Supporting Guernsey Mind through yoga nidra and Reiki

Thank you so much beautiful people for helping to raise £308.50 for Guernsey Mind through yoga nidra and Reiki this evening.

I’m probably biased but I just love a room full of people channelling and receiving Reiki, it’s powerful stuff! I also love sharing a yoga nidra, so it was the perfect evening for me, especially as I taught yoga first too. The Reiki share was a particular highlight, where we linked palms and shared Reiki around the circle, my hands were buzzing!!!

Thank you very much to my helpers too, so much appreciated.

Sending love and Reiki.

Emma xxx

Yoga Nidra!

With the Yoga Nidra session for Guernsey Mind soon approaching I thought maybe I might share an article I wrote that was published by a European yoga & health magazine about seven years ago now. This was before children so I do not reference the way in which my journey with IVF deepened my experience of yoga nidra and helped me recognise more than ever the transformative and supportive nature of this practice.

I write about it in my book, Dancing with the Moon, but yoga nidra really helped me to maintain a positive mind set when it came to my journey to motherhood and I worked a lot with the Sankalpa, “I am pregnant with a healthy baby”. I practiced Yoga nidra a lot, perhaps daily at times, during the post natal period as I found it so incredibly healing and helpful when i was depleted from C-sections and sleep deprivation.

Only now are we beginning to get more sleep, almost seven years on from having our eldest and I still practice yoga nidra a few times a week. It was helpful earlier on this year when I was initially exploring sobriety, and throughout lockdown it helped enormously in managing my angst at not being able to physically teach yoga or give hands on Reiki. It has been extremely helpful in recent months as I work through some old patterns around boundaries and self-worth.

That’s the thing with yoga nidra. It not only makes me feel better, but it actually helps to completely change things, we are potentially transformed by the practice, if we can make the time. This is the reason I am so keen to share it, not simply as a deep guided relaxation, although it is this, but because it literally transforms our mind in a more positive direction if we allow it, almost re-programmes it then. It’s quite remarkable.

Anyhow here’s the article…

When I initially started practicing Yoga almost 10 years ago now, I simply could not relax.  It was impossible.  At the end of the Yoga class when the teacher announced Savasana, I would try and find any possible excuse to leave the class early so that I could avoid the last few minutes of relaxation.  

It was not so much that I was adverse to the idea of relaxation per se, it was more so that I found relaxing so mentally uncomfortable.  There were simply too many thoughts, too many tick lists, too many things I should be doing, rather than simply lying there on the floor trying to relax.

When I first ventured out to Byron Bay in Australia to immerse myself in Yoga a year into my practice, I shall never forget my first 2 hour Yoga session (the normal length of the classes out there at that time).  While I loved every single minute of the asana practice, the problem came, however, with a 20 whole minutes of quiet relaxation at the end of the class.  Proper quiet that is, with no music, no distraction, nothing.  Those were the longest 20 minutes of my life, or so it seemed in that moment! 

Still with me attending these 2 hour sessions once or twice a day every day for a month and unable to leave the class early (many teachers will understandably discourage you from doing so), I quickly developed my own way of dealing with the mental chatter.  I imagined in my mind a train line with open trucks in which I placed each of my thoughts and then watched them pass by, one after the other, until I was able, eventually, to experience some relief from the constant background mental chatter.

Over the next year I practiced a lot of Yoga as I developed my practice both on and off the mat, qualifying as a Yoga teacher in the process.  My ability to relax improved hugely, but it wasn’t until I assisted on a teacher training course at Govinda Valley, Sydney that I discovered the joy and indeed benefit of Yoga Nidra. The relaxation became something I enjoyed rather than something that I endured at the end of a Yoga class.

I can still remember the experience of that first Yoga Nidra clearly.  There we were, the whole class of students, lying comfortably in the corpse pose, a bolster under knees and a blanket covering each of us to keep us warm as the teacher’s gentle voice soothed us into a state of cosy bliss as we relaxed each part of our body part by part, experiencing sensations and bringing awareness to the natural breath; it was a journey like no other I had experienced previously.

Time lost all meaning, what was actually 30 minutes felt like 5, and before I knew it we were back in the room, on our mats, in our bodies, feeling much more centred and grounded than I had felt at the beginning of the class.  What was also noticeable was the fact the mental chatter had eased, I had managed to drift beyond it into that wonderful state of being between being awake and asleep, the hypnotic state, where real healing takes place.  I felt brighter, lighter, rested and renewed.  

Essentially Yoga Nidra is a powerful meditation technique inducing complete physical, emotional and mental relaxation.   During Yoga Nidra one appears to be asleep but the consciousness is functioning at a deeper level of awareness so that you are prompted throughout the practice to say to yourself mentally, “I shall not sleep, I shall remain awake”.

Before beginning Yoga Nidra you make a Sankalpa, or a resolution for the practice.  The Sankalpa is an important stage of Yoga Nidra as it plants a seed in the mind encouraging healing and transformation in a positive direction.  The Sankapla is a short positive mental statement established at the beginning of the practice and said mentally to yourself in the present tense, as if it had already happened, such as “I am happy, healthy and pure light”, or “I am whole and healed”.

A Sankalpa can also be used to encourage you to let go of something in your life like smoking or overeating, focusing on the underlying feeling that leads you to smoke or to overeat such as “I love and care for myself and my body”, or “I choose to eat foods that support my health and wellbeing” or “I am relaxed and contented”.    In fact simply having the opportunity to establish a Sankalpa is powerful in itself as it gives you a focus and enhances your awareness of self.

