Self-policing

I have had a revelation thanks to one of my friends, around this self-policing which we all seem really good at. You know, the one where we give ourselves a hard time because we don’t live up to our idea of right or wrong, good or bad, perfect or imperfect, and how we can even take this into the spiritual realm. The trouble is when we judge ourselves, our heart and spirit flags. And the more we judge ourselves, the more we are likely to be judging others too, so we end up in a vicious cycle of negativity and stuck in this ‘judgement’ conditioning.

It was explained to me that if Hinduism had been the triumphant religion in this part of the world and all our law, religion, ethics, literature, medicine, art etc. had been based upon it, then our ideas of good verses bad would have been different to the ones we have, in this Christian dominated part of the world.

Now don’t think I’m about to lash out at Christianity or indeed Hinduism, or any other religion for that matter; I’m not. I have no preference, I’m not pro or anti any of it. I have just become increasingly aware that whether we wanted it or not, religion has seeped into our cells, our minds and our ways of thinking, and sometimes to our detriment – at least in terms of our relationship with our Self.

You see when Christianity came along, it behaved very much like a terrorist group, at least to the Pagans, who were living life deeply connected to the Earth and the Goddess too. People were beaten and bullied, temples and statues were smashed or buried (think of our glorious Goddess statue at St Martin’s church which was broken in half, and the one at Castel church which was buried to rid the church of links to Pagan beliefs), then when more established/popular, the church just started burning anyone who disagreed - those of you reading this would probably have been burned, I definitely would have been!

So our modern society’s adoption of Christian morality to determine good/bad, right/wrong, perfect/imperfect is basically to agree or disagree. This showed up marvellously during the pandemic and was a divider. In fact those of us who chose not to take the vaccine, were in many respects persecuted by our modern form of religion, namely science, just like the witches back in the day, although fortunately we weren’t burned at the stake albeit it did get rather ‘hot’ at times.

Anyway the point is, to question in this geographical reason is tricky, because there is only more Christianity to measure it against - there are no alternative reference points unless one has a spiritual practice.

And even then we’re up against it, because while spiritual practice helps to release us from the conditioning of our mind, we live within a conditioned society so we’ve always got that ongoing external conditioned influence – and it also depends on the nature of our spiritual practice, because even that doesn’t necessarily lead us to freedom depending on whether it actually has any roots to it.

Not to say, it isn’t possible to release ourselves from the conditioning, but it does demand more courage to increasingly live differently, namely outside of the box and the mainstream programmed way of believing how life should be lived.

But the bit that really concerns me, is this self-policing as a way of gaining control of the populace and how this control keeps us, well, controlling ourselves.

Because that’s the thing with Christianity, it wasn’t enough to control us on the outside, it also sought to control us on the inside, inside our own minds. It was very clever really.

And whether Christian or not, this continues on today, and the scary thing is, we don’t even realise it. It has become so normalised that we don’t question that our minds could be shaped differently. That is, until we wake up and realise that we have been brain washed, programmed then, to behave and consider our life a certain way.

It’s pretty scary - like a form of amnesia.

And when we wake up and realise this, it raises all sorts of questions – how might we relate to ourselves and live our lives differently if we let go of this internal control based on our brain washing?

It is my hope that we might start loving ourselves more as a starting point. Because if there’s one commonality amongst most clients and students is this lack of love for self, which manifests in all sorts of unhealthy and unhappy ways, and I know only too well the damage that is done, when we are at war within ourselves.

In fact it was this war that brought me to this path. I really didn’t like myself back then, over 20 years ago now, I didn’t consider myself good enough, worthy enough, enough of anything really, and I was constantly giving myself a very hard time as I judged myself against these crazy ideas of right/wrong, good/bad based on what society had taught me let alone school, family members, friends and peers. This led to years of self-harm, some techniques more obvious than others.

