A Beginner’s Guide to Dark Retreat with Andrew Holecek
5/13/202648 min
Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and he leads seminars and retreats on meditation, dream yoga, and death and dying. For the past thirty years, he has been engaging in a form of esoteric practice known as dark retreat. In his new book, Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation, he lays out a comprehensive introduction to the practice of dark retreat and how it can utterly transform our relationship to ourselves and our world. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Holecek to discuss what exactly a dark retreat is, why he views dark retreat as the most transformative practice he’s done, how spending time in darkness can help us recover a lost way of seeing, and what the darkness can teach us about our unconscious mind. Plus, Holecek offers practical guidelines for starting a dark retreat practice at home.
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First 90 secondsAndrew Holecek· Guest0:01
[gentle music] If you look at so many of the words for awakening, these are terms of negation, right? Nirvana, extinction. Nirodha, literally cessation. Nirguna, without attributes. Nirvikalpa, without thought. Non-duality, right? These are all terms of negation. And so what one discovers through this journey of, of, you know, the via negativa, the apophatic way, releasing, negating, letting go, letting go, letting go, that's just a euphemism for dying. That's the dying part. And as you let go, let go, let go, you're dying, dying. And as you're dying, dying, you're dropping, dropping, dropping. And as you're going down, it's, it's, it's healing that's in the wake as you descend. The farther down you go, the more you heal. You heal all these fractured dimensions of your being, all the fractured dimensions of your psyche, 'cause all these aspects are, are brought up in the dark and, and, and you are-- have this extraordinarily precious opportunity to relate to them, to integrate them, to heal them.
James Shaheen· Host1:04
[gentle music] Hello and welcome to TriSchool Talks. I'm James Shaheen, and you just heard Andrew Holecek. Andrew is an author and spiritual teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and he leads seminars and retreats on meditation, dream yoga, and death and dying. In his new book, Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation,