Chakra Balancing Crystals

I can barely contain my excitement as my new batch of chakra crystals have arrived! My lovely cousin Yolande has managed to source these for me from reputable buyers, no easy feat right now with Covid-19 affecting mining and distribution.

I’m grateful to Yolande because I have questioned in recent months, the ethics of crystal mining and selling. I love crystals but I’m aware that as their popularity has increased in recent years, there are increasing numbers of people trying to benefit from this, and selling sub-standard products at a high rate. I also question the industry itself, and the manner in which the crystals are being mined.

It all starts to get a bit heavy though and detracts from the joy that crystals can bring. They make such a difference in my life and I am grateful for every one of them. I am hopeful that these crystals will make a difference to other people’s lives too and look forward to sharing them on retreats and Reiki trainings, and ad hoc workshops.

I can highly recommend investing in a chakra lay out so that you can place the relevant crystals on each of your chakras if you are feeling in need of balance. There is a free chakra balancing guided relaxation on my website, it is a bout 10 minutes long and you could listen to this at the same time of lying still with the chakra on you - this is something we do during the Reiki Level Two training. It’s something I do from time to time too. You could use the following:

Root - red jasper

Sacral - Carnelian

Solar Plexus - Yellow aventurine or yellow jasper

Heart - Rose quartz and Green aventurine

Throat - Sodaiite or Blue lace agate

Third eye - Amethyst

Crown - Clear quartz

Anyhow I just wanted to share these crystals with you because just sharing them may spread their joy to you too!

Love xx

Introducing my calendula ointment!

Well here it is, my calendula ointment, and if I’m honest, then I’m proud of myself for it!

Sometimes in life things just happen. Traipsing up to Everest Base Camp as detailed in Namaste was one of those things, so was my water breaking six weeks early while leading a yoga & wellbeing retreat on Herm as detailed in Dancing with the Moon. Not that I’m thinking that my growing pot marigold will lead to me writing and publishing a book but you never know - something things do just happen!

Me seeing Fi’s Facebook post about her organic seeds just happened. Me accepting some of her organic seeds just happened. Me deciding I might grow them on the waxing moon because I thought this might help them grow just happened. Me giving them Reiki also just happened. The seeds growing just happened, and it seemed to happen very quickly.

These were the seeds that germinated before any of the other medicinal plant seeds did, that grew faster than any of the others and demanded the most of my attention and yet I was pleased to tend to them because they were so giving with their cheerful and uplifting energy. These were the plants from whom I learned to transplant into bigger pots and bigger pots and even bigger pots because they just kept on growing!

These are the plants that whispered to me that they needed to go in the ground a few months later and caused me to spend an entire weekend establishing a moon garden on Lammas so I could make sure they were in the ground after this, when the full moon had aded her energy to the prepared soil.

These are the plants that produced the most beautiful yellow and orange flowers which are not only hugely cheerful but calming to the spirit too. I quickly began to love my pot marigolds and have never looked back since; they have been extremely abundant and giving, even now I am still picking the flowers. I struggled with this initially, it seemed such a shame, especially as they attract pollinators, but it is almost as if they like to keep giving more flowers to bloom.

In historic times calendula was used for magical purposes. It was also used by the Romans and Greeks in many rituals and ceremonies, sometimes garlands and crowns were worn that were made from calendula. It is sometimes called ‘Mary’s Gold’ referring to the flowers’ use in early Catholic rituals in some countries. They are considered sacred flowers in India and have been used to decorate the states of Hindu deities since early times, and they were used around the shala at Satsanga Retreat centre in Goa when we were there last year.

They were used for culinary purposes too, both for favour and colour. However it is its long history of medical use throughout the world that has made calendula so popular and continues to make it popular today. It is considered a vulnerary agent, a plant which promotes healing. It has been used internally and externally with above-average results compared to other healing herbs. It has anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial properties. When applied to wounds, calendula prevents microbial growth and does not cause skin tissues to retract, thus providing more oxygen to the skin cells to lessen the healing time - as I discovered on a burn recently. The flowers are high in vitamin C and have been used to improve appetite and increase circulation.

I decided that I would use my flowers to make a calendula ointment that could be applied to skin. I started picking them and drying them on a hanging rack I bought for that purpose in our airing cupboard. Initially I picked all the petals from the flower heads thinking it was just then petals that one would add to any oil but then I read more into the subject and discovered, with much relief as it was rather time consuming, that the whole flower head could be soaked, phew!

I researched oils and while I opted for organic olive oil for my lavender, rosemary and sage, I chose almond oil for the calendula, it just felt the right choice intuitively. I covered the calendula flowers with the oil in a glass jar and placed it on a sunny window sill for three weeks or so and over a waxing moon too. Actually during the latter part of the moon cycle from half moon to full moon, I placed the jar outside so that the oil and flowers could absorb both the moonlight and sunlight directly. I’m ever hopeful that this may have increased its potency and healing properties.

After three weeks or so, I don’t know, just when it felt right, I drained the flowers and was left with this most beautiful orange oil. There was something about its colour and texture, like a form of liquid gold, that made me feel very satisfied and very grateful for the abundance of my beautiful plants.

My mum helped me then to melt organic beeswax into the oil so that I could make it into an ointment. This was exciting! It wasn’t anywhere as near as tricky as I had imagined, and extremely pleasing, I felt like I had actually achieved something, made a dream come true that I hadn’t even recognised was a dream, but there was something in me that was delighted to have made a potentially healing potion. I’m a passionate healer and a little bit Wiccan and I guess it was empowering. I infused each jar with Reiki and of course they were made with love too!

So here it is, my calendula ointment…

It can be used to treat acne, burns, scrapes, nappy rash, scratches, minor abrasions, small cuts, insect bites, recurring skin conditions such as dermatitis and eczema, to ease very rough and dry skin, on cradle cap and dandruff, on haemorrhoids or inflammation of the rectal area, peeling and chapped lips, vaginal yeast infections, conjunctivitis, deep aches, muscle spasms and rheumatism. Ointments keep body heat and water in so it shouldn’t really be used on hot, inflamed and weepy skin conditions.

I’ve used it in a few situations and I know I’m biased but it feels good! It eased some sore skin, it healed a burn quickly, it helped my son’s dermatitis and I used it on a sun burned nose too! I’ve given some to my friends to test on their various skin conditions and am hoping it works for them too.

I don’t have many pots, but if you feel it might help you then let me know. I am selling them for £15 for a 120ml pot.

But really they are invaluable to me, because they brought so much joy and it is difficult to put a cost on that!

Apologies for the slightly amateur photos, not my strongest point!!

Love Emma x

You're not a fraud!

It’s been in the ‘field’ recently, because a number of people have shared with me how they feel a fraud for working in the capacity of Reiki healer or yoga teacher when they are still healing themselves and dealing with their own trauma, insecurities and lack of self-worth.

I have fallen into this trap in the past too, of believing that I had to have all my ‘stuff’ sorted to work in a healing and yogic capacity. I used to put all my yoga teachers up on pedestals, for example, thinking that they had it sorted, that they were wiser and somehow better than me; healed and enlightened. Not that I had any evidence that this was the case, beyond my own perception of what it might mean to be a ‘proper’ yoga teacher and/or Reiki practitioner. 

