Emma's yummy flapjack recipe

Many of you have asked for this recipe, having sampled a yummy flapjack at one of the attunement sessions.

These are especially great for children, supporting them during the kapha stage in their lives, when they need good solid food, but also for any of you needing some grounding.

Recipe

Ingredients

300g of dairy-free marg

200g of organic coconut sugar/demerara sugar

300g organic oats

100g organic desiccated coconut (optional)

50g organic cocoa powder 

Extras: You could add nuts, seeds and dried fruit. You can also make without the cocoa. 

Method

1. Melt marg in a saucepan and add the sugar into the melty liquid goodness

2. Mix oats, desiccated coconut and cocoa powder in a large bowl

3. Add melty liquid goodness and mix again into even more of a chocolate melty goodness!

4. Oil a baking tray and pack the mixture into it, and pop into a pre-heated oven at 160 degrees for 15 minutes. Leave to completely cool before cutting into bits and enjoying!

Calming Green Soup from The Medicinal Chef

Delicious vegetable soup from Dale Pinnock’s recipe book The Medicinal Chef.

This simple soup is not only an awesome colour, but also has a naturally sweet flavour and a wonderfully smooth texture. Serves 3 - 4

INGREDIENTS

• olive oil for cooking and drizzling

• 1 white onion, finely chopped

• 1 garlic clove, finely chopped

• 350g fresh or frozen peas

• 1 large courgette, coarsely chopped

• 1 large potato, roughly diced, skin left on

• 500ml vegetable stock (from stock cubes or bouillon powder)

• 1 x 180g bag baby spinach

• small bunch fresh mint leaves

• sea salt and black pepper

METHOD

Heat a little olive oil in a large pan, add the onion and garlic and cook for 4 - 5 minutes or until softened.

Add the peas, courgette and potato, and enough vegetable stock to just cover all the ingredients. Simmer until the potato has softened - about 10-15 minutes

Add the baby spinach a handful at a time, until it has all wilted into the hot soup. Add the mint leaves, setting aside a few small ones

Season with salt and pepper. Transfer in batches to a jug blender and process to a smooth soup. Scatter with the reserved mint leaves and drizzle with a little olive oil to serve.

Tell me about Ayurveda

Over 5,000 years old, Ayurveda is the most ancient and authentically recorded health system in history. It was created by yogis who spent their lives studying nature and the human condition.  Meaning ‘the science of life’ it is exactly that, viewing health in four dimensions of physical, sensory, mental and spiritual and is centred on preventative medicine and bringing a person back to balance.  

Energy plays an important role in our lives. We need energy and vitality to be able to live our life in a healthy and harmonious way. We get energy from nature through the sun and other natural elements. Ayurveda believes that there are primary functional energies in our bodies that are aligned with the elements of nature. These three forces of energies are known as the doshas in Ayurveda and include  vata, pitta and kapha. The entire system of Ayurvedic healing is directly related to these three doshas.

There are understood to be five elements in nature - earth, air, water, fire and space/ether - which are contained within the three doshas. Vata comprises air and ether, pitta comprises fire and water, and kapha comprises water and earth. Our biological existence is a dance of the three doshas and life is a multi-coloured tapestry of their movement in various plays of balance and imbalance, coming together and going apart. These three powers colour and determine our conditions of growth and aging, health and disease. 

Essentially the doshas impact on us on two primary levels.  Firstly, they are the factors that produce the physical body and are responsible for its substance and its function, for example our tissues are mainly kapha or watery in nature, the digestive system is mainly pitta or fire and the nervous system is mainly vata or air. Secondly, one of the three doshas predominates in each individual and becomes the basic determinate of his or her particular constitution or mind-body type. 

However the word ‘dosha’ (which is Sanskrit) translates as a fault or a blemish and indicates the factors that bring about disease and decay and where we are therefore out of balance. Ayurveda will therefore seek to establish the dosha, or imbalance and treat to that, thereby allowing more of the natural constitution to reveal itself. In this way Ayurveda seeks to discover the causative factor for loss of wellbeing and will focus initially on restoring digestive function as this is believed to be the seat of all imbalances and disease.

