This is the true story of Arion Light, an Australian man who tragically lost is wife to cancer about 10 years ago. Recently, Arion shared his deeply moving story before a large audience at the online Embodiment Conference (14 – 25th October 2020). Below is Arion’s personal account as shared at the conference (here carefully transcribed by me):
“[About] ten years ago my life came crumbling down. My beloved wife and mother to our 18 months old boy got diagnosed with cancer. And all my lovely little spiritual paradigms and my world came crumbling down and she was terminal. And I went into this space where I felt broken and I felt betrayed by life… Those of you who have been through hard times, know that the ideas and the concepts that we have, and we think we have worked something out in life; they can fall apart. That is what happened for me. I became really resentful of life, really hard and then really guilty about how [I felt]. I was going through all the motions caring for her, caring for our young boy, trying to take care of everyone and do everything I was meant to do. But I was frozen inside and furious. Actually, which I didn’t even know at the time, but I felt so betrayed. I bought into that spiritual principle of, if you just do your meditations and say your affirmations, your life will work out. And I was even teaching people that, and I thought I had some sort of handle on life. And then ‘real life’ came and got me. So that was in many ways the hardest time in my life. There was about six months of that, and it just got harder. And people could say, ‘Aaron you’re doing so well’, and I would smile and go ‘Yes’, but underneath I was just frozen inside.
Then after about six months, I got to this point where I actually couldn’t cope anymore. I remember sitting on the couch… [It was the day’s end] at 10:30 at night. I was sitting on the couch and I just started to cry. And my wife was in one room. She was sick with the cough, and my boy was sick in another room, and I had been going between NCIS [a television show] and caring for both of them for hours. And finally, there was this moment, sometime close to midnight, where they had both gone silent and the house was still, and the tears started to fall. And I remember literally slipping off the couch and falling on the floor and just sobbing, and this incredible feeling of failure came up. This feeling like ‘I can’t do it’. You know, ‘I can’t be this man that I meant to be. I can’t look after my wife. I feel like I’m failing her.’ She’s going through, you know, facing her own death and facing not being able to be a mother to her son. And here I am frozen and angry and just going through the motions and here is my boy trying to make sense of what was going on. And again, just parenting like a robot. And the guilt and the shame were so intense, and I just sobbed and broke, really remember saying ‘I can’t do this. I can’t do this.’ I didn’t know what any other option I had, but I just felt like I broke [inside].
And in that breaking somewhere on that floor, in that puddle I was on the floor, when I’d finally stopped trying to be the man I thought I should be. There was something else there. This presence, this depth of love, that came and held me. And I remember it like it was yesterday. Just this sense of Love rising up, and going, ‘I’ve got you’. And this feeling of ‘I don’t deserve this. Look at the horrible husband I’m being. Look at the pathetic dad I am being. Look, I’m so full of anger and hatred of myself.’ And the Love just rose and said ‘I’ve got you. It’s okay.’ And I just laid with it and got the first bit of rest bite that I’d had since we’ve got the news. And then, the next night it happened again, and the Love rose and held me, and I just cracked into it like an ocean and just got held there. I felt like I was being rocked by this deep love. I had known love as something more spiritual before, like something that I would experience out beyond me. I would open into the Divine Love.
But this was like Love rising through my flesh and my bones and that most ugly human bits of me. It was just saying ‘I love you. I’ve got you’.
I went through this process every night for about a week, where I would just fall into its arms of Love, and this really beautiful thing would happen where I would argue with it. It’s like, I would tell it where I wasn’t worthy of love. ‘Look how I haven’t been able to do this. I haven’t been able to do that and failing here.’ And if you’ve ever tried to argue with unconditional Love, it’s hard to win because it just goes, ‘I see you. I love you’. So after about a week, I just broke and this Love just washed through me. This oceanic love that was bigger than all my pain and all of my failures, everything. It just held me.
I remember waking up the next morning and just going: ‘Oh my god, I can, I can do this.’ And I just had this new vigor of life to meet my wife and my son. And then this miracle happened, which is really the source of this work [called Warrior Rythm] and why I’m telling this story. It’s that in the months leading up to her passing, this Love wasn’t just something that consoled me. It wasn’t just a Love like I had understood Love to be, which was like a sort of passive ‘I love you’ sort of thing.
