Interdependence in community

We’re deep diving people. Pluto has entered Aquarius (which appears to be a big deal) and Mercury is retrograde, but that aside the moon has also entered its major lunar standstill year and the last two weeks especially have been intense - well since the eclipses in September/October.

And you can expect more as the energy is really ramping up ahead of the peak of this 18.6 year major lunar standstill which takes place in June and July of 2025. This when the moon will rise its lowest in the sky, and up in the Outer Hebrides, for example, the full moon nearest the solstice will only be present for a few hours - the stones of Callanish have been aligned with this so that on the major lunar standstill it appears as if the full moon rolls along the hills.

The last time we experienced the major lunar standstill (which basically means the moon rises and sets the most extreme of the sun, and will be super high at full moon around the winter solstice rising and setting the opposite of the sun, so more northerly and then around the summer solstice it will be very low in the sky, rising and setting most southerly, again the opposite of the sun) was 2006, which funnily enough was the year I set up Beinspired.

In fact it was the year that yoga really exploded into the world. It moved away from being practised in church halls by ladies wearing leotards, into the huge billion dollar industry it is today where commercialism encourages us to invest in expensive mats and yogis clothing to realise our inner nirvana - or not, as the case may be.

In fairness here in Guernsey we are protected a little from what it has become elsewhere in the world, and the pandemic sorted some of it out in any event, because yoga started losing its widespread popularity and yet those committed went deeper - at least this was my experience and with my students too; my student base is vastly different now to how it was pre-pandemic, there is much greater commitment, students are in it for the long term, not just as a fad.

Anyway the point in sharing this, is to highlight that the year that the moon does her major thing, is a year where things are renowned for changing, like significantly, like we take a step forward in our individual and collective evolution, consciousness then. How this manifests remains to be seen, but I do have a sense that increasing numbers of us are called to play our role in making holistic therapies and alternative healing practices more available to the populace to allow greater opportunity for healing.

I am always reminded that we are not in control, that despite our best planning, sometimes things are just not meant for us. I am always reminded too that we don’t create alone - sometimes the universe’s plans for us are indeed very different to our own idea of where our life is going - a reminder not to plan too far ahead (but we do this because we want things known and certain). Ultimately decisions are often made for us if we give them the space, if we don’t restrict their freedom by over planning our life and making it rigid instead.

I have done my fair share of over planning and pushing and of using will power alone through ambition, desire and impatience, but it never quite turns out the way I had hoped, and I then have to unpick what was created, and allow something greater to enter in. Maybe it was always meant to be that way. There is no perfect either and the only way we learn is through our mistakes. This is where forgiveness is helpful. Forgiving ourselves, letting go and moving on.

I don’t feel we know yet where our lives are headed or what it is we should do. Instead our focus might be on knowing what not to do. .Thus we might start asking ourselves, what can we discard? What emotions are we holding onto which can be let go of now? What belief systems are we still buying into which limit us? Which negative thoughts still shape our reality? What are we carrying for others which is not ours to carry?

As I know only too well myself, a degree of honesty is required.

And being present to ourselves.

For me that means being very quiet on my mat and allowing my body’s intelligence to reveal more of the stuckness and holding. It means being in nature as much as I can be so that I can hear more clearly and recognise increasingly that I am part of the whole, not separate from it. It means communing with standing stones and the moon to elevate my perspective.

At times it is scary.

At other times I am filled with deep love and gratitude for this process.

But mainly I am grateful to receive the support of all the wonderful beings, Earthside and Ethereal, who support me, the people, the birds, the plants, the guides, all are there, communing with us, reminding us that we are not alone, that we are part of this whole wonderful dance of creation…and destruction…and creation again.

I have also become increasingly conscious of something that seemed important to me when I set up Beinspired, but without really knowing the reason: the idea of creating a Beinspired community where people could feel safe being themselves without fear of judgment, has always been one of Beinspired’s main intentions, but it is only now, all these years on, 18.6 in fact (ain’t that funny, a whole lunar standstill cycle) that I can see how that has finally manifested (reminding us of the need for patience!) into something rather magical.

I have never loved teaching and giving treatments more than I do now, with such a beautifully dedicated and committed community of clients and students who are truly committed (there’s that word again) to their healing and ongoing spiritual and personal transformation. We have a laugh. It’s fun. We care about each other. Being in community really does enhance each of our healing and transformation in ways I never imagined.

My Mum shared this beautiful quote by Ernest Hemingway this morning, which sums it up well, how a hand can help:

In our darkest moments, we don’t need solutions or advice. What we yearn for is simply human connection—a quiet presence, a gentle touch. These small gestures are the anchors that hold us steady when life feels like too much.

Please don’t try to fix me. Don’t take on my pain or push away my shadows. Just sit beside me as I work through my own inner storms. Be the steady hand I can reach for as I find my way.

My pain is mine to carry, my battles mine to face. But your presence reminds me I’m not alone in this vast, sometimes frightening world. It’s a quiet reminder that I am worthy of love, even when I feel broken.

So, in those dark hours when I lose my way, will you just be here? Not as a rescuer, but as a companion. Hold my hand until the dawn arrives, helping me remember my strength.

Your silent support is the most precious gift you can give. It’s a love that helps me remember who I am, even when I forget.

Then I read the I Ching, and I loved what it said in the translation I use:

“It is the nature of being human that we are dependant in many ways; dependant on water, air and food for nourishment; dependent on shelter for warmth and protection; dependent on each other for family life and friendship. We are also spiritually dependent: when challenges arise, each of us must have some place to turn for guidance and support”.

This is what Beinspired is all about. We are deep diving. It is tough. Endings. For the new beginnings. Emotions are coming up, deeply buried ones too - anger, sadness, grief, the heart is releasing, lightning itself so that more love and compassion can enter instead, the centre is feeling the fear but encouraged to rest more easily into it, not numb or run from it - we are being asked to transform, to let go over and over again without falling into patterns of victimhood or revenge. We are being asked to take responsibility and compassionately find a new way forward, independent and yet dependent, on our own and yet together, interdependence perhaps. It is the paradox of life to be able to hold both sides of tension and allow something else.

Please do reach out if it all gets too much. Know that you are not alone, that we are here at Beinspired to help, that we can be interdependent within community.

And thank you to all of you for taking responsibility, allowing your vulnerability and being part of this magical little community by just being your beautiful selves with warts and all!

Love Emma x

Our yoga practice

I am increasingly aware of the many layers, which accompany our yoga practice, and the need to get quieter and quieter.

I am becoming increasingly conscious too, of the deeper teachings of yoga, and the limitless potential offered by this ancient practice, of the wisdom of the Vedas and the knowledge ‘downloaded’ by the ancient Seers.

This knowledge is tried and tested over thousands of years and I am sometimes astounded at our collective lack of consciousness over this, how we are always trying to reinvent the wheel, how science is placed on a pedestal and yet knows so little in comparison to the ancient keepers of wisdom on this planet.

We each have the opportunity to know ourselves on a much deeper level than the superficial and to experience greater freedom and contentment as a result. So much of our suffering comes from our lack of connection to truth and to self, of feeling confused, isolated, discombobulated, merely because of this lack of deeper relationship to heart, soul and indeed cosmos. So often we are out own worst enemy, at war with our self.

Yoga offers us a sincere path. But it does ask of us something in return. We cannot know yoga by merely reading a book, yoga is a practice and to gain the wisdom, to free us from our suffering, then we must practice. It is the same with Reiki - this too is a spiritual practice and asks us to do exactly that, practice. Ayurveda is no different, reading about it will make little difference until we start to put the wisdom into practice, eating more appropriately to ease imbalances and making changes to our lifestyle.

As far as yoga is concerned - at least if one follows the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras - our practice is anything which takes us towards attainting or remaining in a state of yoga. This state of yoga means that the mind is contained. Or at least more contained than it would be without a practice.

We are required to put in a certain effort. This is not just going to happens we have to put in the hours and have a certain degree of discipline and self regulation.

Furthermore, to really feel the benefits we have to practice for a long time and without interruptions.

We also need to have a positive attitude. This because we can start out with enthusiasm but then it can wane, especially if we come upon against an obstacle such as a mental or emotional block, which can be uncomfortable to work through.

Krishnamacharya always said that we should love our practice - that we should not stop until we reach our goal.

Yoga is real. It is in touch with realism. It helps us to realise our highest potential. This is potential to obtain clarity and stability.

Desikachar used to say that once we have stated on this path, the destination is assured. It is simply a matter of time. It holds open possibility. We can all do this.

Yoga is an extraordinary practice for us ordinary people. It is accessible to everyone, you simply start where you are and keep turning up and tuning in.

I love nothing more than sharing my practice with others and helping them individually where I can. Traditionally yoga was taught one to one for this very reason - so that the practice could be tailored to the needs of the individual, yoga is not one size fits all, we are all different, all at different stages of our journey and require a practice that will help us to grow an d thrive individually.

So practising with a teacher is best, so that we don’t fall into old habits and patterns in the body and mind complex that might limit us and keep us trapped. The body has a habit of following the path of least resistance, the mind too, yet this doesn’t mean that it is healthy for us, sometimes we simply reinforce more of the same and wonder why things are not truly changing.

Yoga is helps to release us from unhelpful conditioning and beliefs but sometimes we need someone to shed a light on these. I am eternally grateful to my teaches for sharing their wisdom with me and the teachings of yoga.

Practicing at home online is better than not practicing at all, but a guide is extremely helpful.

