My craving for lightness is so overwhelming it permeates everything going on in my world right now, to the interruption of all those things I once felt I “should” do. My steady working habits lay in disarray and I find I must seek this feeling of lightness in all quarters of my life; not least “as me”, the physical me that I see in the mirror and inhabit as my home. On that impulse, I just had all my hair cut off to the shortest length I’ve had for decades and am thrilled with the lightness of it, not just when I look in the mirror, though my face looks more youthful and my colour more bright and shiny than for a very long time, but in the light and carefree mood it brings, along with the lighter feeling on my head. This all sparked off conversations with friends, one of whom is already the keen enthusiast for shorter hair and whose natural wavy-white locks dazzle without detracting from her wonderful face; which is something else I find I was craving…to come out of hiding and to have people notice the light in my eyes more so than the “do” on my head. This, I realise, is all just an outer metaphor for something else taking place more deeply on the inside and its a longing to switch on all the lights and to BE light in physical form without reservation or reticence any more; no more holding back.

You don’t have to understand quantum physics to get to know light in a far more intimate way. We know it already as the visible part of the wider electro-magnetic spectrum. Electro-magnetic radiation travels through space as electric energy and magnetic energy, sometimes acting as a wave and at others as a particle called a photon. Wavelengths are measured according to the distance between the peaks of these waves, ranging from miles (radio waves) to inches (microwave) to millionths of an inch (the light we ordinarily see) and even smaller than that (x-rays) and beyond. There is a well-accepted visible spectrum, discernible to the naked eye yet most people forget about the waves that can’t be seen…but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there, including right here within our physical human bodies. Near death experiences repeatedly tell us about an incredible bright-white light accompanied by an overwhelming sense of peace, love and joy; divine or “spiritual” light. We don’t need to go all quantum to get our heads around such a light; in fact, many of us feel we have direct experiences of it, almost like a lucid dream-memory that accompanies a feeling of “wholeness” or “home”, and it can alter us once this surfaces into our awareness.

Electro-magnetic waves exist on either side of the visible light spectrum (in fact, most of the energy spectrum “cannot be seen”) and yet I suspect some of us are party to experiencing them as a very real contribution to our daily experience of life. For all of us, our consciousness us already atuned or “wired” to pick up a staggeringly broad range of energetic frequencies since all life is energy so we were designed this way though we are only using a tiny fraction of our full capacity. Consciousness is, itself, a vibrational entity and the higher it (as it were) “vibes”, the more it picks up on higher frequencies in the environment, through resonance. It’s an innate quality of awareness that we are able to do this…so, it follows, the more aware we become, the more we inevitably start to “feel” beyond the narrow bandwidth of the so-called ordinary. The reason some of us are becoming super-sensitive and thus susceptible to incredible and perhaps quite bizarre levels of pain, I have long suspected, is that we register frequencies that our physical senses aren’t accustomed to picking up and trying to interpret or, at least, not for a very long time. It’s why we seem to feel so much more than most of the people around us, because those people simply don’t register the same bandwidth of frequencies that we do (yet). So we see, hear, smell, taste and feel (the closest words we can attribute…) vibrational sensations that trigger our nerves; blowing the limits of our central nervous system thus registering as intense pain, as changes in our vision or new colours and flashes, as electric sensations on the tongue or the lip, as intense headaches and endocrine confusion, affecting our hearing and omitting strange tones and so on. Thus we are often tipped into fear and overwhelm by experiences that baffle our every-day senses or cause us to struggle to do ordinary things. Yet our task is not to block those higher frequencies (such as we register them as higher vibrating impulses; we can discern this, when we tune in, by the way they make us feel beyond the initial alarm they may generate…), like some sort of enemy at the gate. Rather, we get to hone and refine this enhanced receptivity and bring all this additional light into our cells where we can experience those higher frequency as our physical self.

Many of us are already doing our best to express those higher frequency through our life, our work, our art…coaxing and coercing others to see what is plainly (to us) there to seen, if they could only broaden their receptors and soften what they think they already know. Its true, most people (to varying degrees, including me) live life according to the parameters of what they think they are experiencing according to their conditioned responses rather than “seeing” what is there for them to know more directly. I’ve spent many years trying to paint what I see and thus to beguile people into registering in a painting what they fail to notice in “real life” where their learned expectations tend to drive what they end up seeing…and its been hard to keep plugging away at this, so I find myself weary of this elaborate hobby, my painting urges all dried up for the moment. I’ve also striven tirelessly to shed light through all of the blogs that I write for no other reason than to impart a feeling of lightness and deliver some enlightenment to anyone in need of it yet even this is also wearying me as I find myself  being tugged back into the dark-peaty earth of my much more physically challenging autumn mornings. This repeated longing for a hiatus from “a sense of responsibility” has urged me to focus on myself this year; and I have, to good effect in the lighter months but, now the days are drawing in, I find myself focussing instead on all the enhanced pain I seem to experience at this dark time of year when I sit still for too long to write. I find I need to get out more and just BE! This disconnect between what I try to “put out there” into the world and how I am still feeling, in my body, has forced me to a new point of admission; which is that while I have tirelessly put out all of this light for so many years, I remain such a novice at bringing it in to where it is needed the most and where I can BE light as a walking-talking body of lightness (and I can only imagine how good that would feel).

