Sacred Journeys: How to Shine Your Light More Brightly in the World

Raised with the belief that shining too brightly was called showing off, I had no tools for exploring how to fearlessly be the best version of myself

Have you noticed how creative life gets, once you suggest a playground that you are wanting to explore? In my last column, I commented that the year ahead is going to respond quickly to our focused intentions and I announced I was ready to change how I turned up. No sooner did that get published than I was sent a sign.

It all started when my old station wagon used the last of its energy, alarm lights flashing as headlights dimmed, to get me home where it parked on its own steam, for the last time. So my partner bought us a classy older Volvo with a cassette player. A road trip to Montreal became a reason to bring out a bunch of old bags of cassettes from the basement. It was so much fun to play music I had not listened to for years, as each rediscovered song came with a flood of memories.

Down at the bottom of the cassette bag were some personal psychic readings by a trance channel whom I had met while managing the conferences at Toronto’s Omega Centre between 1991 – 94. Each reading seemed to have a clear agenda; to serve as an energetic wake up call for me to embrace the gifts I brought into the world, and a reminder that I was ignoring, denying, and squandering those gifts. All of this, I should add, was said lovingly on the tapes. These readings were my first proof of an ‘otherworldly’ point of view that took an interest in what I was doing with my life. Listening in the car 25 years later, I heard messages I had been unable to hear previously. The voice on the tapes was telling me that I was a pattern-maker imbued with the energy of the goddess, a master co-creatrix and manifestrix, who came into form to help co-create a new pattern of being. I knew I had heard the words finally by the moisture of the tears rolling down my cheeks.

The voice said I was believing in only the life my body was living, caught up in its day-to-day concerns, and had grown to believe I was small and not worthy. The message got through and I knew profoundly that it was all true.

Raised with the belief that shining too brightly or believing too fiercely in one’s own abilities was called showing off, or even abhorrent, I had no tools for exploring how to fearlessly be the best version of myself. This is true for so many of us. I felt I had let myself down by falling asleep on the job; taken the easier road of not pushing myself and those around me, to shine brighter.

This wake-up call came for me through a channeled reading, but there are many down-to-earth ways for life to reach out and whisper in our ears. Others discover their higher nature in a myriad of ways such as an inner voice, a deep knowing. Some cultures encourage us to find our ‘calling from god’. Not everyone believes in a ‘higher calling’ but for those who sense there is work to do, this could be the year to deepen the journey, follow those urges, listen to the whispers.

A week after the trip to Montreal, I was telling my girlfriends about the message and letting them know I needed to try on this new goddess suit and stop being small. Unanimously they rose up saying they felt the same way! Each woman was feeling the pull to live larger, to shine brighter, to live unhindered by whatever voices they used to keep themselves small. It was so exciting!

We explored initial feelings of wanting ‘permission’ to turn up differently, and then realized we do not need to apologize for our brightness. Instead, we asked for each other’s support to keep onto this higher calling and not fall back to being small:

“Your light belongs to everyone who’ll be illuminated because you were bold enough and obedient enough to let your light shine.” Lisa Nichols https://tinyurl.com/ybcqqdn8

We wrote a list of what we would like to be and do and we rated them in order of importance, then in order of how likely we thought they were of happening. The difference was how we keep ourselves small, how we curb our potential and limit ourselves. We looked at patterns within our lists and saw that we were expressing a world where we were Healers, Soul Catchers, Goddesses, Teachers, Pattern makers.

We called out to the night sky our star seeded energetic natures and called in the energy that would nurture and replenish us in a good and sacred way. We committed to a re-awakening, and to nourishing those forms in each other.

With the understanding that as we raise our own personal vibrations we attract higher vibrations and therefore manifest more easily, we are planning a ribbon dance around a May Pole to celebrate the marriage of our daily selves to our mythic selves and weave that goodness into our homes and our communities.

Why not make this the year to seed your superhero and see how that makes a difference in the world.

Kim is the co-founder of Algonquin Teas, a line of teas made from organic wildcrafted Canadian herbs. Email Kim at: spirit.algonquintea@gmail.com