Love would laugh a lot

It follows on a little from my previous blog post, still this inherent fear around safety and security keeps coming up, there are many layers to it and it is deeply embedded so it is inevitable that it will take time to truly get to the root of it. I have a feeling I am not alone here though, that it is an inherent fear for many of us, passed down from generation to generation.

I’ve noticed that the more I try and free my centre, my ‘core’, the more I go into free-fall. This is a scary feeling because it is unknown and uncertain, so I find myself grasping for anything concrete to bring certainty back again. A few days ago, when my teacher guided me to a place where I was not gripping in my core, I felt an overwhelming feeling of fear and anxiety, and accompanying nausea. I honestly felt as if I was free falling and I wondered if I might have to stop the practice, such was my fear.

The feeling didn’t last, and it made me very curious because the practice was taking me deeper into my feet and hips, so that I would also lessen the grip of my thighs, part of the fight, flight and fear musculature, and free more of my knees, which hold a lot of fear (you’ve only got to think of the saying, “my knees buckled from under me”). I began to realise how much my thighs hang on, and my knees and core tighten as a kind of defensive “I will not get harmed and I can run away” position. 

That’s all very well and good, but this pattern has become unhelpful. It’s not so much that I need to change my thighs, it’s more so that I want to feel more of life, not be so restricted and limited by patterns that I have developed over my lifetime in reaction to fear. I know that I am safe and secure, that we are lovingly held by the creator, but on some level, I still struggle to rest easily into this.

So when the practice did reveal more of the free fall feeling and the fear and nausea that accompanied this, I paid attention. I began to notice what I did in response to this feeling, not in that moment during the session but later, in my life lived off the mat. 

I noticed how I tried to grasp for something concrete, for a sense of security, questioning whether it was about time I got a sensible, stable and secure job, with a guaranteed monthly salary and a pension - this in contrast to the insecure job of teaching yoga and Reiki, when you’re never quite sure how much you might earn week to week, let alone month to month.

I noticed how I begin to lose perspective of the bigger picture, my world becoming smaller as I focus on my perceived threat to survival rather than re-membering oneness and being in service. I drop into ‘thinking’ brain, trying to ‘work it out’ and I start running to give me much needed (or so I feel) headspace, and although it is unconscious, I use it as a way of strengthening myself.

I become increasingly rigid in my mind, as the running makes me more rigid in body, the two a reflection, and it is this rigidity that restricts my consciousness. In these moments of perceived loss of safety, I also cling to my opinions as if they alone will make me safe. I struggle to find the middle ground and will become more argumentative. I also withdraw into myself, become increasingly serious. 

I fall out of alignment with soul, feeling separate and vulnerable. But really what happens is I get more controlling, as if this, on some level, gives me a false sense of security, as if I really am able to control the outcome, which is of course impossible, at least impossible without getting extremely stressed!

Initially I attempt to control my immediate environment, and in the past, this would have meant obsessively and compulsively tidying and cleaning. Now it’s not quite so obsessive or compulsive but the tendency is still there! 

I also try to control my behaviour, trying to live up to my extremely high and unrealistic ideals as if this alone will keep me safe. In reality, all that happens though, is the inner critic gets involved, and I berate myself with a whole heap of criticism for my various shortfalls to the extent that my spirit plummets and my toxicity levels increase. 

The inherent perfectionist does not let go easily. It was this pattern that fed the eating disorder, in an attempt to control the food I ate. It doesn’t get much more controlling than controlling your food intake and therefore your nourishment, it’s a very cruel form of self-harm, because you are never doing the job as well as you should and therefore the inner critic goes wild.

There is also the control of everyone else. Not easy for those around us, and yet we are all doing it to some extent, and if we’re not, then we’re numbing out instead. 

I notice how all of this sends me into a negative and downward spin - I’ve a sense that this embedded threat-based, negativity bias is the default programming of our consciousness.  In the past I would have popped straight into depression, but the patterns have shifted over time, I’m aware of them for a start, and depression doesn’t arrive so easily, if at all, now.

I know how awful it feels when it does though, because it is difficult to find your way out again and the negative voice is all consuming, fed by the anxiety you are feeling and that in turn feeds the anxiety, and thus it is a downward spiral where you give yourself an enormously hard time, and life can feel as if it has become pointless and hopeless, without purpose.

The spirit slumps even more and the soul is absolutely ignored as the ego has taken over complete control. All this because of that feeling, the free fall and the uncertainty that this brings. 

There is a way out though, I’m seeing it more clearly. There have been signs and I have been trying to pay attention, see more of the roots and how they might be gently eased, the soil changed, by a shift in perspective and energy. 

It’s helpful to notice the patterns and the way in which we react to what we are feeling and to our life as it then unfolds. Recognising our disappointments and giving voice to them, so that they are no longer sat inside us eating away at us. 

When the negative spiral begins, if we can catch it early enough, nip it in the bud, it’s helpful to try to do something that lifts the spirt and soothes the soul, like getting to the beach, watching the sunrise and sunset, walking on the cliffs with a friend, being out in the elements, taking a dog out, just getting outside somehow and being distracted from our thoughts by being with someone else or an animal, something that occupies our attention.

Recognising that fate sometimes takes over our life and unforeseen events happen and we feel you have no choice. We always have a choice, but this rests in how we deal with the situation that fate brings to us. It’s helpful to look for the positive outcome and where it is leading us. We might try to recognise the new direction or opportunity as it unfolds from the chaos.  If our perspective is positive then the outcome will be positive. 

The key is not to strive against the situation but to see beyond the negative. Every single thing that happens has positive repercussions, even if it is hard to see it at the time. Ayurveda supports a positive attitude as a path to healing, cultivating balance and wholeness. 

Cultivating gratitude changes things, brings in a perspective shift as an antidote to the negative. Seeing that the situation could be worse and remembering that there is always choice, always another way. 

Self-compassion is essential too. Witnessing the patterns of potential harm caused by self, and doing something about them, changing them, cultivating compassion, nurturing the spirit in the process. 

I’m finding self-compassion easier these days, and it has become clearer to me that the focus this year is about cultivating greater friendliness towards myself, more jovialness, the feeling I feel when I spend time with my closest friends, when there is humour and ease, a recognition of one’s perceived faults but in a friendly way, with laughter and compassion – a greater recognition of one’s humanness without judgement.

This is a whole other language than one of ego and the duality of being good or bad or this or that. There is only what is and a gentle recognition that the ‘what’ is marvellous and wonderful and all it that was ever needed or needs to be. There’s nothing then to berate or harm, nothing to correct or fix, nothing to put down or in any way criticise. It’s incredibly liberating.

Self-compassion is both an attitude and an action, we take on an attitude of compassion for self and we take steps to action this. I always had an issue about self-care and I think it’s because it was more of an action, another tick box opportunity, ‘massage taken, self-care done, tick box’, ‘yoga class attended, self-care done, tick box’. It doesn’t encourage us to change on the inside in quite the same way as self-compassion does. Self-care is very much doing, and self-compassion is more so about being; something has to soften within us.

