My 5th 10-Day Dark Room Retreat - Integrations
And here goes the time again. My 5th time heading to Chiang Mai, Thailand for my yearly 10 days in darkness. No physical food, deeply immersing into the field of love.
For many years, I have been sharing about how this experience has completely transformed my life. It’s not just the fact that I can finally hear the wisdom that is trying to come to us in this busy, busy life, but I can also practice something I call the process of unlocking (which of course came to me in darkness).
To truly understand how powerful this is, I can’t stress enough to give this a chance. I was very lucky that my heart originally discovered this in the “Opening Illuminated Heart” workshop I did in Hawaii about 15 years ago, exploring the healing powers of darkness and tapping into the infinite regenerative source within. This is what Jasmuheen calls “Source Feeding.” Jasmuheen is the most down-to-earth, self-realized female pioneer in the possibility that we don’t just have to be nourished by physical food but that there are so many other alternative sources that we can draw from. The most important source is the one within us, which is in every atom and molecule inside of our bodies, as well as everywhere around us. The issue is the way we spend our time on earth. When we continue living in the high “beta” brainwave state (the overall thinking mind and always doing something), we don’t let the universal love unfold from inside us to nourish everyone around us. We are all connected to one source, but without this source, there would be no physical body. It’s just the amount of source feeding % we use vs. physical food, depending on how we spend our time.
Now back to the first main lesson – the process of unlocking. If we don’t spend time in silence and solitude, then we continue living somewhere outside of us, which is determined by the external. When we take charge of our thoughts, words, and emotions, we slow everything down and go inward so that we can hear the whispers or insights coming through us. Those inner insights come from a limitless source of information, which is always there for us to be aligned and to take the highest path on our journey through earth.
I spend my time connected in a cyclical way:
1x/day – I take the first hour of the day for myself. I focus on an 8-point lifestyle (will share more later) and do a deep dive into cultivating gratitude for how I want to spend my day. It’s the golden hour before you touch your cell phone or dive into other needs that will determine the best outcome.
1x/week – I take a full day off. From everything and everyone. This is my sacred day to go deep into meditation, evaluating my past week and projecting to the next. For the first half of the day, it’s just me, and the second half is spent with family or close friends.
1x/month - I take 4-7 days off. It all depends on where in the world we are, but a minimum of 4 days has been proven to really work to calm down the nervous system and withdraw from everything we are doing in the world. It’s important that we don't use any digital technology and, ideally, we fast or do something totally different than in our everyday lives. I tend to stop using all of the supplements and biohacks to fully reset back to baseline and truly evaluate and ask my body and life how I can best use it in the greatest service to mankind.
1x/year - 10-15 days off. For me, this is the Dark Room. It does not have to be this extreme, but it is so crucial that we completely unhook and go deep inside. Sometimes this can be a great retreat, a long multi-day hike, or spending time in a cabin in the middle of the woods with your notebook and no agenda. This is the time when you let go of the monkey brain and allow yourself to hear the best outcome of your new year and how you did the year before. So often we just keep on going and forget to look back and evaluate who we want to be and how we want to show up in the world. Set goals, reevaluate dream goals, and bring them into an actionable plan so that you can start with your dreams, 5-10 years ahead, 1 year, 1 month, and 1 day so that every day you are moving towards who you are choosing to be.
This process has changed my life to a point where I don’t get burnt out anymore. I get to go fast but also slow. It's the ultimate dance of life. We create “choices,” wait for the “consequences,” scan, and ask if we loved it, and if not, we do it again until we live life fully based on our dreams. I never thought that this was possible, but I live a dream every single day. I am spending time with people I love, I am working with people I admire, I get to travel the world, I have the most amazing wife and kids…and omg just thinking about this my heart is fluttering with overwhelming gratitude and disbelief that I did it.
Back to the Dark Room. So essentially, this is an initiation into “source feeding,” how to be solely nourished by “prana” as your energy source and receive complete mental, emotional, and physical freedom from any hunger. You can still decide to eat but, of course, it's for pleasure not for the “need” to survive.
I never really understood this well as my conscious mind was never looking for this, but I know now that this has been my pre-ascension agreement to be able to activate this blueprint inside of me. It always takes another 2-3 weeks to reintroduce food after I do this Dark Room. I was mesmerized by the potential, as well as the amount of energy influx you receive. The most important part is that you have to change your belief from “fasting” to eating all the time from an infinite source of love inside you and around you.
I used to worry about sharing this because it's so far out there, but we are in the stage of evolution where we have to wake up to the realization that we are so much more than we think and we can do all of the things that we can visualize into being.