It is actually in connecting with yourself that you come to realise all the deep seated tensions that Yoga Nidra helps you to release.  These are all the unconscious and unresolved issues that are playing a role in some of the unwanted habits and behaviour patterns you are noticing consciously.  This is the stuff that goes through your mind time and time again, the stuff you resolve to change at the beginning of each year but that “will” alone will not change.  What you need to do is get to the root of the problem and Yoga Nidra provides you with a means to do this.

With all the letting go of this “stuff”, such as trapped emotions and feelings, you become lighter and there is more energy available to be used in a more positive manner.  Plus with the power of intention in the form of Sankalpa, that which we attract into our life also changes.  It is in this way that Yoga Nidra offers us so much potential for transforming our lives in an even more positive direction than we can ever imagine.

Of course let us not forget the physiological benefits too, such as lowering of the heart rate and blood pressure, the release of lactate from the muscles that can cause anxiety and fatigue, a more restful night’s sleep and, ultimately, a calming and unwinding of the nervous system, which is basically the foundation of the body’s wellbeing.  So you see our physical health and sense of wellbeing can improve too.

Over the years Yoga Nidra has helped me in so many ways.  At times of crisis, when I have been tired and exhausted, sick and stressed, it has helped to restore, renew and heal me.  At confused times in my life when I have been unclear of the way forward then it has provided me with much needed clarity.  At other times it has helped me to let go of unhealthy addictions and behaviour patterns, the most profound was changing my relationship to myself and therefore enabling me to effortlessly let go of the need to smoke tobacco after so many years of battling with this nicotine addiction.

These days relaxation comes easily to me and I positively seek out and embrace any opportunity for Yoga Nidra for it is just such an amazing practice. In this stressful and fast paced world we live, where we can feel so disorientated and fragmented, it really helps to bring us back together and connect with ourselves again. Needless to say, I cannot promote the benefits of Yoga Nidra to you enough.

But of course you cannot benefit from merely intellectualising these things, and reading about it will not necessarily change things.  What you really need to do is make a commitment to take the time out for yourself.  Lie comfortably, cover yourself with a blanket, close your eyes and allow yourself to be guided through a Yoga Nidra session.  I doubt you will regret it, in fact you may find it a life changing experience. 

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!

Insecurity and safety

The squeeze keeps going, into the vulnerable places that we try to ignore. I’ve known it needed exploring but it was always possible to put it on the back burner, keep busy, pop it in the shadows, hope it might resolve itself without too much effort on my part. Those of you doing the work will know what i mean. You’ll also know that you cannot help it to resolve without going to those vulnerable places; it’s the natural lore!

It needs expression, release, a voice, a way of being digested, expelled.

I’m always, always blown away by how it works, the coincidences and the synchronicities, the seemingly small things that the universe sends in to help us feel the uncomfortableness of staying stuck and yet the uncomfortableness of finding our voice and speaking what needs to be said. Urgh.

It’s all good though. Today I’m very aware that it’s a beautiful world, really it is, however awful we may feel or however challenged or squeezed, really it is a beautiful world and it will support us and meet us as we need to be met. Everything is perfectly ordered in our lives, we just need to notice it.

This is the message that i received today and if you are reading this then you might relate to it too:

“Perfectionists often have conditional self-esteem: They like themselves when they are on top and dislike themselves when things don't go their way. Can you learn to like yourself even when you are not doing well? Focus on inner qualities like your character, sincerity, or good values, rather than just on what grades you get, how much you get paid, or how many people like you. “

This my friends is what underlays my current healing. This feeling is not a very pleasant feeling, laid down in childhood, the insecurity one feels from not living up to one’s idea of perfectionism, which I believe it underpinned by the need to keep safe.

I felt like I had found the missing part of the jigsaw puzzle when I read this:

“Some of us have very high standards for everything we do. You may want the highest grades, the best job, the perfect figure, the most beautifully decorated apartment or house, neat and polite kids, or the ideal partner. Unfortunately, life doesn’t always turn out exactly the way we want, even if we work extra hard. There is a piece of the outcome that is at least to some degree out of our control. Bosses may be critical, jobs may be scarce, partners may resist commitment, or you may have genes that make it difficult to be skinny. If you are constantly disappointed and blaming yourself for being anything less than perfect, you will start to feel insecure and unworthy. While trying your best and working hard can give you an advantage, other aspects of perfectionism that are unhealthy. Beating up on yourself and constantly worrying about not being good enough can lead to depression and anxiety, eating disorders, or chronic fatigue.” Psychology Online.

It’s always such a relief when we see more clearly into the shadows and make sense of that which we have been trying to understand for a good old while now. I’ve written a third book as many of you know, about my journey with depression and eating disorder to a point, the two are so interlinked it’s difficult sometimes to separate them; they feed into each other. I’ve been trying to explore the root of all of this, to understand more of what caused it all to begin. I had known on some level, but this substantiates it in a way that had not been so visible previously.

It feels like an ending in many respects. Kali came into my life the other day, the Goddess of endings and new beginnings, of death ultimately, and it all make perfect sense. We need to the ending, the dying, the letting go, the grieving and the sorrow. Like a fire we combust that which is no longer needed into ash, and this can be added to the soil in which we grow new seeds. It is all a cycle.

