Following my heart by Geraldine Green - one of our Reiki students.

2 and a half years ago I contacted Emma to see if I could receive a Reiki 2 attunement. It was 23 years since I had done my Reiki 1 and was wondering if it was possible to get the next attunement after so long. My husband of 20 years was dying of cancer and I wanted to do something to help him. I am certain that channeling healing energy into him right until he departed was deeply soothing to him and eased the death process significantly.

My husband was not a well man. He had severe heart problems for 10 years and battled cancer for 2 years. I fell into the role of carer, running around, looking after our young daughter, the home and working. My husband had no energy to help and would return from work and fall straight to sleep on the sofa. Over the 10 year period our relationship suffered, we lost all intimacy and were more like friends by the time he died.

Now, reflecting on this deeply traumatising time, I realise I lost myself in those years. I channelled all my energy into caring for others and working in the finance industry to make money to support the lifestyle that is deemed a success by our society. I put my own needs and happiness on hold hoping that one day things would change. Finally it was my husband’s death that changed everything.

Since he died, I have gained a new sense of perspective. I feel like I have woken up. So many of us are obsessed with money and getting bigger houses, better cars and accumulating more ‘stuff’. I’ve realised this doesn’t make me happy. Life is very short. Time and energy are our most precious resources. To me it’s a waste spending my life making rich people richer, contributing my energy to a corporation whose purpose is not my own.

I am a deeply creative person. Since birth I have loved painting, drawing, sewing and making stuff. I did Fine Art and Textiles and Fashion A levels and then went on to do an Art Foundation Course in Bournemouth for a year.

So I’ve recently quit my job in order to focus my energy on what I love - creating beautiful artwork - whether that be painting, sculpture, embroidery or mixed media pieces. I’ve done a teaching course at the College of FE that qualifies me to teach evening classes. I’m selling my house as I don’t need the space and don’t want to be spending so much time and energy maintaining the garden. I intend to buy somewhere smaller and bank the equity. I’ve set about halving my possessions as I find that the less ‘stuff’ I have the less my energy is diverted and the more calm and peaceful I feel. I have also found love again. The relationship is deep, intimate and nourishes my soul.

I’ve come full circle back to myself, back to who I was before I married, but now I’m a wiser, stronger version. Will I make enough money to live on? Well, I believe that the universe will bring me what I need and I know that I have gathered enough skills during my life to ensure my survival. Is it easy? Sometimes it’s not. I’m working on embracing uncertainty and I need to get better at setting boundaries. Some of my family disapprove as I am not behaving according to their expectations.

I do know that I’m happier than I’ve been for a long time. It’s great to feel like I’m back on track after all these years. My intuition tells me this is the right path for me and that I’m doing exactly what I’m meant to do to live my best life.

To follow my art journey on Instagram go to @yellowtreeart. I’m also available for commissions (paintings, murals or needle-felted landscapes) - you can contact me on WhatsApp 07911 728438.

Freedom

We’re in a bit eclipse portal right now and I find myself reading another one of Christopher Wallis’ books, this time on the Recognition Sutras and I love what he writes here as it really helps:

{That is to say, Ksema is telling us] that to be completely self-aware is to be completely free. This is one of the most powerful teachings he has to offer us. We continually seek to experience freedom by manipulating our external circumstances; for example, most people believe if they don’t have money, they will be more free and independent. But what is it that depends on money for its continuance? Ksema tells us that freedom is an inner state that arises naturally once you know yourself completely. To know the whole of your real being is to know a freedom so limitless that it has to be directly experienced to be believed. The attainment of such self-awareness is made possible by clear and honest self-reflection.

The most common misunderstanding here is to think that this freedom is something individual or personal. In fact, we are talking about the innate autonomy of awareness, and that awareness is one and the same for all beings. When you access this divine freedom, you recognise that no one could ever limit your experience but you. You see all beings in yourself and yourself in all beings, so that this is not the sort of ‘freedom’ run which you try to take what you want at other’s expense, which in reality is not freedom at all but another kind of bondage”.

It’s an interesting enquiry:

1. What is the connection between self-awareness and independent freedom?

2. Now think of a time when your self-understanding increased substantially. How did it result in greater independence and freedom?

3. And from the other side, think of a time when you experienced a breakthrough in your sense of independence. Was this perhaps linked to increased self-awareness?

It’s not easy becoming increasingly self-aware. Sometimes we have to look at the parts of us that we don’t like, that are trying to be in control and do all sorts of things to make it so. I don’t really enjoy looking at those parts in myself either, the parts that come from the ego, which are fed by my fears and insecurities. But alas this eclipse season is making us aware and encouraging and supporting us to identify the wounds we unconsciously hold on to that have potentially clouded our judgment about people, situations, events and ourselves. We may gain insights during this time, uncomfortable perhaps, but helpful.

Furthermore eclipses have a habit of really changing things. The earth, sun and moon come into alignment and can bring karmic endings, which allow us to begin again without being weighed down by anything in our past, including past lives. This might allow us a whole new way of relating as we examine our thoughts and behaviours and notice where we are sticking ourselves. Obviously we can’t know until we know. And this of course is the benefit of spiritual practice and of sitting.

Since the moment we were born we have tied together sounds we hear with the image that is in front of us. We know a flower is a flower because we have been told so and a whole heap of information comes to mind when we think of flower including memories, emotions and opinions. So it is with all words so that when we hear the name of an ex or someone who has harmed us, all this stuff comes to mind and we think/feel/.behave based on all this tying and this creates stress and can keep its trapped in the past.

Sitting and being with words as they arise, neutralising them, undoing our conditioning and programming is essentially what sets us free, so that we can hear the name of an ex or of someone who we feel has harmed us, and there is nothing there, it is just a name.

It feels to me that this eclipse portal is giving us the insight and power and bringing in karmic closures (events then) which are helping us to untie our words, to let go of the vibrational holding, clear our vision, and begin again, as if new born. It is really rather exciting!

It helps that the moon is doing it’s most southerly swing on the weekend, just after the equinox.

But for now there is that feeling of neither being here nor there. The weather is reflecting this, stuck in a cold pattern, bright, but cold, and on it goes.

Here’s something I read about the moon:

"The maximum southern lunar standstill for the entire 18.6 year cycle is upon us!

The waning half moon will be low in the south for northern hemisphere viewers, rising in darkness in the early morning before dawn of 22 March 2025 and setting a few hours later in daylight.

It will be high in the sky for southern hemisphere viewing, rising late in the evening on the 21st and setting many hours later in daylight on the 22nd.”

On another note, maybe it’s the shifting energy and my need to nestle closer to the Goddess, and her need t o make her presence more known in her life, and the greater cosmic forces at work, but I am reminded again to never say never as I have a real draw to share yoni yoga with you women again. Look out for updates on the yoni yoga offering, a charity class to raise funds for Bright Tights on Good Friday in the afternoon and a class to celebrate Beltane on Bank holiday Monday.

We have posted up our spring schedule of Sunday offerings now too, which I hope, hope, hope are aligned to truth and not my ego’s wishes because I got carried away wanting to share all the spiritual practices which have helped me enormously such as the sutras and Vedic chanting and pranayama and Yoga Nidra, but didn’t think to check if anyone else wanted this in their lives! Still, I am hopeful some of you will feel to join me and immerse in this energy as spring settles.

Other ideas are coming to mind, but will see how those form over the eclipse portal, but Glastonbury is now booked for April 2026, and a Master Attunement session is also arranged for September. There are some little changes!

Enjoy the moon and all she brings. I am off to Anglesey in Wales to immerse in the Welsh Neolithic landscape and nestle into all these energetic changes. See you on the other side, or maybe en route if I have time.

