Dancing the dream with womb yoga and healing
Wow, so it's been a fairly intense month of healing. The moon has certainly been putting it in the field - there was a lot of fear, anxiety and agitation coming up for so many, and the need to root down.
I was lucky, as I had been feeling a pull to dig deep into some inner healing work, and in many respects this turned out to be perfectly timed, as it helped support me during these, um, testing times.
The Ayurvedic treatment and the herbs, combined with some Reiki and massage, and the most amazing sound gong bath all helped on some level to awaken some old stuff and keep me on a level throughout. I fell in love with Sabine's rain stick, but that is a whole other story as I've got one on order (a rain stick that is, not Sabine, she's absolutely one of a kind and Guernsey is lucky to have her) and I cannot wait to use it to soothe away residual tension at the end of class.
My month of healing work came to a delightful end with the most amazing day drinking in the energy of the the delightfully delightful, and ever so phew, amazing, Uma Dinsmore-Tuli and Sivani Mata in one of THE best venues ever for training...the Tibetan Buddhist Meditation Centre for World Peace and Health in Bermondsey, London. This was followed, the next day, by the finale of a ki massage treatment with the most gifted and intuitive healer I have ever had the fortune to meet, Jo de Dielpold Braham.
I can truly credit Uma with bringing me home to myself when I discovered her during my second pregnancy. I've always been drawn to the Tantric approach to yoga, Rod Stryker, being my main inspiration, but then in stepped Uma with her womb yoga and Tantric practices, and I felt that finally, it all made sense. As if all the pieces came together and I found my heart AND my womb. Hoorah for that, the heart is great, but being a woman, there is much power in the womb space too.
So I was suitably excited in joining her in circle again for a day of creativity, sexuality and cycles of our lives. I was not disappointed. Oh my gosh. I LOVE the energy of Tibetan Buddhism, having discovered this on my many trips to Nepal - I resonate with the energy, and it fits in so nicely with the Tantric teachings and the Reiki, and here now with Uma. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
Laying on a sheepskin rug, the first thing we did was practice Yoga Nidra together, and the rest of the day fairly much floated in the most ecstatically joyful and poetic way - we were weaving the dance with some movement to really bring some light into the darkness of the womb and heart spaces, into the solar plexus and then the throat with some breathing exercises. And then the joyful of joyful moments for me, Bhakti yoga, yoga of the heart, and the chanting of mantra to music, sweet voices, and the energy raising, hearts opening, tears flowing. I LOVE Bhakti yoga.
Then it just kept giving - homemade, fresh, loving, dahl and rice in the Tibetan cafe making new friends, and then chai, that I didn't have to make. Back to class, and then another Yoga Nidra, drifting in a liminal space of healing, and then waking to chocolate, oh my gosh, we were given dark chocolate to ground us after the practice. Oh Uma, I love that you give us permission to eat chocolate in class, I really did die and go to Heaven!
Sivani is also a joy. She lives and breathes kirtan and the sharing of sound and her beautiful voice. So too her love of yoga for women, and she showed us how to massage our breasts for health and wellbeing, and led some of the session, increasing sensitivity with the most gentlest and smallest of movement, proving again and again the need for all the undoing, undoing, undoing. It's so simple.
I was reminded that absolutely nothing has to look a certain way. Not me, not you, not the practice, not our bodies, not our yoga, not our anything needs to look a certain way. Just be me, just be you, just be however it greets you.
Perhaps because of the expansion and openness that arose sharing my day with 47 or so other ladies, the majority in the autumnal phase of the cycle (this alone was truly fascinating), and chatting with beautiful Chris from the moment we left Guernsey to the moment we returned, so I'm not even aware of the travel (it felt like we floated to the centre and back again in Bermondsey, and yet I have vague memories of the plane and of walking along the Embankment and through Borough Market, neither here nor there, a day of that beautiful liminal space), I was ready and open to complete the healing with Jo, and this we did, and this by doing nothing...the undoing, undoing, undoing, by not doing, not a thing, not even speaking, just feeling the energy and witnessing the unfolding, not getting lost in story, letting the body undo all the doing.
There are times in life when we have absolute certainty that things were meant to be and that we're guided. Like maybe a handful of times when the stars and the moon align and every light is green, and every person smiles, and there is chocolate in yoga, and the robins keep appearing, and the doors are opening, and you can see inside yourself in a way you've never done previously and it all just feels right. Well that was then. That was one of those moments and I'm so grateful to have shared it with Chris and to the Universe and the angels for bringing me these most amazing women into my life.
Thank you beautiful ladies, and thank you Ewan, for helping me to indulge in such a way, Uma has inspired and there is a greater coming home to the self...Jai ma! Yoni Shakti should be a definite on every (wild) yogini's reading list and definitely try and find your way to Jo in Guernsey or the UK.
With eternal gratitude and love xxx
