The Magic of Enclosure: Dark Retreats with Meghan Elfsten
In a world that never turns the lights off, what happens when you willingly choose complete, uninterrupted dark?
Joining us for today’s conversation is Meghan Elfsten. She is the Director of OMYA Dark Retreats, a California Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT), and holds a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. She is completing her Somatic Experiencing® training in September 2026 and facilitates immersive dark retreat experiences designed to support nervous system regulation, deep restoration, and inner reconnection. Rooted in Somatic Experiencing®, her work weaves mindfulness, relational awareness, and body-based practices to gently unwind patterns of trauma, addiction, and chronic overstimulation in a way that feels more womb-like than punishing.
Drawing from her own life-changing time in extended darkness, Meghan became deeply devoted to the question: What becomes possible when we remove all external stimulation and finally listen to the body? At OMYA Dark Retreats, she now creates highly supported, trauma-aware containers where participants can safely turn inward, meet long-buried parts of themselves, and access deeper layers of emotional and embodied healing—without plant medicine, performance, or spiritual bypass.
If you feel the pull toward the dark, Meghan is offering 20% off for our listeners at darkcaves.life with the code ROSEWOMAN at checkout.
In this episode, we cover so many topics, including:
(00:00:00) - Introduction and History Of Enclosure Across Traditions
(00:08:56) - Meghan's First Dark Retreat
(00:10:14) - Structure Of Dark Retreats and Omya Ranch Environment
(00:13:26) - Gray Retreat Option
(00:15:11) - Tomb-To-Womb Reframing by Andrew Holacek
(00:17:25) - Neuroscience Tracking and Aftereffects
(00:24:32) - Somatic Experiencing Practices
(00:26:30) - Psychological Screening
(00:28:12) - Participant Stories and Non-Local Effects
(00:30:08) - Extrasensory Perception And Telepathy Training In Darkness
(00:32:00) - Meghan Life Purpose Shift
(00:33:40) - Building The Dark Caves and Finding Comfort In Total Darkness
(00:37:42) - Omya Ranch Vision, Regenerative Ecosystem, And Practical Integration
Helpful links:
Meghan Elfsten - Director of Dark Retreats at Omya Ranch. Follow her on Instagram @meghanelfstense and @Omya.Community
Andrew Holecek’s Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation
Oversized Mulberry Silk Eye Mask available at Rosebud Woman
Your host:
Courses, Retreats and Events by Christine:
Wake Down for Women: Virtual Workshop live in Mexico
Fall Hawai'i Immersion: November 1 to 22, 2026
Easter Intensive: Mystic Heart of Easter Retreat with Christine Mason on March 25-28, 2027
Upcoming Events with Christine
Brought to you by Rosebud Woman, Award Winning Intimate and Body Care:
The Rosewoman Library: The Embodied Menopause & Intimacy Library
Founder, Rosebud Woman
Co-Founder, Radiant Farms and Sundari Gardens
Host, The Rose Woman on Love and Liberation:
Listen, Like, Share & Subscribe on Apple Podcast | Spotify
Transcript
Meghan Elfsten 0:05
There is a primal aspect when you take away sight and sound. There's a primal piece that will panic because you can't orient yourself to anything, and it is such a level of darkness that you can never see your hand. People always walk in and they're like, "I never knew this level of darkness could exist.
