Awakening: What a LightWorker can (and can not) do about Darkness

Guidance for LightWork...Holding Each Other Thr...

Apr 16

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Though it can seem that there has never been more suffering in our world, more and more people are awakening and reaching for light. If that's what has led you here, I welcome you. Here are a few thoughts about what being a light worker is really about.

When I decided to hang my Light Worker sign in the window of the world, I thought I'd be guiding people out of boring jobs, dead end marriages, and unhealthy lifestyles toward awakening. As it would turn out, the awakening would be my own.

From the moment I opened the door of my Light Worker office, my clients began teaching me about darkness. I started an online discussion circle about angels and miracles. My clients brought their stories of alienation and cruelty. I led a forum on joy. My clients wanted to talk about heartache. When I offered safe space, they poured into it terror and worry and pain. Their brutiful and terrible stories of the many ways this world had let them down broke my heart open. Their trust in love broke me open.

It was there, in the cauldron of community, that my clients showed me what it really means to be a Light Worker.

As Brene Brown discovered in her research into vulnerability and shame, when you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. When you ask people about connection, the stories they tell are about disconnection.

This is how it is in LightWorker land. In fact, it's the first lesson in the mystery school curriculum: There is only light. Everything else, all that appears to be 'not light' is light hidden behind the shadow of remembered pain. Put simply: shadow (or darkness) is a symptom of hidden pain, defended hurt, blocked light.

So, a LightWorker's 'job' is not floating on a cloud of positive affirmations tossing glitter and rainbows into the world. A LightWorker's job is to hold the space for light - no matter what.

It's easy to hold onto light in the crystal cocoon of a workshop. It's another thing entirely to stand face-to-face with darkness, armed only with a heart burning with love. For though I am absolutely certain this world is a sea of miracles, I am confused, confounded and shattered by the ice-cold terrorism of some people.

Because of my sensitivity to violence, suffering and pain, I had some work to do. I had to integrate my own darkness: the hooks that made it hard for me to be intimate, the terrors that made me vulnerable to manipulation, the things I didn't like about myself, which I was desperately trying to hide. I had to admit to my envy, my pettiness, my greed.

Luckily, I had the best teachers on the planet: my clients. They showed me the real nature of LightWork - presence. All they wanted was a conversation with a human being who cared. All they needed was a listener, a soul friend, a witness. All I had to do was let myself emerge - through my own darkness - into the light of what I really am: love. The whole messy, imperfect (sometimes bossy, sometimes tearful) willing to be there with them no matter what kind of love that I really am.

With profound grace and courage, my clients taught me it was never my job to lead or guide (or even, heal) them. My job was the simplest (and most courageous) thing I'd ever done. Simply holding open my heart - no matter what. To listen to their stories, no matter how terrible, without being pulled into darkness myself.

In other words, my job - as a LightWorker, as a teacher, as a spiritual counselor, is to remember that the true nature of things is love. Love is their true nature, Love is my true nature, Love is the true nature of the world - even when the evidence they present to me - stories of terror and trauma, cruelty and neglect, abandonment and abuse - seems anything but love.

My job is to hold the space for love. This is the paradox of LightWork. We are witness to the pain. We are witness to the light. We stand at the chasm, holding these seeming opposites in our hands.

A Lightworker's job is not to perfect the world. The world is already perfect. Our job is to hold the world that is already here in all of its contradictions, inside of the blessing of love.