Full moon and perspective
It’s an Aquarius full moon on Saturday morning, peaking at 2.36am, so the energy is ramping up these last few days.
In myself and working with various clients I have noticed a theme; this moon is bringing up feelings of injustice around the system. The system is broken. We are living in a world where the systems that are broken and many more are suddenly awakening to the uncomfortableness of this awareness.
Here in Guernsey the judicial system is flawed and is in desperate need of a review to bring it into the 21st century. We have evolved as humanity and this now needs to be reflected. Imprisoning people isn’t the answer in most cases, and we need to collectively wake up to create a world where people are treated individually, compassionately and humanely. The laws themselves are out of date.
In Guernsey we also still haven’t moved forward in resolving the educational issues. Another generation passes through the faulty system and as parents all we can do is hope for the best, or home school or go private. As a teacher it must be beyond frustrating.
But the same could be said for nurses working in the health care system also flawed and outdated, especially in mental health. Fortunately we’re now seeing social prescribing here on Guernsey, but we have a long way to go to shift the paradigm that finds people giving they power away to health care professionals, expecting to be fixed with pharmaceuticals, rather than taking responsibility for their own health and wellbeing. Given the choice between yoga and an anti-depressant for depression, most would probably still choose the anti-depressant because people continue to look outside of themselves for resolution.
However there are others who are awakening and seeing through more of the educational, societal and cultural conditioning and realising more of the illusion. It’s never an easy process to go through, and we can feel as if we are awakening for the very first time, even if we felt we were awake previously, and in many respects its harder on those who thought they had seen through the illusion, to discover that there is another level to it. There are many layers and levels to the illusion. We peel away one and see more clearly the truth, and then another one reveals itself and we have to peel into that one too, so always the picture is changing.
It’s easy to get lost along the way, playing out old paradigms, from the ego, whether that be mind ego or spiritual ego, it’s all the same in terms of keeping us stuck and fixing us in time and space. if we truly want the systems to change then we have to let go of trying to fix it in any one way and just allow it the space to unravel itself into something more aligned and true. It serves no one to begin fighting the system, because the system will fight back and before you know it you’re caught in more war, even if you believe that you are fighting a just cause, it doesn't matter, it’s all the same, a lack of harmony and peace.
There are as many different perspectives in this world as there are people living it. Everyone will see things differently and Covid has absolutely highlighted this with various opinions on what should happen next. There will never be a right or wrong way that everyone agrees on because of perspective. There is never just a ‘yes’ without there being a ‘no’, such is the nature of duality and we currently live in a world of duality. However if the sages are to be believed then we are moving towards a world of oneness and therefore harmony.
We have to begin to recognise that for this to become a reality, we have to play our individual role in making the change from ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to maybe or perhaps…to allowing. It is in the space of allowing that magic happens. If more of us allowed a change to the systems, then the system may have the chance to solve itself into something more, well, evolving, something more suited to the evolving nature of society, into something more fluid then. So therefore fluid has to start with ourselves.
The full moon as we all know has a habit of shining light into the shadows, of highlighting where things aren’t working for us in our lives. Where life isn’t working! This full moon is highlighting that the systems aren’t working, but it’s also highlighting where our internal system of evaluating ‘yes’ and ‘no’, our fixed point of view then, might also not be working, especially in relationship to our self. Have we a fixed idea of how we should live? Have we a fixed idea of how life should be lived en masse? Do we have a fixed idea of how we should relate to our self? Or to others?
This moon is bringing fluidity, water, not necessarily in the sense of going with the flow, albeit there is no harm in going with the flow, but in being fluid in our approach to life and in our relationship to self. Heck, giving ourselves a break, letting go of the fixed mind and its rigidity. Giving ourselves some time and space to allow whatever needs to drop away to drop away and to allow whatever needs to come in to come in…if there’s no space, if we’re too fixed then nothing will ever positively change.
It’s the allowing both sides of the coin and everything in between that we might experience greater harmony and inner peace, love then. And the more we feel that inside ourselves, the more we will feed that into the collective consciousness and the more the systems will break down and evolve - reflecting our own process of breaking down before we experience a shift in consciousness and evolution. Fighting against ourselves will just create more injustice and loss of harmony, and this will merely feed the war in the outside world too. There will be a lack of love.
Again we come back to the notion that to change the world we need to first change ourselves. Love the self and everything else shifts.