Christine Mason 0:23
Hey, friends, welcome back. It's Christine Marie Mason, and this is the Rose Woman podcast on love and liberation, and all the ways to amplify that in our lives. The summer of 2026 has been a very inward summer for me. I've spent a lot of time alone. I've been going into the places in myself that I've been unwilling to look at in very profound ways, and I've been drawn to the topic of the dark. In fact, I was just listening to my friend Wendy Rule's album Persephone which she recorded in 2019, just telling the story of what it means to go down into the darkness. And last night, it was at a women's event where these gorgeous women acted out the story of following the impulse to go down deep and to meet the roots and and depths of things, not just the light. And synchronistically with all of this, I had invited Meghan Elfsten, the founder of a new form of dark retreat, which we're going to get into today on the show. I've done a lot of sitting practice in my life, including sitting 10 days of vipassana in silence, and I have been intrigued by these dark retreats. But frankly, they are-they sound quite intense to me. So I started thinking as a way of introduction to this topic about the long spiritual history of enclosure as a technology to touch the true essence of the self. So before I introduce our guest, before we get started on the main part of the body of the show, I want to just mention a few of those things, so that we're all on the same page. We're all framing this in the same way. So let me take you deep into a cave in southern France at Lascaux, 17,000 years ago. The first known cave paintings of our human ancestors. They did not paint at the mouths of those caves where they cooked and slept and lived. They crawled hundreds of meters into the lightless interior, past every practical reason to be there, and that's where they made their art. The darkness was part of the destination and the expression. This enclosure idea that you're going into the dark purposefully appears everywhere, independently, in every tradition that has ever pointed us to ask who we really are, to remember that we are not just the material body or what we see or the mask we wear. In ancient India, a whole life was divided into seasons, and when your children were grown and your first gray hairs arrived, the forest dweller season began, in which you were expected to loosen your grip on the world and withdraw toward the trees to contemplate more. Retreat wasn't for specialists; it was written into the human life cycle itself. There is also the story of Milarepa, Tibet's great yogi poet, who took it much further? He sealed into his Himalayan caves for years, living on nettle soup and singing his realization into the stone. His descendants and the Tibetan lineages still send their practitioners into retreat for three years, three months, and three days. Sit with that number for a moment, because the length isn't a punishment, nor is it some sort of triumphant thing. It's a considered dose. The tradition says it takes roughly that long for the winds of the body-the 21,000 breaths a day of grasping, performing, self-defending life-to be exchanged breath by breath for something quieter, and the retreat consists of nothing like adventure or novelty. It is rather radical simplification. One room, one schedule, the same practices in the same sessions at the same hours, rising before dawn, sitting, resting, sitting, the same simple food, the same walls for 1000 days. Everything that could happen next has been removed, and this is the intention. When nothing new can come in from the outside, the only thing left to become interested in is the inside. The Tibetan word for meditation, gom, doesn't mean transcendence; it means familiarization. You're not going somewhere exalted. You're becoming familiar, family, deeply, patiently, unavoidably familiar with your own mind. The boredom isn't a side effect; it's the door, because the self we perform for the world can't survive 1000 identical mornings. The self we perform for the world needs an audience, variety, and somewhere to go. So, if you take all of that away, what remains?
The tradition tells us that what remains is what was there before the performance started, and in the deepest of these practices, the practitioner goes further still into total darkness for 49 days. Why 49? Because in the Tibetan understanding, 49 days is the length of the bardo, the passage we travel between death and whatever comes next. In prolonged darkness, visions arise, lights, forms, whole landscapes, and the practice is to recognize every one of them as the display of your own mind, which is exactly the skill the tradition says you will need when you die. 49 days in the dark is a full dress rehearsal for dying, with one instruction: recognize what appears as yourself. The same discovery was made in the West. In other rooms, the desert mothers and fathers of Egypt taught, "Go sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything. The Sufis kept their 40 days of kalwa, remembering that Moses met God on the mountain, and Jesus fasted in the desert, and Mohammed received revelation in a cave. And medieval Europe gave us the anchoress, a woman who took a vow of permanent enclosure and was sealed for life into a small cell built onto the side of the village church. Sometimes, with the funeral read over her as she entered, declared dead to the world. Her cell has three windows: one to the altar, one for food, and one where the whole village came for counsel. Because the woman who went nowhere became the one everyone came to for wisdom. Julian of Norwich wrote the first book in English, by a woman from inside that room. She was a great mystic. All shall be well, she wrote, and all manner of things shall be well. So why, why does every tradition arrive at the same door? Because I think the self we perform is maintained by being seen. We are held together hour by hour by the mirror of other people, by the light, by the 10,000 things to look at. You take the mirror away, you take the light away, and what remains is what was always underneath. The senses flow outward by design, but enclosure turns the river back on its source. Every one of those traditions discovered the same secret: the fastest road inward is the one with nothing on it. No other traffic. But most of these models were built on endurance, dominance over the body, hardship, but does that have to go together? Would the darkness alone, for a shorter period of time, without the discomfort and the disciplining of the body, produce similar results? What if the dark was more womb-like than tomb-like? Today's guest, Meghan Alpston, spent 15 years searching through every healing modality you can name, until four nights of total darkness rewired her nervous system and reorganized her life. She left her career as a CPA, trained as a mental health counselor, and built dark retreat caves into a hillside in Nebraska over an aquifer on a farm that grows its own food, where she now walks people to the threshold, hands them a candle, and then lets them blow it out. Before we begin, I just want you to know that this conversation touches briefly on trauma and panic. So, if that's something that you're not ready to dive into today, listen with care, but with curiosity. Is there something in the idea of a darker treat for me. I think there is for me. I am intending to go after hearing her, and see what might be waiting in the dark. Here is Meghan.