Healthy digestion is therefore fundamental to wellness in Ayurveda and to establishing strong immunity, an open and loving heart and a peaceful and calm mind. If the digestive system is out of balanced,  the digestive fire is not functioning properly, then this will create a loss of physical and mental wellbeing which will negatively impact on the immune function, let alone the mental state of an individual and their experience of themselves and life.  

As Ayurveda seeks to restore digestive health, diet is always considered, together with life style factors that may also be contributing to a loss of wellbeing. Like attracts like and we will often be attracted to those foodstuffs and activities that will enhance imbalances. We may also be living a life that isn’t true to our life path (dharma), and this will show up as physical and mental illness that cannot be effectively treated with modern medicines but can be helped by Ayurveda. 

A person can possess just one predominant dosha, have two equally dominant dosha or have all three doshas in balance. Here follows a rough guideline for how the doshas apply to different people:

Vata traits

·       Tall or very short, thin and bony with good muscles

·       Tendency to do many things – make things happen

·       Quick learner

·       Flexible

·       Quick moving and actions

·       Oval, narrow face and smaller eyes

·       Dry, rough and thin skin texture, dry and thin hair

·       Variable appetite, tendency towards constipation

·       Poor endurance and easily exhausted, with bursts of energy

·       Stiff joints

·       Light sleep, possibly interrupted, dreams full of movement

·       Poor circulation and sensitive to the cold. 

·       Intolerance to pain 

·       Forgetful and disorganised. 

·       Sociable and imaginative 

·       Drawn to creative activities

Anyone can experience vata imbalances, though the vata-dominant individuals are more prone to them. 

·       Signs of a vata imbalance include:

·       Dryness of skin, hair, ears, lips and joints

·       Dryness internally, bloating, gas, constipation, dehydration, weight loss

·       Dry and lightness of mind, restlessness, dizziness, feeling ungrounded

·       Roughness, especially skin and lips

·       Cold – poor circulation, muscle spasm or constriction, asthma, pain and aches, tightness.

·       Excessive movement, anxiety, fidgeting, agitation, muscle twitching and palpations. 

Pitta traits

·       Medium height, average build, often athletic.

·       Warm skin texture 

·       Intelligent by nature

·       Loose joints and good circulation

·       Moderate immune function

·       Thin and oily hair

·       Good stamina levels.  

·       Strong metabolism and a healthy appetite (tendency towards ‘hangry’

·       Tendency towards anger, intolerance, impatience and jealousy

·       Tolerant to pain

·       Subject to mood swings

·       Sensitive to hot weather

·       Motivated and goal-orientated

·       Strong leadership skills 

·       Organised, private and have good will power. 

·       Tendency towards inflammation. 

Anyone can experience pitta imbalances, though the pitta-dominant individuals are more prone to them.

·       Heat increases in the body and causes discomfort.

·       Inflammation in the body that can lead to joint pain.

·       Stomach heat increases leading to heartburn, acid reflux, and ulcers.

·       Diarrhoea or impaired digestion.

·       Mental heat increase can cause excess anger, irritation, and frustration.

·       Increased sweating and body odour.

·       Increased hunger and thirst.

·       Headaches with burning pain in the head.

·       Sore throat with infection.

·       Giddiness and/or hot flushes.

·       Heaviness or tenderness in the testicles/breasts.

·       Becoming judgmental and perfectionist tendencies. 

Kapha traits include: 

·       Large, well-formed frame, usually short but can be tall and large

·       Cold and damp skin texture

·       Thick and lustrous hair

·       Firm joints

·       Moderate circulation

·       High immune function and high endurance 

·       Often relaxed and calm

·       Have a strong pain threshold and a strong will power.  

·       Tolerant, composed, patient, calming and forgiving

·       Metabolism tends to be slow, making them sluggish

·       Prone to respiratory disorders

·       Heart disease is a risk they face

·       Needs motivation, otherwise can get depressed

·       Caring in nature and shows empathy

·       Emotional over eating

·       Stubborn, possessive and greedy

·       Trusts others

·       Wise and mature

·       Happy

Anyone can experience kapha imbalances, though the kapha-dominant individuals are more prone to them.

