Ramping up to the Eclipses...

You know we have the longest partial full moon lunar eclipse of the century next Friday 19th November? That’s a HUGE deal btw. Eclipses massively change things. It’s like they come in and end things, bringing to a close those things that are now misaligned in our lives, or perhaps always were misaligned.

This could be all sorts of things, not just relationships, but anything which is no longer saving us like the way we are living. I feel this theme is HUGE for many of us, and follows on from the heart/head split. Are we living from the heart or from the head? Are we living in accordance with our deepest values? Are we living in alignment with our deepest truth? Are we living our dreams? If not, why not?

Difficult questions. If you’re reading this you probably have an idea or an inkling, even if you’re not really ready yet to own it. This is the thing with eclipses though, they just come in and literally change things. We realise we cannot go on. We have no choice in the end but to let go whatever the outcome. It is literally about getting out of the head, which tries to rationalise, understand, be certain and plan, and into our heart which will flow us where we need to go even if it makes no sense.

I can definitely apply this to my life. We have changes going on. I had felt it a while ago but I know I am not alone. Many are feeling this. Our roots have been shaken and we are being asked to step up and forge a new direction, a new way of being, that we may have known in our hearts for a good few years now.

As a humanity we absolutely need to find another way because this way ain’t working. Life is way too fast and way too stressful for people to literally have the time to sit down and take a breather. Even yoga classes are sped up and shortened so that people can fit them into already busy and hectic schedules full of tick boxes and things to accomplish. Soon be Christmas btw. I can almost sense the panic of that in the shops. I mean really, do we need such a big lead in? Why do we collectively put up with it?

I was reading a Mayan take on things these next 13 days earlier and a paragraph especially talked to me. I am very aware that the systems are broke and cannot cope, but it is more than that, it is about our collective conditioning around what it means to be successful and in our power…that needs to change…

“Real power comes from true respect. Not fear, not admiration or worship, not envy or insecurity. In modern society, many public and private figures carry an aura of apparent respect that in fact stands on a weak foundation: just think how easily a politician falls when it’s discovered he’s had an affair or has misappropriated public funds, how quickly a media celebrity goes out of favor once their sales start to sag. We are learning not to respect, but to want—we are taught to desire fame, money, status, influence, power—and eternal youth. These are the values celebrated by our media and our leaders. Respect for ourselves, for one another and our planet doesn’t seem to have a seat at the table. This needs to change if we are going to live in a stable, sustainable and equitable world.”

Anyway, I just wanted to give you a bit of a lead in, because these next 10 days are going to be super charged, electric, messy, chaotic. I wonder what on earth made me think it was a good time to try and get off the island! Well my eldest turns 8 during this time too, and there are other significant things happening so it really is just one of those intense times. I honestly don’t know how anyone is managing it without a daily yoga practice, being able to lie down on a mat and feel the earth beneath the body and the breath coming in and out.

Let alone getting in the sea each day. Saints is honestly a saviour to me. I can’t go in for long without getting too cold, but a daily dip before school is all it needs to set me up for the day ahead. We are so lucky here on Guernsey, that we even have that option. I am eternally grateful for the karma that brought me here…albeit this time in humanity’s journey is an interesting one to incarnate!

I did have this sense today that we absolutely must make every effort to stay in the heart as much as we can. Anything we feel will be massively amplified. Thus if we feel fear we’ll find it staring right back at us and it’s going to be really uncomfortable. Same with anxiety. Same with negativity. Everything will be amplified so love is possibly the most compassionate way to navigate the next ten days and into the after shock beyond…

Enjoy the ride…

Pushed through the eye of the needle

Wow, that was an intense new moon, it felt like we were being pushed through the eye of a needle. The after shocks can still be felt and I know in my own life significant life decisions are having to be made. There can be no more head in the sand, at least, it’s become increasingly obvious what needs to change.

I had a rather synchronistic time of it too. I had been debating a trip to Glastonbury, my heart was desperate for it, but of course my mind got involved, trying to rationalise, was this really the right time. The same day of all this contemplation and flight checking, I received a completely random telephone call from a lady in Glastonbury who had read one of these big posts from 2018 about a healing crisis (which coincidentally, I was going through at the time too) and was in an uncomfortable place within herself and needed someone to talk to.