It’s sort of related and maybe not, but there are more flies than usual here on Guernsey and I have had a fly in the healing space all day, and it has just reminded me about the need to live in greater harmony and to let go of our irritations. The fly was absolutely annoying me during my first session, but as I realised that it was possibly teaching me a lesson, and as I tried to radiate a sense of love towards it - it has as much right to be on planet earth as me, just like viruses and bacteria and all other life forms - so my irritation eased and so the fly stopped bothering me or my clients!
It has to begin inside us. We have to notice what is irritating us and then learn to turn towards it and see its alternative perspective rather than turning away from it, fixed and blinkered in our own perspective. It is in this way that we step away from feelings of separation and aloneness, of victimhood and blame hood, of ‘us’ and ‘them’ of ‘yes’ and ‘no’, and begin instead to enjoy glimpses of ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’, of not being fixed in any one direction and of the magical inner harmony and oneness that might arise as a result of this allowing of all perspective.
As always it’s about love. Allowing love the space to heal and allowing ourselves to be loved. To turn toward those who irritate and annoy us with love, because they’re merely reflecting a part of ourselves that irritates and annoys us! A hard reality to face, but a necessary one too. It’s harder to love than it is to hate!
Enjoy the full moon, we’ll be celebrating on Sark! Spread love!
x
Ramblings of change
I returned from Sark to find chaos in the moon garden! The St John’s Wort has taken over the Oil of Evening Primrose and the flowers all needed picking, so too the last of the chamomile, and the endless mint, gosh, it really has gone quite wild and this after just a few days of being left alone in the rain and the sun.
It’s been funny old weather but the garden has loved it and judging by all the blackberries taking form all over Sark, these have loved it too. But here the garden has especially thrived and I am very aware that all my plants are planted really far too close together, and yet despite this, they are still abundant in their growing. There are flowers! This is the second year for many of the plants - they’re flowering year, I missed all this last year, so it is a real treat.
But of course it’s thrown me into a spin because what on earth do I do with everything?! My first ay back found me rushing around trying to process all the dried leaves and flowers in the drying rack, to turn them into teas, this so I could create space to dry more of them. Then there was the endless picking, goodness, who would have realised it took so much time to pick St John wort’s flowers, and then turning some of the pickings into tinctures and oils.
I also returned with this renewed sense of getting things done. I had ordered a Vitamix as a birthday present to self and this still sat boxed and unopened, so i was keen to get going and make some much needed nut butters and humous of my own. What a delight! I’ve wanted to do this for ages but never got going, so I am grateful to Katie for getting me going, and for putting me onto healthy supplies.co.uk where you can buy organic nuts and seeds and all sorts of other things at a reasonable cost. I’ve got the almond milk to make next…
There was also the Ayurvedic consultation space to set up. I’ve had it in mind for ages, but this required clearing out a space and moving furniture etc. I’d made steady progress, throwing away a ton of out of date paperwork that was just holding old energy, and clearing out cupboards that were housing stuff we no longer needed. It’s all just stuff really! We found a gap to negotiate an old sofa down the stairs and I managed to shift a few other things and voila, finally the space presented itself to me.
It feels a long time in coming and yet absolutely the right timing to it too. Sometimes it takes time to step up into a more aligned and authentic version of ourselves and along the way things have to drop away. The dropping away is never an easy process. Nor is settling into the uncertainty of not knowing what is coming next. This can throw up feelings of fear as there is nothing stable to hold onto, nothing concrete. It can throw us into quite a spin, as we desperately try to figure out a way forward, but without having clear idea of this.
I’m in that zone right now and I know others are too. If I can elevate my perspective to see that I’m in it, then it’s actually very exciting, but when I am caught up in the thick of it, it can be extremely unsettling.There’s a lot of change in process. Elijah finishes infants tomorrow and Eben finishes pre-school. Yet more change in September as I have to attempt to settle Eben into big school and Elijah steps up into juniors. Both suffer with separation anxiety, the common factor being me, so I guess I must allow it on some level, we all have an inherent fear of being separated from one another! It’s not easy to manage, drop-offs are emotionally exhausting, age-inducing, after 4 years of it now.
Eben is also going through his own changes, as he transforms from a little boy to a bigger boy and plays around with self-weaning. I’ve been breastfeeding him now for 4 years and 9 months and before him, Elijah for 2 years and 1 month, so it’s quite a shift for me too. But one has to accept that the children want to fledge from the nest as they become increasingly independent. However I am very aware that they always need their mum, and their dad, just the demands change.
