The meeting of sky and earth

[Warning: A long one!]

Well I don’t know about anyone else but I loved the full moon last Monday. This wonderfully settled weather meant I got to get out in it lots as well, not only watching it rise and set, but swimming in it and staying out in it a couple of nights too. Maybe it helped that I am a Cancerian so there was a resonance. Who knows!

But what I do know is that it ushered in a whole heap of clarity and inspiration, which meant the last few days have been lived manically as I have tried to transform some of my ideas into manifest. One thing I’m really excited about is finally setting up a session to coincide with Beltane to celebrate the wisdom of the sacred womb space and acknowledge the magic of the menstrual cycle. More on that to follow on the website.

The moon definitely highlighted again that we are between worlds. I have been talking and writing about this recently, that we cannot go back but we don’t yet know altogether where we are going either. This is partly because we have to find a new way, I wrote about that sometime recently too, that it cannot be based on what has happened previously because that is just bringing in more of the old, more of what has been done and what now needs to change, at least from a perspective basis.

It’s a bit like the psychologist we saw for our boys a few months ago who, in reference to Elijah, asked whether I really want to put him into a system that I know isn’t working, both for his sake and the sake of society. It was something along the lines of, ‘there you are, raising him to think outside the box and yet you’re boxing him and wondering why he doesn’t fit in and suffers acute anxiety as a result of it’. 

Ultimately he didn’t feel safe. That world of systemised education, the one that so many perceive as safe, was not having that effect on him. Despite all the wonderful efforts of the staff, he still didn’t feel safe, the environment was not support to his need to be outside in nature and to learn at his own pace, allowing for his specific educational and other needs. 

There’s a broader subject to be written about here, to share the story about Elijah leaving the education system, in the hope that it may help those of you navigating unhappy and anxious children, who have particular needs, which aren’t able to be met by mainstream education. But the point for now is that when I drilled down to try to work out my residual fear about taking him out of school, it became apparent that this was around my fear of loss of safety too. 

I realised that my conditioning was such that in my head having a good education, the motivator in my life for many years, was essential in ensuring my safety. The programming went something like - if I had a good education then I could be assured a good job, one that paid me well and ensured my security. This was paramount in the world in which I grew up, the notion of security. My whole educational and societal conditioning supported this. It was validated everywhere I looked, especially here on Guernsey where accumulation of wealth for accumulation of wealth’s sake is common.

This was more essential than anything else, valued above happiness, valued above interaction with nature, valued more than appreciating one’s own nature. Simply because a life based on security – so was the message - would keep me safe. But what was overlooked was the fact that putting my security and safety above everything else, was not actually making me fulfilled or indeed happy. 

Many of you know this already and I go into much more depth in my new book in the final stages of editing, From Darkness Comes Light, but by my mid-twenties, living a life based on my security (as a form of safety) resulted in me suffering depression and eating disorder, and I self-harmed in ways unimaginable at times, my inner narrative was appallingly self-depreciating and critical.  I hated and loathed myself and the world I was then living, life seemed so pointless, hard work and nothing else, and I knew that this was not the life I wanted to be living to the extent that I contemplated taking my own life and made a drunken half-hearted effort to set that in motion as a cry for help more than anything. 

That’s when yoga and Reiki soon entered my life and ultimately saved me, showing me that we are all supported, that in our darkest moments something meets us and shows us another way. I couldn’t carry on, not that way, and while it took two years for my life to unravel from that point of despair, I never once looked back and wished I’d kept treading that same miserable and unfulfilling path. The sacrifice of giving up my security was not easy at times, so ingrained in me was it, still now, 18 years on there are remnants of it that cause me to sometimes question myself. 

The journey to unpick and understand the effect of feelings around perceived loss of safety has been paramount to my healing journey. All of us have a fear around our safety, it comes with us and is reinforced during childhood and beyond. If we’re not careful it’ll result in acute anxiety in adulthood, an inability to live the life of our dreams and our potential simply because we are stuck in fear. Fear is of course at the root of this all. Fear of loss of safety, of annihilation, of not being alive anymore.

It’s been quite a journey, deep into the root chakra and deep into the mind to question the false beliefs I have been holding which feed my fear. I’m very aware that there is nothing to fear but fear itself and for me it has always been important to address fears because they limit our experience of life. We have so much potential but when fear pops up, it prevents us grasping opportunities and accessing deeper parts of self. It’s incredible how fear stops people living while they are alive.