Our inherent feelings of safety on this planet are all being tested right now, Covid has tested the habits and patterns that we have created in our lives to give us a sense of feeling safe, whether that is real or imagined. The rug has been pulled from under our feet and we are trying to find our grounding again, clutching at anything which makes us feel safe, even if it is just imagined. We are all being squeezed, to heal those wounds which prevent us from feeling inherently safe in our connection to the universe, to God, to a higher power, however you want to define ‘it’.

It’s not easy though, because we have to go to those vulnerable places. I see this in yoga. We know, the ancient texts tell us, that yoga can help to cease the fluctuations of the mind, can help to ease our suffering, but even then, even knowing this, it can be too confronting for many to go there in the first place. We might try, we might like to stretch the body, build strength, take a few photos for instagram, but something stops us letting the practice take us deeper, into the shadows, to the spirit, to the heart of yoga.

It’s a shame and while I’m delighted that yoga has become more mainstream with increasing numbers of people teaching yoga now, and some with very few years of practice or experience, it doesn't matter because it is spreading yoga out into the world. But, my concern is that what is being taught is no more than an exercise class, that lacks the potential of yoga, so that many are buying into the idea that they are practising yoga but are able to remain unaffected by it, so that yoga is diluted and not allowed it’s expression either.

But i have to trust in that, because if I don’t then I can feel the frustration creep in, especially when i hear about rising levels of depression and anxiety and increasing use of medication to create feelings of safety and security, to try to mask the inherent feelings of insecurity. There is another way. It’s not easy, but it is worth it when you get there. A whole new world awaits, that you could never have imagined, when you find that place within yourself, your centre maybe, that helps you to access your inner strength and sense of security, challenged as it might be from time to time.

Just for today, we let go of all that is in our way. Just for today, we allow ourselves to go to those tricky places. Just for today we hug ourselves and remind ourselves how beautiful we are inside and out. Just for today we celebrate our perfections and our imperfections in equal measure. Just for today we acknowledge our vulnerability and we’re OK with that, rejoice in it even, because we have to go there to pop through teh other side, into a more compassionate level of being, more connected, more trusting. Then the feelings of safety arise naturally. We are safe, we are safe, we are safe.

The social dilemma

Twice today I have been told to watch Social Dilemma on Netflix. As I exited all social media in May, I asked one of the people whether it might make me want to go back on the social media again and I was assured that no, the documentary would instead make me feel like saying, “ha ha, I told you so!”.

Now obviously I’m not going to say that to anyone because we all have a choice in how we live our life and it’s not for me to judge anyone for making different decisions and having a social media presence. I made the decision for many reasons and have very much enjoyed having my life back again. In the nicest possible way, I don’t need to know the ins and outs of other people’s lives and I don’t want another reason to be distracted from my children and wasting my time.

I’ll admit that I did have a wobble, when I doubted the decision I made, questioning whether I may have been foolish to let go of Beinspired’s presence on there, not least for the community and sharing side of things but to keep people informed of classes and offerings. 

But I am also very aware that there is always another way, and I’m conscious that I don’t want to encourage people to spend any more time on social media and/or to feed into the marketeers and their obsession with selling and profiteering at the expense of all else.

I do what I love and I love what I do and I have faith and trust in something that I cannot name that will bring those to me who need to find me and take me to those who I need to find and connect. This to me is the other way, and when it happens, when there is synchronicity and coincidence then it is rather magical, like this sacred world going on that others don’t notice with their head in phones.

What clinched it for me recently was practising the yoga posture hanumanasana, the monkey pose, or commonly known as the splits. For years I have practised this pose but always by stretching my hamstring on the front and my hip flexors on the back, to the extent that it has not been without some forcing and the general discomfort of stretching legs apart.

Yet recently, practising with my teacher, she has guided me to experience a different way of accessing and being in this pose that does not in any way resemble the way I used to practice it. This way of being in the pose does not put so much pressure on my hamstrings and does not at all stretch the hip flexors and therefore brings with it much greater freedom to the spine and lightness within this.

It was certainly a process to get there though, a few weeks of practice and me struggling to access it in the way she was teaching me so that I resorted to how I had always practised it, stretching, and yet this triggered something in me, brought up an old pattern around the external and self-worth, which was uncomfortable and outgrown, yet here I was still feeding it because I couldn’t find another way.

I knew though that I couldn’t continue to practise like this as I knew it was unkind to my body and I was also selling out a part of myself, compromising it for the external glory of looking like I was in hanumanasana, but with none of the freedom and lightness that I knew could be found in it.

My mind let this go eventually, not without a struggle, the mind always holds on to the old, because it is known and comfortable, and yet eventually we outgrow it and the comfortable can become uncomfortable and then we are caught, to continue doing what we have been doing because it is safe and known and yet knowing that that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable because we know we need to let go! 

I can’t remember how it happened, I think someone said something that resonated, and I realised what I was doing and the bigger picture and pattern, and I knew then that I might not be able to go so far in the posture as I may have forced myself to do previously, but that there was no option but to practice the gentler way, that things have changed and that I now have a lot more respect for my body than I did previously. I was reminded that there is always another way.

So it is too with social media. There is always another way, and I know that we will try and convince ourselves that there isn’t. That if we are running businesses or have families overseas then this is the only way for people to know that we exist or for us to keep in touch with our families respectively. But this is really just a story that we tell ourselves and because we believe in the stories we tell ourselves then they become our reality – our thoughts create the world we live in and our experience of it.