When it comes to gratitude, I can hear societal voices asking me if I am really sure that all I have is enough? This, because we are always focused on wanting more; more badges, more qualifications, more money, more houses, more cars, more possessions, more stuff. As if looking outside of ourselves will bring us the inner contentment that we ultimately seek. We all want to be happy, peaceful and contented, but isn’t that something that has to come from within?

Thus the continuous looking outside ourselves is unhelpful and unnecessary. When is enough ever enough? In many respects, if we can simplify our outside world, then we will encourage a greater sense of simplicity within too – there will be less to distract us. But this does mean we have to find the courage to live our simple way, to let go of our educational, societal and capitalistic conditioning that tells us we should always be wanting more, achieving more and obtaining more than what we already have; no more striving or achieving for the sake of it!

It is all very well recognising these patterns and understanding them, but I wanted to touch them in my body too.  I have been taking regular SHEN sessions with Jo Henton, which have supported this process, it’s a good fit with my approach to yoga practice. Each week a new delight has revealed itself, more of the fundamental imbalance in the root, which has given rise to a hardness and holding in the solar plexus and the heart.

This week, the session took me to a feeling that I have been trying to uncover for a good while now, but didn’t know what it was until it revealed itself to me – it was a extremely deep yearning for my mum. I would have felt this when I was little, perhaps the drop off at play school, a temporary separation from her, and it brought with it intense sadness and grief for the loss of her in that moment.

I wondered if this might be the mother wound that people talk about; not a harm done by my mum but an intense love, so deep, so powerful, that I didn’t know what to do with it, as it brought with it the opposite pain of loss, this feeling that now revealed itself to me, like an old friend, there was a deep recognition and a relief to finally feel this again, after years of hiding from it, because of my deep love and longing for my mum and all the love she has for me, for all her attempts to keep me safe, I have never doubted my mum’s love or her devotion to me, and I know myself to be extremely lucky.

The yearning was primal, free-fall, nauseating, deep in my solar plexus and there was a very real aching, almost like a stabbing pain in my right upper arm bone.  As I felt all of this my shoulders moved without my apparent control, flicking, releasing deep tension that had been held there most of my life. 

I have always had over developed shoulders, not so noticeable now as they were when I carried more of the weight of the world upon them. I blamed surfing and netball, but as I have deepened my awareness of the manner in which our body keeps score, I have been increasingly aware of the emotional tightness and hardness that they have held. 

I suddenly realised the reason I have done all I can to avoid feeling this feeling of intense yearning, loss and sadness for my mum, because it is so very yucky and unpleasant. I suddenly realised why I had stopped letting my mum hug me or hold me; on some level I was protecting myself from having to feel this degree of loss again; the love was so strong, the loss would be strong too.

I rejected my mum in many ways as a late teenager, and caused her much harm, sorry mum, I didn’t know what to do with all the love, all her nourishment, perhaps on some level I never felt I deserved it. The trouble is, I couldn’t make any sense of it, we rarely can at the time. I know that I hardened my heart to her, and kept this all deep inside, and now I know it is because of her love, which is so strong, that the potential loss was too much, so I self-sabotaged, rejected it, as some strange way of protecting myself. 

I also suddenly realised the reason that my children suffer with separation anxiety. I’d had an inkling but it became crystal clear that I had been unconsciously transferring my anxiety around separation from my mum onto them. I knew how it felt and I didn’t want them to feel it. It wasn’t conscious. I can’t blame myself for it either, as that helps no one, not me and especially not my children – as mothers we really shouldn’t be promoting self-flagellation. 

It’s also possible, of course, that my children are really feeling the feeling of loss inside them too, of the grief that accompanies love. Love brings grief, because there is always the possibility of loss and of the intensity of the feeling deep in our centre and in our arms, as we realise that loss means never holding that person again or never being held by that person again. So we might turn away from love, for love brings pain; put up the closed sign at the heart, harden to our centre, make ours arms hard too, no holding or too much holding on.

I could see more clearly how I had closed my heart to love generally because of the fear of the feeling of loss. How I’d hardened to my brother when he emigrated to Australia, because of the intensity of the sadness and the grief of my perceived loss. How this caught me out at times, a tear slipping out as I remembered, and then turned away again. We make peace eventually, time is a healer, but we should remember that we grieve the living as much as we might grieve the dead. 

We’ll find grief in our upper arms. Like our lungs have tears that they cry, but we do not express them through our eyes, instead they collect in our arms, an extension of our hearts, like a river swollen with water, set to burst, but it doesn’t burst, it holds on tightly, the water stagnant now, there’s no room for it to move and it cannot burst its banks. Like a face swollen by excessive alcohol and sugar, how it looks like it needs to pop to give the person some release, their eyes hidden by the fullness of their cheeks, not healthy, the holding of grief.

In my yoga practice, it was the knees though that we were exploring and yet all this revealed itself to me, the knees! I was surprised how quickly the knees took me into my centre and back to the yucky feeling. Not of loss this time but of nausea. I felt sick and I asked my teacher why I was feeling like this. She said that the way we were relating to the knees, and the leg bones either side of this was likely causing me to access deeper parts of my centre, parts that are involved in the vomiting process, that help to remove toxicity from the body.

It was then I remembered how fearful I was of vomiting growing up, this to the extent that I developed a technique, involving the tapping of fingers and the repetition of some words that I had to perform each night before I went to sleep, to ensure that I wouldn’t be sick that evening. I realised how much my fear of vomiting caused me to keep everything held in. I was always in awe of my best friend who could put her fingers down her throat and vomit, I just couldn’t do this, I had trained myself not to do this, and in many respects, this was a blessing, because the eating disorder could have gotten very messy (it was messy enough, you’ll have to wait for the book to read more about that).

We found a depth to the knees that I didn’t know was there, a place in the pelvis for the skull, a spine that settled between the hands and arms and felt very alive. We found how the body might have felt propped on a mother’s hip, or wrapped around her leg, as my children do to me, and yet I find myself telling them not to. “He’s too big to be carried”, I’m told, and it’s annoying having someone hang off your leg as you cook, pulling your leggings down. But I felt that differently today, that this won’t last forever and it is to be embraced, not changed. 

I suddenly recognised the humour and joy in our thigh if we allow it, in that yuckiness, there is always the opposite of how we are feeling, excitement, joy, possibility. You cannot have one without the other, and so it becomes about perspective again and orientating away from something negative to something more helpful, more joyful, more loving. Wrap your legs around me I will tell my children, hang off my leg like it’s a tree trunk. I won’t berate you or tell you you’re too big, I’ll laugh instead, I’ll choose laughter and love instead. 

I felt into my liver too, and had a sense of the toxicity, not least from self-flagellation and the constant negative inner critic growing up, but the toxicity that comes from holding on, from resisting, from living in two extremes, the end of the inhalation, the end of the exhalation, rather than just sitting between the both, continuously orientating in the middle ground, neither here nor there, just being with what is present as it unfolds moment to moment and choosing how we are in relationship to that. 

