Dark Retreat - to spend days in total darkness. A qualitative content analysis of people's experiences of dark retreats and the potential health benefits of such a retreat.

This essay will examine spiritual and personal development YouTube channels where the content is about what it is like to do a dark retreat. The questions of the study is if they talk about that there are any health and physical benefits in doing a dark retreat and how their experience can be explained. This is linked to one of the key messages in the study which is to point to the altered state of consciousness and what life-changing transformation and positive change that can bring for the person who have experienced a transcendent and mystic state of consciousness.

A dark retreat is one practice used in the tantric Tibetan Buddhist movement "the Great Perfection" Dzogchen where a person is for a long time in total darkness to gain knowledge of the emptiness of everything. The dark retreat tradition that is the focus of this study are linked to the new age movement that differs from the Dzogchen tradition regarding dark retreat in that there are no masters or rules that the person doing their dark retreat must follow.

There is also an underlying commercial agenda for why people share their experiences of what it is like to do a dark retreat and upload their videos on YouTube. The pattern that became clear with the collection of the material was that those who are doing a dark retreat are working with some form of spiritual and personal development and it is these services that they want to sell by creating an interest by sharing their dark retreat experiences. This is something that is addressed and discussed in the study.

The methods are conversation analysis to determine how genuine people are when they talk about their experiences in the dark. Content analysis is used to be able to find themes in the material for how the people experience their dark retreat stay, the focus on themes, phrases and words is linked to health or life-changing transformation. The findings from the content analysis are that people talk about surrender/acceptance when the situation became intense in the dark, that they met themselves/gained new insights, got a glimpse of relationships that have not been good and where there are things to work with and that there were a lot who were positive about their dark retreat stay.