But it became a living current in my body. And after breaking into its arms, it would start to flow through me like a river. And I noticed it flow through and move into action, and it would literally love my wife in ways that I couldn’t. That ‘me’, the personality, had fail that. And here, Love was moving and holding me in her arms, while she shared the deepest vulnerabilities of our heart. And there was me meeting my son and holding him as he was trying to make sense. And all of a sudden, I was living my life way better than I’d ever been able to.
And I was in that sort of cracking that I had to make my life work. You know, I’ve been like most of us being in that notion that I need to be the best person I can be and I need to try harder and do my affirmations and align my chakras and heal my mommy and daddy issues and you know, being more Zen and being more Yin or be more Yang. You know, I had all these different things that I was meant to do, to try and be, the person that I was meant to be. And yet here I was, broken, failed, and yet life was moving through me and living my life better than I ever could have.
I actually remember the day she passed, I was very blessed in such a horrific time, that was full of love. We had called the whole lot of friends together and they had been singing songs. She had been in a coma for a couple of days and I woke up about 5:30 in the morning. I was sleeping in her room next to her bed. And I just went over and went behind her and just held her in my arms, and just felt this Love pouring through me and through her. And another whole story is the way she had opened to Love in that time of death as well, in her last week. She would share that she has found the Love that cannot die. And so we were both in this incredible state of love as my heart and her heart was breaking again and again.
So in this morning, just as the kookaburras, which are amazing birds… their birdsong is like a laugh. Just as the first kookaburra started laughing in the morning, she passed away in my arms. And there was this incredible rush of love and beauty as my heart broke and the tears fell, and you know I was shattered. But this Love… I was in awe that here I was in… the worst thing that could ever happen to me. And here I was, more in love and more myself than I’d ever been. And it really made me realize that this sort of striving that I have been trying to do wasn’t working. It was more effort on the top of actually the truth of what I was, which call it Love, Spirit or Soul, but I’ll stay with Love today. That true nature of Love that had revealed itself. That wasn’t just a passive ‘Aahhh’, angelic spiritual thing. It was a f-cking, excuse the language, wild current.
In the years after that, through the grief and the 10 years since then, I have become a student of that Love. I have bowed to that Love and it has shown me how to be that Love. And then… I have started to teach other people and train… [In the past,] I’ve ran coaching programs and things beforehand, but they were much more about using techniques to try and become a better person. But as this Love ravished me and showed me that I was Love and that you are loved and that we are Love. This whole part of me trying so hard to make my life work just got in the jacuzzi, in the back of the bus, and just chilled out. And this Love learned to be the driver in my life and more and more of me learned to surrender to it. And then I began to work with other people and realize that this wasn’t just something for me, but that this was actually my life’s work, to help me and anyone else who is up for it to become that flow of Love, both for ourselves [and others]…
So, in any moment, we can bring in that flow. But even more miraculously, we can tap into that Love through our bodies, so it can become a living fire and create through us.
You know my passion, my tagline, the heart of my work, is ‘Love in action’… We can connect to that love and then bring it through. And so that’s what the ‘Warrior Rhythm’ is about, to teach you about this power that we have, to tap Love and let Love be that force that creates our life. And I have helped thousands of people now in yearlong programs and three months programs to become ‘Love in action’. And I’ve taken it from an experience and a possibility to a trainable method so that we can learn how to crack open to the Love. We can learn how to awaken it through our bodies. We can learn how to let it allow flow into action.”
Today, Arion Light works with clients, individually and in group, to help them connect with and awaken that Love in their own bodies and let it move them into action. This is his deepest passion, to inspire and awaken “love in action” in people around the world. Arion is founder of ‘Warriors of Love’, a year-long embodiment training program, as well as the creator of the ‘Warrior Rhythm’, an integral four-phase modality that unites spirituality, embodiment, action, and shadow work. For over a decade, he has worked with tens of thousands of people on how to align their soul, body, and action in everyday life. In addition, he is the author of many books and online programs and has ran hundreds of retreats and workshops.
For more about Arion Light’s work, see: https://www.warrior-rising.com/warrior-apprenticeship.
Note: The manuscript was fully read and approved by Arion Light before its publication.
Photos from Unsplash:
Top photo (man by lake) by Aaron Burden; second photo (sofa) by Jorge Moncayo; third photo (woman) by Oliver Pacas; last photo (man in sunset) by Zac Durant.
