The moon and menstrual cycle awareness

I love the moon and working with it, so too working with my menstrual cycle. I know that idea freaks some people out, I could see the eyebrows raised when I announced the release of our online moon and menstrual cycle awareness course, as it is out of the comfort zone for many. So too, some just don’t get it. Why would anyone want to connect with the moon, to help them connect with their own cycle, and why would they want to connect more deeply with their own cycle anyway?

I see it with yoni yoga from time to time too. Yoni means amongst other things vulva, cunt, womb and place to call home. Yoni yoga is all about coming home to yourself, but when I mention womb wisdom for the first time, I can sense some women having a hard time accepting that. If I mention bleeding then this totally freaks some out. Yet they have experience of it, monthly on the whole. But sadly the shame runs too deep, so too, the effect of patriarchy on women’s own perception of their bodies, wisdom and power.

But the course is now available for those who want to explore further. My life has been infinitely enriched by inviting the moon into it, and as for getting intimate with my menstrual cycle, well that has been deeply empowering and helpful too. I bleed on the earth each full moon and I make no apology if that freaks you out. We are all nature. My second cousin bleeds on her plants, to give them greater vitality. I like to swim naked in the sea too if I can and especially when menstruating, it just feels right.

E’s more than used to it all now, doesn’t phase him. The boys too, know no different. We do laugh though, about how things change generation to generation. Fortunately my parents were always open with me, there was no shame around menstruation. It was never celebrated as I might do if I had a daughter of my own, but nor was it brushed aside. I’m grateful to my parents for that, amongst many other things I’m grateful to them about. It seems a pity to me that women can have such a hard time with it. But such is the depth of our societal, generational, cultural, educational and parental conditioning, to say nothing of our discomfort at truly knowing our own body and getting intimate with it.

So often I see people who are so out of touch with their body, it’s literally screaming at them for help, but they would rather give it a pill then try and listen. I see it all the time in yoga too, people who have injuries, say an issue with a shoulder for example, who are dead beat on pushing through with plank and chattaranga, even though their shoulder is screaming at them to stop. I’ve stopped teaching those postures regularly, simply to prevent people further damaging themselves. I did it for years myself, pushed through even though my body was saying rest, for example. Eventually the body finds a way to make us listen, albeit for many it can be too late and surgery is required, or another form of medical intervention, I’ve learned the hard way with this too.

I write a lot more about this in my book From Darkness Comes Light, which has finally been professionally edited, Now the hard work begins and this is where my energy will no doubt rest the next few months. That and with the family. And getting our Plant a Tree project off the ground this Saturday - do feel you can come and collect a tree to plant and do your bit (another bit, I know) for positive climate change and making this world a better place to live. We could do with something positive to watch grow and flourish in the years ahead. Let’s hope us humans grow and flourish too.

Trees help bring some continuity in an ever changing world. It’s been noticeable these last 18 months, how uncertain our lives can be and how easy it is to experience a change of heart and perspective depending on what happens to us and how we are affected by it. For many of us life will never be the same. There is greater depth somehow in living more presently and moment to moment, less able to plan ahead, at least with any certainty. This is one of the gifts I take from Covid, and there have been many.

Finally managing to get the moon and menstrual cycle awareness course off the ground has been another. I know it can help, that it works, that there is power in embracing the moon cycle and our menstrual cycle too and I really hope that some of you will take the plunge and immerse yourself in it. You can find out more about it here https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/courses/the-moon-and-menstrual-cycle-pack, but for now I am off to bed.

Love Emma x

Finding the goodness

I’m delighted that the States of Guernsey have decided to end the discrimination between vaccinated and non-vaccinated travellers to the Common Travel Area (why it makes any difference elsewhere I have no idea, Covid is Covid is Covid the world over). I’m sorry to all those people who took the vaccine simply to be able to travel.

It’s a weird state of affairs isn’t it, that these days we take vaccines for purposes other than health and wellbeing. Back in the day that WAS the reason we took vaccines, but with Covid, for many, it became about travel instead.

Mind you, I’m not sure why I’m surprised, we live in a topsy turvy world where we think that happiness is found in material possessions and self-worth is found in recognition on social media. As I mentioned in one of my recent blogs, my friend, Marie, who recently died from cancer, taught me a lot about this - that happiness is found mainly in love; everything else becomes quite irrelevant in the end, I mean you can’t take your possessions with you and social media, well, I won’t even go there.

I always remember a successful businessman friend saying to me that he’d rather be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy, and I did think this made a lot of sense. But it seems that the more we ‘progress’ as a society, the unhappier we become and the more we feel less human.

