www.patriciapearce.com/podcast
We often have a misunderstanding of what it means to be a lightworker, believing it means to do battle with the dark.
But the very idea of battle is dualistic, and in this episode we take a look at the importance of welcoming all things into the truth of Love, including those aspects of ourselves we may have deemed unworthy.
This willingness to be a shadow worker is essential in our world right now that is so plagued by division and fear.
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Transcription
Hello, beautiful souls, and welcome to this week’s podcast episode. Today, I would like to talk with you about what it means to be a shadow worker. And we we use the term light worker a lot— that gets tossed around quite a bit these days. And yet, I think that many people have the idea that to be a light worker means to do battle with the dark, to do battle with the dark side, to do battle with evil.
And this whole idea of doing battle with anything is a dualistic understanding. So to see a Lightworker, as someone who’s doing battle with the dark is to be operating from a dualistic perspective. And as we know, dualism is now fading is, it’s time for dualism to pass away and for us to open to unitive consciousness and the truth of interdependence and interconnectedness of all that is.
So we’re at a time now where it’s time for us to let go of this whole idea of doing battle with anything, and instead to open up to everything, because unitive consciousness is the consciousness that receives and holds and encompasses everything. Nothing is excluded.
And unitive consciousness is you could also say the consciousness of love, and love excludes nothing, because love is everything that is. So the one thing that love cannot do is banish anything. And so when we move into this unitive consciousness, we are moving into this understanding that nothing is exiled, nothing is banished, nothing is condemned, that there is no battle, that this whole idea of battle is just an idea in the egoic mind, which is based in the idea of separateness, in the idea of dualism.
So the reason I wanted to bring this up about being a shadow worker is we are, I believe, in a time that is crying out for us to become shadow workers, that these times more than anything are crying out for and in desperate need of us to be shadow workers.
What I mean by that is for us to be willing to be open to everything that arises, and for that to begin within ourselves, for us to be open to every thought, every feeling that arises and to do battle with nothing. We see when we have thoughts or feelings that arise that we deemed to be unacceptable, and we try to squelch them or we try to push them away or we try to shove them off into the shadows, we are enacting dualism in our own minds. We are enacting separateness in our own minds, we are playing out that illusion in our own minds when we try to banish anything that is arising within ourselves.
So to be a shadow worker is to allow everything to arise and to hold it in the truth of love.
And why do we banish some thoughts and some feelings? Well, I believe it’s because we have in our mind some idea of what it means to be an ideal self, or what it means for the world to be an ideal world. And so if we see something that arises, some thought or feeling in us that comes up, that doesn’t correspond to our idea of what it means to be an ideal self, we will try to banish that. And this really is a form of tyranny really, the tyranny of the ideal, and the “perfect.”
Instead of trying to be ideal or perfect, we open up to what it means to be whole. And to be whole, of course, is to be all encompassing, it is to be complete. So as shadow workers / light workers, we open ourselves up and we invite those feelings, those thoughts to arise. Those feelings of shame, or pain or anger, we simply allow them to arise. And we allow them to be accepted and received and held in love.
I spoke in our first episode about this being a time of we awakening, that we are awakening to the truth of we, and I talked about how we’re doing this in partnership with the Earth and in partnership with one another, and in partnership with the spirit realm.
And it’s an awakening that we do in partnership with all aspects of ourselves, including those aspects that we have banished. And in psychological terms, this term shadow, of course, refers to aspects of the self or an aspect of the self, an entity if you will, of the self that has been banished. These are aspects of ourselves that we have deemed unworthy and unacceptable, and so we sort of split them off, we don’t allow them to be part of our awareness or part of our consciousness. And so we experience this inner split.
And so what we’re doing now is we are allowing that split, that inner split, to be healed by inviting back in all of these feelings, all of these thoughts we have previously rejected.
And I have this this image of these aspects of the self that are hiding in the shadows of the psyche, if you will, they’re hiding and we put out this call, we put out this call for them to return, this affirmation that we are willing to receive them and that we are willing to be whole, that we are willing to hold everything in love.
And it’s like we put out this call to the shadow self, and these aspects of ourselves that are hiding in the shadows, I see them as hiding, they’re waiting, lingering the shadows to see if we really mean it. And some feelings may venture forth into our awareness, they may arise into our awareness, some feeling of discontent or disgruntlement or some feeling of fear. And and the question is, does she really mean it? Will we really be accepted? Will she really allow us to be felt? Is she that brave? Is she really that courageous? That she will allow herself to feel this anger to feel this shame to feel this pain to feel this grief? Does she really mean it? Is it safe for us to come home.
And that’s the work that we do. That is the shadow work that we do. And it is courageous work. And we see how desperately this shadow work is needed in our world today that is so polarized, that is so fragmented, that is so afraid, so afraid of these feelings, so afraid of the intensity of the transformations that are happening on the planet. And what is needed more than anything right now in this time of extreme polarization is this willingness to be open to all things that arise.
So as we enter this season of a here in the Northern Hemisphere, the winter solstice, when we move into this time when darkness descends, it to me is a beautiful time, an ideal time to open up to this work, to allow these parts of ourselves that have been hiding in the dark, that have been hiding in the shadows— trembling with fear because they’ve been exiled—this is a beautiful time for us to invite them back, to invite them back into the light of our awareness, into the light of our acceptance, into the light of love.
And as we do this work in ourselves, as we begin to welcome back these previously banished parts of ourselves and allow them to be felt and received in love, we discover at a very experiential level what love is. Love no longer becomes an abstract concept for us. We are experiencing the immensity of it in our own being. We are experiencing what it means to love unconditionally and we are experiencing what it means to be loved unconditionally.
So I hope that you will take this to heart, I hope that you will be willing to be a shadow worker in your own life, to decide that you’re no longer willing to banish parts of who you are, but instead you are willing to invite back everything that has been exiled so that you can experience wholeness, so that you can hold all things in the light of love.
And until next time, I bet you peace