Last summer I spent 49 days alone in a pitch-black room in Italy.

No light. No phone. No people. Just me and whatever was waiting on the other side of all that silence.

Somewhere around week two, at 4 am, walking six steps in one direction and six steps back, four words dropped without warning.

One Life. Soul Led. All In.

That dropped me to my knees.

This episode is the full framework — the story behind it, what each piece means, and why I'll be teaching this for the next decade.

One Life — Most of us are living three. Public, private, and secret. We burn enormous energy keeping them from colliding. The work is collapsing them into one. Not necessarily by going fully public — but by not having internal secrets. By being able to look in the mirror and say: this is who I am, all of it.

Soul Led — The deepest, truest part of you. When you make decisions from there, things work. When you don't, you end up chasing whatever your version of the bottle, the screen, or the distraction is. I know mine. I talk about them here.

All In — Around day 35 I hit a wall. I was 25 pounds lighter, sleep-deprived, staring down two more weeks with nothing but my own mind. What came through: “What is required of you is a heroic effort, because you have chosen a Herculean task.” The all-in piece isn't just motivation. It's the reserve tank for when willpower starts to run dry.

I also talk about what the eight months after the retreat actually looked like. It wasn't all sunshine and rainbows. But underneath all of it — more grounded than I've ever been.

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Ready to start?

 

Want to know where this all started?

Read the book about my first Dark Retreat

 

Want to hear from the woman who guided me through it?

Listen to EP 419 with Arpita Kshama Devi
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