Yum, yum, yum, "healthy" banana bread

For health reasons I went totally sugar free for a few months and weaned myself off that glorious dark chocolate that saw me through the first few months of Elijah's life. I admit I still succumbed to bubbles which can be very good for the soul, but I even cut out fruit to give my body a fighting chance!!

It is a joy incorporating fruit back into my life again and this cake is super yummy and almost guilt free (until you weigh out the nut butter and pay for the coconut flour!!).  Enjoy! xx

GLUTEN, SUGAR AND DAIRY FREE!!

Oven at 350◦F and wipe loaf tin with a little coconut oil.

Ingredients

4 extremely ripe bananas

4 eggs

½ cup nut butter (your choice)

4 tablespoons coconut oil

½ cup coconut flour (Hansa)

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 teaspoon cinnamon (optional) – I don’t use because I am not a fan of cinnamon but I don’t think it needs it!

Pinch salt

What to do

Put all ingredients into food processor and whizz until batter like consistency.   Pour into prepared loaf tin and bake for approx. 30-40 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean.

Once cooked remove from oven and leave for 30 minutes before turning out.   Allow to cool completely before serving.

{Apologies for awful photo!!!)

"The Small Things in Daily Life" by Mother Teresa

Do not think that love, in order to be genuine, has to be extraordinary. What we need is love without getting tired.

How does a lamp burn? Through the continuous input of small drops of oil. My daughters, what are these drops of oil in our lamps? They are the small things of daily life: faithfulness, punctuality, small words of kindness, a thought for others, our way of being silent, of looking, of speaking, and of acting. These are the true drops of love...

Be faithful in small things because it is in them that your strength lies.

Mother Teresa

Healing those wings

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” - Rumi

Do you ever get one of those days where you wake up, its raining and you just know 'it is going to be one of those days'?!

Well I had one of those days recently.  Rain in August, a small child who woke me 3 times during the night and wanted to bounce on me at 6.32am and a partner who was feeling quite under the weather.

I felt like I was treading through treacle to get ready for work, progress was tough and when I did finally manage to get to town I could not find anywhere to park my car.  I was getting incredibly frustrated and irritated and was questioning the merits of not only working from home, but living somewhere where the summer sun actually shone on a consistent basis.

And then when I did finally find a space and get myself to my desk, I was confronted with what can only be described as the most infuriating email requests that made me question exactly what I was doing with my life, oh whoa me, how we can be so drawn down by a single event.

It was a busy few hours and I completely forgot I needed to move my car and I just knew I was going to get a parking ticket. And there it was, my intuition was still working at least but I was now seething with irritation and no amount of rationalising would ease the discomfort I felt.

On an ordinary day I may well have laughed it off.  More fool me for not moving my car, cause and effect...

In any event I was also  late leaving work and in a rush to collect my son and I almost laughed but felt so irritated that the laughter would not come as I found myself caught behind a top loader crane, which was driving at 20 miles an hour. I was actually so wrapped up in my 'whoa is me mentality' that I started to question what the Universe was playing at as I became more and more beside myself with frustration and anger and the tears were truly flowing by then (and I could not have cared less who saw me, I wanted someone to help me!).

Focusing in my breath was just not going to crack it as I was too caught up in the energy of destruction, it felt like the world was truly against me and I was actually revelling in it.  It was an "I hate life" moment.

And yet deep down I knew that a healing was taking place.  I have been here before and I knew it was on its way.  I had been drawn to wear rose quartz and amethyst the last few days and I was craving space and time out and salted water on my skin. Plus my dreams were very obscure.

Kali (the Hindu Goddess who removes the ego and liberates the soul from the cycle of birth and death) and Shiva (the Hind God who is responsible for change both I both the for of death and destruction and in the positive sense of destroying the ego), in all their glory, were dancing on my back again. 

How the ego clings on. How Kali and Shiva laugh.

Everything has to be destroyed to be created again, and in terms of a healing, well you need to let go of all that stuff (the false ego at some point or another, some wounded sense of self) that has been causing an energy block in your energetic body so that the physical (and mental, emotional and spiritual) body can heal...so that you can fly lighter, not being dragged down by that old negative weight and ways of being which no longer add value to the life you are living.

Dead weights hanging around, weighing you down.

