Light Work vs Shadow Work

The topic that I’m here to talk about today is light work versus shadow work. I’m excited to talk about this, because it really feeds into what the Initiate Program is all about.

One of the things that I have seen happening more and more in our world is that our contemporary spirituality is a really superficial spirituality.

It’s built on trinkets and superstitions, on spiritual retail therapy, on promising that you can bend God to your will to produce the outcomes you want for your own little life.

It really has nothing to do with sacred service and nothing to do with the bigger picture of why we go after our soul.

The yearning of our soul is one of the most impossible things to ignore. That, inevitably, we are all going to awaken. We are all gonna do it – it doesn’t matter how many lifetimes it takes.  The very function of our life is to get to know ourselves as God, or the infinite unlimited consciousness.

So when you participate in something like the Initiate Program, you go beyond the superficial spirituality. Instead, you’re actually opening and expanding into the truth of what you are.

It’s inevitable in that process that everything you desire will change.

What you yearn for will become so much richer, so much more purposeful, and so much more about what you can do to contribute something to the world, rather than just what you can get.

Caroline Myss, the great contemporary mystic, says that spiritual maturity is moving into the higher levels of our intuition. Our visionary intuition is about moving from ‘how can I get something to fix my physical symptoms, my financial situation, or my relationship troubles’ to ‘what can I give?’ Or, to put it in my own terms, ‘how may I serve?’

When that happens, that’s when your life will start to flow with abundance.

Because it’s the law.

I really honestly believe that understanding the cosmic laws is the antidote to the superficial spirituality that is like a cancer in our world right now.  That type of spirituality makes people think they’re showing up to spirituality when actually they’ve been sold a lie. They’ve been given this idea of what it is to seek God, but actually it’s just seeking more to satisfy the ego.

That’s not what I stand for and my mission is to take our spirituality to a place where we become self-initiated, self-reliant aspects of the God-consciousness that we truly are.

Shadow Work vs. Light Work

Let’s talk about the difference between light work and shadow work, what are they are, and what are the differences.

The idea of shadow work is something that is growing in popularity and prevalence in the spiritual conversation.  There’s an ever-increasing idea of going to meet the dark goddess or into the underworld or into the shadow. I have to say, I really applaud that.  This goes a little ways towards the antidote of the superficial spirituality which is all about everything always being light and fluffy and feel-good, and if it’s not, then God has let me down somehow, and towards being safe to explore the darkness that resides within all of us.

We are all fully-expressed aspects of everything. So anything that is possible exists within us. We are one with everything so we have a personal responsibility to do the shadow work on behalf of all, especially those who do not know.  We are charged with that responsibility because we have the freedom and the privilege to pursue our soul-awakening. In the priority of needs of our life, we are free enough that we can actually go on this journey of exploring and getting to know ourselves better, which is the central edict of the spiritual seeker’s life.

Know Thyself

This was written at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, inscribed over the gateway for a reason. It is the most important thing that we can do.

We need to go and meet the darkness as much as we need to be willing to meet a lightness. In fact, we will come to see that they are one and the same.

Shadow work, to me, is about going fearlessly towards your fear. 

Your fear is always where you’ll meet yourself as God.

Wherever fear shows up, you’re being lovingly guided back to the place where you have forgotten that you are God.

Shadow work is investigating that temporary amnesia, that functioning of the ego, that part of you that believes it’s separate from God.  It is going in there to mine, to ask, “What’s the Intel here? What’s the universe showing me? What can I discover now that’s going to allow me to get to know myself better?”

Wherever I am meeting my fear, I am getting to know myself better. To know myself is truly to know myself as God or the infinite unlimited consciousness.

If we follow that formula, it’s very easy to see that every time fear shows up and you do the shadow work of going in to meet your darkness and your fear, you are emancipating that fear into light.  You are returning to the truth of what you are.

If you ignore that invitation (which most of us do because we’re not taught that it’s safe to go and do shadow work, to go and meet our fear), we accumulate that fear inside of us.

That darkness rises inside of us and then comes out in inappropriate ways. Or, it gets twisted and becomes ailments in the body, or mental health disorders, or it has all sorts of ways of showing up. It has to escalate to get our attention because we haven’t paid attention.

