively studying. I’m currently working with five universities and research labs. There’s some data on sensory deprivation in flotation tanks, but virtually nothing on extended dark retreat. What we’re discovering is that when you go into the dark, the Tibetans describe what happens with a term I love: <\/span>rang vop<\/span><\/i>, which basically means “self-fall.” Over extended periods\u2014and this may not happen in your first retreat\u2014the mind opens and relaxes to such an extent that it descends into itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

My favorite definition of meditation is: meditation is a situation of openness. What happens in the dark is that you pass an initial threshold\u2014very often people contract defensively at first\u2014but eventually, if they open and relax, the mind descends into itself. As it falls into itself, it’s like an archeological tour through sedimentation layers of the conscious and unconscious mind. You descend from conscious to preconscious to subconscious to unconscious to collective unconscious\u2014this is where the work of Carl Jung and the depth psychologists really comes into play\u2014and then the baton is handed off to the deepest dimensions of what the wisdom traditions call the super-conscious mind, things like the clear light mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

As the mind falls into itself, you start to realize all the ways we constantly distract. The word “distract” literally means to pull apart. In the dark, you can’t distract anymore. There’s nothing to distract into. So the mind retracts, retreats, and returns to what we’re calling in our studies the “reduction base of innate wholeness.” Instead of fracture upon fracture\u2014dismemberment, distraction upon distraction\u2014what happens is remembrance, reintegration. The essence of spiritual practice is remembrance. Plato was onto this, the process of <\/span>anamnesis<\/span><\/i>\u2014recollection.<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine you’re skiing and you break your leg. An orthopedic surgeon puts the two broken pieces into approximation and places them in a holding cast. Through the mere act of cessation, of holding, all the natural restorative healing processes take place. In exactly analogous fashion, by placing your entire being in this kind of holding environment\u2014a cast where you can no longer dismember\u2014you start to remember. That’s where the healing, the integration, and the transformation take place.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is also why you can make a compelling argument that what we call the meta crisis or poly crisis today is the result of one fracture upon the next\u2014relentless dismemberment. And in the dark, in a very direct first-person way, you can see how we’ve become quite broken beings, continuously seduced out of ourselves by the relentless distraction of light.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> What do I need to do\u2014or not do\u2014in the dark for this to work? Someone could go into a dark cabin and thrash on the floor for four days, and that probably isn’t going to be particularly useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Spot on. People do dark retreats for many different reasons. I went in principally\u2014decades ago\u2014to prepare for death in the context of Bardo yoga. To learn how to let go and open. But by far the most important thing to do, Tami, is absolutely nothing. Which is simultaneously the easiest and the hardest thing, because we’re not human beings\u2014we’re human doings. And when you’re in the dark, you can’t really do anything.<\/span><\/p>\n

Meister Eckhart said it beautifully: “The soul does not grow by addition, but by subtraction.” This is a practice of negation, cessation, erasure. Many of the great terms for awakening are actually terms of negation: <\/span>nirvana<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>nirodha<\/span><\/i> (cessation), <\/span>nirvikalpa samadhi<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>non-duality<\/span><\/i>. These are terms of cessation, negation, erasing. The single best thing to do is literally nothing\u2014but the trick is doing it well. That’s the real art. If you’re in there thrashing and resisting, you’ll survive a dark retreat, but you’ll mostly just come out with a bruised ego and a stronger armor. The most important thing is to develop a quality of trust.<\/span><\/p>\n

The darkness is neutral. It’s like a mirror. It isn’t doing anything\u2014it’s providing this extraordinarily precious environment where you can look and feel into yourself at levels never before accessed. So the best thing to do is <\/span>shavasana<\/span><\/i>: corpse pose. Just lie on the floor and do nothing. That’s not easy, but that is the essence of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