Fear will show up in our body in different places, just as it will show up in our life in different ways. We don’t know until we start delving deeper, the many ways that it prevents us from living, truly living in this moment. I came across this wonderful quote that I think sums up this week and all this awareness gained:

“There is no escaping the uncertainty of life, nor its beautiful, ugly chaos. We must embrace its unexpected twists, dead ends and bridges, its red lights, surprises and blessings. Because without them, are we really living?” - Javaria Akbar.

So it is, the message on the new moon this week; self-compassion, cultivating gratitude, turning into love with all its potential for loss, rather than turning away from it, living our life, each moment, as if it is our last, truly living, with all the messiness, the chaos and the unknown. Letting go. Allowing ourselves to be loved and held by our mum. And laughing lots. “What would love do in this situation?”, we might continuously ask ourselves. Love would laugh a lot. 

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. 

2021: Orientating in the here and now.

I find it interesting that we ended 2020 with a Cancer full moon, having begun the year with a Cancer full moon too! As a Cancerian myself I am well aware that Cancer brings with it a focus on the home and family – rather fitting then, given that the majority have had little choice this year but to spend their time at home with family! It was a beautiful moon and I feel like it really has ushered in more of the new. 

I know it’s been a terribly tricky year for many, but each year brings its fair share of challenges. This, I’m afraid, is the reality of being human; everything is subject to change, including us, thank goodness. Admittedly 2020 has highlighted this more than other years; that life is always uncertain and unknown, at least if we are truly living. However, this brings with it fear, which has been a central theme during 2020.

As Krishnamurti writes: “I lead a certain kind of life; I think in certain patterns; I have certain beliefs and dogmas and I don’t want those patterns of existence to be disturbed because I have my roots in them. I don’t want them to be disturbed because the disturbance produces a state of unknowing and I dislike that. If I am torn away from everything I know and believe, I want to be reasonably certain of the state of things to which I am going. So the brain cells have created a pattern and those brain cells refuse to create another pattern which may be uncertain. The movement from certainty to uncertainty is what I call fear.”

We have all in some way been asked to face some of our fears this year, and to pay attention, noticing how we are living and whether this is serving us. We have also been asked to consider our relationship with death, not only in relation to the death of our body in this lifetime and the fear that Covid-19 brought up around this, but also the death of the life that we once lived, and the death of those parts of ourselves that we now need to let go, and the fears that prevent us from doing so. 

We are all afraid of something, and while fear can be translated as ‘False Evidence Appearing Real’, it can feel very real, preventing us truly living in each moment, either tied to the past through fear of change, or clinging to the future through fear of being truly present to what is happening in each moment, imagining instead a life ahead, rather than appreciating the one we are actually living. Our fears are huge, obstacles some might say, not only creating much of our suffering but preventing us truly living in the present and settling into the uncertainty of change as it happens moment to moment.

2020 found me exploring my fears as I questioned the way that I was living. Perhaps it was coincidence or just meant to be, but I spent much of the year editing and re-editing my third book, From Darkness Comes Light. This asked me to dig deep to identify my inherent fears and to notice the way in which these were preventing me from letting go of my past, almost binding me to it through the certainty of that which had already been lived, and how those same fears were preventing me settling into the uncertainty of that which might lay ahead.

At times it was challenging, as I had to be deeply honest with myself, noticing emotional resonance to past events that were still playing out in my current reality, albeit unconsciously, such is the nature of the shadow. I was surprised to find that I was still informed by core beliefs around fear of loss of safety/security and fear of not being good enough, two central themes weaving their way through much of my earlier life, and continuing to play out in my present reality in the decisions I made and the way I was relating to self and therefore living my life.

I began to notice that in my quest to heal wounds and let go of threads from my past no longer serving me, I was continuously caught up in it, and identified with it, to the extent that it was difficult to be truly present to this moment. This fascinated me. I began seeing this play out with students too, especially those studying Reiki - how in our quest to heal, we can lose ourselves in our stories of harm and hurt and loss of wellbeing, even though we are trying our best to move on from them. 

I also noticed the manner in which we continue to play out the victim role and lay blame, even though we are trying our very best not to do either. I noticed this in my own life too and it made me curious. What was preventing me from letting go of my victimhood and blame hood? I began to realise that both had fed my identity and sense of self to the extent that letting go meant letting go of a part of myself, a part of me then having to die to this world.

Furthermore, I recognised that in the process of letting go of identifying with my past hurts and wounds, I would also have to look deeper at my inherent fears and the escape routes I had created to avoid feeling them. In the process, I became increasingly aware that our identification and attachment to what has been, is the cause of much of our suffering. This to the extent that our over-identification with our wounds and harm-done can actually become an obstacle to our healing and orientation in the here and now.

E and I have been watching Virgin River on Netflix these last few evenings and there is a story within it about an older couple who split-up 20 years previously because of the husband’s brief affair with another woman. The wife was understandably broken hearted and the relationship ended albeit they remained the best of friends. Twenty years on and the wife finally asks for a divorce, she decides she finally needs to draw a line in the sand. The husband is surprised and initially resists her request, apologising again for what happened and stressing that it happened 20 years now and he has apologised countless times over the years!

The wife won’t give him a break though, she keeps going on and on about what he did and how it has affected her. He apologises again, saying it’s crazy, what more can he do, it’s been twenty years, will she ever move on from it? This really interested me, I appreciate it is fiction, but it really highlighted the manner in which we create our own suffering by holding onto the past, to the pain done, so that it’s lived over and over again, allowing ourselves to become a victim of it, blaming others for our misfortune and sticking us in time because a part of us never moves on. 

It takes courage, strength, compassion and humility to forgive, yet forgiveness is the only thing that will ultimately set us free, that will allow us to let go of our stories and change the narrative. I too had to find the courage this year to forgive those who I felt at some point in time had harmed me, and to forgive myself too, for all the harm done through decisions made. I had to step up and take responsibility, change my own narrative, let go of old identifications, and in the process, let go of outdated core beliefs, though patterns and fears too – rewrite my past in many respects as you can read in my book when it’s published. 

At the same time, I also became aware that our fears not only keep us trapped in the past, but can also cause us to orientate our attention too much into the future as well. I had known for a while that the trend in the spiritually-orientated world towards vision boards, The Secret and moon manifesting was not settling well with me, this to the extent that I stopped using any of these techniques, but I still noticed a tendency to project into the future, always planning, and expending a lot of energy trying to make my dreams come true and constantly comparing my current reality to some future imagined reality instead.

I started to recognise that this was also driven by fear.  While my inherent fear around loss of safety/security, caused me to cling to the past because it was safe, secure and known, I also noticed a tendency towards over planning into the future to bring some certainty to it, making it safe and secure too. This further fed a motivation to earn money as a form of security (an illusion) and resulted in a pattern of over work and exhaustion. 