And this is often the problem that we face; our own minds and what we believe to be right or wrong and our (mis)perceptions and expectations of what a particular ‘role’ in life might look like. Others will feed into this with their perception and expectation of what they think your life should look like too. Many yoga students assume that yoga teachers are vegan-eating, calm and centred semi-enlightened beings. This couldn’t be farther from the truth!

 We are all human and we are all doing the best we can, and those of us yoga teachers and healers are trying to find our way just like everyone else. As E always says, we’re probably more neurotic than most, and it is this, and our own suffering, that has led us to yoga and healing in the first place. More fool anyone for putting themselves on a pedestal and putting out to the world that they are sorted, because it will always catch up on you in the end.

I suppose this had been on my mind, when quite by chance, or not perhaps, I stumbled across reference to Michael Stone on a yoga website a few weeks ago. Michael was a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, Buddhist teacher, author and activist, committed to the integration of traditional teachings with contemporary psychological and philosophical understanding. He hosted sell-out seminars, retreats, conferences and workshops related to Buddhism across Canada and around the world. 

Married with two children and another on the way, he died from a drug overdose in Victoria on Vancouver Island at the age of 42 in 2017. Unbeknown to his students or the outer world, Michael was suffering quietly with bipolar disorder and several months before his death, his mania began to cycle more rapidly. Until that point he had been managing his mental health through Buddhism and yoga for years, but had sought medical help in the months leading up to his death.

A statement at the time of his death said, “He went to bed early. He ate a special diet…He saw naturopaths and herbalists and trainers and therapists. As things worsened, he turned to psychiatry and medication as well. Balancing his meds was ever-changing and precarious”. The statement went on to say that Michael kept his condition private because he “feared the stigma of his diagnosis…[but] he was on the cusp of revealing publicly how shaped he was by bipolar disorder and how he was doing”.

I was shocked when I read all this and felt sad that Michael hadn’t felt he could share his suffering with his students, as if he might be judged, or his sharing might somehow negate his teachings, cause others to question them. His website reads, “Michael was on the cusp of revealing publicly how his life was shaped by bipolar disorder. It was complicated though. As a spiritual teacher for whom so many looked to for stability, he wondered if it was better to hide his own fragility. As a psychotherapist, he was trained to put his own stuff aside in order to work with others. He was also a human who felt—and was allowed to feel—the stigma, shame, and self-consciousness that comes with a mental health diagnosis in a culture that largely doesn’t know how to deal with neurodiversity.”

It is complicated. There is a certain vulnerability that comes with being deeply authentic in this world with all its expectations, and especially when we have such high expectations for ourselves too. As many of you will know I have a history of depression and have been trying to write about it in a manuscript these last few years. The writing has taken me on an inner journey as I have been required to dig deep and resolve those aspects of self that still held an emotional resonance, that were still impacting on my mind, feeding into false perception and continuing to support – in many respects – my suffering.

During lock-down I dropped into a dark night of the soul and the depression felt all too real. It was all part of the process, and was necessary for my writing and own self-healing. A friend asked how it was that I could continue teaching and I remarked that it is in the teaching and the attempt at being there for others that keeps me grounded and helps support my own healing – life continues anon and I want to be a part of that, not hide away from it, because I feel that my life should look a certain way if I am to be a compassionate and effective teacher or human being. 

This is reflected to a point by Michael’s website, which further reads, “Michael loved his students and he loved his work. The practices he shared through workshops, retreats, and writing were a life raft for him. His work inspired and grounded him. As a neurodiverse person living with internal instability, he channelled his challenges and the insights gleaned from his experience into tools that he could share with others. It could be argued that it was in experiencing these challenges that Michael became so effective as a teacher and communicator. For someone facing his kinds of suffering, he did really, really well.”

This raises a very important point, especially for those who are battling with their ‘goodness’ and ability to teach/heal others when they are going through the mill themselves. It is only through our experiences that we grow as conscious human beings, that we gain insight and are en-lightened of the human condition. Let us not forget that we are in this together – we are all connected and are a micro of the macro. Our challenges are here to help us to grow and it is through our compassionate sharing that we can help to support others as they too navigate their challenges; empathy, understanding and compassion are paramount to the healing process.

Authenticity is crucial too. Without this, we are kidding ourselves as much as we are kidding others and we are setting ourselves up for a fall. This also comes with experience, the dropping away of the layers that prevent us from being honest with ourselves and allowing more of our vulnerability. It is a never ending process and demands patience and kindness towards the self. Unfortunately our ‘quick fix’ culture, especially influenced by the allopathic world, does very little to support this, and it is common place to find yoga and Reiki students grasping for the ‘cure’, the course, workshop, training and/or attunement that will suddenly make them whole and fix them.  

It will all help, of course, but it takes time and honesty, getting out of our denial, and the tendency towards self-sabotage and the misperception that we have to have it all sorted otherwise what right do we have to help others – buying into the idea that we are indeed a fraud. It’s tricky territory, because as soon as we start buying into this, we start to give ourselves a hard time and our internal critic reigns as we feed into the negative self-talk and add to the weight of our lack of self-worth, which underpins so much of this.

I went through this not that long ago so write with some degree of experience. Fortunately my healing friend, Jo, pulled me up on it and I am more aware of catching myself now. I have had a skin condition for three years now, which has gotten worse over that time. I have been trying to treat it holistically, mainly through Ayurveda. I can see so clearly why it is there from an Ayurvedic perspective, but have ‘struggled’ (this word is the give-away!) to heal it myself. I felt like a fraud – how can I possibly help others to heal Ayurvedically, when it didn’t appear to be working for me. 

This train of thinking did nothing to ease the bout of depression. I was giving myself a really hard time, to the extent that my spirit flagged and I questioned whether I might continue working in a ‘healing’ capacity. I went to the doctor in the end, which was a big deal for me, because until that point, despite the many lessons I have learned through my experience with conception and birth, I still held onto the notion that allopathic treatment is bad, holistic is good; the mind was buying into the separation and thus creating some inner-disharmony.

The doctor diagnosed peri-oral dermatitis, which was a huge relief, to finally have a diagnosis and something to work with and I wished it hadn’t taken me so long to ‘surrender’ to seeking allopathic help (and having to therefore let go of my notion of right/wrong, good/bad – it amuses me how we create so much of our own suffering through our perceptions). I was prescribed three months’ worth of anti-biotics, which caused me to actually laugh out loud in the doctor’s surgery, because of course I know only too well that what we resist persists - I have been a vocal advocate against antibiotics for a good while now and this was strengthened when I saw for myself the damage they caused when Eben was prescribed them at birth; even now his tummy is still not healed.  

It was a big deal for me to take the tablets, and yet I learned so much about my mind during the experience, that has been helpful. It kickstarted too my research into peri-oral dermatitis, which is of course not straight forward to treat, why would it be, how would I grow if there wasn’t a healing challenge to resolve! The anti-biotics will help to an extent, but will not get to the cause - any skin condition, as I know only too well, is linked to the heart and involves a good look at self-love and the manner in which we self-harm, and it is intrinsically linked to stress too, which is ironic, is it not, for a yoga teacher to be stressed! 

