Pedestals are for dead people and statues
(Continued from Part 1/2)
Thank you if you’ve stayed with me this long. I’m writing on this topic to find the source of my own exhaustion at this time and to point to some perils that “success” in lightwork can bring.
Managing the criticism that lightwork can attract is found at one pole of the perils associated with service. At the other end is dealing with being put on a pedestal.
If anyone is putting me or other lightworkers on a pedestal, I would request that you please stop. We put people on pedestals for various reasons, almost all relating to our own wants and needs.
Some interviewers put their guests on pedestals to establish themselves as having quality guests or “experts” on their show, to promote their own offerings, and so on. Lightworkers do so for many reasons, perhaps innocuous, perhaps not.
But the impact on the lightworker so captured and constrained can be painful for a variety of reasons and does no one in the end much good.
It demeans the person raising the other up. It promotes codependency and dysfunctionality. It erects a barrier between the one being raised and the one doing the raising. It deprives the one being raised of choice, freedom, growth, and contact. The negative impacts of pedestalling seem to go on and on. “Don’t fence me in” surely applies here.
If as a lightworker you’re being invited to mount a pedestal, I’d recommend that you be wary of accepting.
Climbing onto a pedestal is a trap, a form of confinement. More times than not, adulation carries a price in deference. It corrodes one’s better sense of one’s self and leaves one open to arrogance, conceit and all manner of difficult psychological conditions.
It makes people afraid of the one raised up. It skews behavior and relationships. It’s altogether unwise and not something fated to last into our future.
I’m not an enlightened person. And really, as far as I can see, only people of enlightenment – and an advanced state of enlightenment at that – can serve as spiritual teachers or mentors. When I’ve turned down requests that I somehow mentor another, which I’m not suited to do, I’ve excited disappointment, resentment, and reprisal.
I myself have many dysfunctional traits. I have a temper. I’m impatient, irritable. I don’t like obstacles being placed in the path of my work. I transfer onto people. I have many remaining vasanas.
Apparently I can write well but that’s all I can probably claim for myself. Definitely not pedestal material.
Besides I’m also alive and made of flesh and blood. Only dead people and statues belong on pedestals. Julius Caesar perhaps. But even Jesus would decline to set foot on one. In fact he’d be the last person to agree.
So these are two barriers that a lightworker who realizes a modicum of “success” may meet. Now I want to discuss the barriers within oneself and how they are exaggerated and made more difficult by having your service catch on to any degree.
As I said earlier, if your lightwork provides a useful service and you find yourself thrust into the public eye, your life becomes more difficult. All the normal things that others do – erupt in vasanas, transfer feelings onto another – you do under the actual or anticipated glare of public scrutiny.
The most excruciating example of this occurred for me recently when I was transferring onto a colleague feelings that properly attached to a former girlfriend.
Transference means projecting onto another the thoughts and feelings proper to someone else. A husband might turn his wife into his mother. An employee might see his boss as his father.
It took me days to see and get to the roots of the transference that I was making. In the meantime all manner of conflicting and disturbing feelings arose in me and affected my service.
I felt I should be true to myself but what I was being true to was simply the transference. I did many things which in retrospect I wouldn’t have done had I only realized what I was up to. And all the time the stress mounts because one falls under the prospect of public attention.
Everything one does becomes skewed and exaggerated by the pressure of being somehow a public figure. I remember watching … well, many movies really … about celebrities cracking under pressure. Only now am I seeing how that could be.
So without going into the lurid details, I just warn you that, as you commence your lightwork, the stress and strain that go with “success” can be exhausting and disturbing. I have only a limited tolerance for these stresses and strains. My tolerance would be greater if there was something I was seeking. But I’m not. However, much of what I’m learning now I couldn’t have known ahead of time.
I haven’t gone into any of the difficulties presented by teamwork – the tug-of-war phase, the differences in paths and personalities, the lack of a shared or common body of what the Boss calls “rules of engagement.” Here I am urging everyone to begin their lightwork, but please be aware that just because we’re all lightworkers doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily open road ahead.
I myself am not a trainer, counsellor or anything of the sort and have only a very limited role to play in anything to do with lightwork past the point of beginning. But I also don’t want to give the impression that starting in is all that’s needed. Much work remains after that.
Hopefully we’ve only just opened up the subject of the perils as well as the rewards of lightwork. As we move forward in our engagement, whether it be in spreading abundance, healing, terraforming, government work, or whatever else, just know that, in my view, we’ll have to discuss the barriers at some point as well as the breakthroughs.
I feel cleaner and clearer for having said that “success” is not a bed of roses, but carries with it its own set of challenges and pitfalls. I feel less exhausted now, which is my test for whether what I’ve been saying is the truth. Because the truth will set us free, if one tells the truth, one can know it by seeing if release follows. No release, no truth.
These perils and pitfalls need to be met if we’re to achieve a pace that will see us last until Ascension. I’m only now exploring what all this means for me. And it took me almost falling over to be willing to explore it.
I’ll look to see if there’s more to say. If what I’m experiencing is a block due to uncommunicated truths or withholds, then sharing them should set me free.