On Day 3, I started seeing Rothkos. Immersed in darkness, I was hallucinating abstract expressionism, smears of pink and blue pulsing through what I knew to be a room in Massachusetts, though it was also a cave and somehow a black hole. A strange inner cinema comes online after enough time in absolute blackness, a kind of backup generator for imagery. I sat. Had sat for hours. It was daytime, or maybe nighttime, one of the big two.
Was I unraveling? Raveling? What did I know for sure? I knew to breathe: Om ah hum. If I truly freaked, I could find the door. I didn’t want the door. I wanted to boil existence down, see what remained.
Another hour or four. No light, people, activity, screens. A brain in the dark, and a warping one at that. I watched a wolf’s head drift past. Memories slid in. Autumn afternoon in Virginia, rusty rake tines snagged on a willow root. That Belgian boy from summer camp who knew just one English phrase, “bed of nails.” My daughter home with the flu, head on my chest, lifting it sweetly to barf. The crook of an unusual tree in Mexico 20 years ago.
Om ah hum. Enough with the breathing. Tea? No more tea. I opted for a journey to the bathroom, mostly recreational — edge along bed, feel for far wall, left at dresser, don’t knock over soap dispenser. Sitting again, more staring, more blackness.
The Rothkos floated in front of where my face presumably was. Pink, blue, pulse. I’d done unusual things but had never stepped outside life itself. Greater strangeness was coming. But first: three soft knocks in the darkness. Meal time. Oh, god, yes.
Supposing that “time” is a “real” “thing,” it was four days earlier that I caught a late flight from San Francisco to Hartford, Conn., where Lama Justin von Bujdoss, the man who just knocked softly, met me in his pickup. He would be driving me to the Yangti Yoga Retreat Center, his new venture in the woods of New England. For days or even weeks, visitors plunge themselves into darkness and solitude, per a highly specialized and largely secret Tibetan Buddhist practice, dating back over a millennium. In such a state, the true nature of one’s mind, and of reality itself, is said to clarify.
Von Bujdoss is calm and thoughtful, you’ll be surprised to hear, with a long ponytail and a scraggly beard that wouldn’t be out of place on a misty mountaintop. A mutual friend had introduced me years earlier, and I watched from afar as von Bujdoss became an increasingly prominent figure on the Buddhist landscape. (His Instagram bio remains humble: “A temporary participant in this field of appearance.”) When conversation swung around to my approaching isolation, I found myself asking a question he’d already answered.
“And it’s … really OK that I’m not a Buddhist?”
In the weeks prior, von Bujdoss and I had discussed my history of meditation and general spiritual inquiry — but these were rooted in no religious tradition.
“Some Buddhists won’t like it,” he said now, “but dark retreat is about liberation, and ultimately that includes liberating yourself from religion itself.”
I had skeptics in my own orbit.
“I’m just wondering,” a friend had said. “Did you already give them a deposit?”
“You’re going to lose your [expletive] mind,” another said brightly.
My friend Anne’s face simply crumpled. “Is there at least Netflix?” she asked.
There was not at least Netflix. Nor reading material nor music nor companions nor even thoughts, ideally. Just me, in a lightless room from Friday morning until Monday morning. Von Bujdoss would wordlessly deliver meals through a lightproof metal pass box and ring a bell when it was time to emerge. If things went sideways, he would be there to help.
I assured concerned loved ones that people used to do this stuff practically all the time. Taoist adepts once sealed themselves in dark chambers to refine mind and body. In Colombia, the Kogi raise spiritual leaders in caves, training them from birth in darkness to commune with a hidden dimension called Aluna. Ancient Greek rites unfolded underground, where sensory deprivation marked initiation.
Von Bujdoss has sought to recreate the Tibetan Buddhist version of this ritual. Practitioners would live alone in darkness for long stretches, in some cases years, in hopes of achieving nonduality — the recognition that the apparent separation between self and world is illusory. Our failure to appreciate this truth lies at the heart of the suffering we inflict on ourselves and others. Intense visions were common, way points on the path to dissolving the boundaries of perception.