I love Steve Biddulph’s new book, Fully Human, as he says it like it is:

“The hyper capitalist life - rushing, stressing, consuming - takes a terrible toll on families, which we just assume is normal. And if it’s normal, then there must be something wrong with us - and our family - that we can’t keep up. Just as women in the 1950s thought there must be something wrong with them when they weren’t fulfilled in aprons, cooking scones, contemporary men and women feel inadequate that they can’t sustain the lonely, competitiveness harshness of twenty-first-century life. Our children too are growing up in a world that’s increasingly nasty, aggressive and punishing of everyone who does not meet impossible standards in things that really don’t matter at all - such as fashion, body shape and possessions. So many really terrible problems that readers will recognise - divorce, anxiety and stress in children, rebellion and self-harm in teenagers - are the direct consequence of this”.

I do believe it is a significant time in history, threshold, and we really do need to be conscious of the decisions we make and the choices we take, not only for ourselves but for our children and their children too. I am involved in the Children’s Forest Project and this is based on a book called The Children’s Fire and the work of Mac Macartney. The Children’s Fire is basically a pledge to the welfare of unborn future children (human and non-human alike) but more profoundly it’s a pledge to life, a commitment to the responsibility carried by each successive generation to safeguard the vitality and regenerative capacity of the earth. It insists on a circular economy and it views any action that compromises the wellspring of creativity from which our species has emerged as sacrilege, an act of betrayal, evidence hinting at insanity.

Decisions we make individually and collectively are important. We do not need to follow the common narrative, especially if it doesn’t feel right for us. Covid has helped people to question things, but I don’t know that people are questioning things enough, or caring enough either. The rug was pulled and the opportunity was given, but whether it’s been taken, well let’s hope it has, for humanity needs to be careful what it does next.

I highly recommend Steve’s book, it’s about new ways of using your mind, and forms the basis for a talk I’m giving later on being fully human and checking in, not checking up. There’s a message for us all there somewhere, about what it means to be fully human and being in touch with that. He makes some really valid comments about our ways of defining a human being and how this impacts on our relationship to others and relationship to self - if we see human beings are crappy, what does that say about us?

I’m constantly reminded at the moment of the goodness inside all of us. There is goodness in this world and the more we can find it inside ourselves, perhaps the more we see it outside ourselves, and vice versa too! I’m pleased that the States of Guernsey has showed more of its humanness and goodness these last few days, thank you.

Love Emma x

Happy Equinox balancing!

What an incredible day for the equinox. I was lucky to watch the sunrise at a locally-aligned spiritual site and the moon set the other side. Rather sublime. The tide was super high too for a beautiful swim at Saints. Days like this I feel especially blessed.

I felt blessed too on Monday hours before the peak of the full moon (12.55am Tuesday morning) wandering around faerie paths lit by the brightness of the harvest moon. Nature really did help the farmers with their night time harvesting on this moon and goodness knows what they might have seen. There’s magic on this land, it comes alive at night. I even managed a naked moon dance, which I’ve been meaning to do all summer but it just never aligned.

Alignment is the word though for this time. Everything in and on it’s line. Equal duration of day and night. Like a seesaw held stable, before it tips one way more than the other. There’s fun in that though, I watched the boys on the seesaw at the park the other day, their jubilant faces said it all really! You’ve just got to let go into it.

it’s definitely a time of letting go. Look at nature. She lets go so beautifully. I love watching the leaves fall from the trees, they all do it so differently. We’ve got to wait for the wind, then we’ll be in for a treat, But meantime I’m enjoying this stillness and brightness, it’s a real vata time is the only thing, very ungrounding and drying for some.

Balance, balance, always a good reminder, not getting stuck into a mindset or perspective one way or the other. Being open minded, allowing for change. I was talking a lot about the nature of suffering at the weekend and how the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lists change as the main source of suffering…is not wanting to accept reality as it is. There’s a wonderful quote on that:

“Through practice, I’ve come to see that the deepest source of my misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. Not wanting myself to be the way I am. Not wanting the world to be the way it is. Not wanting others to be the way they are. Whenever I’m suffering, I find this war with reality to be at the heart of the problem.”  – Stephen Cope

It’s an interesting quote, highlighting how we do create our own suffering. Covid has really highlighted this. People separating themselves into one camp or the other, and creating suffering in the process. Live and let live. That came through on the moon too. As well as noticing patterns that no longer serve. The manipulator came up for me, so interesting to see what we do to manipulate things and get attention. It’s often a pattern laid in childhood, so subtle that we don’t recognise it, until we do and then we have to be careful not to reject it or give ourselves a hard time for it.