I have been seeing this incredibly intuitive energy healing osteopath for spinal realignment and she had warned me that a healing would come.  It was later than she had anticipated, but it was here nonetheless. The tears came and went, so that at times they were rolling down my face. 

The anger, irritation and frustration was all consuming and a challenge to sit with.  But deep down I knew they were not me, this was not me, just something passing through.  But oh my gosh what a destructive energy these old emotions hold, caught in my left hip all these years.  That forgiveness stuff is powerful work, but you wouldn't want to be doing it every day!

The rest of the day was not much better as the Universe triggered me on each turn of the corner. More traffic irritation and a lady who pulled in front of me at the petrol pumps just as I was about to leave so that I felt so wronged because I needed to get home to feed my son and now here I was sitting waiting for an extra 7 minutes (a whole 7 minutes) as she worked her way through the long queue.  Sigh. 

See, I had started to buy in to the stories. To blame these people, when really Divine Order was at play (and I knew this really)...this happens because that happens, and this needs to happen for that to happen.  We all have our stories, we all like to blame someone else for our discomfort, but really it is OUR discomfort, OUR reaction to an event. 

On an ordinary day it would not have bothered me in the slightest, I could have used the time productively opposed to sitting there seething and crying and getting myself in a state.  But let's face it this would NOT happen on an ordinary day, because I wouldn't need the triggering.

And the funny thing is, because I was feeling so miserable and challenged and down on life, it seemed that everyone else was the same, mirrors, we are all such mirror, law of attraction, what you put out comes back!!  There were opportunities for learning everywhere.  And I knew it really, I knew at times that I should have laughed, I knew it was all a process, even if I did feel that the angels has taken a day off!

I actually ended up running it out that early evening, which felt good to process, vent and sweat it through, get out of the head and into the body and amazingly the pain in my hip had disappeared.  I was gentle with myself the rest of the evening and allowed the tears to come and the self pity and all the residue that I didn't need to understand, I just needed to let go.  Tears are so cleansing for the soul.

It goes without saying that after a night's sleep (I would love to say a good night's sleep but my son wakes me 3 times every night at the moment ("this too shall pass, this too shall pass"!)) I felt so very much better, I have more energy, I feel clearer, lighter, brighter and more positive.  Phew, I survived a healing...and a test in faith, tears really are healing, pain needs to be released so that we can fly again.

It really is a process.  And if you find yourself there, perhaps after a yoga class or a holistic session, then try to see it for what it is.  You have to feel it for it to pass through.  Healing is no easy journey, the pain needs expression, some way of letting go.  Up it comes, hot and red and furious and angry and sad and bitter and frustrated and all those emotions we keep trapped inside that cause further pain at some point in our lives - dis ease. Ill at ease. Illness.

So we let it out.  As my yoga teacher, Emil, once told me when it felt the tears would never stop a few years into my yoga journey, "but tears are good Em, invite them in".  They are angels dancing on our face, healing our wounds and enlightening our heart and soul in their innocence. 

I will finish by sharing an extract by C JoyBell C, which I adore:

Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.”

With gratitude to the Universe, the angels and the process of healing.

Does my bum look big in this?

It came to my awareness again this weekend how much of a hard time we can give ourselves.

One of my friends thinks she is over weight and she gives herself a hard time about it constantly. She also likes to drink wine and she gives herself a hard time about that too. So that actually she constantly feels that she is not good enough, and so her self-esteem lowers, her spirits sink and she is full to the brim with self loathing.

I give myself a hard time sometimes too.  I like to drink some sparkling wine but when I do so, even though I enjoy the moment, I am then full of guilt for lowering my vibration and dehydrating my body and I give myself a hard time about it. It is ridiculous really - all the negativity is of my own making, not in the drinking alcohol per se, but more so the berating I give myself for doing so. 

Who needs enemies when we have ourselves!

It intrigues me how much this self-loathing and lack of self-esteem shows up in our yoga practice; how we can be so hard on ourselves and think our practice is not good enough.  I see it on students' faces when they are practicing, the grimacing, the sadness, the frustration, the self-loathing struggling.  It is all there. So too the smiles and the laughing (at oneself) that makes it all so much better when we learn to let it go.