If I had doubt previously, I had no doubt now and the trip came together easily, so that as long as covid doesn’t mess with plans, as we can not be so sure of anything right now, I will get to return to the land of Avalon, next week. Sadly the white spring, which is my favourite place in Glastonbury, is currently closed to the public due to covid restrictions, but at least I know that and do not have any expectation.

It really has been a time of moving deeper into the heart. I suspect you have all been experiencing that too, the need to make decisions from that part, the all knowing part, that doesn’t align with any ‘normal’ societal structure. It’s sometimes an uncomfortable place to be, as decisions need to made, that contravene the ‘norm’, but it is a place of great freedom, once we have settled in it. Always the heart, I have been reminded of this.

Have a lovely week ahead. It’s going to pulse on, the energy is far from settled. We are at a very tricky time right now. I truly believe that settling into the heart and ensuring a connection to the earth is essential. I am noticing an increase in people seeking the support of Reiki for this very reason. It helps. It makes a difference. It helps to get us out of the head and into the heart and back into the body. So if you are feeing anxious don’t forget that. You don’t have to get stuck in anxiety, you can find your way out.

I don’t have many appointments available but try Katie, or join our online Sunday session, to receive Reiki by distance. I’m not there next weekend, but Katie will be leading it for me. Obviously there’s yoga too, and I don’t honestly know how anyone is coping without a regular yoga practice in this current environment!

Good luck! See you soon!

The choice for love

It’s an interesting old energy today, on the eve of the new moon. I’ve not yet read anything about this moon but I can feel that it is bringing up some fear and agitation. People are simply not settled, there’s a restlessness, a feeling of discombobulation, things are up in the air as if the potential for change can be literally felt and yet there’s no certainty to how it might land.

The song, The Drug’s Don’t Work, by The Verve springs to mind. It’s not to say that the vaccine isn’t having some positive impact, but that alone it isn’t solving things. I thought it ironic earlier that on the BBC website there was an article on the CO26 that was not focused on climatic change but on the fact Boris wasn’t wearing a mask in one of the photos taken when he was sitting by Sir David Attenborough (yet there were two other photos, once where they were both wearing a mask and one where David wasn't and Boris was). David was asked for a comment and understandably didn't make one. After all, they were there for climate change not to judge or create further division in society over face masks.

i’m easy going, if people feel safer and happier wearing face masks then so be it. But like everything with covid and decision making, I really wish we could stop judging. Live and let live. No one actually knows how we’re going to manage this Covid situation as we head into winter. SAGE are calling on the government to reveal their Plan B. Do w even have an effective Plan A?

I did find it interesting the very week that while CO26 is taking place, we’re spending money and wasting resources heating our local schools, while keeping the windows and doors open. Maybe it’s just me but I’m struggling to understand the sense of it, at least climactically, let alone from health perspective, children wearing coats in class, rugs next perhaps, gloves too maybe?

My children are all finding it a bit much, all the changes and the increased anxiety in the air. I do wonder what kind of generation we are raising, what all these decisions are doing to them mentally and emotionally, let alone physically. I do know that both my boys have been sick this last term and this despite all the endless hand washing and anti-bacterial stuff, let alone the attempts at isolating them within the wider school when there has been a Covid outbreak. I honestly feel they might just be weary.

I do wonder the effect on people’s immune systems of all this fear. I know from my own experience what fear does to us, how it messes with our digestion and our mental and emotional health. It’s a restless energy that doesn't allow us to find our centre and rest into that. We come out of the heart and lose a sense of the bigger picture. We overlook the soul.

I have always found it really helpful to come back to the heart, get as deep into it as possible, to elevate the awareness and shift the perspective. There’s a wonderful poem about this, that I’m sure I’ve shared here before, but I shall share again as it seems helpful and necessary at the moment:

The Choice For Love – From Emmanuel’s Book II, compiled by Pat Rodegast and Judith Stanton

What does the voice of fear
whisper to you?