Keep well and keep diving into the shadows - may freedom keep coming.

Love Emma x

Choice and responsibility

I am extremely passionate about Reiki as it literally saved my life from the depression that had enveloped me in my twenties. Working with my Reiki Master and her intuitive life coaching offering supported me not only in my healing but in finding a new way of being, which has brought much purpose, joy and contentment.

The reason this is on my mind is because I established Beinspired off the back of that healing and work on myself back in 2006, the last time the moon did its full major lunar standstill. This was the same year that yoga started exploding into the west - I had just been a tiny bit ahead of the trend and the teacher training course I attended was the first of its kind. Since then yoga teacher training has also exploded, and that is a world I have since left behind.

While yoga helped me enormously in my healing and my letting go of the past, which was causing all the angst and the suppression of the soul which was causing depression, it was really Reiki that kept encouraging me to find this new way. And the wonderful thing about Reiki is that it is gentle and compassionate, because it is essentially the energy of love and once upon a time, during meditation, I intuited that life was just love on this planet, until something changed, as it always will do, and in came a move away from our heart based relating. And here we are today, stuck in power and money and all the yucky solar plexus action that accompanies this. But anyway, that’s another story.

I have always felt passionate about sharing Reiki with others, because I know that it can make a huge difference. However I am also aware that the person needs to participate in his or her healing journey. Reiki will heal regardless (unless the person absolutely prevents it), but to really gain the benefits there needs to be some personal responsibility and accountability. This has become increasingly clearer to me over the years and I was reminded of this last week as I was working with a client and all of a sudden I had a sense that she won’t find the healing she seeks because she is not prepared to look into her shadows and take responsibility.

This isn’t her fault, she is merely indoctrinated into the allopathic health mind set of expecting others to do the healing, taking pills and potions and what not, which can obviously help, but even then, we need to be brave enough to get to the root cause, if we can, of the loss of well being, which usually involves participation of the emotional and mental bodies - we are more than just the physical!

I have seen a number of clients this week who have displayed such courage in the way they have dealt with their illnesses and used it as a platform for deep transformation, leaving behind a way of living which was causing the loss of well being, which is often around the way we are relating, on some level. These individuals have found the courage to look at their mental patterning and the emotional repression that undoubtably caused the loss of wellbeing in the first place. We have to remember that we are energy and that where energy gets stuck or becomes heavy, it can manifest as dis-ease.

It struck me that many keep on keeping on and hoping that they’ll be OK until they are not OK. So many of our modern health complaints are now normalised as if they are to be expected, such as dementia. I always have an issue with the signs that warn you that the elderly might be crossing the road, these heart collapsed stick figures, crumpled under the weight of age. I am inspired by yoga teachers who have lived into their nineties and managed to maintain such agility, grace and lightness.

As we say in Ayurveda, “health is your wealth” and this is so true, yet our current society tells us that wealth is about making as much money as you can, rushing around, stressed in the process of accumulation, ignoring the signs that your body is giving that it is not coping, drinking wine, taking cannabis, numbing out online, consuming vast quantities of pharmaceuticals just to get through the day. It doesn’t have to be that way! We have choice, just we don’t often realise it. This is where Reiki helps as it raises our consciousness so that we begin to realise that we have choice and then we begin to make different choices.

We also start to notice when we are giving ourselves a hard time, which is often the cause of much suffering, and we might find that little wiggle room which allows us to observe the way we are relating to ourselves and others, and again make changes. Consciousness is all that we are ultimately, just that so much of our existence is lived unconsciously. This is what makes Reiki so amazing, it increases consciousness and helps us to expand beyond our limited 3-D reality and appreciate the wider cosmos and our place in it.

My motivation towards offering the spiritual life coaching was to give clients the opportunity to go deeper, as I did with the intuitive life coaching all those years ago. I am in awe of my clients who have trodden this path. This week I am reminded of their courage and amazed at the extent of their transformation by their thoughtfulness and determination to make changes. I am reminded that often the change is as simple as a shift in mindset and perspective and a deepening of love for themselves. Usually there needs to be a celebration of their differences, and an acknowledgement that they don’t fit into the mainstream and might let ago off even trying.

I left the mainstream a good while ago now and it is very liberating. There are always so many ways to live life and so many different realities, it seems a shame to limit ourselves to what is expected of us by society, regardless of whether there is any alignment on a soulful level. But it is hard, often we are stepping alone, a ship at sail at night, maybe you see other lights from other ships, but you are no longer part of the fleet. Still, community helps enormously, not a false community, this wishy washy idea of something, but of human connection and relating on a deep soulful level that helps one to feel less alone.

I am proud of my students and the way they have created community within Beinspired. Our Friday and Sunday morning yoga sessions a two of the most uplifting times of the week, because of the sharing and humour and the lightheartedness that is such a needed part of spiritual practice, otherwise we start to take ourselves far too seriously and that’s counterproductive to the heart and soul.

Anyway, going back to Reiki, I have always felt indebted to this practice, which supports not only our healing but our personal and spiritual development. It has helped me in so many ways, re-aligning me with people and situations which have supported me to live more of what makes me feel alive. This hasn’t always been easy, I have grown apart from others, relationships have had to change, life is always encouraging me to step outside the comfort zone, but there is depth, their is aliveness and for that I am eternally grateful. Who wants to live a half lived life? We only get one chance, why squander it thinking we’ll be here forever, forgetting that we are impermanent?

So many do though, move through life unaware of the fact their time could be up the next day. I have always found the sorcery perspective helpful of using death as your advisor - if you were to die tomorrow, what would you do differently today? Now that’s an interesting question to work with.

But many will pop their head back in the sand and keep on keeping on with lives that lack meaning and lose themselves to their depression and anxiety, without appreciating it could be different. Maybe there is a little voice inside which knows this and tries to get our attention, but the fear of change is often too strong…what will we become if we let go of our pain? What then of the stories we tell ourselves of the harm we have experienced in our life and all the people we blame?

This is also an interesting question to ask - who will you be if you let go of our idea of who you are? If you forgive those who harmed you, what then? If you forgive yourself for your perceived wrongdoings, what then?

Many don’t realise they can create new stories, every day of their lives, new stories that are positive and full of hope. Yes, life will always throw us challenges and curved balls but it is up to us how we narrate these experiences, the stories we tell ourselves and the life we therefore create because of reality reflecting back the state of our mind. If we are always stuck in negative thinking, then the world will appear a very negative place. If we always feel fear then the world will look scary. Remember that we have choice, you have choice, I have choice.

Needless to say, I am always keen that others have the opportunity to experience the many benefits of Reiki too, and am always delighted to catch up with students and hear how their lives have been changed by this ancient practice.

I am keen to encourage more to this path, in the hope that it may positively make a difference in their lives. I have a number of Reiki One and Two attunement courses coming up but I am aware that many of you are ready for the Master attunement. Usually I offer this one to one, but am considering another group attunement session in the autumn so that you may spend the day with others who are like minded and keen to develop and deepen their spiritual practice. If you are reading this and wondering if that might work for you then please ping me an email so I can get an idea of how many might like to take their practice forwards.

In the interim, we have some charity events coming up so that those of you Reiki attuned can come and lend a hand, literally. The next one is March 15th 4.30-5.15pm when we will be offering Reiki to the Pink Ladies, so women experiencing breast cancer, and all hands are helpful so again, get in touch if you have the time to spare and can lend a hand - please don’t let insecurity get in the way, we will work in groups. There will be another chance to work with Parkinson’s Guernsey in May too.