The practice makes the body, breath and mind healthy - but we have to remember that these are just side effects, not really what yoga is for. They help us to stay supple and healthy into late adulthood so that we have more time to work on ourself and sit for extended periods in meditation.

Essentially, yoga is very much a movement from the gross to the subtle. The more we practice, the less distracted we are with the things around us in this world. It is a gradual practice, not a goal focused process.

In fact we have to let go of the conditioning around achievement and our modern definition of success. Yoga is non-competitive, which is also difficult for people as we have bene conditioned by our society and education system to be competitive. We have to be careful not to take our perfectionist tendencies into the spiritual realm.

Saying all that, there is a goal - to realise the self - and we can reach for that, but without grasping.

Happy practising. And on that note, many of you know this already, but I now teach intimate group yoga sessions on Sunday mornings at STYX., just five students in each class, £28 each for the 90 minutes. If you are interested then please ping me an email as I give thought to my schedule in 2025. Meanwhile do feel to join a general class as I try to give people individual attention here too, I do ask for commitment however, and an awareness that I don’t teach exercise yoga.

Love Emma x

I am increasinof the need to become quieter as we go deeper inside ourselves. I am also increasingly conscious of the deeper wisdom contained within the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and how our interpretation can be limited if we are not careful.

That annoying thing called imposter syndrome

I have many talented clients who are keen to offer Reiki or other holistic and trauma-based therapies, teach yoga and/or write books, but let the imposter syndrome get in the way.

This is a syndrome which essentially tells you that you are not good enough to offer whatever it is that you are wanting to offer, that you don’t know enough, aren’t clever enough, expert enough, knowledgeable enough, that you don’t have the right qualifications, that you won’t be able to do a good job, that compares you to others and concludes that there’s too much competition anyway and that you will never be able to make a go of it etc.

But really when it boils down to it, it shows that you just care too much what others think of you and that you don’t recognise your own magnificence.

It also shows that you don’t trust spirit and/or have faith in whatever it was that gifted the idea in the first place.

And that you are Ok about selling out on your heart.

It might also indicate that you have forgotten that we co-create in this life and it is about so much more than you.

We let our ego get involved.

This is the self-depreciating ego which tells us that we are not loveable, or good enough, or enough of this and that, or too much, or whatever other negative self-depreciating inner narrative we repeat over and over again and make manifest in our lives simply because we are always seeking validation of this negativity and embedding it deeper into our psyche and belief system.

If we look for trouble, we will see only trouble.

If we look for love, we will see only love.

If we look for validation of our uselessness, we will see it everywhere.

It is all about perspective.

And we have a choice.

We can keep limiting ourselves with all this negative crap, or we can choose to shift our mentality to something far more positive and expansive and live our best life.

It’s not our fault. We have been conditioned since birth to question ourselves, to doubt ourselves and to be down on ourselves.

We are constantly criticised for not being intelligent enough, or quick enough on the sports field, or arty enough, or musical, or thoughtful enough, or kind enough or polite enough, or not wearing the right clothes, or saying the right thing, or walking down the corridor correctly, or sitting still, or any of the other many, many ways that we are told how to be and judged for behaving differently.

No wonder so many are so tired.

This trying to be what others want us to be and this caring what others think and the hyper vigilance this requires, is really rather exhausting. It creates so much insecurity, anxiety and depression. It causes us to lose our centre, close our hearts and, at times, think we are negatively losing our mind.

Consumerism thrives on this insecurity. It thrives on our externalising of our worth. Of caring too much what others think. People make millions selling products that we are told will help us feel better about ourselves. Even in yoga, it has become all about the building or the mat or the clothes we wear, and this when yoga is absolutely an internal practice.

But that aside, it is crazy isn’t it, to base our self-esteem and sense of self on other people’s fleeting thoughts. Watch your own mind and ask yourself, “what thought will I think next?”, and watch the constant stream of thoughts that appear from the ether in all their randomness. Thoughts come and go. The trouble is we give them far too much energy and believe that they are a concrete representation of reality. They aren’t. So why on earth we care what other people are thinking about us or the opinions they hold one us (which are just thoughts) is quite beyond me.

If we don’t care about our own thoughts - and we really shouldn’t, especially those self depreciating ones, then why on earth should we care about other people’s thoughts? And this to the detriment of our experience and quality of life.

Because when we care too much, it stops us fulfilling our potential, it limits us and it keeps us stuck. And slowly a part of us begins to die, to give up, to feel hopeless, to accept our miserable lot. We close down to excitement and joy, we let our head drop, we drink more wine, eat more junk food, watch more TV, spend more time meaninglessly scrolling through social media, we might manifest illness and we tell ourselves all sorts of stories to justify why we won’t bother trying to move our life forwards and step into our power, share our gifts with the world, just yet.

Sometimes we are scared of failing. Or scared of our potential success.

Somewhere though, we have forgotten that there is a bigger picture.

You see spirit works through us. It wants to co-create with us. It needs us to be the channel and vehicle to bring more heart and soul onto this planet. The trouble is we block this flow by getting in our own way.

We make it all about us, rather than the people who may benefit.

We forget our place in the cosmos.

Maybe I am lucky. I didn’t intend to teach yoga or Reiki or offer Ayurveda. I only signed up for my yoga teacher training course because I wanted to immerse myself in yoga. Together with Reiki it had quite literally saved my life and I wanted to learn all I could about it. I also wanted everyone else on the planet to practice yoga because I knew how much it might help to ease our individual and collective suffering.

It was the same with Reiki. My Reiki Master had to really encourage me along to the first attunement session as I didn’t feel good enough. I was quite sure that the Reiki wouldn't work for me and when I was the only one in the room who didn’t feel a thing during the attunement itself and certainly didn’t see colours or have a sense of energy beings, i concluded that I definitely wasn’t good enough.

But alas a seed was sown and I found myself attending the Level Two training. It was the pendulum dowsing that got me really. I just couldn't believe that it actually worked for me. It was life changing. I slowly started to connect with, and trust, my intuition. It helped that I had by then started receiving spiritual life coaching using Reiki and the Reiki had been working its magic in my life, this to the extent that I wanted everyone else on this planet to benefit.

It was the same with Ayurveda. It felt like magic. I couldn’t quite believe how changing my diet in such an ancient way and taking some medicinal herbs could create such a profound difference in my energy levels and my relationship with myself. The pre-menstrual symptoms which had plagued me for years dissipated. The cysts on my ovaries healed. My disordered eating eased. The overwhelm and accompanying depressive moments abated. I was sleeping better. My digestive system was consistent. I wanted to learn as much as I could. I wanted everyone to try Ayurveda.

And so I ended up teaching yoga and Reiki and becoming an Ayurvedic lifestyle and nutrition consultant simply because I wanted others to experience the benefits for themselves.

I felt as if I had been given these incredibly sacred gifts and the only way I can truly thank the powers that be, is to share these gifts with others. My teachings and sharing then come from a place of deep gratitude.

Not only that, but I realise spirit is just moving through me. I don’t own any of it. Even Beinspired is not mine. It came in at just the right time and it has shaped itself.

The moments when I take myself too seriously, make it all about me, or try in some way to control things, especially Beinspired, is the time it all goes to pot. That I have learned the hard way.

And yes of course, I too have suffered imposter syndrome. Every time I offer something new, I can feel a creeping of anxiety and start questioning my ability and hear myself saying something like, “who do you think you are offering spiritual life coaching, do you really feel you have the qualifications/training/knowledge to help coach others spiritually, and can you honestly charge people for what you are offering?”

I hear those thoughts.

But then I also know that the idea to offer spiritual life coaching was not about me, it was about the people who may benefit from my sharing my passion for yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda, and all the many spiritual practices I have explored these last 20 off years. That is not supposed to sound arrogant, as if I am better than anyone else, I am not. But with all that I offer, it just suddenly comes in as a possibility, I haven’t gone searching for it.

The yoga teacher training course was the first of its kind and arrived on my penultimate day in Byron Bay when I was wondering what to do next with my life, but knowing that I wanted to continue immersing myself in yoga (you can read more about this in Namaste and From Darkness Comes Light). The Reiki came in by encouragement from my Reiki Master. The Ayurvedic training was encouraged by my Ayurvedic doctor. A part of me was cynical - they just want my money. But I know now, as I do this to others, that it is never about the money, it's an intuitive nudge, because you know that other person will benefit - if I have been badgering you to come to class, or do a Reiki attunement or consult with me for Ayurveda, this is the reason, something is telling me that you will benefit!

In many respects I have felt that I have had little choice. My yoga teacher told me to go back to Guernsey and start teaching yoga. My Reiki Master encouraged me to establish Beinspired and start offering Reiki. My Ayurvedic doctor was super keen for me to offer Ayurveda and did all she could to help me. These people are conscious, they have benefitted themselves from these spiritual practices and they also see the bigger picture - that we are co-creating with the divine, we are playing our role in positively shifting the vibration on this planet. We have incarnated at this time in history for this very reason.

So each time I come up against imposter syndrome, I acknowledge it and sit with it. Where is it coming from? What is the fear? And how is my heart feeling?

And as long as it still feels aligned, my heart sings, my intuition is nodding, then I’ll go for it anyway.

I’ll put on my big girl leggings and I’ll face my inner demon.

I’ll trust in whatever it was that gifted me the idea or the nudge in the first place.

I have learned a ton of lessons along the way.