Yet stressed I can be, in my effort to be all things, to live up to my cultural expectation and my own inner drive towards achieving and being of some use and purpose in this world - living life to the full, helping and knowing more of my own mind in the process; in short, becoming conscious. Reading about Michael, it struck me that this might well have underpinned so much of his motivation too and I couldn’t say it better than the words used on his website:

“Considering his practice and teaching, it’s easy to wonder how he could’ve died. We could instead ask, how did he live so well considering the power of his neurodiverse wiring? What can we learn about our own minds and hearts from someone who visited the front lines of the mind? There is an all too common theme in yoga and dharma worlds: if you practice deeply enough, you will heal, and if you don’t heal, your practice or something in you is flawed. This is not true.”

 I agree; I know that those teachers and friends who have inspired me the most, are those that have gone through, and are going through their own mill. These are the people who are doing work on themselves, who embrace the challenges, because it gives them something to work with. Yoga and meditation are practices, they provide us with tools to help us navigate our way through life, they are not the cure in themselves, it is only when we work with them that we might come to heal more of ourselves. So it is the same with Reiki and Ayurveda – we adopt the principles so that they become a part of our life; we live them. 

There are times when we need help from others, when we need counselling or therapy, when we need allopathic medicine. All of these I have called on over the last few years; nine months ago I went through a course of EDMR because the yoga and the Reiki and the Ayurveda had got me so far, unravelled some of the trauma, but I was struggling to let it go and EDMR helped me through this process and I shall be forever grateful to Marni Alexendra for that (life changing) processing.

We should not feel it is a sign of weakness or be shamed by the need to seek professional help or to allow our students to know what we are going through; we are all only human, even those of us teaching yoga. We need to give ourselves a break and allow the break downs to help us to break through whatever is getting in our way. Sometimes we are our own obstacle because we feel we have to look, act or be perceived a particular way. It takes a lot of energy to keep up this pretence and half our problem is letting go of that and this idea of an image that we want to present to the world. 

I am grateful to the depression and also to the peri-oral dermatitis, for both have given me a reason to dig deep and learn more about healing and about myself. My learnings have helped me to be kinder and more compassionate to myself, forgiving and letting go of stubborn unforgiveness and having greater compassion and empathy for others too, so that my experience informs my work and I may share from a place of deeper awareness and integrity.

I suspect the depression will always come and go for it is a messenger that shows me where I need to let go of holding in my mind, of mental constructs which are limiting me and the process of letting go allows me to breakthrough to another level of consciousness so that the world appears brighter, with more potential than I could have ever possible imagined - as if a new world awaits if only I could get out of my own way (depression helps this). As for the peri-oral dermatitis, I’m not quite sure where this is taking me, but I’m flowing with it as best I can and increasingly accepting that we are more than the face we put out to the world! 

To those of you battling with this idea that you have to be whole and healed to do the work you do, give yourself a break: it is your humanness that will inspire others, and allow them to be more of who they are, not your denial of it. The more you can allow your authentic self its expression, with all its messiness and contradictions, the more it gives others permission to awaken and acknowledge those aspects of self that might require attention. It is in our healing that we help others to heal, it is in our growing and expansion that we allow others to grow and expand too. I’m grateful to Michael, for his story has allowed me to own more of my truth - thank you.

Love Emma x

More plants!

I managed to move more plants to our home yesterday, get them in the ground as they requested! They really do talk, its amazing. E thinks I’m crazy, says they are just responding to the gases in my breath when I talk to them, but I believe they have a consciousness and we can tap into that, same with trees.

Here’s the Echinacea, in our front garden, by some lavender that a kind neighbour gave to us. This is good for supporting our immune system and preventing colds and such like.

Here’s the Valerian, good for sleep and relaxing, looking forward to trying that!

Here’s some of my elecampane, got to figure out whether I can fit the rest of it into that space…

I’ve got about 70 pots of St John’s Wort that still need a home. E’s beginning to grow weary of me taking over ‘his’ garden that he’s cultivated from a wild mess of stone and brambles when he bought the property 15 years ago now. It’s incredible the transformation, and what he has found as he has turned the land, it was very much a rubbish dump out the back overlooking the quarry.

My veggie patch has been abundant too this year and we are going to extend this, if we can make the room, we’ve got almost 200 saplings we are nurturing for our Plant A Tree Project, and intend to extend on this the next six months or so. It’s so exciting, I just love the process of growing, my grandparents were tomato growers, my uncle was a rose grower, both my cousins have grown their own produce for many years, more recently my parents too, you can’t escape your nature can you.

Trying not to get too attached…that’s the tricky bit! That’s when the suffering comes, as I am continuously learning; the more attached we come to outcome or expectation, the more our mind craves it and is disappointed if it doesn’t materialise. So let’s just go with it, see what happens, ‘let it be’, that’s my mantra for now.

Love

Some of my medicinal plants!

I am so delighted to finally have the plants in my moon garden, ahead of then next moon cycle next week. We’ve been in Sark and it has been hot and I could almost hear them asking me to get them in the ground as soon as possible…the marshmallow had already started rooting through the pots!

So here they are, the plants en masse…

And here they are individually:

Gypsywort

Woad and wormwood

Mullem and motherwort

Hyssop

Marshmallow

And this is the pot marigold soaking in sweet almond oil awaiting me finding time to make calendula salve infused with moonlight, sunlight and Reiki, oh and some love…

There’s still a significant number of plants in my parents’s greenhouse needing to be planted out, this is next on the list. The airing cupboard is now full of flowers and leaves drying so I can make teas and oils. Here’s some marshmallow and calendula flowers about to go to be dried.

The beams in the kitchen are being used to dry lavender, sage and rosemary to make beautiful oils. Here’s the sage oil on its way:

I love my plants, they actually communicate. I’m so grateful for their abundance and all they give. It’s a learning curve trying to work out what to do and its costing a small fortune in bits and bobs, but I am enjoying making my own potions and feeling the benefit. The bath scrubs I am enjoying the most, especially with the homemade lavender oil, although the sage oil is definitely potent and great for clearing the energy - very calming when applied to the head.

I made some cough medicine for the boys recently using thyme from the garden. It actually worked! I was really excited about this, despite the amount of honey required by the recipe, made me realise how much we can do to help ourselves, it’s just about finding the time!

I’ve got to learn what to do with the St John’s wort as these are flowering…I shall share photos once those are in the ground too!

Happy Friday!

x

Opening to greater intimacy

Dr Christiane Northrup talks about the intrinsic link between the low heart of the sacral chakra and the high heart of the heart chakra. Yoni yoga, a practice I developed inspired by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s womb yoga, is centred on this because it is my experience that this connection and relationship between these two energy centres is very real; when the energy of the low heart is blocked through trauma or abuse then the high heart is also affected.

Those of you who read my book Namaste will know already that I suffered trauma in my sacral chakra in my mid-twenties as a result of a destructive relationship that negatively affected this area of my body. The greatest harm done through was not so much what happened to me physically, although there was a significant energetic imprint, but more so the repression of my experiences and the attached emotions.

There was an encouragement to continue life as normal, to put one of the experiences into the shadows and pretend it hadn’t happened. This approach alone brought with it intense feelings of guilt and shame, let alone confusion that arose because of the conflicting feelings of relief and loss and sadness. This based on a cultural expectation that we must keep going, linear, brave face, everything is fine, I’d learnt from the best, the stiff British upper lip so deeply ingrained.

I went out of my body with the second destructive experience (and yet later I would come to reframe this, as we must with our painful experiences, for they are a treasure, a blessing, an opportunity to learn and awaken), fragmented, tried to pretend it never happened, didn’t mention it to a single person because for all intents and purposes I had forgotten about it and I didn’t know how to process it or make sense of it, and yet it informed who I was to become and defined the level of intimacy that I would allow into my life after then. 

