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Both Greek and Celtic mythology include a mysterious image known as the “Black Sun,” which can be visualized as tremendous energy radiating from a dense and dark center. (Celtic myths sometimes place it in the center of the earth.) And it stands in contrast to the metaphoric qualities we commonly associate with the sun: The brightness of day gives life its warmth. Good things must be close by when we rise to a sunny morning.

But the idea behind the ancient Black Sun image is that energy and life radiate from darkness as well. Some kinds of energy that we need for growth and for a complete life come only from the experience of darkness. This Black Sun is a hidden resource, a font of energy that is available if we recognize it for what it is and know how to turn toward it and accept it. Being dark, its energy is hidden. We cannot explain it in the same way we can explain things in the light of the more familiar sun. The wisdom and energy it brings are less obvious, less rational.

Myths illuminate subtle aspects of the human condition and human development. The Black Sun tells us that there is value in slowing down and being patient when things seem dark and unclear. Do not run from such experiences, it says. Turn toward the difficult time. By just focusing on it and sticking with it we will discover power that radiates from it as surely as warming light radiates from the daytime sun.

The Black Sun is an apt metaphor for the deep concentration and inward focus that precedes the actual act of writing the poem, founding the company, forming the sculpture, or jumping into a radically different role at work. In all of these cases, we do not operate “in the light” or “from the light”; instead, we are going where we have not been before and are trusting an intuition that seems to rise from the depths of our selves. The successful artist and the successful businessperson alike learn how to stay with this process of being stuck in the darkness; in fact, they stick with it until a new momentum emerges from the very experience of being stuck, of being in the dark.

The problem, of course, is that we are afraid of the dark. We want to move in the sunshine, walk along familiar streets, and have experiences that are sure to give us pleasure. We want to feel that most of life can be planned and that we have a reasonable chance of avoiding pain. The idea of staying with things just as they are, without a plan, of suspending our model of how things work, puts us at a frontier of unknowing, which is to say at a place that is “dark” to our previous conception of things, to our plan for ourselves and our notion of how everything works. We avoid this dim frontier, and so we stay stuck.

Being in the dark, at an impasse, is not clinical depression. (It is important to know the difference, though; appendix B describes how to differentiate the two.) Sometimes we can’t help seeing impasse as failure, rather than as a necessary crisis in the service of larger creative movement. There is a danger of internalizing the experience of impasse as evidence of personal deficiency, as a statement about our self-worth. This can be painful. We may need the help of a friend, coach, or counselor to reflect the reality of the situation back to us and remind us that this is tough time and not a statement about who we are in the core of our being.