What The Darkness Reveals w/ Erick Godsey & Caitlyn Howe | AMP 452

CAITLYN: In the darkness, there's no shadows, actually. And there's no contrast.

AUBREY: Just the one you bring with you. That's not like the homogenous field of just black. That's never what you see. You're always seeing some element of this visionscape playing out in your mind. 

ERICK: And then before you know it, there's this soft glow of light starting to come in like it's behind you. It was the peak spiritual moment of my life because of the sobriety, there was something about like, there's something in me waking up. 

AUBREY: That’s what’s so fucking interesting about this whole thing is that all of this is inside. It's all available, like as within, so without, as above, so below, like we get access to everything.

CAITLYN: What's inside of me that I've been avoiding? In so many ways, through addiction or busyness or dissociation, my entire life. And I said over and over again to myself in the dark, I am going to die. And then the gifts started to really open up.

ERICK: The way that I see the darkness is I see it as an opportunity to get intimate with my unconscious, like the being that's behind us, that dreams our dreams.

AUBREY:  The darkness that contains everything. It's the doubt that's older than God. It's everything.

CAITLYN: It's everything. 

AUBREY: It's the whole substrate of creation. Before God said let there be light, what was there? Eric and Caitlyn, fresh out of the darkness. 

CAITLYN: Reborn, baby. 

AUBREY: Caitlyn, when I was going into the darkness, you expressed probably the most concern and fear out of any one of my friends. Like, what are you doing? No, you can't, and here you are. Going into a darkness retreat, for those of you who don't know, a darkness retreat is absolute pitch black, no communication except for limited communication with the facilitator, maybe once a day, and then you get your meals brought in, not a speck of light, you're all by yourself, just your thoughts. So there was some part of you that was afraid and projecting that fear on me, and now look, I had a lot to go through, so you weren't exactly wrong about that. But you decided to do it. And of course your fiance, Eric, had already done it. Already a veteran, your bestie, myself, we did it. And you're like, fuck it.

CAITLYN: You guys tested the waters for me. 

AUBREY: Tested the waters. 

CAITLYN: I had a lot more trust after that. 

AUBREY: And you went in there and I don't want to get to your experience as well, gods, now that you're the most experienced darkness retreat aficionado in the whole family, But Caitlyn, I think, you know, I've read some of the things that you've written about it, and it really feels like this, like it was for me, it was one of the most powerful experiences that you've ever had in your life. So start where you want to start, but set us up for what this experience was. And how this helps you understand the structure and challenges of your life and the pearls of wisdom and lessons that people can glean from your time in the darkness, where you went mining in that deep, dark cave of your own psyche to come out with gems.

CAITLYN: I very much did. It's perfect that you use the word pearl too. Yeah, I was terrified when he went into the darkness. I thought that sounded insane. I was, you know, at the time worried about what would happen to the psyche being so removed from life and not being able to orient to anything and I was totally projecting, for sure with you know, I care about you and it's a very unusual sounding thing for a lot of people probably a little bit confronting. I know for some people in my life who care about me, who haven't, you know, gone through many different kinds of initiatory experiences like we have, there's lots of concern as well. And over the years I've definitely built up more courage and resilience and also curiosity about the unknown. I've specifically worked with the intention of leaning into the mystery since you went in. And of course you guys, really helped me embrace it, embrace the idea of it more, but I would not have sought this out probably, and it had a divine timing, aspect to it for me because Eric went the year before and he was so excited and had such a delightful time in there actually, that he immediately booked a trip for us a year later. And the way it worked out for me was I was for the past couple of years experiencing mysterious symptoms physically and mentally particularly I noticed since about 2021, I had, you know, me and everybody else on this planet had a lot of disruptive stuff happen in the year 2020. And the world changed and there was for me, my father died that year. And then I went through a big breakup the following year and there was lots of disruption in my emotional body and in my mind. And from then on, I started, I was still expanding and like cultivating this inner resilience and curiosity and strength, but paradoxically, my body I'm 40 years old now. My body started having these inexplicable challenges. It was a headache, it was insomnia. It was, you know, chronic sinusitis. I was sick for, you know, two months last year at the beginning of the year, constantly having this cold-like thing that I never could really understand what the source of it was. Physical twitches, kind of heart palpitations and all these things and it was really making me nervous and I had a lot of people like gently approach me and suggest maybe have you looked into breast implant illness and I'd had breast implants for 17 and a half years and they were saline, and so I had these stories that like, oh, they're saline, it's safe for your body, that can't be the issue for me. But with time passing and, you know, feeling the same sense in my body at the same level of stress and starting to feel some emotional challenges come up from it too, I decided, you know, I've had these things in my body for so long. And I really, they don't feel true to me. I don't want them in my chest anymore. And I decided to take them out. So the way it worked out was that on January 23rd, two and a half weeks before I went into the darkness, I had my breast explant surgery. And I feel so much moving in me already talking about this, but it was very surprising to me. All of us up here have sat in so many ceremonies with different medicines and so many tests of endurance and strength and confrontation with different aspects of our inner world. And I've sat in 25 ayahuasca ceremonies already. And I felt really prepared. I was like, I'm doing this, I'm ready. You know, this is what I want. And when I went into surgery, I knew that I'd have a physical change that I would need to adapt to in certain ways, but I didn't expect it to open, you know, it felt like Pandora's box in my nervous system. It was all of my fears about trusting life and, you know, trusting my surgeon, trusting my body to heal, all of these different deep core wounds, started to surface and I was very fragile. Very fragile going into the dark, and I was afraid, you know, I think it exposed it opened a place in me that was actually when I was a child, I was afraid of the dark in that very cliche way. It was, you know, I don't know what's gonna happen when I can't see, but I think the thing I learned in that timeframe getting ready to go to Oregon and go to the darkness was that I was most afraid of what was inside of me. That I might have to finally confront and I've had this kind of sense of dissociative nervousness my entire life. I had ADD as a kid and I still struggle with a lot of it. I still struggle sitting still and being present with myself on a certain level, in my ordinary habitual routine. So I was nervous about that part and after this stuff started arising in me, tons of emotion, tons of grief about my body and almost a somatic memory of the circumstances of when I got my implants. I was in a really dangerous, life threatening, shocking car accident. I have a metal rod in my leg from that time I had to have revision surgeries and go to college with a cane, and it was super painful. And there's so much happening in the world. It just kind of opened up all of this instability and fear that was buried under all of this armor of strength and you know bravery that I identify with now, so when I went there I was nervous about everything. Primarily, you know, what's inside of me that I've been avoiding in so many ways through addiction or busyness or dissociation my entire life that feels like it's the darkness inside of me. Yeah, and so should I just go ahead with the story? 

AUBREY: Yeah, I think you've set the stage. 

CAITLYN: Yeah

AUBREY: I think we're with you into where you are, your state of mind as you're going into the black. 

CAITLYN: So I'm going into the black and I arrive, you know, on my way there I was, I just went to my shelf and I picked up a book kind of intuitively off the shelf. I picked up Francis Weller's, The Wild Edge of Sorrow. It's a book on grief and ritual, and I am very big on ritual in my personal life. I brought a whole bundle of sacred items and I set up my altar 

ERICK: Every time we fly, she gets flagged by the TSA because she has this suitcase full of foreign objects that they don't recognize. And it's like 10 out of 10 times. 

CAITLYN: It's like a chalice, 10 stones. Okay. You just keep it going. 

AUBREY: They're hoping to catch your sex toy. That crystals and wands carry on.

CAITLYN: Not the wands we’re looking for. Yeah, so I came in, tender, all of that to say I came in very tender and I was also simultaneously looking forward to a lot of time with myself because everyone can relate to, I'm sure right now is, you know, we have so much access to each other and life is busy and there's a lot happening in the world that pulls us out of ourselves. And so I was hoping for some deep rest and introspection and the team there was very encouraging to me, given my surgery, being so recent to really focus on nurture and that felt really good to me. And so that was kind of my intention was just to really, really slow down, receive care, rest, and be with my inner world in a very tender and present way that I don't often have the awareness to give myself. And the first night was lots of rest, you know, it's like my nervous system was a mixture of a little bit of fear and then also this kind of like permission and freedom to just completely melt into myself.

AUBREY: There's nothing you got to do. 

CAITLYN: There's nothing you can’t do. There you can't write, you can't read, you can't do anything except for the one my best friend in the dark, my voice recorder had a little furry lightning bolt sticker on it and I would just grope and it felt like my other and so my first thing that I missed in the darkness was the sense of an other, you know, I hadn't quite hit the point yet where the darkness became my other, but at that point, anytime I felt the nerves come up, I would go and just have a talk with myself on the recorder. And it was really sweet. And then there was also this subtle thrill of just finding my way around the room and kind of gently groping in the abyss for the clues about my orientation. But the beauty of it two is I think I'm outside of my body a lot mentally and interacting with life. And it gave me lots of practice immediately in just orienting myself in space by only being with my own body. So that was a new experience. Or like a nice reminder to feel like this is me. I'm here and I can be with me. I don't need another. I'm right here. And so that took practice the entire time. But I noticed that there was immediate discomfort with the sense of loneliness. That kind of set in pretty quickly and I got some deep rest and then I tried to do all the activities that you get to do, which is like meditate and stretch and eat and you know, it's like I'm still doing in the darkness at this point. And so the next day, I did my whole routine I had planned, and round about midway through the day I was in the dark for four nights and three full days with the option to stay in for six nights and five days like Eric did. I was also encouraged a lot by the staff there that, to not push myself too far into endurance, because if I felt too uncomfortable for too long, I could dissociate a bit from the experience, which I really like their framework, I see Aubrey's eyebrow raised, their framework with it, and this is different schools of thought, but their framework with it was really like, make sure that you feel relaxed enough that you're present and you're not pulling yourself out for panicking or in a state of panic for a really long time because I guess they encounter that often enough. But it didn't take me long until I started feeling some discomfort. So around midday, I started getting in a bad mood. I was like, I don't like this. This is not for me. I wasn't made for stuff like this. I meant to be connected to life. I need touch. I need people. And it just made me really grumpy. And then I started 

AUBREY: The one thing for people to know is, it's not like they lock the door on you, right? You can fucking leave. You're a grown, sovereign adult. You can get the fuck out there and go in the light. So that's something you have to wrestle with the whole time

CAITLYN: Oh, yeah. Especially when they're like, come out whenever you want

AUBREY: Yeah, exactly. So it's like, you are choosing to do this. 

CAITLYN: Yeah. 

AUBREY: You know, which is the difference between like, we're going to be in a sweat lodge tonight. And so some lodges are like, you can't leave. And it's this kind of authoritarian situation, which can ultimately be dangerous, but in the darkness, you can leave, 

CAITLYN: Oh, you can leave.

