Be the brightest thing in the dark

01A Sentence Like a Bell

There’s a sentence that has been living in me since a recent session with my friend Sally Pullinger. Sally is a channel who brings through ascended masters and beings with a love and joy you can feel the second you interact with them. In this session, the sentence came up from somewhere very deep, and it rang through my whole body like a bell.

I am the brightest in the darkness.

I want to share how it found me, slowly, the way it moved through me, so you can feel your way into it with me.

02Home Ground

The dark has been home ground for me for a long time. I’ve spent days at a time in dark room retreats, sitting in total blackness with nothing but my own awareness. For more than ten years I’ve been initiated through shamanic ceremony, and my meditation practice has opened a connection with Spirit that keeps showing up in my life in ways I could never have planned. I’ve done the work with all of it. I’ve let it ask things of me, and I guide others in bringing what they find in the dark into their bodies and their daily lives. So I came into this session as someone who knows the dark well, even though I wasn’t expecting to go into the dark that day.

I also came in restless. I felt like a racehorse at the gate, every muscle ready, with opportunities all around me that weren’t quite landing. I had energy to create in my work and my community and my relationship, and nowhere for it to go. Underneath all that, I was tired. Maybe you know the feeling. You can see so clearly what wants to come through you, and the gate stays shut.

03You Are the Instruments

As the session opened, my space filled. My guides were there, and my ancestors, and the presence I know as Isis, mother of creation. What came through was tender and very direct. There is a great darkness on the earth right now, a lot of fear and a lot of pain, and the light is needed there. And all of it, even the heaviest parts, is perfect. Every soul came out of one heart, and the work is remembering that.

Then an ascended master Sally calls Chung Fu came through, gently speaking to my impatience. My spirit is already out in the potential, where everything I can see already exists. My human self wants to build it now. The friction lives in that gap, and the human part is where I’m meant to put my attention, because bringing the vision into form is why I came. It happens from the inside. It can’t be rushed.

I don’t think I have to teach you anything about consciousness. You are conscious. You are awake. You are ready. You are the instruments.

I felt that land. The waiting had nothing to do with being ready or unready. Something was being prepared.

What was being prepared, it turned out, was a clearing. So much is awakening on the earth, and so much dead matter is still hanging around, like carcasses that even the light workers carry. Old weight from old seasons of life. We’re coming into Samhain, the season of giving away the old, and the invitation was to call up the dragon fire in the earth and in myself and offer to that fire everything I’m carrying that no longer serves me. The heavy things are there for a reason. They confront us so we’ll stop asking why and start asking what they’re showing us.

04Down the Well

And then I was taken down.

There was a rope of light running from the highest part of my soul down into a well inside my own being. An ancestral well, older than time. I held the rope and lowered myself, hand over hand, not knowing how deep it went. Down, and down, until I landed softly on warm earth.

I trusted I was being held from above. I also knew I’d gone down into wells like this before, and somehow this time I was being taken deeper than I ever had.

If you want to come with me, close your eyes for a moment here. Feel the soft dark around you. Feel how safe it is.

Far above, a silver ray poured down from the mouth of the well and caught in the walls, and the walls were full of crystals and gemstones. The air was warm and humming. When I touched the stone I could feel it pulse. I was inside the body of the earth, in the womb of creation, where everything is born.

And I was at ease there. That part was familiar. I know how to go into these recesses and hold space without losing myself. I wasn’t judging where I was. I moved in reverence, from a place of who I am.

05The Place of Your Birthing

Then the Great Mother spoke, and everything in me went quiet.

I called you here. This is the place of your birthing. I called you here to light your light, the light I placed in you and strengthened time and time again.

She showed me the star of my soul. It was shining at the very bottom, in the darkest place, inside her body. Brighter than any darkness. Brighter than a million stars and suns.

That’s when the sentence came, and it rang through me again and again until I knew it was true.

I am the brightest in the darkness.

I don’t have to become the darkness in the darkness.

06Staying Lit

That second line is medicine for a lot of us, I think. When you’re good at the dark, when you’re the one who sits with people in their pain or holds space in ceremony, you can learn to match it. You go quiet and heavy so you won’t disturb anything. You dim yourself to blend in, and it can pass for respect.

What I was initiated into down there was carrying the light again, fully. I was given the authority to be the light in that space and to stay lit. And I understood that this is the transmutation that was spoken of at the very start of the session, the call to transform and lift up. Light in the dark is what transforms the dark. It’s what all of us who feel called to this work are doing together.

07The Shungite Pool

Once I let myself shine, things began to move on their own.

The beings who live deep in the earth, ancient and gentle, led me to a pool of shungite water and asked me to bring every part of myself into it. Every thought and feeling. Every vision I’ve been carrying. As the water moved through me, memories surfaced from twenty and thirty years ago. They were being revised in me somehow, and they rose only to be released. I didn’t have to understand them or do anything with them. They were the carcasses. Once they carried real meaning and light for me, they’d done their work, and I’d kept carrying them anyway. I watched them go.

Then I felt myself transported somewhere else. I could swear I felt my brain being rewired as I was taken into a space beyond my consciousness that asked me to surrender into something I don’t know. I let it. I was grateful to go.

Afterward they warmed me at a crystal fire, a fire that was alive and conscious, and they wrapped around me and whispered that all is well. I was being born again down there. They held me there in the dark so I would know I’m safe in it. What they gave me was certainty, a knowing of my own divine essence, and the power to see clearly in the darkest places.

I climbed the rope back up fully empowered.

When we closed and I was asked whether there was anything else I wanted to say, there was nothing. Nothing in my heart or mind needed to speak or be heard. I felt complete. There was only space, with an intelligence in it, and the awareness that everything had landed exactly as I was ready and open to receive it.

08Your Light Belongs There

So here’s what I want to leave with you.

Maybe you’re in the dark right now. Maybe you’re the one others call when they’re in it. Your light belongs there. You can walk into a hard conversation or a grieving room or your own 3am, be fully present with what’s there, and still be the brightest thing in the room.

Go in with reverence. Set the intention to stay lit. When old things rise, ask whether they still carry any light for you, and if they don’t, give them to the fire. When you feel stuck at the gate, go to the place your visions come from and feel the thing already done. The oak is already inside the acorn.

And now, if you’ll let me, close your eyes once more.

Feel the dark inside you, the places you don’t usually look. Let them be there.

Somewhere at the very bottom there’s a light. It has always been there, shining in the place you were most afraid to go. Let it rise up through your roots and fill you from the inside.

Say it slowly, to yourself.

The world needs us lit, right now, in the places where it’s darkest.

With deep gratitude to Sally for holding the rope.

Blessings and peace.