New age spiritualism didn’t help with its focus on love and light and its rejection and suppression of so called ‘negative’ emotions. It took me a long time to free myself of that conditioning too, the one that told me that to be a sincere spiritual seeker I needed to behave a certain way, feel a certain way, eat a certain way, present myself a certain way, look a certain way and use certain vocabulary. Not true incidentally. Spiritual practice encourages us to be us, your true Self, without aligning to any notion of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect etc.

Slowly, slowly, I have tried to let all this go but it isn’t easy, it requires work and awareness. Needless to say, the conditioning pops up from time to time, usually some guilt around doing something which brings me joy, at least if it is criticised or judged by others. Because for some strange reason, not everyone likes us following our joy. We’re named selfish or self-centred. In fact we’ve been conditioned to associate self-love with selfishness and self-depreciation with virtue.

This of course makes it really bloody hard work to actually love ourselves and put our needs first without feeling selfish, self-centred or indeed – as I was saying - guilty. But this is just a conditioning. And if more of us can free ourselves from it, then it gives others permission to do similarly.

I have been leading a series on Self-Love and yesterday I asked the ladies what brings them joy. It was interesting to hear what they had to say and to notice commonalities in that often their greatest joy occurs when they are participating in activates on their own and generally in nature too. This quite in contrast to society’s externalisation of joy, as being something that we find outside of ourselves, that we have to buy  – we have commercialism and capitalism to thank for that, yet more conditioning!

Sex is another factor that sometimes brings up this conditioning. Following a Tantric path, there have been moments where I have stumbled up across old feelings of shame, because to be sexually liberated was once hugely frowned upon and we would have been shamed and labelled a whore.

This programming (and indeed fear of caring too much what others think, because we might have been killed for that at some point in history) runs deep and having attended various Tantra courses, I am conscious that many women suffer from this, unable to experience sexual pleasure, whether from themselves or another or even touch their body gently, let alone their yoni.

It is a real shame as there is a huge amount of power residing in these lower chakras, in yoni especially, but this is the point – the powers that be back in the day were fearful of women’s potent sexual and creative energy, and so in came the virgin ideal, so that we women then feared our own power and being killed for it and  therefore learned to supressed our true nature.

If you look back pre-Christian, to the Neolithic times it was fairly much all about sex, in terms of creative energy and the consciousness that results when we tap into it. Menhirs are penises essentially, piercing the land, dolmens and cairns are like yonis entering to the womb, the space which creates new life. This is the reason so many are aligned to a rising or setting sun, the sun is the masculine principle so it comes into meet with the feminine. Stone circles, with all their various menhirs are aligned to capture the energy of the moon and further sex the land.

We once celebrated this sacred union, think of the maypoles at Beltane, May Day, and how they represent the masculine penetrating the female land. A mortar and pestle used by Witches to mix magical herbs is worked on the same principle.

Nowadays we have totally lost our way. The sacred has been stripped from sex and a whole industry now exists in its place. Sadly the younger generation are growing up thinking that sex is all about strangling each other, which is such a shame because they miss out on the potential intimacy, tenderness, heart-felt, blissful and all body connection that sex can create.

I digress.  But let me just say that this is for me one of the greatest woundings of this self-policing brainwashing, is the way the body and mind have been separated and the body’s intelligence and indeed power has been supressed. This still plays out in allopathic health care – the body is treated in one building and the mind in another and there is a lack of cohesion between the two, or indeed respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the body.

Even new age spiritualism leans heavily into this paradigm of head being best, with its emphasis on the upper chakras, over the lower chakras. Yet the real juice  - or so it feels to me - is found in the lower chakras and our connection to the earth, but this is tricky, because we hold a lot of crap down there (quite literally sometimes!), far easier to hang out in the upper chakras, where we don’t need to look at our stuff, or be in the body for that matter.

I stumbled across this blog post written by Sharon Salzberg which highlighted this lack of self-love in our Western world

“At one point during the event, I had an opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama a question, so I ventured, “Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?”. He looked at me seeming somewhat confused and asked in response: “What’s that?”