This brings us back to balance again, in our relationship to ourself as much as anything else, embracing all aspects of self, even those that we don’t like. This of course the lesson in non dualistic thinking and constantly separating and fragmenting ourselves. There’s this whole ‘love and light’ bridge (of which I have played a role i the past) that focus only on the love and light and reject everything else. This means they are also constantly rejecting a part of themselves. We all have the capacity to rage and anger. We all have the capacity to kill too. We have to learn to love and embrace all aspects of self, even those darker bits! It’s all good.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, enjoy the wane and the shift down into the darkness again - who knows what we might find, and where we might be at the next equinox in spring time.

Love Emma x

The flower of life

I lost a dear friend to cancer last Thursday just before going on retreat to Sark. It was tough week, Eben starting school on Monday and all the emotions that brought with it, willing my friend to live long enough to marry on Tuesday, and witness her son’s 8th birthday on Wednesday, for her to pass away peacefully two hours after midnight.

We only became friends seven years ago now, through E’s family and because our eldest boys were of very similar age. We happened to end up in the same Sarnia sea lions swimming group on a Saturday morning, my friend and I sitting on the side line moaning and chatting together while our other halves and eldest boys swam. Our friendship grew from there, I loved catching up with her and putting the world to rights. We loved a good moan, all done in the best of spirits.

When she received her cancer diagnoses over two years ago now, she was living both our fears, of what life might be like faced with an early death and how one manages that while raising two young boys (by then we’d both added to our family). Our friendship deepened over that time, I tried to support her as best I could, we texted regularly, she said I had a knack of always knowing when she’d received bad news and needed some extra support. I gave Reiki where I could, she did her Reiki Level One training with me only last year, and came to yoga too.

We thought she’d gotten better, or at least, we hoped she’d gotten better, but I think we both knew deep down that it was going to come back again, that there was more yet for her to journey through. When it did come back, we were still hopeful that a treatment might work, but she faced one obstacle after another, and during Covid too. I honestly don’t know how she did it. She never moaned to me once about her treatment, just got on with it, enduring periods of separation from her boys due to Covid restrictions, and all the other implications that Covid and government response to Covid brought with it in terms of surgical and cancer care.

When it came back again and the prognosis was not so great, we tried to all stay positive. I’d put a Reiki hand on her at any available opportunity, to calm both of us, and feel as if I might be helping. She told me it did help, but as always I was faced with the reality that while Reiki is amazing and wonderful and healing, it doesn’t necessarily cure. But it does help give comfort, and this is sometimes all people need. It’s a journey of the soul and I was very aware that as her illness worsened, her soul connection deepened.

My friend taught me a lot about living as she was dying. Her strength was like nothing I have encountered previously, and her will! Well, as I kept saying in her last days, as she dug deep to keep going long enough to fulfil her dream of marrying, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”. She found her will and she made her way. I will never forget seeing her in church, how she managed to pull that off, in her wedding dress, looking beautiful despite the weight loss and all the other nasty things that cancer does, 35 hours before she died, I will never know. It showed remarkable strength of spirit as much as will.

In the end my friend was probably one of my greatest spiritual teachers, this was her gift to those of us who fear death. It was never lost on me that she should end up on a Reiki courses with two ladies who were at that time struggling with fear of death. My friend never told them that she was probably closer to most in facing that reality. And she did face that reality. And she did what she needed to do. She married, celebrated her two boys’ September birthdays and then she let go, just like that.

The text messages stop two days before she married. She knew her time was very limited, that nothing more could be done, and she savoured every ounce of energy to see through those final days. I knew, but I still texted her anyway, she always made a point of wearing mascara and each day I’d send a different emoji with heart eyes. The last one, I told her how beautiful she looked, how brave she was and how much I cherished our friendship. I’ll never know if she read that message, but it doesn’t matter now. She would have known anyway, how much we loved and cared for her.

The night she died I couldn’t sleep, I sort of knew, and when the news came in, well I just felt empty. The boys and I go to the beach before school each morning and that morning the world looked different. Nature was brighter. The trees sparkled. The sea was glistened. The sky was bright, clouds gently spaced. I saw her then, her presence, it was the profound experience, of knowing that she was in peace and experiencing such bliss and freedom. Words do it no justice, but some of you will probably have had the same experience. There was a sense of the permanent beyond the impermanent, the real beyond the unreal. It was hugely comforting and I laughed out to her through the tears as I swam in the sea, the early morning sun warming me.