So that first impulse of fear is where we should begin. That first niggling thought, the first time we feel a sense of contraction instead of expansion. All of that is fear.

The difference between Shadow Work & Light Work?

What’s the difference? How do I see the difference? I hope it’s becoming pretty clear that there is no difference.

When you go to meet your shadow, you return it to the light and that is light work.

There’s no way to avoid going to meet your fear.

There’s no way to avoid doing that work.

If you avoid your fear, you’re avoiding meeting yourself as God, and in that avoidance you create the chaos of your life.

In that avoidance, you delay your own awakening. In that avoidance, you can see your life falling apart because you have broken the law.

Everything exists.  All is one.  All is within us.  All that has ever been imagined and done exists as a resonance or a frequency inside of us. 

Our personal responsibility is to see the world as an aspect of self and to say, “How may I be of service to the world?”

Not being afraid of fear is absolutely the very first thing you can do to use fear as a friendly ally, to take you to those places that you’re terrified of, to sit in the discomfort and say, “Show me what I need to know.”

Let your fear be your ally. 

Whether you call that light work or shadow work, I don’t mind, but do the work.

Don’t come to me and say, “But my life is still chaotic! I can’t make things work and I got no money and I haven’t got this and I haven’t got that!”  I will say, as Joe Dispenza says to his students,  “Are you doing the work?  No matter what the circumstances of your life are, are you doing the work?”  If not, do the work and then come back and tell me what your life situation is like.

Until we are willing to show up to our devotion in our practices, until we’re willing to meet that fear, we are avoiding the most powerful invitation from the infinite to know ourselves as unlimited, to know ourselves as God.

The fear is where you’ll meet yourself as God.

There’s no way around that. That is the way it works.

What a freaking privilege to know that, because the majority of the planet are running around with no idea that they have the capacity to meet themselves as God by just sitting with the discomfort. Just by sitting with the fear and diving deep into that horrible icky-ness and saying:

“I’m not afraid because I know that you are that part of me that is inviting me back to my truth.”

In ‘A Course In Miracles’, it explains this to us when it says there is nothing to fear.

The truth is, there is no fear. Fear only exists as a functioning of awakening our consciousness.

It is here in service to us.

It is inviting us to remember who and what we are.

The more we go towards that fear, the more we’re saying, “Yes, I accept the invitation.”  and we neutralise that which is terrifying us and we begin to truly become masterful in our own lives.

To go towards your fear fearlessly, even if it’s as scary as hell, you just say, “Yes, I’m doing this. I am willing to go where I’m being invited.”

If every time fear showed up we said, “Oh cool, another invitation to get to know myself as God,” then we wouldn’t get drunk and pick a fight with our boyfriend.  Or eat the cake or do any of the other avoidance strategies that we use to try to suppress that fear impulse, instead of just going, “Okay, this is uncomfortable. This sucks. But I’m willing.”

Your willingness will mean that every time fear rises it will leave you more and more quickly because you have created the conditions. You’ve imprinted the body mind. You’ve imprinted the soul. You’ve imprinted the energy body with how you want to be in the world.

So when fear rises, it rises and it goes really quickly.

That’s my personal experience. I might have those five minutes of self-pity, but then that energy drops away quickly.

If you find that you are ruminating, or you’re stuck in a fear impulse, you can’t let it go and it goes on for days, then there’s a very good chance that you’re addicted to that feeling state, that low vibrational feeling state.  Then fear isn’t helpful because you’ve just turned your fear into ammunition to keep you stuck.

The work of the spiritual seeker

This is the work, my darlings! This is the work of devotion. This is the work of the spiritual seeker. This is the work of the Initiate.

If you truly want to go to the deepest, most profound places inside of yourself, if you want to meet yourself as God, then I have no doubt that the Initiate Program is for you. It will take you – wherever you are – to the next level.

The Initiate Program gives you the tools you need to become self-reliant as a spiritual seeker and to put down those trinkets and superstitions and go beyond superficial spirituality to where your soul is yearning to take you.

Join me.