It powerfully sums up a fundamental difference between our Western, ambition-focused value system and the Buddhist moral compass. While I came to meditation at 18 as a result of dealing with feelings of inadequacy and self-judgment for my entire young adult life, the Dalai Lama didn’t even know what the meaning of self-hatred was. When I explained to him what I meant by the term — talking about the cycle of self-judgment, guilt, unproductive thought patterns — he asked me, “How could you think of yourself that way?” and explained that we all have “Buddha nature”.

In other words, he simply didn’t get the fact that many of us are often overcome with fundamental feelings of negativity and inadequacy. I revisit this story repeatedly because there was, and still is, something so freeing about the fact that the Dalai Lama was so surprised about this negative way of relating to ourselves, an attitude that seems so common in today’s day and age.

I don’t want to deify Asian culture, or Tibetan people, or Buddhist thought. There are problems in every society, group, and philosophical school. But, I think it is powerful to reflect on what we think we will find within if we look underneath our habits and our desires and our fears. Is it a capacity for love and awareness? Or is it pretty much nothing, or nothing good?

In particular, I’ve thought about this in the process of writing my upcoming book this past few months. I’ve found that many, if not most, of the people with whom I’ve spoken, feel the greatest sense of struggle around the question of cultivating love for oneself. We are conditioned to associate self-love with selfishness, and self-deprecation with virtue. It often seems easier to access feelings of judgment and anger about ourselves than towards those around us.”

At some point we have to let off our self-policing and our inner control, which judges and harms us. We have to let go of the idea of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect based on something external to us - some imaginary rule book.

We also have to find the courage and strength to set ourselves free, because let’s remember, no one else can do it for us. This is sometimes our biggest obstacle because we still live within an allopathic care model, which causes people to give their power away to others, hoping to be fixed. More often than not they simply find symptomatic relief, without getting to the root cause of their loss of wellbeing.

We have to take responsibility.

But how?

By noticing our thoughts. Watching them. Remembering that we are not our thoughts any more than we are out emotions. They simply come and go, like clouds in the sky. The trouble comes when we hold onto them and identify with them as if they are concrete – like making the sky permanently grey, rather than letting the clouds come and go and allowing the weather to change.

This is not easy. But there are various tools available to us on this spiritual path which can help. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offers us the 8-limbs of which yoga asana is a part. But there are other activities such as those which feed our joy, which take us deeper into that quieter space within ourselves where we become less beholden to our thoughts and feelings and orientate increasingly to the moment and to our heart, gut and soul.

And this demands honesty. Because like I wrote earlier, doing what we want, that which makes our heart glow, that fills us with joy will often be judged by others as being selfish. Yet if we give of ourself, like some perpetual charity worker, being both the people pleaser and the good girl, then we never please ourself and are constantly up against our perfectionist tendencies and loaded sense of good/bad and right/wrong. And then we wonder why we feel so frustrated, angry and overwhelmed.

Instead we might watch our thoughts and notice when we have fallen into the trap of self-policing or judging others, and take a step back, detach, change the pattern, be mindful and cultivate greater love and compassion for Self and others in the process.  In this way we gradually – very gradually - let go of the negative conditioning imposed on us over the centuries and set ourselves increasingly free.

Happy Samhain!

Today is Samhain, the day of the dead and the dying parts of us that now need to be let go so that we can make way for the new beginnings that the new moon may usher in tomorrow. It’s a poignant time, the veil is thinnest between the worlds, a great day for meditation and communing with other realms, entering them if you can.

At Samhain the dark half of the year commences. It is a truly magical time. We have to remember that death is always followed by rebirth and I love that the new moon appears so soon. Tomorrow then really does mark the beginning of a new year. But remember celebrations today begin at sunset, when the darkness arrives. Light is always born out of darkness. We must remember this. Darkness is fertile with all potential - embrace it!

My concern these days is that new age spiritualism rejects the darkness and the darker parts of ourselves, in its quest to fulfil the light and love potential. Yet we do not know light an love without darkness and dismay, without the anger and the frustration and our sheer rage.

