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"Only the heart can see well. The essence is hidden from the eyes." (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
Did you see that or keep your eyes open often signifies knowledge and attention.
People are naturally seeking the light and love to go into an unknown and colorful world
where much much happens when they embark on a journey.
What did you see is equated with what did you experience.
Darkness on the other hand is often understood as blindness
and means fear, loss, sadness.
We are looking at the black side when we are lacking all hope.
White and black are no colors in color theory.
White is the sum of all light and black is its absence.
In mythology as well, white stands for insight and luck
whilst black means the opposite:
it is the non-color, the expression of eternal deprivation and sadness in the underworld.
Naturopath Saskia John sees that in the real sense of the word differently.
In the years 2003 and 2005 she chose total seclusion.
Not traveled far and yet entered a completely different world.
She describes her exciting journey into darkness and absolute silence in her German book "In den Tiefen meiner Seele".
The book is also available in English in a short version titled "Retreat Into Darkness - A Path To Light"
and as a long version under the title "In the Depths of my Soul - Experiences in Complete Darkness" through all common outlets.
As the light went out, it seemed, that something in me gave up fighting.
I surrendered to the darkness - it was like a process of entrusting myself to darkness.
In my book, I am describing all my thoughts, all my feelings, kind of all what really happened in the darkness.
I also give an account of the emotional and intellectual processes, which happened in the ensuing years.
In 2002 I had read an article about dark therapy,
which touched two sides of mine very deeply: an explorer spirit and the call to wake up.
I had the feeling, that in dark therapy I was diving deeper into the levels,
which I already knew from meditation,
and that the unconscious layers rose more intensely into consciousness.
My facilitator came once a day for an hour's debriefing.
The other twenty-three hours I was by myself. That was sometimes hairy, if I may say so,
because it was often a very deep experience at my personal limits.
When I came out of the dark therapy,
the world seemed somehow different to me:
I responded differently to people,
to my surrounding, differently to my children,
to my relationship, differently to clients.
My whole emotionality had changed.
When I had got upset or angry before,
I now noticed more equanimity
and could therefore deal differently with the situation.
Or where I would have burst into tears before, I now noticed more inner calm.
The darkness thus had a very, very deep effect on me and still does today.
I attribute all my feelings - my primal feelings - to my inner child.
This child is anxious to suppress painful feelings,
because it can not deal with them.
It develops a survival and adaptation mechanism to avoid them.
This survival mechanism is very worthwhile in childhood,
because with its help we get by in life, we grow up and we reach adulthood.
The downside is, that we unconsciously take it into adulthood
and behave in certain situations in ways, which we learned in childhood.
As adults we often do not notice that, because our adapted behavior
became so familiar, that it now runs completely unconsciously.
But the contents, which was suppressed in childhood,
now creates difficulties in our adult live.
In the darkness, these suppressed energies and situations resurface in their originality
and I can contact the child energy with my present adult consciousness.
By being looked at from a today's adult perspective of consciousness,
this old child situations can be evaluated anew and differently.
This leads to an aha-effect in which the originally painful feelings can be changed
and transformed through the new understanding and the explanations from the adult perspective.
This is a healing process, which leads me in critical situations
to being less consumed by
old child energies (= old survival mechanisms),
which on their part would make me relate childlike (e. g. recalcitrant or huffy) and loose my equality.
Before I went into darkness, I had established a good contact with my inner child
- with my child energy - in the course of a therapy of several years.
I could apply this process with the inner child well in the dark.
But I can imagine, that people without prior experience
are also able to establish contact with the inner child in the dark.
In both retreats into darkness my fear of death appeared strongly.
If I do not take care of these levels during my lifetime, I will unexpectedly be confronted
with them as I die, because all the support structures that I have built fall away in
the process of dying and the innermost appears, as it does in the dark process.
The more the landscape of the soul is already familiar
and the more the old patterns are already transformed into ease, calm and equanimity,
the more I will be able to die in a different way:
As I live, so I will die. The way to death will be more peaceful than when I panic
and therefore faint and become unconscious.
The darkness greatly helped me to reduce my fear of death,
because I got in contact with the core layer of myself, which I had not touched before.
It can be compared to a snake shedding its skin:
Skin after skin falls away and what appears is the underlying layer in a new light.
And that just feels utterly different.
The retreats into darkness were adventure holidays
and served the integration of injured layers in me. They also had research character,
namely to explore these untouched levels within myself.
The book is available in English in a short version titled
"Retreat Into Darkness - A Path To Light"
and as a long version under the title
"In the Depths of my Soul - Experiences in Complete Darkness"
through all common outlets.