Episcopal priest and author Barbara Brown Taylor sat down with Oprah Winfrey for Super Soul Sunday to talk about her new book, 'Learning to Walk in the Dark'.
The book explores the lessons she believes we can learn from the toughest moments in our lives - the moments we would rather run away from, than run to.
She told Oprah that much of the thinking today centres on a kind of "solar spirituality", as she calls it, one that teaches us to stay in the light and flee from any kind of darkness.
"It wants me to ignore the dark places in my life, get out of them as fast as I can and to avoid them if possible," she said.
In the interview, Oprah admitted she was someone who, like many others, fears the darkness and particularly emotional darkness.
The idea of embracing that darkness was one she struggled to grasp and Brown Taylor agreed she'd spent "more energy trying to manage and avoid that time than I have wondering what's there for me".
It was the prevalence of darkness in her own life that forced her to confront it and see if she could find a new way of looking at it.
For her personally, a very dark place was the aftermath of her father's death.
"It's half your life, whether it's 'day night' or your emotional life," she said.
However, Brown Taylor believes there are crucial lessons for living that are to be learned in such times - times of what she calls "unknowing" - and much of it has to do with unlearning everything society has taught us about darkness as only something negative.
"Because we don't know what we're doing we think we've just failed; this is defeat; we need to get out of this as fast as possible [and] move back into the light."
She suggests people resist that urge and instead take three breaths to feel their way around that place of unknowing.
"If we continue to live responding out of fear ... my soul would be the size of a pea," she admitted. "I try to do one thing that scares me every day. You have to practise courage."
Weighing in on the themes of the book, Oprah said she felt darkness was something she experienced in direct proportion to how far away she was from the light.
"For me, whenever I start to feel the darkness I think that means I need to get closer to God, which is the light, or some light sources. Because in order for me to remove the darkness, I've got to bring light into it," she said.
Brown Taylor agreed, explaining that the darkness isn't as dark as we might think.
While her father's death was the "most awful, dark experience" she had ever gone through, in the midst of it she says she felt a "dazzling, breathtaking clarity of knowing there was no place else I should be than there".
"So there are tunnels through these experiences," she said.
"Probably the places I least want to go are the richest places for me, the richest treasure is there."
The conversation between Oprah and Brown Taylor can be watched in full below:
