Sark and yoga
We were thoroughly spoilt on Sark for our second autumnal retreat last weekend. The weather was amazing! I felt blessed, as if we might have done something right in a previous life, until my dad reminded me that we’ve had some dodgy weather ones over the years and last year the October retreat was even postponed due to strong winds, so you can never be quite sure.
However, the weather was very well received, life has been a touch on the challenging side these last few months with curved balls coming in. I’m very aware that every curse brings a blessing, and that sometimes we have to go through the mill to come out stronger the other side, seeing more of our unhelpful patterns in the process, but a break, quite literally, with sunshine and yoga was perfectly timed.
Adam and Katie even made it out to the dolmen with me one of the nights and we were treated to a wonderful dark night sky with the milky way overhead and fairy glimpses. I went one night on my own too. It is one of my favourite places, you feel like you’re getting away from it all, even on Little Sark. There is something very special about this place, untouched as it is in many parts by civilisation. I accidentally left my rods there that second night so had to hot foot it back there the next day before our boat and felt as if the dolmen was drawing me back there for a reason, and it was, but it won’t mean anything to anyone who’s not already a fan of dolmens!
As for the yoga, well I LOVED it. The students were all amazing, Jan was on super form over the weekend, and I felt as if there really was a deeper enquiry going on. I know I keep going on about it, but I suppose it was reinforced earlier by stumbling across an interview with Angela Farmer on YouTube. She is an inspiring teacher and what she said totally resonated when she explained that all of a sudden she woke up one day to realise that while she was passionate about yoga and it had undoubtably changed her physical form, it was merely feeding her motivation towards achievement to the extent that she was stuck on the inside. She realised, really, that she was practising from a masculine perspective, single focused, goal orientated and linear.
This awareness changed her, as it did me too when i had a similar realisation before that first lockdown when I visited a Scaravelli teacher in Littlehampton, who had been recommended to me by a local yoga teacher in a village in the Outer Hebrides on our trip to see the Callanish stones. It was one of those synchronistic moments that you know as meant to be, because it totally changed my life simply because it changed my approach to yoga in a very big way. This is exactly what happened to Angela too and I take great comfort from that, because it can get lonely on the classical yoga path of raising consciousness (opposed to refining physical form).
Like my yoga teacher, and me in turn, Angela was drawn to focus on releasing the belly so that there could be much greater femininity and inner transformation in her practice. My regular students will have noticed this themselves, as we keep coming back to the belly and sorting from there too. It’s a very powerful place of transformation - you only have to think of what happens in the digestive system to know it is a place of inner transformation!
Like Angela, I had gotten to a point where I was stuck with the same mental and emotional patterning, albeit that my physical body had grown in strength and flexibility over the years. It has been truly life changing to go deeper and transform from the inside out - becoming downward facing dog, inhabiting the body rather than just doing a posture for the sake of it, to tick a box, in my mind as much as in any sequence structure.
Angela was explaining that after this revelation she wondered how she might teach. That first class she saw a lady in a forward fold. Normally she would have helped her go further by applying pressure to her back to push her deeper into the posture, something I too might have done in the past. Instead though, she could see that her back looked very tight and rigid both under and inside and that she was carrying tremendous emotional pain or something similar. So instead she put her hand softly on the student’s back and it started to melt, the student started to cry a lot and the back completely softened down.
That was a turning point for Angela, and she comments that you can push and pull yourself and other people and the body will respond like a tired horse but eventually it breaks down (many of you know this with your shoulder, knee and back issues). Eventually we might then realise that everything we feel and everything that happens to us is experienced and lived in the body. If there is some great pain from the past in the body then it won’t go away until we go into it and let it unravel itself. Pushing, pulling, repressing and denying it won’t let that happen. I couldn’t agree more. This is exactly where yoga has taken me too, and while it goes against the grain, I am so grateful for that.
The body is not designed to follow a straight line and why would we want it to do that anyway. It is a body of curves and round spaces. Thus the body might find a straight line but from a curved path. Sadly these days yoga often overlooks the energy of the body, and it has instead become a form of physical training, contracting the muscles and pushing and pulling to change external form. This approach might be helpful for athletes, or those who need to strengthen themselves physically, but it doesn’t help us to get in touch with energy and emotions so that we may notice the energy blocks within us.