Other than that, if you are reading this and life is a bit challenging as it is with the moon doing her thing and asking us to slow down and heal and expand into a new way of being, then do feel to get in touch as maybe it is time to begin or deepen your Reiki journey and make positive changes in your life by taking responsibility and holding yourself accountable. This of course has a knock on effect on everyone else - the more you positively change, the more the collective positively changes.

This reminds me, as I have heard people concerned about the state of the world currently (but doesn’t every generation worry about this) and yet, if you want to see positive change then it has to start with you. If you don’t make changes, how can you expect others to make changes too. This is when we realise we need to take responsibility, when we stop looking at others to make the changes that we need to make in our own lives - remember, we have choice.

My email is emma@beinspiredby.co.uk.

For those wanting to read more about Reiki and my experience with it, then probably my books Namaste and Dancing with the Moon, are the best ones to read.

With love

Emma x

The thing that screws us up the most in life

I stumbled across a quote a few years ago now, which I was reminded of as the dust settled after the new moon blast of insight.

It goes something like, ‘the thing that screws us up the most in life, is our idea of how it is meant to be’.

This is so true!

And of course inherent within this is the idea of how we have been conditioned to believe it is meant to be so.

This because our conditioned and therefore fixed - and often rigid - mind is often at the crux of our suffering. The ancient yogis knew this, the whole premise of yoga is about reducing our suffering and unlinking our link with pain. More often than not, our pain arises because of our state of mind and its tendency to want to control through fear of the unknown and the uncertain and the patterns that arise because of this.

I stumbled up against another strand of this in my own life just recently. An event happened that was completely out of my control. Eben managed to rack up - and we still don’t quite know how - a substantial amount of credit on the dreaded Roblox, bypassing all security measures so the amount was deducted from my bank account. Panic ensued. Fortunately, my bank and Apple were helpful; this is clearly something that happens regularly and eventually Apple did refund me the majority of the charges, but it took me on quite a journey.

In fact it was a much needed experience, because it gave me the opportunity to witness my own patterning around not being in control. First I went into shock; shock that this had happened and I had been none the wiser - shock then that I hadn’t managed to be in control of this. Then I went into self-criticism and made it all my fault because I hadn’t been ‘on it’ whatever that means. I also criticised myself for my apparent lack of attentive parenting skills.

This giving myself a hard time of course dampened my spirit. It also kicked into being an old pattern of then trying to control everything I could control, as if to find some safety in a world which clearly wasn’t safe because otherwise the whole Apple thing wouldn't have happened in the first place - or so my mind told me, because it had at that moment labelled the experience bad and I must surely then be a bad person for having attracted it in. Of course this is negative and limited thinking, but in that moment I had overlooked that there is always a different side to the coin and that every challenge brings with it a blessing - more on that later.

Furthermore, as with every challenging situation, I was overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety, doubt and fear. It’s like all our fears get triggered just by hitting up against one of them - in this case a fear of losing money, which brought up a fear of being unsafe. This also brought with it doubt about the power of spirit to resolve the situation favourably, even though on some level I sort of knew that the situation would resolve itself, but I was looking for signs to validate this.

I am conscious that when we act on these feelings - let the fear get the better of us and lose our faith in the higher power - that we can split apart from the our spiritual path and start to doubt it or doubt ourselves. My tendency is to doubt myself - shouldn’t I have known better, was my intuition wrong? For many this is when imposter syndrome can kick in, and anxiety which then prevents people from making changes in their lives and living more of their dream. For me, I got stuck in a pattern of anxiety, which caused me to want to control whatever I could control because of the uncomfortable feeling of not being in control.

And yet this is counter productive because then the mind creates even more rigidity and gets stuck in its limited patterning. It is easy to forget the wisdom of patient non-action. In some way I was conscious of this and was grateful to be able to observe my mind as it followed a well trodden path rather than being stuck in it - this is what yoga is teaching us in many ways, the ability to observe, rather than being a victim of our mind, not realising we are not our mind and that we have choice in our thoughts and feelings and therefore our experience of reality.

Not that this made it any an easier process - the path to greater consciousness is anything but easy in fact. This because we have to break through our conditioning which is causing the unhelpful patterns and the fixed mind and the resulting pain and suffering. And this demands that we let go. We have to let go of all we thought and believed to be true, to allow something deeper to come in stead. But we don’t like letting go because the unknown is scary.

Yet our suffering can become so painful that we realise there is little choice in holding on. This is when we expand consciously. When we give it up. We stop trying to think our way through something and allow the benevolent and grace of the universe to enter our lives instead - I might argue this is just the higher self being finally allowed expression. This is a metamorphic process, like the butterfly exiting the cocoon, like the breaking of the casing of the seed, nature has many examples. Essentially, the breaking down needs us to be still and quiet, accepting our reality rather than fighting against it and instead weathering the storm patiently.

I was trying to explain this process to a client the other day. Because once we have caught our patterns, then we need to do something about them. I tend to dig deeper into spiritual practice, prioritising time on my mat, engaging in breathing exercises, going for long walks, being outside, getting in the sea, baking, doing things with my hands, and settling into the physical discomfort of the feelings as they arise.

I was feeling anxious. I knew it was part of the process, but it is still a horrible feeling. However, rather than turn away from it, I knew I needed to turn deeper into it. I could feel it deep in my stomach, an unsettling feeling that makes me want to get busy or run, anything to distract myself from it. But it is important that we don’t turn from it, that we sit into it instead, really feel it and allow it its expression.

It is also helpful to talk to it, to the mind which is creating it. So in this instance I kept repeating to myself “thank you mind for trying to keep me safe. I know you are trying to help, but it isn’t helpful anymore, I can just be with my experiences as they arise without having to feel anxious”. After all anxiety is just a form of fear manifesting, when the mind is challenged because it doesn’t feel in control and therefore safe.

Ideally we are trying to train the mind to be OK with the unknown and the uncertain. Then we can just be with our experiences as they arise, without labelling them good/bad, right/wrong, for example, or in any way allowing the mind to have power over us.

Eventually, working with the mind in this way, of noticing the feeling, of challenging the thoughts and any limited beliefs which arise, we can get to a point where we can actually laugh compassionately at the mind for it’s attempts to keep us safe - in this way we can befriend it rather than judge it, berate it or in any way limit our experience.

Thus, the more I worked with it, and challenged whatever thoughts and limiting beliefs were arising such as “Am I really unsafe? No”, “Am I really going to lose all my money? No”. “Is there any evidence to suggest that I am unsafe? No”, “Is there any evidence that I will lose all my money? No”, the more the mind lets go of its grip.

Of course we (the mind) is not in control, how can it be. The universe will always send challenges and curved balls to remind us of this. Not to say we don’t do all we can to try to control things, but ultimately we squander copious amounts of energy in trying to make things the ‘right’ way whatever that is. This because you're ‘right’ and my ‘right’ are no doubt totally different, so it is ALL an illusion anyway, which keeps us trapped. At some point we have top break free, especially if we are keen to evolve in this lifetime.

In many ways we are up against our indoctrination, our false belief that there is a right way to live our lives. I am convinced part of this arises because of our fear of getting it wrong and being bad and therefore needing punishment and if we are not careful ending up in hell, because this notion lives in our psyche whether we are religious or not. But really this is a benevolent universe, it knows only kindness, it is just our mind that labels things good or bad, right or wrong, as my previous blog post touched upon.

I came to realise that the Apple situation actually brought a huge gift because life had to change - it was a wake up call on many levels, the universe intervened and life has not been the same ever since. The iPad went in the drawer and is still there now. Eben hasn’t asked for it once, instead he has found other activities to entertain himself that do not dumb him down. I have made more effort to be offline and this has created a much needed re-prioritisation in how I live my life.