AUBREY: You can leave when you want to leave, but that's 

ERICK: There’s light switches in there.

AUBREY: Yeah. Flip that thing on and you can, you know, write in your journal or do whatever the fuck you want.

CAITLYN: And I had some outs planned. I was like, well, I'll do 24 hours and then I'll come out and I'll see

AUBREY: Ofcourse, all the negotiation tactics that we use in our everyday life where we negotiate with ourselves. To get to do the more comfortable thing you have to confront that over and over and that is actually the medicine. The medicine is actually confronting that part of you that wants to escape to a greater level of comfort and this is where the real medicine is one of the hidden aspects of this is like you wrestling with yourself and your own desire to escape to a more comfortable situation. Same with the lodge, you know, wire, like if you got to leave at one of the doors, you can leave, you know, but if you're, 

ERICK: Let me tell you a story of my sister, I've been fasting for four days but you can go.

AUBREY: You did this for 11 days straight, but yeah. So, but it's such an important thing because we have every capability to just slip into comfort and just choose comfort, comfort, comfort until our body becomes and psyche becomes so soft that we actually can't handle the just kind of brash abrasiveness of life itself, the energetic cacophony that we find ourselves in, and also the physical stimulations of the energy flows of our body. There's, we're always having to choose, you know, either the comfortable path or the path that we know that's best for us.

CAITLYN: Totally. And I think that's really highlighted in the darkness is that, that's happening all day every day in so many ways and we're just maybe not necessarily noticing every movement of energy in the body that's like, I hate this. This feels like torture. I want to change this. I want to change my experience. I'm going to reach for this thing. I'm going to do something to alleviate this discomfort. I'm feeling because comfort is king, really. So I went through all the waves on that first day. No, sorry. That was my second day, two nights in, it was first, resistance to the dark stories about how it was kind of torturous for me personally. This is my story 

ERICK: Did you blind me at any moment on day two 

CAITLYN: No, I was free, you know, I was free to get out too. And I wanted to be there. I knew I was also simultaneously desperate for a breakthrough from the energy I was feeling that had opened up in my nervous system from having the surgery. I was very disturbed by the way that, you know, I think some people may think like, oh, you get your implants out and you just have small breasts and, you know, how hard can it be? But it's actually, you go through periods and I'm still very early in this process where you look quite disfigured. It doesn't look normal. It's very invasive and very painful. And I was still holding a lot of that pain in my body. So another aspect of my second day was all my physical pain. All, there was no way to dissociate from it, so it actually got louder. And it was like my subconscious was opening up and being like, Actually, this is how much pain is here. And in some ways I think creating pain too because it didn't stay that way. So my joints got painful. My surgery sites got painful. I started worrying that I was having pain because I was in there. All of those things. And then that moved into more agitation and I had a spell of confronting all of the ways I was angry at myself. All of that agitation and discomfort finally turned on me. And a part of me started to arise from the darkness that was angry at myself for everything I didn't do right, didn't do on time. This inner judge was like, how could I have done this wrong? Why haven't I done this yet? Fucking stupid and like just vicious. And this was hours of, you know, I ended up punching my, I tried to meditate to get it to go away. It got louder and I was punching my meditation cushion to kind of exert some energy because it was so overwhelming. And then the gifts started to really open up. And I think for, you know, some people may, like I did in the past, imagine the darkness is kind of this boring thing and then eventually you see some lights and you have some breakthrough visions. But for me, it was very somatic and it was very emotional. All of my breakthroughs came with going all the way into a feeling that I'd been avoiding for decades, maybe, you know, and the first wave that came after my hours of, you know, really scolding myself for everything I'd done wrong, was a wave of nausea and fatigue. I curled up into the fetal position on the bed, just nothing else I could do. And I had this uprising of energy in my heart, my gut. And I began to cry. And as I began to cry, such a deep, Ocean of sorrow is what it felt. It feels like, in my body particularly, that moment was related to my father and in privacy, the soft velvety privacy and radical freedom of being in the dark like that. I didn't have to hold it back or make it palatable for anybody and I got to just grieve and speak every feeling or fury that I felt about my father dying the way he did when he did and I felt this almost childlike, this childlike, it was so infantile almost, like a part of me gotta just shake and cry and scream this grief that felt like a little girl. And it felt at times I couldn't breathe through my nose anymore. It felt at times like, maybe it's too much, but I could feel simultaneously my adult present time self could hold this and feel like, Oh my God, this feels so good. It feels so good. To just feel this. I've been avoiding feeling this for years. And I suddenly don't feel afraid of the dark anymore. I suddenly feel present. I felt all this energy come back into my body. It was so relieving. It felt good and it felt hard, but it was such a big gift. And that's when things opened for me there. And when I'd gone in, I did a session. I have a very active dream time. I guess I would say I work a lot with my dreams with Eric. I've always been a big dreamer, big dreams, big complex imagery and things of that nature. And so I have a pretty open imagination. I'm able to see things when prompted. And one of the facilitators there held a little session for me and she just invited me to speak anything that 

ERICK: This was before the darkness.

CAITLYN: Before the darkness, yeah. So speak anything that I saw while we sat there and there was nothing happening. I was just relaxing and then I saw this strange image of some white stones on a little island. And I thought, Hmm, that doesn't feel relevant. It looks kind of like Greece, like the beach or something. But I spoke anyway, because she invited me to just acknowledge anything that arose and ..

ERICK: She has this uncanny capacity to, without you saying anything, she's like, there, what's that? And it's just like, 

CAITLYN: Yeah, what just happened

ERICK: How do you know that? I just had a thought. I didn't want to share 

CAITLYN: What just happened. Yeah. And so I was like, okay, I'm seeing some stones. It looks like Greece. I don't understand. And then I saw a flash image of myself as a little girl. And then she kind of entered the frame of this. It was a tiny island in the middle of the ocean. No life, no green, no trees, no other beings of any kind. And she was just in her underwear, crouched down on the edge of the shore.

AUBREY: That's you. 

CAITLYN: Me, as a child. That was the image I went into the darkness with. And I approached her in this space with the facilitator, um, pre darkness again. And I immediately felt in my body, Oh, this is her space. I'm not supposed to be here. And she wasn't happy, but she also wasn't sad. She was just somber, and she was kind of playing in the sand with her hands. And so, I held that going into the darkness. And my one anchor, and you introduced me to anchors when you started working with Ayahuasca many years ago. You gave me a serpentine from Peru, I remember. And so, Aubrey introduced me to the idea of using anchor stones during ceremonies when we were much younger. And I brought many anchor stones, as we've already mentioned. There was a whole altar for them. But my primary anchor was this mala that is my Kuan Yin mala. It's black stones for people who can't see. But my one commitment every night was to sit after dinner and I would speak the heart sutra mantra and I would just commune that way. And so that was my ritual at this point. And after my big grief breakthrough, I picked up my mala and I began to chant the heart sutra and I saw the space again in my mind. It came to me. And at that point, my father entered the beach. And he just picked her up. She never, she didn't smile still. And she just rested. 

AUBREY: So this is in the darkness.

CAITLYN: This is in the darkness

AUBREY: You returned to that same vision that you were talking about before.

CAITLYN: Yes, so this became an area that came to life inside of me with the darkness all around me and it would just come, it would come to me. So I wouldn't, and to be clear, I wasn't seeing visions in the sense of lights or any kind of psychedelic

AUBREY: Purely the imaginal realm, 

CAITLYN: Purely imaginal realm. But it was very key. And I think it's really instrumental in what I got to access there. So at this point, my father enters and I'm just watching and I'm weeping still. And there's a reunion happening in my psyche here. So this was night one, day two. I'm sorry. This was night two, day three, night three. Again, a kind of empty morning, I'm back, I'm feeling a bit comfortable, and then midway through, I start to feel fear, and I'm like, I shouldn't feel fear, I didn't feel fear last night, I already grieved, I feel like, me and the darkness are friends, what is this? And I start having intrusive thoughts. The intrusive thoughts are like, what if a hand were to just grab you right now? What if the people who run this place lose their minds. And you're just in here like a sitting duck. What if somebody saw you on Instagram? And I immediately be like, that's ridiculous. You know, stop. Like, where is this coming from? And shoo it. But it kind of sat in my field, like this edge of intensity that was hard to shake and I would move and I would, you know, I took a bath and that felt very vulnerable. It's so funny in the darkness, just kind of groping around and trying to sort it, but that felt also quite vulnerable. And just, I just noticed this sort of background intrusive fear that kind of sits around and tries to, you know, in so many ways actually protect me from phantom ideas of things that could happen. And again, I worked with, I tried in some ways to escape it. I did my meditation stuff. I did my little rituals of the day. And finally, I recognize this fear is always here. This is my fear of death. I'm afraid of dying. And I keep telling myself that I'm not. And I've told myself I've graduated from this. And it's here, and it shows up like anxiety. And it lives in my day to day life like anxiety just protecting me in the worst way by imagining everything that could possibly go wrong. And now there's not a lot of good evidence for things that could go wrong on a small scale. So now it's coming up with these, you know, outrageous ideas of some horror show that might happen to me while I'm in here. So I sat down again and I just sat with it. And I said over and over again to myself in the dark, I am going to die. I am going to die. I'm going to die. And let that work for me. And I started to remember the first time I realized I was going to die as a little girl. And then that vision opened up again. And I felt, I got in contact with the part of me that was like, you know, there's all these things that people tell you about why it's okay that we're gonna die and, you know, all of this stuff, but at the bottom of it is there's just, in this body, with these people I love, in this beautiful world that I get to enjoy, there's still grief. There's still grief that I'll lose these unique beings, and this unique body, and my love for myself, this fundamental love that's at the heart of that fear of death, which is, I'm afraid to die because I love this world. I'm afraid to die because I love myself, actually. What a revelation. So, I saw this space in my mind again, and at this point, I approached my younger self. And I said we're going to die, and we cried together. And at this point, I saw a bunch of pearls start to wash up in the foam of the water in the vision. And so I said, let's make this place nice since we're going to die. And so we took all the pearls and we started making a castle out of the stones. And decorating it with pearls and I planted a tree with her. And the tree started to grow and glow and it had pomegranates and figs, and peaches, and a big snake wrapped around the bottom, and it sat at the center of the island. And then we started building temples, and all this is, I'm sorry, like towers. So my father had a tower there, my mother had an art studio, and she was still making art like she did when I was a little girl and we became friends. And so this became my little place that was always inside of me, and I realized we planted, you know, rose tree, rose bushes so the thorns would protect the edge of the castle, and I realized this part of me in my psyche is now in the darkness in this canvas, and it's presenting something to me from my subconscious. It's actually an exiled part of myself that withdrew from life. It actually was like, I don't want to, this is too painful. This is too scary. Instead of loving it too much. I'm going to remove myself from life. That's why there's no sadness. There's no happiness. There's nothing alive there. And that was my big, felt like a big, beautiful gift. And then I went to bed and I stopped being able to sleep. Now I know Eric's going to talk about this and both of you guys experience this in the darkness. You lose track of you. There's no time. There's no orientation to time. Your circadian rhythm starts to dissolve. And so I went to sleep that night again with my heart sutra beforehand and I woke up, not knowing how long I'd been awake or asleep. At this point, I was having some intrusive thoughts about things in my life that I wanted to be different and that I felt like I needed to say. So I just spoke. I spoke everything in my heart in probably three hours straight of things that I was afraid to say. And afraid to say to myself, afraid to say to other people and basically retold my story to myself in a way that was very unfiltered and powerful. And now that was night four and the real big magic happened for me the next day. So I was supposed to come out the next morning, and I did. I was up most of the night. I think I ended up being able to fall asleep after speaking for so many hours. My truth is what it felt like the truth of my feelings. And then I had a terrible nightmare featuring my fiancé here. 

