What Dark Retreat Offers (Andrew Holocek)

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Andrew Holocek is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other wisdom traditions. He’s a profound teacher and his new book feels quite revelatory; it’s called Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation.

Andrew has been meditating for about 50 years and doing dark practice for about 30. As I tell him at the start of our conversation, I’m a terrible meditator, but I’m obsessed with darkness.

Today, Andrew explains how he uses darkness as a tool for essentially living a life of greater clarity, depth, and meaning. He explains a bit of the ancient tradition of dark therapy, and the nuts and bolts of how to dip your toe into dark practice at home, starting with just…closing your eyes for a moment. If the idea of being in the dark freaks you out, Andrew also gets that, and I think you’ll find his perspective on fear interesting, and even soothing.

Andrew also puts into context why more people have started turning to dark practice and dark therapy, which I found really resonant. As he explains, we’re living in a pretty light-addicted age, with a lot of masculine energy, and we’re all a bit addicted to light. But we’re also getting kinda blinded and lost in the light. And, perhaps, darkness is offering us a way to swing the pendulum back, and to see and feel things that we haven’t before.