As we know, that which is repressed into the shadows, which we try to ignore, will find a way for expression, will have an impact on our present. It was this relationship, which brought me to my knees, which shut down (I would later realise) my lower heart and my upper heart, and cause me to contemplate taking my own life, and I am writing a manuscript about this at the moment, about the depression that followed, although I had been dipping in and out of depression for a few years before then.

What I have become aware of over the years is the manner in which so many women suffer with the effect of trauma and abuse within the sacral chakra, whether this be from casual sex, rape, non-consensual sex-doing what’s expected in a relationship, unintended pregnancy, termination, miscarriage, challenging pregnancies, internal examinations, birth etc. So much of this goes unsaid, not talked about or given expression. Sometimes the words are difficult to find because there is shame and guilt and worry about being judged, and often the hurt is too much, and the vulnerability too great, and this all impacting on our heart chakra and our ability to love (ourselves especially).

I feel vulnerable even now sharing this, but there is a part of me that is tired of it not being said, and yet there is a part of me that questions boundaries, raising questions about what needs to be voiced and what doesn’t, about how much of my life experience needs to be shared in the quest to help others, and to help myself. It feels sometimes that these things need to be voiced, because it is one thing finding forgiveness and quite another clearing it out from our psyche.

 For many years I suffered with PMS and it was this really, and the depression that accompanied it that led me to yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda and helped me to change my life. The quest was always about healing the PMS, changing my diet and my lifestyle, taking potions and doing energy work. I knew that I had issues in my sacral chakra around relationship with self and with significant others and especially around intimacy, but I didn’t realise the extent to this until it became clearer earlier this year, almost twenty years on from the wounding done. 

There has been signs along the way, a yoga pose practised one day that brought back a memory that literally floored me (fortunately I was on the floor) reminding me and causing me question the nature of the harm, so repressed and hidden was it in my body, yet the body never forgets, more fool us for thinking that we can bypass it. Then there was EMDR that was intended to resolve residual issues surrounding disordered eating and up it came that memory again, central to everything, so that I could no longer ignore it and I recognised that how much of my life had been spent skirting the edges, trying to do the work on myself but ignoring the gem in the middle, in the shadows of the solar plexus.

I did not want to spend the rest of my life denying my femininity yet this scared me because it took me to a deep place inside, and it asked me to step more into my sexuality and my Goddess nature and this in the past had only caused me pain. Yet it was impacting in immeasurable ways in my life, in my relationship with myself, with those I love and with my ability to surrender to those deeper places of sexual and spiritual bliss, simply because of the confusion between pain and pleasure and the residue of those experiences; the energetic imprint and emotional repression that didn’t know how to express itself without me feeling as if I might fall apart or drop into an abyss.

I had spent all those years keeping myself safe by building my armour (albeit unconsciously) and escaping into my spiritual practice, so that I wouldn’t have to feel all those things again. PMS was my body’s way of trying to get my attention, of reminding me of what lay in the shadows, simply because every cycle there was a rage that would come with the pre-menstruation, in that dark phase. Like the dark moon, every month I was taken into that thin void where you have the opportunity to see more of your truth, yet I couldn’t see it because I was so caught up in it and had learned to settle so comfortably into my denial and yet the comfort was killing me.

I don’t suppose I mean killing in the sense that I was dying, although there was some part of me dying inside for recognition, dying to be set free, dying to take me to that deeper place, to the ecstasy that lay below the scar that had grown thick over the wounding, dying to make me surrender into the edges of my awareness, and let go, let go, let go. Always it is about letting go, and this is the toughest thing; to let go we have to let go of something mentally, some attachment, often the attachment to our pain and the victimhood and blame that comes with this.

Unconscious as it was, I held on to my wounds and allowed them to continue to play out; there was my relationship with ahimsa (non-harming) and the harm caused in my quest not to harm (there is always such paradox and contradiction), and there was the trying to make myself invisible and deny my feminine attributes for fear of…I’m not even sure what the fear was, fear of actually being kind to myself, fear of allowing all of myself, fear of falling apart when I let go into all that I am…

Even when I stared to work with menstruation consciousness as a spiritual practice, the darkness was too dark for me to see, or perhaps it was just that I wasn’t ready, because we can only handle so much in our healing, and there are layers and all the hardness of the armour to dissolve and that itself is tricky because we have put it there for a reason and it has a narrative and a story and there is that blame and victimhood already mentioned, and always some stubborn unforgiveness.

 I thought I had dealt with it, and yet I hadn’t even started, it wasn’t that I was spiritually bypassing but most definitely my spiritual practice allowed me to avoid it, and the EMDR took me deep into the wounding, and I felt my energy moving from sacral chakra to heart, but really it was the solar plexus that kept grabbing my attention. Here is where we might hold onto our undigested life experiences, like food that has been undigested by our stomach and small intestines, and it creates problems, not only physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually too. 

By then I hadn’t experienced PMS for years, not really, I had managed to heal much of the harm done by then, at least I had healed some layers. Yet there are always more layers, for we are not linear any more than life is lived in a linear fashion, and healing isn’t linear either, you only have to think of the depth of the chakras and the roundness of the earth, the moon and the sun. The PMS symptoms re-appeared from no-where, grabbing my attention, and this when my ability to surrender to intimacy had already deepened and yet still the body was crying for my attention. 

It’s a process that I now know well and I can be with it more calmly, spot it quicker, settle into with greater ease, make space and create stillness for it after all these years, and people will think me crazy, this obsession with healing, but there is a reason; I want to feel life moving through me, I don’t want my energy to become stagnant, I do not want to invite dis-ease into my being because the energy cannot flow – e-motion is energy in motion. Plus there is a motivation towards opening to spirit and increased consciousness, stepping into the truest of self, oneness and peace then.

I do not want to repress my emotions as my culture has at times demanded and my breasts were getting my attention, telling me that there was still some repression in the heart chakra and I know the link with the sacral – the sacred. I want to be all that I can be in the present, not weighed down by my past, settling for second best, not experiencing the feelings of spiritual bliss that are inherent in all of us if we can allow ourselves the vulnerability that this demands, that I spoke of in my previous blog post when I wrote about Scaravelli-inspired yoga.

It is this really and Ayurveda, Reiki and TM, that has helped to take me to this deeper place, to feel the holding in my sacral chakra and in my heart, so that I cannot ignore the connection between the lower heart and the higher heart. I went outside and I ran to make sense of it, to get in the body, move the energy, out my head, and there was rage that found me screaming into the air, the half-moon above me, dusk settling, bats flying around, and this calmness that held me, and I felt my heart about to burst with the pain of the stubborn unforgiveness.

I battled with it in my head, why could I not forgive? It hurt and I had been harmed by this story of needing to hold on, of the inability to express those old emotions, of denying my most soft and vulnerable parts, and I was angry, angry at being told that this was the way, at being sold a lie, and I wanted those that fed this story to know how much they had harmed me. Yet here was the inability to forgive, the stubbornness, and the realisation that accompanied this; as it always does, that the inability to forgive was now the bit hurting me.

