Hygienic Darkroom Retreat Profound Rest for the Self-Healing Psyche
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hygienic darkroom retreat profound rest for the self-healing psyche Andrew Durham This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/darkroomretreat This version was published on 2021-09-06 This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do. © 2009-2019 Andrew Durham // Copy & sell this book! See license. // DISCLAIMER: This book is not intended as medical advice. The responsibility for the consequences of your taking any action described herein lies not with the author, publisher, or distributors. For late friends, Lisa Saavedra and John Rosenberg, who burned bright in a benighted lifeway and so fell long before their time; And my brilliant, life-imprisoned cousin, Damon Durham, on whom the sins of our fathers are so heavily visited these decades of hard time. Contents blurb ................................ 1 notes ................................ 2 foreword ............................. 3 preface .............................. 4 introduction ........................... 5 basics .............................. 5 background .......................... 9 application ........................... 14 1 - hygiene ............................ 18 essence ............................. 19 rest ............................... 20 history ............................. 20 laws of life ........................... 21 2 - darkroom retreat ..................... 33 elements ............................ 33 darkness ............................ 34 distinctions .......................... 38 mechanics ........................... 44 3 - psychology .......................... 47 intro ............................... 47 pathology ........................... 49 trauma ............................. 56 psychosis ............................ 61 cataclysm ........................... 64 hygienic psychology ..................... 67 CONTENTS 4 - format ............................. 71 sleep .............................. 71 retreat ............................. 74 future .............................. 81 5 - protocol ............................ 83 mechanics ........................... 83 attitude ............................. 89 experience ........................... 95 difficulty ............................ 97 aftermath . 102 6 - prepare ............................105 register .............................105 questionnaire . 106 menu ..............................107 bring ..............................110 7 - design .............................112 normal .............................112 start ...............................112 types ..............................113 standards . 113 facility .............................114 quiet ..............................118 round ..............................120 8 - make ..............................123 metric ..............................124 tools ...............................125 plans ..............................127 fabricate ............................132 9 - air ...............................136 ventilation . 136 lightproof . 140 soundproofing . 159 machines ............................164 10 - darkness ..........................170 sleeping mask . 171 door seal ............................176 CONTENTS blinds ..............................177 11 - water .............................199 sink ...............................199 toilet ..............................200 bath ...............................204 faq .................................207 mechanics . 207 concerns ............................208 objections . 209 appendix - laws of life .....................212 criticism ............................214 bibliography and influences ................215 acknowledgments .......................218 services ..............................223 writing .............................223 speaking ............................223 consulting . 223 design-build . 224 license ...............................225 participate ............................227 bio .................................229 contact .............................229 blurb relief, rest, recovery When the door shuts and the light goes out, the miracle begins. • instant relief from distress and overstimulation • profound rest from exhaustion • complete recovery from illness and injury This is a hygienic darkroom retreat: extended rest in total darkness. Healing super-intensifies. Energy and function are restored. Clarity, strength, and joy reappear. The lost self returns. This complete manual explains why a retreat works, how to do it, and how to make a darkroom at home. It shows that miracles are easy. Simply provide their conditions. toward a hygienic psychology Indigenous and spiritual traditions have used physical darkness for millennia. This is the first approach to darkness—and psychology—based on hygiene. Not just cleanliness, hygiene is the science of health. Hygiene recognizes the self-preserving nature of life and all its normal conditions. These include fresh air, ample sleep, pure food, frequent bathing and exercise, etc. Darkness enables the full application of its principles to the organic system of the psyche. Hygiene began to show nature’s way to industrial civiliza- tion in 1832. Worldwide massive improvements in public health followed. Benefits continue for billions who never see doctors or even understand the terminology. Hygiene is history’s most influential approach to health. The primary condition of healing is profound rest. All its conditions exist in a hygienic darkroom retreat, perfected and temporarily extended, as in fasting. The psyche heals itself autonomically of even the greatest injuries. The result: reliable miracles. 1 notes This book is an integrated whole. It presents the idea immediately in brief, then in detail. Every word contributes to understanding, including the blurb, dedication, etc. Each paragraph builds upon the last. This book has links. On the web, they are colored. In the ebook and print, they look like this: • external links to other webpages • internal links to other parts of this book. Chapter and section indicated for readers of print version. • books, downloadable get latest version • web – one page per chapter, dark background: darkroomretreat.com – single page, light background: leanpub.com/darkroomretreat/read • ebook (pdf, epub, mobi) – get notified of new versions: leanpub.com/darkroomretreat – direct: darkroomretreat.com/ebook • plans: darkroom-retreat.zip 2 foreword This book comes out of an investigation into the cause of joy. At 15, great joy spontaneously overcame me. It felt nor- mal. But after three heavenly months, it disappeared. My other concerns seemed empty. The need to solve this mys- tery gripped me. After 21 years of investigation, I did. Others had discov- ered the destroyer of joy: cataclysmic trauma. I discovered the self-healing power of the psyche and the essential con- dition nature provides us to heal: darkness. More than a decade of testing, refinement, and documentation followed. Briefly, joy is a function of being alive, not effort. Lack of joy indicates a damaged system, not moral failure. Given conditions of profound rest, this damage heals by itself, and joy returns. It’s that simple. We are all days away from a return to hap- piness, health, and peace. My condolences to the founders of world religions for either getting it wrong or explaining it so badly. Effort, our lifeway’s smug panacea, gives false and fleet- ing results. With the will, one can do nothing directly to restore joy. One can only provide proper conditions. The organism does the rest autonomically. For 10,000 years, we civilized people have correctly ascer- tained that something is terribly wrong with ourselves and that we must do something about it. But we have mistaken which part of ourselves must do it At long last, this book puts the issue to rest. 3 preface When I first retreated in darkness, I just did it to rest. It worked. After 56 hours, I felt caught up on all the sleep I had ever lost, truly awake for the first time in decades. I was stunned. Two years later, the same thing happened. Except, unusu- ally, I also felt humbled. Genuinely calm. Well in my soul. This sense of psychic health stayed with me for months. But how, after a lifetime of depression, alienation, and anxi- ety? From hygiene, I vaguely remembered the self-healing nature of life, and rest as the primary condition of healing. The onset of middle age was daily demonstrating the organic nature of the psyche to me. One morning in a dream, these clues fused in a conception of the restful use of darkness in support of the self-healing psyche. I began testing this idea in more darkroom retreats. As predicted, lethal psychic issues that have tortured me for a lifetime began resolving themselves spontaneously. In 10 years and 25 retreats, I have seen no sign of an end to this process—short of full recovery of psychophysical integrity. Now I feel confident about what I have learned: what happens in darkness and why; how to retreat and what for. And I can only go further in this by sharing this approach. It needs more participation, resources, and velocity. Hygienic darkroom retreating requires minimal effort and no faith. Darkness is not a void, but a sanctuary. It is not the absence of light, but the presence of the self. It is yours. ad Europe, 2019 4 introduction In civilization, we are: • over-stimulated