I’ve never lost a friend before, younger than me too. It’s changing things, re-prioritising things. In the end we need very little. And what we do need, we store in our hearts. It’s not lost on me that my friend chose to end her life in love. The wedding sermon spoke of love. She taught the grace of love. That’s all she cared about in the end. There’s a lot to take from that. She also taught the strength of letting go - she did that so well in the end too.

I’ve been swamped in emotion all weekend, no space or time to process, I didn’t realise the extent to which our stomach takes it all in. Of course it brings up other stuff, that was literally stuffed in the shadows, that has served its purpose and be let go of now.

This pisces full moon is notoriously emotional, the most emotional one of the year. We process our emotions in our stomach. It’s only appropriate then that I should be feeling all of that and more. Full moons are always one of letting go. I really feel that too. As if the whole year has been spent preparing for now. The equinox follows on Wednesday, and equinoxes are notorious for shifting things.

I can’t tell you what that means for you, only you’ll know that. But if you’ve been doing the inner work, I have a feeling this could be a perspective changing week for you. Another opportunity to step up and live more of your truth, be more of who you are, not sweat the small stuff, or care too much what others think. I came across this lovely quote the other day and it somehow seems appropriate…

“Sometimes just being yourself is the radical act. When you occupy space in systems that weren’t built for you, your authenticity is your activism”. Elaine Welteroth

Essentially, it’s always about oneness and unity though isn’t it, about connection, knowing that we’re all built from the same blueprint. It’s the Flower of Life, one of the basic sacred geometry shapes. It starts with the seed of life, seven overlapping circles that build outward, forming a flower-like pattern that has been used since ancient times. It’s understood to be the basic template for everything in existence. It connects us beyond realms and shows how we are always supported, always part of something.

I was studying this in a different way this afternoon, from the Bhagavad Gita, the notion of karma yoga, in that your only right is to the action, not the fruits - there can be no guarantee of outcome. The outcome is left to a higher source. This is reminiscent of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and reference to Isavara Pranidhanani, implying that there is a higher force which protects the universe, so we surrender our actions to that higher source, and acknowledge that we are not the doer or the enjoyer (which is asmita, ego - prakriti level), but something else instead, something eternal, Purusha then, the Self.

There will always be a connection with my friend. She is not gone, not really. She lives on in her boys and in the essence of this universe. I feel her presence, it tickles me, like the feathers that I keep seeing. She’s there all right. I’m so grateful to her, for her friendship, the love and her lessons on how to better live and love. Thank you beautiful friend - you were a true flower in my life.

Enjoy the full moon and equinox shift!

Love Emma x

Ah the good old letting go...

The moon always brings a lesson if we’re open to it and this new moon in Virgo was no different. I thought I’d ridden it well, it didn’t seem to be too turbulent, at least at the time. But what I have started noticing is that in the days that follow, both the new and full moon, the effect can be felt more strongly than on the actual day/night itself. At least, it takes a few days for the learning to unravel and a few more days to understand exactly what the hell just happened!

This week was no different. Bumbling through Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday came, a SHEN session with the lovely Jo, and out came the rage! You’ve got to love a SHEN session for the release it brings. Another day later and I was stuck righto in the middle of it, but also fortunate to spend the day giving Reiki, which always helps me to see the wood through the trees, so to speak, because of the peace and clarity that it can bring. I LOVE Reiki. I long for the world to be imbued with Reiki!

The lesson of course, as always, as always (deep sigh), is one of letting go and surrounding to what is, rather than trying to make things different to fit our idea of how we think things should be. There’s every possibility that things will turn out as we might like them to, for life to fit our imagination of it, but often the reality is very different.

This letting go is so, so hard because we all love an illusion, an imagined reality than the one we are actually living. It’s one thing letting go of saying eating chocolate, or of seeing a toxic friend (an oxymoron in itself), quite another letting go of how we think things should be and what life should look like and instead, let life find its own way (and our children find their own way too). This if course is the good old case of illusion versus realty. How we love an illusion!

It’s not lost on me that I was chatting about this with my philosophy teacher this week, about purusha and prakriti, about the real and the unreal. How we identify with the creative energy of prakriti, believing it to be permanent, but it is not, it is continuously moving and impermanent. Everything we experience comes and goes, we have to accept change and for the most part endure it. We must find a way therefore to ride it, and not expand and waste our energy fighting it. The permanent, real, eternal never changing is of course purusha, pure consciousness, but we continuously confuse that with prakriti.

So of course the lesson is one of accepting the current reality however challenging this is, and finding the courage and strength to surrender to it, until this reality changes and another one creates itself instead.

