The body never lies; eclipses and shadows
That was quite some eclipse season just passed. Phew. It probably didn’t help (or rather, it massively helped) that it happened to coincide with me holding two Reiki Level One attunement sessions and going through a twenty-one day cleanse.
They say that eclipses shine the light into the shadows and it certainly felt like this for me. The process itself was painful, quite literally as well, but I am always grateful when I come through the other side of it and awaken to patterns that no longer serve me in my life and that I can finally let go.
One pattern was around harm and the harm that we do to the self and the lack of love for the self that might underpin this. I have been exploring this theme since 2019 and it did feel that the understanding of this, the ‘aha’ moment was a long time in coming. But I got there in the end and I cannot tell you the relief to finally be able to acknowledge the love for self, but to know that I am both worthy of it, and deserving; I blogged about this last week.
What is interesting to me though is the way in which our internal dialogue, our thought patterns, especially the negative ones, manifest physically. For a long while now there has been some inner tension around this idea of self-love and I have battled with this more than ever before since having children, simply because this gave me even more of an excuse to give myself a hard time, in all my perceived failings as a mother.
I have found it so difficult to forgive myself for the moments when I may have acted out of anger, let alone the moments when I feel that I may have let my children down in some way, working more than I might do now or putting my needs before their own. My skin reflected this tension; the anger and resentment that I was harbouring towards myself for not being a better parent. Every time I got stressed because of my perceived short comings or because I wasn’t living up to my expectations my skin would get even worse.
Tied up in this was the idea of the face that I might put out into the world – the face of someone who wanted so desperately to look like she was in control, who didn’t want to show her vulnerability, and yet was floundering underneath the weight of it all. My skin told the true story, the skin is the largest organ in the body and will give your inner game away. The skin is also connected to the heart chakra, because it is through touch that the heart tenderly expresses itself; this is where we feel and touch life, and we learn to truly feel and touch others and to be felt and touched by others too.
It was extremely reassuring to me actually, because I had been getting a touch (no pun intended) frustrated that despite all the dietary changes, all the Ayurvedic medicine, all the inner work, that I was still seemingly incapable of healing my skin. I have no doubt that all of this helped, but it did feel that it took an awfully long time and a lot of inner reflection and finding my way in the dark, to finally get to the point where I understood the root cause of my skin condition. This of course is one of the main benefits of Reiki especially – it helps us to know our own truth and understand the reason for any loss of wellbeing.
I was beside myself with relief therefore, when I finally got it, and quite amazingly my skin began healing. I’m sure there is a way to go, that this is only the beginning, but it has been a few years in coming! Mind you, if I thought things would calm down with this realisation then I was to be disappointed. Because almost immediately after recognising the pattern and the connection with self-love, I started experiencing heart pain. This was on my birthday and I had a feeling it might be connected to the revelation about self-love and this was the ‘felt’ harm coming to the surface. And it may well have been, for there were moments when I felt a stabbing pain as if I did indeed have a knife in my heart – all the stabbing that I have done to my own heart over the years.
But when the pain started shifting and continued on as one day between two and so on, I did start to wonder if it might be another pattern. It was really unpleasant actually. Sometimes there was a pain in my actual heart and other times it was over my energetic heart, and sometimes shifted to the back. I noticed that I was becoming increasingly panicky with it, convinced that I was breathless, and wondering if my days of smoking had finally caught up with me, yet I had this sneaky suspicion that it was purely metaphysical and my pendulum kept confirming this.
I was aware that a full moon lunar eclipse was upon us and I was expecting that the pain might ease once this had passed. But yesterday it was still there, despite daily Reiki on myself and even going for a session with Sue on Friday. Something did not want to release easily! I was teaching a Reiki attunement session yesterday and I hoped that that might pass it through, working as I was through the heart chakra, but alas the course ended and still there was the pain, only now it was increasing in intensity to the extent that I actually googled signs and symptoms of heart attack and contemplated a trip to A&E.