I also allowed my fear of not being good enough to keep me stuck in the past and all that is known, looking outside of myself for external validation of my worth in this world through various identities. This made it difficult for me to let go of the various identities, because my sense of self-worth and feelings of being good enough were both precariously tied up in these identities and in my feelings around security, and earning potential!

I have become increasingly aware that it is important we actually look at fear, not what we are afraid of, but what underlays even this. Our fears are underpinned by the unknown and the uncertain, so we cling to what is known and certain through fear. We consider how this prevents us living in the present moment, how we live in the past or the future instead, clinging on to what is known or to a false notion of who we might one day become.

It became clearer to me that this flip-flopping from the past to the future was exhausting and making it increasingly challenging for me to orientate myself in the here and now. This fed a story of being inherently flawed and needing to be continuously healed, as much as it fed a story that in the future, if I only managed to realise my dreams, then everything would be OK. But what about now? 

Well it’s easy to overlook this moment because life is messy and we reject messiness, craving something clearer, something with greater certainty, something known, something more perfect instead. But what could be more perfect than this exact moment - so why keep rejecting it? Why do we always reject what is, in pursuit of something else? In doing so we are continuously rejecting ourselves, saying that in this moment, this version of ourselves is not good enough. 

As Krishnamurti writes: “One of the major causes of fear is that we do not want to face ourselves as we are. So, as well as the fears themselves, we have to examine the network of escapes we have developed to rid ourselves of them. If the mind, in which is included the brain, tries to overcome fear, to suppress it, discipline it, control it, translate it into terms of something else, there is friction, there is conflict, and that conflict is a waste of energy.”

Working with this, I began to recognise the network of escapes that I had created in my own life, one of literally running away from this moment, always needing to be somewhere else in physical space, but also disappearing into the future in my mind and to an imagined world giving me the peace and contentment that I sought. I saw how my attempts at ignoring my fears, was creating inner conflict because of my inability to be truly present to who I am now, in this moment, with all my vulnerabilities and foibles. 

As Krishnamurti also writes: “To live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.” Most of us are frightened of dying because we don't know what it means to live”

I realised that I had no choice, I needed to die to everything of yesterday and I also had to let go of trying to control the outcome of my life. The process was messy and uncomfortable because I had no idea who I would become and how my life would unfold because it was not known, not certain, but this was necessary, because I had to learn to trust and have faith in life as it unfolds, of being OK with moment to moment uncertainty.

This didn’t mean that I gave up on my dreams, but that I finally stopped using them as an escape route from being here now. Further, I saw clearly how my fears had stuck me in my comfort zone as I made life certain, and that it was time to step into a more authentic and aligned version of myself, yet to be defined. I became aware that as we move from where we’ve been to the person we are becoming, we need to be with whatever life is offering, rather than trying to control it.

This was not easy. The tendency to want to control to make life certain and known is deeply ingrained, it’s a survival mechanism, but when it rules our life and prevents us growing, creating inner conflict and binding us to our fears, then we know we have little choice. Gill Edwards writes, “Whereas love is the accelerator which gets us moving, fear is the brake which prevents us going in the wrong direction. It can help us to steer a steady course through life. But if we react too strongly to fear, the brake is applied so hard that we come to a standstill, and fail to grow – which means a wasted lifetime”.

It is the moment by moment existence that unfolds when we live in the now, no longer a victim of our memories, our imaginings and our inherent fears, that will bring us the contentment and peace that we seek. When we start to accept the messiness of daily life as the moment, then we stop looking outside of ourselves and this moment for life to change. It is in this moment that it can change. Right now. And each moment that follows, but we have to let go and settle into the unknown, as so brilliantly explained by Krishnamurti: 

 “We would rather cling to the known than face the unknown - the known being our house, our furniture, our family, our character, our work, our knowledge, our fame, our loneliness, our gods - that little thing that moves around incessantly within itself, with its own limited pattern of embittered existence…to live completely, wholly, every day as if it were a new loveliness, there must be a dying to everything of yesterday, otherwise you live mechanically, and a mechanical mind can never know what love is or what freedom is.”

As we approached the end of the year, I was increasingly drawn into the heart, to absolve myself of residual hurts, of threads still tying me to the past. I threw myself into SHEN and could feel the threads pinging apart, releasing me from more of my past, as I later sobbed out. I was surprised though when I  also noticed a significant ball of anger and sadness over broken dreams and the disappointment that I felt because of an imagined future that never realised itself.

This amazed me actually because until that moment I had not appreciated the manner in which our broken dreams create so much of our suffering and our inability to be present. It is as if a part of us clings on to the slightest possibility of realising the dream (imagined), even though another part of us knows that we’re done, that we need to move on. We can feel significant disappointment to the extent that we see life through a negative lense. We can feel anger too, to the universe, God, ourselves, to all of this and more.

In the process, our spirit flags, our faith wavers and we close down our connection to heart and soul. It’s not intentional, but we lose our grounding too. We also feel disempowered. It reminded me though that we cannot control outcome. Some of the greatest spiritual texts such as the Bhagavad Gita tell us this. We should not get attached to the fruits of our labour. We have to trust that what happens is meant to happen, that this is the journey our soul has chosen in this lifetime and that love, peace, joy and contentment are available to each of us in each moment if only we can shift our perspective into something more positive. 

This awareness created an energetic and perspective shift for me as I recognised that the more I can settle into the moment, the more I accept it, the more I do notice the beauty and loveliness of it – how can it be anything other than this? As the year ended, I felt much more positive in myself than I have done in a long time. Rather than finding fault with each moment, I have instead felt a renewed sense of gratitude and a deepening connection to that which cannot be named or seen, the holy spirit, a presence, whatever it is, but there is deeper trust and faith.  

2020 has been a gift in many respects because it has offered a perspective shift. Not everyone will have seen it like this though and many will be stuck, waiting for things to ‘get back to normal’. But this is the normal! This is life. This moment, and the next. There is no going back to normal, but there is the possibility that many will continue to live in the past, reminiscing and clinging because of their fears of the unknown ahead and of death, which will one day become a reality for every single one of us as much as we might try and pretend otherwise. 

We are reminded that death is as much a part of living as birth. We are in a constant cycle. Each new day brings with it the opportunity for death of everything that was known yesterday, and the beginning again of all that is new. We are a micro of the macro. Nature lives in cycle, from one season to the next, the sun rising and setting, the moon waning and waxing, the breath inhaling and exhaling, and we too, women especially, cyclical in nature through the menstrual cycle and our transition from one way of being to another, from maiden to motherhood and onwards. 

The moon, the eclipses, the planetary shifts and the stars, all have helped to move us on, change things. By chance, I watched Forrest Gump while ruminating over this post, and it reminded me how sometimes things happen and life will never be lived again, this with reference to the peace movement of the 1960s which ushered in significant change, the heart and freedom, it brought a huge shift for humanity. Here too, 2020, and onwards into 2021, life can never be lived the same again and more fool anyone for trying.

