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

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

The yoga body?

“This yoga is not about gymnastics, contortionism or pushing, pulling and stretching the muscles. This yoga is about unsystematically undoing the tension in the body, so the body becomes freer and expresses an aliveness, clarity and beauty.” 

— Christine Borg

The moon, the moon, the moon…we have a super new moon on Friday and a whole heap of planetary stuff going on that is just adding to the general chaos of life lived at the moment.

The best thing I believe, would be for us all to retreat away for the rest of the month until the next full moon on October 31st has passed! Everyone is being squeezed a little, even us here on Guernsey who are fairly exempt from the covid and lockdown chaos seen elsewhere around the world.

I’ve talked to a few people who are all responsible for managing others and they all say it is a complete nightmare with anxiety and insecurity and depression running high and people sick and off work worrying about their potential covid symptoms and others just fussing, there’s a lot of fussing going on.

I’ve been questioning where yoga fits in all this because in theory it should have prepared us for this. Yoga teaches us how to be able to stay centred in the midst of uncertainty and wobbly times. It is a spiritual practice that helps to cease the fluctuations of the mind. Yet I have a sneaky feeling that much of the yoga that has been passed to us in the West is not really the yoga that the ancient rishis talked about and Patanjali codified in his Yoga Sutras.

I feel a bit peeved about this as many of you know, about the way yoga has become little more than an exercise class when it can be so much more than this if we allow it - if we allow ourselves to get out of our tiny little minds and see the world differently. The trouble is our education and society has conditioned us in such a way that it is difficult to see life differently, to let go of the rational mind as it has become and to access other parts of it that are not at all interested in what is right or wrong, but in something far more sacred and special and different altogether that cannot even be spoken of because it has a whole different language and vocabulary that is beyond our rational mind.

It’s even difficult to imagine this and I know that some who have come to class recently are challenged because the yoga that I practice and teach is one that is less driven or determined by the rational mind and therefore is not as rigid as it might once have been. Not to say that rational yoga is not without its benefits. It got me this far and I have definitely let go of many of the samskaras, the negative patterns and grooves in my mind that were there when I started, and I have managed to release the memory of trauma form my body so that i am able to enjoy greater intimacy in my relationships with others and with myself, and there has been a complete shift in the way I live my life.

But something still needed to change, and into my life this practice appeared that has been confronting and challenging and asks me to go deeper than I could have ever imagined and as difficult as this has been at times with the increased vulnerability and the need to let go of my notion of that which I thought was right (and many of my judgements along the way) there is something that keeps me attentive and engaged.

There have been a few times when I have thought, “to hell with it, what is this yoga anyway if it is not just postures for the sake of posture” and practiced in the old way and yet it feels so dead, so forced, so insincere and unkind to my body and to my soul. I lose my awareness drifting off, and while I might still rest at the end of the session, and there may be a sense of euphoria of moving energy and breath, the mind is not so free and calm and light, and the soul, hmm, the soul does not have as much expression, or room for expression as it might like.

Is this yoga?

It’s something I keep pondering on. We all have to start somewhere and anything that begins to tame the mind can only ever be a good thing. But when do we know that we need to move on? When do we know that we have gotten ourselves stuck? A student mentioned this week about taking a friend to class and knowing that he had a yoga body and that he would be good at getting into the advanced poses. Does that make him a yogi I wonder? If so are all the gymnasts in the world yogis?

I don’t think so. But I do believe that this is the illusion sold to the west and reinforced by all the many yoga images we are fed these days. Would a photo of someone attentively moving and connecting with that which cannot be named but is accessible though the body really help to sell anything? Maybe not, and yet to me it is the most beautiful thing, when you see someone moving in a way that encapsulates the ease of being in their own skin, or being in their own nature, of not denying this, of not pushing, pulling or forcing, of having no ambition beyond being their true self.

For the last few years I have been inspired by Christine Borg’s video called “Moving with Attention”, which is just beautiful and motivates me to practice in a way that allows more of my own nature, and to teach in a way that allows more of my student’s own nature too, that might make me appear to know very little, but allows me to access parts of the mind that at times makes me feel mad, but I know also makes me feel very alive and very much in my nature in a way that I haven’t felt in all my 17 years of daily yoga practice.

Just watch this, and right to the end too! http://www.christineborgyoga.com/practice/ It might just inspire you too!