There are supplemental practices to fill the space. Many people sleep enormous amounts in the first days\u2014and that’s not a waste of time. It’s profoundly restorative at a physiological level. And it’s a magnificent opportunity to work with nocturnal meditations, liminal dreaming, lucid dreaming, Dream Yoga, and Sleep Yoga. When you’re in the dark, you reallocate perceptual resources. One third of brain volume and two thirds of brain processing power is devoted to vision\u2014the most superficial of all sense faculties, the one that seduces us out into the world of mirror appearance where we’re skimming and scrolling across the surface of life. When that dominant sense faculty goes fully offline, you can reallocate those perceptual resources. You come to your senses by losing your senses. You become much more sensitive to your interiority\u2014what’s called interoception.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Nondual Shaiva tradition of Kashmir Shaivism, there’s beautiful teaching about touch as a form of transmission, touch as a form of knowledge. In the dark, you’re returned from the most dualistic sense\u2014sight\u2014and almost forced into the most intimate of all sense faculties: touch. The literal and metaphorical collapse into one. You get deeper in touch with yourself. You get deeper in touch with reality when you’re no longer being pulled apart into all these surface modalities.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> As I was reading <\/span>Total Eclipse of the Mind<\/span><\/i>, I fell in love with the dark. You romanced me into it. And I pulled out of my closet an eye mask I happened to have\u2014and as we were talking, I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to explore together, to have this conversation in darkness? So we put on our masks for part of this interview. I also want to share: I’ve signed up for a dark retreat. I found a little tiny house just a couple of hours from where I am. My intention in going is to reset my nervous system. Since the pandemic, I have to be honest\u2014my nervous system has been in a kind of overdrive. What do you have to say about dark retreat for that kind of reset?<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Oh my gosh, a hundred percent. With COVID, with everything happening in this meta crisis\u2014the political, pick your poison\u2014I feel not only drawn and quartered but splintered, decentered, fragmented. And what we’re doing right now with the masks is actually spectacular, because when I close my eyes or put on a mask, darkness invites intimacy. It invites interiority. It represents depth, authenticity, and dare I say truth.<\/span><\/p>\n

And here’s something worth reflecting on: you can create light. You cannot create darkness. Darkness is elemental, primordial. You cannot manufacture it or produce it. People are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by it, and I think that ambivalence is interesting. Those who are attracted intuitively know deep in their system that darkness represents the elemental. When I put this mask on, immediately there’s a slowing down, a connection, speaking from depths I don’t always access. Without that, I get speedy, rush to the surface of my identity structure, become superficial in my approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the nervous system reset: putting the mask on, speaking from this space, or going into dark retreat\u2014which does this in a more extended fashion\u2014returns you to the elemental, the primordial. It hits the reset button physiologically, because you tend to sleep deeply in the early days, which is fantastic healing. And then the deeper restorative processes of this descent\u2014waking down into the wisdom of the body, waking down into depth and interiority.<\/span><\/p>\n

One thing worth noting: once you get past just a few millimeters beneath the surface of your skin, it’s pitch black inside your body. Darkness is genesis, creativity, and origin in so many mythological traditions. Darkness precedes light\u2014before the Big Bang, there was this primordial state. We were probably conceived in the dark and spent nine months bathed in it. We return to darkness every night when we fall asleep, and at the end of life. Even the phrase “at the end of the day” points toward what finally matters. And what happens at the end of the day? It gets dark.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> One of the things that attracted me is what you describe as the irreducibility of darkness. I’ve had cautionary notes for myself around exploring psychedelics, but when it comes to darkness, there’s no obstacle\u2014because I’m not putting something in. I’m simply being with something that’s organically there.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Spot on. This is exactly why a number of scientists I’m working with, who also do parallel research on psychedelics, are beyond enthusiastic about this. At the early levels of dark retreat, I make a distinction between what I call sutra-level dark retreat, which is more about self-fulfillment and is <\/span>psycholytic<\/span><\/i> in nature\u2014lysis means to loosen, to soften. This is where all the stuck material loosens and comes to the surface. Trungpa Rinpoche said beautifully, “Meditation isn’t a sedative, it’s a laxative.” Well, dark retreat is meditation times a thousand\u2014which means you’re opening, opening, opening, and things are going to come up.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, at the Tantric level\u2014and this is where it gets genuinely interesting\u2014it’s less about self-fulfillment and more about self-transcendence. It’s more <\/span>psychedelic<\/span><\/i> in the truest sense: mind-manifesting. In the dark, the mind manifests as never before, because there’s nothing else\u2014it’s all been taken away. Dark retreat is absolutely a sober psychedelic. You become the medicine. We have no hard data yet, but we’re confident that after a certain duration in the dark, endogenous DMT is released, which accounts for the more vivid aspects of extended darkness\u2014the lights, the visions.<\/span><\/p>\n