It’s funny how much of our lives can be dedicated to something like breast feeding, where once it was all consuming, every 3 hours in those new born days, to nightly, and how we just get on with it, forgetting that there was a life before it and will be a life after it. I never imagined back then, that I would keep going this long. Or that at the age of 7 and a half, Elijah would still require one of us to lie with him when he falls asleep at night. That’s over 7 years of one of us being at home every evening to put him to bed, bar the few times in the earlier days when he would stay with my parents before separation anxiety put pay to that. Eben has never slept away from home yet.
So it is a change. We have now entered the world of sleep overs and having Elijah’s friends to stay over. Eben’s started going to clubs when I said I would never do this with my children, be their taxi service. but this is what happens. He wanders around with a football most of the time, the kitchen has become an indoor football pitch, a basketball court, a hockey pitch and a tennis court. There is often a ball or a plastic bottle flying around, the latter because of some You Tube challenge where children throw a bottle to see if they can land it right side up. Eben spends hours perfecting his bottle throwing.
Even the cat is going through a period of transition. He’s losing his mind and forgets he’s eaten. He miaows for no apparent reason. He walks from the front door to the back door and back to the front door again. It’s a relief when he finds a comfy place to sleep and gives us some peace for a few hours. I never used to let him sleep on the bed, but even this has fallen by the way side. It humours me how much we end up letting go over time.
This is life though isn’t it, peaks and troughs, and periods of noticeable change. It’s not just teh external world, but the internal world that goes through its transitions. We have changes of heart that find us seeking a new direction, of wanting to live life differently. That’s where I’m at. It’s been another one of those years, what with lockdown, and all the various Reiki attunements, let alone the eclipse and all the hanging around in dolmens. It was inevitable really, that things would change.
But when life is busy and constantly organised into a neat timetable of always doing, it is very difficult to see the wood through the trees, and absolutely impossible for the old to drop away. I was sick for two days recently and I am never sick, I just picked up a cold from the boys and I knew that it was because I needed to slow down and drop in. Stuff needed to drop away. It was an intense few days, followed by this wobbly energy up to the new moon, which was a wonderful new moon, because we were in Sark and there was a whole heap of space. There’s always a settling after a new moon and a day of total chaos.
I notice that in that chaos I cling to the past. I try to find reasons to do what I’ve done before, to hold on to what’s been, or to reach for it again. It’s not that my heart is longing for it, only that the fear gets the better of me, because I absolutely have no idea where life is going and as exciting as that is (as I mentioned above) it is horribly disorientating. But if we can settle into the discomfort, be with it, rather than turning away from it, or reacting to it, then we will move through it, and life will change by itself without us actually having to do anything about it.
Saying that, it can be helpful to take yourself somewhere on your own, out in nature, and just settle into yourself. Take some breaths, meditate if you can, or watch nature unfold in front of you, anything to get you more in tune, and then write or draw, from the heart, all that you feel inside you needs expression at some point, all that you hope and dream for in this world, almost like a vision board of sorts. Sometimes it just needs to come out. But then we put it aside, pop it away, let go of any attachment to outcome, to forcing things to happen and just know that when our personal will is aligned with divine will then all will come to fruition, in its own time.
There is a timing to all of life. A time to be active and a time to step back. We women especially have our menstrual cycles to guide us through this, so that we are naturally drawn to retreat from the world at times, and also to be very much in the world too. For me the summer is always one of retreating from an otherwise busy workload and yet taking the time to be out in the world, on the beach mainly, if the weather allows, and we’re backwards and forwards to Sark, which feels increasingly like a second home. There’s something about the energy of this place that feeds me energetically and spiritually.
We all need to be fed energetically. We all have our ways. For some it is feeding off others, for others it is feeding off place, or space or some activity. Once we know what we feed off, what fills us pop, it makes it easier for us to seek it when we know that we need a pick-up. Silence feeds me, so too spiritual landscape and working with energy. In the silence of giving reiki there is great joy. Sometimes we don’t realise the extent to which we fulfil our needs by the things we do. More often we notice when we are not meeting our needs and we feel depleted.
Which brings me around to the whole sharing today, of change. Mainly because I know I am not the only one going through this transition, we are being awakened and asked to step up collectively. It’s helpful then that we know what does fill us up, asking us few energised and feeding our authenticity. This because it is easy to kid ourselves and to settle for jobs or situations that don’t allow any of this, because we lack the awareness of what we do actually need. It’s easy to cling on to what is known, to do more of the same, albeit in a different place, or under a different title, simply because we don’t know how to be with the discomfort of the unknown.