AUBREY: Who is he banging for? 

CAITLYN: He was

ERICK: I was banging myself with drugs. 

CAITLYN: He was banging, he was overdosing on drugs till he convulsed and died. And it was

AUBREY: Least likely outcome for Eric.

CAITLYN: He had a gas mask. 

AUBREY: If you're going to look at the whole spectrum of outcomes for Eric Vongadze. Dying of drug overdose 

CAITLYN: Well the drug was

AUBREY: is the lowest possible outcome. 

CAITLYN: It was wild. I think it would take too long for me to share that dream. But I'll say it was disturbing as fuck. And my precious best friend's voice recorder also died. And I was like, Okay, that's a sign. 

ERICK: I'm coming out. 

CAITLYN: I’m coming out. 

AUBREY: How'd you even know it was, how'd you even not die? 

CAITLYN: I picked it up to use again because it was my best friend and it didn't, it wouldn't work.

ERICK: So I put tape over it to block the light, but the way it's designed, there's a slight amount of light bleed through one of the buttons.

CAITLYN: It's, yeah. 

AUBREY: Yeah. So you can see it just a little bit. 

CAITLYN: Slight green glow around the edge. So yeah, for all of you out there, you gotta put some black tape all around your recorder and it is, oh man, I would record something,

ERICK: Practice how to use it before you go on. 

CAITLYN: Talk for 10 minutes, then play it back and be like, click, and I'm like, all right, take five. So I felt like, 

ERICK: Real quick Aubrey, guess how many audio files she recorded on her tape recorder? 

AUBREY: I mean, I think I was in there for six days and I had 400. 

ERICK: Holy shit. Did I just not record enough? I think you're

CAITLYN: This bump. 

ERICK: 160. 

CAITLYN: I think so. Yeah. Lots of, lots of mistakes though. So. 

AUBREY: Cause I would just have something come and I would click it on and then I click it off like another file. Another file. Another file. 

CAITLYN: I would add tons of little. Yeah. It's a clutch. It would be really interesting. One of my voice notes is me saying, this would be a nightmare for me if I didn't have my voice recorder, so that's another level. But you have so much come through that feels, you know, like profound tools. And at this point also I will say that with the fear, my fear of death, I started to notice a lot of programming in my mind around fear and some of my ruminating or intrusive thoughts or stress oriented thoughts that I started noticing, you know, I adopted this. Like this isn't, this stuff is mine. The things I'm so hard on myself about come from my parents a lot. And the fears that I have come from this control mechanism comes from my parents and I love them. And that's not mine. You know, I want to make a sovereign choice about what kind of beliefs are running the show for me every single day. So it was really helpful to have that recorder to parse out what I am, what's running in my program all the time and just get that out and then use my voice. My voice became my ultimate instrument because it's only you and your voice. It's only you and your body. It's only you and the sensations that are happening within you. And so that kind of consistent unbroken presence with yourself yields so much wisdom. That's kind of just waiting to be sought or listened to or resourced and so I was on four nights at this point and I decided to go ahead and come out the next morning. And I had also been working with a sacred word, which I think I feel fine sharing. It's not that sacred, but it was my intentional word for the trip. And it was welcome. And my intention for this word was to meet the darkness with it, you know, and to be able to say over and over again to the darkness welcome. And ultimately I learned to bring that into every sensation that I encountered no matter how comfortable and no matter how true it felt, you know, I'd sometimes say it and it took me saying it like 10 times for me to really feel it. But I was picked up the next morning by Scott who runs the center there. And we put on a blindfold, a very effective blindfold, actually. And at this point, I'd also started seeing some phantom lights. So it was really interesting.

AUBREY: Yeah, it's about when it started for me, 

CAITLYN: Phenomenal.

AUBREY: Between day three and four.

CAITLYN: What started happening for me was I would wake up and I would see moonlight in the room. And it looked like it was cast, there was something casting light and I could see, the first thing I saw was the wall, almost like those squares on the wall over there, there were big squares like crown molding, but each of them was a safe. And this really spooked me because I'm like, what's in my subconscious? Oh my God, why are they all safes? It was like a wall full of safes. And then, continuing to wake up and see this moonlight is when I finally realized it looked like no source, but I would see shapes on the wall or shadows. I could lift my arm and see a shadow against the wall, but there was no, I couldn't see my arm or the wall or literally anything at all. Just the abyss. 

ERICK: Including people listening. It is incredibly hard to describe the uncanniness of being in complete darkness and then before you know it, there's this soft glow of light starting to come in like it's behind you. 

CAITLYN: Yeah

AUBREY: It almost starts to pulse. You know, that's how I experienced it. Starts to pulse and then it started to drip and ooze like blobs from the ceiling 

CAITLYN: Interesting.

AUBREY: First and then it bursts into a more fractal kind of vision space after a little while.

CAITLYN:  See, my experience felt very somatic, which is hard to convey. I think how extraordinary and special it really is to move, you know, lots of imaginal realm visions. And then I did have the light, but mine was very soft and not pulsing, not super active, but what was really bit unnerving was the way that I could see shapes of things like it looked like hatchets and like a thing that was like, it was like there was decorations all over the wall, but the wall was a plain, concrete wall in real life.

ERICK: The wall was darkness, like you can’t see the wall.

CAITLYN: The wall was just darkness. It was, there was no wall actually. 

ERICK: Right. 

CAITLYN: And I would, you know, move towards something and think it was the edge of the center of the room and it would be nothing. And, or I would walk towards the bed and suddenly end up with the wall right next to my head. And so, it gets more and more disorienting in a certain way, but what I was really marveling at with my form of light was that I was projecting, I was either seeing something from the inside or I was projecting things that weren't there. Which is another like, wow, moment for examining yourself is how much am I projecting all the time? Emotionally, mentally, and even visually, because my mind is mapping something into the world around me

AUBREY: Yeah. It's difficult to separate what you're projecting from what you're receiving, 

CAITLYN: Yes

AUBREY: Right? Because the field contains everything. So, it contains all the light, all the dark, all the shadow, distortion, delusion, you know, all of that, as well as all the light and the beauty and the clarity and the sacred geometry. It contains all of that. So I remember, you know, one of the visions I had in the darkness, you mentioned hatchets for probably three hours, I just kept seeing repeated visions of like a wheat thresher, you know, one of those giant machines that rolls through and it was just infants. On the ground and it was just threshing over like babies and infants and like, and it was like, this is fucking horrendous. 

ERICK: Yeah

AUBREY: Like, this is just absolutely nightmares.

CAITLYN: And you can’t get away.

 

AUBREY: And that was it until finally like, and then just rotting and rotting skulls and maggots and bodies. Cause then like the fields would start to rot and there's this whole fucking thing just moving, which was one may be purging through my psyche and my psyche interpreting it as that.

Another may be actually like seeing these things that exist in the field and trying to allow me to accept all that is the darkness that contains everything like, right? It's the Dow that's older than God. It's like everything.

CAITLYN: It's everything. 

AUBREY: It's the whole substrate of creation before God said, let there be light. 

ERICK: Exactly what I was just about to say.

AUBREY: Let there be light, but there was what's before that darkness.

CAITLYN: The darkness, there’s only light. The darkness.

AUBREY: That's the womb of creation. That's the birthplace. That's the doubt that cannot be named. That's older than God. It’s like, it's the most.

CAITLYN: Yeah, and ultimately like for me, I had a big break through the night after my first emergence, but I was there in intimacy with the darkness. It was a really a slow process for me kind of in so many ways, kneeling at this primordial, you know, void and trying to really open my heart to it because of all of the separation I'd created as a human being and my relationship to the security of the world of light. And so I understand all of these things and still there's this gravity to you know, whoa, you hear this darkness. You are the infinite source of everything and your power is so all encompassing and so big and yet you're so generous So gentle, so everlasting, like how can I open to you enough to really receive you and really be with you without fear. And the wild thing too is my identity, my ego feels very comfortable in “darkness”. I've always felt like I've had a very strong and consistent relationship with working with my shadow. So I've been in a lot of deep, dark places energetically in my life. And so it was my experience now of this kind of maternal divine, this idea of this maternal divine, source darkness is a very loving one. And when I went there, you know, I was nervous about what would come up for me, but I wasn't scared of the dark and it took a couple of days until I really got in touch with a part of me that was kind of like, this is intense, like to really embrace this. And ultimately it started to feel the way that it wants to feel. I think if I can imagine it is my deepest companion, me coming home to my source and really resting in it and befriending it, befriending the darkness in a true way. So when I emerged that next morning, I was escorted outside. It was raining cold. It felt so titillating and so just exciting. And I was trembling. And I shared a video of this on my Instagram, which a lot of people were touched by, but I lifted the blindfold. And at first I glimpsed and I saw a sliver of the ground and it was incredibly psychedelic looking everything, the grass, the stones, like it was almost fractal, it was so different than I remembered, and it was too much, and so I immediately closed my eyes, and I thought, I'm gonna, like, pace myself into this. Lifted the blindfold up all the way, and I sat there with my eyes closed, and it was a gray and dreary day, I would come to discover, but this moment, the light poured into my eyelids after being in darkness for four nights. So bright, so golden, it was almost warm, even though it was cold outside. And my body had a physiological response to this sensation of coming from total darkness into the light. And I felt myself remember in my body not mentally, remember what it was like to be born into the world out of the womb. And I just immediately began to weep at the grace of it. It felt grace-like and terror, almost. It was like my body remembered like, what? Whoa, what? Whoa, this is beautiful. And this is, I don't know this, but I also remembered and knew. And then I finally was able to open my eyes, up to that beautiful experience and see all of the vivid colors and the way everything popped and contrasted from coming from a world. You know, in the darkness, there's no shadows actually, and there's no consciousness 