In recent centuries, these retreats fell out of favor, partly because of the psychic distress they could set off. Von Bujdoss appreciated the stakes of such distress, but he also felt the stakes of not utilizing a powerful tool like this. Some disagreed; esoteric practices, perhaps, are meant to stay esoteric. For his part, von Bujdoss believed that the world no longer had the luxury of keeping ancient remedies in the dark.
While he set out to create a traditional Buddhist retreat, a looser version was gaining traction elsewhere. The quarterback Aaron Rodgers famously holed up for four days at Oregon’s Sky Cave Dark Retreats in 2023, as he debated whether to keep throwing footballs for a living. One can find similar options in Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica and Thailand.
I would be bringing no career conundrums to Massachusetts. My project was both simpler and hazier: I’m a generally happy person whose response to an unhinged world could use some ancient wisdom. On any given day I’m too busy, or too porous, or too moronically distractible. Upon picking a date with von Bujdoss, I went to YouTube to watch one of his talks but clicked instead on a “Sopranos” scene in which Christopher Moltisanti has to extort a local massage parlor, and then I accidentally looked at some pictures of what the “Sopranos” actors look like now, and then I accidentally thought of a funny text to send a friend. By the time I finally got to von Bujdoss, I wondered if I was cut from suitable cloth.
What if I’ve come to depend on all the noise and algorithmic incoherence I mutter about? Part of the dark retreat’s appeal is that it offers the precise opposite of our obsessively connected, entertained and photon-bombarded civilization. But maybe that stuff has become structural. I once heard that Sacramento’s early levees had been cobbled together from whatever was at hand — old bicycles, scrap lumber, trash. That’s pretty much how I think of my mind: a bulwark of random crud, holding back the full torrent.
Von Bujdoss’s headlights swept the dark roads of Franklin County, and then we were off the asphalt, and then, in a clearing, a log cabin appeared. He showed me to a spare bedroom for the night. The next morning, we descended stairs to a finished basement room. Decorwise, my new home hovered between B. & B. and “Saw XII.” Every window, door crack and bit of electronic glow had been meticulously covered. Built into one wall was the metal pass box. A bed occupied the bulk of the space, with a dresser, a hot-water dispenser, a small desk with nuts and a bowl of cherries and some meditation cushions at the edge of the room. A door in one corner led to a small bathroom.
I tried to snap a mental photo (herbal tea on the left, black tea on the right; silverware at the edge of the desk), and then it was time.
Von Bujdoss smiled at me. “It’s all in your head,” he said simply.
I closed the door, taped its edges and switched off the ligh
Friday morning in a cabin became any time anywhere. I need to be emphatic about this part: I didn’t know darkness like this existed. There was no adjusting eventually, no difference whether my eyes were open or closed. I looked down, saw no trace of my body. A truck could have driven through the room and I wouldn’t have caught the faintest outline.
I stood there, a steadying hand on the desk, taking in the vanished world and my vanished self. My visual field filled with varieties of blackness and amoeba strains swimming within. Were the amoebas … in my eyes all along? Are they darkness-activated?
Just a couple of minutes of such pondering was enough to lose my bearings. Eager to avoid walking into the bed, I overcompensated and walked into the wall. Before my retreat, I asked my friend Josh, who’s blind, whether the whole conceit chafed, ala my disability is not your elaborate meditation practice. He told me he found it amusing, and then predicted I would conk right out. (“Sighted people tend to react to darkness like birds when the cover is put over their cage,” he noted.) But I felt too alert for sleep.
Over the next few hours, my time began to ricochet between the mystical and the mundane. One moment I understood existence to be a soft lattice suspended in gel; the next I was groping along the baseboard for my water glass. (Filling the glass in the first place: no biggie. Ditto for brewing tea, once I got a minor scalding out of the way.) I was soon creating systems. Always drape sweatshirt over chair; always return spoon to edge of desk. Sensing that I might soon lose myself in time, I devised a rudimentary calendar, using a piece of paper. With every meal, I would make a new rip along the edge.