The next difference to this Dark Room is the fact that Jasmuheen is a conscious channel. Every session brings the right information that our collective needs to hear, and every day we have a series of meditations and activations to go deeply into the unified realms of existence. She changes her voice when the elders come, and the energy is just magnifying in the whole room. Everything changes from the way she speaks, how the energy feels, and the information that is coming through her. I have spent a lot of time with different conscious channels, as this information coming through is so helpful for bettering our existence here on earth. You, of course, always have to discern and ask yourself, “Is this information limited or limitless?” If it’s limited, don’t tune into it, and if it's limitless, simply follow and open your heart to deep learning. I love the work of Paul Selling who channels “christ consciousness” – I have been working with this for the past 10 years. Its body feels when it works through “the word” the divine in action and helps you re-code your belief system and integrate it into the physical system.
As you can see, spirituality was never a fun project for me. We are spiritual beings living in a physical experience, and we have to look at all of our aspects separately but also integrated all together. This is why I continue prioritizing my inner evolution over anything on earth; everything on earth magnifies when you are fully aligned and cleared at the “spirit” level.
Let's get into this year’s Dark Room:
We came after one of the busiest months ever (check out our February Travel Blog). I was really not happy with this year’s preparation, as normally you want to be fully detoxed before you enter the cave, as well as quit eating meat about 3 months before for the ideal connection. Of course, everything is perfect and surrender is the key to times when you simply didn’t do as you wish. I accepted it but also knew that this year might be a bit tougher. I always set different intentions for areas of life that I want to look at, but the Dark Room simply brings you what you need. It's just to feed my monkey brain something to focus on so that it can calm down and be ready.
We arrived from Spokane, Washington where we had our last event and got to do some skiing with the kids on spring break. On the way to the Dark Room, we took a pit stop in Denver and went into Nater in Boulder where we bought the kids some new things before Bodhi and Bella went on their first flight alone back to Huntsville. Fairy, Pixie, and I took off to Thailand. I can’t believe how many times I have taken this massively long trip all the way there. It's so crazy to look back at the time, see how fast things move, and feel how sad my heart is that these memories have passed.
When we landed in Thailand (Chiang Mai), we drove up to Tao Garden by Mantak Chia where the Dark Room Retreat was held. On the way there, I had calls still set up because of the immense expansion that we have been seeing with NOA|AON and our latest company Athena HealthSpan. I was literally on calls until the last hour before going in, and, again, definitely wasn’t proud of it. At least once we got there we got to have some amazing treatments as Tao Garden provides full offerings from Ozone IV, cleanses, colonial flushes, healthy food, massages, and so much more (Fairy will write a blog on their treatments. Worth a visit!)
When the time came, I had a few last kisses with Fairy and Pixie, and then it was game time.
My 10 Days:
Day 1 - Getting to know the space. This is the first night before the official retreat that you spend in darkness. The morning is the last time you turn on the lights; this is so that we can memorize where the water, bathroom, and all of our belongings are. Of course, doing it so many times I ended up just staying with my loved ones Pixie and Fairy (wife and daughter).
Day 2 - I won’t lie, at first, I was just sleeping and sleeping. My body needed so much rest that I was just plugged into source. I didn’t have many insights or anything, just major withdrawals. YES you heard me, one of the biggest goals this year was to get rid of anything that “owns me” and “own it.” Simple discernment to ask yourself today, what owns you and what do you have in your control? Because anything that owns us comes from a negative pattern of the unconscious mind and can lead to addictions, just as it did for me. I was owned by Coffee, Nicotine (not cigarettes but low-dose sprays for brain function and Rapé tobacco), and Kava/Kratom drinks. Because of my busy schedule and no sleep, I required extra support that led me to use it more often than I liked, and, ultimately, I had physical withdrawals. I told my mind that we are releasing all of these beliefs and pathways and going to surrender by “suffering” through it.
Day 3 - It continued to be tough. Last year, I had the best preparation before, and it felt like a breeze compared to this time. Boy, I was getting my butt kicked. I had full-on cold sweats, shivers, a massive headache, and on top of all that, I was hungry (which normally I can very well control) and pissed. Each day, we start with morning meditation and lecture in the group, and, honestly, the source nourishing meditation flipped me back to my baseline. I still had all of the physical withdrawals, but at least I now had a calm mind and an open heart.
Day 4 - I started to sleep less and wake up every 1-2 hours. It was honestly better than the day before, but I still wasn’t feeling that well. Thanks to all of the training I have, I kept on using different exercises to keep me present, and I started to do some light workouts, breathwork, and stretching because I could not sleep on their firm mat. I would spend an hour in my bathtub connecting to source, as well as call all my energy back from all of the people and places. I finally started to drop into my past year, relationships, and started to consciously re-code. Each day brings new levels of insight, and every time this happened, these little drops of information were inserted into my brain. It's really awesome. I also realized that now I receive these insights all the time, even in everyday life, which used to be sporadic when I started this 8 years ago.