AUBREY: Just the one you bring with you 

CAITLYN: Just the one you bring with you. This little guy is right here and shows she has a few of them.There’s a few of them, so I had this beautiful moment of grace. I got cold rain on my face. I felt like I've never been this happy. I can't remember ever being this happy, this bliss. I feel peace. I feel peace with my life, all this stuff. A few hours pass. I go back into my room, which has no windows, and this, like, yellow light, and Eric's still in the dark for two more nights, and I was like, I miss the dark. I miss the dark. So I went back in, and that night was when something really important happened that I think has fundamentally changed me. I went back into my heart sutra with my beads. At this point, I had a pretty elaborate little space in my psyche going on with my inner child. And so I decided, I shouldn't say I decided. Everything was kind of intuitively coming into my imagination there. But as I went through every bead, I brought back a piece of a part of myself from every year of my life starting when I was a baby. So it kind of drew it out of, in my psyche, out of like school photos and stuff. And my little girl, the cheese was there in the center at the tree of life. And I was circling her and the younger self with everything I would become. And so one by one, year by year, each version of me began to set, sit around the tree in a big spiraling circle as I went through the malas and I chanted and I sang and at this point I'm singing all the time in the dark and it's something starting to flow through me that just never has space to flow and I get to certain points in my life. And I noticed that my body stopped singing. It won't continue the mantra. And so at this point I have to pause and tune into my heart and explain what I'm doing and invite it to continue doing this practice with me. And I got through a couple of really difficult times, you know, my ex boyfriend getting shot in the neck and dying, my car accident, some of the parts that were mysterious to me, why my body would stop, but my body became this like compass of where it was really okay going. And I learned a lot about which parts of my life I judged or that I pushed away or that I held in exile as I did that practice. And, as I worked through it all, I brought in everyone I loved. So, you guys both arrived and my family, every best friend, everybody started to fill the room of this space and then I got to when I lived in Las Vegas. And, at this point I'm getting a little carried away, and so I decide to bring in some characters that really, I thought what a great exercise it will be, how they can see the woman that I am, everything that she's been, and will forgive them. Some people that really, I felt like, brought a lot of damage to my life. And these aren't anyone I dated. These are other people. And so I placed them on the edge of the room in my mind, and immediately my whole body shut down. And something happened to me that was so primal. It was not me. It was something primal in me, I had a response where all of a sudden my face started to twitch. And this face came over my face that was animating my entire face like a growl. It was like an animal in me. Like, get the fuck out. That kind of energy. It was so, and I was not doing it. And I was like, whoa, this is my, this is something in me. This is not me and it's protecting me, but I'm not doing this and that was very scary to me in a way I couldn't. I've had my body be animated outside of my conscious control in spaces with psychedelics mushrooms ayahuasca, etc. But this was pure, you know, I was completely sober and I was in the dark and I was quite disturbed by that and also impressed kind of and so in my mind I removed them immediately and I broke the trust with this part of me that was letting me bring things in and so I felt, okay, I'm going to take everybody out and I removed the whole collection of people outside of this space I'd created for her.

ERICK: Just by the way, she put them in a Merkaba ship above the whole scene.

CAITLYN: I don't want to make it too weird, but yes, I did. I put them in macabre stars, silver macabre stars above the little castle. 

AUBREY: That’s how you imprison demons. You intuitively knew. 

CAITLYN: But the thing too, that I could feel was actually that the energy I was defending against was not even in the human beings. It was something 

AUBREY: That's what I'm saying. 

CAITLYN: Yeah 

AUBREY: They represented, they became the idols or the energy that was moving through them, which is the energy of what Tico anti you, the adversary, whatever you want to call it, that force of negation that seeks to actually not only be the fertile womb of the darkness, but to snuff out the light.

CAITLYN: Exactly. And that's when I could feel that I was sick with carrying it and I couldn't sleep that night. I was so shaken by what happened, but I laid there in the dark, sleeping terribly again in the morning because they came to light the fire. I got out and I went for a walk in nature to ground myself, but I couldn't shake the energy and had intuition on that walk. I said, I'm going to let this energy that came forward to protect me. I'm going to let it speak. I'm just going to write. I'm gonna start with writing. And so I got a notebook and I let it write and it was writing so, I almost scribbled a, it was writing a protection, it was basically voicing protection and I won't get into everything that it said, but the essence of it was, get the fuck away from me. Get out of me or I will kill you and I'm going to destroy you from my body. You are not welcome in my body anymore. And this was, you know, not to the people that I saw. It was to the energy that was being transferred and that simple ritual of writing. I wrote and wrote and then I read it and I kept speaking and I was screaming. And I was commanding into the tissue of my body, where my subconscious can hear where everything in me can hear, I will scream you out of my body. I will scrub you out of my body. Stay away from me. Stay away from my friends. Stay away from my family. Never ever come close to me again. Get off the face of this earth. It was so powerful. And I was like, I was lighting, I lit two candles and I said, I'm not sad. I've been sad for way too fucking long. I am powerful, and if you come anywhere near me, I will fucking kill you. And it felt so good. It felt so good to just let myself speak because I've been a nice girl who swallowed parts of what she was really feeling over and over and over and over again. And I've curbed my fury with this higher awareness that it's inappropriate, it's too much with compassion, even with the compassion for, oh, this person doesn't deserve my anger, with a feeling that rose in my body was like, this is in me now, because I won't let it out. I won't just express it. And as I spoke that my voice came back in a way that I'd never felt. It was a glory, and I wrote, or I said out loud, I said, I'm going to scrub you out of my body now, and I'm going to spit on you as you washed down the drain. And so I did. I took a bath, and I lovingly scrubbed my body. All over, and I did the ritual that my, this part of me wanted to feel me do, and I sat under the water with my hand, with my elbows on my knees, I wrote in my journal, I think I can remember it, I wrote, I sat like a queen giving birth to a newborn crown of light. I sat like a queen. Welcoming a worthy lover to pleasure her. I sat like a queen who had just taken a criminal's head and was washing the blood from her hands. I sat naked like a queen on a throne, washing anything but dignity down my spine as the tub emptied. I spit on the suds as they washed down the drain. I bowed my head for nobody but God and God did not respond, but God was there. I said, I forgive you and I love you too. And it was done. And I went back into the dark that night and all of that anxiety in my body, all of my grief, you know, I have an incision right here on my breast that I think is gonna be a bit of a deformation always. And I was so upset about it. And the love I felt for myself after that moment was just like, I'm never going to violate my body again. I love my scar. I love my breasts. I love my skin. I'm here to protect life. I'm here to protect the life in myself and in everyone around me. And I love myself and I love myself enough to stand up to this energy that I've been carrying around with me for 30 years or longer. And something lifted in me that day that I haven't felt come back. It was, it was utterly glorious and I really would venture to say that as far as the explants go and the women that are going through these symptoms right now, that there's something really worth exploring in our emotions in terms of what we're not letting ourselves feel, speak, and express that's actually contributing a lot to the sickness. I think we're only looking one layer deep when we're just pointing at the implants and saying we've got to get these out. So..

AUBREY: Yeah. So much I want to say, but thank you for sharing all that. How fucking beautiful. I mean, one, to touch on your latest point in the state of free floating anxiety, right? I interviewed Matthias Desmet who talks about the psychological structure of mass formation. So we have free floating anxiety, which is something that you could say you experience free floating anxiety. So one way is to scapegoat it. You attach that free floating anxiety to something external and at the point that you attach it to something external, you go to rise up and destroy that thing that's external. So that was anti vaxxers in 2021 or that's, you know, it could be the deep state or it could be whatever, whichever way you want to put your own free floating anxiety and then come with your pitchforks and come with your torches to try and that's one way. That it could be happening with the breasts, when the breasts may be contributing to, and likely is contributing to at least energetic blockages, some kind of toxicity, but you can't just place it all on that and cut it out. And then it's all gone. There's still the free floating anxiety that you have to deal with and you have to get it all the way, trace it back to the root. And I think one of the beautiful things that you were expressing was in spiritualism. I'll say, there's this idea of ‘God that is all that is’. Right? The God that is all that is, which is a conception of God. The God that includes all of the demons, all of the darkness, all the anti you, the God that includes Wateka, the God, so there's this idea of the God that all that is. And with the idea of God that all that is, if we want to actually mirror and reflect, you know, that divine nature, then it's about radical inclusion and acceptance of all the darkness. So you allow all boundaries to be kind of removed from yourself and you don't pick a side. I'm on the side of all that is, so I'm on the side of the murderers as well as the I'm on the side of everything. And this is a subtle thing. It's like, Oh, my shadow, my shadow is welcome here. It's my show with Tico, you know, you're part of all that is too. So you're all welcome here. But when, you know, myself or Gaffney, you know, we say. All in for all life. Well, what does that mean? That means that we're actually picking a side and we're picking the side of life. 

CAITLYN: Yes 

AUBREY: We're picking that ever deeper contact and ever deeper wholeness seeking radical aliveness, we're picking the side of life itself and that there is a force of anti life and there is a force that's seeking to snuff out life

CAITLYN: Yeah 

AUBREY: And You make a stand and that stand is going to be radically fierce. And so even this idea of somebody like, what do you mean spiritual warriors? It's all that is, there's no conflict. It was like, no, there's fucking conflict. It's built that way. There's a force of life and a force of anti life and it works within you. It's you versus anti you. It's a new book that I'm writing, but part of this is to take that radical stand and also know at another dimensional level that the contest is part of the grand Game of God that drives evolution forward. But nonetheless, it's essential to take that stand and say, no, not today, motherfucker. Like Yeshua said, Satan got behind me. It was like, literally, I don't know the Aramaic or Hebrew, but this is, and I don't know the citation, but that's one of the things that Jesus says to the devil. Right? Like Satan get behind me, you know, like get the fuck out of here. You know, like not today, motherfucker. You know, and this is an important aspect of standing in our full spiritual power. So it's interesting because, you know, we're on the precipice of transmitting like the bleeding edge of everything. We understand, you know, Eric, you have a, you know, you're teaching the cohort mentally fit for our next fit for service summit, Caitlyn emotionally fit. Myself, you know, and all of us together, we're doing spiritually fit, but these are the concepts that we're talking about, which are like alive and contain the wisdom of all the traditions and all the schools. And, you know, you did this auto directed internal family system, working with exiles and parts and vision space and all the medicine informed things like what Hamilton Souther would call creating your medicine world, which was your little Island that you built upon. There's like so many different things that we've picked up and learned together, learned from each other and just transmitting into what we're teaching people. And I think we're all being initiated in this process as we're preparing. So, I mean, what a fucking beautiful initiation, not only for your emotionally fit cohort that you're going to be able to lead because you're going to be able to lead men and women through these processes and so many more processes just like we're all going to be able to lead people through this idea of spiritually fit, which is not just let it all run in, let the demons in your home, you allow them to come in and the vampires at your door. Come on in suck my blood. Nope, not today motherfucker. There’s a wooden steak.