One very powerful parallel to psychedelics: set and setting matter enormously. Having the right environment where you feel safe and contained is essential. And dosage matters. You can absolutely overdose on yourself in the dark. Going in for too long\u2014white-knuckling it for weeks or 49 days\u2014is where people can get into trouble. Titrating the dose, figuring out what’s workable for you, is part of why having a guide is helpful. Understanding why it gets heavy and suffocating in there\u2014and knowing that the pressure isn’t coming from the darkness, but from your own projections\u2014is tremendously helpful.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> Andrew, I’m going to take off my mask for a moment. <\/span>[removes mask]<\/span><\/i> Look how perfect\u2014instant control of the dosage. <\/span>[replaces mask]<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> And this is actually something scholars and scientists are beginning to study\u2014the practice of <\/span>gray retreat<\/span><\/i>, which is exactly what we just did: titrating, dripping the darkness so it never becomes unmanageable. Working out the dosage simply by flipping the light on and off, or taking a mask on and off. So people whose first response is “there’s absolutely no way I can do this” can approach it this way: closing your eyes is a microdose. Every time you put the mask on is a microdose. Everybody who has eyelids can do dark retreat.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is how an otherwise wildly esoteric practice can be brought to home use and to scale. And to me, this is incredibly exciting, because we live in the Kali Yuga\u2014the dark age. And you can make a very powerful case that one of the generative drivers of the dark age is artificial light.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> Say a little more about that\u2014I think people will want to understand it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Of course, we couldn’t operate without light. Blind people would contest otherwise, and we absolutely need it\u2014photosynthesis, half the day is light. I’m not saying get rid of the light. I’m saying put it into balance. The Greeks offer a useful framework here. From Heraclitus\u2014the philosopher of flow, who said “you can’t step into the same river twice”\u2014comes a beautiful term: <\/span>enantiodromia<\/span><\/i>, spelled E-N-A-N-T-I-O-D-R-O-M-I-A. It literally means “running into the opposite.” You’ll find this principle in Taoism as well, in the yin\/yang: if you take something to its extreme, it flips into its opposite.<\/span><\/p>\n

When you’re in the dark for an extended period, the past closes in on you, the future closes in on you, the walls seem to close in. It feels like you’re being crushed. And what I’ve discovered\u2014and this is just remarkable within the context of enantiodromia\u2014is that when the mind is forced so completely into the present moment, it flips into unbelievable openness. The tomb turns into a womb. A womb with no view, or as I like to say, a womb with the best view of who you really are.<\/span><\/p>\n

The darkness closes in, withdrawing and withdrawing, to such an extent that eventually it blows you wide open. And when you come out, you have no idea until you emerge just how open you got\u2014or just how contracted you normally are. In the dark, everything dilates. Not just your eyes\u2014your mind dilates, your heart dilates, your body dilates. When I come out of extended retreats, I sometimes feel I should be quarantined, because my heart is so open I’ll tell people I barely know “I love you”\u2014and it kind of startles them. But I can’t help it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Look below any experience of unconditional love\u2014not conditional love, but true unconditional love. What are you going to find? Openness. You can practice love by practicing openness. And as my friend Chris Wallace says so beautifully: there is no darkness within\u2014there is just light unseen. You go into the dark so deeply, it flips into profound light.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> I want to pick up on something you write about in <\/span>Total Eclipse of the Mind<\/span><\/i>\u2014working through the spiders and snakes, as you called them. I talk to a lot of people who wake up at 3 AM in some kind of panic. Can dark retreat teach us how to work with panic and terror when it comes upon us?<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> My gosh, yes. Let me actually guide us through this\u2014it’s something I do every single day. If you don’t have a mask, just close your eyes. Let’s do this together.<\/span><\/p>\n

Take a nice deep breath.<\/span><\/p>\n

Put your hand over your heart.<\/span><\/p>\n

And allow yourself to feel.<\/span><\/p>\n

You mentioned “working through it”\u2014going through it. I want to amend that slightly: go <\/span>into<\/span><\/i> it. That’s exactly what darkness invites. Whatever you’re feeling right now\u2014the invitation is to feel it, make contact with it, touch it as fully as you possibly can.<\/span><\/p>\n

The practice: feel into it, but don’t feed it. Feel it, but don’t feed it. You know you are feeding it when you start riffing on it\u2014that’s what keeps you up at 3 AM, that’s what turns a sensation into a full panic attack. You’re feeding the underlying sensation.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you give yourself permission to feel it as fully as you can, this radically changes the entire structure of the experience. Trungpa Rinpoche said so beautifully: “There is no way out. The magic is to discover that there is a way in.” Dark retreat is the way in. This practice is the way in.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hold to your experience\u2014just like the holding environment of the dark. Notice how we break away. That gesture of distraction\u2014pulling apart\u2014is our default when things become difficult. And right in that moment of distraction, we transform simple unwanted experience into complex suffering. You can deconstruct your suffering by returning to the fundamental unwanted sensation. Hold it\u2014don’t grasp, but hold it in the cradle of kindness, without judgment.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is how you can resolve even the deepest underlying traumas, because trauma is nothing more than chronic contraction. And when those contractions come up and you hold them\u2014in the essence of the Sanskrit word <\/span>dharma<\/span><\/i>, which literally means “to hold”\u2014you hold to heal.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stop, cease, don’t move away. Hold in that sense, and then hold as in contain, relate. Eventually you’ll discover: hold it to heal it.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is how you resolve any unwanted experience, even intractable chronic contractions from trauma. Everything I’m describing comes up in the dark\u2014whether it’s the panic at 3 AM or the challenges of dark retreat itself. When we keep running from these experiences, we never process them. We never get through them. Stop, drop into the wisdom of the body, which knows exactly what to do.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> Andrew, as we move through the unwanted experience and the mind begins to relax, you mentioned encountering deeper levels\u2014something like who we really are. Was there a moment in dark retreat that was an initial recognition, a genuine aha?<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So when you start to relax and open\u2014when you’ve dropped through what I call the refuse heap of the upper dimensions of the unconscious mind, through the spiders and snakes\u2014you’re dropping deeper into more fundamental dimensions. And as Rumi put it so beautifully, into “wider, wider rings of being.” You’re getting down into deeper, more fundamental truths.<\/span><\/p>\n