Ultimately, there is now space. And space of course is needed to make change and for the us to create a new way of living. And I can tell you one thing - when we have managed to cultivate more space in our lives we absolutely don’t want to give it up. We no longer want to over plan or over commit, we no longer want to fill our diary, we no longer want to waste our precious time here on earth doing things that our mind tells us to do but our soul is not the slightest bit interested in.

Ultimately though, this whole process helped me to see very clearly that our idea of how we think it should be is one of the greatest obstacles to our inner peace. Not only because we then try to control our reality to make it what we think it should be, opposed to just accepting it as it is, which inevitably creates stress, but because we also play roles, behaving in ways we think we should behave rather than just being ourselves regardless of the situation. Furthermore role playing becomes exhausting, and creates greater stress, as we mask to the world.

The minute we give this ALL up and accept reality as it is, and ourselves as we are, warts and all, is the minute that things change for us, and our stress starts dropping away. This involves honesty, being very honest with ourselves about the way we are living, the choices we are making, and the stories we are telling ourselves that create our reality. At some point we have to let go of the many boxes we have created, to make our life neat and orderly, at least in our mind.

I knew my boxes needed to change because I was getting bored, but I didn’t know how to change them. So I am grateful to the universe for ushering in the the opportunity for change, to break down any fixed ideas about how it should be. It wasn’t in the way I might have liked, but in a way that has been extremely helpful. I have had to let go of my idea how I thought it should be, to allow something else to come in - and that something else is freedom - freedom to let life unfold as a continous experience and freedom to be myself regardless of the situation.

Thus, I am grateful to Eben and Elijah for continuously showing me another way, for unsticking me from more of my limited thinking and unconscious and unhelpful behaviours. I am also grateful to the universe for showing me that I am not in control as much as I might like to think that I am. And I am indebted to the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga which encourages me to let go of my fixed mind, and especially as it applies to my yoga practice - there is no one way or right way, just moments constantly unfolding and dancing in my body.

I hope that my honest sharing might help you if you are up against your fixed mind and idea of how life should be - how your children should present themselves, how your partner should behave, how your home should look, what role you should play to earn money, how you should ‘be’ in this world, what masks you wear and just let go and flow, remembering that we are not in control, there is always wiggle room and this wiggle room allows greater consciousness and the beautiful gift of freedom.

Love Emma x

Addressing the self-critical voice

That was one very intense new moon on Friday highlighting our tendency to self-criticism and self-blame. I was aware that my clients and students were being encouraged to find a kinder voice to talk to themselves, to shift the internal narrative to something much more positive.

In my own healing too, I was aware that we were being asked to question the various roles we have taken on and the way these limit us, so too to consider the stories we tell ourselves and the narrative and thoughts running through our mind.

I was essentially reminded that we are our own jailor and punisher. That we create our own suffering by our limited beliefs (as mentioned in the previous blog post) and our limited perception of reality.

We also create our suffering when we try to control our reality. Sometimes in life things just happen that are quite beyond our control and to blame ourselves for not having seen it coming or managing it better only services to diminish our energy levels and depress our spirit and soul. Life is as it is. There will always be challenges, always be curved balls, always be something that gets our attention and asks us to go deeper still.

We are being asked to let go and flow. Let go of how we think it should be, and allow something more aligned to come in.

We are being asked to let go of our various roles and the way we define ourselves to the world so we can show up as the soul that we are, regardless of the titles and what ‘we do’ in this world. Because we can always do it differently.

But as for the self-criticism, this needs working with. We have to become conscious of the self-derogatory words as they arise, catch them, and shift them into something more positive instead. After all, why so negative?

Here is some info I share with my spiritual life coaching clients to help them navigate all this, and I feel to share here so that you may benefit too, after all, you making these shifts and having a more positive relationship with yourself, positively affects the collective - we’re in this together whether we like it or not!

What is self-criticism?

Self-criticism is the tendency to evaluate oneself harshly. When we are self-critical we are always scrutinising ourselves and our performance in most areas of our life.

Self-criticism is sometimes considered a personality trait, which means that some people tend to be very hard on themselves whereas others are less so. But, we all fall somewhere along the continuum.

If we are being self-critical then we are generally deeply afraid of failure and rejection, and can feel a lot of guilt. We may also prioritise achievement over social connection.

Furthermore, being self-critical can make it difficult for us to form close relationships.

What is the psychology behind self-criticising behaviour

Self-criticising behaviour arises from a complex interplay of psychological, social, and environmental factors. At its core, self-criticism often stems from internalised beliefs about our worthiness, competence, or likability, which can be influenced by early experiences, cultural norms, and societal pressures. 

 Those who exhibit self-criticism or tend to be hard on themselves may have grown up in environments where perfectionism was encouraged or where criticism was prevalent, leading them to adopt harsh standards for themselves.

Comparing oneself unfavourably to others—whether in terms of achievements, appearance, or abilities—can fuel feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy.

Experiences of trauma or abuse can also increase the likelihood of internalising negative messages about oneself, resulting in a persistent pattern of self-blame and self-condemnation. 

Additionally, societal ideals of success and beauty, for example, often promote unrealistic standards, causing us to constantly judge ourselves against unattainable benchmarks. 

Furthermore, we may think self-criticising will help to undo whatever bad thing(s) we have done, even though in reality, we can’t change the past as it has now passed – the past is passed and the future is just an imagining, so live in the present and forgive, let go and move on.

Also, maybe we were criticised a lot as a child, and we may (unconsciously or consciously) believe we deserve criticism. When we’re told we’re stupid or fat or lazy repeatedly, we start to believe it. And then, even after our parents, teachers or other critics from childhood no longer have our ear, we may find that we’ve taken over their job and repeat these criticisms to ourself to the extent that we normalise them.

It is important to note that these thoughts are not objective truth, even though they can feel that way. In order to push back against internalised negativity and criticism, we might try to assess the truth of critical thought as we have them. What did we do wrong? What specific standards were we trying to achieve? How would we feel if someone else made the same mistake? Will punishing ourself do anything to fix the situation?

What are the consequences of being self-critical?

Increased stress and anxiety: Constantly criticising ourselves can lead to heightened levels of stress and anxiety. Furthermore, ongoing internal pressure to meet unrealistic standards can create a perpetual cycle of worry and tension.

Physical health issues: The knock on effect of chronic stress and anxiety resulting from self-criticism can have negative effects on physical health as well, including increased risk of cardiovascular problems, weakened immune system, and other stress-related ailments.

 Low self-esteem: Continuous self-criticism often erodes self-esteem. When we focus solely on our flaws and mistakes, we begin to see ourselves in a negative light. This can lead to feelings of worthlessness or inadequacy.

 Depression: Persistent self-criticism is closely linked to depression. The constant barrage of negative self-talk can contribute to feelings of hopelessness, sadness, and a general lack of motivation or interest in activities.

Perfectionism: Self-criticism can fuel perfectionistic tendencies, where we feel we must meet impossibly high standards to feel worthy or accepted. Perfectionism can lead to a fear of failure and avoidance of challenges.

Impaired relationships: Excessive self-criticism can affect our relationships with others. People who are overly critical of themselves may become irritable, or may also be overly critical of others, leading to strained interpersonal dynamics.

Procrastination and avoidance behaviours: Fear of failure resulting from self-criticism can lead to avoidance behaviours and procrastination. We may avoid taking risks or pursuing goals because we fear we won’t meet tour own high standards.

 Difficulty accepting feedback: When we are overly self-critical, we may have difficulty accepting constructive criticism from others. We may interpret feedback as further evidence of our inadequacy, leading to defensiveness or withdrawal.