CAITLYN: Yeah. It's actually, if we listen to the code, vampire code, they need permission. And one of the things I noticed in the darkness, was that to let go of the blame of like, Oh, this isn't mine. This is my mom's, but also like, no, I agreed. I agreed. I didn't know any better, but I actually gave it permission to be here because I agreed to it. So my sovereignty now commands, just simply commands that I don't agree to it anymore because I now see it. It's just a matter of consciousness 

AUBREY: Yeah, so much awareness.

CAITLYN: And so it's actually quite, it's important. One thing I learned, and I want to let Eric share some of his story, which is hilarious. But to me, I learned that commanding the voice is very powerful, but there's a difference in the effectiveness in terms of what we're calling in rather than to sit in meditation and manifest a different, you know, envision and just like to use positive affirmations. For me at least, and I would highly recommend this to anybody who's listening or wants to do some of this deeper work like we're going to do with fit for service this year is bring the whole body in wholehearted. You have to feel it all the way for it to work through those parts of the subconscious, which is living in the body and hiding all of these limiting beliefs. And like my tissues, I had to wholeheartedly feel that feeling and command it with my voice. It wasn't enough to just pray for it, visualize it and journal it. It's like the Soma is something that's participating with all of its memory. Our matter is connected to memory. And so if we have patterns running and limiting beliefs or fears or any of these things that we didn't consciously agree to, but we did on some level agreed to and we've been carrying we have to bring the body in and the way that the body uses like the electromagnetic energy of emotions to actually rework that on a deeper level, otherwise that will just be conceptual and will continue to you know, be confused about why am I intending this manifesting this? And then I'm getting the same patterns in results over and over again. We need to bring the body back into the equation in my opinion always. 

AUBREY: Always 

CAITLYN: Yeah.

AUBREY: Always, because this is the self at the density of matter 

CAITLYN: Yeah.

AUBREY: Right like this split, this cartesian dualism where it's mind and body and they're totally different things emotions.

CAITLYN: They're all this. They're all connected. 

AUBREY: It's all connected. It's just different densities of the same energy.

CAITLYN: And different doors. I think that the other thing is any of these doors, whether you're going through the body first, through the emotions first, through the mind first, they're all one in the same entity, but you can do different techniques to enter different doors depending on which area.

AUBREY: I’m so stoked for the people who are going to be in your emotionally Fit program. They're gonna get such a radically transformative experience. 

CAITLYN: It's gonna be a lot of fun. It's gonna be powerful.

ERICK: When she told me what she did in the darkness, I basically started crying because it was just a beautiful, intuitive example of real magic with a CK. Like, from all the things I've read, like internal family systems, and how to work with dreams, and how to emotionally absorb repressed memories. She just did that shit intuitively with her mandala. 

AUBREY: Yeah, and that's where it all comes from. I mean, everybody who gets all of this, where does it come from? Where did it originate? You know, where did Carl Jung get his ideas?

CAITLYN: From the inside. 

AUBREY: Found them from the inside, connected to everything, the drop. The drop in the ocean, that's the ocean in a drop. You know, it's like, that's the secret. 

CAITLYN: He said, Caitlyn, you did high magic. And then we realized after talking about it for a little bit that no, I did deep magic. It was depth magic going deeper. So that feels really true. Yeah. 

AUBREY: Well, I'm excited to hear your fucking story too, darkness veteran. 

CAITLYN: I got to wait outside and be like, there he is.

AUBREY: Totally. Did you watch him come out? 

CAITLYN: I recorded everything. 

ERICK: I had no idea.

CAITLYN: Coming soon to an Instagram reel near you.

AUBREY: That's epic. All right. Second time in the darkness. Now, I’ve wondered what it would be like for me to go in a second time because you learn so much. And there's probably expectations that'll build up, but it's still only the end of one experience. So your second experience doesn't mean it has to even follow the same trajectory at all of your first experience. And there's going to be some things that you'll be like, Oh yeah, I remember that from this last time, you know, so it's a little combination of both. 

ERICK: Yeah. So the first time I did it was last year and I did it for four days. And the reason I booked a session for Caitlyn and I, the moment I got out was because that first time went as good as it could possibly go. I found out on the first day that if you use a foam roller as a walking stick, you will not run into anything. So I just felt like that was great. And I had big emotional movements the first time I did it and my dreams were incredible and the lights came on at the end of the third day and the quality of the lights, it felt like if God was a whale and I was a baby whale, she was singing a lullaby to me. It was just like, soft and actually like a peak spiritual moment for me because you're sober and there's nothing else there.

AUBREY: And when he's saying lights, these are the lights that it's very hard to describe. But if you close your eyes just to kind of give people like close your eyes like right now. Well, if you're driving don't, unless it's safe and yeah, or maybe your car is driving itself, whatever. But use your discretion, but close your eyes and you'll see that there's some kind of muddy brown elements and then there's some brighter kind of yellow orange elements. Right. And there's always this kind of mix in our visual field. Some of it's related to the external stimulus of the lights that are actually in the room, but some of it. It's not like we're just seeing pure light and shadow with clear distinct lines like we would, we're seeing this fuzzy mix of energy that's in our visionscape. But what happens is that fuzzy mix in your vision state, scape starts to actually pulse with light. So again, your eyes closed, eyes open, it's the same when you're in the darkness, you're still in this fuzzy visionscape that's not like the homogenous field of just black. That's never what you see. You're always seeing some element of this vision scape playing out in your mind. And all of a sudden that starts to pulse and throb into what you were saying. It's like it was almost cooing to you in a lullaby. 

ERICK: Yeah. And it was the peak spiritual moment of my life because of sobriety. There was something about like, there's something in me waking up and it’s like, grateful that it's getting to like stretching and it's like singing a song. So the first time was awesome. Now, what's important from the first time for when I went in a couple weeks ago is first working with that somatic practitioner before I went in the first time, she was able to pull out of me that I felt like a fraud. And when I said that out loud, I started to cry. And the background there is about a year and a half ago, I learned what existential risk theory was for the first time. And which is basically, there's a pretty good chance that if we don't get some shit right in the next couple hundred years, we could extinct ourselves.

AUBREY: It's the very generous, the generous side of the existential risk theory, 

ERICK: And that killed my personal dream for my life. Like my personal dream for my life was, I didn't realize it, but it was selfish. Like, yeah, I wanted to help people, but I wanted to, I had my dream for me. And it took me a long time to try to heal from that. And so I started talking about existential risk theory. And what I realized was to the degree that I got admiration or respect for talking about this stuff, but that talking about it didn't generate, like, participation from the people listening, I felt like a fraud. You know, and  

AUBREY: Fraud? 

ERICK: Yeah.

AUBREY: Why fraud? Why is that the word? You know, so fraud and imitate an imitation. 

ERICK: Yes. So it felt like I wasn't, this is an hindsight, but I wasn't being brave and I wasn't being audacious in what I was trying to do in the world to actually contend with existential risk theory like I was just talking about it. This was a year and a half ago, you know, fast forward, your audacity for us to do the academy for fit for service the way that we're doing it now was the catalyst for me to bring the thing out that has been in me for like 13 years. So, but 

AUBREY: Right.

ERICK: Right. So I won't skip ahead, but so I felt that. And the big jewel from the first time in the darkness was when Churchill gave me the advice and he said, don't try to ask for any wisdom until the very last day. Like get as relaxed as you can get. And then if you have questions, like from the Buddha body. Ask your questions. So on the last day, the first time I asked the darkness, what should I give my life to? What should I do? And what came through was the phrase, the regenerative city project. And then I said that out loud, and I swear on the souls of my children who are not born yet, the moment I said it out loud, a huge log in the fireplace cracked, like broken half, and I've had enough synchronicities to know when they're real as shit, and I just started crying. It was just like, whoa. So fast forward to this darkness experience,

 CAITLYN: Him and confidence. 

ERICK: I'm so excited. 

AUBREY: Ofcourse, you're a veteran. You're going back around to let's go. I'll go. Hello, darkness my old friend. 

CAITLYN: My old friend.

ERICK: So to give you guys the frame, the way that I see the darkness is I see it as an opportunity to get intimate with my unconscious, like the being that's behind us that dreams our dreams. So like, I'm really excited for the visions or for the lights because I see it as like that part starting to like come in. So I actually don't struggle with it, I'm not turning on the light. I'm not going outside because I want to see the real lights. And there's a quote from Carl Jung and it's like, If you could personify the unconscious, it would be as if a two million year old being that has been a mother, a father, a child, a slave, a farmer, a priest, a shaman, are all together in one, inside of you and it knows all the cycles of life and death and degeneration and regeneration and from its infinite wisdom, it can sometimes be a great prognosticator, but you can see the future at times and for better or for worse, that thing dreams. And that's, like I'm trying to hang out with that thing. That's basically how I see it. 

AUBREY: All right. 

ERICK: Right. Yeah. So on the first day, I learned the lesson. Don't try the spiritual taskmaster. Don't try to do all of your things and, you know, I'm going to let Caitlin do her things. She brought all of her things. She crushed it by the way. 

CAITLYN: I used them. It was great.

ERICK: Yeah. So the first day. Super smooth. I sleep. I relax. I enjoy the food. I use the foam roller as my walking stick and I feel like, you know, it's great. My first kind of emotional purge was after Scott came that first day to bring dinner. I asked him, how's Caitlyn? And he was like, she's doing beautiful. She's making contact with the part of her that is not broken and doesn't need to be fixed. And so I started to cry a little bit and I went to the chair and I played a harmonica and sang a song to her just to like, yes, you know, like that part that I see, I'm so glad. And so I was able to cry. It was great. And I slept. 

CAITLYN: I'm over there like, what if he has a psychotic break and then comes in and murders me? Just kidding. No, 

ERICK: I was just assuming that she was doing great.

CAITLYN: Right, I was.

ERICK: One of my big boons from this time is I captured like five or six dreams a night, at least the first three nights when I was actually dreaming. So the first day was smooth. Day two again, and like, I'm waiting for big content to come up. Cause the first time I did it, like the moment I stopped trying to do stuff, I had this huge purge about like, the tragedy of my relationship if I choose work over love and justify that I work so hard for the relationship, but I miss the relationship. So I'm like waiting to cry. It's like, I want to fucking cry. Nothing really comes through. And the only thing that happens on day two is I really reached deeper levels of non dual awareness and just like merging with the dark and it's beautiful. And then I have like six more dreams. Some of my dreams were particularly funny where I would wake up laughing and that's not normal. But with my handy dandy recorder, I was able to capture those. And then on day three, you know, I'm just like, Peacocking in the darkness like a fucking this is so easy. God.