There are most definitely triggers.  Aspects of the practice, the poses then, or the manner in which a pose is held, that trigger a moment of self-loathing and dissatisfaction so that sometimes I feel the energy change within a room, I can almost feel the anger directed at me, the discomfort, the edginess that comes from sitting quite literally being on the edge.  On the edge of a knife...our knife...stabbing our own heart one time, two times, ten times a day.

My trigger is core work.  It is not that my core is weak, or that I mind doing the core stuff, more so that it triggers some really deep old memory from when I was 17 years old that for some silly reason (that I still do not know even to this day) my tummy was not right.  Not right? What was I thinking!

But there it was.  17 years old and my tummy needed to be smaller for me to feel ok about myself.  And with that thank you very much, 15 years of a rather tedious eating disorder.  Sigh. So even now, after all these years of healing and yoga and mindfulness and acceptance (yes, hoorah, we get there) acceptance that my tummy is marvellous just as it is (and I say this from my heart, not my ego), it enabled me to bear a son after all, I still have an uncomfortable moment every so often on my mat when I suddenly get faced with my old demon voice that says, "yikes there is your tummy and it is certainly not good enough".

And I have learned (most of the time, but I am certainly still a work in progress, nothing perfect about me or my life) I catch myself and this rather unhelpful and unkind internal dialogue and I breathe and I remind myself that that was something old popping up and moving on..."this too shall pass"...and it does and we move on to the next thing...does my bum look big in this?  No, I'm joking.  Seriously I am joking.  Your bum looks just amazing as it is!

I am reminded of this fabulous quote I read recently, that when this particular lady realised that none of us are getting out of here alive, she decided then and there that she would make sure that she would only drink quality wine for the rest of her life.  I like that. She is right.  None of us are getting out of here alive.  NONE OF US ARE GETTING OUT OF HERE ALIVE. So why waste precious time and energy being unkind to ourselves, loathing ourselves, berating ourselves and believing that we are not good enough.

We are good enough.  We are miracles.  The human body is a miracle.  I mean seriously, look what it enables us to do and feel and be.  We really need to learn to love ourselves a little bit more, accept ourselves as we are and embrace our uniqueness and individuality and humaneness. What a strange world it would be if all the flowers looked the same.  It is the same with humans, how boring would it be if we all looked like Gwyneth Paltrow (no hard feelings Gwyneth!).

We just need to learn to catch ourselves when we start being unkind to ourselves, to listen out for that inner voice when it starts berating us and judging us and calling us to task.  And we then need to start being disciplined and committed to overriding that voice and telling it to bog off and leave us alone...and smiling and hugging ourselves inside instead and reminding ourselves that  "I am good enough just as I am thank you very much".

I have a lovely extract to share with you from Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, "Wherever You Go, There You Are", which really hammers it all home:

"You may have noticed that you are no always the centre of love and kindness, even towards yourself. In fact, in our society, one might speak of an epidemic of low self-esteem. In conversations with the Dalai Lama during a meeting in Dharamsala in 1990, he did a double take when a Western psychologist spoke of low self-esteem. The phrase had to be translated several times for him into Tibetan, although his English is quite good. He just couldn't;t grasp the notion of low self-esteem, and when he finally understood what was being said, he was visibly saddened o hear that so many people in America carry deep feelings of self-loathing and inadequacy.

Such feelings are virtually unheard of among Tibetans. They have all the severe problems of refugees rom oppression living in the Third World, but low self-esteem is not one of them. But who knows what will happen to future generations as they come into contact with what we ironically call the "developed world". Maybe we are overdeveloped outwardly and underdeveloped inwardly. Perhaps it is we who, for all our wealth, are living in poverty."

So let's embrace us as we are warts and all. And let's see how this all shows up in our practice so that we can start quietening the internal negative dialogue and learning to be kind and compassionate to ourselves as we are to the rest of the world.

Happy tummies everyone!

x

Make a list of things that make you happy

I came across this fabulous quote from Project Happiness, which reads:

"Make a list of things that make you happy.

Make a list of things you do every day.

Compare the lists.

Adjust accordingly"

I love it!

It reminds me of doing some cognitive behavioural therapy ("CBD") quite a few years ago now.  I had managed to get myself sick from working 7 days a week teaching yoga and channelling Reiki full time and I was exhausted.  That was back in the days where I was incapable of saying "no" and was completely put everyone else and their needs before my own.  It was perhaps no surprise that I ended up with adrenal exhaustion and from that depression and anxiety.

