The Dark Retreat Was Just the Waiting Room
[Level 2: Mystical] The "spiritual surgery without anesthesia" that happened before my taxi arrived
I wasn’t expecting much from my final 50 hours in Mazunte after emerging from 10 days of complete darkness. I expected to be taking it easy, trying to process all the revelations, shadows, and intense experiences that I thought were going to come up during the dark retreat. Instead it was so anticlimactic that I got blindsided by something completely different.
The first day out
As I was sitting on the terrace, adjusting to the light of day, I recorded what bits of wisdom I felt like I gathered, flipping through the sparse pages of blind, messily scribbled notes:
You are not trying to catch the butterfly or even waiting for it to land on you. You ARE the butterfly being invited to rest on the blossom of your own being and to be nourished by it.
All of life is a dance and God is the dancer. Life loves to dance.
The mind loves to tell stories about things to avoid actually just sitting with the feelings and feeling them.
It wasn’t even 7 AM by the time I felt like I’d finished my “post-dark retreat processing” that I originally thought would have taken a couple days.
The ego death never came to be grappled with. The shadows never surfaced to be integrated. The visions never came to be interpreted.
It was just...over.
I felt like I had to salvage what was left of my sabbatical given that I’d only have a week home before returning to the “dreadmill”.
So I wandered around town, looking for something to bring home with me if not a revelation, shift, or “new me.” I bought several things with what pesos I had remaining, but it didn’t bring me any real joy.
Eventually, it grew closer to sunset and I made my way out to Punta Cometa, a sacred spot in Mazunte where many people gather together on the cliffs to watch the sunset over the Pacific.
I managed to snag a front row seat on one of the wooden logs. It seemed like it would be the appropriate bookend to the day after watching the sunrise, but... I just felt this gnawing sadness even despite the beauty of the red sun over the crashing waves.
It felt like the sun was setting on my hopes for this trip entirely.
The failed experiment
I realized part of my grief was that the sabbatical was ending and the retreats didn’t “work”.
I wrote in my journal that I didn’t feel any closer to God, even despite the intense and unexpected experience I had on the third night of the silent retreat (hand spasms while lying on my back before bed followed immediately by what I can only describe as an energy orgasm entirely in my heart center). To me, that was just a very weird and novel somatic event.
I expected God to show up in the dark in some capacity, but as far as I was concerned, that didn’t happen. I dreaded the return home because I knew from talking to my husband on the phone earlier that day that friends were expecting some biblical-level “coming down from the mountain” transfiguration. But it wasn’t that at all.
And now it’s June and in less than 2 weeks I will be right back at work, right back in the corporate cage like none of this ever even happened.
I feel like I gambled on God and I lost and now I’m sitting here in the room I was stuck in the dark in for 10 days straight crying and blowing out snot with blood in it because of how much I’m crying I guess.
Did I just spend 3 months running away? Even if I faced going on this trip alone, doing something I’ve never done in a foreign land and facing the dark, ready to confront all the demons that never came out, I don’t feel changed. I wish I did.I was told the dark retreat was a cocoon, a womb, that I would be “reborn”. I felt the same watching that sunrise as if the past 10 days in the dark were just me in extreme adult timeout while my brain just wouldn’t fucking shut up to even let me meditate deeply or “feel into the spiritual heart”. It’s really hard to feel like those 10 days for the dark retreat portion of my stay was valuable versus doing psychedelics for the first time.
— Journal Entry, June 3, 2026
I didn’t want to sleep that night because it would make the metal tube to the suburban cage come sooner. I thought about throwing my phone off Punta Cometa and just going full AWOL. I was up until 2 AM watching the fireflies through the tears, trying my best to console myself.
This Rumi quote came up a couple times in the silent retreat:
Love is best when mixed with anguish. In our town, we won’t call you a Lover if you escape the pain. Look for Love in this way, welcome it to your soul, and watch your spirit fly away in ecstasy.
Yet at that point I still didn’t get it. I did this for love and was met with just anguish as the clock ticked down to the flight home.