My languaging: darkness is the color of non-duality. It’s a duality-decimating practice. Fundamentally, darkness will take you all the way to the groundless ground of non-duality. That’s the fruition of this practice. But as you work your way down and open, you’ll pass through what I described as archeological sedimentation layers\u2014the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious. Whether you use Jungian terms\u2014archetypes, shadow\u2014or the eastern and western traditions’ language of gods and deities, this is where you meet them. These are the most fundamental dimensions before you dissolve into the full openness of the non-dual space.<\/span><\/p>\n

The aha moment you asked for: I dedicated this book to <\/span>Prajnaparamita<\/span><\/i>\u2014the feminine archetype of emptiness\u2014and also to Hermes-Mercurius, the Greco-Roman deity who ferries between the gods and the mortals, carrying information, carrying insight. What happened to me in the dark retreat that broke this book loose is that Hermes-Mercurius wrote this book, not me. When one opens to such an extent, primordial creative forces start to flow through you. More and more creative people\u2014writers, musicians, poets\u2014are going into the dark because they’re realizing this extraordinary capacity to tap into tremendously creative sources. When you return to the original, to the reduction base, originality and creativity are a natural part of what’s revealed.<\/span><\/p>\n

And beyond creativity: as the mind opens further, not only does day and night break down, not only do waking and dreaming break down, not only do inside and outside break down\u2014but eventually the very sense of self and other breaks down. Because these are all constructs. When you go into the dark, they are unmade, deconstructed. You drop below the very dimension of space, time, and causality. This is where the shamans enter into the world of the mystics. Visions of the future can arise; when I wrote this book, I had a very clear vision of precisely what would happen with its release. And so you can see why darkness is, for me without question, the single most powerful way to drop all the way down into the reduction base.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> [removes mask]<\/span><\/i> I feel an explosion\u2014a boundless explosion of light\u2014extremely vibrant and stimulating.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Oh my God, you just hit it. This is one of the most beautiful aspects of this practice: as the mind opens and opens and softens, your eyes dilate, your mind dilates, your heart dilates, your body dilates\u2014and what is a natural consequence of this opening? Love. This is how you fall in love with your world. When you stop contracting against it and surrender and open, love is the natural consequence. I sometimes feel I should be quarantined when I come out of retreat because my heart is so open. You can’t help but express that level of openness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Look below any experience of unconditional love\u2014not conditional love, but genuine unconditional love. What are you going to find? Openness. You can practice love by practicing openness. You noticed this in twenty minutes of wearing a mask. Imagine doing this for an afternoon. Imagine doing this for a couple of days. This is what Joanna Macy describes so beautifully as falling in love with the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> And it’s so interesting\u2014and I’m glad we demonstrated it\u2014you can do this right in the midst of your life. Andrew, in your basement, you’ve built a dark room where you can go for several hours. I want to ask about the difference between eyes open in the dark versus just shutting your eyes\u2014what’s happening neurologically?<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Such a sensitive question. We’ve explored this with dark retreat centers and guides. We’ve discovered that about 90% of people\u2014we’re still collecting the data\u2014contract at first when they enter the dark. Flight, fight, or freeze response. It’s so unfamiliar, so unknown. And most people, when they first go into the dark, keep their eyes closed because it normalizes the experience.<\/span><\/p>\n

But when you’re in the dark with your eyes open\u2014which is why masks that allow you to open your eyes underneath are so important\u2014it’s a different story. Now you’re relating to a genuine restructuring of your sensory capacities. You’re literally boycotting your sense faculty of vision. And that distinction\u2014eyes closed versus eyes open in the dark\u2014is significant. One-third of brain volume and two-thirds of brain processing power is devoted to vision. When that sense faculty is completely taken offline even at a neurological level, you can reallocate all those perceptual resources.<\/span><\/p>\n

