The Assignment by Asha Lightbearer

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This poem was an assignment that I received during a meditation in my Lightbearer’s Garden healing & alchemy community.

In the community, members have a focused intention that they hold in mind as we do energetic and psycho-spiritual work during each gathering.

In this particular meditation, participants were asked to give an offering* to Brighid in exchange for insight related to their chosen intention for the month.

As the group leader and experience facilitator, I didn’t expect to receive a message from Brighid during the meditation. But as I paused to allow members to journal, she showed herself to me. So, I made an offering for her assistance.

What she required of me was to “write many poems.”

I wasn’t sure why Brighid had given me such an easy task, but I liked the idea. The next day, I got out my notebook and started scratching out The Assignment.

The Mundane

There was no big importance that I was trying to capture.

I just started writing, with no agenda except to be open to the ideas and words that came to me, and to allow them to flow out onto the page without judgment.

As I wrote, the words were not inspiring. My poem was frumpy and trite, but I kept going.

After a while, a line finally emerged that was poignant,
“It doesn’t have to be any thing or any way. It just has to be, perhaps, like me.”

The message was clear and impactful:
The ordinary can have extraordinary value.

Value is not about perfection. It’s about participating fully—showing up and doing your best in each moment, without judgment.

The Messy Middle

Every day, you are bombarded with thousands of images of picture-perfect situations, people, homes, and lifestyles designed to make you compare yourself and your life to an unattainable ideal of perfection that is both unrealistic and unhealthy.

But what if your best service to the world is simply to show up, be authentic and do your best?

There is no greater gift.

I have been stymied so many times in the past by trying to make things too perfect, too polished, too correct, to the point that many of my projects never saw the light of day.

I hid my work because I was not satisfied. But what I didn’t realize at the time was that:

The only way to level-up is to take imperfect action. Experience is the tool.

But in order for that to unfold, you have to be willing to be wrong, look foolish, make mistakes, and sometimes do poorly. That’s how progress is made. You have to be vulnerable.

The same goes for healing!

Finding Perspective

So often people take actions to help themselves heal, but then they get frustrated when they aren’t “better”—in a month, or a year (or especially, if it’s been many years).

But perhaps, they are measuring their expectations against the wrong measuring stick.

You see people online doing what you want to do, feeling the way you want to feel, having the life and experiences you want to have. And they make it look like it happened overnight, with “this one simple hack.” But that’s never true!

Even if one specific change made a huge impact, it was still the culmination of their experiences that got them to that point and made it land for them. And in most cases, I am going to guess there were lots of “failures” and less than stellar results along the way.

But they didn’t give up.

When something didn’t work, they used it as feedback to help them improve. Only by knowing what didn’t work for them were they able to pivot and figure out what did.

They also paid close attention every time they saw any hint of forward movement toward their goal. They noticed even the tiniest of results and learned to amplify those results (or use them as a launch pad for new ideas) to help them gain traction toward their goal.

Most of us are not wired to think that way though. Especially for anyone who has suffered abuse, our go-to response is often to believe that we are failing if we don’t get the results we want in the timeframe we want them.

We put a window on our healing that actually harms our ability to keep going.

Our idea of a healing “destination” overshadows the important work we have done, and undervalues any progress that we have made. With this mentality, especially after any length of time, our resilience is crushed and we begin to feel like we will never find relief or have what we desire.

But it’s more likely that you are making progress, you are just lacking perspective.

Sure, sometimes you can make a lot of progress in one fell swoop. But that’s not the bulk of the work!

More often, our progress is subtle and easy to overlook, especially if you don’t know what to look for. This is why objective observation and recognizing wins is so important: an accurate frame of reference can go a long way in improving your outlook and resilience.

Building Evidence

An easy way to start building right perspective that can shift your understanding and help you heal, is to foster a practice of taking notes about where you are now in your healing journey versus where you have been in the past. How often are you triggered and how disruptive is it in your life? How quickly does it pass? Do you have any tools that have made a difference to help you get back to center when you are knocked off balance? What have you tried? What have you not tried?

And I don’t mean think about it right now in your mind for 5 minutes and then walk away.

I mean, use a notebook or a journal (or the computer) and literally write these things down. There are going to be days that you will need some physical reference that you can look at and remind yourself that you have been through worse in the past, and that you are making progress.

Write down:

• where you started on your healing journey,
• where you are now,
• what you have tried so far to help you heal
• how you felt afterwards—immediately and over time,
• some ideas you have heard about that you haven’t tried yet!, and
• any overall progress you may have made along the way.

Then moving forward, you want to be fastidious and pay attention to how you are feeling every time that you try something new or make a change. Write down how you felt during the exercise/healing session, how you felt immediately after, and how you felt over the next 2-3 weeks afterward.

By simply monitoring how you feel and react, and any behavioral or thought changes that you notice during or after trying a new healing practice, you will begin to learn what healing looks like for you.

