Practicing and raising our vibration!
It’s been a funny old time, the Equinox ushered in a significant change for us all in some way or form, there was a whole heap of synchronicity flying around in my life at that time, and then onto the full moon, which was just amazing!
It honestly felt like a gift from the goddess, a clear sky and a very large moon, simply because she was closer to the earth than usual that evening. I went out later at night, rare for me, but to meet a friend who also shares a love of the goddess, the moon, dolmens, nature and working with energy.
I was buzzing for a good while off the back of all that energy and life had a certain fullness and vibrancy that comes from spending time on the earth and communing with it, watching sunrise and sunset, moon rise and moon set. This all coincided of course with the really high morning tides and that beautifully warm March weather, which found us enjoying the fisherman’s slip at Saints harbour for before-school swims. Bliss!
Then everything shifted again, because this is the nature of cycles and our own cycles too. My body started doing a re-aligning exercise, after the effect of all the shifting in vibration, what with an additional online Reiki attunement I received, and attuning others, plus the time spent in dolmens and witnessing nature’s cycle, which will always change things.
Admittedly, there was a sense of overwhelm about all that is going on here with Beinspired, as I attempt to write new material to allow for some of the ideas whizzing through my head of the workshops I’d like to share with you, both Reiki and yoga, such is my passion for both. Often I get asked, “how do you manage it all?”. It’s easy really, because of the practice.
Yoga and Reiki are both all about practice. The yoga sutras makes this very clear; in the first chapter, sutra 12, “abhyasa-vairagyabhyam tat-nirodhah, which means mastery of those [fluctuating activities of the mind] comes from practice together with detachment. Then sutra 13 reads, “tatra sthitau yatnah-abhyasah”, which is translated by Frans Moors as “practice is the sustained effort to remain there, in this place [or direction] of mental stability.”
In Reiki, Mrs Takata, the first female Reiki Master who is accredited with bringing Reiki to the West, stressed the importance of practice on ourselves first and foremost. At Reiki Level One we are invited to consciously develop a daily practice, so that we can extract the goodness and nourishment of Reiki on a daily basis. The more we practice, the greater our understanding and the greater our understanding, the more committed we are to practice!
Like yoga ‘trainings’, Reiki ‘trainings’ don’t really teach us Reiki; they teach us how to practice Reiki, and it is through practice, and practice alone, we come to understand Reiki more deeply – so it is with yoga too! And how do we practice? On ourselves first! Why is practice more important than study? Because yoga and Reiki are spiritual practices rather than learned skills. It is through practice that we strengthen our connection to what is already there, what is already ours: the access to primordial consciousness that is our birth right.
This is one of the many reasons I love Reiki, and of course yoga, albeit Reiki changes things in a different way. It’s more accessible for people for a start and it has less connotations attached to it - or perhaps that’s just my interpretation! Unfortunately yoga has now become so mainstream that it has lost (in my humble opinion) some of its essence, becoming little more than an exercise class, feeding our obsession with manipulating the body and being ‘seen’ to be someone.
This external ‘drive’ has become an obstacle for many on the spiritual path – many don’t even appreciate the inherently spiritual nature of yoga, and in our typical western way we have extracted the bits of eastern practice that feed more of our superficial nature and our resistance to go deeper. Not everyone, and I don’t mean to sound judgmental either.
Only that I have witnessed a significant shift in yoga over the last 15 years that I have been teaching. I’m grateful to my students for going deeper and appreciating the spiritual nature of yoga practice and regularly practising with me, because it is only through dedicated regular practice, on good days and bad days, that the potential of yoga unfolds in our lives.
With, Reiki, we know from the outset that it is a spiritual practice. Maybe people don’t realise this when they initially come for a treatment, but with attunements there is an eagerness to embrace the personal spiritual development aspect of Reiki, and the healing opportunity too. There is a recognition of what might have otherwise been lacking in their lives – a deep yearning for something beyond the mundane and material.
I have witnessed an increasing number of people drawn to this ancient practice over the last few years, especially. On some level, we know that this is a time of awakening, to move towards that which we thought was never possible and attempt to raise vibration – even the vocabulary around this has changed so that we can actually say this nowadays without people freaking out!
Or perhaps the point is, that I can no longer pretend that it is about anything other than discovering and realising the self and raising our vibration in the process for the good of humanity and this planet. It’s simple to me and the various synchronicity and coincidence in my own life recently have validated this to me – the earth talks of this too, a language that is beyond logic and our English vocabularly, that is embodied and known instead.
So how do we raised our vibration? Well it’s really easy. You just have to practice! I think people think it is more complicated than it is and this allows them to play out their “I’m not good enough” theme, which is huge, that and “I am not worthy”. You are good enough and you are worthy! You are a child of the creator, in whatever guise you use to describe the omniscient presence that supports our lives. It’s true. [I’m not religious – and I stress that, because the mention of creator and such is our conditioning that it makes people run a mile with fear of…gosh I don’t even know.]
So raising our vibration comes when we connect with higher divine consciousness. Reiki and Yoga allow this, so too visiting ancient sites, chanting mantra, meditating, connecting with feelings of love, oneness and connectedness with all other beings etc. This means avoiding anything which lowers and dampens our vibration such as alcohol, recreational drugs (including cannabis btw), negative and draining people, clutter, TV, heavy music, activities, spaces and places which in any way depress us and reduce our vibrancy and lower auric field etc.
It’s really important we keep our energy channels as clear as possible and eating a relatively clean diet is essential – it doesn’t have to be raw and vegan (definitely not in this colder weather) but energetically light is best, lots of vegetables, for example and being conscious of where food is coming from and the resonance it has picked up along the way, fresh and local over international and air freight, for example. Also we might try and prepare food with awareness and love – with Reiki too if we are Reiki attuned!