At my first yoga class no one turned up. I went home and cried on my Dad’s shoulder. But I didn’t give up because something was telling me that I just needed to be patient, that Rome was not built in a day, that we all have to start somewhere, that it takes time for people to find their way to you.

And they do.

I have learned to trust in that.

That the right people will find you. That the universe will connect you.

Sure, it helps to advertise, to make people aware you exist. But people will come when the time is right - and for both of you, because it’s a two way process - I learn something from every single client and students who has entered my life.

I have also learned that you can advertise as much as you like, but if you have some resistance within you because you are letting imposter syndrome get in the way then people will not find you because on some level you are blocking them, you are also manifesting the validation you need that you are not good enough so let’s back out now while you can. I have sene this happen lots of times, people make it all about them again.

We have to be careful with our thoughts as they do create our reality. So shift your thoughts. And pray. Pray for assistance. For the most perfect situation for all parties.

I have also learned that we are not in control.

And that we should never base our self worth on external validation such as the number of students in our class or our busy schedule.

Just like we should never look to someone else to make us feel whole.

Or look to love to save us.

Or someone else to make us feel safe.

Or assume we need a community or tribe to feel as if we belong.

Our primary relationship in this lifetime is with ourselves. That much I have learned.

We come in on our own and we will leave on our own. This is the journey of OUR soul.

I know this with absolute certainty.

We can hear the powers that be if we are still enough, quiet enough, gentle enough.

We just need to learn to trust in what we hear, and cultivate greater faith in ourselves and in spirit in the process.

We need to cultivate self-belief. We have to learn to love and accept ourselves. This takes hard work. No one else can do it for us. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, you cannot buy this. Sure others can help you, but only you can really make the inner changes.

We need to switch off and switch in. People love eating energy. Protect your energy. Don’t give it away or let others steal it.

Faith is our protection.

Discernment is our weapon.

I have also learned that we should never have an attachment to outcome. If we do, we will never write that book, or run that course, or offer that treatment.

We do what we do for the love of it, for the sheer joy of the creative process.

We leave others to receive our offering in their own way. We are not responsible for this.

We have to let go of our idea of success or healing or whatever it may be.

We cannot control outcome.

We cannot make someone better if they don’t want to be better.

And we need to remember that we don’t all think and feel the same. So just because we might feel a certain way after say a yoga class or a Reiki treatment, doesn't mean that others will feel similarly. Some may like it, some may not.

And the other lesson I have learned is not to personalise everything. Someone doesn’t come back to yoga. Big deal. That’s their choice. Maybe that one session was all they needed to move them forwards in their life, maybe they can’t get a baby sitter, maybe they have to work late, maybe yoga is just not for them. We don’t need to make up stories that revolve around us, “oh I don’t think they like my style of teaching, oh I am such a rubbish yoga teacher blah blah blah.

Who cares!

Do what you do, offer what you offer, for the sheer love of it.

Stop caring what others think.

And put your energy to loving yourself more instead. Of being your greatest friend.

I have spent thousands of pounds on various trainings, workshops, courses and treatments over the years, but one of my best friend’s gave me the greatest advice for free. He told me to stop caring what others think. No one had ever told me that. Not one single person. or if they did, I didn’t hear them. I started putting this into practice and I couldn’t believe how deep the conditioning around caring what others think. Every time I was triggered, when I traced it back to source, I realised it was always about caring what others thought. I cannot tell you how liberating it has been to work with this and stop caring. It automatically tightens boundaries and helps you value yourself - and - it increases interestingly your compassion not least for self, but for others, because you see how much they suffer by caring too much what others think.

To the extent they don’t live their best life.

And this, to me, is a real tragedy.

So too the fact that they are denying others the benefit of their gifts by not sharing them - it’s like a form of stealing.

If you are reading this, then the chances are that you too have something to share. That you have a passion for yoga or writing or holistic therapies or whatever it may be and that your life has been touched positively to the extent that you would like others to benefit from what you have to share, be that your healing hands, your story or just your ability to listen.

So my advice is to share it. Notice the self-depreciating and limiting thoughts and do it anyway. Dig deep. Find the courage. Trust in whatever it was that gave you the idea. Cultivate faith. Pray for assistance along the way. Please don’t deny others the benefit of whatever gift you are here to share.

If it helps then I am happy to work with you to move you forwards, but remember that I cannot do it for you. You have to do it for yourself.

To help others.

To liberate yourself. Fly free.

To raise the vibration on this planet.

And boy do we need it!

Love Emma x

Setting ourselves free of false ego identity

The moon has gifted many insights this cycle, but the one that has struck me the most is the reminder that we are not broken and don’t need fixing and that we need to shift this mindset if we truly want to thrive and appreciate our true divinity.

I have also been reminded that our mind is our worst enemy and creates our suffering through our forgetfulness that we are neither our thoughts nor our feelings. However, we have this self-depreciating tendency to allow both to run riot, getting caught up in, and stuck, the same mental and emotional patterns over an dover again, and creating our reality from this limited perspective.

We are not our thoughts and we are not our feelings. They come and go. You only have to ask your mind, “what thought is coming next”, to realise that you are not your thoughts. And you are not your feelings, because emotions are simply energy in motion. When we stop their motion and cling onto them, then we stop their flow and mis-identify with them as who we are - “I am sad”, I am depressed”. Not, you’re not! You are merely feeling sadness and depression. But they are not you. It is important to realise this.

Same with your thoughts. Did you know that ego simply means , “What you think you are”. So it’s just your ego that says, “I am fat”, “I am thin”, “I am a victim”, “I am clever’, “I am stupid”, “I am unloveable”, “I am ugly” and every other “I” statement. The collection of these thoughts creates our ego identity, so the ego is nothing more than a raft of self images bound together by your belief in them. Thus the way you identify with yourself is nothing more than fictitious construct, consisting primarily of self-images that exist because of your belief in them and attachment to them.

What is crazy is that each self image is based on a particle moment or moments of past experience that created a mental construct, “a story”, that was taken as static reality. For example, the moment you were praised or punished for something, told you are this or that, you believed it to be so, you bought into the story and by buying into the story, you acquired a self image to add to your forming ego that became a static reality - you believed it so and in believing it so, you made it so.

I have lost count of the number of clients who are stuck in mis-identification, believing they are this or that, usually something negative because of what has happened in their past. Not only does this keep them locked in the past, but it prevents them from expanding because they have limited themselves to the thought, “I am unloveable”, “I am unattractive”, “I am fat”, or whatever it is. The more we keep buying into these false identifications the more we make them so. We believe them into reality and create our own prison bars in the process.

It doesn’t have to be like this! Every moment of every day offers us the opportunity to remove the prison bars and set ourselves free. We choose how we relate to ourselves. I cannot tell you how liberating it is to bat those thoughts away, like they are tennis balls, to challenge every single idea we have about who we are, and to let our feelings flow, see them quite literally as the energy in motion that they are.

Yesterday we had an incidence at the beach where a very important person got annoyed at us for dumping our bags near to her shoes and towel. We’ve spent hours at Fort Grey this summer, hours an hours, and everyone has been really friendly, it’s one of the reason we love it there so much, let alone the opportunity for jumping, kayaking, paddle boarding, rock pooling and just absorbing it’s sacred energy, so it ws quite a surprise. It wasn’t until we got home, E told me that the lady in question, who actually accused us of intentionally leaving our stuff near her stuff to annoy her, is a reputable lawyer on the island, recently returned.

I realised then the reason for her reaction - she has over identified with her job title and believes herself better than everyone else, she has that entitlement that certain occupations encourage. This is not to say she isn’t divine, she is. We are all divine. But her ego has made her believe herself to be better than everyone else. But one day she will retire and what then? What identity will she take on. The lawyer that was? This is the reason so many company directors have heart attacks following retirement - they lose their job title and with that their identity and they no longer wield the same level of power that they did in the organisation.

So we have to be careful. One day we will die and we will become nothing more than dust or compost. There’s this lovely bit in Hamlet, in scene 3 of Act IV, when the King asks Hamlet where the late Polonius is, Hamlet replies, “At supper”. The king, knowing that Polonius is dead, asks Hamlet what he means, to which he curtly gives this riposte:

“Not where he eats, but where ‘a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end…A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of the worm.”

Hamlet is very clever as he skilfully catches the audience off guard with his initial reply, “At supper”. This because we tend to think of the phrase, ‘at supper’ as, as meaning a person eating a meal. However Hamelt is referring to the person being eaten and emphasis with force the upheaval of hierarchies - the fat kind (and the lean beggar) serve the appetites of the imperial worms, “two dishes” end up on “one table”.

I’ve always thoughts this quote really interesting, reminding us that we are essentially all the same, and all part of the whole - of the continual cycle of life and indeed death on planet earth. Also a reminder that we are no better than each other. In death and indeed in life, we are essentially all equal. Admittedly some are more evolved than others, born with different karma and special qualities, but in terms of our treatment of each other, it is only our ego that says we are better, or indeed worse.

Anyway my point in all this, is to remember that we are not the stories we create about ourselves. Which is the reason I have some concerns about our over identification with labels, because we then make it so and again limit ourselves in the process. We over identify with our states of being too and continue to perpetuate the story, buying into victimhood at times, and keeping ourselves stuck.

At some point we have to realise that we are more than our thoughts and feelings and the stories we tell ourselves - or the stories others tell us. We have to remember that other people’s opinions of us - which they share readily with us, especially when we are children - are just thoughts. They are just someone else’s perspective. They are not true. They are not based on a divine reality but on someone’s judgement which is based to their conditioning and way of seeing the world and our place in it.