I had feared claustrophobic boredom. This didn’t happen — everything was too engrossingly strange for that. But lacking anything to do, the question of where to put my body did need answering. I sat on a meditation cushion. I got up and lay on the bed. I returned to the cushion.
My thoughts, if that’s what they were, grew gauzy. I ate cherries, felt I understood cherries. I ran my tongue over each tooth, absorbing its years of service. I remembered a beautiful obituary I read once and pictured the peach fuzz from the back of my son’s neck. I reminded myself not to think. Om ah hum.
A current of unease shot through me. What actually happens when you cut all your cables? In signing up, I imagined the dark retreat as a corrective to a deranged world and a periodically deranged self. It also just seemed a fascinating kind of self-excavation. (The old urge to shave your head: Who am I under there?) But now, in the dark, untethered from everything and everyone, those notions felt distant. What was I doing?
I ate some more cherries, felt my way to the bathroom and knocked over the soap dispenser. The bird-cage cover did its thing, and I let something resembling sleep come over me.
Von Bujdoss’s relationship with darkness began in the mountains of Sikkim, in India’s eastern Himalayas. It was 2001, and he found himself in a small cabin near a cave belonging to Pathing Rinpoche, a lama in the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. In recent years, Pathing had begun bestowing teachings upon von Bujdoss. But this day would be different. Without explanation, Rinpoche reached into his belongings and produced a series of weathered pages, or pecha, marked only by unusual drawings: visions that others had seen in darkness in centuries past.
That pecha would put von Bujdoss on a yearslong path toward uncovering the dark-retreat practice and bringing it to the modern world. Back from India, he received his Buddhist ordination and began parlaying his practice into practical help — “chasing death around New York City” as a chaplain for a Bronx home-hospice service. Then came a job offer too daunting to pass up. In 2016, von Bujdoss became the first staff chaplain for New York’s entire Department of Corrections, tending the sprawling psychic needs of some 9,000 correction officers and 1,400 members of the support staff.
At Rikers Island, where von Bujdoss spent a majority of his time, he ministered around the clock to souls battered by death, violence, chaos and some of the highest rates of PTSD, psychological distress and burnout in law enforcement. When Covid swept through the jail complex, von Bujdoss’s obligations only deepened. In addition to his Department of Corrections post, he served as chaplain for Hart Island, New York’s potter’s field, presiding over the burial of more than 5,000 dead.
Through it all — through death and grief and threats to his own life and then a weary commute back to his wife and sons in Brooklyn — von Bujdoss never lost sight of the mysterious pages he was given as a young man. He showed them to his Buddhist teachers whenever possible, hoping one might guide him in the esoteric practice they described. No one would.
Then, in October 2020, the Tibetan physician and meditation master Nida Chenagtsang agreed to teach him — and to help carry those secret teachings into the open. By the following year, von Bujdoss was converting an old outbuilding behind his parents’ home in Cold Spring, N.Y., into a makeshift dark retreat. He was a contractor before his chaplaincy, and after shuttling between the mass graves of Hart Island and the turmoil at Rikers all week, he would drive up from Brooklyn to black out windows or install ventilation. He’d been a practicing Buddhist for nearly three decades. When he finally tested the space, sitting in darkness for a week, it was unlike anything he’d ever experienced.
On the last day of von Bujdoss’s trial run, a corrections officer died at Rikers. Emerging from darkness, von Bujdoss stepped back into duty: comforting the man’s family, handling logistics and donning his uniform to attend the funeral at a Bronx church. It was while the bagpipers played “Amazing Grace” and the coffin was borne to the hearse that he heard a whisper in his mind: Return to the dark.
Still in uniform, he drove straight to Cold Spring. He had already arranged a leave of absence, and his parents would slide him meals. He said a difficult goodbye to his family, stepped into the darkness and stayed there for 49 days.