Thus when I began to doubt whether I should be on social media, I felt disempowered by my thinking and my mind imagined my worst case scenario, that I wouldn’t have any students to share yoga and Reiki with, that no one might find their way to me and I would have to give up the one thing I love doing more than anything else. Because of my negative thinking, I gave out that energy and experienced a momentary loss of faith and lack of trust that ended up making me feel depressed and a little bit anxious for a future which wasn’t real but just imagined in my catastrophising. 

The experience with hanumanasana allowed me to change the script, to see the pattern I had around negative thinking and disempowerment so that I was able let it go simply by becoming aware of it. The fact I was able to experience another way of practising the posture allowed me to embody the fact that there is always another way, one that is more sacred perhaps, and works on a different level to the mundane, of which fear is such a limitation and pushing and pulling becomes the norm. This whole experience strengthened my faith.

I value what I do and the teachings that are passed to me by my teacher, and I have no doubt that those who are meant to find their way to me so I can share what I have learned will do so because the ‘something’ that drew me to my teacher will draw us together too. I have questioned whether this is egotistical of me, but I don’t believe it is, more so that I am extremely grateful for having found this sacred practice and a community of yoga practitioners who are also off grid and who have experienced this other way too – who don’t want to sell out on it. 

I don’t want to sell out on my childen either, they are worth so much more than that and our time together is always so precious, especially now they are back to school/pre-school. It’s all too easy to lose ourselves, get caught up in that which isn’t important in the grand scheme of things, to buy into other people’s dramas and to find ourselves anxious and disempowered by the experience. I really don’t think there is anything social about social media, but heck that is just my experience of it. All I know is that there is another way, one of spending time actually communicating with those who matter, getting outside and having fun.

Disillusionment about teaching yoga

This week I was hit by this overwhelming sense of disillusionment about teaching yoga. I think it had been building, but it did take me a little by surprise nonetheless. For the first time ever, I also found it difficult to get on my mat one day, that’s definitely a first! I made it in the end, and was pleased for it, it felt like a cross-roads, a no going back and perhaps on some level that was where the resistance came from!

The not teaching yoga anymore though, that one I have been sitting with. It comes in part from a disillusionment with the yoga ‘industry’ and the fact I don’t want to be a part of that. When I trained as a teacher 15 years ago now, teacher training courses were sparse, and I had to apply to get on the course that I chose, with a reputable teacher in Australia.

Now anyone can learn to teach yoga, or what the West now perceive to be yoga, which for many is nothing more than an exercise regime. It’s sad really, that our culture has once again taken something and turned it into an opportunity to make money. Many courses are focused on this alone, how you might make money and run a business from teaching yoga; not about the love of it, the calling, the passion!

But it’s more than that, it’s just this weariness I have about being a part of it, of somehow unintentionally feeding into the illusion of it, just because I teach yoga, when really it is so much more than that to me, because it is my life, my all, my whole being. It is the practice and the sacred and the deep mystery. I don’t want to sell out on that and I don’t want to be confused with those who are, and to maintain all that it is, I wonder if it might be better not to share it and have it be diluted in the process.

I realised though, once I had chatted it through with my brother (my spiritual advisor!!) and my yoga teacher, that it is about boundaries and trust; the boundaries to know with whom to share it and to trust in the mystery of the practice, both of which sit deep in the solar plexus. Perhaps it was no surprise then that my teacher has been taking me deep into this space the last few weeks, to the gateway that lives in this space,, which will reveal itself to us when we are still enough to rest into it.

Strangely, or not so strangely, I have also been aware this week, of insects landing on my skin, to the extent that a random flea (a flea!) jumped onto my foot completely out of the blue, freaked me out a bit! There’s been a theme this year with the mice and ants before lockdown and now the insects. So it came as no surprise, less so because I had had a strange inkling for a while now, that something wasn't right, but the same day I had an ‘ah ha’ moment about boundaries, I found out that I have a parasite living in my gut!

It was a relief actually, to finally have the diagnosis, because I knew something wasn’t right and my skin was indicative of that, yet I knew that I hadn't quite got to the root of it…and might still have some way to go. But let’s face it, there’s no greater boundary issue that letting a parasite enter your gut! The universe couldn’t make it clearer, the other parasites showing themselves this week (the flea!) and me questioning the parasites who are sucking the life out of yoga and feeding into the illusion of the wellness world (an illusion because we couldn't be a more unwell society if we tried!).

Boundary work takes you deep into the heart and the solar plexus. There is an element of self-worth and self-love; how much do you value your time? Do you put other’s needs ahead of your own, or that of your family and those you care about the most? Do you know how to best mange your time? Do you protect yourself from the parasites that suck the life from you? Do you know how to meet your own needs as they arise? Are you capable of looking after yourself? Do you give too much of yourself?

Yet it is never black and white, never quite as clear cut as we might hope it to be, because wrapped up in this is the passion for helping others, for being in service, for living a life of purpose, for exploring what it means to be alive. so that our boundaries might change from moment to moment, depending on where we are at in our life. And tied into this is trust, and settling more fully into that, so that we let go of our attachments, our pushing and pulling and trying to control and make things happen…which is the reason there has to be some flexibility around our boundaries too, to allow the mystery to enter in.