Fear speaks to you
in logic and reason.
It assumes the language
of love itself.

Fear tells you
“I want to make you safe.”
Love says,
“You are safe.”

Fear says,
“Give me symbols.
Give me frozen images.
Give me something
I can rely on.”

Loving truth says,
“Only give me
this moment.”

Fear would walk you
On a narrow path
promising to take you
where you want to go.

Love says,
“Open your arms
and fly with me.”

Every moment of your life
you are offered the opportunity
to choose –
love or fear,
to tread the earth
or to soar the heavens.

Let’s choose to soar the heavens. Let’s choose love over fear.

i’ve been trying to settle into the heart as the energy ramps up in this lead up to the new moon. I believe others are doing the same, we’re being called into it, to ease the pervading fear, and help us to care a new future both individually and collectively. The heart will help us find our way, but we need to settle into it as much as we can first…and we will drop in and out as the energy won’t let us settle easily, it’s trying to wake us up . I’ll try and record a yoga video to help…

Enjoy the new moon - hopefully some of you are enjoying this as part of my Moon & Menstruation offering and finding it helpful thus far.

Love Emma x

Head or heart

We just got back from Sark and another amazing visit. I just love that place, it restores me in a way that Nepal used to do, there’s just something about it’s energy. My heart and soul crave it and my roots need it. Life gets way too busy on Guernsey, it’s a place of frenetic activity, there’s something about its energy that just has people running around in circles and I get caught up in it like the rest.

Sark encourages the go slow approach, albeit I only managed to sit down and watch one DVD the whole time, which I guess was a positive thing, as I don’t usually watch any television. We had relatively lazy mornings though, given that the children for some crazy reason were waking at 5.15am, so I was able to make the most of the time to sit in bed drinking tea and editing my book, a treat.

Then it was swim in the pool and a walk down Dixcart Valley for a swim in the sea, maybe some yoga, maybe a cycle, maybe another beach, maybe some Reiki or a massage, maybe a search for more ancient stones (we accessed some private land on Little Sark and finally found the cist that had evaded us previously), maybe more swimming, maybe some more tea, maybe a walk to somewhere new, maybe a visit to the play area or more charity shopping. I made it out to the dolmen a few times too, saw the milky way, the skies are unbelievable on a clear night. There is so much to do on Sark that we still didn’t manage to visit all the places we have intended and I have yet to find the lump of rose quartz found on an excavation.

We made new friends, I now know Phil the farmer and owner of much of the field of Little Sark. I also met Terry. I caught up with the yoga group and the holistic therapist. It increasingly feels like home away from home. It is my intention that one day I spend more time there, but for now, I am contented to look forward to our trips and the various retreats - the good news is that we WILL be running the September and October retreats as hoped, thank you Helen at the Island Hall.

It’s always uncomfortable for me coming back to Guernsey. The energy at the moment doesn’t help things. There is such division, not least between those in Covid-Fear and those not, but in whether we live from the head or the heart. I got myself well and truly caught up in that with incessant thinking and a horrible feeling of fear. I knew I had dropped out of the heart, but couldn’t seem to get back into it again. Jo, my shadow worker friend, helped me to feel into it again and cease the thinking mind and ego with all its need to try to control and make life certain. Ha. An illusion no-less.

I am reminded that our stories alone are simply a fabrication, a way that we try to make sense of things, but in the process run the risk of getting caught up and lost in the narrative. The ego likes to keep unfeeling alone and separate, making us right or wrong, good or bad, and making others the same too, taking it all so blinking personally that we truly believe it is about us, forgetting it can only ever be about them - their stuff.

Anyway, it’s time for bed. I’m going to lead a yoga nidra on Sunday night, with the Reiki share. I just have a feeling there’s a real need to get into the body and especially into the heart. There’s no fear in the heart. No ego either. No nothing other than just this beautifully calm expansive feeling. Then you know. No need for the head to try to figure it out!