So practicing with your eyes open underneath a mask is helpful. Stepping into a dark space\u2014even a simple, low-cost dark room, like the one I built in about five minutes\u2014gives you direct access to this. And I’ll say this about the dark: you cannot have a bad hair day. Appearances don’t matter. This is the ultimate democratizing agent. It doesn’t matter if you have the wealth of Bezos or Musk, or you’re a dictator, a king, or a beggar, or you’re struggling with body image. This is why so many women come out of the dark with tears in their eyes saying, “I’ve never felt so safe, so held, so loved in my life. I could finally drop my guard and just be myself. I knew nobody was looking at me. I could finally relax.” Think about what this could mean for people dealing with body dysmorphia or struggling with aging\u2014people who have consolidated their entire identity around their physical appearance. In the dark, that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is the only thing you’ve ever really had: your beautiful mind and your good heart.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> As we’re completing our debrief\u2014masks off\u2014I mentioned the word <\/span>dharma<\/span><\/i> and its connection to holding, which I’d never understood that way before this conversation. I’ve found that working through traumatic experience has a lot to do with finding a holding space and relaxing into it. The fact that darkness is a holding space\u2014can you say more?<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> It just sends chills down my back. The darkness is incredibly nurturing. I’m riffing these days on what I would call repatriation\u2014returning to the feminine. In the wisdom traditions, light is masculine and darkness is feminine. Too much light results in the pathologies of patriarchy, the dominance of consciousness itself. The unconscious mind is feminine. Darkness is feminine. And so going into the dark, using the principles of enantiodromia, we’re balancing a runaway patriarchal expression\u2014getting lost and blinded by the light. At these levels, light doesn’t reveal; light conceals. When you go into the dark, you’re returning to the divine feminine. Emptiness is feminine. Darkness is feminine. You’re repatriating, returning home.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is why dark retreat centers that are actual caves within the earth are so magnificent. You’re balancing a fundamental equation. When you first go into the dark, it can feel crushing\u2014but that crushing weight isn’t coming from the darkness. It’s coming from your projections. All the weight you feel in the dark is directly proportional to everything you’ve projected onto it. And so as you’re in there and feeling all of that, what you’re really meeting is the weight of your projections. As you start to clean them up\u2014as you own them\u2014the darkness literally gets lighter. It frees up, it lightens. That’s one way you know you’re progressing.<\/span><\/p>\n

And once you can trust and surrender into this basic holding environment\u2014once you experience the goodness of the darkness\u2014the dark provides this incredible embryonic environment. I dedicated this book to <\/span>Prajnaparamita<\/span><\/i>, the Mother of All the Buddhas. She holds you in the dark. And when you’re held in this loving way, what do you do? You trust, you surrender, you relax. And right there, in that gesture, all the benefits arise.<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s a beautiful line from Trungpa Rinpoche: “We lose the essence in the display.” There’s too much display. We get lost in the light. We get pulled out, distracted. When you go into the dark, the display is reduced to near ground zero\u2014just as it is when we sleep, just as it is when we die. When the display is reduced to ground zero, you can recapture, recognize, re-recognize the essence of who you really are.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then what do you do? You come back\u2014just like we did when we took our masks off. You come back into the light, into speech, into form, into action. But you carry the memory of this darkness, this depth, this interiority with you. And so every word comes from this depth. Every gesture comes from this depth. Every action comes from this depth. And therefore this is how you bring, in post-retreat life, authenticity\u2014and dare I say, love\u2014into everything you do.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> Andrew Holecek\u2014we’ve been talking about dark retreat and his new book, <\/span>Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation<\/span><\/i>. Andrew, I had so much fun with you. Thank you.<\/span><\/p>\n

Andrew Holecek:<\/b> Such a delight. Thank you so much for the opportunity\u2014always so much fun to talk with you. Have the best possible time when you enter your own retreat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tami Simon:<\/b> I will remember that. Thanks, friends.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":{"_expiration-date-status":"","_expiration-date":0,"_expiration-date-type":"","_expiration-date-categories":[],"_expiration-date-options":[]},"class_list":["post-25645","transcript","type-transcript","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nAndrew Holecek: Stop, Drop, and Be Held in the Dark | Sounds True<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Andrew Holecek: Stop, Drop, and Be Held in the Dark | Sounds True\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Producer: A quick note before this episode begins. Tami and Andrew Holecek both use eye masks to shut out the light and explore the power of darkness for much of this episode. 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