Thus, individually and collectively, 2020 asked us to re-write the way that we are living as a humanity here on planet earth. We are being asked to transition from a place of fear to a place of greater love, we are being asked to die to all of yesterday, all of that which is known and yet not serving us, of dreams that will never be realised, and to create a different reality, one not yet known. We have been gifted a pause, a time to retreat inwards, to connect and reconnect with family and home, to be stiller, even here in Guernsey where we might not be in lockdown but we can’t travel so easily, we can’t keep escaping, we have to be present to our lives lived here now. 

So while 2020 was messy, really it was messy, it was also absolutely necessary. And there has been change. For the first time in many, many years, I am not making any resolutions or intentions. Instead I shall try to be open to each moment as it unfolds, dying to the moment that came previously, and appreciating the peace, joy, love and contentment in each moment lived; lessening the binds of fear and opening more to heart.

I shall leave you with this beautiful extract from Emmanuel’s Book II, The Choice for Love:

“What does the voice of fear 

whisper to you?

Fear speaks to you 

In logic and reason.

It assumes the language

Of love itself.

Fear tells you,

“I want to make you safe”

Love says

“you are safe”.

Fear says,

“Give me symbols.

Give me frozen images.

Give me something

I can rely on.”

Loving truth says

“Only give me

this moment.”

Fear would walk you 

On a narrow path

Promising to take you

Where you want to go.

Love says

“Open your arms

and fly with me.”

Every moment of your life

You are offered the opportunity

To choose – 

Love or fear,

To tread the Earth

Or to soar the heavens.”

Trust the heavens and the earth on the new moon

Oh my goodness, I think I died and went to heaven this evening. I had this feeling we needed to come to Sark, no idea why, just a break, because I love it, because I needed to recharge, there was no reason really, just felt the pull.

Coincidentally, the lights were being turned on in the high street an hour or so after we arrived. Wow! There was quite a gathering, I didn’t realise there were so many people with children living on Sark, more so since the recent influx. The Sark School children treated us to some amazing singing, I was super impressed, well done you lot, and your teacher. Then Santa arrived and the lights were turned on. Another wow!!!

The lights are amazing!!! And overhead, the Sark skies, oh my goodness, we were so lucky after such a wet start to the morning, and here, the most incredible clear skies. Sark never lets us down, thank you!

I hadn’t anticipated the dark skies cycle ride home. I didn't think to pack a torch in my hand luggage, and my phone had run out of battery, so I attempted to cycle Eben and me home in the pitch black. Alas though I shouldn’t have been concerned, the message this new moon is bringing (an eclipse too, super potent and with the solstice soon and some planetary stuff going on) is to trust the earth beneath our feet and the heavens above.

This has been coming through all week, not least within me, but my students and clients too. Maybe it’s Covid, but I think Covid is a mere trigger for something much more ancient, an old pattern of humanity, our collective inability to trust that all our needs are met in each moment. That we don’t need to try to hold it all together ourselves, control outcomes, that we really can go with the flow of life, as nature does with such ease and grace.

I’ve seen this showing up in bodies all week, mine especially. I had no idea how much stress and anxiety I was holding deep within. I can definitely trace it back to childbirth, when I felt the earth drop away from me with a planned C-section due to full grace placenta previa with Elijah. I was extremely angry that I wasn’t being gifted the home birth that I dreamed, but I was also fully fearful, for the first time in a long time of what lay ahead.

This was not fear of motherhood, although if I had realised, I would have feared it, but more the actual birth and whether the surgery was going to go as planned. There was the fear that I might need a general anaesthetic and neither E or I would have been present to witness the birth. There was also the fear of a blood transfusion, which I knew I didn’t want, and having no choice due to the possibility of extensive blood loss.

I have never been as scared as I was waiting for E in that theatre room, almost willing him into the room, as validation that we would both get to witness the birth of our baby. I cannot tell you the relief when i did see him, it was indescribable after the weeks of stressing about it. This is me too, who should have known better, who should have trusted in the universe and remembered the Reiki principles, but I had fallen out with the universe by then, my faith had been tested and I hadn't risen to the challenge, I hadn't found the strength too go with the flow, not then.

Motherhood itself was a shock to the system. Literally. I was in shock and yet I tried to keep going, do what I’d always done, ensure some solidity, some continuity, some grounding to my world that had changed in ways I could not, ever, have imagined. I realise now that because it was so absolutely scary and demanding and all consuming, and me so selfish previously of my time and energy, that the change was so HUGE that I have not stopped running since.

I caught myself last week, breathing again, easily. Life has slowed down, both boys being cared for, me alone, and I realised that I can stop running now, that it has become manageable and less scary, joyful and pleasant instead. If you had asked me about that event year ago, I would have been too busy running, a 3 year old is the trickiest age for me, so it was a relief when our youngest made it to four a few months ago. Life has changed and there is more time and space and I have grown into motherhood, finally.

But it’s still in my body, the running, tight, in the fight/flight musculature, deep tension, so deep that it’s taken me seven years to find it, to get through the layers, to flow down enough to find the holding that accompanied that first caesarean section. A lot has happened during that time, three books have been written, a number of retreats have taken place, innumerable people have been assigned to reiki, our consciousness, collectively, has increased, life has changed. But there has still been this holding deep inside, drawing in more of the same; stress.

I write about it extensively in my new book, From Darkness Comes Light’ so I won’t repeat myself here, you’ll just have to wait. I can’t wait to finish editing it, I’m proud of it, excited to get it out there when the time is right. It’s madam dig deeper into my shadows, my skin drawing me in, my barrier between the inner and outer world highlighting my tension. Motherhood has a lot to answer for, and yet it is the greatest gift, not only bestowing us with daily mirrors, but making us look at our every core belief, our conditioning and our mental imprinting. It’s been an interesting seven years and only now, everything has a seven year cycle right, I’m opting through then other side,.

The universe has our back. We have our own back. Try and reflect back to what was happening for you seven years ago because I think the universe is bringing anything unresolved back up. Consider your connection to the earth, your deep trust in it (or lack of trust) and your connection to the heaven, your faith in some higher power, however you name it, and look at where you hold your tension, physical, mental and emotional.

The more I have practiced with an awareness of my spine, the more I do feel as if I have my own back. All of our roots have been shaken this year, all our core beliefs challenged. Once we were told we couldn’t work from home, couldn’t be trusted, now we are actively encouraged to work from home. Once we were watched 24/7, now we have greater freedom to pop to yoga classes during our working day, go sea swimming, sneak out, make up our hours later. The world kept spinning. Life continued. We’re starting to see how some of the stuff we’re been told, our conditioning, is a great big pile of poo. We’re reclaiming our power, step by step.