Meghan Elfsten 8:56
I come from a history of a lot of trauma and abuse, and I left a really toxic marriage with three little kids, and so I spent the next 15 years trying every healing modality possible, everything from plant medicine to EMDR, just anything I could find. And it wasn't, and they all had great aspects that you know helped me heal to some degree, but I always had this level of panic in my nervous system and this low level grade of constantly doing and just the sympathetic nervous system was just pedal to the metal all the time. And I did a dark retreat three years ago, and it was the hardest thing I ever did, and it was the most life changing. And my nervous system fundamentally changed forever. And when I came out of there, it was just this deep knowing that this was my purpose, and I knew that this could be done in a feminine way, in a way that this was nurturing and womb-like space. Didn't need to be this, you know, masculine endure just endure the dark space, and so from that point on, the last three years I've spent all of my time and energy just researching, studying, and building.
Christine Mason 10:14
To this point, it is in the lineage of like a long line of traditions that do enclosure, like going to the cave. Milarepa went in and shut himself in. Even now in modern Tibet, you know, you'll go in and sit still for years in the dark, and it is a very sort of dominance over the body versus what I feel like you're doing. Can you can you describe what one of your dark retreats is like,
Meghan Elfsten 10:41
yeah, and we do everything from gray retreat to dark retreat, which I can also explain. But basically, it's on this place, this ranch, this healing ranch that is in Nebraska. This ecosystem alone, it's you know everything's in perfect balance. We grow all of our own food, the plants, the animals-it's just this beautiful frequency where everything is in harmony. So that's to begin with, and it also has one of the largest aquifers in the world. So these caves are built into this hillside, and then there's an aquifer running underneath it, and then everything in this environment-from the filtered air to the filtered water to the local food to every component is there to like support your health and well-being. So basically, somebody comes in on the Sunday and we do everything from breath work to they have shift wave, we have infrared sauna, we have cold plunge, hot tub, hiking trails, just kind of dropping into nature and into the environment, getting settled. We do a ceremony, learn some techniques. We bring in qigong, kundalini, breathwork, just tools that they can use in the dark. And it's this beautiful space that then they set up, and we do a ceremony. And then that night they blow out a candle, like signifying that they're entering the dark, and so then they do four nights, three days in total darkness, and I come and check on them, and we have the potential for therapy sessions outside the door, twice a day. So there's as much or as little support as you know somebody needs, and so it's really working with whatever somebody is bringing in in that moment, so if they are really activated, then there's a candle in there. There's a red light. They have the option for me to come get them at nighttime, and we go under the stars and we have some tea, and you know talk. So it doesn't have to be hard. It's really like meeting somebody exactly where they are, and just supporting their nervous system, their body, their psyche, in whatever way possible, as they go through this, and then we bring in a massage in the dark on the second day, and then there's also potential for you know for me to come in and do holotropic breathwork if somebody wants it, but it's really just so individual, and there's a bathtub, and Epsom salts and an anti gravity chair and trigger balls inside of there and a yoga mat to really kind of work with the body as well because that's such a like fundamental component is being connected and letting our body sort of show us what it wants to show us and let the dark teach us what it wants to teach us. This is such
Christine Mason 13:22
a far cry from taking yourself into a three foot by six foot ox mom cave.
