Yeah, okay. So, the dark places — I could have called it the scary places. I could have called it the places that make us really, really scared. I could have called it, you know, the deep places we don't look at very often. I could have seen it, you know, the place that we look last, after we've looked every other single place that we can. Those are the dark places.

One of my personal favorite writers of the 20th century was Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell has a saying, and he was a comparative anthropologist. He compared a lot — comparative religion and anthropology were his two domains — and he would draw out these archetypes that transcend the human experience.

And one of the things, and he's also responsible for what we now know as the Hero's Journey, he was responsible for articulating that across multiple cultures and presenting it as a universal story that resonates with, you know, across all human cultures. He condensed that down into saying, "The cave we fear to enter holds the treasure we seek." The cave we fear to enter — that's a deep dark place.

That's the place that has the dragon in it. That's the place that we don't want to go. That's the place that's cold and dark. It's the place where we have to face our fears going into it, and there is no way to cheat it. You can't say, "Well, I'm gonna face my fears and then, I don't know, say an affirmation," and suddenly you're not afraid. That's — that's not how that works. You have to actually walk through the fear.

So, dark places are essentially the deepest and most difficult part of the journey in bringing out the beast. We have to get used to — well, I don't know if you have to get used to — we have to learn that it is healthy and good and life-giving to us to go into the dark places that we're afraid of, discover what's there, dispel them, and reemerge a bigger, faster, stronger version of ourselves. That's what the dark places are about.