Short Notes
Darkroom retreating provides the conditions in which the organism restores one’s capacity for both self-care and its benefits. This is recapacitation. The intensity of a retreat mostly fades, but restored capacity remains. A broken leg, once healed, doesn’t spontaneously become broken again.
Restored capacity varies with an individual:
– in their familiarity with darkness
– in their ability to truly rest
– in their ability to trust their self-healing organism
– with the length of retreat.
The full application of hygienic darkroom retreating consists of doing retreats of increasing length, alternated with periods of radical change in lifeway, until health is fully restored.
Withseveral medium-length retreats, this is what you can expect:
– recovery from injury and illness
– healing from disease
– tissue regeneration
– return of sanity, energy, joy
– restoration of youth
Extracts from Andrew Durham’s book, hygienic darkroom retreat.
Protocol
How to be and what to do once in darkness is simple. It’s a lot like having a guest. Provide what is necessary for function and comfort, then stay out of the way.
Darkroom retreating is like the rest of hygiene. Practice consistently follows theory. In hygiene, our purpose is to serve life. Life’s needs are our priorities.
We need profound rest to recover from exhaustion or injury. This makes our task in darkness simple and clear: maintain the conditions of rest. This frees the autonomic self to return the whole being to health and function as quickly as possible. The autonomic self does most of the work and all the complicated parts. It indicates to the volitional self the simple ways to help.
Darkroom retreating is nothing less than recovery of the lost self. In darkness, you will begin to reunite with yourself. It’s as if a peg-legged sailor were to awaken one day to find his leg had started to grow back. The more you com back to ourself happens, the more you become your own guide. This chapter helps you navigate your first retreats. It is a map, a reference, if you or your supporters get lost.
The final authority in hygiene is life itself. Consider these notes from the field and an invitation to explore an idea whose time has come.
Besides sleeping as much as possible, eating, eliminating, and bathing, what does one do in darkness without work, people, or media? Light exercise and restful placement of attention. I explain more about the latter in protocol > attention.
attention
What do you do in a retreat?
Consciously, you rest.
But how, exactly? Half the time, you’re lying around awake with nothing to do. You could get restless.
Unconsciously, you are busy healing. Consciously, you focus attention in restful places. I know of 4:
* externally on environment. A well-built and operated darkroom minimizes this. conscious phenomena, for a few minutes at a time
* mentally on thoughts, above and behind the head
emotionally on feelings, usually in the chest
physically on sensations, throughout the body, centered in the gut
* visually on darkness, in front of the eyes, for 5-10 minutes at a time
* palpably and audibly on semi-voluntary bodily rhythms, for hours at a time:
on breathing, in the belly
on the pulse, anywhere and eventually in the heart
on swallowing
on blinking
These are all suitable places for attention. It just depends on what resting requires in any given moment. For example, if you need to think about something, avoiding it will be agitating, not restful. Remember the purpose of rest, and you will learn when, where, and how to move your attention.
We have no choice about having attention. We only have a choice about where to place it. The capacity to place attention varies moment to moment. We will recover this capacity, too. Meanwhile, attention sometimes wanders like an untethered goat. Sometimes it dashes off madly. Sometimes it gently returns for direction.
Don’t fight the goat of attention. Be at peace with it. It is an injured animal that must remain free to heal. When it wanders, track and observe it. When it dashes off uncontrollably, hang on for dear life. If it rampages, cover your head and endure it. Or sieze it if you are sure you must.
On leaving the darkroom after 64-hrs (continuous darkness)
Slowly re-adjust to light. You did not just watch a matinee in a dark cinema, but spent days in total darkness. Sudden exposure to daylight would be a painful and unnecessary shock. Spend a minimum of 15 minutes gradually relighting the room by opening the door a little at a time.
Profound Rest Retreat 