There are many people I know at the moment who are ill, and this too highlights the lesson. Not least in terms of our impermanence but also in recognising that this is only a momentary moment in the journey of our soul and taking comfort in that - that we are moving from death to re-birth, to death to re-birth until such time as the soul fully recognises itself and can be free from this otherwise continuous cycle.

Also, it brings up the whole notion of letting things be, and of letting go into it, whatever that illness brings or means. Of the deepest surrender when we are ill and may not get better. This brings up all sorts of other lessons around the nature of healing versus cure and what this means for the individual, something that we talk about during the Reiki attunement sessions.

What I have found helpful during this time, is reading Steve Biddulph’s new book about being fully human. It should be a textbook to accompany life, maybe it’s just where I am in my life but his words resonated on a deep level and while on the one hand, it allowed me to buy into a bit of the illusion - how things should be - which brought up a bit of the moon’s dis-resonance, there was also much comfort in his words.

Talking of books, please don’t forget about my own books, for anyone going through IVF, please do pass them a copy of Dancing with the Moon, and for anyone who wants to learn more about the Himalayas and Tibetan Buddhism then Namaste too. Both available from Amazon;-)

Oh and don’t forget to come and join me at class next week. My yoga practice has taken me back to my Buddhist roots all those years ago in Nepal, and I have found myself enjoying the meditative quality of this slower practice. After all, yoga is about containing the mind. Oh the mind!

Love Emma x

Caring deeply

People have acknowledged that I am bored of the vaccine conversation but ask me the reason I don’t join one of the local online groups who have a number of local medical and legal professionals on them (to validate the groups’ professional and informed status) to help me know what’s happening legally.

I’m sure these groups are doing a wonderful job, and the people in them feel that they are fighting a worthy cause, admittedly I have seen some fall-out, in group members overwhelmed or in disagreement with other group members on stance and direction, and inevitably there are different motivations and a sprinkling of ego.

The thing is, I’m really not concerned about the vaccine per se. I mean, yes, as with any medical intervention, it concerns me how it might agitate the immune system and with the vaccine especially we don’t know the long term effects on immune function or indeed on changes to individual blueprint and how that might transmit down the line, and therefore the greater impact on humanity (as a species) in the future. But equally, we can’t be sure how many additional deaths in this moment there may have been without vaccine intervention.

Furthermore, we have to respect that everyone has an opinion and a stance. My stance is not necessarily the same as yours and vice versa, and I don’t feel it is my right to try and convert you or convince you that my way and opinion is best. Just as I don’t want to be converted or coerced by anyone else. It is an extremely divisive subject that has highlight our prejudice and our various perspectives and ways of seeing the world. This has been fascinating in many respects but also concerning, mainly because of the compromise on human rights and the right to choice about what is put in your body and being able to voice this without fear of being vilified by others.

Someone was telling me recently that a friend of a friend had said that all those who don’t take the vaccine should be put up against the wall and shot. I mean, when you think about that, it’s interesting isn’t it. That we can hold such strong opinion that we actually think others who do not hold that same opinion should be shot. You can see how ethnic cleansing begins and that ordinary people living ordinary lives end up becoming part of that because they truly believe that their way is the best and everyone else should be, well, annihilated from Planet Earth.

The covid testing of children is another divisive area. An active and vocal anti-vax friend cannot get his head around the fact parents will test their children and pop the plastic bit up their noses to do so (with the supposed cancer-creating chemical on it, which interestingly is on lots of pharmaceutical tablets that people take all the time), he thinks they surely care more about their children then themselves, so they won’t do it. Yet I know parents who care so deeply about their children that they will test them and think those who don’t, don’t care about their children. It’s a total split in perspective. Both ultimately care but go about it in two opposing ways!

Anyhow, it’s perhaps not surprising that my concern is one of human rights. Therefore it’s not just about the vaccine, it’s about Covid generally. I got myself impassioned about this during the second lockdown here on Guernsey, because of the loss of rights of a father to accompany his partner to support her and witness the birth of their child when born with medical intervention and Caesarean birth. This goes against everything I believe in terms of intimacy at the beginning of life here on Planet Earth.

I was watching a documentary last night, The Human Animal by Desmond Morris, initially released in 1994. There are six episodes but for whatever reason I found myself watching the one on immortal genes, where the documentary showed images of babies born in Russia at a certain time and how they were essentially removed from the mother at birth, swaddled and placed together in a row of babies in a ‘nursery’. This in contrast to a home birth elsewhere and the intimacy that accompanied the experience. They’re still questioning the emotional impact on the Russian babies of the separation from their mothers and the impact this has culturally and indeed genetically.