• Excess mucous in the body

• Slow/sluggish bowel movements

• Increase in body weight

• Thick white tongue coat

• Sinus congestion

• Depressed metabolism

• Fatty accumulation in the arteries

• Mucoid diarrhea

• Pre-diabetes

• Cold/cough/runny nose

• Hay fever

• Cold sweats

• Excess urination

• Excess ear wax

• Oily skin and hair

• Poor sense of taste and smell

• Lethargy and drowsiness

 Ayurveda also uses elemental medicine to balance out imbalances in earth, fire, water, air and ether in the body. As mentioned above, Ayurveda places great emphasis on helpful changes to diet (with consideration of the six tastes and whether a food stuff has a heating or cooling effect on the body), lifestyle factors (including exercise, rest, yoga, meditation), massage and herbal medicines to bring a person back to health, and keep them there, promoting natural immunity and a more balanced and harmonious state of being on all levels.

To find out more please see here - https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/ayurvedic-consultations

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. 

Rest

I was heartened to read Karen Brody’s recent blog post where she talks about rest and how many are using it as a tool to be more productive, missing the point entirely.

I’ve been questioning this for a while now. Yoga Nidra has become a popular practice in the yoga world, and the concept of rest too, but I have concerns that it becomes yet another tick box exercise, “done my rest- tick”, yet another ‘thing’ to fit into already busy days.

I also like what Karen  says when she writes, “If we are resting to be more productive then we are feeding into the same paradigm that's making us all sick and tired”, because I believe she touches on something that is underpinning so much of life right now, this constant feeding into the same paradigm that has the world sick and tired and in need of change.

Frequently I see people coming up with ideas and schemes, which they feel will positively change the way we live, yet from my side, all they are doing is simply reinventing the wheel and in many cases, losing themselves in the jargon of it. Women especially are doing this, believing they are supporting a move to a new more aligned way of being in touch with the deep feminine, yet actually they are still feeding into the male paradigm.

Patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and in our society that it is very difficult to see through it. I was reading an article about Jane Fraser being appointed as the first female CEO of Citigroup, making her the first woman to lead a major US bank and I congratulate her for piercing the glass ceiling and yet I find myself questioning whether it will actually make a positive change. If she is playing the game the male way, focused on objectives and achievement and feeding into the linear, then what difference does it make if she is female, she’s still supporting the same system; nothing changes.

I’m not sure that we can create a new world based on sex anyhow, nor on what’s happened previously, because memory doesn’t always serve us well, its laden with perception, and false perception often too. I wonder if it might be the dreamers that will see us through to another way of being, those who have tapped into a much deeper place within themselves that is not based on history (at least in their minds), but imagines a whole new world that we have not yet ever seen. This is one of heart and creativity, not one of fear and safety. 

This might be a world where family and health are viewed as more important than material wealth and the bottom line, where stress is taken seriously and so too the needs of our children for parental interaction and time. A world where simplicity is viewed as more important than filling our houses and our minds, our world then, with ‘stuff’ that adds no value beyond the sophomoric and numbing that is so entrenched in our society.

We are always trying to find a way to numb our pain. I could write a whole blog post on this alone. The almost daily reporting of court cases over here in Guernsey about people found illegally possessing cannabis and being found drunken in a public place is indicative of this, so too the drive towards legalisation of recreational drugs and the explosion of CBD oil as a pain reliever. I always think of Kahlil Gibran’s poem entitled ‘On Pain’, which reads:

“And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.

     And he said:

     Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

     Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

     And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

     And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

     And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

      Much of your pain is self-chosen.

     It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

     Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

     For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

     And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. “

I like how he writes, “much of your pain is self-chosen”, because this is my experience. Having suffered with depression for much of my 20s, and having made an attempt to study and understand my mind and the source of my suffering, I see that so much of it was because of my mind and my perception of life as it was lived moment to moment, but so often lived based on memory, and even this a perception, an illusion all of itself. 

 It was my pain that made me go deeper, that asked me not to numb myself from it with antidepressants and to gradually let go of my reliance on smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol, but to delve right deep into it, to understand it, and to make peace with it. In the process of this, turning as I did to yoga and Reiki, I connected to a part of myself that I knew on some level from my teenage years as a surfer and a contented childhood spent so often in my imagination, that there is more than what we can see. As Gibran writes, there is this part of us that is “guided by the tender hand of the Unseen”. It was the connection to the tender hand (the hand an extension of the heart space lets not forget) of the Unseen that eased my pain and supported my healing.