The depression I was used to, but the anxiety was new to me, and was really a result of living on empty, the adrenals were shot and with that my endocrine system was out of balance, so it is no surprise I was feeling out of balance and on edge and ever so sensitive too. 

I took time out and did quite a lot of gardening to get my hands in the earth, and did a lot of swimming in the sea to cleanse my aura plus I had quite a few treatments on myself, and saw my homeopath and did some CBD.

The CBD was amazing as it made me realise that my life was full of lists of things I needed to do and I wasn't doing much that made me happy other than teach yoga, but because I was teaching so much of it my passion had started to become all consuming work and I felt I was churning it out and losing a little of my heart and soul in the process.

How refreshing to give myself permission (and yet how difficult too when you are so used to outing others first, it is very difficult to then start putting yourself first) to do the things I enjoy, like reading and writing, sunsets and sunrises, walking and cycling, listening to music and dancing,  and all those things that make my heart and soul shine.

It is good to have the reminder from time to time.  Life has changed significantly for me since that time, my mind has changed a great deal too  so making time for the things that make me happy comes a little more naturally. But it is still good to have the reminder. 

I have found that having Elijah has made it easier somehow, not initially perhaps, what with the demands of babies and the limited time for doing anything on your own, but as they become more interested so life becomes more interesting.

And while it has been an ongoing awareness for me, "seriously, I get to spend an afternoon making sandcastles rather than working?!",  I am finally getting into the groove and loving it, the painting, tractor searching, sand castle making, these things make me happy, amazing!!  And if I am really lucky I get time to go for a walk or do some reading when he has gone to bed. 

It is amazing how it lifts one's spirits to do some stuff that makes you happy each day!

So make your lists and adjust accordingly.

x

Letting go...letting things be...beautiful...

I was talking about "letting go" in the yoga class yesterday and someone said that it is all very simple in theory and yet ever so difficult in practice.  And this is true, yes, letting go can be a challenge, but this is the reason that our practice is so important, for it provides us with an opportunity to realise how much we are holding, how much our mind won't let go of something, be that a thought, an idea or its relentless need to plan for the future, or reflect (again and again) on the past.

It shows up on our yoga mat.  We are practicing, yes, our body is resembling triangle pose, but our mind is somewhere else.  The teacher reminds us to focus on the breath and to push our big toe mound into the mat, but we are still thinking about that event at work that threw us off balance, and now we come to think about it, we have a bit of a wobble going on in triangle pose, oh yes, back to the breath, bog toe mound and off we go again, back to the event, running it over and over in our mind, and then we are thinking about what we are going to eat later that evening, and back to the breath, and here we are moving again.

It is exhausting!

So how do we let go? Well I have been playing around with this and it really is all about catching yourself and literally letting the thought go.  Changing your mind. We are back there really.  It crops up constantly, the holding, the craving, the likes and the dislikes, the wanting things to be different to how they are.  Its all in the mind.  So that's where we learn to let go.  By changing our mind.  By catching ourselves and literally, quite literally, letting it go. Breathe.  Deep breath in, deep breath out.  Arghhhhhhhhh.  That's right, sigh it out.  Gone.

I love what Jon Kabat-Zinn writes about this...

"The phrase "letting go" has to be high in the running for New Age cliché of the century. It is overused, abused daily. Yet it is such a powerful inward manoeuvre that it merits looking into, cliché or no. There is something vitally important to be learned from the practice of letting go.

Letting go means just what it says.  It's an invitation to cease clinging to anything - whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a particular time, or view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. To let go means to give up coercing, resisting or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It's akin to letting your palms open to unhand something you have been holding on to."

It basically means that we need to be present.  To accept whatever is happening and be okay with that.  I have to say that there is a huge relief in living like this.  To have trust in the process and the divine nature of all life.  We are ok.  Everything is fine.  In this moment  This breath.  We are alive. Now. Beauty.  Everywhere. Breath, body, mind. Letting things be, just as they are, right now.  It will all be okay.

Still, it is all a work in progress and it is all practice.  And on that note, I am off to my mat...practice, practice, practice, it is all in the practice and being kind, let's not forget that.  Kind to self.  Let's not forget that either.

x

just adore what Jon Kabat-Zinn says about this

Changing my mind

My 20 month old son is my greatest teacher.  What a Buddha he is. 