Meghan Elfsten 13:27
Yes, it's very different than that, for sure. What's the gray version? Yeah, yeah. So the gray version is really like if if someone's nervous system. So I had to do the gray version for the first couple days because within two hours I was in full panic, and I was like, "I can't do this the way that I thought. Like I thought I was just going to make it through it, and I had all these meditation practices and breathwork practices, and and none of it was just I was in full panic, and so I had a candle, so I had to titrate the dark a lot more. I had to have candles for periods of time, blow them out. Use a red light and take it out. So I really that's where the gray retreat starts. It's like how much do you need knowing that window of tolerance? Because so many people are addicted to their phones and to distraction, and it really is a pretty big opposite reaction to what our daily life is. So when that panic comes in, it's like we need to nurture it. Put on a candle, and then if I hear somebody is really still in panic, then it's like, okay, let's tonight we're going to come out. Let's go sit under the stars and let's discuss what's happening and let's work with your nervous system and let's have a cup of tea, so you don't have to stay in there. What is your theory? What do you think is happening when people are panicking in the dark?
Christine Mason 14:43
When
Meghan Elfsten 14:43
you were in the dark, what were your and having that initial reaction? What were your thoughts? Was it about death? Was it about you know what what was what was happening there? There is a primal aspect when you take away sight and sound. There's a primal piece that will panic because you can't orient yourself to anything. And it is such a level of darkness that you can never see your hand. I mean, it is so people always walk in and they're like, "I never knew this level of darkness could exist. So it's almost a heavy heaviness. And so Andrew Holacak, who's kind of an expert in this field, he says that it goes from a tomb to a womb. So there's an element of it that just felt heavy, and so for me, the panic-I think it is-it is death. It's disappearing. It's not being able to know what's in your environment. There's some aspect that is just a state of panic, and so that's where bringing in candles and a little bit of light lets you orient, and you're like, oh, okay, I'm okay.
Christine Mason 15:43
Yeah, people even have that on a vipassana, like three days into vipassana of not speaking, like some kind of a panic can set in.
Meghan Elfsten 15:51
Yeah, and I think it's how we orient because we stay busy. You know, most of our life we are constantly distracted, and we have such great strategies for managing our life that we're not aware of those strategies because they run under the unconscious level. So that's one of the greatest like pieces of this work is that all of our life we're projecting our subconscious into the light. We don't even understand what most of our control strategies are and how we are using them until we get into the dark, when you take away everything, the only thing you can project into is the dark, which bounces back to you. So the mind starts to fall in on itself. So it's like the disappearance between conscious mind and unconscious mind, the disappearance of inner world and outer world.
Christine Mason 16:39
That's beautiful. You mentioned Andrew Holacek. He's out of he's out of a Buddhist lineage, right?
Meghan Elfsten 16:46
Yes, yes, the dochin practice. Yes, he's he's so magnificent. So actually, we always ask everyone to read his book, Total Eclipse of the Mind, when they come in, and he's been a mentor. And it's just so incredible to learn from some of these incredible people who've been doing this for-he's done it for 30 years-and to really weave in these practices and see what different sciences have shown, and we're also doing our own science to start to really bring this modality and this practice into modern culture into a way that it can really benefit people where they are now, instead of just a select sect of people who are practitioners,
Christine Mason 17:25
what does the neuroscience show? What have you learned so far?
Meghan Elfsten 17:28
So we are just starting. I mean, what I've seen from participants and like the aspect of experience is that people feel like they're on-they're just so alive. One of the comments is like, I've never felt so alive. Like your skin's vibrating, your whole body's vibrating. You're blown wide open. It's almost like you're on MDMA. Your heart is wide open, and so people are so present. And because you have to move so slow in the dark, there's a layer of unwinding that that level of presence is like so palpable with everyone that comes out, but we are just starting the science. So we're actually testing cortisol levels before people come in and when they come out, melatonin levels in different markers before they go in, when they come out, and then we're also doing inflammation markers with blood before they go in and when they come out. And some people are using aura rings and taping them up, so we're really starting to track what does this do biologically, what does this do in our nervous system, and then we're in relationship with some other scientists at some other places that are doing more of the psychological components and studying, you know, taking recordings of what people are doing in the dark and then analyzing them into a psychological framework of what this arc is. So we're just at the beginning, and you know most of what I know now is what I'm just seeing from people's experience. And we'll start to get the data, you know, the next few months from this year. And I'm just excited to start building and collaborating with other scientists to see how we can really study things that impact this field in a big way because I think it really is a powerful modality that doesn't involve any medicine, any drugs. Like you are the medicine, and when do we ever get that level of intimacy with ourselves?