Addressing self-criticism

Addressing self-criticism often requires cultivating self-compassion and self-acceptance, challenging negative thoughts, setting realistic expectations, and seeking support from friends, family, or mental health professionals. Learning to treat ourself with kindness and understanding can help break the cycle of self-criticism and improve our overall mental well-being. 

What can we do if we want to become less self-critical?

We can begin by acknowledging that our self-criticism came about for a reason and has likely had some purpose in our life. So, we should refrain from criticising ourselves for being self-critical, which only makes the situation worse.

We can try to be curious about the feelings behind our self-criticism. Is there a part of us that is feeling scared, angry, ashamed, and/or sad? We can try to have compassion for those feelings.

We can do our best to pay attention to our inner dialogue and notice when it becomes harsh and critical. Sometimes, when we’re feeling angry and anxious, it’s partly because the voice in our head has become attacking, so it helps to be mindful and not react.

We can challenge our critical self-talk. For example, “It’s not true that my performance/presentation/class was terrible. I could tell that some people were enjoying it”.

We can try to be more compassionate with ourselves and talk to ourselves as we might a friend. For example, “It’s really difficult to feel that I worked so hard on something and it still didn’t go as well as I’d have liked. It’s understandable to be feeling upset about this.”

Try and transform self-criticism into self-acceptance.

However, the road from self-criticism to self-acceptance can be a tough one. It requires us to challenge our negative thoughts and consider that we’ve been relying on distorted thoughts, inaccurate beliefs, and unrealistic expectations for years. It requires us to discard the notions that self-criticism is helpful and deserved.

Here some ways to get started:

Look for positives and cultivate a more balanced view of yourself: Intentionally notice your strengths, the things you do right, your progress, and effort – take time to congratulate yourself. This exercise works best when you take a few minutes daily to write down the positives, reflect on them, and let them sink in.

Challenge your inner-critic. Not all of our thoughts are accurate and you can weed out the inaccurate ones by being inquisitive and questioning whether they are true. When you have a self-critical thought, ask yourself these questions in an effort to create more accurate thoughts:

·      How do I know this thought is true? 

·      What evidence do I have to support it? / What evidence do I have to refute it?

·      Is my thought/belief based on facts or opinions?

·      Is this thought helpful?

·      Am I overgeneralising or jumping to conclusions?

·      Is this what I want to think about myself?

·      What would I say to myself if I was more accepting and self-compassionate?

Practice using helpful self-talk. Below are some examples, which might be useful. Please do feel they can be changed to meet your needs:

·      I don’t need to be perfect.

·      Everyone makes mistakes. That’s how we learn and grow. If we never made mistakes, we would never try anything new.

·      This is stressful. What do I need right now?

·      I’m not stupid (or any negative adjective), I am just stressed.

With lots of practice, you will be able to replace self-criticism with compassionate self-talk. But in the beginning, you may not notice a self-critical thought until after you’re had it. Over time being more mindful will help you to notice when you are being negative and criticising yourself.

When you notice that you are criticising yourself, practice self-compassion as a way to teach yourself how you want to think. You might gently say to yourself, “What I meant to say/think is that it’s OK to make a mistake and/or say what I said. I am not stupid; everyone has forgotten something important at home, everyone has said something they wish they hadn’t. I don’t’ need to make it harder by beating myself up about it.” Or “It doesn’t matter that I look different to other people, my body is unique and special and does amazing things for me, it is a special vehicle I have been gifted for this lifetime and I am happy living in it and taking care of it, even if it doesn’t look like how society tells me it should look, but then nor does anyone else’s really, not naturally”.

Tell yourself what you needed to hear as a child. Another variation of the exercise above is to talk to your inner-child. Think about a younger version of yourself — the little girl or boy who suffered through criticism from others. What did s/he long to hear? What words would have given her/him comfort and reassurance? What would have built her/him up rather than tear her/him down? Here are some examples:

·      You deserve to be treated with kindness.

·      You are lovable just the way you are.

·      Your body is beautiful and strong.

·      You can count on me. I’ll always have your back.

·      You are not lazy, you have your own pace and it is your right to live your life as you choose.

·      You are absolutely not a failure as there is no perfect so nothing to fail against.

·      I love you.

·      You don’t have to accept other people’s opinions as facts. 

·      There is no perfect.

·      It’s OK to make a mistake otherwise how can we learn and grow

·      Embrace your differences, they make you the wonderful soul you are.

Focus on self-acceptance rather than self-improvement. There is definitely a place for self-improvement, but when we focus on self-improvement exclusively, we set ourselves up for self-criticism and never feeling good enough. Although it may seem backward, we actually need to accept ourselves first and then we can improve. In other words, self-acceptance isn’t the result of self-improvement. Self-acceptance makes self-improvement possible.

Self-acceptance doesn’t mean that I don’t want or need to change. It means that I accept myself as I am in this moment; I accept that I have perceived limitations and flaws. I still want to learn and grow and improve, but I also accept who I am right now.

When you start accepting yourself, you become less self-critical and can start to create a more loving relationship with yourself. And when you start accepting rather than criticising yourself, you can change. You will become calmer and feel safer. You will likely becomes  less defensive, and be more open to learning and accepting feedback.

Accept your humanness and that you can only ever make choices based on your level of consciousness in any one moment given your psychology, mental, emotional and mental states in that moment too. There are no mistakes, just opportunities to learn and begin anew. Let go of regret, forgive, move on, love and follow your joy.

So to end, if you have found this helpful and want to explore further then book yourself a Reiki treatment with me, or perhaps explore the Spiritual Life Coaching as this can help enormously in shifting old patterns and finding a kinder voice and inner narrative - and therefore gifting freedom. Be gentle on this wax!

Love Emma x 

There are always two sides to every coin

These are interesting times as cosmic forces usher in more change. We are being asked to go deeper still, to seek out the wounding and harm done, to heal and set ourselves free so that our future is not based on what has happened previously and all the various conditioning and limited beliefs, which arose because of this.

I have been deep diving with Brandon Bay’s The Journey, a technique I used many, many years ago now to heal ovarian cysts, which turned out to be the result of internal angst towards another pupil in my year at school who ended up with the boy of my dreams. Or so I thought at the tender age of 15. It was heart breaking, truly, because I have always had a tendency to fantasise about life, one of those dreamers, which inevitably leads to repeated heartache because reality and my fantastic dream world rarely match up!

The recent ‘journeys’ with a Brandon Bay’s facilitator have been intense; the first one caused me to have a healing crisis which found me in bed for 24 hours as all my cells went through a significant releasing. The second was kinder. But both served to remind me that the body keeps score and that we are our own worst enemy in the narrative and stories we tell ourselves and the limiting beliefs that we make so in our lives, limiting our potential for love, truth, peace and trust.

The first journey with its significant healing crisis, took me back to university days and the intense homesickness and loneliness I felt. It is so easy to dismiss these experiences, but I missed my family enormously and felt anxious for a lot of it with a deep lingering fear of not getting a degree at the end of it. I have no doubt that the anxiety and fear promoted the eating disorder which I had developed during Sixth Form as a way of coping with the pressure of A-Levels and the fear of going to university in the first place, which you can read more about in my book From Darkness Comes Light.

I knew something was amiss as I kept getting the same repeated dream and waking up in a minor panic that I had failed my degree. I never did of course, I got a 2.1, but the fear was still there, all these years on. It never ceases to amaze me how much our dreaming points the direction to whatever lays unresolved within us.

