14 Days of Darkness Retreat + First 7 Days Fasting

[Katerina Riverside]

Hello everybody,

this is my first post on Leo's forum, exciting.

12 days ago I have returned from a solo dark room retreat I have booked in Belgium (Gent). The experience itself was not that intense as I have expected in terms of hallucinations but what is now happening in my life is just mind-blowing. I am breaking off the chains of old patterns, observing triggers, emotions, zooming above everything. It has never been so "easy" to do it like it is now. But it puts me on a slippery slope, balancing between sanity and insanity. The emotional waves and shadows being processed now are really overwhelming.

While exporting and uploading my full testimony video (see below) I played Leo's last video on my phone (Content vs Structure). Leo started with "Let's jump right into it"... just like me in the uploading video. "Haha, nice" I thought. Then Leo was talking about content vs structure I realized that last 12 days I was not doing anything else than analyzing content vs structure of my shadows and emotions and what it is doing to me. "Well, this starts to be interesting" I thought. After that I have remembered that Leo's uploads about fear has come just before my retreat. And fear of the unknown and fear of being affraid was a huuuuuuge topic for me before I went to the Darkness. "Mind-blown", I thought. Thanks for the sync, Leo. It is just so fulfilling to follow you while you can highlight my current state and help me out. What an elevation. This is just too crazy for words.

If you are interested in watching / listening to my testimony, please remember... I speak slowly, I am still slowed down. I have just been back to the womb, and to the grave, I am reborn and emotional, speaking subjectively and taking my time. I am, shaky, tired and less enthousiastic than normally and than I would want to. Feel free to skip some parts.

And also feel free to ask some questions.

My full testimony:

With love,

Katie

[allislove]

Hi Katie. 

Welcome to the forum!

It's interesting how everything is interconnected. I started to do shrooms a few months ago and I already visited your YouTube channel while surfing YouTube on shrooms topic. Imagine, I read your post, then open the video, then see the channel and.. booom, I already have been here before, surprise. 

Anyway, I wish you a beautiful journey and one more time, welcome. 

[Katerina Riverside]

8 hours ago, dimitri said:

Hi Katie. 

Welcome to the forum!

It's interesting how everything is interconnected. I started to do shrooms a few months ago and I already visited your YouTube channel while surfing YouTube on shrooms topic. Imagine, I read your post, then open the video, then see the channel and.. booom, I already have been here before, surprise. 

Anyway, I wish you a beautiful journey and one more time, welcome. 

Hi Dimitri, thank you for your kind and welcoming words. It means a lot for me.   Success with cultivating these little miracles.

[Nak Khid]

thanks for sharing this video, you are tough to be able to finish it. I have listened to much of it.

I wonder if you hadn't fasted how it would have been different

here is another darkness retreat account

https://hridaya-yoga.com/reflections-on-a-40-day-dark-retreat/

Reflections on a 40-Day Dark Retreat

by Kali Aney

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Also

 

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/11/the-caves-of-forgotten-time/414894/

The Caves of Forgotten Time

Two spelunkers lost track of entire weeks as part of an experiment on the effects of isolation.

When Josie Laures came out of her cave on March 12, 1965, she thought it was February 25. A few days before Antoine Senni came out of his cave, on April 5 that same year, he thought it was February 4.

The two cave explorers emerged from their holes in the French Alps, near Nice, 50 years ago.  Each of them set the then-world record for time spent alone in a cave—Laures set the female record at 88 days, and Senni the male record at 126 days—as part of an experiment to see what the effects of extreme isolation and loneliness would be on their bodies and minds.

While in their caves, which were separate but just a few hundred yards apart from each other, Laures and Senni kept in touch with researchers at a control point, who tracked their sleeping and eating habits, as well as memory and vital signs. The researchers did not, however, give Laures or Senni any clues about how time was passing up on the surface. By the time they emerged, wearing dark goggles to spare their cave-accustomed eyes from the sunlight reflecting on the alpine snow, they had lost weeks of time, by their own reckoning.

In chronobiology, the study of biological rhythms and how they relate to the environment, the German word zeitgeber means “synchronizer.” Natural light is the best-known, though not the only, zeitgeber that syncs human sleep patterns up with the Earth’s 24-hour day. Absent any cues from sunlight or even from clocks, Laures’s and Senni’s sleep schedules got wacky—sometimes without them realizing it. A Chicago Tribune article titled “Sleepy Caveman Calls it Quits” proclaims Senni “a great sleeper, sometimes nodding off for 30 hours at a time and waking up believing he had simply had a short nap.” (In years since, researchers have found that people often slip into 48-hour sleep cycles when isolated from the environment.)

