Endings and beginnings: Dreaming a new dream

We are fast approaching the end of 2021 and what a year it’s been! Another year of learning to live with Covid, and another year of significant change for many.

I always had a sense that 2021 was about stepping up and i certainly felt that in my own life. As a friend, I had to step up as my good friend, Marie, died from cancer and try to be there for her and later for her husband and boys. As a Mum, I had to step up when Elijah’s separation anxiety got critical and I fought for his exit from the school system, something that should have happened a long time ago. I had to step up in letting go as my youngest, Eben, settled into the school system and I realised I was holding him back.

Professionally I had to step up too, making some ruthless edits to my new book, From Darkness Comes Light, as well as letting go of The Family Yoga Book (now available on Amazon!), so it could find it’s own way. I aligned with Guernsey Mind too and had to step up my healing work. I stepped up my medicinal plant growing too and have added tinctures to my repertoire. I have also stepped up my Reiki practice and have qualified recently as a Karuna Ki Reiki Master Teacher.

But really none of that matters, not in the grand scheme. Maybe that’s the greatest stepping up of 2021, has been the shift in my perspective of how I see the world and my place in it. I realise that no amount of achieving will ever give me the inner fulfilment that I seek, just as no amount of money will ever replace the gift that is time with my children. In a round about way Covid has been a blessing, not only bringing me back to basics, but back to myself, beyond all the external stuff that seems so important two years ago. This is a changed world and I feel positively changed by it.

I also realise that we are at the end of a big chapter in each of our lives. I knew my chapter was coming to an end with the final proper edit on my book and this ushered in a big heavy heart and a period of grieving for that life now lived. It was time to let it go. Its weight was beginning to exhaust me. But I have never been good at letting go - this is the tendency of those of us who have experienced depression, we lug our past around with us and wonder why its gotten heavy. Those who suffer anxiety and fear are more likely to be future orientated, stressing about some unknown moment ahead.

I knew it was time to let go, that there was no need to keep holding on. I’m grateful for all that I have learned, for all the experiences lived, but it is time now to dream a new dream, whatever that may be. I know I am not alone, many others are also experiencing this dying to what has been and opening up to the possibility of the new coming in. Life is like this, it is one of cycles. As difficult as it has been to witness friends and family members dying this year, I am aware that it is all part of our individual journey as a soul incarnate but also part of the cycle of life, each passing brings new beginnings, whether we like it or not.

This in-between time is always difficult, caught between two worlds. I feel adrift without a future orientation, living now the life I once dreamed and without another one yet clear to me. I have a feeling though, that is is about the Earth. Maybe we will start dreaming the Earths dream of greater harmony and alignment, of co-creation and respect for nature’s inherent wisdom - our own inherent wisdom if only we could access it beyond the noise of the thinking mind and demands of the ego.

The ancient yogis, the ancients themselves, they all knew how to live in harmony with nature and with their own nature too. They saw the sacred in everything, and this was reflected back at them. It’s such a shame that our ways of control and manipulation, of greed and materialism have taken us so far away from our very essence. But times are changing. We are awakening and realising how far we have fallen. We are even beginning to realise that while it is about us individually, it is actually about us collectively. Deep within us, we know there’s another way, a far more heart based and sacred way and we are being called to connect with it.

I have found myself increasingly drawn to spiritual communities, such as Embercombe and Findhorn. Findhorn especially excites me, not least because of it’s amazing growing capacity (the soil is said to be spiritual and ethereal beings assist…) but because it is guided by three simple practices, inner listening to the sacred, co-creation with the intelligence of nature and work as love in action. Their vision is of a radically transformed world embodying the sacred, honouring each other and co-creating wisely and lovingly.

I have a feeling this will underpin my approach to 2022 - embodying more of the sacred, co-creating with others wisely and lovingly and within all this, opening to greater love. I have another feeling that this in turn may lead to a radically transformed way of seeing the world, which will literally change the world, simply because of the changed perspective - if there’s one thing I have learned this year, it is that in freeing our mind from more of its conditioning, the more our perspective shifts and the more we see everything differently, we actually start Seeing!

Thus it’s clear to me that the more we can embody the sacred, the more it guides us and the more we enter into greater harmony with it and the more everything changes. It’s a radical approach in itself. Nothing to do but undo, and nowhere else to be but here now. There’s nothing to achieve. Only a life to be fully embraced, experienced and lived. Easier said than done. Being HERE now is not always easy. I hear myself often wanting to be somewhere else. So this is where the practice is needed. In being in the discomfort of the NOW moment.

On another level I’m grateful to the changes that Elijah’s schooling situation has ushered in as we take a more nature based approach to learning. I’m blessed with some wonderful unschooling friends and their children who see life similarly. This has opened up a whole new way for me, which i am keen to embrace in 2022. Children have screwed over by Covid. It saddens me the manner in which Eben has had to settle into Reception Year at School, let alone the way he had to manage the changes at pre-school. We have let our fear override our compassion at times and I do believe it is time to put children’s wellbeing at the forefront of our hearts and minds. I’m keen to do what I can to support children’s spiritual growth as the year unfolds…I have a few ideas in mind.

But for now, we did our bit, my boys and I today, enjoying more of a NOW experience as nature tends to encourage. We headed out west for sunset and managed a fire in the process, using their new fire strikers (thank you Leo!). Elijah tried to whittle a wand and we had great fun with the stormy seas and casting spells towards it. There was the inevitable fighting as there always is, but there is something about letting boys be boys in nature that is hugely heartening. We were much more present moment. Time lost meaning, just as it usually does at spiritual sites. It certainly lifted our spirits before we turned home to a poorly daddy.

I hope the end of the year is kind to you and you are kind to yourself too. Do away with the new year’s resolutions that set you up for a fall and embrace more of who you are and give yourself a great big hug in the process. 2022 is truly a year for loving more of the Self and letting this energy of acceptance and love, of inner harmony, ripple through the planet and help us to love more of each other in the process. Here’s hoping anyhow!

Love Emma x