CAITLYN: I asked Scott how he was doing. He was like, he said he could be there for 10 days. 

ERICK: Wait, what's up? 

AUBREY: Just gloating 

CAITLYN: I’m like, I’m scared.

AUBREY: Gloating from the other. Just tell her I could be in here for like a year or something

ERICK: Yeah. And if she needs someone to like coach her through her anxieties, 

AUBREY: I'm like, I got this.

ERICK: So on day three. I knew that the lights were going to eventually come. And so I did a lot of meditations on that day and I noticed that playing the harmonica did something to like regulating my breathing that actually started to bring the lights on just a little bit. And then I did a meditation where like her word was welcome to kind of relax into the darkness. Mine was oscillating. Wow. And so I went through my 108 bead mala, and like it was a movie, once I got like four fifths of the way through, I could feel the intuition. That on the very last bead, the lights would break through. And I just knew it. And I get to the very last one, and then the lights come on. And I'm crying, because it's just, it's so beautiful. 

CAITLYN: That’s the dream. 

ERICK: It's so beautiful. And so that's when Scott comes later that day, it's the end of day three, and I talk about it, and that's when I say, I could be here for ten days. And in hindsight, it's like my unconscious was like, now we got them, bitch. Because from that point on, nothing was smooth. Nothing was smooth. So the lights are here. It's great. I eat, I take a bath, I get into bed. I've been sleeping easily all the nights before. And so I'm in bed and the lights start to increase in their intensity and I'm loving it, but it's like huge Mandala Dharma wheels are growing and it's just like, and I'm just like, wow, this is cool. And then like, what feels like an hour goes by. And the pulse rate is slowly picking up. Like it's going from like 40 beats a minute to now it's at probably about 120 beats a minute. And then an hour goes by, and now it's like 160, like the pulse rate starts to get to the point where it's faster than any blinking light I've ever seen. And it's the whole field of vision and multiple times cause I'm like, fuck, I can't sleep, but I'm not disturbed. I love it. And multiple times I sit up in bed and I just go, wow, what the fuck? And at one point I go to try to record something on my recorder. So before the lights, the little light bleed in the darkness was so bright that I would have to cover it with a pillow to talk. I couldn't tell the recorder was on, was how bright the inner light show was. And like four or five hours must go by and I get to the point where I'm like finally starting to fall asleep and as I enter into the hypnagogic stage, it felt like the container of my mind keeping my thoughts relaxed started to melt into sleep and it's like my thoughts took the form of the erratic, intense pulse rate of the lights and my thought process went to a situation that played out in different possible, I won't get into the details, but basically I saw the way that a confrontation could lead to me dying and could lead to me, injuring myself to the point where I would become a paraplegic and I would have a seizure and I started having a seizure or like

CAITLYN: Convulsing. 

ERICK: Yeah. Convulsing. 

CAITLYN: Mind you, I dreamt that he was convulsing. 

ERICK: On the same night. 

AUBREY: Whoa. 

ERICK: On the same night.

CAITLYN: That was my nightmare night. He had a mask on and he was convulsing.

ERICK: The same night. 

AUBREY: Whoa. 

ERICK: So I've been meditating every day. It was such a weird experience. The observer, Eric, is completely calm. Cause I trust all this shit and I'm watching my body like just convulsed in bed and there's no emotional content. It's like my body is playing out this possible future. And before I know it, I'm asleep, you know, it's just like, I went from the convulsing, I guess, to sleep. So the next day I wake up and the lights aren't there. So I just kind of like go about my business just doing, you know, the things and I have a really a huge thing happened on day four where I basically got the download for a new myth that I'm going to write, which I won't get into the details, but if it felt like what would happen if Merlin had a nephew who grew up in like a Zen Buddhist monastery and learn the technique of the darkness and then entered into the King Arthur myths with the intention of bringing the darkness to each of the major characters. So they could heal all of their unconscious shit. 

AUBREY: Yeah. 

ERICK: Yeah. So just going to place that over here, but like my unconscious, like gave me entire episodes, like a whole scene happened of that character encountering Morgan, the witch, and it was just, so I'm going to be writing those stories and just see what happens there. And kind of like technology that is coming to the world. 

AUBREY: Yeah. Well, you have unmediated access to the creative source itself, you know? Right. Like you're pulling on the strings of the creative source of you in the muse and you're in this wild dance there. 

ERICK: Yeah. 

AUBREY: And what are you going to create? What are the stories that you're gonna tell from this energy? That we dream out of the darkness, you know, like we dream this reality out of the darkness. What are we going to dream into reality? What stories are we going to dream about? Like all of the movies we see, they build these worlds. We go into the worlds emotionally, we're in the worlds with, you know, like you feel them like that. This starts as a dream in the mind, dream in the mind of an artist who just starts to see something and dream something and then it comes to life and then people, then you can start changing this world to model that world and so it's such a beautiful process.

CAITLYN: That’s actually the source of everything that's been dreamt up here

AUBREY: Yes.

ERICK: Yeah. And like the thing that feels cool is it feels like, cause I plan on doing darkness retreats, like every year, like I love this shit. And so the idea is that before each darkness retreats, I'll immerse myself in one of the characters from the King Arthur myths and then let what happens in the darkness. Inform, like be a muse for that character going through their psychological, like what happened to Caitlyn? What would happen when Lancelot spends 10 days in the dark or 14 days in the dark? And like, I'm going to do King Arthur last. 

CAITLYN: It’s a lot of darkness to do. 

ERICK: I'm gonna do the least interesting thing that has happened, but that's for me and I love it. The lights are kind of coming through, but not like last night. And so I got through that day and Scott came and I explained to him, like, last night was really hard. And he was like, Oh, you know, like, Oh, something's finally starting to happen for an old dude who can be here for 10 days. So that night, I couldn't sleep. But the whole night, I’m almost like kind of a scared animal just like, all right, like if the lights come, I'm going to surrender, but they're not here yet. And I basically just lay in bed for five hours, anticipating the lights, but they didn't come back, which was really interesting. So, and I don't think that happened for you where the lights just stopped. Like,

AUBREY: No, they transformed. 

ERICK: Yeah. 

AUBREY: They were always transforming. They first started flashing. It was just like a full field flash pulse, just like a soft pulsing. And then from the pulsing, then it started in the dripping phase where they were like slag, dice, slag, dice, and that never actually ended. That was kind of like always, there was always a little bit of that there. But then from there, that's when it was like into the visions and these fractals floating, you know, beings and sacred geometries and things would float by and images. So many stories I could tell darkness, but I've already told those stories, but that's the substrate that you get into. And that's what's so fucking interesting about this whole thing is that all of this is inside. It's all available. Like as within, so without as above, so below, like we get access to everything. 

CAITLYN: Yeah. 

AUBREY: If we go in. 

ERICK: Yeah. 

 CAITLYN: If we go in. 

ERICK: Yeah. 

 CAITLYN: That's the key

ERICK: And so what was interesting is, like, that's what I was looking forward to the whole time. And after my, like, just fucking barrage seizure episode on day five, it just wasn't there. And I wasn't disappointed, because at any moment I was like, it's coming back as soon as I think it's not coming back. But it didn't come back on day five. So day six, I woke up, it's the last day. I'm like physiologically exhausted cause I'm barely sleeping and there's also part of me that's like, when are the lights going to fucking come back and just like assault me again? And I had a bunch of insights on the last day about what I want to do with my work, and what I wanted to say on the webinar. Like I had this insight where like, I'm just going to give away like as much of my program as I possibly can on this webinar because it feels like a cool fucking thing to do. And that felt really exciting. And I'd had a bunch of dreams that I'd captured and I was super excited about that. But nothing, again, no big emotional thing has come through the whole time. And the last day was very uneventful. And Scott came to bring dinner and I was like, you know, yeah. And then after he left, throughout that last day, whenever I would go to the bathroom, I would start to notice that the very tip of my dick would get wet and in my head. I'm like, is my dick getting bigger in the darkness? Like that's how so 

AUBREY: Yeah, so listen, we've actually been just nudging you along this whole podcast or the grand reveal, which is darkness makes your dick get bigger. 

CAITLYN: And they're sold out for the rest of our entire lifetimes. 

AUBREY: They're already sold out. So now here it is, the darkness makes your dick grow.

ERICK: So like, that was a type of thought that I didn't notice I was having until everything became clear because, after Scott came and gave dinner, I ate and then I went to the bathroom and the moment I sat down, my like, under thighs and everything got wet and my brain instantly recognized. Oh fuck. The toilet is clogged in the darkness,

CAITLYN: It was the toilet, clogging more and more.

ERICK: It wasn't my dick getting bigger it was definitely the toilet and I couldn't tell because it's just it's dark and just to give people a sense of what my situation is Scott comes, he's not coming back until the morning. If I were to try to go get help, I would have to walk through the Oregon forest on the side of a mountain for half an hour to get to the first place where there's a person and I have no cell service. There is nothing I can do. And so I fucking turn on the light because I have to address this. And so as I turn on the light, 

CAITLYN: The first thing you see is.. After six days.

ERICK: So the inner voice in my head, like the joke that came out of my mind as I looked at this full toilet of my shit was the voice was, behold your bullshit. And I just started laughing and like, grow cause like, right when I turn on the light, like I don't have my glasses on, I haven't worn them the whole time I'm in there and my vision is dog shit. And so my brain couldn't compute depth. It's like my brain needed time to load the visual program of depth. And so everything looks very ayahuasca-y. And I somehow figured out how to turn off the water. Like it's like a quarter of an inch away from just spilling over into the room. So, figured that out, turned off the light as soon as I could, and now I'm back in the darkness. And, by the way, the diet that they feed us has a lot of fiber. The food they feed us has way more fiber than I'm used to in a 24 hour period. And so, I'm now in a situation where it's like 10 or 11 hours before Scott is going to come in the morning, and I cannot shit in there. So, like,

CAITLYN: Or pee in there for that matter. 

ERICK: Well, I was like, if I have to, I'll pee in the jar.

CAITLYN: Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. 

ERICK: Yeah. But I'm not going to shit in the tub, you know? And so 

AUBREY: Yet! Yet! So, at a certain point, the tub gets sacrificed.