There sre stepping stones too. Sometimes we have to move somewhere to allow us to take the next step after then, to where we are actually meant to be. The risk is always forgetting to take the step and getting stuck in the middle. I’ve seen this happen with relationships and jobs, the stepping stone is overlooked and people settle into something that isn’t quite aligned but was better than where they were previously, albeit precarious as it is based upon a stepping stone, a place that is meant to allow movement, not settling.
We all find our way eventually, or we don’t. Something will happen though, illness, death, redundancy, something to awaken us and prompt us back to the heart. The heart always knows best, but sometimes we can’t hear its because there’s too much noise around us and within us. And thus we come all the way back to silent practices, that allow us to settle more fully into ourselves, yoga, Reiki, gardening, solo walking, all of this can give us the space we need, and the grounding to really feel and listen.
Enjoy your transitioning. I’m told 2022 is going to be a big year, so 2021 was always going to have to facilitate that and get us questioning and opening up to new possibilities, of unsticking ourselves if we have gotten stuck, of dreaming new dreams and of letting go of all that’s been. It’ll take its time, there’s a pause right now, great big exhale taking place…keep exhaling too, and letting go.
Love Emma x
Stepping into the uncomfortableness of our authentic selves
You know how it goes, I’d visited a spiritual site which had triggered something, I went for a massage which triggered it more, and later that day the uncomfortable realisation crept up on me, out of the shadows. My wise old friend had been badgering me for a while: why was I always so busy he wanted to know. I’d asked myself the question many times before, but it’s an easy question to brush aside with a flippant answer, “I’ve got a family, we’re all busy aren’t we, as a society?” But I had questioned it myself many times since, increasingly so, with another birthday passed, which always calls for a life review and an awareness of how life is being lived and how that aligns with inherent truth. Why was I always so busy? So despite the uncomfortableness, I was grateful for the insight when it came. Financial consideration aside, there was the dawning realisation that I’m busy because I feel this need to be productive and achieve and, ah hum, be someone. It’s a sad old state of affairs, because despite the many years of stripping the layers away to be ‘no one’, such is the nature of the spiritual path if I can call it that, there is still a deep uncomfortableness that comes with the idea of literally being ‘no one’…(other than my beautiful self).
It’s an interesting position.
The more I have grown to love and accept myself, the more it has become less important to me what others think or feel or to seek their external validation. But! There is always a ‘but’. The layers of my cultural, societal and education conditioning run deep. And despite the work done, I can still feel a clinging on to my needing to be someone for fear of…drifting away into nothingness… and yet isn’t that where the most joy and beauty and bliss lies, in the deep mystery that can only arise when there is nothing else to distract us? And ultimately, we drift towards the nothingness of death itself, so perhaps that is the fear, the nothingness that comes from being no more.
I had thought about this too. How our lives are surrounded by stuff that seems to mean so much to us, yet when we die, what then? Junk to be processed and cleared by someone. We can’t take it with us after all, yet we spend our lives accumulating it anyway. It seems such a shame to think that so much of our accumulations end up in landfill, redundant. Our memory lives on in hearts and DNA, admittedly, and perhaps that’s the point, it’s never the titles, never the achievements, just how much we touch lives while we’re living.
The yoga has taken me to increasingly deeper places over the years, many know this because they’ve either journeyed with me into the thick of it, or found it too confronting that they have jumped ship and found refuge with all that was and remains familiar. We are all different in our wants and needs, it doesn’t make us more or less spiritual, we just have different motivations and journeys to be lived.
My teacher increasingly takes me into a state of nothingness and beingness, where there is no regard for achievement. Sometimes I find this desperately uncomfortable because old habits die hard, there are still strands that find me desperate to lunge a little deeper into splits, even if this does cause my ego to take over, because my ego is still so attached to outcome. Therein lies another little lesson. The one of attachment to outcome and expectation.
It’s very difficult to let this go and just be. Anyone who tries to live their lives aligned with their heart and soul knows this, because there is no guarantee, you literally just need to trust and leap. The mind hates it of course, clings on, goes around and around in circles trying to rationalise and work it out, trying to make the outcome known and certain.
I’ve written about this before, Krishnamurti wrote at length about this too and Vanda Scaravelli (they were good friends) was inspired by him, so it underlies much of the teachings now shared to me that have come from Vanda and her teaching of Diane Long (who taught my teacher Louise – to explain the connection).