I have lost track of the number of people who suffer simply because of being told they were lazy at school, or sloppy, or whatever it may be, that they have taken with them into adulthood and believed it to be a truth. Who cares what other people think?!

It’s our conditioning actually that needs shifting. We have layers and layers of it and much of it patriarchal and christianised. This is something else that has really struck me lately. As women especially we talk of being empowered, yet we are still subjected to our conditioning that tells us we can only be empowered if we dig into our masculine energy and do it like the men. We still buy into the idea of power and money equalling success. We still pedestal masculine traits of achievement, outcome, rationality and consistent and linear ways of being in this world over the feminine qualities of empathy, intuition and cyclical ways of being.

We still pedestal science as if this is King. Nothing is believed if it hasn’t been proven by science. Yet science in itself is so limiting. The ancient Rishis knew the workings of this universe and the teachings have been shared for thousands of years. But unless science proves it so then we are not to believe it. Of course science has its place, but our intuition cannot be proven, nor our empathic feelings, but that doesn’t make them any less meaningful or important. We also have this annoying habit of reinventing the wheel and then commodifying it.

We strip the sacred out of everything. We are hell bent on externalising our view of the world. It doesn’t become about your meditation, it becomes about the cushion you are sitting on and the room you are sitting in. Even yoga has become less about recognising our divinity and more about how your body looks in a certain pose. We have to be careful what we buy into. In my day you didn’t need a particular water bottle to remind you to drink water. You drank water from a water fountain when you felt thirsty and I am still here to tell the tale. I’m actually honoured by the many ways we buy into commercialism.

Furthermore, so many women I see are still beholden to feelings of guilt and shame for wanting to step into their sexual energy. This because the christianised concept of purity runs deep in our DNA. We hold ourselves up against values which were forced upon our ancestors. They didn’t have a choice. But were do. We don’t need to keep perpetuating the story that we are good or bad, pure or dirty, virginal or whore, pretty or ugly, success or failure. All this duality kills the soul and keeps us trapped in our ego identity.

We are EVERYTHING. Our spiritual practicer can be anything because everything is essentially a manifestation of the Goddess. One of my friend’s loves playing AirSoft. He takes his spiritual practice seriously. Seeing an AirSoft gun hanging on his wall, someone made the comment, “well that’s not very spiritual is it!”. but actually why is yoga spiritual and playing AirSoft not? What differentiates the two. If they both serve to take us deeper to the truth, and into this present moment where we realise our divinity, then why is one good and the other bad?

It is from this understanding that the Tantric tradition arose. Tantra teaches that even the most mundane actions like washing the dishes and hanging out the washing are opportunities for experiencing the joy which flows from being truly present - of being in full Presence. We don’t limit ourselves then to our spiritual evolution, our recognition of our divinity, arising only on say our yoga mat or meditation cushion. For me this is incredibly liberating, to realise my deeper Self by being immersed in the world, rather than separate from it, of being deeply in the body, not denying it, of feeling pleasure and pain and not making one good and one bad.

The other point here is around evolution. My use of that word is perhaps not helpful as it implies moving outside ourselves and leaning into our existing conditioning that we need to do more/acquire more/fix more/future orientation “to be ……”. We have to remember that we are already perfect in our divinity and that all our spiritual practice is doing, is helping to remove the layers which prevent us from seeing this clearly. Our suffering arises because we have forgotten our own true nature and we buy into our thoughts and feelings as real.

This moon is gifting us the opportunity fort greater freedom by acknowledging all that has been and letting it pass into the ether, loosening our attachment to it. What is done is done. We have all suffered trauma - the trauma of incarnation is felt widely, for example. We have all made senseless decisions at one time or another. We have all held false views and perspective which we have shared with others. We have harmed and been harmed. But at some point we have to let it all go. We have to wipe the slate clean and realise our inherent divinity and allow more of this to shone forth in the world. We are EVERYTHING. Our playing it small, our not loving ourselves, our giving ourselves a hard time is really pointless. We have one life. Let’s live it well - kindly, loving and compassionately.

I could continue, there’s a theme around pain and suffering bubbling through but I will leave you with a quote by Christopher Wallis, a Tantric scholar, which is food for thought on this full moon:

“The great master Abhinava Gupta suggests to us that if you practice from the perspective that you are not good enough as you are, or that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing, then your yoga cannot fulfil its ultimate purpose because it is a practice founded in wrong understanding. It can only go as far as fulfilling the limited purpose that has been conceived by your limited ego-mind. However, if you undertake the practice of Yoga with the right View of yourself, that you are doing yoga to realise and then fully express what is already true, then you have empowered your practice to take you all the way”.

Happy full moon!

Love Emma x

But it is more than that. We have to stop believing all we have been told about ourselves and buying into it as if this is a truth. Our teachers, caregivers, friends, family members, general public, all will have had an opinion about us at one time or another, but it doesn’t make them real or concrete, they are just someone else’s thoughts. Yet our whole life can be based on these thoughts, because we ignorantly take them on as a truth and then make them so - creating our own reality in the process.

My other concern is our over identiifcation with

Why yoga?

Why yoga?

“The success of Yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships.” Desikachar

Yoga firstly helps us to gain clarity and reduce our suffering. Then eventually it helps us to overcome that suffering and realise our true potential.

When we comment on the world being chaotic etc., we are really talking about ourselves. We need to change. It is only when we change ourselves that we change the world. 

Yoga changes our life in a more positive direction. That is the potential it offers ALL of us. 

Although the teachings of yoga are over five thousand years old, they’ve never been needed more than now to bring stability and clarity into our lives and to this Planet. 

The very first sutra of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, is written:

Atha yoga-anuśāsanam

Atha means ‘now ‘and ‘now’ is very significant. 

Yoga is practised NOW. Not tomorrow, not next week, not when we can be bothered. It means yoga is practised in this moment. It means ‘Now I am going to follow the path of yoga, now I am going to follow the teachings’. 

The only reality we have is THE moment as it unfolds.

The past has passed and what we call the future is no more than imagination. The only reality we have is the moment we are in.

I need to start NOW and I need to continue in each moment, breath by breath, movement by movement and moment by moment. Yoga is not something I can pick up and put down. If I really want to enjoy the fruits of yoga, I have to make that commitment to yoga. I have to start now and each moment that follows, I need to be present.

Historically yoga was not practised alone. Any of us who have practised alone will know how easy it is to switch off, for our body to be doing one thing and our mind quite another. There is a lack of presence. The mind is usually caught thinking about the past or planning into the future. A whole thirty minutes can pass. The box for ‘yoga practice’ is ticked, but the effects are much less than when you are practising with a teacher and are encouraged into the body and to the breath.

If a guide takes me over a mountain on a particular known path, then that is going to help me enormously in navigating the mountain. So it is the same with yoga; a teacher can act as a guide in helping me navigate the path. I have two teachers for this very reason, because it would be much more challenging to navigate the path without them. They pull me up when I need pulling up, and provide a point of reference, bringing light when it is otherwise dark.

But a teacher cannot make us commit. We need to find the strength to commit ourselves, not least to a teacher, but to a practice too, we need to trust in the process. 

Practice (abhyāsa) should be anything which takes our mind to a place of stability and clarity, to a state of yoga.

Patanjali qualifies this practice as follows:

• Practise for a long time;

• Practise without interruptions (so don’t take time off from practising, there should be a regular commitment);

• Practise with a positive attitude;

• Practise with enthusiasm.

He stresses that yoga is not going to be a quick fix or an easy journey. It has two main drawbacks in that it requires time and effort. However if you are prepared to put in the time and effort then many things are possible. 

But you have to participate! Yoga – like Reiki – doesn’t just miraculously land on us. These are spiritual PRACTICES, they demand that we practise. Sure, we can read about them and acquire knowledge on them, but it is not until we actually practise that we experience the benefits and come to realise the potential of yoga, and even then, we do this with increasing detachment.

The practice will help us to increasingly let go of things we no longer need - including behaviour patterns, mental conditionings, limiting beliefs and ways of being - which are no longer helpful. These will drop away gradually. This is the benefit of a regular yoga practice. We put in the time and effort but we begin to feel lighter, there is more stability, clarity and joy in our lives.

It helps that the practice will make our body, mind and breath healthy. But at its essence, yoga offers us much more than this – it offers us a way of living, which supports our self -realisation, we are gifted the opportunity to see our eternal self, to literally realise that we are indeed a reflection of the highest power, that we contain the whole universe within ourselves. 

The problem, particularly at the start is that it is very easy to forget the support yoga can give us. It can also be hard work – we are encouraged to look at ourself more truthfully, and release our long held tensions and the accompanying emotions and thoughts, which no longer serve us and cause a loss of wellbeing. 

All you have to do is practice. 

“Practice and all is coming.” Pattabhi Jois 

Certainly my life has changed beyond recognition since I brought yoga into it, 20 years ago now. It is a way of life with a philosophical underpinning, not an exercise regime, albeit it can be met solely on this level. But to be truly changed by yoga, one has to surrender to it and trust in the teachings, which is the reason it is so important to be guided by a teacher, to truly know its essence.