My whole world was turned on its head simply because I discovered a way to practice yoga that was actually kind to my body, that didn’t force it to be a certain way, that wasn’t exercising it for the sake of exercising it, that wasn't trying to change it’s fundamental nature. As someone who had suffered for years with an eating disorder, this was profound, I cried with the sheer relief that there was another way form the one I had been trained and had grown weary of. I was bored, the practice was no longer sustaining me. We have to evolve. Get out of our minds, out of our conditionings, we have to trust.

Which brings me back to Sark, because as I was cycling home in the pitch black I was wondering how we might make it home as I really couldn’t see anything ahead. And then, lo and behold, another cyclist (not daddy as it turned out) appeared from out of nowhere with lights, which saw me to the next section of path where a mobile scooter was travelling along with a whole heaps of lights so I could see a little further ahead, to the junction when daddy did finally appear!

It struck me as rather appropriate as I question trust and faith and the path. That the light appears to help us move along our path when we are on it, and we just have to trust in that and have faith. Sark is amazing, it really does allow us to go with the flow and notice the comfort that comes from that, when we truly let go. The lights are amazing if you happen to get a chance to visit (taken me 45 years though to make it for a pre-Christmas Sark!).

Enjoy the new moon if I don’t see you before then, it’s a potent one, so really pay attention to what it is trying to show you.

x

The Secret Kissing of the Sun and the Moon

There’s this wonderful Hang Massive song called ‘The Secret Kissing of the Sun and the Moon; and Got to experience this for myself on Sunday, such was that amazing full moon energy.

I just had this feeling I needed to head to Le Varde to sit with the ancients. My soul has been craving calm and never is it calmer than here, even Elijah felt it, there’s something incredibly incredible about that place, I sometimes wonder if I might be transported to another place in time and space in there, like a portal just awaiting the right alignment.

I also had this feeling that we needed to head to Fort Le Marchant. I’m pretty sure I must have headed out there at some point in my life but not consciously and I couldn’t get over how amazing it is out there and this on my doorstep, I pay a fortune to travel to other parts of the world to find this albeit there were lots of dog walkers and it’s the solitude I pay for in the Outer Hebrides etc.

We were out on our own at the Fort ever so briefly until we chanced upon another yoga teacher as it happens who was out there to enjoy sunset. Our timing was perfect and totally unintended, but as we left, we got to see the sun set to the west and the moon rise to the east, my goodness, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! The universe was abundant in all her glory and there too followed a skinny dip and howl in the dark sea lit gently by the light of the full moon above, this with a soul swim friend, thank you Jo.

Monday I awoke forgetting it was E’s birthday, and settled into my meditation before I remembered, whoops, so gave that up, there were presents to be opened, by the children obviously! Once that was completed though my pendulum called me to the Bach floral remedies and the Star of Bethlehem appeared, I don’t know that I’ve ever dowsed this one before and lo and behold brought with it the word ‘shock’. Of course!

This last week especially I have noticed a pattern in bodies I’ve been interacting, and souls too of course, this deep distrust in heaven and earth and here of course sitting in the centre is a deep shock, covid will have escalated these feelings, the shock of arriving on planet earth probably set the scene, the arrival into the bright lights of this world, unless you were fortunate to arrive in the dimmed lights of a maternity room or at home. Many more these days appear in theatre, bright lights and clinical introduction to planet earth, was that what was intended?!

I did think to myself that if it is true and Le Varde was a fertility chamber and with that a portal for new life to enter, then what a space! A calmness that you might not find in the hospital environment or in the stressful and chaotic nature of our lives lived these days. But I am reminded that we have a choice and it is up to us the choice we make, the thoughts we allow ourselves to think and the manner in which we relate to our environment, externally and internally, a reflection of each other perhaps. Something somewhere always has the possibility of shifting, of pausing so that the change can come in.

I was talking about this with my philosophy teacher yesterday and I am blown away by the Sutras and the manner in which they address all this! The first step is to become aware. To notice that which no longer serves us and at least then we get to choose. Until that point we have no idea that what we’re doing is even a choice, or that it is no longer serving us. I’ve always found yoga and Reiki so helpful in helping to show up the patterns so that we start to become aware of what might need to change.

Then we start to make a conscious decision to do something different, little steps, baby changes, one glass of wine less each night perhaps, chocolate only once a week, an earlier bedtime if we can manage it, an earlier start so we might incorporate a 5 minute mediation, committing to a yoga practice twice a week, little things that we can commit to, that we consciously decide to change and as we do we make space - inside and outside - for the mystery to weave her magic in our life.

That’s what the full moon revealed yesterday, more of my own patterns, around stress and rushing, around shock that I can continue to ignore and hope will go away, or I can take ownership and responsibility and change something, me, mainly! So I’m grateful to the moon and her illuminating more of where the path is right now, not where it’s going, because I’m becoming increasingly aware that we can really only be aligned with it in this moment…this moment right now. Let’s breathe to that!

Trust on the full moon

The message this full moon is trust.

I’ve worked with a number of people this week and there has been a common theme, this I feel in my own body too, a deep distrust, in the earth below and heaven above, not consciously, but from a very old place, past life, and from this life mental imprinting, which causes us to hold on extremely tightly, especially around the centre of the spine and in our solar plexus.

It’s an old pattern for us all, eons ago, and the full moon is bringing into the collective consciousness. I’m pretty sure you’ll be feeling it too.

This isn’t about letting go for the sake of letting go, this is about deeply trusting instead and in that deep deep part within yourself. This is knowing that even in the darkness and most challenging moments of your life that your soul has your back and that life can still be meaningful and hopeful. That actually it is sometimes those darkness moments, which will bring the most meaning and sense of hopefulness into your life, give life greater meaning.

So we trust in that and we start to notice the mental imprinting which conflicts with that, the need to control and make certain, to plan and organise and try to mitigate (and litigate) all risk from our lives. Covid taught us that. We can’t! It’s not easy, it’s one of the most challenging spiritual lessons, to overcome our deep distrust and need to control outcome and brings us right back to duality and to the mind and the manner in which this is really our problem!

It starts by noticing and the body provides us with this opportunity, in our yoga practice to notice where we are gripping and holding on for dear life, in all postures, not just those that take us out of our comfort zone, and the way we are challenged when presented with something new, a different movement pattern or way of practising a posture, and of the way we cling to notions of principles. Do not be fooled! The more you cling on to what you’ve been told, to an idea or a notion of something that’s concrete, absolute and somehow certain, the greater the fall when you realise that contain the soul.

It takes us to the path. I’ve finished writing my book about depression and I write in there about how the ‘sod it’ moments of my life have often been the most fruitful, not the carefully planned ones, not the arranged ones, but the ones that happen when I let go into spontaneity, and when I am therefore least expecting it, something new will pop in to lead me down a different path that I had literally not imagined.

This quite in contrast to the vision board and moon manifesting that I have done in the past, and which exerts a certain amount of will and a lot of energy to create an outcome. This approach started to settle uncomfortably with me, because even though I might have felt it came form heart, there was a lot of pushing and expectation of outcome, which took up a lot of headspace.