But at its heart of course is ourselves, our true self, and releasing and surrendering any patterns or behaviours that are no longer serving that truth. The universe will make this clear to us, will give us signs, will help us step up and drop in, to hear more clearly that voice within, to trust in where it is taking us, even if we cannot see how life might unfold, if we could only let go into it without having to control it or direct it or in any way sabotage it. There’s a lot of strength in living like that, because we have to develop deep trust in something greater than what we can see and discernment too. But sometimes, like with teaching and practising yoga, we have no choice, there is no other way, we know that deep down!

The choice for the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga

Each week my yoga teacher asks me what has happened since I have last seen her, what I’ve been practising, how my teaching is going, that sort of thing. This week I heard myself telling her how difficult I have been finding it, how the practice takes me to a much deeper place than I have ever gone to previously, and how tough this can be at times, not only because of my own processing but because I cannot teach in a way that isn’t respectful of this, and authentic, and how that takes me to a much more vulnerable place and this demands more of me; greater involvement. 

Since discovering the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga my life has changed significantly, perhaps not visibly to others on the outside but certainly the inner landscape has shifted and some of the holding and old patterns have dropped away, and yet still there are more layers that continue to reveal themselves to me. I am always surprised by this, that which we think we might have resolved pops up again later for even deeper exploration, another thread, another connection, because there is always somewhere else to go.

There was a time when I thought our experiences were linear, much like I thought our life was linear too, the path between birth and death, although now I know that it is not so clear-cut. That our past informs our future as much as it informs our present and that there are past life experiences that weave their way through our current reality, and decisions made in the future that will impact how we consider our past, all connected but not linear with a clear beginning and ending. 

Life is a cycle, much as our breath is a cycle, the moon follows a cycle, the seasons follow a cycle too. We are a cycle manifest as we also wane and wax, and yet there is this conditioning to live in a constant manner, controlled, linear, a start and a finish line, an objective to achieve, a result to gain, a right way and a wrong way, something to validate a sense of certainty and sureness in a life and the world that is ever changing.

I see this played out in yoga too. Only this week I witnessed a student really struggling in class with my touching her, encouraging greater ease, changing things a little, trying to facilitate her letting go of her armour, the conditioning, but this was taking her completely out of her comfort zone. She had spent her life refining this armour, of keeping herself safe, and while she has found her way to yoga and actively encourages a hands-on-approach, she struggles when it comes to truly letting go into those deeper places, to the areas that are uncertain and vulnerable, to the parts that cannot so easily be controlled. 

Vinyasa yoga allowed me to hide behind my armour too and control more of where I didn’t want to go, keeping me stuck at a point that was comfortable, that did not give too much of myself, not deep down. The Scaravelli-inspired approach entered my life, took a hold and wouldn’t let go, and as a result I have had no choice but to explore more of these places and let go of some of the armour that I had created to keep me safe, yet was suffocating me and denying me the depth of sensation that I have since experienced. 

It’s only now I realise how my yoga practice and the flow and strength of a vinyasa approach were, in many respects, helping me to hold on to patterns and emotional repressions that were no longer serving me, yet to look at them honestly was impossible, because the practice did not allow that depth of feeling, it was too fast-paced and encouraged only superficial involvement of muscles and of awareness.

There was an expectation of outcome, of being more flexible or stronger, of being able to practice advanced postures even if I had to pull, push or somehow force myself into the positions, as if that alone validated my worth in the world, and demonstrated my progression on my yoga mat. I know that yoga offers us so much more than this and I embrace the other limbs, but from an asana perspective, I found it very difficult to move beyond this pattern on my mat. 

It is my experience that it is very easy to get caught up in the superficial and in the illusion, you have only to look at the images on Instagram. Yoga teachers are often the worst, filling their websites and Facebook pages with photos of themselves practising advanced postures as if this proves their worth as a teacher and encourages students to want to engage with them on this basis alone. I’d rather know how they are living their life, and the love they are bringing to the world and to themselves, how they are in relationship to self and to others then what poses they can practise.

This is really for me what yoga is all about; our relationship to self and letting go of anything that prevents us living our truth and our potential in this lifetime. The more we enquire into the nature of self and accept our own true nature, the more likely it is that we will find greater intimacy in all our relationships, deepening our experience of love, living a life of increased freedom and harmony, experiencing bliss (ojas) and recognising more of the sacred that resides in everything – we become more conscious and this feeds the collective.

Yet it’s a courageous heart that goes deeper, and not everyone is ready for this and I am in awe of my students for being open to greater possibility and potential. These are students who are not scared to do the work, to look at themselves and their lives honestly and be open to the change that yoga can bring with the tears and the sighs and the yawns and the releases. 

This is the path I know in my heart that I have to take, even though there are times that it is very difficult and while I never question showing up on my mat each day, I do question whether I want to keep teaching because this is not easy either. Yoga has changed everything, and the deeper I take my practice, the more I read the scriptures and try to live my life from an aligned and authentic place, the harder it becomes, because there is no place to hide, I can’t numb out like I’ve done in the past. 

The universe made it very clear the path to travel with its nudges and synchronicity and coincidence. During 2018 I had a real desire to visit the Outer Hebrides to see the Callanish Stones. I don’t even know how I had heard about them, but they entered my awareness and that was that, it didn’t matter how challenging it was to get there (and with a young family in tow), or the cost, I just knew I had to go. Interestingly I had always been drawn to a song called ‘Stornaway’ by a band introduced to me by a friend, and I’m pretty sure this laid a seed as the idea of visiting Stornaway fascinated me.