If we hold on to resentment and anger then it is likely it will lead to dis-ease be that of the body or the mind because of the tension it creates and the inability to be at ease within ourselves, peaceful then . I know this and so I asked myself these questions; why did I want to be a victim of this? Why did I want to hold onto blame? Oh the gut wrenching awkwardness and discomfort that comes with knowing you need to let go but the power of the need to hold on. 

This sense of being harmed and being hurt and needing to blame someone else is the cause of so much disharmony in this world. I know this too. Yet still we hold on. I ran some more and I thought about how it might feel to let it go and I played out the scenarios and I knew I had no choice, not really, not if I wanted to set myself free, be free, release the burden from my energy body, find greater ease in my sacral chakra and let go of the pain and the sadness and the heaviness in my heart that was causing me physical sensation. 

I passed an old abreuvoir that had called to me during lockdown but then it had been completely overgrown. Now it has been cleared and I was able to sit in the quiet space, with the trickle of water and the mosquitos that hovered, and I noticed the half-moon shining in on me, and I remember the crystal oracle card that keeps appearing around ‘ancestors’ and I surrendered to them. “Show me the way”, I asked, “you keep calling to me and now I call to you, help me to move on”. 

I ran on some more, and I attempted a half-hearted effort at forgiveness, but I could sense there was still resentment; I’ll forgive you but I need you to know how much it hurt me type approach, which means you’re not quite there in making peace with whatever has happened (for a reason, as part of the need for the soul to experience and come to know itself). I dug deep, it felt so uncomfortable, because I had to let go of the story and all that this meant and then who would I become and what of the story? 

Yet I was done, and I noticed the sky tinged orange and clouds turning red as the sun set deeper below the horizon and the airplane trail moving away into the distance, and the half-moon still there reminding me that the light will shine brighter into the shadows in days to come, that there is nowhere else to hide, not when you have become conscious of what needs to go; and also that there is always duality, black and white, right and wrong, love and hate, and it is only in recognising this and embracing both, seeing that we hold all aspects inside ourselves, killer, pacifist, that we might settle into the peace of the oneness of it all.

I knew I had a choice, airplane flying away from me, it’s path clear and I know I could do the same, I was at the top of donkey hill, the path ahead was clear, I had to let go into it, and as I ran down the hill, I finally found the courage, because I felt held, the earth was calling, and I called back to her and I finally managed to find the words, stuck in my throat for too long now, gave voice to that which needed to be said, to be heard by the earth and I forgave those who needed forgiving and I forgave myself.

At the bottom of the hill is another abreuvoir and I felt called in here, as if these are the portals, the ancient way that we might connect more deeply into all that is, with its mystery and wisdom, that is beyond time, because the past greets the present and creates the future all in one, reminding me of the distance healing symbol in Reiki – no past, no present, no future. 

I sat here and I talked to the ancients, connecting to my root, to the solidity of the earth and I put my hands and wrist joints into the water as if I was letting go into the flow of the water of the sacral chakra, the element of water of the sacral chakra, breathing the air of the heart chakra and the fire in my solar plexus was cooled and there was an ease to the space of the throat, now the words had been spoken, and I smiled and I congratulated myself because that has been a long time coming and I knew then without doubt the connection between the low heart and high heart.

If you are reading this then I suspect you will understand and be tiptoeing in your shadows too, dipping in and out, and knowing that the full moon is due and she is asking us to look at our wounds, and to come to know our cycles as she too cycles through our life and brings with her the light so that we might go deeper to set ourselves freer. I’d also like to share this article with you, I came across it by chance and feel it might be helpful for those also exploring this path - https://www.drnorthrup.com/energetic-breast-and-heart-disease-prevention/

 The morning after the letting go and the forgiveness, and the releasing of the residual tendrils of the repressed emotions and stuck energy, I picked up a nerf gun and I played with my youngest in a way I have never done previously. As I heard his squeals of delight and his laugher as I chased him around the kitchen tablet pretend shooting, his favourite game, I realised that I hadn’t allowed myself to play in a very long time, not really, not properly, I had even killed my own joy (kill-joy) in my mental imprinting of what I considered right and wrong, and the hangover from my past experiences around killing and joy, pleasure and pain. 

I was reminded that we never know what might shift for us when we do the releasing into the deeper places; the idea of being more alive and intimate with the self, will manifest in ways we could never have imagined (often what we resist: playing guns!) and yet those ways will always bring more joy, because our hearts will be more open. It’s not only our ability to feel joy and bliss that becomes positively affected, but also our ability to be in relationship with those we love, and with the earth, and ultimately with our self.

The body never lies; eclipses and shadows

That was quite some eclipse season just passed. Phew. It probably didn’t help (or rather, it massively helped) that it happened to coincide with me holding two Reiki Level One attunement sessions and going through a twenty-one day cleanse.

They say that eclipses shine the light into the shadows and it certainly felt like this for me. The process itself was painful, quite literally as well, but I am always grateful when I come through the other side of it and awaken to patterns that no longer serve me in my life and that I can finally let go.

One pattern was around harm and the harm that we do to the self and the lack of love for the self that might underpin this. I have been exploring this theme since 2019 and it did feel that the understanding of this, the ‘aha’ moment was a long time in coming. But I got there in the end and I cannot tell you the relief to finally be able to acknowledge the love for self, but to know that I am both worthy of it, and deserving; I blogged about this last week.

What is interesting to me though is the way in which our internal dialogue, our thought patterns, especially the negative ones, manifest physically. For a long while now there has been some inner tension around this idea of self-love and I have battled with this more than ever before since having children, simply because this gave me even more of an excuse to give myself a hard time, in all my perceived failings as a mother.

I have found it so difficult to forgive myself for the moments when I may have acted out of anger, let alone the moments when I feel that I may have let my children down in some way, working more than I might do now or putting my needs before their own. My skin reflected this tension; the anger and resentment that I was harbouring towards myself for not being a better parent. Every time I got stressed because of my perceived short comings or because I wasn’t living up to my expectations my skin would get even worse.

 Tied up in this was the idea of the face that I might put out into the world – the face of someone who wanted so desperately to look like she was in control, who didn’t want to show her vulnerability, and yet was floundering underneath the weight of it all. My skin told the true story, the skin is the largest organ in the body and will give your inner game away. The skin is also connected to the heart chakra, because it is through touch that the heart tenderly expresses itself; this is where we feel and touch life, and we learn to truly feel and touch others and to be felt and touched by others too.

It was extremely reassuring to me actually, because I had been getting a touch (no pun intended) frustrated that despite all the dietary changes, all the Ayurvedic medicine, all the inner work, that I was still seemingly incapable of healing my skin. I have no doubt that all of this helped, but it did feel that it took an awfully long time and a lot of inner reflection and finding my way in the dark, to finally get to the point where I understood the root cause of my skin condition. This of course is one of the main benefits of Reiki especially – it helps us to know our own truth and understand the reason for any loss of wellbeing.

I was beside myself with relief therefore, when I finally got it, and quite amazingly my skin began healing. I’m sure there is a way to go, that this is only the beginning, but it has been a few years in coming! Mind you, if I thought things would calm down with this realisation then I was to be disappointed. Because almost immediately after recognising the pattern and the connection with self-love, I started experiencing heart pain. This was on my birthday and I had a feeling it might be connected to the revelation about self-love and this was the ‘felt’ harm coming to the surface. And it may well have been, for there were moments when I felt a stabbing pain as if I did indeed have a knife in my heart – all the stabbing that I have done to my own heart over the years.