It is this perhaps, the Unseen, that will help to change things if only we can trust in it. It is tricky though, to trust in something that we cannot see, to trust in something that is difficult to define because definition limits and this cannot be limited, to trust in something that is felt from a deep place inside us that comes and goes, cannot be held down. This is not a world where we trust. This is a world where we try to make life certain, ordered, controlled, because we don’t trust and look how Covid-19 has challenged that! 

This is not about patriarchy or feminism or the divine feminine movement, this is something entirely different. This is about a paradigm shift deeper into the heart, that is not separated in the quest to understand and compartmentalize. It is about resting into that deeper place within ourselves, within our body, that cannot be intellectualised, that cannot limit us like our mind, but that can help us navigate our lives into the unknown. It can be very messy, but this is the way of the heart, as my yoga teacher says, “Deep grace isn’t always pretty or easy to witness. Sometimes it is necessary to howl.”

 It seems so simple to me at times. If we look to those who might inspire us like Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi, and for me Diana Beresford-Kroeger, there is only deep integrity, heart and simplicity. These are people who learned how to rest into themselves. I don’t know that this meant they took time to lie down and be still, which is how we might think that ‘rest’ looks, although it is likely. If you look at a definition of rest, ‘cease work or movement in order to relax, sleep, or recover strength’, then being still must surely play a part in it. Yet it is more than resting for the sake of getting anything and more an opportunity to ‘strengthen’ through non-doing, the connection to that which is always present and yet often overlooked in the quest for productivity.

As Brody writes, “Productivity is not bad. But the problem with using rest practices to fuel more productivity is that not only can productivity put us in a hypnotic state of masculine overdrive, but productivity feeds a culture that is fundamentally not working for most of our bodies and minds. When we tell people to rest so that they can be more productive, even if it's couched in values asking us to slow down, we are still selling a flawed paradigm.” She gets it! This is the trouble with our society. We grasp onto something as if it might be the magic pill that makes everything OK, yet still, still, we do it to get something; we expect an outcome, and a positive one at that.

It’s so not that. In the fleeting moments of the rest there is nothing to do and nothing to change, for we become, fleeting, fleeting, fleeting, like a bird fleetingly visiting a bird table to feed, more of who we already are, underneath all the stories and labels and ‘things’ and ‘stuff’. It is not that we trust the Unseen, it is that we are the Unseen, so why wouldn’t we trust in it when we know it to be all that is actually real. Fleetingly it goes. But like the bird that fleetingly feeds at the bird table, we fill ourselves up on it each time that visit it. It is this for me, that is truly rest. It doesn’t try to change anything! It allows us to live from a deeper place in heart, that’s all. Then everything changes!

 It is not therefore for us to find a new way on the outside, but to rest more fully into the deep presence always available to us from within our own body, on the inside.  This is when rest becomes much more than the opportunity to become more productive or to achieve something or produce an outcome, to separate, divide and conquer, but to take us back home to the mystery and magic of the self. 

I’ll leave you with this poem from Rainer Rilke

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”

P.S. Pride was AMAZING tonight!

The rest of the plants!

The rest of the plants are now in the ground at home and it feels good to have them all close, like their energy has lifted the property!

Here’s the wood betony, above, only a few of them, but they’re interesting nonetheless, curious to see what happens to them as they grow.

Here’s my one and only culver’s root. I’m grateful for this little being, it took its time, teaching me patience!

Here's all the elecampane now in place.

And here is the abundant St John’s wort, which is now in what was the veggie patch (with a courgette plant and corn hanging in there, the rest was finished).

These are red oak, grown from seed, we’re excited about those. Got a whole heap of acorns potted up on the waxing moon and with some Reiki…hoping they’ll be OK!

I’m busy drying herbs and various flowers…so far my lavender oil is my favourite, mixed with dead sea salts from Israel, just the most perfect bath companion; my skin loves it too, and the boys are keen as well!

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