This being the era of the space race, and just a few years after President Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the subjects, researchers, and NASA alike saw the cave jaunt as a window in to what astronauts might experience on long, lonely space missions.

The experience was definitely trying. Upon her exit, Laures told the Associated Press:

I am so happy to have lasted it out, that I have forgotten everything. I can tell you though that it became very difficult toward the end and I felt terribly worn out … At the start of my stay I read, and then I lost the desire. I didn't suffer from the cold. I was well heated in my little tent. My tape recorder refused to work the first few days, but later I managed to repair it and I listened to music. Outside of that I knitted, and knitted some more, and looked forward to the time when I would finally see the sun.

But aside from that, the many old AP and Reuters articles I read about Senni and Laures didn’t say much about their physical and mental states post-emergence. Senni was apparently pronounced “in very good physical shape” by someone at the control point. And Michel Siffre, the speleologist who oversaw the experiment, told the AP that Laures was “in perfect health” after her stay, according to the hospital tests, though he noted that she had some temporary color-blindness, and trouble getting back to a normal sleep pattern, which does not sound perfect to me.

Later studies on isolation have found not only effects on sleep cycles but anxiety, hallucinations, and a decline in mental performance. These were sensory deprivation studies, though, and at least in the caves, the subjects were welcome to read or knit or listen to music.

Siffre’s isolation studies, of which Laures’s and Senni’s was but one, drew criticism as well as admiration.

“Some people think he is a bad boy,” the chronobiologist Franz Halberg told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “But Siffre does what nobody else will do. He has, by far, the longest records of people in isolation. Others who have studied similar situations have done it for weeks; he has done it for months.”

Siffre also experimented on himself. In 1962, a couple years before Laures and Senni descended into their own stalagmite-studded holes, Siffre spent two months in a glacial cave in the Alps. Ten years later, in 1972, he did an even longer stint—six months in a cave near Del Rio, Texas.

“Physically it was not tiring, but mentally it was hell,” Siffre told the German magazine Der Spiegel, in 2014.

Siffre was so lonely in the Texas cave that he attempted to catch a mouse to keep as a pet. According to Der Spiegel, he spread jam on the floor of the cave, and while the mouse was licking it, brought a dish down over it to trap it. But he aimed poorly, and when he lifted the dish, the mouse had been crushed to death by the dish’s edge. “Desolation overwhelms me,” he reportedly wrote in his diary.

Laures, too, turned to rodents for friendship during her time in the cave, but with happier results. “A white mouse was her sole companion during the three-month ordeal,” the AP reported. “It came through the experiment in good shape.”

 

Edited November 13, 2019 by Nak Khid

[Katerina Riverside]

9 hours ago, Nak Khid said:

I wonder if you hadn't fasted how it would have been different

Indeed, I was wondering the same. I intended to fast the whole 2 weeks but it was waaaaaay too hard. I felt that at the beginning of my retreat my body got into a kind of shock. Sweating, adapting, wondering wtf is happening. And fasting made me retreat even more towards the inside of me.

How I see it now: it was a pure brilliance of what was manifested for me and how the synchronicities were. I was able to experience 2x7 days with different experiences (I thought that I was on day 12 when I asked for food ). I am still like WOW.

Thanks for sharing the sources above.

Greetings, Kate

[Amihai]

Hi Katie -

Its my first  hearing about dark retreat. When I was younger I did few hours here and there, since I have found it intriguing. But seriously who cares about me...

You are just so amazing, wooof!!! I loved every moment of this video, and I'm not a "long term testemonials relationship dude", and your testimony was VERY long.

I'll start by quoting you saying 2020 is going to be a special year...well girl, hell yes! 

I loved it so much, I laughed with you as you laughed, I cried with you as you cried, I held you in the darkness when you felt alone. Thank you for sharing and making me feel this way, thank you for taking the ride.

I feel that from this video (of which I have no idea how ling it took), I have learned so much. You are so crazy smart, and deep with so much detailed information, wow.

So many things you said, I find in my life, my past experience and people that are around me like my wife, my kids, my job, my journey...shit everything.

You are such an inspirational person, I just fell in love with you instantly, and as I heard more, it got better and better.

At some point I was getting into a meditative state, being of the observer seeing reality as a movie, screening the mobile I was looking at, while you where wrapped up with talking about being board at the last few days, I was starting to alter state.

I want to thank you, bow to your wisdom, ask you to post more, and share. You are just perfect, perfect as you are and more.

Please thank your family for allowing you to go, they are the best.

Love you!!!