There are several, awkward silences during my phone conversation with Traver Boehm.
More than once, I’m about to ask if he’s still on the line, convinced the unreliable signal he’d warned me about has cut us off, only to be alerted to his presence by a deep intake of breath as he prepares to speak.
It’s easy to see why silence might come easy for Boehm. He has just emerged from seven weeks at a popular darkness retreat in Italy. There, he ate, slept, exercised and meditated in a pitch black, windowless ‘pod,’ with only his inner demons for company.
Sometimes described as ‘meditation on steroids,’ darkness retreats have taken over from psychedelic ayahuasca ceremonies as the latest trend for sports stars, Hollywood actors and tech titans in search of spiritual truth and enlightenment. Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert – whose movie adaptation stars Julia Roberts – recently did a five-day darkness retreat.
But it’s no walk in the park.
When quarterback Aaron Rodgers spent four days in the dark in 2023, he started hallucinating by day three. Comedian Tiffany Haddish fared better when she spent time at the same Sky Cave Retreats in Oregon last year. She emerged, blinking, into the daylight and declared, ‘It’s beautiful.’
But it all proved too much for Charles Hoskinson, the multi-millionaire founder of Cardano, one of the biggest crypto coins in the world. He cut short his five-day retreat and fled in terror after just 12 hours.
In a post on X, he described experiencing ‘terrifying shadows gnawing at my soul, sleep paralysis demons, and [an] inability to breathe.’
Traver Boehm has just emerged from seven weeks at a popular darkness retreat in Italy. There, he ate, slept, exercised, and meditated in a pitch black, windowless ‘pod,’ with only his inner demons for company
The author of Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert , recently did a five-day darkness retreat led there, she wrote, by a ‘full body yes’
Tiffany Haddish spent time at Sky Cave Retreats in Oregon. She emerged, blinking, into the daylight and declared, ‘It’s beautiful’
Boehm, a former bodyguard and MMA fighter, first ventured into the darkness in the wake of personal tragedies – the loss of his unborn child, the break up of his marriage and the collapse of his gym business.
He says he once even considered suicide. But instead, seeking to make sense of it all, he embarked on what he termed a ‘One Year to Live’ project in 2016, which included making amends with ex partners, running a marathon, sitting with hospice patients who were at the end of their lives and spending 28 days in a dark cave in Guatemala.
He’d faced some terrifying foes in his time, but nothing could prepare him for his experience in the dark. It was, he says, a descent into a violent battle for his sanity.
Wracked with excruciating stomach pains, at times doubled over and drenched in sweat, he heard a female voice command him to kneel.
‘There’s no other way to describe it,’ he wrote in his book, 28 Days In Darkness. ‘An invisible hand shot out of the darkness and grabbed me by the throat, picking me up off the ground and slamming me flat onto my back.
‘The wind was knocked completely out of me and I fought to inhale. It simply would not come. The night terrors I’d experienced as a kid returned to my mind – that feeling of being paralyzed and trapped in my bed as something evil came toward me.’
In 2025, he went back into the dark and this time for much longer – seven weeks.
Why, I asked, so many years on, and having completed his book about the experience, would he willingly go back for more?
He answers slowly and thoughtfully, ‘I’m not a religious person by any means and yet I can say this to you with full integrity and a straight face… the dark itself called me back.’
He admits how insane that might sound, but continues unapologetically. If a total of 77 nights (between his two stints in the darkness) have taught him anything, he says, it’s that people pleasing is a waste of time.
‘I woke up one morning having been uncomfortable in my body for maybe two months,’ he explains.
At first, he didn’t understand the source of his discomfort. Life and business, he says, were good.
But he didn’t have to look far to find tragedy and trauma. His cousin had committed suicide two months earlier, leaving behind a wife and two children. At 49, he was the same age as Boehm.
He says, ‘I was sitting at my breakfast table and thought, “Oh, s**t, I have to go back in the dark.” That’s what this is. That’s what the call is.’
Darkness retreats have their origins in Buddhism. According to Boehm, retreats in the Tibetan tradition, in which they are considered an advanced meditative practice, last 49 days.
He explains, ‘Here in the West, we’ve kind of taken that and chopped it up and said, ‘Oh, you can do three days, you can do five days, you can do whatever it may be.’
‘Ayahuasca has been called four years of therapy in four hours,’ he adds. ‘We want that quick fix… I wanted to do the full thing.’
But there was another aspect to his decision to return to the dark in 2025 for 49 days – a question that had been gnawing at his soul since his first, shorter, retreat.
He wanted to know, he says, ‘What was on the other side of day 29… day 32… day 35?’