This is what the moon is bringing up for me, this need to keep listening in and living from that space regardless of how difficult it can be because it means that life is often lived differently from the majority and that can trigger feelings of vulnerability and a little insecurity too, because there is nothing concrete to hold onto anymore…only more uncertainty in a life that is lived less and less in the right/wrong. Yet there is no other way, not when you have began and if madness and quirkiness is the result, then mad and quirky I shall become!

As Vanda Scaravelli said, ‘Yoga must not be practised to control the body: it is the opposite, it must bring freedom to the body, all the freedom it needs.’

Happy new moon!

Blame the moon!

This full moon has definitely been illuminating in many ways, shining a light into the shadows and, as always, bringing up fears and the opportunity to surrender to them. It has brought up a limiting belief too that has been awaiting release. 

I could feel it building all week, and with bad weather predicted and a Sark retreat to run I just had a feeling that the moon was going to make me face my fears around cancelling. I made extra time to meditate this week so that I could really feel into it and look at my fears and what underlaid them. I realised that there is only one way to manage a situation like this and it is to surrender to it, a little like when my waters broke six weeks early on the October full moon while leading a retreat on Herm and Eben arrived a few days later by Caesarean section. 

Me and retreats, we have a history, they provide a golden opportunity not only to me but to my fellow retreat goers too, to look at our fears and our patterns and potentially let them go. I don’t know that I’ve ever run a retreat that has been utterly painless or gone totally smoothly, they all bring with them a potential drama or issue, whether that be the weather, the boat, the hotel, the food and/or the student, there is always something that encourages me to surrender. This one was no different and I was remarkably calm when Sark Shipping finally told me they were cancelling (this after they had told virtually everyone else!) because I knew it was inevitable and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it but surrender!   

A limiting belief around motherhood also came up too, and I have a feeling that this may have been in the field as I know I am not alone. I could feel this creeping in during the week too, but I wasn’t able to give voice to it or understand what was happening until the clarity came today with the moon. I stared to feel old feelings around lack of worth and this in relation to my role in the world. I began to doubt the work I do and my choice to let go of titles and patterns of over work and over achieving in my quest to live my dream of being a more present mother to my children.

I ignored this dream for many years through fear that it would never become a reality and I threw my creative energy into my work and making money, in the finance sector initially and then in the holistic realm as I wanted to share my passion for yoga and healing with others. I gave everything I had and fell into a pattern of over work and exhaustion, which had always been my way, as if proving my worth through working and earning money. 

Then the children finally came along and not without a bit of effort and yet still, with the first one, I continued to throw myself into my work because this is what I had been conditioned to do, by my education and by society if I hoped to be seen as a successful woman. Yet this made me ill. I was trying to be all things to all people and my eldest child was growing up without me being truly present, always in the office or running off to teach yoga.

When the second one came along, and this after a failed IVF round which made me appreciate the fragility of life a little more, I decided I wanted to step up as a mother, but even then the patterns had been set and I got dragged back into the office and working and trying to be all things until my body made me aware that this couldn’t continue, but I didn’t know how to change things.

Then life intervened and my eldest suffered with separation anxiety at school which presented me with little choice but to step up and be a much more present mother. It took a bit of getting used to because I hadn’t realised how much of my identity and worth was tied up in my role as a company secretary where I could command a fairly decent salary and have people take me (relatively) seriously.

It’s ironic in many respects because as a career girl I used to judge those mothers who chose to stay at home, and those who worked but whose priority was their children. I had been sold the idea that to be a successful woman in this day and age, I needed to take my work seriously and put the needs of the business before both my children’s needs and my needs but I slowly started to wake up to this and the illusion I had been sold.

I started to notice how no one questioned the way in which we women are expected to be all things, how women were actively encouraged to put their children into childcare so that they could carry on working, women forced to stop breastfeeding, not because they wanted to, but because it impractical to continue once they returned from maternity leave and this sometimes after a mere 3 months.

Understandably many women have no choice, they have mortgages and bills to pay and they need to work. This was one of the reasons that I felt the pressure to return to work 3 months after having my eldest, but actually we could have coped. The reason I returned was because I didn’t know that I had a choice, it was what we women did, we had children and then (on the whole) we returned to work. 

I needed to earn money for the sake of earning money, I needed a career for the sake of having a career. I did all this because everyone else was doing it and it was expected of me. I did it because I expected to keep doing it. What was the point in all my education and professional training if I just gave up and stayed at home with my children? It just wasn’t even something I seriously considered; I was sold the notion that I would go mad, become brain dead, if I just stayed at home with my children.

