Do you call yourself a Lightworker? Or has someone else called you one? How has that changed the way you see yourself—or the way you understand your life?

I’ve always winced at being called a Lightworker—but the truth is, I wince at most labels. To me, labels are really just shorthand for the human life underneath.

Strip them away, though, and you get closer to the actual experience beneath them. And beneath all the language around Lightworkers, perhaps right at the heart of it, is a calling: the intuitive knowing that you’re here on purpose. I know this well in myself, and I see a unique calling in almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. I like to believe everyone has one. These callings can be so beautifully intricate or disarmingly simple that a single word could never remotely hold all of that—which is why I find labels, however accurate they feel to the one giving them or the one wearing them, inherently reductive: a whole cosmic calling compressed into a handful of convenient syllables.

Perhaps part of why I see it this way is that I’ve always occupied a liminal place in relation to the spiritual world. I know it from the inside—I’ve spent most of my adult life in spiritual circles, and many of the experiences being described are my own. But I’ve never felt entirely of that world either, or comfortable letting its language define what I experience. So I’m close enough to know how it speaks, but far enough away to hear its own echo.

All this said, I know very well what it’s like when a word suddenly explains a huge part of your experience, especially the ways you’ve always felt different. When I discovered I was a Projector in the Human Design system, a huge amount of my own experience suddenly made sense—in a nutshell, a Projector is said to thrive when they’re recognised and invited, and they influence and guide rather than lead from the front. A single word did that for me. It took everything I’d been feeling, all the ways I had felt different, and encapsulated it within a completely new frame. When a word can do that—hand you an entirely new way of seeing your own experience, give it meaning and even take you to a new level of reality—all sorts of other things can start riding on the back of that.

And just like that—poof, like magic—all the lights come on and, finally, all those little clues start adding up and the pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Out of nowhere, experiences that may have seemed completely unrelated suddenly fit into one story, with an identity that explains them and gives them meaning and purpose.

Identity has become a lens. It sits over reality itself, making any differences feel more fixed and more important than they are. It happens so easily because we’re already steeped in a wider culture of identity, whether we notice it or not. We encounter it absolutely everywhere. It’s in the forms we fill out, our children’s school assemblies, it influences which stories reach the news, and it shapes policies and campaigns. By the time most of us reach adulthood, describing ourselves through a category is a reflex.

Now I know there is another side to this conversation, and that identity can give people language, recognition and a sense of belonging. My old and good friend Professor Ceri Brown—still feels strange calling her a Professor—has spent her career looking at identity as constructed and negotiated, shifting according to context and relationship. So I don’t want to dismiss what identity offers people.

But…if a child is sorted into a category before they’ve even had a single unsupervised thought about who they are, by the time they reach adulthood, identity can feel less like a choice. Because a label doesn’t stop with describing us—it quickly starts explaining us: why we feel as we do, why certain things have happened to us, where we belong, and how we’re supposed to make sense of any of this.

So for those uninitiated, a Lightworker, broadly, is someone who feels called to bring healing and light into the world. There are many varied and unique experiences that can activate such a calling. But that impulse, towards light, is usually where it begins. What gets built on top of it is another matter entirely. Other identities can arrive this way too, discovered rather than chosen. But few arrive with the same built-in explanation: not just this is what you are, but this is why your life happened as it did, why you’ve always felt different, and what you’re here to do about it. That kind of identity rarely gets much scrutiny, because it doesn’t feel like an identity at all. It feels like a discovery, then a homecoming—like the lights have come on and all those little clues start adding up and the pieces of your life’s puzzle fall into place.

No identity slips in more easily through the side door than one that seems to uncover what was already there—felt, perhaps, but never quite named. And when a label arrives dressed as something sacred, we are less inclined to look closely at what it contains.

It is strange that, for all the attention we now give identity, almost none of that scrutiny follows it into spiritual circles. We’ve grown sharp-eyed about identities elsewhere, but when that same impulse to name and locate ourselves turns all spiritual, it barely registers as an identity at all—quite the opposite.

Gurus, spiritual traditions and thinkers have warned for generations about how easily the human will exchange one identity for another, whenever it’s convenient to do so. So why, despite all that warning, does the same trap keep catching people, again and again, dressed in ever more elaborate spiritual clothing?

Krishnamurti even questioned the idea of a separate “higher self”, suggesting it could be just another construction of thought. His concern was less with the word “higher” itself than with the division it creates: an ordinary, everyday self here, and a superior spiritual self somewhere over there, often above it. Once we create an idealised version of ourselves, we are very likely to start chasing it.

Do hear me, none of this is to dismiss divine presence—for me it’s palpable, and close. What I question is the form many give it: something above the human, looking down, rather than a lived presence within the heart, always in relationship with the human. And in my experience, that relationship is almost the reverse of what we are usually taught. The divine does not ask us to look up to it; rather, it looks up towards the human. It is in awe of us.

The other problem with constructing a superior spiritual self is that it doesn’t free us from identity at all. It simply gives us a new, more perfected one—and because this identity feels more sacred, more special, we can cling to it even more fiercely than the identities that came before. This is one face of spiritual ego: not arrogance in the usual sense, but identity wearing one of its most convincing disguises.

I’ve heard clients say “I so hate my inner child for being so vulnerable”. People do not realise that these are not imaginary aspects—for me, they’re living aspects of our consciousness—and repressing, hating or shaming them just ensures their feelings come out somewhere else.

So it’s a very real possibility that we create deeper splits or fragmentation within. And the parts most in need of compassion and connection to the whole are left forlorn, essentially outside the newly constructed spiritual identity. This has been given a name you might recognise—spiritual bypassing—and one way of seeing this here is how the language of awakening, frequency or transcendence is used to avoid feeling what’s actually still there.

So underneath the spiritual ego, there is something very human. Reaching for “higher” ground can feel much safer than staying with the wounded, frightened, angry, needy or lost parts of ourselves. So while shifting your frequency has enormous value, and readers who do this work will know that already. What counts here is something else: namely if we keep ignoring and avoiding those wounded parts, they tend to show up again anyway—in our feelings, our relationships, or the body itself. But a hierarchy will organise more than our spiritual ideas—it tells us which parts of ourselves we should be more willing to love. Love, the kind that’s actually worth the name, asks for more than that. It asks us to take care of all of it, and of ourselves.

Of course, for many people this kind of splitting is a stage on the way to a deeper experience of living in relationship with the Divine. But we still have to ask whether this detouring process needs to happen at all. If we had a less hierarchical understanding of spirit, the human and the relationship between the two, would we spend years trying to transcend parts of ourselves that were never meant to be left behind?

The Tao Te Ching opens by questioning whether anything can truly be named at all—the Tao that can’t be named—which means that the moment you name something, some part of it is always left out. It’s a problem I recognise in all of this: the name Lightworker like all labels becomes a container, and whatever doesn’t fit inside gets left behind. But underneath the Lightworker, underneath the empath and the starseed, is a presence that embraces our inner child and every aspect of ourselves we have rejected. No edge and no ending, just an infinite presence that no word can ever truly reflect or contain. That’s the part I want to turn to next.