For me, it’s about understanding more of our body, and being kind and compassionate to it. Does the inner being get the nurturing and enlivenment it requires, does it feel empowered, do we feel more comfortable in ourself and in our surroundings, so that we need the outer form less and less? These are really valid questions to ask ourselves. If yoga is merely fuelling our neuroses and focus on external form, keeping us stuck in unhelpful inner patterns (of lack of self worth and self belief and not being comfortable in our own skin, for example, of needing to dramatise our life and blame others and negate responsibility for ourselves and our decisions made) and feeding our need to achieve for the sake of achievement alone, then maybe we should take a moment to check in with it and ask ourselves if it’s truly helpful.
It takes courage to recognise that we are no longer practising in a way that is feeding and sustaining us, enlivening us then. It takes even more courage to do something about it and find another way. More often than not, we are led that way. Maybe our teacher makes changes and we go with the flow of it, or maybe another teacher enters our life, perhaps we have some coincidental or synchronistic moment, maybe you are reading this now and questioning things a bit. It’s never easy taking a new path, and yet really it’s all part of THE path, it just feels a little different and it takes time to settle into that.
I’ve said it before, but when my teacher entered my life in that synchronistic way, it took me a good six months or so to let go of my old vinyasa and relatively unconscious push and pull way of practising. Because at that point, I still associated yoga with exercise and felt that I had to exercise in my practice to feel as if I’d practised properly on any given day. Thus I’d take an hour session with my teacher where we might explore just one or two postures, and then I’d do another 45 minutes or so, to do the ‘proper’ exercise practice.
At some point I came to the realisation, like Angela, that what I was practising was keeping me stuck in the past and that I was now ready to move beyond the notion of yoga being about exercise. It was a huge shift for me mentally. But my body absolutely relished it. It was so weary (as was my soul) of all the pushing and pulling and the mental patterning that followed all this, all the hardening and masculine energy challenging my inner feminine. I haven’t looked back since.
Plus it keeps changing. Yoga is organic and when I don’t see my teacher for a while then it starts to move into something that comes from the inner teacher instead. Initially I had to be mindful not to let old habits come back again, but with time they’ve just dropped away. I did try an online vinyasa class a few months ago and I had to turn it off, it lacked depth and vitality, I was simply moving for the sake of moving, in and out of postures without actually inhabiting my body, or the postures themselves. They were not alive and the practice did not make me feel alive either.
I love yoga and I love how it takes us on these journeys, to the softer and more vulnerable places on the inside. It’s funny too as one of my retreat students was saying how she struggles with some of the visualisations, the ducks in the sacred lake for example, given to explain the fullness and sacredness of the pelvis and the direction of its flow (ducks was the first bird to come to mind!) was a step too far for her. Yet the body loves visualisation, it loves imagery, but the rational mind does not. In yoga we are trying to get beyond the rational mind, as this has a tendency to limit us in some way. We are trying to get to the belly really, of releasing the need to control and to let go into each moment as it unfolds. Tricky I know.
Anyway I could go on for hours, but it was really just to say how deeply inspired I was by watching Angela and all the students on Sark because she was and they were validating all I feel about what yoga really is. If we refer to the classical yoga texts, the Yoga Sutras for example then, yoga is about the containment of the mind so that one can realise purusha, the eternal self. So we have to go deep to remove all the crap that causes us to misidentify with this. We have to let go of even believing that we know the self. It’s deeper still.
So we keep going deeper. And with luck we’ll be able to enjoy many more Sark retreats so that we can be so beautifully held by the vibration of this sacred land. When you look at the geology of the place then it really is mind blowing. There was a large boulder of rose quartz found in the north of the island from the neolithic age. There’s also serpentine balls to be found and all sorts of quartz, red jasper, yellow jasper, pyrite copper, the list goes on…and even a Goddess. The island is blessed. And we are so very lucky to have it on our doorstep here on Guernsey.
Love Emma x