It’s sad really, that we women have been conditioned to believe that we don’t have a choice. Some may well not have a choice and I am sorry about that; sorry that we live in a society where so little value is placed on the role of the mother in raising her young children herself if she chooses. I appreciate that not everyone wants to be with their children, and that is their right and choice too, it’s hard work and I was grateful for the distraction of work on many occasions!

Usually I don’t question the choice I have since made, to give up title and accumulation of wealth in exchange for more time spent with my children, but clearly there is something unresolved within me about it for it to have come up on the moon. I knew it was around feelings of self-worth but it wasn’t until today that I realised that this was in relation to my role as mum.

We finally watched Social Dilemma last night and this helped me to see some of the light. I saw so clearly the dark side of capitalism and how much suffering it creates in its pursuit of the accumulation of wealth above all else. This is partly the reason the earth is in such a mess and humanity too, that we sell out on that which is important in our pursuit of happiness=wealth=success. 

We know on a very basic level that this is not true, that wealth does not create happiness, yet we spend our lives trying to accumulate it anyhow and always at a cost. We equate money to success. It is very difficult to value motherhood, how can we measure it? And it’s this that makes it so tricky, when we have grown up in a society which is always trying to evaluate everything and put it in its place, even my six year old is evaluated on the speed at which he can answer sums to 10; its ingrained from a very young age.

Today I see this pattern so clearly and the extent to which society has lost its way.  But I also know how difficult it is to make the change, to go against the flow of things because something inside you tells you that it is not the way for you, to follow like a sheep, but this brings up fear because the way you are choosing is not known, it is not certain, it has no definite outcome, it is of the heart and soul and of trusting in that and having faith. 

 Keeping our faith high, and trusting in that little voice inside is not easy. This moon has made that very clear. But there really is no other way, not really, not if we are trying to live with integrity. It was this that struck me the most watching Social Dilemma, the way in which those humane IT guys live with integrity, and this gives me hope for the future of humanity. It also made me realise how easy it is to buy into the illusion and how we have to be really mindful about this. 

It is easy to convince ourselves that our actions are OK because everyone else is doing them. I know I’ve been kidding myself about that and air travel for a while now, justifying it somehow and yet knowing that it is not a sustainable way to travel, and in conflict with my other efforts to live more sustainably and with respect for the planet. There are many ways that we kid ourselves and buy into the illusion that its all OK. 

Social media is a prime example of this. I have been going on about it for months now and you can just imagine my joy that others are now taking note as a result of Social Dilemma. No doubt many will watch it and know they need to do something, but will continue to bury their heads in the sand because they will continue to buy into the illusion that this is the way that the world works now, this is the way to stay connected, the way to run a business, and the way to be someone.

But hopefully if enough of us find a different way, let go of the need for titles and the notion of ‘being someone’ and the idea of the happiness=wealth=success paradigm then things might change more positively. As for the over work and over achieve pattern, I can see this still so clearly rooted in the fear of not being good enough, of not being enough, of not being useful to society and of not living a life of purpose. Yet what could be more fulfilling or give my life more purpose or be of more value for society than me nurturing, watching, listening to and meeting the needs of my children? Let alone me meeting my own needs, that I have recognised too. 

This one of meeting our genuine needs requires a paradigm shift, meeting the needs of our children and ourselves, of genuine connection and simple living. It’s back to basics, coming full circle, knowing where our food comes from and having time to prepare it into a nutritious meal for our family, of re-prioritising and realising what is important, of valuing motherhood, of taking responsibility for our physical, mental and emotional health and looking after ourselves and our planet and saying no to anything that compromises any of this, including our own fears. 

Our suffering is our awakening

The last few days have been wobbly, the moon is waxing and she’s a powerful one, due full on Thursday, the first of two this October, the second will find us on Herm for the retreat, coincides with Samhain too and this month is due to be quite a potent one astrologically.

I’ve spent the day trying to feel into her. I had a sense that she is bringing surrender and there was something about community too, but then it came to me this evening, it’s illuminating more of the illusionary world we inhibit. Life is an illusion, this doesn’t mean that it isn’t real, or that it doesn’t exist, more so that it is subject to our interpretation and this a perspective and state of mind, so everyone will perceive the world differently.

There is no absolute truth therefore, other than purusha, the soul, the seer, which experiences through the mind but it is not the mind, it is the observer. The trouble is we cling to the mind and its idea of how life should be lived and we try to make certain that which is uncertain and judge and categories and otherwise create our own suffering through buying into the illusion.