It doesn’t matter how big or how small the changes are. Just check-in with yourself and see how you are feeling. (Rattled? Relieved? Tired? Confused? Clear? Calm? Something else?)

Over time, you will start to recognize your own “feeling” clues from your body and your nervous system, and how those feeling clues relate to any emotional healing work that you are doing.

Once you learn your own signs and symptoms after doing emotional work, that’s when you will begin to be able to tell if anything is shifting for you or not.

It’s also important to remember that beneficial change doesn’t always feel good.

In fact, it often doesn’t feel good – at least not at first. But those are the most important times to carefully discern between perceived harm and actual harm.

For example, maybe you processed something difficult, and it was emotionally painful and taxing, and maybe you are a crying mess afterwards—for a while! You still want to mentally note this as a win because that’s what it looks like to get through something big and process it.

It feels terrible while you are going through it. But it is a positive change for you because you brought something up, looked at it, felt it, and processed it. This is one of those times that it’s really important to recognize that the harm of processing the memory was a perceived harm not a real harm, and you want to look at this as a big win! You did it!

You still acknowledge the pain, but your check-in might look something like, “Wow, that sucked! But I’m still here, still breathing, still okay. I’m okay.”

Those kinds of experiences are often core healing moments, and while they may be exhausting mentally and emotionally, they are clearing the way to a new level of wellbeing.

Believe me, I have had many of those moments myself.

One time, I cried for months straight after a particularly intense activation. It was ridiculous. I cried at Publix Thanksgiving commercials. It was nuts. And I remember saying, “what did you do?” And the woman I was working with said, “Look at it this way. You have been stuffing your whole life, and you can’t stuff in anymore. There is no room. It has to come out.”

I wasn’t impressed, but she was right. It did need to come out. And I was better for it!

Shortly after that though, I learned that whenever I do intense emotional or energy work for my own healing, I am always profoundly tired. All I can do is collapse and sleep. I can barely function sometimes immediately afterwards. But I know that tiredness is my sign that I just moved a lot of energy, so even when I am completely drained afterwards, to me that is evidence that I just did important work that will benefit me in the long run.

Creating Resilience

This is why paying attention (and documenting) even tiny changes is so important. Once you train yourself to do these routine evaluations after facing something hard, you will start to recognize wins that you used to overlook. That’s when you start to develop resilience, because you are feeding your nervous system data to help it build evidence that you are making progress and despite tough moments, you are still here and okay.

This helps you become less stressed and worried all the time, and better able to recognize real danger (something that can harm you) versus false danger (fear of the unknown/fear of processing).

Over time, you start to feel a little safer and a little better in your body. Your confidence starts to slowly uplevel toward a new normal. You spend a little less energy just surviving every day, and a little more on living. You have more faith in yourself and in the Universe/Source and you feel a little less anxious, fearful, and out of control.

This is resilience growing in you, moment by moment.

So even if you are just feeling a micro better, it’s important to make a note and acknowledge it. Acknowledging that tiny improvement will help you re-calibrate your stress response baseline, and over time, life can finally start to get easier and less traumatic.

My Wish for You

Healing is rarely eloquent or poetic in the moment. It sometimes feels like it has no rhyme or reason. And sometimes, it’s just plain unskilled and ugly.

That’s okay.

“It doesn’t have to be any thing or any way. It just needs to be, perhaps, like you.”

Don’t be afraid. Keep going. You got this!

• Allow yourself to make mistakes.
• Don’t wait for perfection. It will never come. Instead, take imperfect action and pivot, as necessary.
• There is no failure, only feedback showing you what you didn’t know before you started.
• Pay attention and acknowledge every win, no matter how small.

This is the path to progress. You can do it!

~Asha

Notes:

*An offering in this context is an energetic exchange of giving and receiving. When asking for divine assistance, you often will make an offering of some kind in exchange for the insight you seek. (Churches do this in a ritualized way when they take monetary offerings during their services.)

In this meditation though, the offering was energetic, and it was clear that whatever offering was made would be used to help the participant on their healing journey.

My offering that Brighid accepted of ‘writing many poems’ will nurture my inner child. It is also perfectly in alignment with Brighid being a muse for poets and craftsmen. So, it makes sense that was the offer accepted.

About the Creator

Asha Lightbearer

As a young person, I had all the symptoms of CSA, but no memory and no awareness of it. Then when my son was about 2 years old, I began having direct triggers that I did not understand. Several years later, images and body memories surfaced, and I had to accept that something bad happened to me: it was real. That was the moment when all of my life’s confusion, pain and trauma finally began to heal.
Today, I work with others using the same tools that helped me on my healing journey from CSA, including: clearing energetic imprinting, helping clients to get back in their bodies and stop dissociating, creating emotional freedom and justice at a heartfelt level, and regaining self-confidence, trust and love.

For more information, check out The Lightbearer’s Garden.

Or connect with me on: Facebook