Today offers you the chance to rest and reflect on the past and to dream new beginnings. The seed now hidden in the earth let us not forget, will germinate in its season. So we look for seeds within ourselves. Yet, we also have to remember that there is a timing to everything and certainly the rug was pulled and doors closed for many of us with the recent eclipses and it may be just a little bit too soon to know where we are heading. We might just have to sit in discomfort of the not knowing for a little while longer yet, and that’s OK too.

What’s called for is patience. This is a word which is coming up a lot for my clients lately. Sit patiently and wait. This is a time to rest, renew and clear out the old. The new will appear in just the right time.

Enjoy it all!

Love Emma

Our yoga practice

I am increasingly aware of the many layers, which accompany our yoga practice, and the need to get quieter and quieter.

I am becoming increasingly conscious too, of the deeper teachings of yoga, and the limitless potential offered by this ancient practice, of the wisdom of the Vedas and the knowledge ‘downloaded’ by the ancient Seers.

This knowledge is tried and tested over thousands of years and I am sometimes astounded at our collective lack of consciousness over this, how we are always trying to reinvent the wheel, how science is placed on a pedestal and yet knows so little in comparison to the ancient keepers of wisdom on this planet.

We each have the opportunity to know ourselves on a much deeper level than the superficial and to experience greater freedom and contentment as a result. So much of our suffering comes from our lack of connection to truth and to self, of feeling confused, isolated, discombobulated, merely because of this lack of deeper relationship to heart, soul and indeed cosmos. So often we are out own worst enemy, at war with our self.

Yoga offers us a sincere path. But it does ask of us something in return. We cannot know yoga by merely reading a book, yoga is a practice and to gain the wisdom, to free us from our suffering, then we must practice. It is the same with Reiki - this too is a spiritual practice and asks us to do exactly that, practice. Ayurveda is no different, reading about it will make little difference until we start to put the wisdom into practice, eating more appropriately to ease imbalances and making changes to our lifestyle.

As far as yoga is concerned - at least if one follows the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras - our practice is anything which takes us towards attainting or remaining in a state of yoga. This state of yoga means that the mind is contained. Or at least more contained than it would be without a practice.

We are required to put in a certain effort. This is not just going to happens we have to put in the hours and have a certain degree of discipline and self regulation.

Furthermore, to really feel the benefits we have to practice for a long time and without interruptions.

We also need to have a positive attitude. This because we can start out with enthusiasm but then it can wane, especially if we come upon against an obstacle such as a mental or emotional block, which can be uncomfortable to work through.

Krishnamacharya always said that we should love our practice - that we should not stop until we reach our goal.

Yoga is real. It is in touch with realism. It helps us to realise our highest potential. This is potential to obtain clarity and stability.

Desikachar used to say that once we have stated on this path, the destination is assured. It is simply a matter of time. It holds open possibility. We can all do this.

Yoga is an extraordinary practice for us ordinary people. It is accessible to everyone, you simply start where you are and keep turning up and tuning in.

I love nothing more than sharing my practice with others and helping them individually where I can. Traditionally yoga was taught one to one for this very reason - so that the practice could be tailored to the needs of the individual, yoga is not one size fits all, we are all different, all at different stages of our journey and require a practice that will help us to grow an d thrive individually.

So practising with a teacher is best, so that we don’t fall into old habits and patterns in the body and mind complex that might limit us and keep us trapped. The body has a habit of following the path of least resistance, the mind too, yet this doesn’t mean that it is healthy for us, sometimes we simply reinforce more of the same and wonder why things are not truly changing.

Yoga is helps to release us from unhelpful conditioning and beliefs but sometimes we need someone to shed a light on these. I am eternally grateful to my teaches for sharing their wisdom with me and the teachings of yoga.

Practicing at home online is better than not practicing at all, but a guide is extremely helpful.

The practice makes the body, breath and mind healthy - but we have to remember that these are just side effects, not really what yoga is for. They help us to stay supple and healthy into late adulthood so that we have more time to work on ourself and sit for extended periods in meditation.

Essentially, yoga is very much a movement from the gross to the subtle. The more we practice, the less distracted we are with the things around us in this world. It is a gradual practice, not a goal focused process.