As children we’re frequently asked what we want to be when we’re older, “what do you want to be?”. What do we want to be? Of course the answer might be, “I just want to be myself”, but usually it’s about labelling in some way, of defining ourselves by a title or profession, of working towards something. If we’re lucky we align this with heart but more often than not, we end up becoming what others want for us, be that society or parents, culture or teachers, to the extent that we sculpt ourselves to fit into something that has been chosen for us. Or maybe we fall into something and then get stuck, mortgages, children, holidays, dreams, they’ve all got to be paid for somehow, it’s difficult to make changes when we’re in the thick of it, we forget we have a choice, that we have free will to always choose again and live differently.
At Elijah’s school, there’s a wall filled with photos of each of the children in the school and a little snippet of what they want to be when they’re older. I like looking at what is written, the child’s idea of how their life might be lived one day. Many want to be vets because they love animals, or doctors because they want to help people, or dancers, or fireman. Some want to be unicorns and mermaids. Fortunately none that I have seen yet want to be billionaires or You tubers or rule the world. That’ll come (or hopefully not). Society today is all about money and power and the need to be someone who has achieved both, ‘to be someone’, to have made something of ourselves.
Even in the spiritual world there is this attachment to labels and being recognised for being someone. It’s a cosmic joke, a little like the one that has women feeling that they’re liberated and empowered, busting balls in the board room, being up there with the boys, working long hours to prove that they can do it as good (if not better) than the men, and all the time, their feminine energy is crying out through menstrual pain and menopausal symptoms that are seen as nothing more than their bodies letting them down. Power and money.
I have been as guilty as the next, I was groomed for the corporate world, and yes, my ovaries made me very aware that the suits I was squeezing into, the masculine energy I was channelling just to get through the day and stay on top of things, was not really going to work for me long term. I had to find that out for myself.
Even in yoga there was a learning too. In the earlier days, and for a long while after then (if I’m honest) I wanted to be someone here too. I was so conditioned to achievement that I wanted to be the best yoga teacher, I alone wanted to change the world. It wasn’t my ego ran wild, although of course it was to an extent, but more so that I knew no other way, I had been trained to be the best at everything, netball, academia, corporate ladder climbing, society encourages us to be the best, because being the best makes us feel better about ourselves somehow. It validates our worth in a world that measures it on the external, on possessions and badges.
When we love and accept ourselves regardless, the external becomes irrelevant, but it took a long time for me to embody this in my life.
Along the way, I also fell into the trap of thinking that I needed to externalise my spirituality, looking the (perceived) part. I forgot too that we’re all inherently spiritual – and instead of trying to be more spiritual, we just need to be less of everything else which prevents us from realising our truth as spiritual beings.
As soon as we start being true to ourselves, all of the externalisation begins to drop away, because it doesn’t matter, not really.
And yet, our conditioning is ingrained and it takes time to work our way away from old patterns. Achievement hasn’t always made me happy. It’s surprised me at times. I felt that writing a book, a long held dream, might make me feel more joyful than it actually did. The trouble being, I was so attached to outcome that I got lost in this. Many do. It’s what prevents us living our dreams in the first place – we get so attached to the idea of how it is meant to be, famous artist, best-selling author, award-winning entrepreneur, that we get overwhelmed and don’t know how to start. Even worse, we give it a go and get caught up in the idea of our wonderfulness.
Our life purpose, all of us, is to be. It’s really very simple. But we are always concerned about how others perceive us. This is my point. Even in the spiritual world where we are meant to be aware of this, we still fall into the trap of separation, of thinking we are better than others, more spiritual, more enlightened, more helpful, more aligned. I see it frequently at the moment. We have been going through a period of awakening these last few years, but even that has a process to it, and the spiritual ego runs rampant. It can’t be helped, simply because it is part of the process, and this is perhaps where all of this began, in noticing the manner in which my spiritual ego still plays out, in trying to be someone!
It’s so subtle that I could have easily overlooked it. The irony that I have been progressively trying to be no one. Leaving social media was all part of this. So too teaching yoga in a more aligned way, less about being popular or liked, such was my insecurity at various times in my life, that the number of students attending my classes was important to me. It validated my worth in the world, as I too was still looking externally. But as my practice has deepened, as the layers have been stripped away simply from the practice (this is the nature of yoga), and as I have aligned more fully with what’s actually happening on the inside and been increasingly comfortable and contented in my own skin, it has mattered less what people think of me. This has been liberating and at times scary, because I feel there is no choice but to share in a more authentic way, which is not always liked or approved by others, and which becomes less affected by the notion of achievement, a whole new approach, because I still look for some validation of it, yet because I am no longer playing the game (so to speak), the criteria has changed. There is no criteria now.