Furthermore, it was helpful healing this wounding in my body, which had settled into my stomach with this increasingly frequent feeling of emptiness, and the pain in my heart around any form of separation, since gone. The emotions which needed processing were intense; sadness, grief, rage, confusion, and enmeshed within all of this were unhelpful limiting beliefs and fear around separation in its many guises and it was such a relief to finally get to the root, which has made life infinitely easier since as the previous triggers are no longer triggering.

The second journey also took me back to university, which had quite a profound effect on me in so many ways, not least the intensity of eating disorder but using alcohol, cigarettes and cannabis to overcome my shyness, which was so not me, but became so simply to cope and feel as if I fitted in. The wounding this time though was around unrequited love and the deep heart pain this caused, as I watched my best male friend since age 4 (who had also chosen Swansea for his degree, albeit at the college rather than the university), fall in love with a beautiful Spanish student who later became his wife.

My dreaming of our life together was shattered, and I internalised this in unhealthy ways around my lack of lovability and my non-deserving of joy, because clearly I wasn’t worthy, given that he had chosen another woman. Inherent within all this was a confusion around the nature of our friendship and a feeling of betrayal.

To uncover all of this was uncomfortable, the heart pain felt very real, like a literal stabbing (or how I imagine a stabbing to feel), let alone the range of emotions which accompanied it, from sadness to anger, to frustration, to rage, to more sadness, to betrayal, to grief, and finally to recognition of our innocence and from there to forgiveness and release. There is a lightness that has arisen since.

Again, I am amazed how much the body remembers all that has happened and lays unresolved inside us, pushing to be heard and seen, so that it can let go of its unnecessary carrying. I am also amazed how we have these life experiences and depending on our nature, we either process them or we don’t. More often than not we don’t give ourselves the space, or we simply don’t know how to go about it so they lay unprocessed. I wrote about this in my book From Darkness Comes Light, but I prided myself back then in never showing emotion, because I thought that was the way.

With a sun in Cancer and a moon in Pisces, I am primarily water, a pool of emotion at times, so to hold onto it all and pretend I was OK was a huge wounding, which of course led to intense bouts of depression, suicidal at times, let alone the PMS, which plagued me for years. I can see so clearly now that my whole being was saturated in unprocessed negative emotions and negative self talk - it was quite inevitable that my heart armoured up and my spirit flagged.

It’s not just the holding of emotions that is the problem, albeit it is, because emotions are energy in motion and if we don’t allow them their movement and expression then they create energetic blocks in the body which can lead to dis-ease if not released. And this to the extent that stuck emotions cause more disease that any virus or bacteria, simply because of the negative impact on our energy field (which leads to tiredness and lack of vitality) and weakens our immune system, which then makes us more susceptible to foreign bodies.

The other problem is that every emotional holding also brings with it a negative thought and unhelpful limiting belief. It is this which often blows my mind simply because we really do create our reality by the thoughts we think. Not that we can necessarily change these thoughts. Those who meditate and try and watch their thoughts will know how they arise spontaneously, endlessly and randomly so that we have little choice but to think them. The difference comes though, when we notice them and stop giving them energy. So if our thought is “I am not good enough”, then we start to cultivate the awareness (become conscious) of this thought as it arises and challenge it, so that over time it stops arising, or if it does arise, we merely laugh at it without buying into it as a truth and making it so.

This isn’t easy of course, because many of these thoughts and the limiting beliefs that have arisen are deep in our psyche, unconscious then, and our behaviours surrounding them are normalised. I was having this conversation with a client yesterday, about how our lack of kindness to self is often very subtle, to the extent that we don’t even realise that we are being unkind to ourselves, not least in terms of the internal voice and the way we might criticise ourselves for our perceived imperfections (because of our false belief that there is a perfect), but also in the decisions and choices we make in our life.

I had thought my internal voice was kind, until this latest journey, when I realised the subtly of the negativity and the unhealthy limiting beliefs that had been laid down almost thirty years ago now still, on some level, play out in my life. These are not uncommon beliefs, most of us have them embedded in our psyche from our religious indoctrination let alone societal conditioning and our educational and cultural systems. We have been fed the idea that there is a good/bad, right/wrong, worth/worthless, perfect/imperfect, pass/fail without appreciating that there are always two sides to every coin, which means we are no more good than we are bad.

Yet it has been helpful for society to allow us to believe that there is a good and a bad, for example, because then we self-police, which makes it easier for us to be controlled. Furthermore, it keeps us trapped in this idea that there is something wrong with us, that we are never enough, that we are somehow flawed and all these beliefs therefore keep us disempowered and more controllable, it’s a clever and vicious cycle.

At the end of the day an experience is just an experience, life is as it is, some of it wonderful, some of it funny, some of it sad, some of it challenging and some of it just plain boring. It is how we relate to it, how we define it, how we narrate it and make it into a story, how we create beliefs based on it, which creates the harm. This is where we have choice. Always we have choice about how we respond and judge a certain situation and how we then experience our life.

We have to be mindful of our judgement system too as we often only hear one side of a story and we forget that there are various ways of looking at a situation - there are always two sides to every coin. To be OK with whatever is arising knowing that there is always more to it than we realise can help enormously.

This was highlighted to me in a book I was reading recently, where a man was caught sexually assaulting a child. Everyone thought he was very bad and reacted very negatively towards him, full of judgement. Then they learned that he had been sexually assaulted as a child and they saw another side to him, they felt sorry for him and had more compassion. this story is a helpful reminder that we have to be careful how we judge our experiences and the experiences of others because without doubt the universe will draw in opportunities for us to opinion differently.

There is this wonderful parable which highlights beautifully the benefit of holding the middle ground:

There once was an old farmer. Every day, the farmer used his horse to help work his fields and keep his farm healthy.

But one day, the horse ran away. All the villagers came by and said, “We're so sorry to hear this. This is such bad luck.”

But the farmer responded, “Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?”

The villagers were confused, but decided to ignore him. A few weeks went by and then one afternoon, while the farmer was working outside, he looked up and saw his horse running toward him. But the horse was not alone. The horse was returning to him with a whole herd of horses. So now the farmer had 10 horses to help work his fields.

All the villagers came by to congratulate the farmer and said, “Wow! This is such good luck!”

But the farmer responded, “Good luck. Bad luck. Who knows?

A few weeks later, the farmer's son came over to visit and help his father work on the farm. While trying to tame one of the horses, the farmer’s son fell and broke his leg.

The villagers came by to commiserate and said, “How awful. This is such bad luck.”

Just as he did the first time, the farmer responded, “Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?”

A month later, the farmer’s son was still recovering. He wasn’t able to walk or do any manual labor to help his father around the farm.

A regiment of the army came marching through town conscripting every able-bodied young man to join them. When the regiment came to the farmer’s house and saw the young boy's broken leg, they marched past and left him where he lay.

Of course, all the villagers came by and said, “Amazing! This is such good luck. You're so fortunate.”

And you know the farmer’s response by now…

"Bad luck. Good luck. Who knows?"

One of my beautifully wise students, who wishes to remain nameless, sent me this poem that she had written for her children, which further highlights the idea that there are two sides to everything:

When darkness falls and your light has dimmed

Remember life requires darkness and light

Remember good things grow in the dark, just as you did

Without distractions you have time to focus and reflect

Know darkness as your friend and not your enemy

Don’t fear it, as it is necessary to grow your heart and soul

Know the greatest compassion is fashioned in the darkest of corners.

Your life is rich with different hues, shades and colours and by making friends with the dark your truest self will become known to you.

Rest easy in the dark and know this too shall pass and a life worth living is yours…!

Personally, I have found that the dark times are actually the most fruitful. Those times where we feel lost and empty, those times when we don’t know which way to turn, when the world we knew is dropping away and we haven’t yet found a hand hold for the new life to be lived, when the stepping stones have disappeared, these are often the most fruitful times of our life.