Christine Mason 19:18
I've gone to these Ayurvedic Panchakarma retreats, which aren't dark, but they do the same thing: sense of testing your cortisol and all your all your markers at the beginning, and they test you again 10 days later. And in 10 days, your beautiful body resets the given relaxation, proper diet, clean environment. Your body completely resets itself, and so the idea you're only doing three or four days, and that it might have a similar impact. I'm super curious to see, you know, what happens to stress markers and things like that, even in such a short time. I thought it was seven days or eight days. I didn't know it was this short.
Meghan Elfsten 19:57
No, they haven't really found like. That there's much benefit for some reason. This is over the people who've been doing it for the last 15 years, and what it's showing is that you really between four nights and three days, around day three, people start to really have this surrender opening effect visualizations that something significantly happens, and that the longer the time frame is, sometimes there's even diminishing returns because the mind can start to like it. Just depends on the capacity of the person of what their mental capacity is because the mind is falling in on itself over and over again, and there's different layers that happen. It could just provide not benefits long term, so this is just what the field is right now that says this is really the best amount of time, the greatest impact, and then it also gives them a day. So they're at the ranch for six days, 24 hours. Then we really integrate. So integration, I feel like, is actually the biggest component of this. That there is the pressure cooker element, and you get aspects that are very, very similar. You enter a state of non-duality, just like you do in plant medicine, but you are so sober and you are so clear that then you know it's like, how does this integrate into your life? And that's really, I think, for me, the biggest piece that really will change people's lives.
Christine Mason 21:22
So there's something in here, like the darkness will produce this endogenous DMT visions, the prisoner cinema, melatonin cascades. It has a peak experience quality, but when you talk about integration, like that peak experience quality sort of misses the point. It's like, what do you do with that in bringing it home into your into your regular life?
Meghan Elfsten 21:44
Right, you know some people have amazing peak experiences, and some people it's like a constant like they're working through a lot of trauma. They're actually having to work. I think there's levels. You know, it's like wherever someone's starting. Right, you're starting with basic security in your relationship to yourself. So, what is the body? What is in your nervous system fundamentally? Starting there, and then working through what in the psyche needs to come out and be worked with, and then of those layers, as you're surrendering more and opening into the darkness, then the allowance of seeing the universe, little lights, that the ultimate state is that they you know form into you know sacred geometry and bring you into that state of oneness. So it's really where you're at. I think where you're going to be. They're so different for so many people.
Christine Mason 22:31
Yeah, I I'm so I'm so interest I'm so intrigued. You know,
Meghan Elfsten 22:36
you got to come do it. I'm
Christine Mason 22:37
sure I'm going to do it now. Now it's like I'm actually I I find like a little fear arises in me, like like darkness would have been encoded as evil or chaotic. You know, we have a kind of a light culture, and it's almost like you know the dark feminine stuff. Which yes, I think I'm afraid of my own dark feminine. Frankly, you know what scares this? What scares me? Yeah, and I
Meghan Elfsten 23:02
think it's there's actually like I think most people there is a level of fear, which is great. It's the reverence, and it's you're purposely stepping into that dark. And I think it is when you're surrendering into it. It's like our own darkness, our own shadow. Like you're just like okay, I surrender. I'm allowing. It's here, right? Instead of like all the things that, like everything you do is going to show up. You're like, oh, I control things by moving my body all the time, and like, okay, I got to let go of that. I'm getting like a nervous laughter because I've been doing a practice, the Neville Godard before bedtime practice, where you, you know you lay and you rehearse the day and you remember what happened during the day and if there was anything that wisdom you cleared out and so you kind of like program yourself as you're going into sleep and also saying a prayer let me see everything I need to see about myself that is in the way of having an integrated nervous system
Christine Mason 24:00
and being the clearest channel possible, and in prayer to ask that prayer means you you see stuff that is very unsavory in your own self. And I have tolerance; I've built tolerance. But I can imagine that with nothing else to look at, I'm not picking up my Instagram to look at some funny reel when I hit that that discomfort of the inner seeing, you either move through it and you let the the metaphorical light into that place you weren't willing to meet, or you break.