My yoga teacher just this week commented that if you think you’re following your path, you’re probably following someone else’s instead, because you’re path reveals itself to you moment to moment. This morning I stumbled across a quote, “trust in the path your soul is leading you to”, which just sums it up beautifully for me. It helps to turn it all on its head, so it is not about directing the path but about allowing the path to unfold moment to moment as your soul reveals itself to you.

This helps us get out of our head and out of our need to control and asks us to go deeper, to come from a different place entirely, not just of heart but of deep trust…of root and crown and everything in-between. There is a point where they meet, where the path reveals itself, in the down and the up and the up and down and it is that place that we let go into, the deep mystery and the deep unknown. This is where we find what we have been seeking and it will only reveal itself to us when we go within.

As Rumi wrote:

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."

There is no language for what we might find, no need for adornments, no need for anything other than courage and vulnerability and an openness to all that might be revealed when we find that place beyond the limitations of the mind.

Trust. Undoing. Releasing.

Enjoy the full moon!

xx

Beinspired is finding its voice

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the duality of this world we live in; with good there is bad, with black there is white, with hate there is love, and all this in the context of that which I most resist or have a strong opinion about, which might cause me to lose my centre because of orientating one way or the other. 

For example, since May I have turned my back on social media and while I have felt much better for it personally, I have recently found myself questioning the impact of me holding onto the perspective that it is ‘bad’ without also considering its inherent goodness too. 

It was not that my experience of social media was not bad per se, I was not vilified or bullied, but it never made me feel very good on the inside and I wasn’t sure it was bringing out the best in me, or in others, or in the wider world per se. I didn’t want to be doing something just because others were doing it and I certainly didn’t want to post for the sake of posting to satisfy an algorithm that has been set up to keep us online. It didn’t make sense to me and made me feel increasingly uncomfortable.

I am very aware that we all of us have a choice about how we utilise our time and while I might rather be writing or practising yoga or outside with the children than stuck inside online with social media, others may have a totally different take on things and it might for them be a lifeline. So while coming off social media has been a very positive experience for me, for others it might be a very negative experience. 

My ponderings have also caused me to watch Social Dilemma and consider more of the effect of social media on the mind and our sense of self. I’m very aware how social media can negatively impact our mental wellbeing, playing into our insecurities and making us feel as if we are missing out or don’t know what’s going on if we’re not on there. This to the extent that we can get hooked without even realising it, so that our mind cannot imagine a life without it such is our dependency on it. 

I’m aware how much the big corporations play into this and make every attempt to ruthlessly profiteer from our dependencies and the need to be someone and fit in to a world that tries to control through organising and boxing us into labels and definitions, organisations in fact, and common ways of being. I am fascinated by all this too – how we try to buy an identity and a sense of self, as if we too can be commodified, often looking outside of ourselves, just look at the yoga ‘industry’…

There’s a sutra in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras which talks about ‘pratipaksa bhavanam’ (Chapter 2, Verse 33), which basically means looking at things from a different point of the view. It’s used in the context of ‘when we find ourselves disturbed/unsure of what to do, not sure of the best way forward, try and look at it from the other perspective’, and I have tried to put this into practice with my resistance to social media.

I have no qualms whatsoever with removing myself from all social media platforms, I have made complete peace with that, but I was beginning to have doubts about Beinspired, not least because I have finally accepted that I am running a business, albeit one with a heart and a genuine orientation towards the community, but because I’ve been feeling increasingly that it needs its own voice. 

Since last May, as lockdown in Guernsey eased, I have stood back a little to feel into things. 2020 has thrown life up in the air and I wasn’t quite sure how it would settle and where I would settle with it. There was a point where I wasn’t even sure I wanted to continue teaching, which surprised me a little as I have always imagined that I would teach until the day I die, but the questioning was there nonetheless.

I even found myself questioning what yoga means to me, and perhaps this was has been the most challenging  aspect of all my questioning, because even this has changed too. It’s been gradual, but picked up a pace this summer the more I practiced with my teacher and began to heal old wounds around eating disorder to the extent that I stopped considering asana (postures) as just another way of controlling my body and feeding into old patterns of self-harm (the ‘push through it/overextending mentality’). 

I began to see the way in which my old way of practising had been feeding into my imbalances and keeping me stuck. My practice had taken me so far, I could practice all these fancy poses but I couldn’t be sure that it was truly changing me, or at least it wasn’t getting at some of my deeply ingrained patterns that I knew needed shifting and releasing. There was nowhere to hide anymore, and actually I didn’t want to hide or use my practice to numb out from feeling and from deepening my experience of yoga. 

While I have always approached yoga as a spiritual practice and tried to share this in my teachings, it has become clearer and clearer to me over the years that it really is a spiritual practice, that not only connects us more fully to the ‘self’, but that calms our mind to the extent that we are even able to recognise, let alone ‘hear’, the self. Thus it becomes a practice to literally freeing us from the limitations and restrictions of the mind, and not just a form of exercising for the sake of exercising. 

Of course yoga does involve movement as we practice asana (postures), and this – in theory - to ensure that the body is healthy enough to enable us to live to a ripe old age where we might have more chance to sit comfortably and realise the self. Of course the postures offer many benefits and the attentive practising of them with an awareness of the breath, can, without doubt, help to still our mind and enable us to access deeper parts of ourselves in the body, but of course we have to be in the body to begin with, not lost in the thinking mind.

Being in the body enables us to notice where we are stuck and holding onto emotional pain which hasn’t been processed. This will often create physical discomfort as much as it will mental and emotional, and also spiritual suffering. With a regular practice we might begin to notice restrictive thought and behaviour patterns that both create and compound our own suffering an keep us tied in the past and limit us in some way, keeping us stuck.

It felt at times like feeling my way through a dark wood, seeking some evidence of a path which might lead me back to the light and to a greater understanding of what it means and how best to be with it in this lifetime! Of course there was a bigger picture, there is always a bigger picture, but I couldn’t see it, because on some level I was in the metamorphic stage and wasn’t actually sure whether I would truly end up finding my butterfly at the end, despite the many signs the universe tried to give me but that I struggled to see because I was so caught up in the uncomfortableness and muckiness of it in that moment!

The clarity eventually arrived, the bigger picture became clearer, there are always steps to take on the path to realising our dreams and of course appreciating and loving more of the self, but sometimes those steps make no sense in the moment, until we are later able to look back and go, ‘ah ha, so that was what that was all about!’. And while I may have had the idea, the notion then, that I always wanted Beinspired to be about more than just me, it’s taken it’s time to unfold to the extent that I’d stopped even imagining it.

But seeds that are planted, albeit some time ago, and that are tendered will, one day, potentially grow, and what they grow into, well who knows; look at Jack and his magic beans! So the seeds are growing in their own way and at their own pace, and perhaps it’s too early, I don’t know, but Beinspired is just starting to have a little bit more of its own voice, one that talks of serving the community and raising consciousness through teaching and sharing yoga and Reiki and through charitable projects and giving back to the island and to the land. 

