UPCOMING COURSE
The Primordial Spaces of the Body
This course examines the relationship between embodied experience and dark retreat, the practice of prolonged immersion in total darkness. In the tantric view, the inner body is a space of wisdom that offers direct access to primordial knowing, or gnosis. From the perspective of somatic meditation, the body is also the space where our felt experience of self-grasping, suffering, and release takes place.
Darkness serves as the incubating space for this work, a womb of wisdom and compassion that facilitates both a gradual unfolding of personal psychological processes and an opportunity to directly experience timeless embodiment at every instant. As the great Indian yogi Tilopa sang, "Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places… I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body."
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Dark Retreat Instructors
Seven practitioners who know the mechanics of genuine rest, from contemplative practice to nervous system regulation.
Andrew Holocek
Vajrayana Buddhism
Andrew Holecek is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions. His work involves studies on dream yoga and the practice of dark retreat. He has completed the Tibetan Buddhist three-year retreat and is a frequent subject in scientific studies on meditation and lucid dreaming.
Lama Karma Justin Wall
Vajrayana Buddhism
Teaches Mahamudra and Dzogchen meditation, making esoteric practices accessible without dilution. Lama Karma has completed two three-year retreats at Kagyu Thubten Choling Monastery under Lama Norlha Rinpoche, and extensive periods of dark retreat. He is the spiritual director of the Milarepa Retreat Center in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. He is also the lead designer and facilitator for aNUma , a company bringing sacred group experiences in virtual reality to persons with terminal illness.
During each class, we will use methods such as breathwork, awareness yogas, and deep interoceptive attention to settle the body and awaken unconscious areas that hold not only tension, but also information about ourselves. We will explore three regions in particular: Belly Space, Heart Space, and Head Space.
Each of these spaces offers equal opportunity to access primordial wisdom, while paradoxically maintaining its own unique character and process of unfolding. Importantly, each space also provides insight into our personal and collective conditioning, including how aspects of trauma, emotional grasping, and compulsive conceptuality have inscribed themselves into our body-mind and obscured its underlying clarity, bliss, and openness.
Through the safe container of darkness, we can attend to these spaces with compassion and intelligence, and shed layers of baggage, all the while recognizing the immediacy of embodied wisdom.
VIP Mentorship Container
For practitioners ready for close guidance and tailored refinement. This is a high-contact container for those who wish to stabilize visualization practice, fine-tune energetic posture, or garner personal feedback and nuanced pacing. 4 seats available
Includes everything in Practitioner, plus:
2 × private 60-minute mentorship sessions
Personalized session notes, reflections, and tailored practices
Private channel access in The Field Discord for direct contact with instructors.
Practitioner
An entry into the vivid grammar of dark retreat; structured, alive, and imaginal. This course helps practitioners cultivate somatic immediacy and nervous system stability while investigating the historical dramas that shape identity. These patterns are not bypassed; they are made workable. Reactive architecture is seen through. What once felt personal becomes expressive, pliable, and free.
8 live teachings + 8 lab sessions
Access to The Field Discord for community dialogue, and Circle for all recorded sessions and course materials.
All materials and recordings hosted on Circle
Scholarship
For students with genuine financial need. Includes full access to the course, all recordings, and community support via The Field Discord and Circle. Private sessions and direct messaging are not included. Designed to offer dignity, not discount.
Practicing Together
When you join the Dark Retreat course, you enter a field of committed practitioners. These are people who aren’t just seeking tools; they are testing their lives as vessels for clarity, embodiment, and freedom.
Together, we explore how somatic practice, nervous system science, and contemplative traditions reveal where rest actually lives in the body. This course doesn't promise escape from holiday chaos. It offers concrete methods for finding genuine settledness while life continues happening around you.
We will meet the common challenges that arise for serious practitioners, including:
Difficulty integrating breakthrough experiences into daily life. It’s not just that we struggle to maintain awakened states. It’s that we keep mistaking ourselves for something to manage, something to idealize, improve, or accept. This course invites a more dangerous move: to stop treating the self as an object altogether.
The oscillation between self-improvement and self-acceptance. As long as we treat identity as something to manage or repair, we reinforce the split we’re trying to heal. This course invites a deeper move: learning to stay with contradiction without collapsing it into a story, strategy, or fixed self.
Overwhelm and existential intensity. Breath and visualization help expand your capacity to stay with what’s hard to hold. These practices train a nervous system that can hold charge, clarity, and contact without defaulting to collapse or dissociation.
Emotional reactivity that hijacks clarity. We don’t override or analyze. We enter into relationship with embodied immediacy. These practices offer embodied, imaginal strategies for meeting difficult states with radical kindness, turning anxious feelings into doorways instead of threats.
A scattered or mechanical practice. If your practice feels fragmented or stale, this course helps you root it in a coherent, sustainable rhythm—through breath, image, and awareness. Not just impactful, but alive. Methods you can inhabit.
Darkness as the Space of the Body
In the dark, there are no objects of sight, and ideally sound is also greatly diminished. One of the most palpable results of this sensory deprivation is the highlighting of the soma, the sense of the body. A natural churning and unfolding takes place in the dark, and the strata that compose our sense of self and world are peeled away. This discloses a rawness of identity and sensing that can be unsettling, healing, and insightful. Once the more substantial layers of habit fall away, the boundaries between the inner and outer, between the physical body, the subtle body, and primordial space itself become more transparent, and at times absent.
These individual practices gain their full power when integrated with relational awareness. Drawing on attachment theory and social neuroscience, we teach specific skills for maintaining connection while setting boundaries during challenging social situations. We understand that genuine rest isn't about achieving a particular state but about developing the flexibility to meet whatever arises with less reactivity and more choice. Each teacher brings their unique expertise, from tantric nervous system work to Mahamudra/Dzogchen practices, all chosen for their evidence base and practical applicability. The holiday season becomes our laboratory: family dynamics, social obligations, and heightened emotions reveal whether you've developed real capacity or just learned to manage symptoms. By working with disturbance rather than against it, practitioners develop a sustainable relationship with their own nervous system that supports both deep rest and full engagement with life's intensity.
Course Details
The course begins Wednesday, March 25, 2025.
We'll meet Wednesdays from 5:00–6:30 p.m. MST for guided meditation and instruction, with Saturday Lab Sessions from 10:00–11:00 a.m. MST for individualized practice and Q&A.
Pre-recorded practice sequences will be available throughout, and a group Discord channel will support exchange between participants. You'll need a sleep mask for darkness practice; affordable options work well
All sessions are recorded and shared via the course platform. Pre-recorded tutorials and print materials accompany the live teachings.
The approach to somatic practice here draws primarily from the Mahāmudrā traditions of Tilopa, Niguma, and Sukhasiddhi, which emphasize natural settling into what already is. When body, breath, and mind are left to unfold in darkness, one settles into primordial knowing, which is then integrated into all resonance, radiance, and movement. The Yangti teachings of Chögyal Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche are also a guiding influence
In this course, we will train to be present with immediate, embodied, sensation-level experience, aiming to cultivate more frequent moments of open-heartedness and presence. This is not about achieving a permanent state, but about refining our capacity to stay in contact—especially when the nervous system is activated or when familiar identity strategies resurface. We’ll explore how nervous system regulation can build the stability required to hold complexity without collapse and relate to intensity without retreat.
Frequently
Asked Questions
Join Us For Preparing for Dark Retreat 2026
The instruction is structured for practitioners who want practices that supports open-hearted awareness and unconditional embodiment.