Meghan Elfsten 24:33
Yeah, and I think one of the pieces that's fun and interesting to work with that might be different too is so I use somatic experiencing as one tool. Like the frameworks I look through, are somatic experiencing from Peter Levine, IFS parts work, and Shadow Jungian depth psychology and dream work. And so, in the somatic experiencing practices, like most of the time when we feel that contraction and the you know discomfort in our body, we do everything to get out of it. I'm going to stretch. I'm going to move. I'm going to breathe. I'm going to, I'm going to move it. And instead, the invitation in this work is like: What happens if you make it bigger? What happens if you go into it and you intensify that discomfort, and you sit with it and you just be with it and you don't need to change it? What happens, and then just tracking it and having that time and the space to really track things because we will pendulate. You know, we will go from contraction, expansion, just like all of nature. But most of life, we just avoid the contraction. We're always trying to just be an expansion, and so we don't naturally necessarily allow our nervous systems. Where I think a lot of times that's where people get stuck with, you know, the gas and the brake on at the same time, and you get syndromes and disorders in the body because your nervous system is your parasympathetic and your sympathetic are not naturally pendulating. So you're allowed. So this work kind of naturally allows you to do that, but we're also purposely looking at what is showing up when we pay attention and we go into it bigger, just a different model than how we typically work with discomfort.
Christine Mason 26:10
I even feel that right now. Like if you're listening and you want to take a big deep breath and like notice any kind of contraction, and just imagine what it would be like to take stillness and to feel that contraction fully in such a way that it starts to the curiosity alone starts to relax it.
Meghan Elfsten 26:29
Yeah,
Christine Mason 26:30
quite beautiful. Is there anyone that shouldn't do these? Do you do psychological screening? Yes, yes, we do. Yeah, we definitely
Meghan Elfsten 26:38
do intake forms. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is. I mean, one, I think this modality kind of self-selects. I think, I think there's, you know, I get, I get two different responses. Some people are like, "Oh, wow, that's super interesting, or I get, "No way, there's no way I'm doing that. You know, you there's kind of a visceral response from people. So I do think inherently there is a self-selection process, but generally, people who are afraid of the dark, you know, that have really a really severe trauma history that they really haven't worked through, you know, claustrophobia. If you're feeling that you get, you know, intense panic attacks, yeah, certain things like that, and we do several different layers of kind of understanding where someone is and what their nervous system's at before they go in, and that also helps us prepare. Because the other piece about this is, if it really isn't for somebody, they can walk out and be done. You're not locked in. You're not like you know it's in in different from a drug where you take it and you're like, I can't get out. I'm stuck. I'm in it. You can just get out at any time. I went into one of those sensory deprivation tanks once and had a panic attack, and they and they so they came back and they opened the the thing slightly, so there was a little bit of light, but very very interesting that you tied it to claustrophobia, and even the slightest amount of light would relieve that your your red light or your null. So tell me of the people that have come, or if it's if you're comfortable anonymizing that. What are some of their stories? What have they reported? We've had some incredible experiences. One person I love. The first thing he said when he came out. As he said that if you want to see yourself, go into the light. But if you want to find yourself, go into the dark. And he has spent the last 20 years doing tons of healing modalities. He's done ibogaine every plant, and he said, hands down, the dark was the most profound life changing experience he's had. So we've had people with visions, visions where they're not sure if it's remote viewing or telepathy. One one person, he has been working and manifesting, and so he was the last day in there. And his brother in law had never had a hole in one. He's been playing golf for 40 years, and so he's like, "I'm just going to play with this a little bit. He's like, he saw his brother in law on a specific golf course making a hole in one in a very specific way from a very specific angle, and he was just having so much fun with this vision. Within two hours of him coming out of the dark cave, he got a text from his brother, that said, you're not going to believe it. I made my first hole in one in this way, and it all matched perfectly. And so he's been relating to me this layer
Christine Mason 29:30
of like nonstop manifestations that are happening. And so there's some incredible things. You know what's what's happening now in this conversation, which is is like you're going to non-local consciousness in a way. It's very easy to do the mechanistic psycho-emotional layer like mind and trauma, but there's so more that's happening in between, and you get into non-local consciousness or the development of clairs like clair sentience, clair congency. And I imagine that when, just like the research with blind people or deaf people, that other senses expand to compensate, that that can look almost miraculous.