There is always, it seems, a compromise on human rights depending on where we live. You have only to look at what is happening in Afghanistan and the loss of rights being now inflicted on women and no doubt children. I have been lucky to grow up in a culture which appeared, for the most part, to respect human rights, so it has come as a shock to witness how easily human rights can be compromised and effectively removed. What has shocked me especially is the extent to which Big Pharma and the Medical Model of health and well being essentially rule the world. I mean I knew it, but Covid has certainly highlighted it.

My other concern has been the manner in which our attempts at giving a crap about the environment are also compromised. before Covid there was a big drive to move away from plastic. Covid came and all of a sudden we were back to plastic again. I received last week a whole heap of lateral flow tests that are made in China (the irony) that are made of plastic, that will sit in landfill I guess. I might be wrong, but for the most part, I don’t see too many politicians and leaders challenging this, even those who supposedly stand up for the environment (and don’t get me started on the cars in Guernsey, we Guerns have this sense of entitlement to the car, as if we feel we’re exempt from climate change I’m guessing)..

It seems that as a humanity we’re really confused. Fearful too. We want to survive. So who can blame us for the action being taken. We don’t know and we’re clutching at straws (quite literally too, if you think about these tests). So maybe we can be excused for the manner in which we so easily take away rights and coerce, manipulate and try to control outcome. We all do it to a certain extent when we’re stuck in fear and overwhelm, and with our children who appear out of control.

For me personally, it’a about energy and the bigger picture. It doesn’t serve me to join groups that sap my energy and distract me from my family and clients. I have my stance on this whole crazy time unfolding in our life - we chose to be here at this time, we are the children of our times as one of my friend’s always tells me - and I trust that the bigger picture will unfold in its own beautiful divine timing as we as a humanity - with luck - come to further awaken.

It’s always messy when we’re transitioning from one way or being to another. And we need to transition if we as a humanity want to continue existing. I have confidence that Planet Earth will continue in her merry way, but humanity? Some couldn’t care less, living in the moment of greed, taking what they can from their time here on this beautiful Planet with no concern for future generations. Others do care, there are many warriors out there who do battle in their own way, come what may.

Maybe we’re all warriors in our own way. Like Arjuna on the battle field in the Bhagavad Gita, figuring out how we can possibly live our dharma when it is so uncomfortable. Life is uncomfortable when lived from a spiritual perspective. I’m reading this fabulous book by Steve Biddulph called Fully Human. In it he writes, “The first thing to realise about spirituality is that it is tough. It isn’t for wimps…Spirituality is tough because it is preparing you for the toughness of life, what it will inevitably bring”. A spiritual practice has prepared us for and helps us in many respects to navigate this time with all its contradictions, separations and divisions. It is all part of a process.

One thing he also writes which I love and feeds a little into the theme of late around spiritual ego, “spirituality that doesn’t lead to action in the world is really just fake, crystal-shop delusion. Those who make sandwiches in disaster zones are closer to nirvana, even if they never chanted ‘om’ in their lives”. He makes an important point and this arises in the Bhagavad Gita too, the need to take action. But that action does not need to be aggressive or confrontational, it does not need to involve an “anti’ march (I keep coming back to Mother Teresa and her comment about going on pro-peace, not anti-war march, in terms of one putting out negative energy and one positive) or create even more separation - us and them, and essentially create more war and disharmony in this world (and within us, may I add).

It can be simply taking action that you feel best protects your children, taking action to live your life as harmoniously as possible, taking action to follow your truth, taking action to live quietly and respectfully on this beautiful planet. We should feel free to take action in a way that best suits us individually.

Earlier on in this whole vaccine passport debate I did write to HSC and the CCA and also to Heidi Soulsby, but I quickly realised that I was hitting a brick wall. A stance has been taken and will not be swayed. I would have been wasting my energy taking it any further, and distracting me even more from my family that I was already distracted from in writing emails and letters and getting myself stressed about the seeming nonsense of the whole situation. The loss of inner harmony was the price I paid and I learned that that was not the way, for me at least.

I shall leave others with their fight if that is their dharma. I have made a conscious decision to retreat from media and from the hype around the vaccine for the sake of my family and my health and wellbeing. It doesn’t mean I don’t care. It’s just means that I have chosen another way to take action. i care deeply about our human rights and about the continuation of humanity and the manner in which we treat this beautiful planet. I care deeply about raising vibration and seeing a positive shift in the way we relate to each other and this planet. You can’t help but care when you have a spiritual orientation towards life - when you appreciate that you are a part of everything it changes things.

