The winds of change
The winds of change have been blowing in. Change is in the air and the winds the last month have definitely been ushering this in.
At yoga this morning, there was an agitation in the air as people were reporting a range of symptoms form sleeplessness to tiredness to not being able to switch off. This is vata. Wind is vata. There has been a lot of vata in the air of late!
The one helpful thing we can do is lie on the earth, or at best, get our bare feet on the earth instead. The earth grounds us and literally brings earth into the body to counter all the air.
The other thing we can do is practice yoga. Yoga is a practice, I’ve written about that before, so we just need to roll our mat out, lie on it, breathe and connect with our body. Yoga will also help to earth us and ground us and calm us right down. It relieves our suffering - is the unlinking of our link to pain (see the Bhagavad Gita!).
We can practice Reiki too. Only this week a Reiki practitioner/yoga teacher asked me if it was safe to continue giving Reiki/teaching yoga while pregnant and whether she needed any particular protection technique. This interested me. I practised Reiki throughout both my pregnancies, my boys were infused with Reiki while they were eggs in my ovaries, let alone in the test tube and later as embryos inside me. I also practiced yoga literally up to the birth of both my boys.
Reiki by its very nature cannot harm, and yoga taught consciously should not harm either, but this highlighted to me how separate we are from our soul and our intuitive guidance, that even as Reiki practitioners and yoga teachers, we might question it. I never have, as it happens, because Reiki and yoga saved my life and connected me to soul and I have trusted in all this ever since.
This is not something you can learn from books or you can be taught by others. To cultivate faith we have to practice and feel it for ourselves, deepen our connection to spirit, to soul and to our intuition. It is not always easy, and it doesn’t tend to happen overnight. I have been practising daily for the best part of 17.5 years now, people forget that. Spiritual practices are exactly that, practices. We have to put in the effort.
Kriya yoga highlights this, that it is not enough then to talk about it, or imagine it, or read about it, we need to take action and we need to have awareness and not be attached to outcome. Unfortunately, in this day and age, the focus is always on outcome and the fruits of our labour to validate our place in the world - look at social media.
Yoga has in many instances become nothing more than an exercise class devoid of any philosophical or spiritual underpinning and basis, the soul has been ripped from it, as it has become instead a billion dollar industry. Like any fitness industry, it is becoming a fad. I can see it happening. People know that yoga could help them, by its very nature it relieves suffering, but people aren’t altogether prepared to practice it. To experience the benefits we have to practice and we have to be ok with practising for the sake of practising without being attached to outcome!
This is difficult in these times of instagram where it is all about what you look like in a posture rather than how you are living your life. Even the idea of the outcome is an illusion! We get lost in form and forget about the reason we came to yoga in the first place, and sometimes when we hit an emotion or some kind of obstacle (an injury or tightness) we give up, because it all becomes too much like hard work.
Reiki doesn’t let us bypass quite so easily, and this is the reason I really love it. Despite various organisations trying to organise Reiki and therefore running the risk of taking the soul out of it, it won’t let itself be abused like this. Reiki is Reiki. It is a spiritual healing technique. It is the energy of love. You cannot strip the soul from love, it’s an inherent part of it thank god. Like yoga though, it is a spiritual practice, so one does need to practice to truly connect with it.
Which brings me full circle. It is in the practising that we cultivate faith in the practice and also in ourselves. We begin to get out of our own way, to notice our neuroses, our insecurities and all those unhelpful and limiting core beliefs about our lack of worthiness and not being good enough. These drop away the more we practice and get beyond the mind and the ego and touch something deeper inside us that we know on a deep level is beautiful and pure, despite our inability to recognise it on the mundane level of our existence, instead filled with a lack of love for self.
This comes too in time, a deeper respect for our soul and inner light, for all that we are and have been and all the gifts we have brought with us into this lifetime. We bring with us lessons from others lifetimes too and karma that needs releasing and settling, so that we don’t keep taking it with us - and more - into any future lifetimes (yes Jan, we sometimes have to go to past lives too and the Akashic records, the records of each soul:-))
Often the questions we ask of others, are the questions we should be asking ourselves, tuning inwards and deepening our connection to our intuition (being in-touch). This asks us to lie still on the earth sometimes and breathe, practising yoga and Reiki for the fun and joy of it without any attachment to outcome. It asks us to drop our crap and our feelings of victimhood and blame hood and be present to this wonderful life that we have been gifted, if only we can realise it.
The wind is ushering in this change and the super full moon (as it is close to the earth) will be ushering in more of this next week too. We really are being asked to see beyond the illusion of this life that we are all living here on planet earth, to remember the dream and the way it was meant to be, and to let go of giving our power away to politicians, institutions, organisations and anything that tries to take the soul out of our being.
My yoga teacher and I were talking about the way modern yoga tries to train the body to be a certain way, much like our education system, as if we are all in a sausage factory and being churned out the same way, all of us the same sausage for ease of fitting into this world. Only that we’re not all the same, not at all, and nor should we be treated as such. She was telling me the story of the tiger trained for a circus. We can train a tiger to do something, much like we can train the foot to do something in yoga. But in the process, not only do we remove the tiger ness, the intelligence, the soul then, out of the tiger, but we remove the intelligence and soul out of our foot too.
Who are we beyond what we have been taught by our parents, education system and society? Who are we when we really drill down. It’s scary because the more we peel the layers away, the more we realise how much we have been limited by all our life experiences to date, and the more we have taken on everyone else’s stuff, their beliefs, prejudices and ways of seeing the world. We cling to our sense of right and wrong, forgetting that there is always two sides to a coin.
The only way out is to get deep within, being still and quiet and practising. Then we come to know our truth and we come to trust in it. We don’t doubt the soul despite the obstacles which will be place din our path to challenge it and to deepen our faith to it. It’s not all love and light on the spiritual path, more fool new age spiritualism for leading people down the illusionary path in thinking that this it is and for people buying into it. It’s not about wearing crystals or attending courses, it’s about doing the work on ourselves by ourselves and believing in it.
Enjoy the waxing moon energy, a fab time to plant seeds and cleanse crystals, also to go in and feel into the changing energy. Don’t forget to ground yourself too.
x