Love Emma xxx

Sark and yoga

We were thoroughly spoilt on Sark for our second autumnal retreat last weekend. The weather was amazing! I felt blessed, as if we might have done something right in a previous life, until my dad reminded me that we’ve had some dodgy weather ones over the years and last year the October retreat was even postponed due to strong winds, so you can never be quite sure.

However, the weather was very well received, life has been a touch on the challenging side these last few months with curved balls coming in. I’m very aware that every curse brings a blessing, and that sometimes we have to go through the mill to come out stronger the other side, seeing more of our unhelpful patterns in the process, but a break, quite literally, with sunshine and yoga was perfectly timed.

Adam and Katie even made it out to the dolmen with me one of the nights and we were treated to a wonderful dark night sky with the milky way overhead and fairy glimpses. I went one night on my own too. It is one of my favourite places, you feel like you’re getting away from it all, even on Little Sark. There is something very special about this place, untouched as it is in many parts by civilisation. I accidentally left my rods there that second night so had to hot foot it back there the next day before our boat and felt as if the dolmen was drawing me back there for a reason, and it was, but it won’t mean anything to anyone who’s not already a fan of dolmens!

As for the yoga, well I LOVED it. The students were all amazing, Jan was on super form over the weekend, and I felt as if there really was a deeper enquiry going on. I know I keep going on about it, but I suppose it was reinforced earlier by stumbling across an interview with Angela Farmer on YouTube. She is an inspiring teacher and what she said totally resonated when she explained that all of a sudden she woke up one day to realise that while she was passionate about yoga and it had undoubtably changed her physical form, it was merely feeding her motivation towards achievement to the extent that she was stuck on the inside. She realised, really, that she was practising from a masculine perspective, single focused, goal orientated and linear.

This awareness changed her, as it did me too when i had a similar realisation before that first lockdown when I visited a Scaravelli teacher in Littlehampton, who had been recommended to me by a local yoga teacher in a village in the Outer Hebrides on our trip to see the Callanish stones. It was one of those synchronistic moments that you know as meant to be, because it totally changed my life simply because it changed my approach to yoga in a very big way. This is exactly what happened to Angela too and I take great comfort from that, because it can get lonely on the classical yoga path of raising consciousness (opposed to refining physical form).

Like my yoga teacher, and me in turn, Angela was drawn to focus on releasing the belly so that there could be much greater femininity and inner transformation in her practice. My regular students will have noticed this themselves, as we keep coming back to the belly and sorting from there too. It’s a very powerful place of transformation - you only have to think of what happens in the digestive system to know it is a place of inner transformation!

Like Angela, I had gotten to a point where I was stuck with the same mental and emotional patterning, albeit that my physical body had grown in strength and flexibility over the years. It has been truly life changing to go deeper and transform from the inside out - becoming downward facing dog, inhabiting the body rather than just doing a posture for the sake of it, to tick a box, in my mind as much as in any sequence structure.

Angela was explaining that after this revelation she wondered how she might teach. That first class she saw a lady in a forward fold. Normally she would have helped her go further by applying pressure to her back to push her deeper into the posture, something I too might have done in the past. Instead though, she could see that her back looked very tight and rigid both under and inside and that she was carrying tremendous emotional pain or something similar. So instead she put her hand softly on the student’s back and it started to melt, the student started to cry a lot and the back completely softened down.

That was a turning point for Angela, and she comments that you can push and pull yourself and other people and the body will respond like a tired horse but eventually it breaks down (many of you know this with your shoulder, knee and back issues). Eventually we might then realise that everything we feel and everything that happens to us is experienced and lived in the body. If there is some great pain from the past in the body then it won’t go away until we go into it and let it unravel itself. Pushing, pulling, repressing and denying it won’t let that happen. I couldn’t agree more. This is exactly where yoga has taken me too, and while it goes against the grain, I am so grateful for that.

The body is not designed to follow a straight line and why would we want it to do that anyway. It is a body of curves and round spaces. Thus the body might find a straight line but from a curved path. Sadly these days yoga often overlooks the energy of the body, and it has instead become a form of physical training, contracting the muscles and pushing and pulling to change external form. This approach might be helpful for athletes, or those who need to strengthen themselves physically, but it doesn’t help us to get in touch with energy and emotions so that we may notice the energy blocks within us.