Connecting with nature is a must, getting our bare feet on the earth, on sand, our body too if we can. Spending time alone in nature is helpful, listening, truly listening to the sounds around us and taking it all in, being conscious of the land and the flora and fauna, the birds and insect life, the changing season and weather patterns. Taking deep breaths of fresh air, feeling the sun on our skin, being conscious of our footprint and the way in which we relate to Mother Earth.
We should never underestimate the power of positive thinking in keeping our vibration high either. Sometimes people say to me that they are doing all they can to keep themselves healthy with diet and exercise but are still suffering with some condition or another, and I then discover that they have an underlying negative mental imprinting, their thinking patterns both in relation to themselves and others are incredibly critical and negative and they hold on to outdated and unhelpful core beliefs.
The fundamental core beliefs that many fall victim to at some point include not being worthy, not being good enough, not being loveable, feeling unsafe and relating to the world as a bad and dangerous place, thinking everything is our fault, that we are somehow different/an outsider, that there’s something wrong with us. There’s no truth in our core beliefs, they are exactly that, ‘beliefs’, not truths. Beliefs we bought into at some point during our childhood, which are no longer helpful in adulthood.
Sadly though, they are self-perpetuating, like magnets they attract evidence that makes them stronger, and they repel those things that might challenge them. So if we feel unworthy, we will attract situations that feed our sense of unworthiness, and repel those situations, which may help to build our self-esteem and make us feel worthy. These core beliefs are formed early in our lives and shaped by our upbringing and experiences, by the language that was used by parents, caregivers, teachers and society at large at that time.
These core beliefs may well have been helpful initially, in helping us to make sense of our experiences, but they become harmful and unproductive later in life. We cling onto them though like any bad habit and increase toxicity in our auric field and further damaging our relationship with self. We continuously reinforce them too, to the extent that we don’t realise that we have a choice, that it is we (ha, the irony!) who choose to harm ourselves by holding onto these untrue core beliefs and repetitive negative mental imprintings. Every moment we have an opportunity to change our thinking.
It’s a form of self-harm in many respects, the way we cause so much of our suffering by the thoughts we think and the way we relate to ourselves. These core beliefs and our negative and self-critical thinking create our neuroses, our anxiety and depression, more so than life experience itself.
Some don’t make it to Reiki attunement sessions or a yoga classes, for example, such is the ingrained nature of their core beliefs, causing them to truly believe that they are not good enough, before they have even given it a try. Some loathe themselves and the way they look to the extent that they struggle to attend thinking that others will be judging them and forgetting that everyone has their own neurosis.
Thus we need to be increasingly honest with ourselves about the way we drain our own vibration. It’s all very well eating clean food and avoiding social media and the news, but if we then constantly criticise ourselves and give ourselves a hard time, judging others and feeding our fear in the process, then the effect of all our efforts are limited to an extent. We have to start on the inside, is my take on things. I know that’s terribly tricky, but otherwise we are just constantly bypassing.
And this is something else that I have witnessed frequently over the years, in yoga, where people say all the right things, look the part, but are bypassing, not doing the deeper work. Our modern yoga focused on exercise alone allows this – we are practicing yoga, but we are not always allowing yoga to touch and change us beyond increasing our physical flexibility and strength.
Many give up or take breaks when it begins to get a little more inwardly demanding. There are many reasons that people give for this, but at the end of the day, it’s difficult coming face to face with the many ways we have been kidding ourselves and creating so much of our own suffering, the many lies we tell ourselves and the manner in which we limit ourselves with our fixed thinking. This before we even get to the spiritual ego, which is probably our greatest obstacle on the spiritual path.
Often we just keep going around in circles, and nothing changes, not really, not long term, we still harbour the same insecurities and neurosis which might come and go, but are inherently there underneath it all. So we come back to the practice, and we commit to it, to one practice too (the yoga sutras stress this, choose one practice and stick to it). We practice through the highs and the lows, through the physical, mental and emotional discomfort, the resistance and agitation, the tears and the joy. It’s not all about love and light! If we think it is, then we should know that we are bypassing!
As far as connecting with our inner guide is concerned, well we all have one, that little voice inside that doesn’t sound like its coming from us. The trouble is, that little voice often gets drowned out by the bigger voice with all its judgements and opinions and attempts at organising and control. This is why we practice! To quieten the bigger voice so we can hear more of the smaller and quieter voice, that gently whispers to us, and guides us to allow more of our soul expression in this world, raising our vibration in the process.
The voice may have a different tone or a different accent, different terminology too, than our bigger voice. Sometimes the voice doesn’t come as words but as images and sounds, we should pay attention! There will be signs all around us guiding us, if only we can slow down and notice. The voice and the signs will be persistent and keep repeating, nudging us to pay attention, the message may even come through another person. Our bigger voice is generally self-critical and this little, quieter voice is different, coming from a place of love and kindness, supporting us in a positive direction.
Reiki absolutely helps us to connect with this voice and deepens our relationship with intuition so that we pay attention to the hunches we receive and act upon them – it is often the voice of our inner guide that has brought us to Reiki in the first place. The same can be said of yoga too, although I feel that more of us needs to be committed to Reiki than it does to yoga, simply because yoga doesn’t always demand so much of us initially – we just come and go from classes, cherry pick etc. in a way we don’t when we are undertaking our Reiki training.
Ultimately the universe, the creator, the goddess, our higher self, all of this is trying to help us raise our vibration and make this world a better place to live. I believe that once we can elevate our perspective to the bigger picture, our own limited neurosis seems less important, when we reflect on the individual role we play in the collective energy – we are the micro of the macro, the more we can love and accept ourselves, raise our vibration, the more the planet and all of humanity benefits. We just need to get out of our own way!
Happy practising!
Love Emma xx