ERICK Check this out. I take a bath, and I get into bed. And because my brain chemistry has changed, I'm not going to be able to, like, sleep through this debacle. I'm just going to be laying in bed, and my stomach is like, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like taunting me. It's like right at the cusp of where I have to take a shit and long story short, after like an hour and a half of laying in bed, I really have to pee. And so I go and I test outside, you know, it's like, 1 am in Oregon. So I had to expose myself to like the light of the night and it was still bright, but again, I don't have my glasses on, can't really discern depth. I went outside right in front of the room to pee and the night just looked like a horror movie because it was raining. It was wet. It was cold and it was just like, sleepy hollow in front of me. And as I'm peeing I'm like, there's no way I'm taking a shit out of there. There's no way that I'm gonna go out that night if I have to take a shit. And so I go back into bed, and the last day of my darkness retreat is working out for like an hour and a half like, Okay, what? Am I gonna do it when I inevitably have to take a shit? And I came up with a plan that I thought was okay. And so the plan that I worked out for, if I have to do this is I'm gonna go get some toilet paper. I'm gonna go to the very, like, there's like a small front porch that's like a stone that you can just go stand on. And so I was like, all right. I'll lay some toilet paper down on the stone, I'll pop a squat right there, you know, like my ancestors would do. And I would shit, I would then scoop it with my hand and throw it into the night. And then I would go wash my hands, because I didn't want to throw toilet paper out into the night.

AUBREY: Why bother with the toilet paper at all? 

ERICK: I don't want to get shit on the doorstep of the house. 

AUBREY: Oh right. Why don't you just take one more step into the forest?

ERICK: You have no idea what it was like, Aubrey.

AUBREY: It was that scary? 

ERICK: So we're not going to go into that. We're just going to talk about how good my idea was.

AUBREY: Okay, alright. Fair enough.

ERICK: Wow, ingenious. 

AUBREY: Wow. 

ERICK: Great idea. Okay, anyway, so. 

AUBREY: So many other ideas. 

CAITLYN: I like fling it into the night so much. 

ERICK: So, once I figured it out. 

AUBREY: Some of the ideas that don't involve turd fondling. Shout out to all those turd fondlers out there. 

ERICK: I wasn't afraid of the turd germs, so, but I was afraid of the night. Anyway, once I figured that out, I was 

AUBREY: Turd fondler you know, I'm talking to you. 

ERICK: And like magic, like I healed trauma, I was able to fall asleep once I worked it mentally

CAITLYN: Cause he worked it out, mental fitness baby.

ERICK: So, I'd been having a bunch of dreams and on the very last night, the very last dream I had before I woke up, I won't share the specifics of the dream because I'm still working on it. I had the most spooky, disturbing, horror movie dream that I can remember having had in a long time. And how I look at dreams is like, I'm not projecting what's happening on anybody else. Whatever is in the dream, it's a reflection of a part of me. And when I woke up, I was just excited. But I was also like blown away where I was like, all right, what the fuck is inside of me that I spent six days in the dark. Bring me giants and my, the intelligence of my unconscious was like, we're going to give you a little nugget as a dream on the very last night. And so I'm definitely going to be worth like, I was able to capture 25 dreams from the time of the dark, I've listed them out in order and I've written them down and I'm going to work on them and I, like a detective, I just have faith that this grand, interesting thing is going to reveal itself to me.

And I was able to survive not having to shit.

CAITLYN: No flinging. 

ERICK: Didn't have to fling. Scott comes, he brings me into the light. I tell him that the toilet is clogged. And he takes care of it. He fixes it. I see the light. It's fucking beautiful. But it's like, in hindsight, I could feel.

CAITLYN: What was the best part of coming out? So turning around perchance, 

ERICK: This was hilarious. I came out. I talked to Scott for like 20 minutes and then, I turned around and I saw in the other room, the front door has a little window and there's just this little Tweety bird just with a big smile. And I just see her teeth and it's Caitlyn and I'm just filled with love and warmth. And I just get up and I run to her and it's super cute. 

CAITLYN: He just saw my teeth.

ERICK: The story's not done. We had a great day. We hang out and then, we're going to leave the next day. So I went back to my place.

CAITLYN: He’s like, don't sleep with me. I haven't slept in nights. We have to be apart

ERICK: And it was never cold. So I was just hot every night.

But anyway, last night, I'm back in my room. I don't fall asleep until like midnight. And then, Scott comes around every morning to light a fire. And the night that I went to sleep. Was like, it's his day off now. And so he was out like having a good time, blah, blah, blah. 

CAITLYN: We were in a cave singing.

ERICK: Yeah. And something pulls me out of sleep and I can't tell what time it is, but I was like mid deep sleep and it's such a weird feeling, but it's like something pulled my consciousness out of sleep as I hear the front door slowly being opened. So the way the room works is there's the room that I'm in, and then there's an entrance room that has a door. So there's two doors. I hear the outermost door, like slowly being opened. Like someone's trying to be quiet and be conscientious. And then I hear movement into the front room. And then I started to hear the firewood start to be moved around. And I checked my phone and it's like 2:30 AM. And so like, I just woke up and I go like, Scott and I was going to tell him like, I don't need to be fired. Like I just assumed maybe he had a great night. They just got done in the little hole  

AUBREY: and they unclogged your toilet and your 

ERICK: That already happened. That's fine. All right. He's just fucking got down in there and did what he needed to do.

CAITLYN: A very resourceful over there.

ERICK: So I say, Scott. There's no part of me that expected there not to be a response because it's like there's someone there and I go, Scott, no response, the fucking intensity of the production of inner drugs to get me from groggy to like, Like cocaine, adderall, MDMA 

AUBREY: This is life or death for somebody in the chamber

ERICK: 100 percent and so it's like, and because of the movement of the door, I didn't even think it could be an animal cause it felt like it took conscious intent to move the door like that. And then I go, “Scott”, no response. And the movement of the firewood, like if it was a person,  you would think that they would like to stop their movement, but it keeps moving. And so I'm just fucking frozen for like maybe eight minutes, like just looking at the door. Because I didn't close my door all the way. Like, it's not completely shut. It's kind of shut probably in hindsight, like most terror, but it felt super directed and controlled. Like I felt just. Like, if I have to kill someone, I'm ready to kill someone, like, whatever, and so the movement keeps happening. And so then after like eight minutes, 

AUBREY: You start thinking about weapons, 

CAITLYN: Fork.

ERICK: I had already gone through. I had the only foam roller, 

AUBREY: That no.

ERICK: A meditation cushion, 

AUBREY: Fork

CAITLYN: Fork

ERICK: Fork

AUBREY: Clearly, a fork is better than none. 

ERICK: And so now I'm starting to process, like, it's probably an animal. So I just slowly start to take stuff and put it by the door and just like slowly and the movement stuff is still happening. And so in my brain, I'm like, it's very likely not a bear, but I'm like, I'm not prepared. 

AUBREY: So you've determined at this point, it's not a human. 

ERICK: Right. 

AUBREY: So you're thinking you may have to fork some woodland creature. 

ERICK: Right

CAITLYN: Potentially bear. 

AUBREY: Potentially fork a woodland creature that could be a small bear. Or it could be, 

ERICK: I was thinking maybe a coyote or like

AUBREY: Something.

ERICK: Yeah. And so I eventually get the door, like not closed, but with enough stuff that if it starts to move, I'll be able to hear it and then I can respond to it. And then I'm just listening for like an hour and a half with just like maximum 

CAITLYN: No sleep for three night

ERICK: Right. And so it's like 4 am and 

AUBREY: Wait, you listen to the sound and you didn't check for an hour and a half?  

ERICK: Fuck no! Because of the risk of the potential bear. You know, just like, I'm not fucking with that, you know? 

AUBREY: It's Oregon, bro. You're gonna be alright. They're not, like, grizzly bears there. 

ERICK: Well, then I guess it was just fear, but anyways, now, check this out. I recorded it on my phone, the sounds, and I'll play it for you later, but it's not.

CAITLYN: It's pretty intense. It's so weird. 

ERICK: It's not like in hindsight, there was nothing there. I've got the fucking video proof. Eventually at some point I fall asleep around like 4 am, but it's kind of still happening. I got to the point where I was like, okay, maybe something like a possum or a squirrel got into the chimney thing. And it's just really loud, 

AUBREY: Bro, I cannot conceive how you don’t look.

ERICK: The 5 percent chance of a bear, the 5 percent chance of a bear. 

AUBREY: Oh my god.

CAITLYN: It also felt kind of supernatural like I think when you're in this well. 

AUBREY: Whatever alien, bear, whatever situation I think you fucking sneak a peek your door wasn't even closed, you didn't even want to just fucking peek through the part.

ERICK: No

AUBREY: Wow.

CAITLYN: So no sleep. 

ERICK: So when I wake up in two hours, it’s like 6 am. I still hear it every once in a while. Like it sounds like it kind of like, and then I go and I look and I expect there to be some ugly ass fucking thing inside of the like chimney, like a fireplace, I look, there's nothing, the front door is closed and all weekend. And I told Scott about all this and his hypothesis before I played him the video was that maybe a mouse got into the very top thing and then I played him the video and he's like 

CAITLYN: It's super weird.