I have resisted his teachings for quite some time, it was a shock really, the effect he had on our life here.  Not to say that he was not wanted, he was desperately wanted and his arrival brought with it one challenge after another so that really, when I think back, he had already started his teachings before he physically arrived.

We tried to carry on living as we had done before, and then we realised that that was no longer working so we gradually made changes to accommodate this new life with all his needs and demands.

But I have to say that even though changes were made, there were still many more to make. On some level I knew this, and I believe that was the driving force for me undertaking the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course earlier this year which made me very aware of the parts of my life that were simply not working, or were no longer me or us as a family.

But this didn't necessarily make it easy to make the changes, it is one thing to become aware of them, and quite another to do anything about them because essentially that change has to come from within, a change of mind is necessary then.  And changing one's mind is not easy because it likes to cling on to what it knows and letting go can be quite a painful exercise.

Elijah was my driving factor.  I realised I had become very used to being busy, I had become Emma=busy, and I did not want that association anymore.  It was tiring and exhausting me and really, why on earth did I need to be so busy,  What is so challenging about just being?  Well of course there are many reasons for this and my fear of being unproductive or lazy or stagnant all feature quite high on the list.

But I knew things had to change.  All the rushing around, the working, the tapping on the laptop and far too much time on social media under the pretext I was working (yer right?!) was limiting conscious time spent with my little Buddha.  And this meant that I was missing out on all his present moment adventures and that seemed a little bit silly given that I had wanted to be a mother my whole life.

So let go I had to try to do.  Phew.  No easy process, a part of me was really having a hard time letting go of the need to be busy, of saying no rather than yes, and more phew, the tough one, just letting things be.  The ideas keep popping up, the desire to plan to organise and to be busy, and I am trying, always trying just to really let things be, to stop pushing and wait for the right timing (and in this I have learned lots and am still learning lots) and enjoy the moment with Elijah however challenging that may be. 

So yes, there are times when I long to practice or to channel Reiki or to go swimming or to plan a workshop or to do any of those things I love to do and instead I find myself reading a book about tractors for the third time.  But isn't this exactly the practice, the ability to be present with what you are doing even if you are inherently adverse to it.  And you know, the more I sit with it, the discomfort that is, the restlessness then, the more I come to enjoy the experience.  

Tractors that is.  Yes, if truth be told I am actually getting into the whole tractor malarkey, which is probably just as well as "tractor" and "digger" are two of Elijah's few words and he says them a lot.  And there are actually quite a few tractors over here in Guernsey, he spots them before I do, although I am becoming better at doing so!

So life has changed.  My mind is changing.  It is an ongoing process, I will be honest about that, I don't always get it right and I find I am on the ipad zoning out before I have even realised, its sticky territory and I get stuck.  But I am getting better at catching myself, of recognising those sticky times. And I will be honest, I did see an independent counsellor for a few weeks, to talk through my findings and make sense of where my energy needed to be - of course I knew deep down, the angels kept telling me, but it is often so difficult to recognise this in your own being.

So it is all tractors and trains now, and we got some paint so we can embrace that creative urge, and we are getting really good at building rivers and dams on the beach, and we are working on our yoga practice although this is going to take some time because at the moment we are at the 'throwing crystals at Mama and jumping on Mama and let's stop for nuhnuhs (milk)' stage and that is fine, there are other ways to practice on being a better person, and Elijah is teaching me all about that with his ability to stay present and embrace all that life offers to him.

With love and gratitude to my little trouble monkey.

The Sark Folk Festival: wholeness in being

The Sark Folk Festival was amazing. I could not have hoped for a more uplifting, authentic and love filled way to begin life in the next decade (oh yes, the big 4 0 has now taken place!).

I was accompanied by the majority of my most favourite people in the whole wide world including my brother all the way from Australia and his fiancé and their daughter (and my goddaughter) Willow and our friends Carl and Tessa and their children from France and Nige from the UK, and my Guernsey friends and family so that I felt truly blessed and part of a tribe for the first time in a long, long time. 