I didn’t know until we were there that the Callanish stones are said to be aligned to the moon and of course there is a Goddess association too. It wasn’t the stones though that had the greatest impact, although they are remarkable and I could have spent much longer hanging out there were it not for the children, but it was the yoga that was to change my life in ways that I could never have expected and yet in the very back of my mind I was starting to realise that I needed a change and there was a hankering to further address some issues that I had been trying to pretend had been healed around disorder eating and intimacy.

We happened to be staying in Uig,  which I didn’t appreciate when I booked, was an hour drive from the main town of Stornaway. I like to attend classes wherever I am travelling in the world, because it takes me off the beaten track and gives me the opportunity to widen my experience of yoga, it’s become a passion. Fortunately, it turned out that a lady called Julie teaches yoga in Uig village hall from time to time and as luck would have it she was on the island the same time as us.

I only attended two classes with her but they left quite an impression on me because they were so very different to how I had practised previously and I was aware of my ego wanting to go faster and to show that I had a stable practice and Julie was probably very aware of this too as she tended to my ego at the same time as showing me that there was another way. 

The practice was slow in pace compared to what I was used to, but absolutely what I needed, even if my head and my ego had a hard time letting go of the idea that I needed to be ‘exercising’ my body to be practising yoga. This was a hang-over from my earlier days of yoga and the manner in which – I now realise – I was using asana practice as a way to maintain my eating disorder and feed my negative relationship with self, remaining in denial of both.

Julie suggested I contact a lady called Sophie Whiting who lives near Brighton as she knew that this wasn’t too far from Guernsey. I dismissed it initially, I had no knowledge of Sophie beyond the recommendation, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I contacted her on a whim really, and she responded from Thailand where she was teaching, and we arranged that I would visit a few months later in March 2019 for a one-to-one, tying it in with a regular visit to Brighton to see Ewan’s best friend. 

Sophie is a wonderful lady, totally different to any other yoga teacher I have met previously and I shall never forget that first session with her in her mobile home in Littlehampton. I lay on my mat and she asked me to begin by taking apanasana, the wind relieving pose, knees to chest, and I did so in my usual way, hands on shins, gripping knees to chest, and she was immediately on me, highlighting all the many ways I was pulling, pushing and both harming and exhausting myself in that one pose. 

I had never thought about it like that before, never considered the manner in which my practice was adding to my pattern of self-harm and my already sleep deprived and exhausted state of being; I’d become so used to feeling tired all the time by then and completely conditioned to the notion that vinyasa yoga was good for me, that I never truly questioned it (although in the back of my mind from an Ayurvedic perspective, and I was studying Ayurveda by then I knew it was not the best approach for my pitta tendencies). That one session of mainly lying and breathing on the mat was utterly life changing. 

It took me to a place that I had never been before, to a very calm and centred place that I cannot even describe or put into words because to do so would limit it and it cannot be limited, that is the thing, and I realised then that I had found something very special inside myself, sacred, and I knew that I needed to look more honestly at the way I was practising and the impact this was having on me.

I discovered that Sophie is a Scaravelli-inspired yoga teacher, not an approach to yoga I had ever consciously tried previously and this alone fascinated me, because despite the many countries and the many yoga studios I have visited, I had not connected with a Scaravelli teacher. Although a few months later I would realise that I had, in London, a few years previously attended a class with John Stirk, again on a whim, and I know now that he is Scaravelli-inspired.

But then, I didn’t know that, I just attended the class because I liked the sound of it, of going deep, of finding the inner calm and centring, and I clearly remember returning to the hotel to join Ewan and Elijah, and saying that it was the strangest class I had ever attended; I didn’t feel like we had done anything, we certainly hadn’t exercised the body or moved much from our supine position, yet I felt so different; calm and centred!

It was the same with Sophie. The way it made me feel grabbed my attention and I spent that evening and every evening thereafter reading all I could on Scaravelli-inspired yoga and on Diane Long who was one of Vanda Scaravelli’s two main students, and who had been Sophie’s teacher for many years too. I noticed that Diane was due to hold a workshop in Scotland that September with another Scaravelli-inspired teacher, Louise Simmons, who was also a student of Diane. I contacted Louise to find out if there were any places remaining on the workshop, yet knowing that it was unlikely I could attend, but I felt to make contact anyway.

There were spaces and Louise was keen to know how I had found my way to her, and I explained the sequence of events and she was very welcoming, and I apologised for wasting her time as I knew I couldn’t attend the workshop, but I knew even then that it hadn’t been about that, that I needed to book a session with Louise who offers one-to-one sessions via Skype. That was over a year ago now and I have been studying with her since then, weekly for the last six months, and she has guided me to places that my yoga practice had allowed me to avoid all these years.

Yet it took me a while to settle into this new way of practising and of moving and of being, despite knowing on some level that I had been shown this way for a reason. And as if to confirm that, and yet even then it took me months to accept it, last summer, a few weeks into studying with Louise and a few weeks after taking my Ayuvedic exams and when I was run-down and exhausted, I went on a weekend workshop with the energetic Stewart Gilchrist in London.

I love Stewart, he’s dynamic and inspiring and his approach to practice was everything I used to love, hard, strong, fast, go, go, go, push, pull, achieve, get into postures you haven’t gotten into before, on and on. Even the breath was forced. It is a yang and masculine practise and yet he has a huge following of female yoginis in London, who also love this approach. Run down, I had developed a cough by then, which just got worse over the weekend, yet I pushed through, sucking cough sweets as I practiced and sat for relaxation to ease the coughing. 