I’m delighted to offer you the opportunity to practice, with a dedicated Yoni Yoga class for women each Tuesday evening starting 9th January, upstairs in St Martin’s Community Centre, 6-7pm. This will be a drop-in class, no need to book, £12 drop-in or buy 5 tokens in advance for £55

This is a gentle and introspective class using Tantric techniques to essentially help you to come home to yourself, to deepen into the loving guidance of your heart and the power and wisdom that comes from the pelvis. This is also a very healing session, incorporating various pranayama (breathing exercises), asana (postures), yantra (visualisation), mudra (hand gestures), mantra (sound) and a yoga nidra (deep guided relaxation/meditation).

The Friday morning Tantra class starts again Friday 5 January from 9.30-10.45am upstairs in St Martin’s Community Centre, £12 drop in and £55 for 5 tokens payable in advance. All welcome, no need to book.

I will be teaching a Monday evening Tantra class from February, 6-7pm, at St Martin’s Community Centre (upstairs).

Jo teaches two Hatha classes a week, please view the calendar below for specific class details.

“Yoga is good for man because the physical body improves, the nervous system improves, the mind improves, the intellect improves—so, how can yoga not be good?” Desikachar

Navigating change

The winds of change are definitely here, we’re at the end of Autumn after all, the Vata time of the year, when the elements of air and ether are at their strongest, ushering greater movement in our lives.

People tell me that they love change but I beg to differ. Even the Yoga Sutras (sutra II.15) tells us that our greatest suffering (dukkha) occurs due to change (parinama).

Sure we love change once it has happened and we can be assured of a happy and positive outcome but the process of change, of moving from one state of being to another, of stepping into the unknown without any guarantee of what might happen next – will we enjoy the new job? Will it work out moving in with our partner? Will we love the new country ? – All of these things can be potentially positive but there is always a moment, always a doubt, a last minute questioning whether we have made the right decision and wouldn’t we be better to maintain the status quo?

This because change brings fear and fear can cause us to resist change.

The mind LOVES certainty. The mind LIKES to ensure safety. The mind will do ALL it can to protect us even if that protection keeps us stuck, scared to make changes and move forward in our lives.

The mind also seeks to find evidence from our PAST to validate its resistance to change, and it LOVES to IMAGINE a FUTURE, usually from a worst case scenario perspective. The mind flip flops frequently between the past and the future and forgets to focus on THIS moment, NOW, when everything is OK. You’re OK aren’t you, right now, reading this?

Our life actually is one of trying to be OK. 

Always we are making decisions based on our motivation to be OK. Sometimes the decisions don’t work out as intended, sometimes our judgment is clouded because we don’t see clearly (Per Yoga Sutra I.6, the first of five activities of the mind is correct perception - sometimes we don’t perceive correctly – the second activity is wrong understanding/mistaken knowledge – we don’t understand correctly). Furthermore we can easily delude ourselves (Avidya, ignorance, appears as a klesha, an affliction of the mind, see Sutra II.3), especially if we are confronted with something scary, like change.

However, life is one of constant change, we cannot avoid it; every day the planet is turning, every day the sun sets farther south or north than it did the day before, every day the moon is in a constant process of movement from full to new and new to full, every day In our own lives we move from morning to midday, wake to sleep, birth to death. Even one second turning into the next brings miniscule (or sometimes huge) changes - we are a different person to the one we were ten years ago and no doubt we will be different in ten years’ time from how we are now. 

The change of any season is a great way to observe ‘change’ at work but especially now in Autumn. Supported by the increase in air and ether (and the resulting wind), the trees drop their leaves and those leaves return to the earth, where they started the first signs of life in the first place. As the trees move from full-life to a state of dormancy and hibernation throughout the winter period, they are preparing to burst into life again in the Spring. If they didn’t do this, the trees would waste valuable energy and nutrients trying to survive in conditions which do not support them.

So it is with us too. In this Autumnal time of year, by its very nature, Vata is all about movement and we are being asked to create movement in our own lives by letting go to create the space (remember Vata is space/ether and air) for the air to blow the new in - think of the heart chakra, represented by the element of air, sometimes we have a change of heart, sometimes something touches our heart and this changes everything. 

Our suffering arises when we resist this process, when we hold on to our leaves when they are ready to drop, when we listen to our head rather than our heart, when we stay stuck in unhealthy relationships, jobs and  friendships, when we keep feeding the same unhelpful and limiting mental patterning (habits, thought processes and behaviours), when we cling on and keep doing what we have always been doing because we THINK we know what’s best when all the time our body is screaming at us to let go and rest. 

How best then can we navigate change?

1. Acceptance is key 🗝

But acceptance can take time. We need to accept that we need to make changes in our lives. Spiritual Life Coaching is really helpful here.

More often than not we know we need to make changes, but we don’t always know what changes to make or how to make them. Often the change that needs to be made is internal, setting ourselves free from our conditioning and habitual thought processes and behaviours, healing old wounds and shifting core and limiting beliefs, letting go of outmoded ways of seeing the world and ourselves, changing perspective, as if awaking for the first time. 

Having someone help and hold space for us while we navigate all of this is incredibly helpful. Worksheets are provided between sessions for us to consider our limiting beliefs, our relationship with our body, our emotional state, our mental patterning, and the option of considering our diet and lifestyle from an Ayurvedic perspective too, as well as being supported by various spiritual practices including yoga and various breathing and relaxation techniques.

If this resonates, if you know you need to make changes but fear is getting in your way then do reach out and we can discuss how Spiritual Life Coaching may help you.

2. Cultivate greater faith 🙏🏽

Faith is the antidote to fear.

There is a wonderful Vedic chant from the Rig Veda called Shraddha Suktam, which is chanted to strengthen faith. The chant contains a verse, “Shraddha devanadhivaste” which translates as faith is our protection -  it really is!

Faith gives us the strength to make changes in our lives, to choose differently, even when there is no certainty of outcome, when we are asked to step into the unknown. 

3. Yoga practice 🧘🏻‍♂️

To cultivate greater faith we might delve deeper into our yoga practice, getting on our mat and taking conscious, comfortable, slow and steady breaths, lengthening into our exhalation, practicing asana (postures) in a steady and comfortable way, taking time to rest, engaging in a Yoga Nidra to work with a Sankalpa (intention) and take us deeper into the body. 

We might also enter into prayer - See Sutra I.23 where we are introduced to the concept of Isvara Pranidhanadva, an ultimate being, God, Universe and later, Sutra II.1 defines Kriya yoga as being the yoga of action with three key components, namely Tapah, which means heat/purification, doing something positive like getting on our mat, Svadhyaya, which means self-reflection, such as reading spiritual texts and seeing how they we can incorporate the teachings into our life and Isvara Pranidhanadva appears again as a reminder to surrender, appreciating the notion that we are not in control, that the world does not revolve around us, thus encouraging us to accept our place in things, that there is something higher.

The Yoga Sutras also reminds us in the first chapter (sutras I.13 and I.14) to develop a steady and balanced practice, which takes place over the long term, without interruptions, with a positive attitude, with enthusiasm and thoroughly if we can expect to see any positive changes.

We are basically reminded that there is no quick fix, that we are in this for the long run, NOT just when things are critical but all the time, so that the challenging times, like when we experience change, do not have to end up putting us into a critical state of mind – practicing regularly reduces our suffering. 

Explore the first three chapters of the Yoga Sutras with Emma, discussing various sutras and considering how they might be relevant to your life. Each session lasts 60 minutes and can be enhanced by a regular yoga and/or Reiki practice to help support general healing and personal and spiritual development. 

4. Spiritual practice 👁

We can expand our spiritual practice beyond our mat, to make all of life an opportunity to cultivate greater faith and help us manage change. We might visit sacred sites, spending time outside in nature, sitting against a tree, taking walks on our own by the sea, reading spiritual books, attending spiritual groups, studying spiritual subjects.

Spiritual Life Coaching can assist in helping you cultivate an authentic and consistent spiritual practice.

5. Reiki 👐🏼

Reiki not only supports our ongoing healing but also promotes our spiritual and personal development. Reiki helps to release energy blocks which will help to free us from the effect of previous trauma and the resulting mental, emotional, physical and energetic patterning that continues to inform our daily life.

In this way, Reiki helps to restore wholeness, positively changing the way we relate to ourselves and others, while increasing our energy and helping us to see our life more clearly. It is extremely helpful through periods of change, when we know something needs to shift, but we don’t quite know how to make it happen.

Becoming attuned to Reiki can also help as you can lay your hands on yourself.

6. Ayurveda 🌿

Staying grounded will help immensely too. Ayurveda offers us many options to help ease anxiety and fear when it arises, eating warming stews, curries and soups, using our hands to consciously prepare food or hands in the earth gardening, massaging our whole body with coconut oil and then lying in a warm bath (adding dead sea salts is really helpful too). 

There are herbal medicines we can take too, albeit these need to be prescribed individually for our specific needs.

7. Positive thinking 🔋

As stipulated in Yoga Sutra II.33, when we find ourselves disturbed and not sure of the best way forward, we can look at it from the other side, so we cultivate looking at things from a different perspective to try to resolve doubt and the lack of clarity. This can be like thinking, ‘well what will happen is I don’t do it versus what will happen if I do’. Or put ourself in another person’s point of view.

Thus if we are stuck in an attitude of fear or resentment, we have to positively cultivate the opposite. This involves working with the mind to see things differently, especially when we are stuck.

At such times we are encouraged to divert attention, reflect on potential consequences, take a step back to ask for advice, practice yoga and in such times seeking help from a teacher is invaluable. Spiritual Life Coaching can help enormously as referenced above. 