Many are being asked to let go as we flow into spring. The moon and cosmic forces are really encouraging change as we move towards the major lunar standstill in June. We can expect the unexpected. Currently we are being cleared out, made empty, so that there is space for the new to enter into our lives. This is uncomfortable for reasons explained in the previous paragraph but essentially because we have a really hard time setting into the unknown and the uncertain.

But there is no going back! If you are reading this then you are in process and on this path, knowing that life cannot continue as it has been, with negative self-relating and limited core beliefs leading to much of the same - I am reminded of that marvellous quote from Einstein, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Our soul seeks freedom and our heart seeks greater expression. Joy is our birthright, if only we could open to it and get beyond our guilt and shame and other lower vibrational emotions that prevent us being all of who we are in this lifetime.

It is worth remembering that we have choice - we always have choice. But sometimes we don’t realise we have choice and this is where spiritual practice is so helpful as it often shines a light into the shadows, helping us to become conscious of that which lays unconscious, to realise the many ways that we restrict our choice and buy into the illusion, and to do something about it - to set ourselves free so that we can truly realise our potential.

It is this - this drive for greater consciousness and the freedom it gifts, to truly know my own truth and the truth of this universe, which inspires me in my sharing of yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda. If it wasn’t for these practices then I am sure I would be dead by now, or living a mundane life. Instead, as I heard towards my 50th birthday in June, I feel truly grateful for my life, for all the dark and challenging times and the lessons learned. I hope that I get to enjoy many more years of living life to its fullest and diving deeper into love and truth with all the various obstacles and challenges this presents.

I am eternally grateful to all of you who trust in this process and show up time and time again, courageously delving deeper into your shadows so that you can live a truer and more heart-felt and soul led life, shinning increasingly brightly and lightening up those around you too.

This is how we will create positive change in the world. Not by changing the outer, but by going deeper inwards. All spiritual philosophies acknowledge this. It is only be changing the inner that we affect and therefore change the outer. And the moon and the cosmic forces are supporting this - asking us to go deeper still, heal, forgive, let go, and show that there is always another way.

We are also being asked to heal our relationship with the universe to - to appreciate and embody, to rest into the fact that it is a kind and fair universe if only we could let go of our conditioning which tells us otherwise. Most of us have been taught to distrust it, to confuse it with humanity’s idea of right/wrong and good/bad, which keeps us trapped in the cycle of judgement and fear. Remember, on this too we have choice.

It is safe to trust in the universe. It never lets us down. We can never get it wrong or fail. All of our challenging experiences offer a lesson and a blessing, to give ourselves a hard time is pointless, and yet we do it, because of our conditioning. We have a choice of the beliefs we believe, of the words we use to communicate to ourselves and others, of the actions we take and the manner in which the effect of this ripples through the universe. It is a benevolent universe, it is only your mind that judges and makes it one way or the other, good or bad.

For those of you between worlds, stay centred in the not knowing and the uncertain. This is not a time to try to force things to happen. It might feel uncomfortable but it will pass. My advice is to dig deeper to practice, hug a tree, get on your mat, enjoy some Reiki, eat well, sleep well and get outside as much as you can.

Until next time, enjoy the wane.

Love Emma x

Happy full moon from Glastonbury

I LOVE Glastonbury, it always feels like I am coming home, not dissimilar to the feeling I get when I arrive back on Guernsey. There is a certain vibrational quality that resonates on every level of my being and a friendliness and kindness that you just don’t get elsewhere.

In fact it was a relief to get here after the testing of Devon with this Leo full moon energy mixing things up in quite a profound and uncomfortable way. I spoke with one of the ladies in a crystal shop I also visit and she had experienced exactly the same thing. She got me thinking about my moon and rising signs, which I haven’t paid too much attention to previously and of course, that has helped me hugely make sense of things - I would encourage you to explore this, there are a plethora of free sites you can use like this one https://www.astrosofa.com/uk/horoscope/ascendant

That’s the thing with Glastonbury, there is always wisdom to be gained and something new to discover, not only in the town, but within oneself too.

I’ve had a run of being tested from a big Corporation perspective recently, learning how easily children can change settings on iPads and spend your money without you realising it - and how ironic that when Apple email you about it, you have to go through a plethora of security checks, yet your child can escape all this and ring up bills on your behalf, but that’s another story. Anyway, this all created a little shakiness to my being and a loss of sense of stability, not helped with our initial experiences in Dartmoor which were merely reflecting my inner state.

And while Dartmoor helped to heal this, restoring my faith in humanity and in the magic that pervades this planet, Glastonbury has further confirmed this. It is a magical place here. We have been showered in kindness. A local factory, Drapers, replaced some woollen boots which had started falling apart, without charge and gifted free parking. The lady referred to above was so taken with the boys she offered them 50% off any of the crystals in her shop. She also gifted me a crystal. A man who was selling his wooden hand-made spoons gifted a magic coin, and the lady in the bakery gave Elijah a pastry for free.

I am reminded that not everyone on this planet is obsessed with making money from us at whatever cost - I cannot tell you the relief. It is easy on Guernsey to forget this, with the emphasis placed on the finance industry and the growing divide between rich and poor and then manner in which the island is being sold out to corporations because of the fear of what might happen if the finance industry left the island. But that’s also another story.

The moon is shaking things quite profoundly and asking us to look at sustainability - what sustains us and what needs to drop away?

Our conditioning around money and safety is deeply ingrained, so too the need to accumulate assets for the sake of it and for some notion of ‘success’.

But really we need so little.

What truly sustains us?

This moon has been showing me how we need to keep getting out of our own way. How our ego identity likes to feel it is in control because then it feels safe, and how it will try to control and manipulate through will. And yet how ultimately we have to surrender this to the higher self, which truly knows and will always show us the way, at least from a soul expression/evolutionary perspective, which might not be how we wanted things to be, but will offer us something far richer if only we can expand the perspective and see the bigger picture and TRUST.

The process is not always easy as we have to be increasingly honest with ourselves about our life and the way we are living it, let alone the way we are relating to self. But I am conscious that if we can increasingly sit with the uncomfortable feelings as they arise, and keep letting go of our idea of how things should be, and be patient, then the path ahead clears and in the process we might deepen into faith and trust and learn to be more compassionate and gentle with others and ourselves.

I am grateful to have this time here at Glastonbury with the boys. For them too they love this place, the playgrounds and the Tor which they can jump and run down, and even the White Spring, which was freezing but always re-orientates and grounds me, and the various shops and cafes in town. It struck me that I brought both of them here when they were only 3 months old and they have visited many times since so it is a second home of sorts to them too.

I am grateful to the moon and to the spirit of Glastonbury and Dartmoor for all this trip has taught me and my two boys. And I am grateful to all of you who have supported our journey in ways you might not even imagine. I can’t wait for the Glastonbury retreat at Chalice Wells in April 2026, details on that to follow…

Happy full moon!

Love Emma

Dartmoor!

Down Tor

My parents used to run Duke of Edinburgh groups on Dartmoor when I was probably a bit older than my boys are now (Elijah 11 and Eben 8), and my younger brother, Ross, and I would accompany them. This instilled in me a love of Dartmoor and of the wilds, even though it took me many years to realise this. It was always lots of fun playing in the rivers and around the clapper bridges, and I have visited a few times since.

Dartmoor is 368 square miles - it’s about 20 miles from North to South and 20 miles from East to West. It is one of ten National Parks in England covering 10% of the land area. National Parks were created by The National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 and Dartmoor National Park is created from land owned by a range of people including lots of farmers and The Duchy of Cornwall (Prince William).