In fact we have to let go of the conditioning around achievement and our modern definition of success. Yoga is non-competitive, which is also difficult for people as we have bene conditioned by our society and education system to be competitive. We have to be careful not to take our perfectionist tendencies into the spiritual realm.

Saying all that, there is a goal - to realise the self - and we can reach for that, but without grasping.

Happy practising. And on that note, many of you know this already, but I now teach intimate group yoga sessions on Sunday mornings at STYX., just five students in each class, £28 each for the 90 minutes. If you are interested then please ping me an email as I give thought to my schedule in 2025. Meanwhile do feel to join a general class as I try to give people individual attention here too, I do ask for commitment however, and an awareness that I don’t teach exercise yoga.

Love Emma x

I am increasinof the need to become quieter as we go deeper inside ourselves. I am also increasingly conscious of the deeper wisdom contained within the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and how our interpretation can be limited if we are not careful.

When is it time to let go of our trauma and move on?

Trauma has become a bit of a buzz word these days in holistic and healing circles - we’re all meant to be looking at our trauma and talking about it and - one imagines — healing it.

I don’t have an issue with this as such, certainly it has been helpful to acknowledge traumatic events in my own life and the impact they have had on my body and indeed my mind and it’s way of perceiving the world and all its very experiences - and the behaviour patterns that follow.

But it is also my experience that if we are not careful we can get caught up in our trauma to the extent that we never quite manage to move on from it and it just become set another opportunity to either drop into our victimhood, or distract us from living more presently.

Shit happens. I have a sense that incarnation in itself is traumatic, certainly for new and/or sensitive souls, and our societal structure certainly doesn’t help. School traumatises many for example but is normalised - break the spirit to fit in is an accepted approach to living. The workplace sometimes doesn’t help, modern day slavery plugged into terminals for hours on end, devoid of fresh air and nature, many have no idea what the weather is doing, let alone the phase of the moon or the state of the tide. We are increasingly disconnected from nature - to me this sounds like a major human trauma, but it is rarely considered as much.

So we’re up against it these days. I stumbled across this article which kind of says it all - we’re living in a mad world! https://uk.news.yahoo.com/unemployed-given-weight-loss-jabs-200000593.html

Somehow we have to find the courage to maintain our sanity when all around us there is distraction and denial of responsibility, of corporations profiteering by making us obese and pharmaceutical companies profiteering from trying to rectify it. Something is amiss.

In holistic circles too, we need to be vigilant. Our only true protection is discernment and never have we had to be more discerning about what we let into our lives, of the people we mix with and the environments we spend time in, let alone the messages we buy into from media, which are always trying to distract us and keep us caught in our fear and negativity and advertising companies trying to externalise our worth so they can sell to us the latest thing to make us feel better about ourselves.

We have to be discerning about our trauma too, of clearing it, not getting caught in it, of recognising that whatever happened happened and noticing the many ways it may have shaped us and still causes us our suffering and then have the courage to do what we can to clear it. Reiki, yoga and Ayurveda all offer us tools, which help to get to the root cause rather than skimping around with the symptoms and numbing outlives with anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds and the plethora of other pharma sold to keep us numbing to the deeper wounding underneath.

We have to recognise when it is time to move on, when we have healed our traumatic past and can finally live more presently in this moment. Otherwise we run the risk of getting stuck, of continually identifying with ourselves as we were and never truly beginning again. This is one of the many reasons I love the Yoga Sutras, and the ancient wisdom, often the Sanskrit word ’Atha’ appears, meaning now. Because right now we have a choice. Now we can begin again or keep repeating more of what we done previously. Now we have a choice. Now we can start over. Now we can be les burdened by our past.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I love that each new day offers us the possibility to begin again. That each now and now again means that we can do things differently if we are conscious of it.

So as we approach this moon, it might be time to reflect on what we are still burdening ourselves with from the past, of all the weight we are carrying which can now be let go of. We are in that time of the year. You only have to walk the lanes to see how many leaves are falling from the trees. This is a fabulous time to let go and begin again, and we are headed to Samhain at the end of the month which marks the end of the Pagan year, for good reason, as it is supported and led by nature.