The answer, he discovered, was so deeply personal and traumatic he admits that he is still processing it and may never fully reveal it to anyone.
He says, ‘My most impactful, awful, day was day 42.
‘I thought I was out of the woods. I was like, “Oh, last week, I’m just gonna skate through this. All I have to do is 14 more meals and seven more workouts and I’m out of here.”‘
Then the hammer came down.
The quarterback Aaron Rodgers spent four days in the dark in 2023, where he started hallucinating by day three
The pod in Tuscany, where Boehm spent 48 days in darkness
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‘There’s a million places to go that you don’t want to go,’ he says. ‘Whether that’s past trauma, whether that’s accidents, whether that’s breakups and betrayals, family history.
‘Here’s where I went. My father had died the year before and my 47th day was the one-year anniversary. I spent a lot of time grieving… just missing him.
‘I had a small container of his ashes in there with me, talking to him, communing with him in ways that I didn’t get to when he was alive.
‘It was really hard. I knew he wasn’t alive and I’d never get to talk to him again. So there was a lot of grief that I had to work through.’
‘Every single thing that I did, other than eat, had to be self-generated… while also dealing with insanely personal, intense, intimate stuff. Self-generation was exhausting to my absolute core, where I had to dig and access a part of my being that I literally didn’t know existed to get past day 37.’
Each day was the same. He woke up around 3:30am. He estimated the time by gauging how long he felt he had been awake by the time the birds started singing at what he knew was first light – around 5am.
He then meditated until breakfast eventually arrived around 10am – served to him through a hatch which had double doors to ensure no light slipped in when he opened it on his side.
He worked out – as much as he could do in a pitch black room measuring barely six feet across – ‘processed’ past relationships and planned the future.
He says, ‘This would come from me asking the darkness to help me and say, “Hey, I’m struggling with this conversation that I’ve had 60,000 times in my head with the same person. What’s my role in this situation?” And then, boom, I may get a visual, like a flash of an image or a video, or hear a word, or literally get a sentence of an answer, and go, “Holy smokes, wow, wow!”‘
He ‘wrote’ a fiction story, started one book and outlined another.
Each day was the same. He woke up around 3:30am, estimating time by how long he felt he had been awake when the birds started singing at first light – around 5am
Boehm’s room had a spartan meditation area and a yoga mat for exercising
‘I wrote a complete 90-minute workshop, which I’m starting to give in November, and when I say “wrote,” I wrote in my head,’ he says.
‘It’s wild. I could go back three days later and pull the same story out, know exactly where I left off and go back and reread it and reorganize it, edit it.’
Dinner would arrive around 4pm – another anchor in the otherwise sparse timeline of his day.
He says, ‘Then I would meditate again for three rounds and put myself to bed.’
When Boehm emerged, it was like a weight had been lifted – emotionally and literally. Thanks to the retreat’s restrictive vegan diet he had dropped 30lbs from 196 to 166 pounds.
‘The morning I came out I walked out onto this beautiful valley,’ he recalls. ‘This is in Tuscany, and the first thing I saw through the trees was the ocean. Wow! And I burst out crying, just started sobbing.
‘Then, about five minutes later, a hot air balloon came up over the horizon and I have no pull to hot air balloons – they’re not my thing – and I started sobbing.
‘I saw a bird and I started crying, because it was a bird. You kind of get the gist here.’
Now, a month on, he still feels stuck between two worlds – things that seem fresh and new, yet also immediately familiar: eating food he can see; taking his dog for a walk; laughter; coffee; the ocean; hugging friends.
‘It’s really a unique experience to be so isolated and have almost no sensory input and then be opened to the entire world again,’ he says.
The tiny room in which Boehm spent his 49 days had a few home comforts – not that he could see any of them
Two meals a day were delivered through a hatch which had double doors to ensure no light slipped in when Boehm opened it on his side
So, would he do it again? He answers without hesitation, ‘Yes.’
But, he adds, ‘For a shorter period of time.’
He explains, ‘The darkness is my medicine. It’s where I go to do my deepest work. I lock myself in a pitch black room and I access things that I cannot access in a group setting, in a therapeutic setting with professionals, in the light, with plant medicine, with psychedelics, with whatever other modality there is.
‘This is the most potent one for me. This is where I feel most at home. This is where I do my work – my soul work, my deep work. So, yes, I will go back over and over and over again for the rest of my life.
‘But I don’t want to leave society, leave my business, leave my loved ones, leave my dog, leave humanity for seven weeks again. That’s too much.’
28 Days in Darkness: A Journey from the Depth of Despair to the Joy of Awakening by Traver Boehm is published by Victory Belt, August 26