With that in mind, my attention is slowly shifting towards our Plant A Tree project launching on Saturday 3 October. E and I have a a whole heap of saplings growing in pots in our garden and pig sty, and they absolutely need to go in the ground - when I’m near them I can hear them calling out, “please can I go in the earth:”. They need to go in the earth, many are outgrowing their pots. Please help! If you fancy growing your own tree and creating a relationship with it then take note! More details to follow. And on that note, there’s this beautiful documentary about the consciousness of plants and trees, a step too far for many, even for E, but totally resonated with me…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idf4oYerbTM

Love Emma x

Clearing the ancestral line and spiritual ego all in one!

This new moon has encouraged me to want to retreat. The seasonal energy shift doesn’t help. But it’s more than that. I’m starting to see things differently and I’m curious to stand back to let that settle. There’s been a theme this week around the spiritual ego and about clearing the ancestral and generational line (and the blueprint therefore).

We are the result of our ancestral and generational background, as much as we are of our parental, educational, cultural, religious, racial and societal etc. conditioning. For the most part we came into this world with baggage, and our entrance into this world, could have merely added to that, let alone everything that has happened since then. I can’t stop thinking about the Russian dolls and how us girls were in our grandmother’s tummy in the form of an egg in our own mother’s body. Maybe this is the reason that people say we carry our mother in our womb space - albeit that’s sort of back to front, but we were there at our own mother’s birth, albeit in egg form! But you can’t make a human without an egg…

There’s been lots of references to ancestral and generational baggage, not only in my own shadow work this week, but in healing sessions with others, so I am very aware that it is in the field, so to speak, and I’m delighted about that. What fascinates me the most is that if we can access it in ourselves, the emotions that have come through the generations (fear or worry, for example) then we can clear it in ourselves by literally feeling into it and tracing it back the generations and asking for it to be cleared. We are then no longer holding onto this stuff that came in with us, but that are not us! We clear our own blueprint then, so it is not so weighed down with ancestral stuff that clogs it up otherwise.

It’s possibly a bit out there for some, to see healing on this level, but I know it to be true. I was watching a You Tube documentary about the consciousness of plants and trees and it was step too far for the friend I was watching it with. He is a lover of trees but it was beyond the realms of his training on trees, and he could not get his head around the fact a tree is conscious and can communicate. Again, I know this to be so, but it made me aware that sometimes we can only manage so much at any one time of stuff that sounds a little bonkers, that is, until we have experienced it ourselves.

To be honest i felt like that about faeries. While I have always been fond of the notion of faeries and like to believe them to be true and real, when another one of my friend’s started talking about seeing them I thought for sure he must be seeing things, that it wasn't actually possible. But lo and behold, after spending time with him and out in nature at certain times of the night, and in certain places, and also building up a certain frequency and opening up to it, I was able to see what I never previously thought was possible. So now I know.

Which brings me around to the spiritual ego because this is also highlighted to me this week, as if the new moon is lifting more of the veil on this, and because maybe talking about seeing faeries, brings up my spiritual ego. The spiritual ego is tricky, because it tricks us into thinking we are somehow more spiritual and therefore more superior to others. We know we have slipped int it when we feel exactly that - superior. Also when we consider ourselves to be more spiritual than others. As if spirituality is like wearing a badge of honour, “look at me, I’m so spiritual”!. I mean, we’ve all been there, and there are moments of course when I still find myself there, the ego is super tricky, is the problem!

But I am noticing more of it. Whether it’s just that I’m noticing more of it, or that there is actually more of it, who knows. It’s become trendy these days to be spiritual so that doesn’t help matters. Of course true spirituality doesn’t need to look a certain way. It has a something about it though, a vibration perhaps, or a feeling, a sense of authenticity and just being … just being with one’s self. Hmm, it’s difficult to define, but it doesn’t need to be talked about, bragged about with all of the spiritual waffle crappiness that gets thrown about with the ‘love and light’ brigade. Nope, it’s much more grounded than that and can be super nitty gritty at times too - it’a absolutely not all love and light!

There’s that wonderful quote about enlightenment and the monk, which goes something like, ‘before enlightenment, chop wood, after enlightenment, chop wood’. Says it all really. So too Jack Kornfield with his wonderfully titled book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Yes, even on the spiritually-orientated path, the laundry never stops. It’s a test of my weariness. If I’m really weary, even the laundry pile stresses me out! That’s life. All of it. Even this, typing away at 10.10pm on a Friday night when I said earlier that I would prioritise sleep this evening…it’s all one big learning!