However it suddenly crossed my mind that this was merely anxiety manifest, and funny that, given that I have been writing about anxiety in a manuscript I have been editing. It felt almost that I needed to be reminded how awful this feeling to be able to dig into it consciously and understand what lies underneath it. Back in my twenties, I used to feel anxious, but I was very good at numbing myself from it, by smoking or drinking or starving/binging. By the time I found yoga and Reiki when I was 28, I had managed to do a very good job of actually taking myself out of my body so I didn’t have to feel anything!
What’s happened over the years is that yoga has brought me back into the body, and never more than now with the Scaravelli-inspired approach which takes you deep into your flesh and bones where there is nowhere to hide! Vinyasa yoga absolutely served a purpose but it got to the point where it wasn’t taking me deep enough anymore, it was just skirting the edges, not resting into them and exploring them – it was easy to bypass them.
I’ve noticed then that the more I have dropped into my yoga practice and the more I edit the manuscript I initially wrote over two years now and have been editing and re-writing and setting aside and then picking up again ever since, the more I am asked to go deeper. It is like my soul has demanded it. I had this in my mind, despite my panic and my fear that actually this was nothing to do with metaphysical healing and I needed to get a grip on reality and join the rest of the world and go see a doctor!
So I kept dipping into the anxiety and sitting with it, as uncomfortable as it was, and as much as I wanted to numb from it, I didn’t, I stayed with it. I had hoped it might pass yesterday evening after working with the moon’s energy with forgiveness and manifesting, but I awoke with the pain this morning and felt rather weary and very sorry for myself. Maybe E was right after all and I needed to go and see the doctor (I had checked my blood pressure a few days ago and it was absolutely normal btw, and my parents weren’t overly concerned, they had a sense it was anxiety too).
A client cancelled a Reiki session at the last minute this morning, no fault of her own, it was divinely guided as it happened because it gave me an extra 90 minutes to myself, which is a complete treat what with having the boys home so much recently as we contemplated the home schooling approach. I locked myself away in the wing as the plumber was in the house finally re-fitting our bath, which some of you will recall has not been in action since March and the week prior to lockdown when we had a flood. I can’t tell you how challenging it has been for a Cancerian like me not to be able to bath daily!
I felt drawn to listen to a 38 minute Yoga Nidra from the Yoga Nidra Network, this one all about new beginnings, which felt appropriate because this is definitely the message I have been receiving, and I feel this strongly, that we have been asked to let go of patterns and ways of thinking that have been holding us back so that we can begin anew, wipe the slate clean…new beginnings. It is unusual for me to listen to such a long recording, but I just knew I needed to surrender to something!
As it happened this recording took me deep into the heart so I could sit deeper into the sensation, which felt very real, I wasn’t imagining it. I followed this practice with a yoga sequence, where I was exploring how I might move on my mat without gripping the groins, some of the armour that I have developed over the years as a way of protecting myself from perceived harm. I am always keen to unravel the movement patterns that are stuck – and stick me – in the past.
It is difficult to say what it was or if it was a combination of these practices, the bath going back in, the swim in the sea this morning, a past life awareness, a comment made to me by Eben’s pre-school manger as I dropped him off crying again this morning, or whether it was something I read or someone else said, but I returned to the kitchen after 90 minutes and the chest pain that has plagued my every waking hour since last Tuesday had finally eased, and I felt an incredible sense of relief and peace.
I emailed a friend and in that email I finally admitted what it was that had been bothering me and the pattern that needed to heard. The chest pain and the anxiety were there to draw my attention to a fear of dying. Not a fear of dying in so much as a fear of me losing my life, I can’t be sure that I am scared of that, I think once you’ve self-harmed and contemplated taking your own life, death doesn’t seem as scary as it might do to others, but I do have a fear of dying and the implications of this for my boys, that scares me, how they might be harmed by it.