8. Loosening the grip 🌏

We take on habits, or a habitual thought process, and at the very beginning it might serve us in some way, keep us safe for example. But after some time, this way of being and living no longer serves us and it is time to let go and change, make new healthier habits or thought processes. The trouble is we humans are very good at grasping and attaching ourselves to there being one way. It is this inflexibility that ends up causing our suffering. 

If we can loosen our grip – aparigraha, the fifth yama or ethical principle/relationship to the world around us as noted in Sutra 11.31 means non-grasping, non-possessiveness, non-attachment – then in theory we can flow more easily moment to moment, adapting to change as it arises, allowing our transformation, and actually arriving in the present moment, experiencing it exactly as it is without needing to react to it.

9. Going with the flow 🌊

Sutra II.3 refers to the ‘kleshas’, the afflictions including attachment/desire (ragas) and aversion/hatred (dvesa) and how we alternate between the two, wanting and rejecting, liking and disliking, and how this causes unsteadiness in the mind.

If we can just let go of our preferences, then we can find greater equanimity. This is particularly relevant if change is forced upon us, sometimes we just need to go with it, let go of our preferences, to be shown that there may be another way – more often than not, redundancy, for example, while a shock, can be a blessing in disguise, presenting new opportunities. 

10. Bach Floral Remedies 🌸

Taking Bach floral remedies, the one for fear (Mimulus) or shock (Star of Bethlehem), or overwhelm (Elm) or the Rescue Remedy to help support generally.

11. Spending time with positive people 🪷

When we are navigating change, it is very helpful to spend time with people who are supportive of this.

More often than not people come from a place of self-service and they can be threatened when we make changes in our life, not least because they fear losing us (and their grip over us), but also because we indirectly encourage them to come out of their potential denial about the state of their life.

Many people like to put their head in the sand and they prefer it is those around them to do the same, so they don’t have to face their reality. 

12. Feeling into it 🫀

It can be really helpful to feel our fear and anxiety as they arise. To understand its root – which is more often than not, around our safety.

Remember FEAR as False Evidence Appearing Real and challenge it – where is the evidence that we will end up homeless, unwell, dead etc?

For more help please do reach out. The more comfortable we can be with the change, the easier it is for us to weather it when it appears in our lives.

Warming, Ayurvedic, vata-balancing recipes:

Yoga practice and our patriarchal conditioning

My last blog was exploring patriarchy and the effect on our conditioning and began to touch on how this might have influenced our approach to yoga, and whether this has been healthy, especially for us women. 

What I mean by that, is whether the style of yoga we practice, whether a trend or not, is harmonising any energetic imbalances, especial from a divine masculine/feminine perspective and helping to set up free from our conditioning and perceived limitations which literally limit us and keep us stuck in more of the same.

My favourite quote of all time as many of you know is by Henry Ford,

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” 

I have become increasingly curious whether repeating the same approach to practice over and over again helps or hinders and whether repeating someone else’s approach to practice – yin or yang - allows us our freedom. 

As I explore this further, I have found it helpful to remind myself of the origins of our modern day approach to yoga and I share a little of this now. Please note that I am not a historian and am relying on information shared with me by my teachers and by what I have read previously. 

It all started with Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (18 November 1888 – 28 February 1989), who was an Indian yoga teacher, Ayurvedic healer and scholar, often called the ‘Father of Modern Yoga’. He is seen as one of the most important gurus of modern yoga for his wide influence on the development of postural yoga. Like Yogendra and Kuvalayananda, he contributed to the revival of hatha yoga because of their emphasis on the physical. 

Krishnamacharya’s students include many of yoga’s most renowned and influential teachers, notably Indra Devi (1899-2002), K Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009), BKS Iyengar (1918-2014), and his own son, TKV Desikachar. As is the traditional way, Krishnamacharya taught each student depending on their individual needs, which is the reason that they each went on to teach quite differently and yet had a massive influence on the yoga that we know today, probably infusing the style of yoga that you yourself practice. 

For example:

Indra Devi – was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, having been the first woman to study under Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside BKS Iyengar and K Pattabhi Jois. She went to India in her twenties (born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia) and became a film star. 

She was invited later to a wedding in Mysore where Krishnamacharya lived and worked, and she asked him if she could study with him but he refused, stating that he did not teach women or foreigners. Indra was disappointed but determined and she approached her friend, the Maharaja, Krishnamacharya’s employer, and he directed Krishnamacharya to instruct her. Krishnamacharya hesitantly took Indra as a student. Apparently, he was strict and difficult with her in the hope that she might quit.

Krishnamacharya ordered Indra to follow a strict vegetarian diet and a difficult daily schedule. To his surprise she showed dedication studying asana and pranayama for eight months alongside Iyengar and Jois.

Krishnamacharya gained increasing respect for her and his son, Desikachar, said later that Indra changed his father’s viewpoint, with Krishnamacharya later saying that “women are the future in yoga and for yoga in the West”.

While Indra started teaching in China, she moved to the US and set up a yoga studio in West Hollywood in 1947, where she taught celebrities including Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson. Here she earned herself the nickname, “first lady of yoga”. Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi “planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s”. 

Michelle also commented that for most of her life, Devi’s only goal was to bring yoga to the West, which certainly has been the case and she played a significant role in helping to make it a predominantly female pursuit, even if the yoga that has become popular is much more vigorous than the style Devi taught – and note that the style she taught, is not the style taught to her by Krishnamacharya, she developed her own style to teach to Westerners.  

K Pattabhi Jois

Krishnamacharya started teaching Jois, an Indian, when he was only 12 years old. At that time he needed a practice that promoted his growth and vitality through his teenage years. Apparently Krishnamacharya researched an ancient text he called the Yoga Korunta in 1924 and he shared this with Jois. He claimed to have learned the text from his own teacher named Rama Mohan Brahmachari on a supposed seven year stay in the Himalayas. The practices included asana (postures), vinyayas (connecting movements), pranayama (breathing exercises), bandhas (core muscular and energetic locks) and drishti (visual focal points). Jois systemised this approach and went on to share it as Ashtanga yoga.

This is the style of yoga that first drew me in. I was very much in my masculine energy, playing competitive sports and working my way up the career ladder, competing with the men for managerial positions, wearing suits to boot and seeking perfection in everything I did. It’s perhaps not surprising that I wasn’t happy, never quite living up to my idea of perfection, suffering from eating disorder, depression, PMS and a strong dislike for myself. 

I was out of balance and yoga was a gift which entered my life at just the right time. While Ashtanga yoga is not inherently competitive, it did allow me to apply my competitive nature to it, because it follows a set sequence and one cannot progress to the next level until all the postures in the first level have been mastered. I was competing with myself as much as I was competing with everyone else in the room. 

I had been taught by my patriarchal conditioning to achieve, to prove myself, to progress in some way into a future where I would be successful, perfect, and finally experience happiness. Obviously this is an illusion but I bought into it and invested in it because I knew no different, and yoga was now offering me another path to this end goal of success, perfection and happiness, just I’d do it on my mat now. Ha.

Not only that but the athletic nature of the practise, with its emphasis on strength and flexibility, came easily to my body, it was used to me working out and pushing it. I loved that I could practice many of the strengthening postures comfortably while others struggled, and that my flexibility could be enhanced by really pushing it – I could quickly see the ‘results’ and it didn’t take me long to establish a dedicated daily practice to further ‘progress’. In reality I was really caught up in my masculine energy and had the shoulders to prove it!

This is not to say that things weren’t changing, they were. Yoga by its very nature changes things. Only that this approach to practice allowed me to bypass a lot of my body issues, making me even more obsessed about the external, feeding my obsession with it, and encouraging more of the same in my mind, increased rigidity and emphasis on a linear ‘progress’ approach, and left me frequently disappointed when I still found that I didn’t really like myself very much, despite my trying to perfect my practice. 

A year into my yoga practice, I ventured to Byron Bay, the yoga capital of Australia at that time to immerse myself in yoga. Here I discovered what was called dynamic yoga, a combination of Ashtanga and Iyengar, which I had not practiced previously.

Iyengar yoga arose from BKS Iyengar, another Indian student of Krishnamacharya, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Iyengar had been very sick as an infant and throughout his childhood he struggled with malaria, TB, typhoid, fever and general malnutrition. Krishnamacharya asked Iyengar to join him in Mysore and improve his health through the practice of yoga postures. During a two year period, while Krishnamacharya only taught Iyengar for about 10-15 days, these teachings had a positive influence on Iyengar and when he was 18 Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune to spread the teachings of yoga. 

Iyengar’s approach to yoga postures is focused on strict alignment principles, this because he was coming at it from a health perspective and was very specific about how a student should place their body to improve their health. This of course, a different approach to Jois, who had arrived to yoga, not through ill health, but with a need for a practice that promoted his vitality during his teenage years. Both of them, Jois and Iyengar, shared the same teacher, but the practices given to them were very different and what they did with those teachings was also very different.

The way they were taught was also different. I won’t go into this now because it’s a whole massive subject all of itself around heart and compassion and the manner in which yoga influences us on that level. From what I gather Krishnamacharya was tough on his students, easily criticising them and especially Iyengar. It is said that Iyengar never really recovered from the criticism he received, and it was not unusual for him to bark at his students and be hard on them too, sometimes slapping them to wake up a part that may have been unconscious. 