When we increasingly align with the heart and soul, it becomes more about feeling, and less about the mind. Thus it cannot be evaluated in the old paradigm, by external validation, approval, and objective assessment. We can feel as if we are free-falling initially, and can question whether we’re doing the ‘right’ thing. But we get to a point where we know we have no choice, regardless of how we are received. There’s a point when we can no longer sell out and compromise on the truth. Knowing when we are doing this does demand a certain level of discernment and honesty with self.
It’s been a gradual process for me and its ongoing too, we are like onions after all and our level of denial can be great – it’s not that it’s conscious even, that we are attempting to deceive ourselves, just that it’s so subtle, especially when we are ensnared by the spiritual ego, that we don’t notice it until we’re ready to see it, and then it’s uncomfortable.
I have a feeling the moon is bringing this up for many of us right now, as we question the direction our lives will take, whether we feed more of the money/power paradigm, or whether we birth into a new one with all the uncomfortableness of not really knowing what that looks like. But at the same time, having a sense that we have to move on because the current world view is outdated, superficial and – quite frankly – destroying humanity and the planet. What choice do we have really?
But it does mean we have to let go of how it is and of the way we have been trained and conditioned to live. We have to settle into the uncomfortableness of not being driven by power and money, by achieving and productivity.
I have a feeling that that which we most seek – of being who we truly are without the need for any external validation of worth – is found in the nothingness and the being no one. That it’s exactly the opposite of what we think.
But of course, that is the problem. We think and rationalise and get in our own way.
Instead, we have to live from a very different place and I have noticed that there is a lightness in doing so.
I have also noticed that this is the path that yoga takes us on. When I consider my most influential yoga teachers, none of them have an Instagram profile, they’re barely on social media, they are not trying to be anyone, they don’t seek followers, they don’t advertise, students find them when they’re ready to receive the teachings they share. I stumbled across each of these teachers at just the right time, there was divine timing to it, I didn’t seek them anymore than they sought me, our paths merely aligned.
There is a deep trust in living this way. Of stepping outside the logical and rational mind, of making things happen, and of aligning with soul, with higher self, with another way of connecting within this world.
It blows my mind even now, the synchronicities and coincidences that can occur to direct our lives. How we are deeply supported and all is asked of us is trust – albeit this is tricky!
This is what crept up on me out of the shadows… The extent to which we don’t always trust or have faith, even when we think we do.
There’s a certain free falling as we learn to let go. Because there is always fear when we move from one way of being to another because we cannot always be sure of what it is we are moving to, and often what is needed the most is space – nothingness, of being no one!
Anytime we look for external validation or direction, it’s an indication we need to stop and turn inwards instead. We have within us all the answers that we seek. We just need to turn down the noise, go within, be with it and wait until something shifts, and then this world that we were conditioned to live in begins to drop away, and a new world is born, a different way of seeing things, a whole new perspective which shifts our relationship with truth and with self – with life itself.
There is always the opportunity to unravel, to release the binds that keep us twisted deep on the inside, to find the thread and allow it to unravel itself, like an old jumper being unpicked, wound back to the ball of wool where it had begun, and spun again into something different. A new way of being, of being our magnificent Self without any of the need for external validation and adoration.
It reminds me of The Invitation:
It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain.
I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it, or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty even when it is not pretty every day. And if you can source your own life from its presence.
I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand at the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, ‘Yes.’
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone and do what needs to be done to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.
I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.
by Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Elderflower cordial
“Summer has not arrived until elderflower is in full bloom and ends when the berries are ripe”.
Or so the saying goes! The elderflowers are in blossom right now and smell divine. These creamy white or pink flowers contain compounds which are anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic and can act to soothe inflamed tissues in the upper respiratory tract and sinuses - ideal for hay fever season!
I’m not sure my Ayurvedic doctor would think this the best tonic for a pitta person given the use of lemons and citric acid, but this cordial tastes amazing!
You are best to harvest the elderflowers on a sunny day when their fragrance, flavour and compounds are at their peak. Don’t wash the flower but do shake the insects gently from them.
Ingredients
30 large elderflowers
6 lemons cut into quarters
2oz citric acid
2lb granulated sugar
3 pints of boiling water
Method
Put everything in a plastic bucket or a large glass bowl. Pour over the boiling water. Stir well until the sugar is dissolved. Leave for 24 hours and strain through muslin or a clean J Cloth into sterilised bottles.
It should keep for years!
Enjoy!
Happy full moon in Capricorn!
So we have a Capricorn super full moon this evening, it peaks at 7.39pm albeit we won’t see it here in Guernsey (if skies are clear) until 9.30pm-ish.