Its interesting timing then that we should find ourselves going through an election here in Guernsey during October and between these two potent full moons. It wasn’t until I was talking to a friend earlier this evening that I realised how much this has been bothering me. I have spent the last few days reading manifestos and listening to videos and my soul has become increasingly weary. I don’t doubt that everyone wants positive change, but people are coming at it in such different ways, some with heart, passionate about some cause, and others because their ego says so.

Even those I might surmise are coming from heart, are trying to sell us a little of the illusion and the lie. I’m all up for the decriminalisation and legalisation of cannabis, for example, why not when alcohol and pharmaceutical drugs are used by the general public legally. But let’s be careful when we start using the excuse that cannabis is a plant medicine. Yes it is a plant medicine, but like any plant medicine you still need to proceed with caution. Wormwood is also a plant medicine but I’m not about to smoke that, and nor will I take more than I need without it having a toxic effect on my body and my mind.

But you can’t tell people this, or have a conversation about how we might look at reducing our dependency on drugs generally, because drugging ourselves on alcohol and prescription drugs has become such an acceptable part of our society that the notion of going without would literally create shock waves, because our pain and suffering is so great that we need something to numb it…don’t we? I’m biased. In the past I did use cannabis and alcohol to numb my pain, sometimes excessively and sometimes under the illusion that it was expanding my mind (the cannabis) and making me more spiritual (ha ha!).

But I finally recognised that my numbing to ease my suffering was actually creating more suffering in the long term and my buying into the illusion that antidepressants was going to help me find my way with depression, was a step too far for me. My little soul which was fairly much suffocated by this stage, managed to find the strength to flash through my mind and somehow make me consider in the darkest of dark moments that there had to be another way. Thank God for the soul. Thank God for yoga too.

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, chapter 2, verse 16, reads, “hey duhkhamanagatam”, which basically means what must be avoided is future suffering, what is done is done let it go - yoga is all about reducing suffering. The chapter then goes on to share with us the tools that will help us to reduce our suffering including asana (postures) but not limited to this! Chapter Six of the Bhagavad Gita contains four definitions of yoga and one of them is especially genius -'“ yoga is the unlinking of the link with pain”.

This has been my experience of yoga. I have been practising yoga daily for just over 17 years now and during that time my life has changed beyond recognition and my relationship with my self and my mind has also changed in ways that I never imagined it could ever change. My relationship to pain has changed significantly too; I am not longer scared of pain and I no longer need to numb myself from it. Without doubt, pain has become one of my best friends because it highlights to me where I need to focus my attention and it is in this way that I can ease my suffering.

Our pain will manifest in all ways, but there will always be a mental source. We suffer because of our mind. This does not mean that our physical pain is not real, our physical pain will feel very real, only that it is our mind that ultimately creates our suffering in how it responds and manages our pain. Therefore if we can find ways to manage our mind, then we might be able to free ourselves from our overall pain and our suffering.

Which brings me back to the election and the illusion. I appreciate that many of those standing are doing so to make a difference, because they believe that they have something new to offer to us, to save the environment, to boost our economy, to sort our education once and for all, to ensure that the elderly are better cared for, to improve the mental health service, to make cannabis available to all, but it’s all just words and it’s just feeding the illusion.

If we truly want change then it has to come back to each of us individually and we need to begin to take greater responsibility, to see through the illusion and stop feeding into it. Facebook is such a good example of this, so many people moan about how it makes them feel bad, how they waste so much of their time on there, but they still cannot delete themselves from it, they are still feeding into the illusion that they will miss out, or lose a sense of community if they are not on it.

My weary soul took me to see La Gran’mère du Chimquière today, to touch something real that has stood the test of time and change. I felt better for it, so too the sea swims and the time spent wandering on Richmond dreaming of spiritual community, This is what I crave the most here on Guernsey, the weaving of the spiritual into our ordinary life, creating a shift in our awareness, ushering in a new paradigm, which doesn’t try to create more of what’s been while calling it something different, but invites in a whole new way of being, one of heart and the sacred, of deeper respect for the self and for the world we live in.

This is a whole new idea of what it means to be alive, if only we could shift our perspective to that extent; so that all the rest would shift effortlessly in a more harmonious and positive direction, so that we wouldn’t need to be talking about treating symptoms but could get right back to the cause of the loss of harmony and wellness of our society in the first place, to what made us sick; treating the symptoms never solved anything.

