Light at the end of the tunnel!

I can’t tell you how excited I am! Dancing around the room kind of excited, like my heart might burst with excitement, grinning from ear to ear excitement, jubilant, light, joyful excitement. It’s a champagne evening if ever there was one - well aside from the fact I’m still trialling sobriety, but it’s worthy of champagne, if you do partake!

The details aren’t yet clear but prayers have been answered, and my rants have been heard (and all those of all the others ranting too) and I should be able to teach yoga again in person very soon, in my parents’ garden, if not at Sausmarez Park and even in the community centres, if the weather is bad. I can’t tell you the relief. I have missed it so much. I am extremely grateful for Zoom, but it is just not the same. I long to get my hands on people, in a non-manipulative, non-weird, and non-inappropriate way! Share the love then!

I’m also super excited that Sark is opening up again, which means we should be good to go for the Sark retreat in October. I LOVE Sark and I LOVE teaching yoga on Sark, there is just something extremely magical about this beautiful Island and I am grateful we can get back there again in October. I’m expecting that we’ll be OK to retreat in Herm later that month too. I do have dates for Glastonbury 2021 too, although whether the UK will be in a position for that is not clear just yet (11-13 June if you are interested and yes, there are spaces!).

I have been extremely grateful for this pause and period of uncertainty because such times are breeding grounds for creativity and transformation; what we once knew drops away so that the new can potentially enter in and fill the space instead. It reminds me of my favourite quote, “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you always got”. In fairness I was contented with my life pre-lockdown and I wasn’t sure it needed to change much, but now I know that it needed to change, and I am grateful that lockdown did that for me!

I now realise that I was very good at wasting time and sweating the small stuff, stressing about silly things that really aren’t important in the grand scheme. I suppose really there has been a real shift in priorities. It has absolutely not been easy. There have been dark nights of the soul as many of you will realise who have read this blog regularly, but I have felt supported throughout it all, and had a deep knowing that it is all part of a very necessary process, that has brought the Goddess calling and more of the sacred has been felt and entered in.

I have felt a connection to the divine that is for sure and I am grateful for the extra yoga lessons and Vedic chanting sessions that have supported the process. I’m sure you can relate to this too. I am no different. We are all a micro of a macro so we will all be going through it. How we deal with it might be different though. However there’s been a plethora of yoga and other healing modalities offering support; there must be so much online yoga content that people might practice a different session each day for the whole of rest of their lives! Plus living on this Island has made lockdown easier for most, as the beaches are always just down the road.

The chance to grow vegetables and medicinal plants has been a true gift. And the pause has also brought in the ‘Plant A Tree Project’ which was there somewhere in the ether, it has been on my mind, right at the back, for over a year now, but I couldn’t figure out what it might look like, but there is much greater clarity now and I am excited about sharing that when E and I are ready. Manuscripts have been finished in draft. But the greatest positive shift has been the children.

It was challenging initially, adjusting to the lack of space from them, because I thrive on my own space, but we got into a new groove, helped by the fact E and I can work around each other, and we get lots of family time together and can support each other when we do need space. Elijah is much happier than I ever remember him being and while Eben is a crazy wild child who triggers and challenges me daily, he has also thrived by this time together. The boys have become best friends. It has been a joy to witness. i feel like I have finally stepped up as more of the mother that I wanted to be and yet didn’t know how to be because my life was always ‘too busy’.

This has been helped enormously by getting off social media and putting my phone to the side. I am not distracted like I was before. I’m not sure about social-media. It’s anti-social media if you ask me. It makes people anti-social, heads in phones, buying into something that’s not real. It’s a performance for many, an opportunity to market what they want to be, superficial, lacking in substance, nothing underneath, bodies, faces, likes, followers, groups, judgments, anti-this, pro-that, not a lot of harmony at best. It makes you feel much more important that you actually are. Life carries on without you, a hard reality to stomach initially, the solar plexus takes a true bashing!

People say Facebook helps them stay connected. I don’t know about that. I have better connections off Facebook: I’ve been writing letters again, to my friends off Island, I can touch that, it’s more real and personal, and most of them in fairness aren’t on social media, which I suppose is the reason they’re my friends, like attracts like I guess! I was concerned initially how difficult I found it to actually write, because I type these days generally. The irony was not lost on me as I was trying to teach Elijah to write and he was more interested in using his iPad, because he doesn’t need to write on there!

I suppose ultimately, the children have become the priority, not whether someone has messaged me or liked something, or is simply messaging me for the sake of messaging me. I’ve actually deleted the Instagram account. It’s liberating. I noticed initially how I was seeing things I might take a photo of and then I remembered that I was no longer posting on social media and I almost laughed, as I asked myself the reason I was taking the photo in the first place - to show off, to share, to prove that my life was somehow interesting, that I was living life to the full? There’s a lot of ego in there, and while yes, I know we need some ego, there’s a lot of fuss around needing to be someone and to have others know. Yet actually my life has become more personal and special, my family time, just for us, and for my extended family.

Not using my phone has been trickier, because of the camera and because my family, with my brother in Australia, communicate by WhatsApp. And because Class Dojo is set up on my phone, and I have needed to access that for the home schooling, and then of course there’s the fact I tend to read something on my phone when I’m breastfeeding Eben at bed time in the dark. But it has been liberating turning it off as much as I can, proving that I’m not ‘needed’ as I might have thought and that it is OK not to respond to emails immediately, and that my boys needing me is actually more real and more important.

I have finally stooped shopping at Waitrose, which I have wanted to do for ages. I just don’t like what these big supermarkets have done to the environment, with mass production and intensive farming, with all the chemicals that are used to grow vegetables and fruits, let alone what happens to animals. Mind you I’m still shopping at M&S so I can’t preach just yet! I’ve been favouring hedge veg though, it has a sweeter and fresher taste, it actually has a taste! And Hansa, I have been supporting Hansa because it’s local and independent.

See, Covid and lockdown has brought with it the opportunity for increased awareness and shifts and possibilities. I definitely know that playing with the boys and having fun is possible, that teaching yoga feeds my soul, and that spending time with the students who comes to class makes me feel very happy. I love the Beinspired community and I am so grateful for all the support and that we have this lovely life here on Guernsey and that we can be together again soon, and that mental health and wellbeing on the Island can be supported through holistic means once more.

I’m curious to see what life will will look like post-covid. What we will have learned. How much we have awoken as a society and individually. The decisions we might make. How we might live. Whether we will try to make this world a more harmonious place to live…by being more in harmony with our true self and with others and with nature and truly knowing (not just saying or thinking), absolutely knowing from the very depth of our being that we are one, and that love is consciousness. That’s all it has ever been about and yet we keep trying to figure it out, going around in circles, looking, looking, looking, at the illusion, and not seeing the truth. Maybe we’ve started to see through that veil.

Sending love xx