But when the pain started shifting and continued on as one day between two and so on, I did start to wonder if it might be another pattern. It was really unpleasant actually. Sometimes there was a pain in my actual heart and other times it was over my energetic heart, and sometimes shifted to the back. I noticed that I was becoming increasingly panicky with it, convinced that I was breathless, and wondering if my days of smoking had finally caught up with me, yet I had this sneaky suspicion that it was purely metaphysical and my pendulum kept confirming this.

I was aware that a full moon lunar eclipse was upon us and I was expecting that the pain might ease once this had passed. But yesterday it was still there, despite daily Reiki on myself and even going for a session with Sue on Friday. Something did not want to release easily! I was teaching a Reiki attunement session yesterday and I hoped that that might pass it through, working as I was through the heart chakra, but alas the course ended and still there was the pain, only now it was increasing in intensity to the extent that I actually googled signs and symptoms of heart attack and contemplated a trip to A&E.

However it suddenly crossed my mind that this was merely anxiety manifest, and funny that, given that I have been writing about anxiety in a manuscript I have been editing. It felt almost that I needed to be reminded how awful this feeling to be able to dig into it consciously and understand what lies underneath it. Back in my twenties, I used to feel anxious, but I was very good at numbing myself from it, by smoking or drinking or starving/binging. By the time I found yoga and Reiki when I was 28, I had managed to do a very good job of actually taking myself out of my body so I didn’t have to feel anything!

What’s happened over the years is that yoga has brought me back into the body, and never more than now with the Scaravelli-inspired approach which takes you deep into your flesh and bones where there is nowhere to hide! Vinyasa yoga absolutely served a purpose but it got to the point where it wasn’t taking me deep enough anymore, it was just skirting the edges, not resting into them and exploring them – it was easy to bypass them.

I’ve noticed then that the more I have dropped into my yoga practice and the more I edit the manuscript I initially wrote over two years now and have been editing and re-writing and setting aside and then picking up again ever since, the more I am asked to go deeper. It is like my soul has demanded it. I had this in my mind, despite my panic and my fear that actually this was nothing to do with metaphysical healing and I needed to get a grip on reality and join the rest of the world and go see a doctor!  

So I kept dipping into the anxiety and sitting with it, as uncomfortable as it was, and as much as I wanted to numb from it, I didn’t, I stayed with it. I had hoped it might pass yesterday evening after working with the moon’s energy with forgiveness and manifesting, but I awoke with the pain this morning and felt rather weary and very sorry for myself. Maybe E was right after all and I needed to go and see the doctor (I had checked my blood pressure a few days ago and it was absolutely normal btw, and my parents weren’t overly concerned, they had a sense it was anxiety too).

A client cancelled a Reiki session at the last minute this morning, no fault of her own, it was divinely guided as it happened because it gave me an extra 90 minutes to myself, which is a complete treat what with having the boys home so much recently as we contemplated the home schooling approach. I locked myself away in the wing as the plumber was in the house finally re-fitting our bath, which some of you will recall has not been in action since March and the week prior to lockdown when we had a flood. I can’t tell you how challenging it has been for a Cancerian like me not to be able to bath daily! 

I felt drawn to listen to a 38 minute Yoga Nidra from the Yoga Nidra Network, this one all about new beginnings, which felt appropriate because this is definitely the message I have been receiving, and I feel this strongly, that we have been asked to let go of patterns and ways of thinking that have been holding us back so that we can begin anew, wipe the slate clean…new beginnings. It is unusual for me to listen to such a long recording, but I just knew I needed to surrender to something! 

As it happened this recording took me deep into the heart so I could sit deeper into the sensation, which felt very real, I wasn’t imagining it. I followed this practice with a yoga sequence, where I was exploring how I might move on my mat without gripping the groins, some of the armour that I have developed over the years as a way of protecting myself from perceived harm. I am always keen to unravel the movement patterns that are stuck – and stick me – in the past.

It is difficult to say what it was or if it was a combination of these practices, the bath going back in, the swim in the sea this morning, a past life awareness, a comment made to me by Eben’s pre-school manger as I dropped him off crying again this morning, or whether it was something I read or someone else said, but I returned to the kitchen after 90 minutes and the chest pain that has plagued my every waking hour since last Tuesday had finally eased, and I felt an incredible sense of relief and peace. 

I emailed a friend and in that email I finally admitted what it was that had been bothering me and the pattern that needed to heard. The chest pain and the anxiety were there to draw my attention to a fear of dying. Not a fear of dying in so much as a fear of me losing my life, I can’t be sure that I am scared of that, I think once you’ve self-harmed and contemplated taking your own life, death doesn’t seem as scary as it might do to others, but I do have a fear of dying and the implications of this for my boys, that scares me, how they might be harmed by it.

I realised then how much of my life since becoming a mum six years ago has been lived with this fear bubbling away in the background. It ties in very well with self-love too, because I suddenly realised how much I have given myself a hard time since becoming a mum if I have done anything which I considered might make me ill, be that working too hard, eating the wrong foods, not exercising enough, drinking too many glasses of wine or whatever it might be. I have felt this enormous pressure too to heal past wounds so that any ingrained negative thinking patterns do not manifest as physical illness through toxicity to the liver or any other part of the body for that matter; cancer or otherwise. 

Imagine the pressure to live up to such high expectations as I have set for myself these last six years! As a healer it has been torturous at times – it’s almost like too much knowledge is a not a good thing – the more I learn about healing and about metaphysical healing, the more I know that our health and wellbeing is a reflection of our thinking. I know this, yet it is the hardest thing in the world to change our thought patterns! For a start we need to become conscious of them, and secondly they are often so ingrained that we identify with them. We literally become our thoughts. So the more negative our thinking, especially out thinking towards ourselves (the inner critic), the more our health will suffer in the long term.

But it’s ironic really, because we can almost give ourselves a harder time when we are aware of this, simply because we think we should know better in the first place – but of course we are only human and we can only ever look at ourselves and our inner world from our current perspective and level of consciousness. It is only in recognising our patterns that we become more conscious and yet somehow we have to recognise them in the first place and so we almost have to fall into the trap first and then find our way out of it – from darkness comes light and all that.

So from the dark it came to light that all of this has been about fear of dying and a loss of safety. I am pretty sure that this is the reason both my boys suffer with separation anxiety, because they will be picking up on my subconscious fears around our collective safety, of something happening to them when they are not with me, and of something happening to me when I am not with them.

It is a loss of safety that is at the root to many of our neuroses. It gets to a point where we have to ask ourselves on what basis have we decided that we feel unsafe. Is it real or perceived? There is nothing to validate that mine is real, it is in my mind, an imagining, a collection of negative thinking. The mind is a powerful thing!

Reflecting over all of this in my mind, I was suddenly very clear the reason I have had such resistance to schooling, not the schooling itself, although I do have some reservations about the education ‘system’ but about leaving my children with people who are not immediate family. This has made me incredibly uncomfortable despite knowing that the people with whom they are left are very lovely people and would never intentionally harm them. But the mind is tricky like I say!

 Needless to say the chest pain has totally gone now, as I knew it would, and my heart feels much lighter and my faith restored, because I was starting to doubt my whole perspective on life and on healing and on knowing thyself. I have also of course noticed other minor patterns that arise from this one and that has been welcomed too. The body doesn’t lie, I know this and wasn’t doubting it as such, but I was beginning to doubt my ability to understand what my body, my soul then, was trying to convey to me through the body.