I barely ate and barely slept, my energy was all over the place feeding into the remnants of eating disorder and this association I had of ‘doing’ hard yoga, not eating, getting caught up in the body and forcing it to do things, look a certain way, all about the external and getting this crazy energy going on that is uplifting and slightly euphoric, like a natural high, but one that finds you running on nervous energy, and far from calming your mind, it makes it race, but it is addictive like drugs and you want more of it even though you know (or I know by now) that it is doing you harm. 

Returning home I was in a mess, my pitta tendencies and pitta vata imbalances, of the need to over work, over extend and over-do, had been pushed to a new edge, both with the exams and now with the yoga and I crashed and burned. The doctor diagnosed a virus, but I wonder now if it was simply exhaustion, the exams and my drive to do well, my ambition then, had challenged me and the yoga, well that had merely added to the general mess I found myself in and I was done; the rest of the summer I wasn’t able to function properly, my immune system needed some tlc. 

I know now that that this was really the turning point, that I had to look very honestly at my life and see what wasn’t working. Yet what I realised is that the changes that needed to be made had to be made inside of me, not outside of me. It wasn’t about getting a new job or a new house, or changing my diet, it was about letting go of all the stuff that I was holding onto that were no longer serving me, and this centred around my linear and masculine approach to being, reflected back at me every time I got on my mat – they say that our approach on our mat reflects our approach to life, so true!

The only time I showed up on my mat and didn’t buy into the old energy of trying to achieve and over extend was when Louise was teaching me, and I had such resistance! The practice calmed and centred me but my ego couldn’t cope with it. I wasn’t achieving! If anything it felt like I was going backwards, having to be so present and attentive and still, moving so slowly and with postures adapted as if I was a beginner, and yet the irony is that I was a beginner, I am a beginner, because there is always so much to learn.

I struggled to the extent that when our session finished I would spend the next hour practising in the way that I had always practised because unless I pushed and pulled the body and moved in an exercising the body way, then I didn’t feel like I had practised yoga, such was my conditioning! This need to practice in the old way only dropped away during lockdown when I finally accepted (and there was a dark night of the soul as I let go of holding on so tightly to the mind-set that maybe there was another way) that I could no longer practice in a way that was harming me and continuously feeding my imbalanced tendencies and ego.

I am always reminded of my favourite quote, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you will always get what you have always got”. I remind myself of this when I know that change needs to come in. It’s very easy to keep doing what we have always done, always taking the same approach and yet wondering why we don’t get a different outcome. 

I recognised that I no longer wanted to live my life harming myself with my striving or from a masculine and linear perspective. I wanted to embody more of the deep feminine that is my nature. I wanted to be all that I am, not all that I am not. It is exhausting trying to be something that you are not and yet it is difficult  trying to be all that you are! This demands that you let go of the stories and the narrative and the ideas that you have taken on board about who you are from your friends, your family, your colleagues, your teachers and society at large. 

So much of who I had allowed myself to become has been shaped by my reaction to my life experience and to the notion of goodness and being good. I had given myself a hard time for much of my adult life, harming myself in immeasurable ways, hating myself, starving myself, destroying myself, sabotaging myself, trying to disappear from myself, out of body, denying my own nature as if it is somehow flawed because we are all so different yet judge ourselves by this misperception that we all need to be the same and thus deny our very own beautiful nature.

Louise has enabled me to reclaim more of my nature and let go of the crap that’s in the way. The journey thus far, our studying together has been illuminating, because there is nowhere to hide, I have had to step both out of the shadows into a place of greater vulnerability, and look back into the shadows to see all that is hidden. I could no longer zone out in a vinyasa flow, or push myself further away from where I needed to be going, not deeper into the superficial muscles which were already over gripping, but to soften into the softer places that I was always ignoring. Soft meant fat and when you have had an eating disorder the last thing you want is to do is acknowledge those soft places.

Yet it is the soft places and their vulnerability that have been the most giving of places to me. There has been a focus on undoing the tension, the holding in the inner thighs for example, that has prevented greater intimacy, part of the armour that I have developed in my quest to not feel deeper sensation for fear of what this might mean; feeling is tricky, especially that space between pleasure and pain when there has been harm done previously.

There is the softness of the inner arms, how much they love to hug given the chance, and the back of the body, how much this loves to be held, if only we allow it and let someone else carry some of the weight for us. Yet we struggle on alone so much of the time, being strong, and we shove the stuff we don’t want to feel to the back of the heart, hardening it, the shoulders rounding with the weight of it, preventing the ease of breath that allows prana and oxygen and lifeforce to fill our body, as if we are not worthy, damaged, must protect our broken heart that is now breaking us with the heaviness of it.

No, Scaravelli-inspired yoga does not let you hide from that. It brings you right to those places that you have been holding your pain and it asks you to let go and rest into yourself. You. There is responsibility. It cuts through the blame and victimhood culture and lays the responsibility right back at you. It’s your pain, your pleasure, you life, your drama, your narrative, your perception. And its perception that often needs changing. A breakdown to break through to a new way of seeing both yourself and the world around you. 

This is the reason the Scaravelli-inspired approach is so demanding and challenging, because there is no fixed mind, there is no right or wrong, no black or white, no good or bad, and therefore there is no methodology because that alone will fix the mind. The whole purpose of yoga is to free the mind so that it can be fully conscious, oneness, beyond the limitations of needing to separate and divide that creates dis-harmony within ourselves and disharmony within the world generally.