Day 5 - My cold sweats are gone, my headache is over, and now it's just the nicotine withdrawal that I still feel so strongly. My mind just would not stop; it would keep asking for more and more and if maybe I could find some in my backpack. It was a lot of surrender, but this day I also started seeing all of the lights. Usually by now our pineal gland gets to be cleared from the light pollution, and man, it was strong! When I stayed strong, I also started getting all of these weird images. Sometimes the weirdest scenes, people, and places show up, and you feel like you haven’t ever been associated. My theory is that when our DMT increases in our brain, it starts releasing all of the clutter from our subconscious minds, which can be anything from movies, TV, radio, and all of the toxicity that doesn’t have to be held in our brain. It has a similar effect with Iboga & Ibogaine in South Africa, where the first several hours you just keep clearing and clearing until the true lessons start showing up.
Day 6 - This is when things start really shifting. The energy of the group was more harmonized and the meditations that were coming through Jasmuheen were so deep, taking us on a journey to heal planet earth, heal our loved ones, and forgive ourselves and anyone who has hurt us. It was actually super crazy how connected we were with this message, as in our System Reset experiences, we have designed a fully immersive transformation within all major aspects of our lives. These are some of the main insights I started receiving. What are the next steps in our company? One of the main ones was that I have to become more active again with our team. I have to shave off all of the other involvements, even though they are financially beneficial, and stay true to my core mission. To UNITE the world. To bring love back into our hearts and to continue to focus on the realms of consciousness expansion in service to others.
Day 7 - I had a visitor :) Fairy came to my room and snuck into the darkness. It was the nicest thing that could happen. It was so nice to unite together and spend a couple of uninterrupted hours talking about our lives and the insights that she has received while on the outside (she had a full detox with daily healing protocols to come back to her core, plus she can’t be in the dark with the baby), and man, we got to chat! There was a human in my room!! Haha :) When you get close to the end, your monkey brain is the biggest opportunity for growth. There is thought after thought, and it's very annoying, to be honest. I had to keep on readjusting and refusing my attention. One of my favorite ways to do this is to dance. I have pre-saved DJ sets on my iPod shuffle, which has no light, and then I just dance, sometimes for hours.
Day 8 - This day, I started feeling very strong. You would never think this, but you can actually get better and better. When we don’t have to digest all of the time and we put our full focus on our spirituality, we can receive 3x more energy than on a normal day. Then the issue just becomes where you put this energy. This is why it's so important to keep moving, exercising, and using this for these deep meditative states. By now, I am only sleeping 1-3 hours/day. One of the benefits of being pranic is that you don’t need to rest so much because your body is so taken care of. By now, I was getting massive concepts of life, got a huge download on mind-mastery, and understood how the biggest toxicity in our life is our own mind, how important it is to not engage in negative movies, TV, radios, or read articles. Just like toxic food for the body, there is toxic food for the mind. This then translates into anxiety, negative thoughts, depression, and an overly thinking mind – this is what many call Weatiku (virus of the mind), where our mind gets hijacked by dark forces and a degenerative spiral in our external life. More on this soon; I will include this in my book coming out later this year.
Day 9 - This is the day when you no longer care about how long you stay. You finally surrender to the slow pace, you love your little routine, and you get to have the most magical meditations full of love and gratitude for life. Love meditations are a way of “source feeding” where you can wake up in the morning and start saying how much you love and appreciate all of the aspects of your body, organs, mind, and emotions. As you start feeling it deeper, you can start extending this to your loved ones, friends, nature, and animals. Then you can go even higher, as you visualize earth in front of your heart and start sending so much love and appreciation for our earth. And then even higher to all of creation, all beings that are supporting and loving us, until you feel a complete “heart orgasm” full of fluttering joyful feelings in all of your body. Remember, what you think gets translated into your emotions – so when you think highly of yourself and the world, your emotions will always reflect that, never the other way around.
Day 10 - The final day is here! I woke up at my regular 1:30 am and had the whole morning for final contemplations. I started by really putting my focus on what I will do differently, who I will reach out to, and what things I will shave off and simplify, as I’ve built such a busy lifestyle that needs to come back to center. I can’t wait to slow things down and really focus on one thing at a time so that I’m not doing so much and can bring that much more being into our culture. I feel so much gratitude for all of our team members and the people I get to be with. It's such an honor.
Final Remarks:
This Dark Room retreat was in the name of mind-mastery. I continued to get major dumps of information as to how our monkey brain is the problem in the world, like a virus that when unleashed causes so many problems. I got some of the biggest releases on the last day when I realized that I needed to start paying attention to what was talking. It all collapsed and went back to peace. This year, my mind struggled the entire time, but I got so many amazing tools to share in my book.