Though many of us are shining beacons of light in a world that would be far more shadowy without us, how many of us focus on evolving our own receptivity to light so that we not only register it all around us but can bring it right into the cells of our body…and do so  without pain. When we open to receiving the full bandwidth of light vibration in our cells….as our cells…we possess the power to heal anything in an instant. For many of us, our own pain makes us afraid to take this next step and, besides, in other lifetimes shining our most radiant light from deep within us has not always made us so popular with others or ended so very well, as a result of which we are well-versed in holding it off at the door or keeping that light turned down to its lowest setting when it enters us. And we tend not to shine that light quite so brightly around others.

Sometimes, life forces our hand; for instance, menopause signals a major influx of light into the cells of a woman’s body. Yet if she hasn’t been doing her housework, that influx can very-suddenly shine light into all her dark corners and show up what doesn’t want to be seen there, triggering such denial of the light (which is often suppressed with all the most dubious methods of modern science) or the onset of a health, or even existential, crisis which makes her think, from all the usual social conditioning, that she is more helpless and messed-up than she has ever been. This is the world turned topsy-turvy for, when we have light at our fingertips, we are our own healer and problem solver and that work doesn’t have to take eons or many lifetimes or even years or months but we do need to be grounded; which sounds contradictory when our craving is only to seek more lightness, not the kind of body that is sturdy and strong with feet planted firmly in the earth. Yet the ballast of a well-grounded body (as I’ve waxed lyrical about before in my posts on Ayurveda) means that more light can be “brought in” to where light already resides and waits only for even more light to be received; for it is our own light that activates the influx of those broader frequencies we discern all around us in the world, through resonance. In other words, when we own our own light, the world seems to become a dramatically lighter place.

When we acknowledge all the light that is everywhere in our world, even in the darkest-seeming situations, we give permission for that light to turn on in our own dark corners and it does…oh how it does. Meditating on this just once a day for five or ten minutes, imaging light coming into our cells, softening and melting away whatever feels obstructive, is enough to feel a degree of lightness that will startle you and which you know, in your heart, could heal the world since it knows no limits. When we do this, without reservation, like turning all our own lights on and admitting we are at home in the body we spent so many years disowning or living outside of, we truly become that light being we always knew we were though we denied it. We complete all the work we have done grounding ourselves (which, done by itself, can come to feel way-too heavy) by partnering it with the lightest aspect of self that we could possibly bring home into physicality and this marks a new level of wholeness that the body soon responds to; as do all those we come into contact with.

Then, we notice ourselves trailing light with us wherever we go, lighting up any room, how people start to respond to us like never before, how something seems to happen when we enter a situation that might so easily have gone a less desirable way or even when we just smile at a stranger. Our enlightened state finds its match in other beings, the domino effect of all effects so that, through upward resonance, like all our dials are being turned up by a few notches, this thing spreads like wildfire and suddenly there is light where a minute ago all seemed murky and depressed; which is its secondary effect and, we could say, why we came here to be with other people. But most of all, we must do it for ourselves; must remember to bring it home before we do anything else for anyone else because this is the most important thing about being light…we don’t just wear it or advocate it, we own it and become it. We need to bring back to ourselves all the light we have tried so hard to give out to the world (pausing before we so quickly give away what we have only just registered for ourselves…yes, how many of us rush to give out what we only just realised for ourselves); and house it abundantly in our cells where, once switched on, it will reside permanently, growing brighter day by day.

Those cells, which fluently speak the language of light, can only take notice once this happens since they are already hard-wired to respond; so this does what no other healing modality, no special diet, no doctor or retreat or magic pill could ever do and it heals us from the inside out. And we do it by following our joy…what a hardship (not)…choosing whatever unlikely thing feels lightest in any moment and, most of all, prioritising that we must feel light in ourselves, whatever that takes including doing nothing at all. It’s a case of truly listening to what calls us ahead to ourselves; the candle trail of our most visionary self, which leads like a pathway of light to who knows where yet we need only focus on each step we take, moment to moment and to keep that light flooding us through all our levels, allowing lightheartedness to permeate our experiences and their interpretations. Permission to be light by owning “I am light” = we get to beam! Once you get there, you realise that’s probably all you ever really wanted.