The Cave.
Lessons from spending over 90 hours in complete darkness.
“I’ve got a closet. Want me to throw you in my closet and feed you with a spoon for five days?”
That was my friend’s response when I told him what I was about to do. And honestly? For a second it sounded better than the alternative.
One of my core life mottos: If you are scared of it, do it. And if you haven’t done it yet, you are probably scared of it.
My coach, Zach Homol, led me through my first darkness experience - ten hours in Sedona back in October 2024. Then I heard Colin O’Brady talking about the full cave retreat, and something in me filed it away under “things I will probably never actually do.” Two of my heroes had done it though. How hard could it be?
Fucking hard.
I digress.
But if you know me, you know I run on people.
Not in the polite, socially acceptable way - I mean their energy is genuinely what charges me up. I think my name is in the dictionary under extrovert.
The whole idea of sitting alone in total darkness for days sounded like something between a punishment and a bad idea someone dressed up in spiritual language.
Which is probably why my wife and our friend Jessica signed me up - they knew I’d talk myself out of it for another two or three years if left to my own devices.
February had already been a blur of cities and flights and retreats. The schedule was genuinely insane. “I don’t have time for this” would have been the completely reasonable thing to say…
I’m running 4 miles every day (no big deal).
We just flew from Las Vegas to Tampa.
Back to Vegas.
Round trip Vegas to Napa Valley - for the 5-year wedding anniversary of my hot bride.
Vegas to Lake Tahoe for a friends-and-family hangout, retreat, snowboarding, + an exceptional blizzard experience.
Then flew to Florida (again) for a remarkable retreat hosted by Rachel.
Then flew from Florida to Oregon.
Flew from Oregon (again!) to Florida for a life-changing retreat at Xpansion.
Destin, Florida to L.A.
Then back to Vegas.
“I do not have the time to sit in darkness for 90+ hours!” - is what most people would say.
I went anyway.
Here is a list of questions sent to me by my doctor friend Steven. I say “doctor” because one, he is one, and two, what a list:
I’ll address each of these for you to read:
Did you go in with a question in mind?
Four things I needed from this experience, and the wild part is all four showed up in the first twenty hours.
The book cover. I’d been stuck on it for eleven months - I genuinely cannot write until I know the title and cover with total certainty, and this one had been hiding from me. It found me in the dark.
The anger. I’d been carrying a weight of frustration and resentment toward the world that I hadn’t fully admitted to myself. I set it down in there. Not dramatically. Just... put it down and left it.
God. I’ve been in a thirty-year argument with Him, and I finally lost. Which turned out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I surrendered. We won.
The next decade. I came out with a clarity about where I’m going that I didn’t have going in - dates, intentions, the kind of quiet authority that doesn’t need to announce itself.
Which presupposed expectations or assumptions did you have that turned out to be totally different from the experience?
I thought cave meant cave.
Cold floor, dripping walls, the whole thing.
It wasn’t like that at all and Scott had built something more like a quiet room - modest, intentional, dark. Everything you need and nothing to hide behind. He’s genuinely gifted at holding that kind of space. Here’s a video if you’re interested.
What I didn’t see coming was my own ego just... folding.
I walked in thinking I was the guy who’d done the work. Years of introspection, of guiding others through the same. I’d built something, survived things, figured myself out. I genuinely believed I was a hardened sage.
Six days in the dark will have a conversation with you about that.
Throw the man into nothingness - while his soul yearns for depth, the heart strives for knowing, the ego pleads for peace - does the search end during the deafening sound of silence, finally allowing the self to transcend into love and grace?
That’s what came out of me in there. The hardened sage turned out to be, in my own words, “a dewdrop perched atop a pine needle in the Pacific Northwest, fighting both gravity and wind to stay secure in my resting place.”
Not a failure. The beginning of something that actually matters.
The unexpected?
Sometime Tuesday - I’d lost all real sense of time by then - Genesis 1:2 just rose up in me:
“And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
I sat with that for a long time.
God didn’t start with light. Darkness came first. Light was the act of creation that followed - which means darkness isn’t the absence of God. It’s where God was comfortable before anything existed.
We’ve spent so much of our lives treating darkness as something to escape. The unknown. The scary thing. But darkness is the original state. You can heal in light, yes - and you can also heal in darkness. I don’t think there’s a separation between the sacred and the dark. I think we just inherited a story that told us there was.
My wife says it this way: “We can only ascend as high into Heaven as we are willing to go down into our personal hell.”
I went down. I’m back. And I feel it now in a way I couldn’t have described to you a month ago - the all-encompassing love of God is not an idea anymore. It’s something I know.
On healing men:
The brokenness of any country starts with the brokenness of its men. That’s not a political statement - it’s something I’ve watched play out over and over again in the work I do.
In Divine Kings, the program I run for men, week five includes what I call the cave experience. After this week, that experience is going to go deeper than anything I’ve offered before. If you or someone you love is ready for something real, you can find more about it here.
One more thing, and I’ll keep it short:
I had a five-minute conversation with Scott about where darkness retreats are headed. With everything AI is reshaping, the experiences that can’t be automated - the ones that require you to actually show up and sit in the discomfort - those are going to matter more, not less. I believe that.
If you’re curious about being part of building something like this - whether as an attendee or an investor - I’m putting together a simple waitlist to gauge interest. No obligation, just a list of people who are paying attention. You can join it here.
Small groups of people who actually care about something are still the only thing that ever moves the needle on anything real.
Thank you for caring, thank you for reading. It’s an honor and privilege to share my soul with you, and to share my journey - as I have been quite transparent and public these last two decades of my growth.
With love, light, and blessings.
~ Jerremy Alexander Newsome
WE DID IT 🧙🔮⛰️
You are exceptional.