But when you have spent a lifetime living in a society and being part of an education system that encourages separation and division and the notion of something being fixed (look at how we cling to science as if science holds certainty and look at how science has been thrown  by Covid, no one can agree, and yet everyone turns to science as if it might save us, yet science can’t even work out how we are here) and you have been practising yoga in a way that feeds into this with its idea of fixed alignment principles and this being ‘the way’, it is very difficult to let that go.

You feel yourself adrift, not sure where to hold to bring back that certainty that you have lived your life trying to create. If I live this way then I can expect this outcome. Yet where is the joy in that? Where is the fun in the spontaneity of play? Where is the space for the sacred and for the unknown to enter it? How is it possible to grow when you have fixed yourself to something just because it feels safe? You have only to look at children and the manner in which they are enchanted by the world simply because they have not yet fixed by having to look or feel a certain way. 

We have to learn to live with uncertainty and the paradox that comes with this. Today we might move this way, another day we might move that way, all the while being gentle and kind to the body, allowing its own innate wisdom, not forcing our will upon it, awakening our spine and bringing greater freedom to the body and the mind. 

As Vanda Scaravelli famously said, “Movement is the song of the body”. There is something very beautiful in practising in a way that allows this, yet it can be extremely difficult trying not to control it but it is in the allowing that our perception will shift. I came across an extract from one of Ken Robinson’s books which I think beautifully highlights this point:

“As human beings, we love in 2 worlds. There is the world that exists whether or not you exist. It was there before you came into it, and it will be there when you have gone. This is the world of objects, events, and other people; it is the world around you.

There is another world that exists only because you exist: the private world of your own thoughts, feelings and perceptions, the world within you. This world came in to being when you did, and it will cease when you do. We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.

How we think about the world around us can be deeply affected by the feelings within us, and how we feel may be critically shaped by our knowledge, perceptions and personal experiences. Our lives are formed by the constant interactions between these 2 worlds, each affecting how we see and act in the other.

What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them”.

I’m grateful that the Scaravelli-inspired approach and Louise, my teacher, entered my life. For a long while I considered that maybe I would just have to rely on my own inner teacher, yet I knew that my ego and it’s control was getting in my own way and I was stuck, I couldn’t quite make myself practise in a way that I needed, such was my attachment. I can clearly understand now, the reason that Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras imply the need for guidance from someone whom you trust, who has already trodden the path so that they might shine a light into the dark; there is an intimacy that comes with this too. 

Since practising Scaraveli-inspired, and more so in recent months when I have felt I have no choice but to teach this way too, simply because it would be inauthentic otherwise, and lack the sacred, which underpins all of me, there has been greater intimacy in my life, in my relationship to self, but also in my wider relationships, in love and in life generally. There is a depth of sensation that I have never experienced previously, and a deeper honesty about the many ways that I have been harming myself, by my inner critic and my negative thought patterns. There is also greater appreciation for the self, love of self, which has been mirrored back at me. 

I am sorry to those students who have studied with me but find this approach too confronting for them in its slower pace and need for deep attention, and I am grateful beyond words for those who continue to study with me, who trust that I may help them to find more of what they already have inside of them. I am grateful that I have the opportunity to learn from these students too and hear more of the song of their body, so that together there is greater harmony, in the class and in life generally!

We must not forget that there is always a bigger picture. The stars and the moon and the planets have made it very clear that if humanity is to truly awaken, if we are to live from a more conscious place then now is the time to move beyond the superficial, to go deep as we open to spirit and let this guide us. While it may be tough and there may be tears and yawns and sighs and a deep weariness in the resignation that will follow as we truly let go, the breakdowns will feed into the breakthroughs and life will flow through you in ways you could never have previously imagined. You won’t be disappointed. xx

The sun, the bee and the moon!

Today I have mainly been trying to stay aligned to soul. 

This meant taking the whole family with me for a brief cliff walk to watch the sunrise, which was just amazing. This was soon followed by a high tide swim, albeit only E and I swam, the boys played titanic on the beach, but the combination set us all up high vibration for the day ahead.

Then, aside from the online learning, washing, cleaning, cooking and shopping, I mainly spent the rest of the day re-potting my medicinal herbs (I’m so excited, as all but two of the 15 herbs I planted have come through and I have so many marigolds, marshmallow, hyssop and woad that I don’t know what on earth I’ll do with them all!) and practising the brahmari breath! 

The brahmari breath, the bumble bee breath, is just wonderful for calming the mind, soothing the nervous system and keeping the energy high – you can literally feel the vibration within your body. The bee knows best, without the bee life would be a bit tricky, so best we bring as much of the bee as we can into life – the queen bee at that, we should all be practising the brahmari regularly! All you need to do is take a breath in through your nose and then hum as you exhale, for as long as you can. Repeat, repeat, repeat! 

I was also reflecting on how easy it is to fall asleep again while awake, and yet how necessary this is for the process of moving from a state of contraction to expansion. To expand, we have to first contract, then we expand and then we contract, as the moon moves through this cycle so do we, from one stage of being to another, and in tune with her too – her energy encourages it if we are tapped in. It’s beautiful really. 

Mind you it’s been a beautiful day all around and I am grateful to the ancient wisdom, which always knows best - to father sun for his high energy, to the bee for its vibration and to the moon, for her energy of contraction and expansion and letting go and beginning anew, and to spring-time Mother Earth for her potency. I’m excited about this next moon cycle and just help I can stay in tune!