A traditional Buddhist dark retreat lasts seven weeks — the length of the bardo, that liminal interval between death and rebirth when consciousness, freed from the body, bounces through visions before finding a new form. Von Bujdoss breathed, meditated, slept and did little else. Day 3 brought jolts of expanded awareness. Soon came dreams “where you’re awake, you open your eyes, but the dream is still happening.”
He saw crocodiles and wildebeests in the room with him, and once a jackal eating a human corpse. At one point, he awoke to find a Medusa-like figure on top of him. Eventually he came to suspect that he had died; a profound reckoning with grief and guilt ensued. He pushed through and was there to hear the voice that ultimately spoke to him — a voice that would bring him to resign from his job, buy 66 acres and move with his family to rural Massachusetts. Instead of merely helping people navigate their challenging circumstances, it asked, why not transform their mind
When I woke up, everything was, of course, still dark. Was it midnight? Dawn? I imagined it would be liberating, getting out from under the tyranny of the clock or the sun. Mainly it felt destabilizing: Apparently time tells you what to do and, by extension, who you are. I made my way to the pass box and found I’d slept through a delivery. It was Saturday, midmorning, I decided. Von Bujdoss had prepared a delicious bowl of what might or might not have been kugel; I reached for my spoon, held the bowl to my mouth and gracefully shoveled its contents in. I was midbite when a projector switched on inside my skull.
Gaza. Ukraine. Sudan. School shootings. Terrible images came roaring out of some corner of my mind. One by one they scrolled, boiling with death and terror and heartbreak. I couldn’t move, just sat there holding my bowl. It’s not that I don’t ponder these horrors in daily life — it’s that I contain them. I’ll read the latest awfulness and then veer into outrage, or political strategy, or more reading, and then leave for car-pool duty. Now all I could do was sit with that awfulness.
A strange dam broke. Just minutes later, the tape along the bathroom door came loose, lighting up that side of the room. I shot up to cover the leak, only to discover I imagined it. I trekked to my cushion, and I was now inside a snow cave. The cave morphed into the Milky Way, so vivid that comets zipped by. Soon I was in an old stone fortress. (Habsburgian, I somehow knew.) Moonlight poured through a hole in the roof, bathing the floor in a pale blue and illuminating a column of dust. In normal life, I struggle to summon visuals in my head; here I was Rembrandt.
At no point did I believe that these visions were real. I was altered but lucid, could’ve recited the Pythagorean theorem. But even knowing that the imagery was invented, I was rattled by the pure chaos of it. A psychedelic journey will often spool out as a story, strange but internally coherent. The visions here felt random — a purse emptied on the couch. One moment I saw my children navigating their climate-crisis future; the next I watched Seth Meyers slicing blue cheese in a galley kitchen. Here was a friend’s death, and then my own gravestone; there was my wife looking cute.
Before my retreat, I consoled myself that I could always leave if my sanity faltered. (Not so in dark retreats of yore, when the entrance to a practitioner’s cave was apparently blocked by boulders.) What I hadn’t foreseen was that the mind bends before it snaps. At one point, I thought von Bujdoss was withholding dinner — a lesson about attachment? A chiding for the psychotic number of cherries I’d eaten? (The dinner he proceeded to deliver: steak.)
The elements around me, my own self — all were growing more vaporous by the hour, almost theoretical. I finally felt I was ready for a shower and nailed it, even found the conditioner — but the basic configuration of the bathroom confused me more than ever, as though a cosmic disorientation was outstripping whatever local familiarity I’d achieved.
I resisted the urge to make sense of what was happening. In contrast to Western psychology, von Bujdoss had explained, insight was just another trap for the mind. Instead of creating narratives about why things are, the idea is to halt those gears altogether, until what’s left is awareness. In lieu of figuring it all out, I tried to just watch.