Meghan Elfsten 30:08
Yes, so that's actually a little bit of a passion project that I'm working on right now too. So, Dalia from the telepathy tapes, and then Sean, who's blind, who has glass eyes, are both coming to do this together. We are fascinated because when I did blindfold training, you know, we're bending spoons, we are sticking things to the wall, we're reading through blindfolds, and your skill, these extrasensory perceptions, just come online, and especially like it's all towards telepathy, and so we're looking at it. I'm excited for her experience because how can this actually be a training ground for people? Because you do have like echolocation, which comes in naturally, which is you know the sound and kind of orienting. But when you're not used to using these extrasensory perceptions, you know what can we do to actually amplify them and work on them as a part of this retreat? So
Christine Mason 31:00
this is actually something we're we're really looking at too, because I think this is like this beautiful womb for like so many things that are possible. I had forgotten that part about you. I remember reading something that you were bending things and sticking them to walls. That's a whole nother thing. But let's not get distracted. Like it feels like there's a much longer arc pull in your life because you could have had like a darker treat experience that was wonderful for you, and you went back to your family and and and just in more clarity. But you decided to like tune your life to making it happen. Also, at the same time, I think getting certified as a mental health counselor, right? Yeah. So also to prepare your own self to be a host in a in a mature way, like you just went at it. And I want to to I want to speak to this trait in you that sees what needs to happen or is called to it to birth something, and then just
Meghan Elfsten 31:59
goes for it, and yeah, just tell me a little bit. Why do you think you're like that? What is that? I mean, I think something broke open in me. I think that most of my life, I was you know a CPA. I went to get my PhD in accounting. I everything I did was like in this measure of what can I do to be successful? You know, what are these things that society says are happiness and success, and really was in that matrix of doing things. And I think just getting blown apart and kind of having my whole world unravel and having to heal and be in the dark. That when I came out, there's just something that it's like I know so deeply in my soul that this is my purpose, and I just know that humanity needs this right now, and that they need the science and the information and like whatever it takes. It just is, it energizes me. It fills me up. It's like I wake up every day on the ranch, and there's this awe of like I can't believe I get to do this. There's just this this way of like feeling like all of nature's in perfect harmony and the frequency that's in this land and people get to come drop into that into the earth and be held by me and the food and everything and just to get to witness and walk along people in this journey just is like I I don't know. There's something so deep in me that I just feel so much gratitude and so much joy, and everything else in life just works so easily just because I don't know. You're like you're walking the red road now, girl. You're curandera. You can't. You no coming back. No coming back. Okay. So this is beautiful. So so I have a practical question for you about something that is completely dark. Like the light gets in through every seam in every place. How did you actually do the build? They're amazing. I mean, it's really, really incredibly built. They're very, very expensive, high end. There is not an inkling of light, and they're also very, very because the thickness of the walls and how they're built in, and just the different layers of everything make it pitch, pitch black, and it can be dead silent. There is a filtration air system, so it's like if it's on, you might hear that kick on. But we've had people turn it off. It was 98 degrees outside. They turned it. Somebody turned it off for the whole time, and it never like changed in temperature, and it was dead silent. Yeah, it's they're built really, really incredibly well. I love a very, very amazing bed. My bed is like my favorite thing, so it's like the most comfortable bed in the whole world, and like this juicy comforter, and just this giant space that you're just like it just is so nourishing. So
Christine Mason 34:44
if someone feels pulled to do darkness and they can't do a formal retreat, what's the smallest doorway? A night without
Meghan Elfsten 34:51
light. Yeah, I mean you can start meditating for you know an hour with an eye mask. I mean it's so there's so many layers and ways to do it so simply. And just even wearing like a really secure eye mask for a couple of hours, and trying to navigate in your own house, or you know cooking something really nourishing, and maybe taking an eye mask and doing an hour meditation, and then going and trying to eat the food with the eye mask on, because there's something also that like changes. That was another big piece. Was my relationship to food also fundamentally changed because I realized how much of this mental construct of like you can't eat that, you should do this, you can't do this, that's bad. Like all these mental chatter, and then when it's just all nourishing food, knowing and you get it for 24 hours, you get it all at one time, so you manage it for 24 hours, and noticing when do I eat because I'm bored, and then because there's so much time to feel what everything does in my body, actually to feel the food, I realized that I spent my entire life like never actually feeling food. I could taste it, but I never felt it. I didn't know what was what it was doing, and so that had to change when I came out. That was like a big awareness for me was actually to listen to my body instead of me telling my body what it was supposed to do and needed. Actually listening to it and like responding that way and feeling it.