Which brings me back to social media, because if there is one ‘good’ thing that social media offers, is the opportunity to bring together community, to share community based projects and events, which might help to bring together like minded people for the greater good of humanity and our evolution on this beautiful planet we call home. This left me in a quandary.

So I’ve tried to put into practice what I can (with my current level of understanding of the philosophy) of Chapter 2, verse 33 of the Yoga Sutras and ‘when we find ourselves disturbed/unsure of what to do, not sure of the best way forward, try and look at it from the other perspective’, which has found me considering the ‘goodness’ of social media and the benefits it offers. 

This has helped me to get myself out of the way a little and to be reminded that there is always another way of seeing things, to the extent that we might consider what might happen if we don’t do it, compared to what might happen if we do, do it. If we are stuck in an attitude of fear or resentment, for example, then we are asked to positively cultivate the opposite, to see this from a different perspective.

I’ve found this process extremely helpful to help me let go of my fixed idea about something, so that I might see both sides of the argument. Ultimately we all have a choice, that is the important thing, and over time our spiritual practice may help us to become increasingly conscious of the choices and impact of the decisions that we make – so we might ask ourselves, are we feeding something with good energy or bad energy and what might be the implications of this? It reminds me of mirrors, what we put out is reflected back at us. 

At Beinspired we have always intended and hoped to encourage a sense of community where people can discover, embrace and share their own uniqueness without fear of prejudice and have fun as they experience the healing and transformative nature of yoga and Reiki for themselves and never more so than now. If social media can help us to spread more love, joy and compassion out into the world then so be it, who am I to stand in the way of it! 

The way I now see it, Beinspired not being on Facebook will not stop others spending their time online, but it will mean that they cannot find out about us and that would be a shame. For Beinspired to have a voice it needs people who are willing to listen so I’m grateful to all of you who are already following us and thank you for hanging in there. We’re keen to let Beinspired speak for itself and look forward to connecting again soon.

 Plus, we’ve opened the blog up to comments in our quest to build more of our community and because sometimes we all have something that needs to be said, so please feel that you can leave your comments below, just appreciate that we’d like to keep the energy high and respectful too. 

A celebration of moving with lightness

We’re waxing down to the dark moon in a few day’s time and don’t I know it! I haven’t read too much about this new moon yet but what I did read confirmed to me that yes, this is a heavy one. In truth it feels like they’ve all been heavy this year, it is a heavy year, and from what I gather it’s not going to get any lighter just soon.

If ever we need to be reminded that we live in a world of uncertainty then this year proves it and as much as I might try to create some certainty in my life, arranging retreats and workshops in advance, I know that the arranging alone does not make them certain.

The practice, the yoga practice, the chanting practice, the reading of the ancient texts, the listening to the Sri Lankan monks, the Reiki, all of this, well it changes things. Everything changes. I was reading a lovely blog post about this yesterday and quoted from it in class. Even one yoga class will change us in some way, how can it not. But being changed is not easy because always we have to let go of our idea of how life should be lived and who we are, beyond the stories, narratives and titles we use to define ourselves.

I’ve not found that easy this year. I feel almost as if the roots have been lifted, my very foundations shaken as I have repeatedly questioned who I am and what exactly I’m practising and teaching, let alone how I’m living and how much of this is from my conditioning - most of it! On the one hand this is deeply liberating. but on the other it is very shaky and very unstable because I have to find a new way to be that might be more aligned, not just in terms of relationship with self but relationship with society too. The latter is almost trickier than the former.

I feel that each moon cycle has ramped this up a little, shone more lights into those places that I haven’t been able to see previously and there has been very little let up from one shift to another, one pattern showing up to another and all so much woven together.

There was a respite for a night spent on Sark, requested by my eldest for his birthday, his soul needing the peace as much as my own. It was magical as always, Sark air, the most incredible night sky and the rising half moon, cycling, no cars, peace, glorious peace and good friends to sit and chat with, a beach to ourselves to potter and swim. I died and went to heaven all in this lifetime.

There as a definite case of Sark blues returning back and into the thick of other people’s dramas and neuroses because we are all of us being squeezed.

I found my mat with renewed need today, and found my breath and a long yoga nidra. There was mediation and self Reiki later, and a need to come back to the texts, to something grounding. Then I thought maybe what I needed was to watch some yoga practised and I found this most beautiful video, which has warmed my heart and fed my soul and sorry if that sounds’s gooey but it was much needed and worked a treat - look at it, just BEAUTIFUL!!! It reminds me that it is worth it. The going against the flow, the doing things differently and all because my heart said so.

If your heart is saying so too then you’ll know that it’s not easy and that there are days when you just want to stay in bed and be done with it, when you might just throw your hands in the air and say that you’re done with it and join the treadmill again. But other days, when you are not so weary, when your children have slept and are not draining all your patience and energy and you are feeling inspired, that you don’t doubt it.

I don’t ever really doubt it, I just become tired by the challenges to almost help me deepen my faith in it. Then I’ll watch a video like that, or I’ll read this extract and I’ll feel strengthened by it, a bit like an angel card that says it exactly as you feel it, as if the universe really is able to commune with you, and it is, it is, it is. There is no such thing as a coincidence, the signs are everywhere, we’ve just got to open ourselves up to it:

“Freedom from the Known is one of Krishnamurti's most accessible works. Here, he reveals how we can free ourselves radically and immediately from the tyranny of the expected. By changing ourselves, we can alter the structure of society and our relationships. The vital need for change and the recognition of its very possibility form an essential part of this important book's message.”

I might just have stumbled across this book at just the right time, and what fascinates me the most is the fact I have finally stumbled across it, because Krishnamurti has been mentioned to me many times previously but all of a sudden tonight from nowhere, yet from a place of longing for something to shine a light, I find his name popping into my head and then I find my way to this book and this quote that means so much already. What force does that? Brings us to that which we need to connect? It’s not gravity and it’s not magnetism, so what is it, love? Divine? It’s amazing whatever it is.

So this is the video that I was watching that was like a light and gives me more strength to continue in the direction that my self practice has been taking me, with a little more lightness…and shining a light on those aspects of self that struggle with this, the linear, masculine and will based parts of me that have been so used to pushing my life forward over the years, of always trying my hardest to achieve come what may…come what may?! I’m pretty sure there’s a more gentle way. I see it in this lady’s practice and it inspires me on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvSBeujJKAo

Peace. That’s the word that keeps coming to me. Our inner peace. Reconciling all aspects of self, the right, the left, the active, the passive, the achiever and the complacent, the being in the middle of it all, the unknown and being OK with that. I’m pretty sure that the more lightness we can find in our movement on our mats, the less certain we are of form and more we allow the body it’s own beautiful expression, the more too our lives will be shaped by that lightness.

Enjoy the squeeze of the dark moon and her insights, and the new moon lightness that should follow…

xx