Iyengar attracted his students by offering them just what they sought – usually physical stamina and flexibility.  He conducted demonstrations and later, when a scooter accident dislocated his spine, began exploring the use of props to help disabled people practice yoga. Propping in yoga has continued to this day, albeit this is not something that is used in the Ashtanga tradition. Here Jois was renowned for giving intense adjustments taking students beyond their physical and psychological comfort zone that at times caused injury in his students, and now we are aware that he was sexually abusing them too. See, a whole other subject about ethics and morality, for another time perhaps. 

Here in Australia the dynamic yoga classes sought to combine the two approaches, namely the precision of bodily alignment and the focus that this demands, (the perfection one might say) and the movement of the body linked with the breath through set patterns. Both systems promoted strength, stamina, flexibility and balance. 

I was quickly hooked not least because I felt infinitely better for the practice, but simply because of my obsession with perfecting and advancing my yoga practice and here was an approach that not only fed my need for physical workout but also fed my need for perfection, because the strict alignment principles now gave me something to work with – a right way or a wrong way, black or white. This regardless of my body and its needs, or whether putting my body in such a strict shape was healthy for it or not. That didn’t matter, my body needed to fit the pose, not the other way around. 

I was soon practising up to six hours a day with two male teachers mainly, feeding an eating disorder by living on fruit alone (I wanted to have the perfect yoga body, which I believed to be very light and lean) and it is perhaps not surprising that my periods stopped. I was jubilant, no menstruation getting in the way of my practice, but really what it showed was that I was not healthy, feeding my masculine energy, which was out of balance in the first place.

It took me a long time to let go of this approach to yoga which I taught for many years and was well received by my students because they too were often caught in the patriarchal conditioning of exercise, perfection and achievement.

Even when I found my teacher who tried to untrain me and open me up to a more feminine approach to practice, I would still find myself practising in my old masculine way, after our lessons together, because in my mind I had to push and jump around my mat if I hoped to see change. What I failed to realise, was that the greatest change, at least on the inside, would come when I let go of my yoga practice having to be a certain way – the way taught to me mainly by men previously. 

There was one other influential student taught by Krishnamacharya, namely his son, TKV Desikachar, born in Mysore in 1938. Desikachar had a formal education which cumulated in a degree in engineering. However, shortly after beginning his career in this field, he decided to become a yoga teacher after a realisation of the great skills and knowledge that his father was offering.

He asked his father to be his teacher and guide and stayed at his side and learned from him until his death at 100. Desikachar founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai in his father’s honour.

Early in Desikachar’s yoga teaching and studies, his father asked him to teach the famous philosopher, Krishnamurti. This led to him accompanying Krishnamurti on a lecture tour of Europe and began his involvement with Western students, many of whom then committed themselves to 2 to 3 years of practice with him in India. As they in turn returned home, they set out to spread the teachings to a wider western audience with the main message that yoga practice needs to be tailored to suit the individual, more like bespoke tailoring that “off the peg”.

This was very much the approach of his father, Krishnamcharya, who considered every student as "absolutely unique" and incorporated his knowledge of Ayurveda working with his students on a number of levels including adjusting their diet, creating herbal medicines and setting up a series of yoga postures that would be most beneficial. Krishnamacharya particularly stressed the importance of combining breath work (pranayama) with the postures (asanas) of yoga and meditation (dhyana)) to help them heal and reach their goal. 

Furthermore, he believed that the most important aspect of teaching yoga was that the student be "taught according to his or her individual capacity at any given time". Thus, for Krishnamacharya, the path of yoga meant different things for different people, and each person ought to be taught in a manner that he or she understood clearly.

I am now very fortunate to have two wonderful female teachers in my life who very much adopt this approach. I met both ladies by chance – thank you synchronistic nature of the universe - when I was stuck in my dynamic vinyasa practice when my boys were little. That approach to practice had taken me so far, and I am grateful for those teachings, but as I have mentioned, it got to a point where it was merely feeding more of what now needed to be healed and shifted and I absolutely needed to begin to let go of my patriarchal conditioning and find a more feminine approach to practice instead to set me and my students free.

The first to come in was Helen, who is a TSYP teacher, this the Society of Yoga Practitioners who follow the teachings of T Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar. She has taught me Vedic chanting, philosophy, especially the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and asana and pranayama. Her approach has always been about what I most need and while it has been difficult at times, calming and slowing things down, I can now really appreciate the benefits of practicing in a way that is so very different to the dynamic vinyasa approach.

I was also led to Louise who is a Scaravelli-inspired teacher. Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian yogini was taught by both Iyengar and Desikachar as well as being good friends with Krishnamurti. She never wanted a lineage named after her, albeit she does have a following of students who will align with her as Scaravelli-inspired teachers. She developed an interest in the breath, gravity and the spine and her work has influenced the teachings which I receive, on a one to one basis mainly, to give me what I most need. Practicing like this has been life changing, no longer does my body have to fit the pose, the pose finds expression through my body. 

And maybe that is where I was getting to with all this. Because my teaching has inevitably changed in recent years as I have connected with parts of myself that were previously not allowed expression, the parts that I rejected because they didn’t fit my patriarchal conditioning, but which were desperate for my attention. It is in this way that my body has healed and my relationship with my menstrual cycle and what it means to be a woman and my sexuality and creativity have improved exponentially as I have reclaimed more of my feminine energy. 

Not only that but some of my fundamental core beliefs about the world and my place in it have changed as I have progressively let go of some of my conditioning and rigidity of mind, seeing through a little bit more of the illusion in the process. The joy of the Scaravelli-inspired approach to practice is one of energy and working with the body not against it. The joy of the TSYP approach to yoga is one of truly connecting with the breath and allowing more calmness because of it. Both approaches have helped me to let go of the notion of things having to be a certain way on my mat – black or white – which has been increasingly reflected in my life.

There is always more practice to be done, more to learn, and more to let go of in the process, more undoing, resting, being and trusting, but one thing that stands out as I approach 20 years of almost daily practice, is the need to honour our needs and what we most need in any moment, not because it is a trend, or someone has told us so, but because we are being increasingly honest with ourselves and the way we are living our life and what might then need to change. 

As a society it seems to me that we need less power and fast and push and rush and external, and more slow and gentle and inward and letting go and being and accepting and receiving. It’s about wholeness essentially and taking from the practice what enhances this rather than takes away from it. It’s an ongoing journey, an imperfect one at that, but this is the thing, life is perfect simply because of its imperfections and our honesty and authenticity. 

This exploration has been helpful because I can more clearly see why we have gotten to where we have gotten to these days as yoga begins to lose some of its popularity, this because people were sold more of the same – perfection, yoga body and endless calmness, happiness and joy. We have to be realistic. Life is messy and chaotic. We cannot expect a continuous state of being. Even enlightenment comes in flashes. 

Hopefully this sets us free from the patriarchal conditioning of perfection and achievement even on our mat and allows us to be more accepting of each moment as it arises and passes. We are part of a whole. My previous blog post explored this. Always a death leads to a new beginning. To try to maintain a linear approach is merely feeding more of what is out of balance in this world. Honouring our own nature is essential, so too our natural constitution. 

Practising in a way that creates greater harmony, encourages more of our whole is perhaps where the emphasis should be nowadays. This requires discernment and the courage to be true, to sift through our conditioning which runs deep. We have grown up in a patriarchal world and it has affected not only our world view but our relationship with our self and – at times – our choice in our approach to yoga practice. We need to be conscious of the effect our practice has on us. 

Stopping Sea Swimming: How it was beginning to harm me

It might come as a surprise to some of you, but I have stopped regular sea swimming! After 11 years of year-round and virtually daily sea swimming, I have finally acknowledged that my body isn’t happy with it.  I have known for a while, but I kept ignoring my body, because in my head, sea swimming is good -  and it can be, and could be again, but right now, my body has had enough! 

It’s been an interesting journey for me though, to acknowledge that I needed to stop. Even two years ago I started noticing that I didn’t always feel so good after a swim; I mean I felt good because I always enjoy an opportunity to get to the beach and be around the sea, but being in the cold and often rough water in the middle of winter when it was wet and windy, was leaving me feeling cold for a good while afterwards, albeit it ticked a box, ‘swimming done’. 

It was a bout of depression that brought me to swimming in the sea and I found it especially helpful during IVF and two pregnancies, swimming right up until birth - it was actually one of the last things I did before both births, and it was one of the first things I did upon leaving hospital, this after two Caesarean sections. Not that I was able to swim having just had surgery, but I would stand in the water, in mid-November for my first born (with extremely deleted iron levels, more fool me) and October for my second, so that I could be healed by the water and the connection to nature. 

But the stress of the quest to conceive, plus the stress of complications during both pregnancies and birth, let alone the initial shock and stress of motherhood, now with seven years of sleep deprivation and attempting to be all things, has, without doubt,  taken its toll on my adrenal glands (to say nothing of life lived in the 21st century which, by its very nature, keeps many of us stuck in ‘fight or flight mode’). None of this helped by my gung ho attitude to life; I’m not one to sit on the sofa and watch TV, for example. 

A skin condition and aching kidneys – finally - got my attention and has taken me on an inner journey to – finally - recognise and accept the extent of my ‘running on empty’ and the effect of ‘shock’ and ‘stress’ on the body and the manner in which I still, despite years of daily yoga practice, deny my body wisdom. Albeit I had a niggling, it was only when I discovered the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga practice that I started to emerge from my denial and acknowledge more of my body wisdom and listen to it.