The last full day
The sunrise that greeted me after only 4 hours of sleep was devoid of color and cloudy as if mirroring my mental state. Even the usual Mazunte heat seemed to be gone as I felt the winds of change rolling in, the rainy season coming and me going.
My emotions battered at me like the waves on the cliffs at Punta Cometa during that morning’s group meditation. The sounds of the bugs through the open windows seemed to be guiding me away from the mental chaos of my mood into the “I am”.
Somehow, during the middle of this, I finally started to glimpse what Rumi meant when he said “love is best mixed with anguish”. That is complete love. That’s its full-bodied form.
I felt myself suspended in an ocean of compassion as if God Himself was trying to submerge me and sink the ship of my separate self. It didn’t last long, but it was enough to remind me that I’m not alone, drowning in these feelings. They’re too big for me to hold alone.
After a lunch in town, I sat outside “Anugraha Hall” unable to follow along with the breathing bell I could overhear because I was crying so much. I wished I could say I felt energized, inspired, or empowered after all this, but I just felt... grief.
Again, I didn’t get to sleep until very late as I did a candlelight vigil for my time here. I lit the two tea candles I’d been given for the dark retreat and sat outside gazing at the stars, brighter than I could see back home. I wondered if there was anyone out there across the far-flung galaxies also staring up at the night sky through tears in longing.
The pre-dawn surgery
My emotions at a peak, the dreams I had that night and the night prior were vivid and literal as I processed my upcoming departure from Mazunte. I remember talking with my mom where even she was talking about God’s fullness in perceived emptiness and that she understands it — Presence in perceived absence.
I woke up just before 4 AM and as the realization hit me that I had 4 hours left here, that this was my last time waking up in this bed, I started crying. I wrote:
God, my heart is broken and You’re leaking out of it. You’re leaking through my eyes as tears that don’t seem to dry from Your reassurance and the Love that bears them. I feel as though I may drown from them. Yet through all this You remain unmoved. It is I who is moved to tears because of You moving through me. I cry in longing for my Self, as if it is not already mine, not already me. They speak of peace that surpasses all understanding, but what of the grief that does the same?
They told me the dark retreat would be spiritual “surgery without anesthesia”. The dark retreat was the waiting room. Leaving Mazunte is the surgery without anesthesia. My heart is being cut out of my body minute by dwindling minute and I cannot sleep through the pain, the hands of the clock moving like a scalpel.
It felt ridiculous how much I didn’t want to go home after all this time away. How much I’d rather sweat in the 100F humidity with the bugs. How much I’d rather stay in a Mexican basement rather than the beautiful home I prayed months for. The guilt made it all even worse.
I sobbed for over an hour. I begged God to not let the sun move across the sky until the battle in my heart was won. I pleaded that if time was truly an illusion then to stop it. I started whispering three words to myself over and over and over again through the pain: I am here. I am here. I am here.
I repeated it until the sobbing subsided and the bugs began to make noise outside. By the time the first bird chirped, this came from within:
I am not cutting out your heart. I am cutting out the wound of separation.
I then realized the bugs and the birds were also saying in their own way “I am here. I am here. I am here.” Everything was singing “I am here.”
This seemed to cut straight to the core of the separation wound better than self-inquiry. Instead of Hridaya Yoga and Ramana Maharshi’s “Who am I?”, I seemed to be leaving with “I am here.”
A new dawn
As I sat on the terrace for the last time, the noise of Mazunte at 7 AM had become a sound bath. I was surrounded by the cacophonous symphony of God’s presence.
The most profound part of the trip wasn’t the 10 straight days in utter darkness or the morning I emerged to finally see the light again.
It was sitting and listening while waiting for the taxi to the airport.
As I was walking away from the terrace for the last time, I caught a glimpse through the screen windows of Viveka hall of several people deep in meditation and felt a bit wistful. The voice said “Let them continue their search. You got what you came here for.”
I can definitely say God talks to me now. On the taxi ride, we were talking and I said that He sounds like He changed, being more jovial and loving. He said “That’s because YOU changed.” And 2 seconds later I saw literal mirrors for sale at a shop on the side of highway 200. He is NOT subtle now that I’m paying attention.