For me, it’s about understanding more of our body, and being kind and compassionate to it. Does the inner being get the nurturing and enlivenment it requires, does it feel empowered, do we feel more comfortable in ourself and in our surroundings, so that we need the outer form less and less? These are really valid questions to ask ourselves. If yoga is merely fuelling our neuroses and focus on external form, keeping us stuck in unhelpful inner patterns (of lack of self worth and self belief and not being comfortable in our own skin, for example, of needing to dramatise our life and blame others and negate responsibility for ourselves and our decisions made) and feeding our need to achieve for the sake of achievement alone, then maybe we should take a moment to check in with it and ask ourselves if it’s truly helpful.

It takes courage to recognise that we are no longer practising in a way that is feeding and sustaining us, enlivening us then. It takes even more courage to do something about it and find another way. More often than not, we are led that way. Maybe our teacher makes changes and we go with the flow of it, or maybe another teacher enters our life, perhaps we have some coincidental or synchronistic moment, maybe you are reading this now and questioning things a bit. It’s never easy taking a new path, and yet really it’s all part of THE path, it just feels a little different and it takes time to settle into that.

I’ve said it before, but when my teacher entered my life in that synchronistic way, it took me a good six months or so to let go of my old vinyasa and relatively unconscious push and pull way of practising. Because at that point, I still associated yoga with exercise and felt that I had to exercise in my practice to feel as if I’d practised properly on any given day. Thus I’d take an hour session with my teacher where we might explore just one or two postures, and then I’d do another 45 minutes or so, to do the ‘proper’ exercise practice.

At some point I came to the realisation, like Angela, that what I was practising was keeping me stuck in the past and that I was now ready to move beyond the notion of yoga being about exercise. It was a huge shift for me mentally. But my body absolutely relished it. It was so weary (as was my soul) of all the pushing and pulling and the mental patterning that followed all this, all the hardening and masculine energy challenging my inner feminine. I haven’t looked back since.

Plus it keeps changing. Yoga is organic and when I don’t see my teacher for a while then it starts to move into something that comes from the inner teacher instead. Initially I had to be mindful not to let old habits come back again, but with time they’ve just dropped away. I did try an online vinyasa class a few months ago and I had to turn it off, it lacked depth and vitality, I was simply moving for the sake of moving, in and out of postures without actually inhabiting my body, or the postures themselves. They were not alive and the practice did not make me feel alive either.

I love yoga and I love how it takes us on these journeys, to the softer and more vulnerable places on the inside. It’s funny too as one of my retreat students was saying how she struggles with some of the visualisations, the ducks in the sacred lake for example, given to explain the fullness and sacredness of the pelvis and the direction of its flow (ducks was the first bird to come to mind!) was a step too far for her. Yet the body loves visualisation, it loves imagery, but the rational mind does not. In yoga we are trying to get beyond the rational mind, as this has a tendency to limit us in some way. We are trying to get to the belly really, of releasing the need to control and to let go into each moment as it unfolds. Tricky I know.

Anyway I could go on for hours, but it was really just to say how deeply inspired I was by watching Angela and all the students on Sark because she was and they were validating all I feel about what yoga really is. If we refer to the classical yoga texts, the Yoga Sutras for example then, yoga is about the containment of the mind so that one can realise purusha, the eternal self. So we have to go deep to remove all the crap that causes us to misidentify with this. We have to let go of even believing that we know the self. It’s deeper still.

So we keep going deeper. And with luck we’ll be able to enjoy many more Sark retreats so that we can be so beautifully held by the vibration of this sacred land. When you look at the geology of the place then it really is mind blowing. There was a large boulder of rose quartz found in the north of the island from the neolithic age. There’s also serpentine balls to be found and all sorts of quartz, red jasper, yellow jasper, pyrite copper, the list goes on…and even a Goddess. The island is blessed. And we are so very lucky to have it on our doorstep here on Guernsey.

Love Emma x