There is a lot to be said about the power of tribe.  When I first happened upon Byron Bay in Australia all those years ago  it just felt right, those people, that environment, it resonated, which is probably the reason I kept returning.  Back here in Guernsey in the pre-Ewan, post-finding yoga days I always felt a little lonely because while I had one or two friends on a similar wave length, I never had the comfort of the group of like minded souls.

The weather was incredible, the music was food for the soul, the views from the festival site were stunning, the tent putting up was funny, the trekking up and down the cliffs for beautiful swims in the sea was challenging and yet satisfying, the cycling was fun, the laughter with friends was uplifting, the lunch with the folks at The Sablonnerie was fabulous, the yoga was out of this world (how amazing to be able to teach with such incredible views and to such a respective group of yogis), the night sky was tremendous and the whole experience made my heart lighten and my soul shine.

The experience reminded me how important it is to connect with like-minded people so that we feel that incredible sense of belonging that comes with the whole tribe concept - it was really obvious to me that weekend, how much this affects positively how we feel. 

I was also reminded of the many benefits that come from spending time in nature and ensuring you have shelter, so that you are focusing on one's simple needs in life - a warm and dry shelter (a tent that will not leak or blow down), the opportunity to clean (share the shower with 70 other campers), fresh food (and not paying £2.85 for an avocado in the Sark shop, ouch, gold dust indeed!), light to see your way back to the tent (no fire here, dragonfly solar powered lights had to work instead!) and water to drink (plus a stove to heat water for much needed 2 cups of green tea and jasmine required to get going in the morning!!).

And from there and as I already said (but am still blown away by quite the positive effect this had on me as I have not experienced that previously) the importance of interaction with others, of connection and moments and merriment. And from there to music and dancing and liberating yourself. How we danced and jumped and jiggled to the music, barefoot and free, hoorah for freedom!

We can go on yoga retreats and step quietly into ourselves, connecting with our heart and nourishing our soul, and we can go to festivals with our tribe, connect to the earth, dance and come away with a joyous open heart and a nourished soul.  I find this fascinating.

Quite a few times in the spiritual world I see this pressure placed on people, practitioners then, to tread a very narrow path, to deny various aspects of them selves, to eat this or eat that, to follow this teacher or that, to attend this course or that, to do all sorts of things that others tell you to do to increase your wellbeing and make you feel better about yourself and your life. 

And I see practionners doing this, flitting from one teacher to the next, from one diet to another, starting a yoga practice and then stopping and deciding that that teacher, or that diet, or this time is not working for them, that there is something wrong with the suggested approach or the suggested person.  But the truth is, they are forgetting that they need to find their way.

Not my way, not your way, but the one that works for that individual.  We can all guide of course, but let us not forget that we all have our own inner wisdom inside, the challenge is perhaps being able to hear this over the chatter of all the other voices in our lives - our friends, our family, social media and all the many books and publications and online material that suggest they know us better than ourselves and we should do this or that...

Not only that but I think we many of us underestimate the power of tribe, the power of nature, the power of dancing, the power of music, the power of going with the flow even if that means you skip your yoga practice that day, or you have to go without your avocado (which I did and I survived!), the power of just being in the moment and flowing with that energy.

There is a time and a place for everything, for early nights to see the sun rising and late nights to see the stars shining, for solitude to hear our own inner callings and noisy time spent laughing with friends and family, for being energetic and active, for being gentle and quiet.  We need them all, ever one of these moments to feel whole.

While it is tempting on the spiritual path to try and rid ourselves of the traits of self that are not entirely enlightened, that take us from the narrow path, or that do not accord to what we perceive to be the way we should live our lives if we are truly spiritual, we should remember that all experiences are valid and that even mistakes are simply another experience.  Wholeness can only really come when we are willing to embrace all of who we are and what we have learned.

And this to me was one of the most exciting discoveries of my 40s (12 days in, but I have been doing a lot of thinking recently...!!) and the Sark Folk Festival was this incredible sense of wholeness that came from truly letting go and going with the flow with a tribe and nature and all things musical and joyful and uplifting. 

So I would encourage anyone who is clinging on tightly to their idea of how things should be and how they should live their life according to what someone else has told them, to let go of this, just let it go and go and have some fun instead.  Find the tribe, get outside, touch the earth, hold your hands to the sky and try and book some tickets to the Sark Folk Festival next year!!!

In light and with love.

x