Befriending the Darkness

A few days ago I got back from a retreat based on Bill Plotkin’s book Soulcraft. It was an eclectic mix of practices ranging from ceremony, structured sharing circles, dream interpretation, and wandering in the forest to find one’s belonging in the “more than human” world of trees, rocks, and animals. The one particular exercise that resonated most deeply with me was an exercise in befriending the darkness.

On the third night, we began our process of befriending the darkness with drumming and rattling in a circle, and when we felt called, the invitation was to peel away from the circle and wander alone with our rhythmic instrument into the quickly darkening dusk, deep into the shadows of the forest. An invitation that stuck in my mind was to find the darkest part of the forest. “Are we talking strictly about luminosity?” a fellow participant asked. The answer from the workshop leaders was that while darkness in the strict physical sense could be part of it, what we were really looking for was psycho-spiritual darkness: that place in the forest felt the most dark.

As I followed my feet up the trail into the night, shadows closing in on me from either side, I began to feel the fear growing inside me. What strange and unknown things could be peering out at me from the shadows? I glanced over my shoulder imagining a figure stalking me on the trail behind me. Though I felt scared, and part of me wanted to run back out at full speed, I found that inside of me there was an even greater force: a deep curiosity and longing even to meet the source of my fear that I had for so long been running away from. My mind traveled back to being a child needing to use the bathroom in the middle of the night down a long and dark hallway, and running at full speed down that hallway from some unnamable, unimaginable source of pure terror. I’d slam my bedroom door behind me and leap under the covers frozen stiff in alertness that the darkness lurking in the hall would not follow me.

But this time was different. No longer an 8-year-old boy but a 38-year-old man, I pulled out my drum and began to drum a steady beat. The drum seemed to give me courage, though I remembered the workshop leader’s description: “Drumming in the night is a powerful deepening practice, because it dulls our own ability to hear and at the same time announces to the night, here I am, come and find me.” I stepped forward announcing myself to the night, and soon found a place on the side of the trail that looked and felt darker than any other place. I stepped off the trail into the shadows, and walked cautiously, looking around me for the deepest shadow, the shadow within the shadow, the place of absolute darkness.

I wandered this way and that in search of the darkest part of the forest. And soon I found it, somewhere just a few steps ahead was a place darker than any other. I felt hesitation as I was about to enter it, feeling that familiar urge to flee, the chill down the spine, and once again I remembered why I was here. So I stepped in and sat down cross-legged in the place that was so dark I could not see my own hands in front of me. And I began to drum.

I called out with my drum and I began to sing: “Oh come to me, you whom I fear. I welcome you here.” I called out the names of all the things I could imagine that scared me–the ghosts, the demons, the fairytale witches, the unknown things that had no name but fear itself. I drummed and sang sincerely for some time, and after some unknown amount of time something peculiar happened. A warmth began to flow through my body and I felt courage. I felt strong–not for fighting, not for conquering, but simply for being willing to remain present in the face of raw, visceral, supernatural, unspeakable fear.

In time that courage turned into comfort, like the comfort of sitting with an old friend. I began to speak with the darkness, sharing my own fears, sharing the things I am most ashamed of, sharing my deepest doubts. And like an old friend, the darkness listened silently, unfazed and unjudging, loving the parts of me that I rejected most deeply, loving me back into wholeness.

I put down my drum. Darkness, my friend, thank you for seeing me and letting me see you. Thank you for this courage, this wisdom, this strength. I offered a prayer, and began to walk back to the trail and back to my tent trusting the darkness.

As I reflected back on this experience, I found myself filled with inquiries and theories.

What is the darkness? More than just the absence of light, it seems to me that the darkness is a sort of unknown blankness onto which we can project all of our fears, the things about ourselves we do not wish to confront. It is the terra incognita, the margins of the ancient maps where fearful sailors would inscribe “here be dragons.” It is the place where not only do we not go, we are often admonished by others not to go, speaking from their own fears of their own personal dragons. It is the place that is ever present, and yet many of us modern people carefully avoid ever truly being with using our nightlights, streetlights and city light pollution, and headlamps that click on with the tap of a button. We can spend a lifetime being surrounded by darkness but never truly allowing ourselves to be in it.

But the darkness is more than just the physical darkness. There is also the metaphorical darkness. I recall some years ago, before I began my work as a psychedelic guide, I took a high dose of mushrooms on my own and I encountered something truly frightening that at the time I felt I lacked the resources to move through and make sense of. At the time I distracted myself out of what was appearing in my mind’s eye, taking off my blindfold and refusing to be with it. It was the psychedelic version of clicking on the headlamp. For a long time after that I had an intense fear of going back into a high dose of mushrooms and what I might encounter. For me, the mushroom had become my darkness, the foreboding place that I refused to go.

And yet, at the same time, in its subtle way, the mushroom beckoned. A year and a half later I decided to step into that darkness again. As if in my own way finding the darkest moonless night, I took the highest dose of mushrooms I had yet with the intention of facing my fears. I sat with fear for about 8 hours, and what I learned is that I do not need to be afraid of fear. I could be afraid and I could be ok, with no need to escape my feelings. That was one of the bigger lessons of that journey.

In my work with 5-MeO-DMT, more often than not clients are afraid. What precisely they are afraid of varies from one person to another–I’ll go mad, I’ll have brain damage and won’t be able to take care of my children, I’ll learn that I don’t love my job/wife/husband/life, I’ll make a fool of myself, I’ll tell my guides the secrets I’m not supposed to tell anyone. The details differ, but fear is nearly universal. In some sense, I think our medicine is its own darkness. It can serve as a foil onto which we project our greatest fears. And like the physical darkness, it also allows a path of courage, trust, and ultimately befriending that which we have been running away from, with gifts of wholeness to those who walk it.

This post was written as part of my commitment to writing a monthly article as part of my role as a Flying Sage Community Leader. The Flying Sage is a Vancouver-based community organization centering around psychedelics.