Light-work✨

Light-work ✨

Have you ever noticed how, when you’re crying and look toward a light source, the tears in your eyes make the light appear like it’s reaching toward you?

As a kid, I used to do this while sitting in “time-out” — heart aching, freshly tender from punishment, quietly yearning for love and acceptance in the midst of my mischief. I’d look up at the nearest light fixture through watery eyes and notice how, in my felt brokenness, the light also broke toward me, as if it were reaching back. I later learned in 6th grade science about refraction — how water bends light and appears to draw it closer. This soothed me.

This is what it means to me to be a light-worker at this time on Earth:
💫 To refract and reflect light.
💫 To shine even in the most obscure spaces.
💫 To love the shadowiest parts of myself and the world — no exceptions.

It may feel emotionally easier to see the world in black and white—labeling parts as good and others as bad—than to face the complexity of our shared humanity. But this good-versus-evil mindset fuels the very hatred we all have the capacity for and deserve to be free from.

This isn’t doormat vibes and letting terrible things happen. This is big courageous heart energy that has the power to dissolve hate all together.  And showing up with a compassionate heart doesn’t mean disengaging; it means being fully present with what’s in front of us, and responding from a place of deep clarity and grounded peace.

The Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers—Not-Knowing, Bearing Witness, and Taking Compassionate Action—offer a powerful framework for this path.

As my Dharma teacher Mikey at Wild Heart Meditation Center says:
“Do no harm. Take no shit.”

There is only love, and what’s asking to be loved. That is the light ⭐

And as my breathwork teacher Dana at Clarity Breathwork reminds us:
“Love brings up everything unlike itself for the purpose of healing and release.” 💛🌕✨

Photos by Nigel Callisto at Bask Retreat Center