Christine Mason 36:16
Yeah, I mean you said that's around the food diet, and that's not just our own interaction with what we're ingesting; it's also the systems of food that are available to us on the outside. And I also feel that sensory diet. You're also you're speaking to all kinds of titration and attention to inputs, like in a world of screens and 24 hour light. That collective combination of bad food inputs or overloaded content inputs is probably a whammy to do together.
Meghan Elfsten 36:49
Yeah, and just like you said, you know, with the with the vipassanas and those different retreats, it's like when you can have everything that is supporting your well being. That state when you come out of like full aliveness and just like feeling healthy and vibrating and radiating, you can just feel it. Then it's like every choice you make after that is it like is this supporting my aliveness or is it not? Because you can feel it so clearly. That is the question we'll leave with is this is supporting my aliveness? So put a little context about the place. Also, I forgot to ask you this at the beginning, but you landed this at Heartland, yes? Yes, yes, at Omya Ranch. Yeah. So Omya Ranch has a broader mission. This is a subset of the activities that go on there. Can you say a little bit about that. Yeah, so Omya is a member invite group of conscious creators and CEOs who really are passionate about wanting to have a better future, and they are looking at how to have a lot of fun while they do it. And so it's it's really people coming together to share resources and collaborate for impact, for change, and looking at how can we build a better world, and looking at building these different conscious communities, and ultimately, Omya, the other property, you know, will have like this ecosystem of you know revamping education. People can live there, growing all the food, community dinners, people bringing their own gifts and coming for a small time, or living there and looking at how we, you know, we impact the environment and how the environment impacts us. And so, right now, it's like everything in both of these properties is like bringing in the bats and the birds and the bees, and you know, really nourishing the ecosystem that's there, because then we benefit when everything's in harmony.
Christine Mason 38:46
Yeah, it sounds like a it's a beautiful vision. Okay, so tell them about how they can get started.
Meghan Elfsten 38:53
Well, I would say you know if if people have more interest, the first thing is to read Andrew Holacek's book, Totally Clips of the Mind. I think it's so well written and really lays out a lot of this practice. But yeah, there's we have a website that is darkcaves dot life, and all the information is there. And I'm always available. People can reach out to me. I'm always happy to have calls and talk with people with any questions they have because I love it so much.
Christine Mason 39:25
You are literally contagious about it, so I know you're going to get a lot of interest.
Meghan Elfsten 39:29
Thank
Christine Mason 39:29
you so much for everything you're doing in the world. Thank you so much. That was Meghan Elveston, and somewhere I think Melarepa is smiling at the Epsom salts and the very good bed. You can find Meghan and her retreat at DarkCaves Life, and if you want to go deeper into the practice, starts where she starts. Everyone, read Andrew Holecek's Total Eclipse of the Mind. Here's what I'm taking from this conversation: For 17,000 years, human beings have gone into the dark to find. What the light conceals, you do not need a cave in Nebraska to begin. You need one hour in an eye mask, one meal eaten without looking, one night where, when the discomfort rises and your hand reaches for your glowing rectangle, you let the hand rest and stay, stay with your feeling. The subconscious you've been projecting onto the world all your life will come home to you. Meet it kindly. It's been waiting a long time to be seen by someone who wasn't looking away, and on the other side of that is more, as we've been saying in the show forever and ever, more love, more freedom. The question we end on, the one we can carry into our day, is this activity supporting my aliveness? The body already knows, and the dark seems to make it easier to hear. One more thing, Meghan just sent us a note, and she said if you'd like to do a dark retreat this year, she'll extend a 20% discount off to our listeners, so you can use the code Rose Woman one word all caps at checkout and get that substantial amount off of these what sound like amazing experiences, and then also if you want to experiment with beginning to train your sightless sensations, and you want a great blindfold, I'm carrying Kylu Silk, which is a mulberry silk, very beautiful on the skin, heat regulating at rosewoman.com. Kylu Silk eye masks at rosewoman.com. If this episode moved you, please share it with someone who's been living pedal to the metal, and leave us a review. It truly helps people find the show and the show find its people. And until next time, may you be well, may you be loved, and may you never again fear your own dark. Please check out our sponsors at RoseWoman.com and RadiantFarms.us for more lovely products to support your love and your liberation in the world.
