Candlehour
To Know the Dark – Wendell Berry, Farming: A Handbook, 1970
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
Candlehour is a practice and creative/ritualistic space that provides the opportunity and to 'digest' the experiences you've taken in throughout the day, effectively unburdening our psyche from having to digest all of our experience in our sleep. It is grounded on the fact the 'only the past sticks', so we engage in the practice of candlehour to help us clear out the past so we can be fully present in our life. It is also a way of exploring the underworld while awake. As such, it strengthens the imagination, setting the stage for deeper engagement in vision work and active imagination practices where you become deeply acquainted with your inner world.
Consider all the ways our experiences and state of mind from waking life color the realms of dream and sleep. Candlehour allows the opportunity for these 'seeds' of waking life to sprout and take root in our imagination before we journey deeper into the underworld of sleep–where, believe it or not, we can continue to explore the shadowy realms of sleep, as long as we've prepared for this realm by conjuring the gentle light of awareness in candlehour.
Candlehour is a practice I learned from the mentor I saw weekly throughout my 20s and has been rich source of creative inspiration over the years. Then, my mentor introduced the practice to me as 'nightwork', which I appreciate, since cultivating this practice does involve effort. But the more I practiced 'nightwork', the less I saw it as work. The name 'candlehour' evokes the unique form of 'candlelight consciousness' that this hour evokes, and reinforces this time not just as another hour of productive 'work' to cram in before bed, but as an intentional hour of rest and inner visioning. Importantly, the space cultivated in candlehour also allows anxieties, fears, and other psychic energies and voices that are not typically accessible in everyday awareness to bubble up to the surface of our consciousness. As these feelings and images arise, you hold them in your consciousness to explore them, untying the knots inherent within them, relaxing the tension they've created in your body, and letting them go.
Where feelings/images stick, and you are unable to let go of them, you engage them in a dialogue of sorts, allowing the feelings/images to speak in their own voice so you can listen to what they are asking of you to attend to in your everyday life or inner world.
In many ways, candlehour acts as the inverse of and complementary practice to meditation. In meditation, we work to notice our unfolding thoughts and let them go without engaging them or allowing them to direct our awareness. In contrast, the work of candlehour requires you to actively stir up your thoughts and experiences and engage with them through your imagination. It is a space where we are able to connect with all of the entities that comprise our psyche–or at least the entities that are willing to reveal themselves to your awareness. It is the realm where we engage with our inner pantheon.
Candlehour Process
- Allow yourself at least 30-60 minutes to engage in candlehour before bed.
- Between the end of candlehour and sleep, do not use any devices or watch TV – ideally, do candlehour right before bed to open up the portal to sleep.
- A good place to start is 2-3 sessions of candlehour per week.
- Find a quiet room, close the door and dim the lights. Light a candle if you want.
- Begin with mindfulness meditation or breathing exercises until you feel a sense of stillness and presence.
- From a space of stillness, notice what emerges in your psyche. Maybe you are playing through an encounter from the day. Use your imagination to re-enter into that encounter. Perhaps you are revisiting an experience from your past. Allow yourself to re-enter these spaces and experiences with your imagination, hold dialogues with the people you encounter, and record what you are experiencing through writing.
- Importantly, while engaging in candlehour, if you are recording what you are experiencing, make an effort to record the experience verbatim, and wait until after the encounter fades to start making interpretations of the experience.
- Also, if it doesn't feel appropriate to be writing anything down while you are engaging in candlehour, that's okay... the work is still working even if you don't record it.
- This might feel a little bit like talking to yourself or just 'making stuff up' which, in a sense, you are! But everything you are 'making up' is rooted somewhere in our unconscious, which, by bringing our awareness down to the liminal space between what is conscious and what is unconscious, we are able to open a channel to the depths of our psyche, leading to integration and healing.
Another avenue inward:
- Begin with eyes open.
- Slow your breathing for a few minutes until you've arrived at a place of stillness.
- Close your eyes.
- Scan your body for any tension, sticking points, or places where your body feels 'hung up'.
- Draw focus to that point and while focusing on that part of your body, allow images to emerge within.
- If images don't seem to be arising, imagine the tension / sticking point as a chunk of ice in front of you.
- Notice the shape and texture of the ice.
- As you draw the heat and light of your consciousness towards the chunk of ice, it begins to melt.
- Sit with it, giving all of your awareness to it until it melts.
- If, for whatever reason, you are not able to release the tension, you will need to enter into dialogue with it.
- In the dialogue:
- Allow the images to emerge and begin to ask questions.
- Treat any figures / images that emerge with the utmost respect (remember, they are all you, no matter the form they take).
- Allow for silence before getting a response.
- Understand that who/what-ever you may be talking to, may not be ready to speak with you, and you may have to return another time, perhaps with an offering.
- Remember to build relationship with these inner figures over time, often you will come back and find the same people. Adversaries may become allies.
- Record your experience as faithfully as possible in a notebook if appropriate and possible given your experience.
It is important to recognize that there are significant limitations to this work being done without professional guidance. What comes up in candlehour is potent material for exploration in therapy or with a mental health professional. If things start to get heavy in this realm, I highly recommend seeking out a mental health practitioner and bringing the things that emerge to this practitioner for deeper work and processing. In the meantime, when things get heavy, there are other strategies for staying present.
Additionally, your first visits to the underworld in candlehour may not be pleasant:
Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
– Joseph Campbell
This practice, along with meditation, requires you to suspend your desire to understand.
Suspend your desire to understand...
The most developmental and generative rituals we engage in throughout our lives require us to suspend our desire to understand. Our desire to understand encourages us to reach past the discomfort of not knowing, effectively filtering our experience of the present moment through what we think we already 'know'.
Another way of saying this is that what you know is based entirely on the past. New knowledge and wisdom comes from being fully open to the experience of the present, which, in its fullness, is inherently unknown.
While suspending your desire to understand may be difficult at first, your ongoing devotion to practices such as meditation and candlehour will support you in developing your ability to suspend your desire to understand.
It is about practicing 'don't know mind', which is essentially allowing yourself to be comfortable 'not getting it' right away. 'It' referring to the myriad possibilities of experience the present moment offers.
In this way, the experience of the present moment unfolding in candlehour or meditation is allowed to bypass the ego affecting change on a much deeper level. You might say it bypasses the 'head' to affect the 'heart'.
With practice, we eventually learn to approach life in general in 'don't know mind' allowing for a much fuller experience of the present oriented in the much wider perspective of the heart.
If you are having trouble opening the portal to the imagination, you might need to engage in some preparatory work. Sometimes, in order to really shift back into a mindset where the portal is able to open again, we need to create space for ourselves and for our attention to settle and disperse.
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