There are over 365 tors on Dartmoor. Tors are where the granite rock that is underneath Dartmoor shows through. 65% of Dartmoor is made of granite and this is no doubt the reason there are so many Neolithic sites here as the quartz is an energy conductor, albeit so many of them have been destroyed, which is a real shame - but I am grateful to those whose efforts helped to restore many of them.

Down Tor and Burrator Reservoir in the background

It was my love of Neolithic stones which caused me to visit Dartmoor last May with a Neolithic friend. My friend had visited that previous February when he had been tested by the freezing temperatures and the relentless wind and rain as he tried to access some of the more inaccessible sites. But this is the thing with Dartmoor, it tests! And its spirit, for it most definitely has a spirit, encourages us to look at our deepest fears.

It did the same to me that trip last May when I was left stranded in the UK by Condor for an extra two days with no available flights, due to bank holidays and me having to face my fear of being separated from my children beyond my control, highlighting my separation anxiety and also my caring too much what others think and judging myself based on this. So it was helpful and set in motion a healing, despite it being an uncomfortable process to look at those fears.

Brothers - Eben dressed more appropriately now!

Dartmoor tested this time too. I had been tested before even leaving Guernsey and arrived in the UK a little on edge. The spirit knew this! Our first day on the Moors we attempted to access Down Tor stone circle, where I had found comfort after the Condor meltdown referred above, and felt I needed to thank it by showing up and taking the boys there too. This was not their first trip to Dartmoor, but their first trip with me on my own and with some proper walking, with a map and a compass.

Elijah in the circle

Trouble is, despite having a degree in Geography, my map reading skills are fairly poor and while I prefer to use my intuition, this was tested by the poor conditions, which I had not anticipated. You see had I checked a local weather report I might have known that fog was forecast, but the report I looked at suggested only heavy cloud.

My parents have quite rightly put fear in me about Dartmoor and mist. Looking after groups of teenagers on the Moors inevitably made them very conscious of the risks that this beautiful wild place brings. It didn’t help that the temperatures were hovering around -1 degrees and Eben was still wearing his football kit and hoody, not ideally equipped for these conditions. And while I had packed water and food supplies, I had not thought to pack extra clothing...

Anyway, we found the carpark and I had a sense of the direction we needed to go, and we were on the path, and being guided in many respects because a couple were also walking the same way, he a new Neolithic stone enthusiast and phone in hand guiding him (I am afraid I am still with the dumb phone). We did really well actually, and made it all the way up to Down Tor before the mist properly started rolling in.

Going up to Down Tor

We had a sense of the direction of the stone circle and the couple were trekking ahead of us at the time, so all we had to do was keep an eye on them. But then Eben got very cold and I had to strip off my leggings to give to him (I did also have hiking trousers) and wrap my scarf around him, but even then the cold was seeping through and the mist was getting thicker and we couldn’t see the Tor we had just left behind and the couple disappeared, as if they had never been there in the first place.

The mist rolling in

I knew we were probably only 100m away, up over the ridge ahead, but when it is misty it all looks the same and I was concerned about Eben, so we had to call it and descend. To say I was frustrated was an understatement. I hate giving up on finding Neolithic stones and clearly I still have some work to do on letting go - of remembering that ultimately we are never in control and we have to trust the process, because perhaps there is another way which better serves us with lessons to learn through the tests we are gifted. This was very much the theme leaving Guernsey and Dartmoor was merely highlighting this.

Elijah is my mountain goat and he remembered the way to get back down, such is his intuitive capacity. I was so grateful for his calmness because I was too irritated at myself at that point, highlighting the ways we give ourselves a hard time unnecessarily, by labelling something good or bad. Good that we were alive and well. Bad that mummy hadn’t thought to dress Eben more appropriately. But actually when it came down to it and I calmed down and realised ALL of this, I recognised that the biggest trigger was around things not working out as planned - just like the last time I had visited Dartmoor and Condor cancelling our crossing. The weather was beyond my control, but I still personalised it and gave myself a hard time for it.

Clapper bridge

So again, Dartmoor’s testing was helpful. Because on some level I did know all of this, that life re-routes us. We spent the afternoon at Plymouth Aquarium, which is not something I feel entirely comfortable about (living beings held in captivity) but this was a big deal to Elijah who just loves all things of the sea, and got to see sharks etc. The day before Eben had indulged in his love of otters at the Otter sanctuary in Buckfastleigh, which had prompted this whole trip, cute little things, but again, held in captivity.

Needless to say the next day the weather was glorious and we attempted Down Tor from another direction. But first we did something we had committed to do the previous day and on entering Dartmoor, we all spoke and prayed to the spirit of the land to grant us safe passage, something I usually always do when entering sacred land and Neolithic sites.

We were lucky again to chance on people who set our path and with bright sunshine and clear visibility and a remembering of the route from my May trip where we had accessed the stones this same way. There were signs too, the birds who enlighten the path and the intuitive nudges and we found the circle and it’s row, which is quite amazing, and lifted all our spirits, to be out in the wild and to finally make it! We would not have had such amazing views the day before or felt so proud of ourselves for finally making it so I am grateful to Dartmoor and its testing reminding me that there is a timing to everything.

The bridge and Kizzy!

We met a man at the stones who told us of another way to access a stone circle - Scorhill - that we have visited previously. So we set out to the other side of Dartmoor through the most skinny of lanes, 7 foot wide in some places, which was hair raising in a hire car and one of those times that you pray you don’t meet someone coming in the opposite direction, and on the whole we were lucky. We found Batworthy corner by some miracle and even found a spot to park, and set out in the general direction of Scorhill, but it is always challenging on the moors as you can’t see the stones until you get really close to them, so a compass is handy.

Scorhill

But we were blessed with another guide in the form of a lady called Claire and her dog, Kizzy, Claire reminding me of a good friend and there was this strange familiarity. She was on her way to Scorhill so while Eben threw the ball and played with Kizzy (no moaning!), Claire and I chatted as we walked the mile or so to the stone circle. We got to visit a clapper bridge which my Mum loves and Claire also told us about the holy stone, which we took turns sliding through because it is meant to create a positive transformation, a bit like Men-an-Tol in Cornwall.

Claire left us at the circle, and Elijah was quite stuck by her being an earth angel who was sent to guide us safely. This spun Eben out who couldn’t quite get his head around what Elijah was saying and was questioning if he meant she was a ghost. I knew what Elijah meant, sometimes in life, these earth angels come at just the right time to guide you and help keep you safe - they appear from nowhere and leave as quickly. They are encounters which often stay with you and I have a fond memory of being ‘saved’ by a businessman who just appeared in front of me from the busyness of the crowds on a Tokyo train platform and basically saved me because I had absolutely no idea where I was going and no way of reading Japanese!

The holy stone

Dartmoor is an amazing place and the boys certainly enjoyed the opportunity to get away from it all too, and immerse in the elements in this way. Eben loved the wild ponies, albeit they are all owned by farmer - about 90% of the land on Dartmoor is used for farming and there is said to be approximately 50,000 cows, sheep and ponies on Dartmoor. I loved showing them the rivers and the bridges and we got to see the prison at Princetown too, which is always a good point of reference!

Dartmoor does test - it is a sacred land and it brings up our fears - but I am grateful for this and the awareness this brings, not comfortable of course, and something now to work with. Always there is a surrendering and the journey continues, here we are now in Glastonbury for the waxing moon and the messages are getting louder still as I am sure they are for you too. This is another moon of change, of surrendering any idea we have of where we are heading and to remember that it is never really about us in the first place - spirit has a say!

Love Emma x