What I have noticed actually, and what kept me holding off from following up with a health care professional, was that during times like this, when I know something is trying to come through and things need to change, when life feels stuck and dark and stagnant, I start desperately looking for things I can change. I question my career, my home, my relationships, thinking that if I change something on the outside then everything will be OK. 

Yet I know in my heart of hearts that something has to change on the inside if it is true happiness and contentment that we seek, if we truly are committed to a path of awakening and consciousness. It is we who have to change, and the only way we can do this is by letting go of something on the inside, of surrendering our fixed mind, and seeing what reveals itself to us from inside the body where we are living during our time here on planet earth.

I’m grateful to Reiki and to the moon and to yoga and to the eclipses for shining a light into teh shadows and helping us all to wake up to our true selves, to peel away the layers and be less inhibited, limited an restricted by our old patterns and by how life has been lived. Together we can create a brand new future, and one bathed in light, from the heart…we just got to keep being courageous and doing the work to love ourselves; the rest will take care of itself.

Love Emma x

P.S. Pleased, if you do get chest pain and you are not sure it is metaphysical, then please do seek medical advice immediately!

Eating disorder as a journey to the soul

I turned 45 today. I’d been preparing for a while, because it felt like it might be a momentous occasion, a real mid-life moment, something that needed to be acknowledged in some way. I had initially thought we might go to Glastonbury on pilgrimage and swim in the white spring, then I decided I’d go and watch the sunrise at Stonehenge on the solstice and celebrate on my own, early.

 But then Covid arrived and we have come to Sark instead, which has started to feel a little bit like a second home, a spiritual home at that. There is something about the energy here, the combination of the ancient rocks and the wild sea, the space, the peace, the fact that it hasn’t been ruined by modern civilisation or mass tourism that I find uplifting, grounding and profoundly healing.

It allows deep knowing to surface, space between thoughts, a re-prioritising of life and a consideration and rejig of what might be important. It also offers wonderful walking and scrambling, and swimming and cycling, all my favourite things and with my favourite people too. It is a place that touches deep into the heart’s core and transforms things. You cannot help but be changed by time spent here.

I needed this time if truth be told, to step away from the maelstrom of Guernsey, the pressure of the schooling debacle, and the routine, to say nothing of the building repairs being carried out on the cottage, this after the flood right before the beginning of lockdown; how I have missed my bath! Here I get to lay in a bath. I cannot tell you the joy. It is like nothing else. If bathing was a subject, then I’d be giving it my effort for a grade A. 

Life always feels better after a bath. Like sea swimming. I have never once regretted a swim. I’ve never once regretted a trip to Sark either. Although there was a drunken work event back in my twenties, when I ended up staying the night at the last minute, and drinking even more wine than was needed and paying for that the next day, not least with an invoice for the hotel room, but with a sore head. Those days are long gone thankfully. 

However, this has definitely been a year of reflection. When I turned 44, I was aware there were still aspects of my past that needed resolving and I thought that if I don’t do something about this soon, then when will I? My mum had highlighted this to me when she had read the first draft of a manuscript I had written and commented that I wasn’t really in a position to write about how one recovers from an eating disorder, for example, when I clearly hadn’t, not totally. She had a point. But the question is, do you ever truly recover? 

It’s a question that made me curious, and it began a process that has found me exploring how this might still show up in my life.  I developed an eating disorder when I was 17 yet I had never taken professional help to understand the nature of it. It was something I skirted around, the elephant in the room, it went unspoken, and yet I could write about it, which is strange isn’t it, that we can sometimes write publicly about the things we can’t talk about intimately.

Yet it is tied up in intimacy, as is so much of the life that we live in our heads, because intimacy is tricky, as anyone will know, who has tried to explore this. The  process took me into intimacy and into harm, and it shook me around, as I tried to make sense of when and why it had all began, and I started to see themes and patterns in my life even now, so that while, these days, I might eat ‘normally’ (whatever this means), an eating disorder is so much more than food. It’s about our thoughts and our relationship with self and about our mind and our heart, our body, our soul and how we relate to the world.

I did find it depressing when a lady told me, a beautiful lady incidentally, who has some experience of working with people with eating disorders, that it is just something you come to live with. I don’t know about that, it doesn’t settle easily with me. I pull weeds out of my veggie patch so that the veggie plants can thrive. Isn’t it the same with us too, can’t we pull out the weeds from their roots and make our internal earth richer, our inner landscape clearer. The sea goes in and the sea goes out. The moon rises and it sets. Are we so very different? 

 Sure the clouds come and obscure the moon, and the winds whip into a bay, disturbing the calmness of the sea, but their very nature stays the same. Is it not the same with us too? I believe it is and I wondered then, whether it may be a matter of making peace with our own nature, living in harmony with ourselves, with our true self. This I have explored too. You can lose your mind in the process. Some people might think you mad, but I think it makes you feel very alive.

What is life if we do not lose our minds? There’s nothing worse than a fixed mind, believing this or that as if it was a truth, when really a truth is only a perception captured in time, your perception, and this can chop and change, like the sea, like the moon, if you catch it from a dodgy angle, or when you’ve drunk too much wine (which I haven’t done for a long time now, I’m so pleased about that), or you think you see something and yet it’s not really what you thought it was when your eyes focus properly.

So where was I going with this, as we’re going out to see a fat pig, on the farm here on Sark, owned by friends, and the boys love pigs, which always amuses me as they love to eat sausages. They understand the connection too, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. I’m more bothered and I’m not even eating the dead pig, ingesting it’s energy – if you buy into that sort of thing, which I do btw, because we are all energy…

Picking up the thread, OK so I think I thought that my mission might be, by the time I am 45 to have explored and understood more around the subject of harm, because this really is the crux of an eating disorder. I mean let’s face it, you can’t harm yourself much more than depriving yourself of the very thing that might nourish you, namely food, or stuffing your face to the extent that you tax your digestive system and counter any potential for nourishment.

It’s a really cruel and nasty state of mind to find yourself in. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s very difficult to be satisfied by life when you don’t allow yourself to be satisfied by food, when the very thing that night nourish you is turned into a weapon by your mind. It’s very difficult to suddenly switch the mind away from that, especially if it has become an ingrained pattern over a long time, and it often is with an eating disorder because it is very difficult to treat – even the ‘experts’ don’t really know how to treat it, at best they might help you manage it.

But I didn’t just want to manage it. I tried that for years and it was a daily consideration, because every day you have to eat. Not that it’s even about the eating, it’s about everything else, and I suppose this is the point that I have been trying to make. It is about allowing yourself to be satisfied by life, of feeling that you deserve to be nourished and loved and cared for by yourself as much as by anyone else, by life then! It is about all these wonderful things, but ultimately it is about love and it is about intimacy, and it is about being deeply honest and truly forgiving and compassionate. 

I have learned a lot this year and I’m proud of myself actually, I congratulate myself, because it has not been easy. There have been dark nights of the soul, as you know, and not because I’m losing my mind, going mad, oh cripes is there something wrong with her sort of thing, but because I don’t want to be continuously limited by my past, and by the patterns I have developed to help me feel safe, that are actually no longer – and never were if truth be told, but you’ll have to wait for the book to read more about that – useful or helpful, that are anything but that.