I realised then how much of my life since becoming a mum six years ago has been lived with this fear bubbling away in the background. It ties in very well with self-love too, because I suddenly realised how much I have given myself a hard time since becoming a mum if I have done anything which I considered might make me ill, be that working too hard, eating the wrong foods, not exercising enough, drinking too many glasses of wine or whatever it might be. I have felt this enormous pressure too to heal past wounds so that any ingrained negative thinking patterns do not manifest as physical illness through toxicity to the liver or any other part of the body for that matter; cancer or otherwise.
Imagine the pressure to live up to such high expectations as I have set for myself these last six years! As a healer it has been torturous at times – it’s almost like too much knowledge is a not a good thing – the more I learn about healing and about metaphysical healing, the more I know that our health and wellbeing is a reflection of our thinking. I know this, yet it is the hardest thing in the world to change our thought patterns! For a start we need to become conscious of them, and secondly they are often so ingrained that we identify with them. We literally become our thoughts. So the more negative our thinking, especially out thinking towards ourselves (the inner critic), the more our health will suffer in the long term.
But it’s ironic really, because we can almost give ourselves a harder time when we are aware of this, simply because we think we should know better in the first place – but of course we are only human and we can only ever look at ourselves and our inner world from our current perspective and level of consciousness. It is only in recognising our patterns that we become more conscious and yet somehow we have to recognise them in the first place and so we almost have to fall into the trap first and then find our way out of it – from darkness comes light and all that.
So from the dark it came to light that all of this has been about fear of dying and a loss of safety. I am pretty sure that this is the reason both my boys suffer with separation anxiety, because they will be picking up on my subconscious fears around our collective safety, of something happening to them when they are not with me, and of something happening to me when I am not with them.
It is a loss of safety that is at the root to many of our neuroses. It gets to a point where we have to ask ourselves on what basis have we decided that we feel unsafe. Is it real or perceived? There is nothing to validate that mine is real, it is in my mind, an imagining, a collection of negative thinking. The mind is a powerful thing!
Reflecting over all of this in my mind, I was suddenly very clear the reason I have had such resistance to schooling, not the schooling itself, although I do have some reservations about the education ‘system’ but about leaving my children with people who are not immediate family. This has made me incredibly uncomfortable despite knowing that the people with whom they are left are very lovely people and would never intentionally harm them. But the mind is tricky like I say!
Needless to say the chest pain has totally gone now, as I knew it would, and my heart feels much lighter and my faith restored, because I was starting to doubt my whole perspective on life and on healing and on knowing thyself. I have also of course noticed other minor patterns that arise from this one and that has been welcomed too. The body doesn’t lie, I know this and wasn’t doubting it as such, but I was beginning to doubt my ability to understand what my body, my soul then, was trying to convey to me through the body.
What I have noticed actually, and what kept me holding off from following up with a health care professional, was that during times like this, when I know something is trying to come through and things need to change, when life feels stuck and dark and stagnant, I start desperately looking for things I can change. I question my career, my home, my relationships, thinking that if I change something on the outside then everything will be OK.
Yet I know in my heart of hearts that something has to change on the inside if it is true happiness and contentment that we seek, if we truly are committed to a path of awakening and consciousness. It is we who have to change, and the only way we can do this is by letting go of something on the inside, of surrendering our fixed mind, and seeing what reveals itself to us from inside the body where we are living during our time here on planet earth.
I’m grateful to Reiki and to the moon and to yoga and to the eclipses for shining a light into teh shadows and helping us all to wake up to our true selves, to peel away the layers and be less inhibited, limited an restricted by our old patterns and by how life has been lived. Together we can create a brand new future, and one bathed in light, from the heart…we just got to keep being courageous and doing the work to love ourselves; the rest will take care of itself.
Love Emma x
P.S. Pleased, if you do get chest pain and you are not sure it is metaphysical, then please do seek medical advice immediately!
