{"podcast":{"title":"Tricycle Talks","slug":"tricycle-talks-828620","podcast_index_feed_id":828620,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/TPG2116740081","website_url":"http://tricycle.org/podcast","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/cc403d78-473d-11ee-ad52-cf8b5d7696e3/image/avatars-zxFGwPk1KOmyzzuw-TyjFTQ-original.jpg?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"Tricycle Talks","episode_count":203,"summary":"Tricycle Talks: Listen to Buddhist teachers, writers, and thinkers on life's big questions. Hosted by James Shaheen, editor in chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the leading Buddhist magazine in the West. Life As It Is: Join James Shaheen with co-host Sharon Salzberg and learn how to bring Buddhist practice into your everyday life. Tricycle: The Buddhist Review creates award-winning editorial, podcasts, events, and video courses. Unlock access to all this Buddhist knowledge by subscribing to the magazine at tricycle.org/join","last_synced_at":null,"page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/tricycle-talks-828620"},"episode":{"title":"A Beginner’s Guide to Dark Retreat with Andrew Holecek","slug":"a-beginner-s-guide-to-dark-retreat-with-andrew-holecek","published_at":"2026-05-13T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/tricycle-talks-828620/a-beginner-s-guide-to-dark-retreat-with-andrew-holecek","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/tricycle-talks-828620","url":"https://tricycle.org/podcast/andrew-holecek-dark-retreat","audio_url":"https://pdst.fm/e/tracking.swap.fm/track/tcQd6Q6C0RUUlOHq1Ytj/mgln.ai/e/51/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/TPG6438222398.mp3?updated=1778525343","summary":"Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and he leads seminars and retreats on meditation, dream yoga, and death and dying. For the past thirty years, he has been engaging in a form of esoteric practice known as dark retreat. In his new book, Total Eclipse of the Mind: Unleashing the Power of Darkness for Creativity, Healing, and Transformation, he lays out a comprehensive introduction to the practice of dark retreat and how it can utterly transform our relationship to ourselves and our world. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sits down with Holecek to discuss what exactly a dark retreat is, why he views dark retreat as the most transformative practice he’s done, how spending time in darkness can help us recover a lost way of seeing, and what the darkness can teach us about our unconscious mind. Plus, Holecek offers practical guidelines for starting a dark retreat practice at home.","meta_description":"Andrew Holecek is an author and spiritual teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and he leads seminars and retreats on meditation, dream yoga, and dea…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2858,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/tricycle-talks-828620/episodes/a-beginner-s-guide-to-dark-retreat-with-andrew-holecek/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/tricycle-talks-828620/a-beginner-s-guide-to-dark-retreat-with-andrew-holecek.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}