My vinyasa yoga practice had served me well. It helped me to connect with my body and my heart and soul again to the extent that I was changed and my life changed too. But I began to notice how it was also keeping me stuck in old patterns that I was keen to let go of and move on from. I was continuously moving my body in the same way, very much focused on achievement under the guise of ‘deepening my practice’. In reality I wasn’t deepening my practice, I was instead stuck in ‘strengthening the same over-strengthened superficial muscles’ that merely fed the ‘fight or flight’ mode and was no longer allowing me to be deeply changed at all. 

It was seeing a psychologist for an eating disorder that really changed things for me. She told me that eating disorder is something you learn to live with. I wasn’t sure about that. I knew that yoga had helped to change me over the years, there had been healing, I had let go of some old patterns and core beliefs that were no longer serving me, so I had a sense that it could – if I allowed it - also help me to heal from a deeply embedded pattern of disordered eating and harmful relationship to body, and underlying feelings of loss of safety and security. 

But I noticed that vinyasa yoga was only taking me so far, and was no longer helping to shift my fundamental and disharmonious relationship with my body. Sure, it had given me a more toned, flexible, strengthened and lighter body, but it had also made me dependent on this way of practising as if to maintain all these things and ultimately control my body, forcing my will upon it. In short, my ‘athletic’ yoga practice was merely fuelling all the bits that still needed healing, not only my harmful relationship to self, but also patterns of disordered eating - it still wasn’t easy for me to ‘rest’ into myself, for example. 

Such was my attachment to this style of practice though, that even when the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga found me (and which I knew immediately was touching me in ways vinyasa hadn’t, because it involved very gentle and slow movement, which was in such contrast to my ‘fast and strong’ vinyasa practice), it took me over a year of weekly practice with my teacher, before I finally let go of the need to also practice vinyasa. 

Until that point, I would practice with my teacher and then practice ‘yoga’ (vinyasa) as I knew it to be, because I didn’t feel that I had ‘exercised’ my body sufficiently in the session with my teacher, and I was concerned I would lose my ability to ‘perform’ postures, and my body would not be as toned or strong etc. (such was my fear). 

I am not alone. The Western world is obsessed about body image and it is no surprise that yoga attracts lots of women with body issues and patterns of disordered eating. Yoga has also become mainstream now, vinyasa yoga especially, like the Coca Cola of the yoga world, to the extent that Adrienne’s online day 3 January ‘challenge’ (is life not challenging enough without making yoga yet another daily challenge) had received 65k viewers in 6 hours of being published! 

On the one hand, this is amazing, because yoga can change our relationship with self so that we start loving and accepting more of ourselves, but has yoga too, become something we do, just because others are doing it and we’re told it’s good for us? Are people now practising yoga as a form of exercise rather than the spiritual practice that it is at heart, are people practicing in a way that is positively changing them, or is it keeping them stuck in their neurosis, mindlessly and mechanically performing postures for the sake of performing postures, without any heart, and fuelling even more of the superficial, yet ticking the box, ‘yoga done’?

A couple of days ago, I bumped into an ex-student who has recently recovered from major back surgery to the extent that she is now able to practice “hard core yoga” again, her words not mine. Hard core yoga! This, when your spine is already held rigid by the mind, such is the stress that has been placed upon it. I got what she meant, she was delighted to be recovered to the extent that she was back to her usual hard core yoga again, but I had to wonder whether it was the hard core yoga that had merely added to the stress on her spine in the first place – sometimes we need to move on. 

Regardless of approach to yoga, do we really want a hard core, do we really want to fix our spine in space and time, reduce its flexibility and ability to allow us to truly feel and move in the world? I wonder why it is that the ‘exercise’ world has become obsessed with this notion that we need a hard core to support our spine, as if we haven’t survived for all these thousands of years without a technique to harden our core.

It seems crazy to me when our core is our soft underbelly, the part of us that digests our life experiences, that feels life moving through us if we let it. The trouble is we have been told we shouldn’t feel, that feelings are not good, especially if they are feelings of anxiety and fear that can often be felt in our centre, so we turn away from them, numb ourselves to them and try to harden ourselves from them instead.

There will be various motivations for wanting a hard core, but I have noticed that the more I’ve softened into my vinyasa-hard core, and let it go, let it soften, the more at ease I have felt within myself and the more honest I have started to be with myself, the less I want to harm myself (by strengthening my core, for example), allowing more of the wisdom of the voice of my core, of my centre, my gut and root, and the wisdom of the voice of the body generally too.

This, for me, was key to my shift from vinyasa yoga to something much softer and compassionate, something that allows more of who we truly are, beyond the superficial, beyond the layers of denial. Vinyasa yoga, as much as I used to love it, hardened me, and I didn’t want to be hardened anymore. I wanted to feel life and I wanted to give yoga the opportunity to truly heal old patterns around eating disorder and my relationship with myself. I also wanted to be more compassionate to myself, less harmful, less imposing, less wilful, less controlling.  

Furthermore, I wanted to listen more deeply, be more honest, drop the act, let go of the denial, and see through more of the illusion. I needed to let yoga change me, but to do so, I finally realised that I needed to change my relationship to yoga; I needed to let go of seeing yoga as a way to control and exercise my body, I needed to step into my vulnerability and soften into all the hard defensive places I had created in my body and kept hardening through the vinyasa practice. In short, I needed to move on. 

The more I dropped into this, the messier it became, and there have been times where I have wanted to give up, but I also know that I can’t. There is no going back, and on the very few occasions that I have attempted a vinyasa practice, it felt mechanical and forced, as if I was trying to contort my body for the sake of contortion. Yes, I could still go into all the same old poses, but to do so in the old way felt soulless and without compassion and heart; I felt as if I was being disrespectful and harmful to my body.

Through this softer approach to practice, I started to see through more of my escape routes and defences. I began to notice the tendency of my mind towards perfection and over-achievement, to the extent that the self-critic was allowed free reign. I was continuously attached to outcome, feeding a pattern of self-inflicted suffering. We can never achieve perfection however much we might try, yet our society and education system continuously feed us this notion that we can so we are always comparing ourselves to something that doesn’t exist. 

Our yoga practice can feed this, the notion that there is a right and wrong, ‘principles’ that we must adhere to if we hope to progress along the path. The more I was asked to let go of all I knew, of all the conditioning from my yoga training, and as difficult as it was, such was my conditioning towards duality and the right/wrong approach, fed beautifully by our education system and emphasis on science, which always tries to dissect, separate, control and make sense of everything (to make certain things certain), the more I was drawn to yogic philosophy for guidance.

Here I was, yet to find anything that tells us that we must practice asana a particular way, with our foot portioned here and our knee positioned there. Yet our modern day yoga will have us thinking otherwise, that there is a right way and a wrong way, and yet this merely feeds our often-out-of-balance-logical-left-brain approach to life. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras suggest that the postures are practiced with a combination of steadiness and ease, and this with a foundation of ahimsa, non-harming. How many modern day yogis can honestly say they practice like this?

So this brings me to sea swimming. What happens on our mat is a reflection of what happens in our life too. The more I became increasingly compassionate to my body and listened, the more I started to notice the subtle ways in which I harm myself under the guise that what I am doing is helpful and healthy.  Furthermore I noticed that as with my yoga practice, sea swimming had become mechanical, rushed, a tick box exercise. 

I started noticing this with others too, which made me curious. Were we truly enjoying our swims in the sea or were we doing it because this is what we did, because we held on to the notion that it was good for us, based on past experience, and because we felt more comfortable in ourselves if we swam, box ticked? 

It doesn’t help that sea swimming has become trendy these days, with doctors even recommending it to depressed patients. But I’m aware that we have to be careful with trends. Look at the boot camp trend that people embraced in their masses until the number of injuries became so great that people began to realise that maybe it wasn’t so good for them after all – it was harming! 

Anything done to excess or anything that stresses our body is not healthy for us, how can it be? But we don’t always listen to our own wisdom because other people tell us that it is good for us and we believe them. Furthermore, in our quest to help ourselves, we have to be mindful that we aren’t doing more harm, creating greater suffering by allowing more of our tendency towards addiction and attachment, feeding our neuroses rather than healing them.  

I finally began to notice how the drive to ease suffering can cause us more suffering if we cling to it, hold onto it, to the extent that we don’t know when to let it go. This was my issue with vinyasa yoga; I knew that something needed to change, but I didn’t realise that it was my practice that needed to change until Scaravelli-inspired yoga appeared in my life and showed me another way.

It was the same too with sea swimming – my body made it clear to me that it was not enjoying swimming, the poor circulation and the fact it took me half a day to warm up after the briefest of dips, let alone the kidney ache in the early hours of each morning - and the more I noticed my resistance to stopping, the more honest I had to be with myself to the extent that I recognised that sea swimming had become yet another attachment, albeit one under the guise of being ‘healthy’. 

This doesn’t mean that I won’t return to swimming in the sea in the future, but for now it is not helpful. My body is happier, less cold, the kidney ache has gone, and my life is not quite so rushed without the need to get to the beach every day, albeit life is always full, such is the way I live it! It’s not been easy though, because of my attachment, but I could no longer ignore the signs that my body was giving me and I had to finally honour it as my patterns around harm have eased. 

Sometimes we need to accept that we’ve changed and what we need has changed too, so that we can let go and move on into something more aligned with where we are in any given moment. This takes courage because we have to be truly honest with ourselves and compassionate too. But we can be sure that there is always a way, a kinder and less harmful way if we allow it; we just have to pay attention and allow more of our deeper body wisdom.