I must have eventually slept, because Sunday arrived, and finally, Sunday night, too. My time had become a tornado of confusion, fascination and exhaustion. The deluge enthralled me, but it also pummeled me. I couldn’t look away, and I couldn’t get peace. I was doing the simplest thing imaginable — just being alone with myself, doing nothing — and it was overwhelming.
In footage from other dark retreats, participants emerge from the darkness in tearful ecstasy. I chose to exit on a more slapstick note. I was sound asleep when von Bujdoss clanged the bell on Monday morning. I sat up abruptly, only to discover that a full jungle had grown in my room. I sprung out of bed and began ducking left and right to avoid the huge branches swinging all around. The bell kept clanging, and the branches kept swinging. I was feeling around on the floor for my clothes when a particularly huge branch came whipping toward me. I lunged headfirst into an end table. By the time I ripped the gaffer tape off the door and staggered into the lit world, everything was spinning.
I made my way up the basement stairs to find the main floor of the cabin empty and still, von Bujdoss having retreated to his own room. I was grateful it wasn’t day yet — the predawn gloom was all I could handle, and I shielded my eyes even from that. Otherwise I had no instincts, no direction. I walked to a window. The trees surrounding the cabin were black and faint, sketched with pencil. Their branches were barely visible against the bluish air around them. A jay hopped from one to the other. A vision? Not a vision. Then it was all too much, and I slunk off to the guest bedroom until von Bujdoss appeared a couple of hours later.
On the drive back to the airport, conversation was a foreign country. Words failed me. (Von Bujdoss had warned me about this.) Cooper? Keebler? I struggled to summon “kugel” when I told von Bujdoss about my visions. I didn’t ask for a decoding of everything I saw — but why had there been so extremely much? The answer seemed to be that I had more to ponder. Maybe what I beheld was the pure and somewhat manic liberation of my mind. Or maybe my mind was throwing everything in the way of deeper awareness.
Von Bujdoss began to talk about Rikers. He ultimately found the machinery of dehumanization there too great to overcome; he is an abolitionist now. But he also saw stunning flashes of humanity, on both sides of the bars. At a meditation group, he helped corrections officers uncover feelings they suppressed about their work — fear, anger, sadness. The point wasn’t to make them leave the job but to notice how those feelings were leaking out, in ways that hurt them and others and that clouded their ability to see the present moment clearly. Von Bujdoss worked with people in custody, too, and they had their own breakthroughs. One man, almost giddy, told him that he watched the urge to punch an officer rise up before him — then fade away.
Von Bujdoss’s pivot from uniformed authority to spiritual guide hinged on what happened in retreat. He had seen how darkness and isolation could break a person, but he also believed that, in a radically different context, these could heal.
He described that healing as spaciousness. Spaciousness is what he finds in the dark — he has now spent over a hundred days in retreat — and it’s what he finds in the lit world, too. In any given moment, there is more room for more ways of seeing, and understanding, and responding, than we tend to know.
We drove along a silvery river. The sun was high now. I kept my eyes mostly inside the truck. I felt a little nauseated. It seemed excessive, all the grass and street signs and asphalt and birds and cars and noise and ideas and feelings. I think he hugged me goodbye at the airport, but I don’t remember.
I’ve been back a few weeks now, and my loved ones have mostly concluded their poking and prodding; to their relief and surely mild disappointment, I’m still me. I do not stop and gape at the beauty of a dandelion. I don’t walk through walls because they’re illusions, or skip meetings because time is a construct. Whatever has changed lurks elsewhere, in a fog I struggle to pierce.
If I claimed that a few days of blackness brought me spaciousness, the true Buddhists’ eyes would roll fully around in their heads. But there are moments when a look or a conversation or some news or just a passing shadow seems to open like an accordion.
Mostly I just get on with it, whatever I’m doing — these sweet potatoes aren’t going to cook themselves. But the idea does seem to lodge somewhere in my brain, the possibility of extra square footage in the world, even if it’s too dark to see most days.
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