I went and sat with it at a sacred site last night with a friend so we could do some healing work together. I find the full moon really supports this, albeit the last full moon was just too intense. This one feels gentler, although it is bringing up some feelings of anxiety and is particularly potent in getting right to the heart of some old wounds and demanding forgiveness.
We sat out in clear site of it, energising some tea and chocolate I’d made, also some crystals. It’s still cold out there though, I long for a warmer full moon evening - could even get wired naked then (don’t panic, I’m not sure I’m brave enough to start dancing naked on some public sacred site, albeit I’m pretty sure that’d be a memorable experience)!
Yes, forgiveness feels key. It’s often ourselves we are forgiving, underneath all these stories and blame hood and victimising we do/allow ourselves to be.
Also, stuff is moving again. A few things are finally coming to completion, or at least moving to the next stage. Random things might come in too, are they the answer to our prayers or red herrings? We need to be discerning, just sit things through, see what needs to land and feels aligned and what doesn’t. Definitely a time to sit it out quietly.
It was a late night (or early morning, I run on moon time out there) and to be honest. I can never get enough of it, she is a magic lady of the night and I’m always curious to see what might happen next. But alas, we live on linear time and with the children waking early there is only so long…
It was a long day too, I got up for sunrise at the same sacred site because I wanted to follow it through the cycle of the sun, making it back there in time for sunset, and the rising of the moon. I was lucky to be able to do that, and it did feel special, although never easy making these things happen when you have children - thank you family for sleeping when you did!
Curious to see what else reveals itself today…there were a few random things yesterday…
Ok, so enjoy the full moon energy, pay attention and love thyself as much as you can. Oh and get your crystals outside, your feet on the earth and make some of Sing’s amazing chocolate!
Love Emma x
The flip side of the coin
Well I have to say that this has been the oddest summer solstice I have experienced ever. There has been none of the usual crazy potent energy, just this weird heaviness and feeling of being stuck.
It’s fairly much rained non stop here today and asked from teaching two yoga classes and enjoying a SHEN session with the lovely Jo Henton, I’ve mainly made my first ever batch of jam all on my own courtesy of excess logan and boys berries from my parents’ greenhouse. I also made a gluten, dairy and refined sugar free chocolate cake for the boys to counter all the sugar, dairy and gluten they ate on holiday in Alderney!
I feel like we are being constantly reminded of the two sides to the same coin, the yin and the yang and recognition of the need for balance and open minds, changing perspectives, going with the flow of things, not to get fixed, to let go of expectation and live in the present - which we are, if only we could let go of our cultural conditioning around linear time which keeps us trapped in patriarchy and never having enough time and this need to achieve all the time.
It’s becoming clearer to me that it is all about choice and about how we want to live our life - as in which reality we want to live in, the limited linear one that we’ve outgrown, hence the stuckness, or another more expansive one where we are not so limited or bound down by this current notion of time. It’s a big perspective shift because we don’t tend to question it - this is the life we have been sold, and we just get on with living it.
But imagine if there are other realms of reality that we couldn’t see but that we could access if we opened ourselves up to it. That our beyond the rational mind and its way of seeing the world? Well there are peter realms and other ways of being and I have a sneaky feeling that increasing numbers of people are going to be opening to these, that we will begin living beyond the realms of what we feel is possible, not technologically by the way, but from a deeper connection to nature and the earth, as if a portal opens up to us…(and it does btw, if we just get out there and into it and believe).
There’s a certain craziness that comes when people talk of things beyond our realm of comprehension, I have a good friend who lives in different dimensions and sometimes I think that he might be mad, but I know that this is simply because my limited mind has restricted my access to it and because of that the only thing I can do, to explain things rationally, is label him mad. He’s not mad by the way, he’s saner than most other people I know in this world, but again it comes back around to perspective.
Are we sane for vaccinating or mad, or does it not matter either way? We’re always changing our minds, always being asked to look at things differently. I really feel that the solstice has been asking us to pay attention to how we see the world and what we expect of it - nothing is necessarily what it appears, and always there is another way of looking at things.
For some this cake looks awful, for others it looks great, for me it tastes lovely and that’s all I really care about!
Happy solstice dreaming!
x
The summer solstice!
It’s the summer solstice here today in the northern hemisphere and I’m feeling much more blurgh than I would be usually on this un-filled day. Ordinarily I’d be up and out for sunrise, exploring some new alignment and getting powered up for the day ahead, but the weather here is appalling and I have been feeling exhausted by the shifting energy. Others have told me they feel the same, there’s a stagnation in the air and a general sense of heaviness.