In many respects our suffering if a gift. It has the potential to awaken us, and this is needed now more than ever before in our history. All of this life currently lived, with Covid is asking more of us individually and collectively. We are trying to fight it, but it is not a war to be fought, it is an opportunity to look deeper at all that is flawed and all that has been mis-sold to us, including yoga, yes, including yoga. This is a time for deep discernment and discrimination, to see beyond the illusion. Only then will life change in a truly positive direction. Are you up for it?!

The second cancerian new moon!

It’s been a while, i have been ensconced in a writing project and just getting through the end of term demands with all the backwards and forwards travel to the school to help where I could.

This is only our second year of school, but I felt it last year and felt it again this year that as soon as school finished, it is like the collective holding that a school provides dissipates and there is a scattering of the energy on the island, as routines drop away and people holiday; it has always helped me to recognise the cohesive nature of a school on the community.

Scattering is probably the word for the energy generally at the moment; I have been trying to feel into it these last few days. Things are still very up in the air and there appears to be confusion, people must aren’t clear yet about paths to take, where to focus they energy, how to plan in a world that appears less certain than it has ever been (although we are always living with uncertainty to an extent) and which path to take.

However saying that, Mercury coming our of retrograde earlier this week, did seem to lift a little of the lack of clarity and begin again the consideration of what might come ahead, and the new moon is - I feel - trying to help with this. But it’s little steps, and probably this is where the cancer crab comes in. I’m not an astrologer but I do know that the fact we have two new moons in cancer this year is unusual and should capture our attention.

I’m cancerian so the cancerian energy is familiar to me. I too can have a hard exterior and yet a very soft and vulnerable interior and this is where we are at collectively, trying to protect ourselves from harm. I keep thinking of rock pooling and the fact that I’m regularly turning rocks on the beach (and back again may I add) to try and find crabs for the children, and I feel like we’re all a little bit like that with the whole covid thing, never quite sure when the rock of protection will be lifted from us, especially here in Guernsey where we are living on our own little covid-free rock.

But it’s more than that, crabs will scuttle sideways and bury themselves quickly in the sand. They’re good at trying to find an escape route, and I do wonder if this energy is up there in the air with us at the moment. There’s the possibility to see clearly into shadows and certainly in the one-to-one work I have been doing with people recently, there has been a keenness to look into the shadows and an openness to seeing what lies there, because on some level we know that things have to change, and we know that now is the time to do some significant shifting.

I can relate to this in my own life too, some family significant patterns have revealed themselves recently and continue to do so, each time I take to my mat I seem to yawn or cry away some of the past as my digraph, which has quite a story to tell softens some of its hardness, a long time in coming, that has has been held there for quite some time with the stress of life and the many moments when I have held my breath with anticipation and perhaps some fear of whatever life has presented at that time, and that has remained in the cellular memory unprocessed and gripping the liver and kidneys let alone my mind.

I do have a sense of where my energy needs to be placed, and a clearer idea of boundaries around then, but there is still greater clarity to come and I don’t get the feeling that this is the time to begin anything new, but to be giving consideration to it instead, feeling into it, like a crab does I suppose with it’s many legs, nit yet able to move forwards so moving sideways instead, because there is always the potential for change, so it’s a bit like keeping all your eggs in one basket for now. It’s a brave soul who does make a major commitment right now with everything so up in the air; perhaps a time to simply put the feelers out.

I always find the summer energy scattered, so whether this moon is enhancing that perhaps - like I was saying earlier there is confusion in the air, and I noticed that even the lunascope I was reading yesterday was confused and lacked a thread, and yet I’m wondering if this thread is difficult to follow, simply because it is sometimes easier to feel into the energy than explain it to others, and let’s face it, we’ll all have our own experience and bias anyway!

So just to bring it all together, I do really feel that this is - as it is every month - a time for considering new beginnings and how we might like our lives to look when the covid situation calms down and the neuroses around it eases, but I can’t be sure that this is the time to take action, not yet, there is more clarity to come through, and the universe will continue to bring signs to support this. I do know this this is a fab time to clear stuff that needs clearing, to get low to the earth, practice yoga, take some Reiki, have a massage, look at your diet, you know, start trying to uncover that which needs healing or expression, and just being with it and letting it drop away.

This is also a time to lighten up a little, and us spiritual bods would do well to remember that. Sometimes the journey can become heavy, we can take it and ourselves too seriously and forget to have fun and be like children, open to whatever comes. As always the words surrender and trust come to mind, let life unfold but try to be present to it so that you can surrender…and trust.

Love! We also need to remember to love.

xxxxx

The body never lies; eclipses and shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love Emma x

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