So with lots of gratitude and love to my ancestors for all the wonderful DNA they provided and the lessons brought through with this to learn and the baggage to clear. And to the spiritual egoists who pop themselves on a pedestal of love and light in an attempt to actually avoid doing the nitty gritty work (it’s called spiritual bypassing btw, when you focus solely on the light in you), I’m grateful too. It all causes me to check in and see if I’m mirroring and where I’m stuck and need some shifting, and more laughter and fun. It also causes me to want to retreat because I can’t be arsed with much of it!

I will just end this post with something that has been bothering me this week. The anti-brigade. I think it was Mother Teresa who said, don’t go on an anti-war march, go on a pro-peace march instead. She had a very good point. The more we are anti something, the more negativity and dis-harmony we create. We don’t need anymore! I’ve lost count of the number of clients and people I have chatted to who are totally affected and thrown off centre and overwhelmed by sitting on a pro or anti position with the very divisive and ever so boring vaccine debate, and now the lateral flow one too. God, I’m so bored of it, I can’t be the only one bored of it? Please don’t talk to me about it. We’ve banned it in the house. What on earth did we talk about before it?! This alone is a reason to retreat from the world at this time!

OK, I’m off before I start ranting, because I could, because there’s a lot going on out there at the moment, but really, if I’m honest, it’s always just about what’s going on inside…because that affects how we perceive the outside. Hence the retreat, inside. I’ll come back soon though as I want to share my St John’s wort with Cerys and I’ve got these fab hand made and ethical earrings from my cousin Rosemary with long eared owl feathers in them, which just makes me so joyful and happy!

Love Emma x

The collective wane!

The new moon energy can already be felt, or so it seems to me. We’re on the wane and it truly feels like this, lots of letting go, you just have to look at nature, as summer lets go into autumn, the trees are already losing their leaves, some have been for a few weeks now, and many of the blackberries are already spoilt (albeit more still waiting to sweeten).

Every moon cycle has the potential to shift us on but this summer there really has been a potency behind the shifting, perhaps the eclipse set this in motion, who knows, but the theme of letting go has been prevalent, and mixed too with the theme of stepping up that 2021 seemed to usher in. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has experienced a shift in perspective and a resulting change of heart about things.

It’s perhaps too early to tell, but I have a feeling we are being encouraged to accept life as it is, now, and let go of any attachment to outcome or notion of how we think it should be lived. It is as it is. It does us no good to try to pull the universe around with us, shaping it into what we want to shape it into, rather than allowing it to shape itself as it needs to be for us in this moment, on all levels of our being. The key word is allowing, so too, receptivity and receiving.

This isn’t easy. We’ve been conditioned to always look outside of ourselves and go make things happen, push and pull to make things happen, manipulate and control to make things happen. We haven’t been taught, and have not necessarily been encouraged to allow things to happen in their own divine timing. It goes against society’s emphasis on ambition and achieving - often using monetary gain as a way of evaluating how well we’re doing on the success ladder of life.

It’s difficult to let this conditioning go, because it is often so ingrained. I notice it even on my yoga mat, the need to achieve and create a shape, as if this alone validates my progression - always this emphasis of moving from one place to another, as if the finished pose is all that matters. The reality is, the bit in-between is where the magic really lies, if one can stay present to it and not be in a desperate rush to get to the perceived end.

Those of you who attend my classes will know how frustrating it can be to lift your arms so super slowly that you actually notice what happens when you lift your arms - how a part of you gets easily bored, another part gets really frustrated because it’s actually very hard work, another part might get angry and rageful, and another part might suddenly feel the grief that the arms have held all this time, but you’d never realised because usually you’re not ‘in them’ or ‘in the body’ this deeply.

It’s all a process. But our yoga practice gives us an enormous gift in that it helps to show up our patterns that aren’t always helpful to the way we’re living our lives. It also highlights our conditionings, which limit us in some way. If we’re lucky it might also reveal ancestral holding that limits expression of blueprint DNA, but maybe that’s a bit heavy for a Wednesday!

Back to the moon.. and yet into the body. For the moon communicates through body consciousness so our body will lead us if we check in, see what it is that currently needs our attention, what we need to allow and embrace, receive and bring in. It won’t necessarily be what our mind says. Our mind is all up for rushing and going fast, not slowing down to the extent that we can hear the whisperings of the body and see where we have laid our rubbish.

We’re collectively heading into the darkness, which can be terribly confusing and disorientating. This is interesting timing for the schools on Guernsey to return! It’s a potent time of transformation and healing though so go with it and be gentle through it.

Love Emma x