Accepting and loving the self is not something that happens over-night, you’ll know that if you are reading this. You’ll know because we all have moments of questioning our worth, when we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror and wish we hadn’t and then quickly find something to distract us from ourselves so that we don’t need to go any deeper, get busy, busier, drink more wine, do more yoga, always doing, rushing, being somewhere other than exactly here right now looking at ourselves honestly in that mirror.

Those of you with eating disorders will know this more than most. It is not easy to recover, to find your feet again, to mend your heart (for it is the greatest wounding to the heart, to harm yourself in this manner), to be able to look at your reflection and love what you see, to be compassionate to yourself, respect, love, cherish your body (so conditioned are you to push it, starve it, abuse it, try to change it, control it), to nourish, care for and be at peace, to put yourself and your needs first, to listen and be heard.

But it is possible, bit by bit. I know this because I have had to face my demons. I had a choice. Last year, the year before and every year before that too. My birthdays came and highlighted to me my ongoing issues and neuroses. Birthdays do this. It is as if a portal opens for us so that we may see more clearly. What used to happen though, was I’d ignore it, because it was too painful to acknowledge that another year had passed and I was still carrying this burden. I’d drink wine. At birthdays you drink wine. It was the perfect excuse to pop my head in the sand and just hope that things might change by the next year.

The trouble is that we don’t change unless we do the changing. Unless something shifts. Unless we look honestly at ourselves and do what is needed, lose our mind usually, because it is only in losing our mind that we can find a new way to be, in the unknown that is not fixed by what has happened previously. The mind is a terribly powerful thing. Ask anyone who has experienced an eating disorder. They will tell you. The mind is truly fascinating, ingenious and beautiful and yet at times extremely disconcerting. Thank god for the heart! The heart keeps me sane. So does faith. 

Two years ago all my birthday cards seemed to be about yoga and drinking wine. The yoga was fab but the drinking wine made me uncomfortable, and I was aware that I wanted this to change. It’s a silly thing to notice, but do notice the birthday cards that you are sent, they speak volumes about where you are at in your life. I was stuck and I needed to go a bit deeper, to stop skirting on the edges, not really getting into the centre. Yet I didn’t know then what to do or where to turn, because on the surface life was great, I was writing books, teaching yoga, living the dream. 

Last year, my birthday was uneventful to the extent that I don’t remember it, I had to look at photos to remind myself, and yet I knew that I liked turning 44, that there was something about the number, and 4 my lucky number, so double luck and I suppose there was a sense that I had to get on with it now. You get moments like that, where you’ve been coasting along, you know there’s stuff there in the background, but you can ignore it, you’ve gotten used to ignoring it. But then all of a sudden you just think no. There’s a line in the sand. 

You can keep on keeping on, pretending that everything is OK, or you can dive right in. In moments like that, when I suddenly become aware of something that needs healing, there is no choice. I don’t want to live a half lived life, denying my potential, too fearful to make the changes that might need to be made, too scared to feel what needs to be felt. I’ve spent too many birthdays in tears, a combination of overwhelm and just because they’ve never felt quite right, a reminder that I still hadn’t quite found that place inside me where I might feel satisfied, deserving, and OK with everything. The inner critic was always just a little bit too loud. 

Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion”, and she is right. This year I have been attentive. Really attentive. The Scaravelli-inspired yoga has helped this, it is all about being attentive, and about devotion. It is through attention that we come to notice all that we had previously ignored, because there is nowhere else to turn, not when we have taken the step inwards, towards the heart. We are all heart, we know this.

Some will argue that we are the breath, because the breath gives life, yet without the heart, there is no breath. IVF allowed me to see this. At six weeks gestation, both my boys were visible on the screen as beating hearts. Beating hearts! They were alive and yet there was no breath. Not directly. This would follow when the heart was ready for expression in the outer world. Did they choose? I still don’t know about that. There is always mystery, this is what feeds our soul. 

I didn’t know how it might be today either. I found myself in tears on my mat yesterday, they seemed to come from nowhere but I wonder if it might have been apprehension, ahead of the big day. I bumped into someone I know from back home, not well, but we had this intimate conversation about home schooling in a very short period of time, on our bikes, along a grass track, our respective partner’s chatting, our children remarkably quiet, and she confessed to crying that day too, in the Avenue. Albeit she is five months pregnant so has an excuse!

But today was the most wonderful day. I felt I deserved it and I felt satisfied by it. I allowed myself to receive all that was offered. I did not get overwhelmed or upset and I didn’t drink wine or in any way numb out. I awoke with Eben’s head pressed to mine and when I reminded him it was by birthday (given he is three, I didn’t expect him to remember!), he excitedly told me of the gifts that were waiting, “the most beautiful Buddha, beautiful crystals and gardening gloves”. I couldn’t help but laugh. He opened my presents anyway and yes, there they were, all chosen by him.

I got to meditate, to drink tea, open my cards, take it easy, before we scrambled across rocks and swam naked in the Venus Pool, a first! We visited the Sark dolmen and Eben learned how to use my pendulum. We cycled and walked, and we swam some more at La Grande Greve, also a first. We ate fresh Sark eggs, homemade chips, and local salad with roasted pumpkin seeds, we drank tea and ate Caragh’s amazing dark praline chocolate, and we got wet in the rain. 

I wrote until my heart was content and I didn’t feel guilty one bit. We visited our friends and their huge pig and I sat in a tractor. I went to a yoga class, I can’t tell you the joy, and I lay in a bath and read my book. I did all these wonderful things that nourished and satisfied me and it felt great. The inner critic was quiet. I cannot tell you the relief.

That part of me that doesn’t self-congratulate easily, that holds back for fear of being judged for being egotistical or big headed, well that part of me is coming out of the shadows, because it is needed, it is so very much needed. I congratulate myself, because it has not been easy, but I know now that it is OK to feel satisfied and deserving. 

It is OK to express our needs and allow ourselves to receive what is needed. It is OK to damage our hearts as long as you find ways to heal it. Then it is OK to let go of the need to keep fixing, because we can get lost here too, playing out the old themes about not being good enough or worthy enough and forgetting that we’ve moved on and all we’re doing is keeping ourselves stuck in the past. Heal and move on. I know that now too. 

It is OK to feel proud of ourselves, to accept ourselves, to love ourselves. And I do, honestly I do. I couldn’t have told you that before. I would have cared too much about what you might have thought and not enough about me, packaging my poor little heart away in a box, whispering, “maybe next year you can come out and shine”. But now is the time. I hear you beautiful heart. And I rejoice in me and my life and my soul. And I hope you rejoice in all that is yours too. 

Stuff happens to us in our lives. We harm ourselves in many ways. I harmed myself with an eating disorder for many years and it would be foolish to pretend that that life is ever the same after an eating disorder comes in, but in many respects it can be reframed as a blessing, as something positive, as it might take you on a journey to the deepest parts of yourself, that you might never have otherwise known. It’s like depression, but more on that another time.

Losing our mind is only the very beginning, and it’s worth beginning, because a mind lost is a heart gained, and really, it can only ever be about love. It is a pilgrimage all of its own, to our soul, to the deepest part of ourselves that can spend a lifetime being unknown, yet with devotion to the self, we can find a depth that we didn’t know possible. This is a continuous exploration, one that I truly believe, is worth making; an act of devotion.

xxx

P.S. My cards this year were about the moon and flowers, goddesses and living your dreams…