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In case you missed it, Aaron Rodgers has emerged from the darkness.
Naturally, one of the first things the Packers quarterback did after completing his darkness retreat was sit down for an hour and a half long conversation to discuss it with his guru Aubrey Marcus.
Aubrey Marcus, for the uninitiated, is the founder of ONNIT, “a nutritional supplement and holistic health provider based on his philosophy of Total Human Optimization.”
We’ve already shared some highlights from the conversation which you can read here, but with the entire discussion now being released on YouTube we’re here to give you a few more highlights. (Mostly, so you don’t have to listen to the entire thing yourself. Yes, I know. We’re doing the lord’s work here.)
Strap in and hold on, it’s going to be a bumpy ride…
“I just needed to get the opportunity to reset and as it got closer and closer obviously there was a lot of other questions about my future that have been, you know, on the mind and been contemplated and I knew it would be a good opportunity to kind of sit with those things but that wasn’t the main reason I was doing it,” Rodgers said.
“It was how often do we ever unplug? How often do we even set our phones down for a little bit? Read a book instead of watch TV? Meditate instead of listen to music? Whatever it might be that allows us to kind of disconnect from technology and from the world and give ourselves a gift of rest?”
Aaron Rodgers did think about whether or not he was going to come back and play another season in the NFL.
“I spent parts of a couple of days imagining what it would be like to retire and then imagining what it would be like to continue to play.
“Instead of trying so hard to be, I’m not just a football player, what if I just embraced, I am a football player, and look at how f—ing beautiful it’s impacted my life.
“And there’s probably people that think I’m done. I thought I was done, you know, before I became COVID MVP twice. So again there’d be plenty of inspiration down that road, but I’m not looking for somebody to tell me what the answer is. All the answers are right inside me and I touched many of them and definitely the feelings on both sides during the darkness and I’m thankful for that time.”
At another point in the conversation, Aubrey Marcus asked Aaron Rodgers, “How was the first moment when the light was fully out and the door closed and you knew you had 96 hours of black in front of you?”
“There was an excitement I think,” Rodgers replied. “It was, there was the understanding that I was walking into the unknown. And I think it’s part anxiety and part excitement. Like, what is it going to come through in these four nights and also what is going to come through in these four nights, you know? Just the dichotomy of just the unknown. s
“So I lit a little candle, I closed the door and kind of arranged my food on my bed where I was going to eat it and then I blew that candle out and that started a pretty incredible, difficult at times, four nights.”
Rodgers also admitted that he ran into a lot of things in the dark, but was mostly worried about a towel hook in the bathroom. He did manage to avoid hitting his head all but one time, but did run into several other things with his shoulders, arms and knees.
He was also very proud of the fact that he solved the whole putting toothpaste on his toothbrush in the dark conundrum by putting the toothpaste directly in his mouth before brushing.
Aaron Rodgers also revealed that because of the diet he was eating he had “very, very smooth number twos” in the dark so wiping wasn’t a problem. “They were all two wipers. They were two wipers and done,” he added.
Alright… so there you go. The highlights of the first 10 minutes of the conversation. I’m sorry, but there is no way I am sitting through another hour and twenty minutes of this stuff. I love you guys, but not that much.
Do feel free to pick things up where I left off though around the 10 minute mark below.