Ah the good old letting go...
The moon always brings a lesson if we’re open to it and this new moon in Virgo was no different. I thought I’d ridden it well, it didn’t seem to be too turbulent, at least at the time. But what I have started noticing is that in the days that follow, both the new and full moon, the effect can be felt more strongly than on the actual day/night itself. At least, it takes a few days for the learning to unravel and a few more days to understand exactly what the hell just happened!
This week was no different. Bumbling through Monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday came, a SHEN session with the lovely Jo, and out came the rage! You’ve got to love a SHEN session for the release it brings. Another day later and I was stuck righto in the middle of it, but also fortunate to spend the day giving Reiki, which always helps me to see the wood through the trees, so to speak, because of the peace and clarity that it can bring. I LOVE Reiki. I long for the world to be imbued with Reiki!
The lesson of course, as always, as always (deep sigh), is one of letting go and surrounding to what is, rather than trying to make things different to fit our idea of how we think things should be. There’s every possibility that things will turn out as we might like them to, for life to fit our imagination of it, but often the reality is very different.
This letting go is so, so hard because we all love an illusion, an imagined reality than the one we are actually living. It’s one thing letting go of saying eating chocolate, or of seeing a toxic friend (an oxymoron in itself), quite another letting go of how we think things should be and what life should look like and instead, let life find its own way (and our children find their own way too). This if course is the good old case of illusion versus realty. How we love an illusion!
It’s not lost on me that I was chatting about this with my philosophy teacher this week, about purusha and prakriti, about the real and the unreal. How we identify with the creative energy of prakriti, believing it to be permanent, but it is not, it is continuously moving and impermanent. Everything we experience comes and goes, we have to accept change and for the most part endure it. We must find a way therefore to ride it, and not expand and waste our energy fighting it. The permanent, real, eternal never changing is of course purusha, pure consciousness, but we continuously confuse that with prakriti.
So of course the lesson is one of accepting the current reality however challenging this is, and finding the courage and strength to surrender to it, until this reality changes and another one creates itself instead.
There are many people I know at the moment who are ill, and this too highlights the lesson. Not least in terms of our impermanence but also in recognising that this is only a momentary moment in the journey of our soul and taking comfort in that - that we are moving from death to re-birth, to death to re-birth until such time as the soul fully recognises itself and can be free from this otherwise continuous cycle.
Also, it brings up the whole notion of letting things be, and of letting go into it, whatever that illness brings or means. Of the deepest surrender when we are ill and may not get better. This brings up all sorts of other lessons around the nature of healing versus cure and what this means for the individual, something that we talk about during the Reiki attunement sessions.
What I have found helpful during this time, is reading Steve Biddulph’s new book about being fully human. It should be a textbook to accompany life, maybe it’s just where I am in my life but his words resonated on a deep level and while on the one hand, it allowed me to buy into a bit of the illusion - how things should be - which brought up a bit of the moon’s dis-resonance, there was also much comfort in his words.
Talking of books, please don’t forget about my own books, for anyone going through IVF, please do pass them a copy of Dancing with the Moon, and for anyone who wants to learn more about the Himalayas and Tibetan Buddhism then Namaste too. Both available from Amazon;-)
Oh and don’t forget to come and join me at class next week. My yoga practice has taken me back to my Buddhist roots all those years ago in Nepal, and I have found myself enjoying the meditative quality of this slower practice. After all, yoga is about containing the mind. Oh the mind!
Love Emma x