And for those who still need to work through your trauma then book in, maybe it’s time to do that deep dive and truly clear it from the mind, body, psyche and spirit. So then you too can begin again.

Love Emma x

Thank you Sark, au revoir for now.

Sometimes there are moments in life where we are struck with deep gratitude. This weekend was one of those moments.

I have wished for a long time to hold a retreat without stress, drama and with students who are dedicated to their practice and to doing the work on themselves. It felt as if the universe conspired to fulfil this wish and I couldn’t have asked for a more amazing Sark retreat to end my Sark retreating.

A huge thank you therefore to the moon, the stars, the sun, the earth, Sark and indeed all the amazing beings who both supported and indeed attended this last retreat. I am really so grateful to each and every one of you for giving so gracefully of your selves and having the courage to go deeper still. There is a lot to be said for bringing yoga, Reiki and indeed Ayurveda into one’s life as you all beautifully demonstrated and embodied.

A huge thank you too to Helen and the other staff at Stocks Hotel who held us so well (and to Helen who held us as a family at the Chill-Inn) . Stocks is truly a beautiful place, healing and centring sited in that rather ethereal Dixcart Valley and the views of sunrise from the Chill-Inn are rather spectacular! Thank you also to Ana of the Sark yoga community and all the Sark yoginis and yogis for their presence on Sunday.

I started retreating in 2009 to fulfil a dream, initially on Herm and then later on Sark. I’ve held quite a number over the years and each has brought with it its challenges, learnings and joy, laughter and love too. There have been cancelled boats and difficult personalities, my water’s breaking on a super full moon and a lifeboat taking Ewan and I back to Guernsey, noisy venues, last minute changes to bookings, students who have never practiced yoga previously, students who complain or find it challenging to go with the flow and all sorts of other challenges in the background.

My shadow teacher back then told me that the retreats were my way of growing, because they each triggered a shadow for me to look at and try to resolve ahead of the next retreat. I think she may have been right about that.

Because while there have been challenges, there has also been a great opportunity let go and let go again, to realise that I have very little control when it comes to weather and boats and noisy venues, let alone the state of the rooms allocated to students, or even the students who choose to attend the retreats. It has been a valuable lesson in service too. And going with the flow. But ultimately it is about patience and trust and acceptance and detachment too.

I suspect those of you who have regularly attended the retreats can understand all this, because you will each have been triggered too, whether it be around other participants’ behaviour or energy, the food, the state of the room, the weather, or just something to throw you a little bit off balance and bring up your patterns (Samskara) for healing/resolving.

This last retreat though was trigger free - just a delightful group of students, blissful weather, relatively easy boat journeys and a deeper immersion into yoga (and a good dose of Reiki) with lots of laughter thrown in for good measure. Sark was utterly magical, especially at night. I couldn’t have asked for more and I felt a deep level of gratitude, which I had never felt before.

However, I wouldn’t have gotten from there, back in 2009 with the first Herm retreat bringing a cancelled boat and fire alarms waking us in the middle of the night, to here, where everything unfolded so easily, without all of you who have given so much of yourself and attended the retreats over the years.

So a BIG thank you to ALL of you who have retreated with me over the years, both on Herm and Sark, it has been an honour and a privilege to have had this opportunity - thank you for your hearts and presence. But all good things must come to an end, it feels the right time now to let go of these Bailiwick retreats and create space for the new to come in.

I have Chalice Wells Retreat Centre booked for April 2026, which will be offered on an invite-only basis initially to honour those who have dedicated themselves to this practice and path, and then to those who are drawn nearer the time.

There are other rumblings in the background, including a yoga immersion day here on Guernsey in February. Keep an eye out if you wish to deepen into this yogic path.

For now though, a huge thank you again and a lot of love to share - thank you Sark especially, what a magical land you are.

Love Emma x

P.S. Thank you to Charlotte for the photo. x