ERICK: I don't know. So we don't know what it was, but that happened. And I'll play you the video afterwards, but that all led to this feeling of like, I left there feeling like it wasn't done. Like whatever was happening in the darkness, it felt like it wasn't closed. And long story short, when we got home, I had the webinar planned where I was going to like, you know, talk about my course, which is like the culmination of my life's work and what I realized as I was working on a course was my sleep was still really fucked up. Like working on this presentation, I was up until 4 am the first night when we got home and then I was up till 6 am the next night and I felt this mania of inspiration starting to come through and it was actually a phone call with clay the night before. I was to present the webinar where I just kind of casually said, yeah, it doesn't feel like my darkness retreat is done. It feels like this webinar is actually a part of the closing of the whole thing. And so it's like 4 am. I'm still working on this thing. I'm going to do it the next day and I have a memory come through and I had two memories come through that I haven't thought about in years and it's my 20 year old self that like wanted to kill himself, he just needed to be shown like, what can I do to improve my life and so a big part of what I was doing on the webinar was to give a gift to that kid. And it felt like I was closing a circle. And then I had this memory that I haven't thought about in 10 years and it's actually one of the most important memories. It was one of the most important moments that led me into the life that I have now. And it was when I was 24, so it was four years after that kid that wanted to kill himself. I had slowly started to get some of my shit together, and I had just gotten fired from a job at a call center. I got fired because I was trying to do the least amount of work there so I could work on my dream. Like, I'd started to figure out some things that were actually improving my life, and the day after I got fired, I somehow stumbled into this financial dude's email funnel. And I didn't know anything about marketing or email funnels. And I started getting emails from him about how to start an online business. And it was really helpful. And then he pitched a course. And I'd never bought a course online. Cause I was like, you know, no one's going to tell me what to do, blah blah. But I was also broke. You know, I didn't have much money. I click on it. It costs 2,000. I flinched like an animal. When I saw that amount of money, I closed it out and I closed my computer and I got up and I started walking around. I was just like too much. The dude's name is Ramit Sethi, by the way. And his email funnel was relentless. And effective because I remember like a month later, I'm reading like the 13th email and all the emails like, he's not sleazy, like he was actually helping me, but the money was scary. And after like four weeks, I think what got me over the edge is he broke down. This costs $8 a day for the next year. It costs less than a shitty frappuccino every day for the next year for you to learn how to start an online business, blah, blah. And I was like, fuck it, I'm gonna do it. It was the scariest thing up until that point in my life that I had done, which, you know, is a reflection of privilege and my cowardiceness and all that shit, but that was the scariest. And then I remembered something that I haven't thought about since it happened. I had the impulse in my body to go outside and call my mom, not to ask for money, but just to be like, Hey mom, I did it, I'm doing it. And the course wasn't even that good, but the action of making a bet on my future self, that the future would be better, that scared the shit out of me, helped me remember. I needed the 13 emails, you know, like I have this big judgment around marketing and about like, just be an artist and just put the stuff out and don't ever charge too much, and then I was like, I have to fucking pitch the people who are going to be on this call, who are that 24 year old, I owe it to them to get them past the fear that I had when I was 24. And that scares the fuck out of me now, you know, I'm an artist and whoever comes is supposed to come, blah, blah. And then the creation of that webinar and the fact that it blew up the way that it did in like 1200 people were on there and that scared me. I was so nervous before doing that call. And then once I did it. I felt like that that was actually the closure of the whole thing and that  there was something about the ‘behold your bullshit’. That was like a part of the, No, it's not gonna end when you get out and then having that night of whatever the fucking thing was that came into the room. It's ultimately the completion of the feeling of feeling like a fraud, like there's something about conveying with full fuck to the people who pay attention to the things that I talk about like no I am going to try to sell you on this thing that I believe in because I want participation. I don't want just people listening and being like, oh that was really cool Eric. Yay No, join. Let's go. And so it feels like that was the completion of the full circle.

AUBREY: Wow. I still want to know what the fuck that thing was inside your fucking chamber. 

ERICK: I got to show you the video, afterwards.

AUBREY: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, I mean, I think this is also where, you know, in this kind of spiritualism concept, which is like, you know, everything will arrive in the right divine timing and it's all going to work out. Yes, and you are an active agent in making it work out. Like you are an agent that is part of the collective cosmos. So if you align your intention with the intention and the will of all that is, of God's source of life, you know, like the Eros that pulses through, it's if you align your will with that will and clarify your desire. And then so that both of those become part of the same will, you are part of the will of what will happen.

ERICK: And to get into that slipstream. Your ego is going to have to do things that scare the fuck out of it, and you're going to have a voice that's going to be like, you're going to talk about this in the spiritual curriculum because you've really been studying it, but the thing about part X is it is just as good as the 99 percent of your best. And it's going to use the type of voices that will work on you. And so if

AUBREY: Those are weaknesses and those are vulnerabilities. 

ERICK: So if the voices, everything happens at its own pace, don't force anything, just go with the flow. That voice will come in when there's an opportunity to do something scary. And it would be like, just go slow.

AUBREY: They'll use all the truths against you, you know, 

ERICK: You’re too busy right now, right? Just wait until you're not busy. I know Caitlyn knows that voice. Like just wait until you're not busy. And all it takes is a moment of awareness to look at that voice and be like, when have you not felt busy as an adult in our modern world.

CAITLYN: I think that's actually the primary gift of the darkness for me, meeting the darkness, befriending the darkness was beautiful and life changing in its own way. But the more profound impact it had on me was that someday I was finally here. There was, I was not too busy now to feel the things that weren't the biggest priority there. You know, it's like, Oh, I want to cry at that moment, but you know, I've got 10 other things to do today, or I'm pissed off right now. And I want to say this thing and I want to get it out, but it's not the right time. And it's like just having that space to go inside, like you said, and to be with myself, it's something that we're getting farther and farther away from as a collective there. I had an insight before you went in sitting on the bed, like on my phone while my cat was next to me and animals are very attuned to more attuned to people. And I think the same thing goes for children than we give them credit for. But I could feel that my cat was disenchanted that I wasn't actually present with my cat, who's trying to get some attention for me. And I was just on my phone and had this thought that we're in the process is we're in this digital era and we have more access to information and people than ever before that we're moving away from having a world that's fit for animals. And we are also part of animals. We are bodies too. And if we never make space to slow down and tune into the inside of the animal body and all of this imagination, all of this like creativity and insight and our own depth of wisdom, that all the symptoms that we're feeling are just going to get louder and louder because that's subconscious saying, Hey, Pay attention. That's all the pain is a signal. Pay attention to something here. And when we really slow down and actually hold it, there's so much power in it actually. It's the thing behind the door that's not really there. 

AUBREY: Mm-hmm. Yeah. 

CAITLYN: Yeah.

ERICK: Hey, a thing was there. How dare you? Don’t even..

CAITLYN: A thing was there. We still don't know what it was, but

AUBREY: Do you wish you would have kind of given it a look?

ERICK: In hindsight? Yeah, But like when you're in the dark alone, and you only have a fork if there's even a 1 percent chance of bear, I know Aubrey here in his chair not having been in the dark in Oregon with this fork 

AUBREY: I’ve been around bears bro, I got the receipts. But that's also because I've been around bears, like the fact that I have some bear knowledge, that I could have applied to that situation.

ERICK:  I have no bear intuition other than the dude who was like grizzly man and got fucking killed by the bear. So, just Jim Rogen talking about that. 

AUBREY: Types of bears. Different types of bears, bro. Fuck. What a journey, y'all. What a journey. And yeah, it's just, you know, I know we've mentioned a couple times this is where, you know, this is our life and our life and the stuff that happens in your life weaves into the ceremonies and the lessons. So the examples of our lessons are a lot of, you know, yours in particular, Eric, pertaining to what we're doing with Fit for Service, which is a deep part of our vocation.

ERICK: Yeah. 

AUBREY: This is a way that we get to actually take the intent of our will and our life and be able to say like, All right, we want to help people along the way. That is an act of gratitude for all the gifts and blessings that we've been given in our own life as well. You know, like that's the purity of the essence of it.

CAITLYN: I've never felt more inspired, certain, and just charged to do the work that we're doing. This is a time where people really need to be empowered to help. It's not only just helping people, it's helping empower people to be, we need more arms. We need more hearts that are awake and alive and connected with themselves and able to help everybody in their own reach. And that was one of the other beautiful gifts of being in the dark when without the other, like I was describing it. Coming back into the world after being away from your life for only four days. My feeling was that I chose my life. I choose my life. I choose my partner. I choose my work. I choose my body. I choose everything, all of these gifts that I wrestle against and resist and take for granted and there's no more time left to debate that. I'm standing in it right now and heart forward, we're doing this, yeah.

AUBREY: We're doing this.

ERICK: And the big insight, or one of the big insights for me is, it's a type of time piercing rescuing that when we do the work to bring forth what is in us that helped save our life. You know, like anyone who's over 30 had to figure something out because they didn't choose to kill themselves. Part of the call of being an artist is you're distilling that so you can give it and the people it's meant for, they're gonna resonate because they have the same part that you had to save and by giving it. It's like I'm participating in the infinite game of the people who came before who helped save me because without a fucking email funnel that was clearly like they had been working on that shit for years because it was tenacious and effective without that I wouldn't have started this process of like make scary bets when it pulls at you and what that unlocked for me was like, Persuade people when you believe in it and for the people that it's meant for, they'll come and they will be grateful that they did.

AUBREY: Yeah. It's the balance. It's a balance of the balance of persuade, which is like, you can't persuade somebody, but it's actually like, how does the leader lead? A leader leads through inspiration? Did Alexander the great persuade his army to follow him into battle? 

ERICK: His inspiration is better.

AUBREY: He led, he inspired them.

ERICK: Yeah. 

AUBREY: Inspired them by his way. And that's, I think really what we're trying to do is just to bring like through the embodied understanding with all the humility that we're always a student that there's going to be 

ERICK: Behold your own bullshit

AUBREY: Yeah, like we all have to work through this whole process But you know inspire a movement towards life 

ERICK: More life

CAITLYN: Towards life 

AUBREY: More life

ERICK: And like 

AUBREY: More beauty more art

ERICK: The vow for me, like the thing that I'm going to be holding as I start to do this more like leading and inspiring is it's manipulation. If the other person, if they knew everything that you know about what you were asking, they wouldn't do it. And then inspiring is if they knew everything that you know about the thing, they would do it. You know, it's just like cutting that line clean. 

AUBREY: Yeah, amen. 

CAITLYN: Amen. 

AUBREY: Well, I fucking love you guys. Caitlyn, if you're listening to this when it first comes out, we got Emotions in the Dark. If you want to drop in live with Caitlyn, a special little offer here, emotionsinthedark.com

CAITLYN: Yeah. Come check it out. I'll be hosting a live virtual event experience to go deeper into some of this stuff and how just really the Dharma of everything that I've lived and everything that I've learned can be synthesized into a great big gift to help people out there who might be afraid of the shadows of, and pulling yourselves out of being associated deeply, intimately associated with your own heart, body, and inner world. To integrate that into, you know, living a life of passion and being in your heart and having that courage that isn't afraid of the grief because it's too big or the fear because it's too strong or any of these energies that we all carry together. Francis Weller talks about it as metabolizing grief. And I think there's metabolizing anger too, and metabolizing many different qualities of emotion that we just have so many distractions that it's easy to conveniently say, I'll get to that later until we're so far away. 

ERICK: Until you get sick.

CAITLYN: We're so far away from it. We're sick or we're dying. And it's too late to get that life force energy back that we could have had if we would welcome all that home. And I feel very inspired to bring more aliveness into you the collective at this time. So emotionsinthedark.com. I look forward to meeting some people there. And yeah, just living this. 

AUBREY: Yeah, totally. And this is, you know, if you're interested in working in any of these different programs with any of us and going on this journey together, cause we're in it together. So a fit for services about fitforservice.com, you can check it out. And like God's, he said, if you actually knew what we know, this would be like the easiest choice in the world, you know, and we got the receipts from everybody, who've made lifelong friends and 100 percent would recommend friends and family. 100 percent made a friend that they would have for life, like 97 percent experienced significant emotional spiritual breakthroughs. It goes on down the line of the people we've surveyed. But, you know, ultimately, yeah, like I hope to see you there. So, I didn't know we were going to get into all that, but your journey was very much about that.

ERICK: It really was. 

AUBREY: And about some shit and a strange creature. So we'll get into that too. We love you guys. See you next week.