I did head the call yesterday evening though, fulled on Sing’s amazing chocolate from our earlier yoga & Reiki empowerment session, and headed out to a sacred site renowned for its midsummer’s eve connection, to watch the sunsetting. There was no sunset to see but I did get a feel into the energy and enjoyed the guidance of the rabbits and blackbirds, who led the way, albeit I was using my rods too, but they both took me to the same place regardless!
I enjoyed a fire too with another Pagan friend, this a traditional way to spend midsummer’s eve albeit we didn’t actually jump the fire this time! We did enjoy the bats and the sounds of wildlife until the rain came in and poured down on us - cleansing in another way perhaps!
It’s a funny time, this period of the sun standing still before we begin the gentle descent into the darkness, reminding us of the polarities of life and that time in-between. It’s very easy in our lives to accept one side of then polarity and reject the other. I’ve grown weary over the years of the whole new age spiritual love and light phenomenon, where individuals focus solely on the love and light, rejecting anything they see as heavy and dark, forgetting that we have all aspects of everything within us, that there is always another perspective.
I got caught up in it like the rest, not knowing any better, feeling that it was all about the love and light and merely fuelling my own repression and rejection of my wholeness, turning away from those parts I deemed bad and didn’t like, such as my anger and rage and my frustration - the darkness. Over the years I realised how much this approach to spiritualism was merely feeding more of the illusion and keeping me trapped in a lack of love for self because I was continuously denying aspects of myself and drawing in situations to help me see this, so it felt that I was never shifting anything, just kept living the same patterns.
It wasn’t until i started to appreciate that I am a mixture of everything and stopped rejecting the bits that thought were bad or simply didn't like, that I started to accept and love myself just as I am. It wasn’t easy, and no doubt is an ongoing process, because we have to notice how much we are deceiving ourselves and that can be tricky - we may have spent a lifetime rejecting bits of ourselves and fragmenting our soul in the process because it’s uncomfortable looking at it. We are all killers and manipulators on some level even if we don’t want to accept it.
Essentially we are the light and the dark and everything in between. The solstices remind us of this. The pendulum swings one way and then it will swing another and somewhere in amongst all that we find our equilibrium, we flow and cycle with nature and our own nature - not doing things just because others do or because it is expected of us, but because it feels right, we are in our flow.
I’m hopeful we might see a sunrise the next few days as I’m always keen to explore local megaliths and dolmens and sun/moon alignments, these power spots that connect around the globe, like a matrix bringing greater energy and reverence into the earth.
I hope you all have a super solstice wherever you are and whatever you do. Do it for you, not for anyone else though, and enjoy.
Love Emma x
Alderney and chamomile
We just enjoyed a wonderful few days in Alderney courtesy of my parents, being treated to the Blonde Hedgehog cottage and numerous wonderful meals. The island is amazing! I can’t believe it has taken me 16 years to get back there again, but I know I’m not alone and others are saying the same.
There’s a real sense of community and those people we met were really friendly and welcoming. The food was amazing too, I love the emphasis on fresh, seasonal and local and only wish we had more of the same approach here.
We explored on bikes, my legs might take a while to recover, missing the electric cargo bike and pulling 3.5 stone of Eben behind me in a trailer! We explored at length too, managing to find a number of neolithic stones as well as some beautiful spots, especially Saye Bay!
The boys enjoyed the many forts and bunkers, not really my thing, but I was rather struck with the roman walls and it did cross my mind that the land must be truly sacred to have been protected by so many different men over the ages.
We even managed a boat trip out to Burhou and Gannet’s rock, to see puffins and gannets, which was a real treat and quite unexpected - it was really amazing to see the land from this angle too and all the shapes in the rocks.
Back home in Guernsey the chamomile has flowered and my nature friend, Fi, was right in that it is a labour of love harvesting the flowers for tea. The evening primrose’s have started flowering too, the garden is alive even if the hedgerows have been sacrificed for the car, always such a shame but there we go.
I’ve been practising some Qi gong recently, having been inspired by my friend Caragh. Loving weaving this into my daily practice and finding more of then earth in the process. It feels necessary with the solstice approaching and another full moon next week - sadly it looks like a wet solstice sun rise but at least this makes me feel less sad about not being at Stonehenge for another year.
I’m curious to see what the next week brings, I was too busy with the family in Alderney to feel into it but hopeful the insight comes soon…change is afoot I can tell you that, this is the year of stepping up and I am finding that manifesting in ways I hadn't appreciated. Let’s see…