We have only to consider Covid, and the manner in which it has stuck people in time. I am still surprised, even now, even at this stage of the pandemic, to see some of the lengths people take to avoid catching Covid because their fear of dying from it – a falsehood in the main, a fear bred by media and politicians to control – is so great. As a humanity we are so easily controlled by fear, governments know this and play into it frequently. The propaganda is unreal, yet for many it is absolutely real and they buy into it to the extent that they believe it to be an absolute truth.

Anyhow, in my unravelling, to seek out any patterns of fear around taking Elijah out of systemised education, I was fascinated to discover that fear of loss of safety was the root to all my overwork and attempts at over achievement. Well that and issues around self-worth and goodness. But ultimately I worked hard to stay safe, because I had a belief that the one served the other. 

Furthermore, my mind had been programmed to believe that formal education was paramount, would help me pass exams, get qualifications, earn money, keep safe. What would happen to Elijah if I took this safety net away from him? This was not helped by my background, both my parents, my aunt and uncle, my cousin, Ewan’s mum and sister, all of them are ex-teachers, educationalists, a big part of their lives has been spent in education, educating and helping children. They each put their heart and soul into it and here I was asking them to help me take Elijah’s away from it and all they believed should support him.

It was a huge mind-set change for each of them but fortunately (or unfortunately in respect of Elijah’s suffering) the situation became so critical that everyone finally realised that there was no other way. Their love for the wellbeing of Elijah was greater than their need to hold onto a particular way of seeing things, based on of their own conditioning about that being the only way. They were prepared to sacrifice that perspective, to help him and us find another way that met Elijah’s individual needs come what may. 

We came together and we are gradually cultivating a new way, one that has not been lived previously, that none of us can be certain about, that we are navigating day by day, week by week and hoping that it provides Elijah with all he needs and that he’ll be able to stand on his own two feet by the end of it.

This too has been a huge theme that came up with the moon, the idea of standing on our own two feet and standing up for what we believe in. I had to dig deep into that one too, more root chakra. I could feel it in my body, the many ways in which I push up away from the earth or push down, rather than just resting into it and allowing the earth to support me. This is ultimately about trust, another theme the moon highlighted. Because finding a new way that has not been lived previously demands trust. It also demands that we stand up on our own two feet and for what we believe in. 

We have also been asked to question the many ways we are conditioned to think and behave in this world, of the ways that our perspective has been moulded by society, parental, cultural and educational expectation and influence. Today I was talking to a 16 year old who is studying for her GCSEs and she was commenting that the pressure is intense this year and all she does is study and sleep and that she has to do this to get a good job. 

I couldn’t help thinking how ridiculous that is, that we give up our youth to work for the job we’ll later have and then we give up adult hood to work in preparation for retirement. And then if we’re lucky we’ll get a good few years to enjoy ourselves, if we manage to keep our health. Then we die. If we haven’t died on the way there.

I know, I know. That’s what we do. but when did it become like this. Which generation decided that this should be the way. And is it not time now to find another way. I mean there is no rule book right. Sure we have religious texts which suggest a way for living. We have politicians too who tell us how to live and lawmakers who make it so and police who ensure that we all abide and without that, yes, maybe we’d end up in anarchy. But there’s a lot of anarchy anyway. Look at all the protests about government reaction to Covid and rules on mandatory vaccinations, not that a lot of this makes it to mainstream media. 

Anyway, yesterday on my yoga mat, I was in the zone, managed to delve quite deep and all of a sudden I tracked a very thin band of tension coming up either side of my upper spine, just inside each shoulder blade, all the way up my neck and I had this image of wearing reins. I was never put in reins as a child, so it wasn’t an actual memory, but in that moment all I could feel was the frustrated of being restrained, of not being free. 

 I could feel the panic in my breath and the straining against the reins to try to writher myself out of them. It was so real that it completely absorbed my attention. I worked with the sensation and my breath to free the tension and the perceived binding and I felt an enormous sense of relief, as it felt as if it had been held there for a very long time and because it would have brought in more of the same, just by having a resonance in the cells, of feeling trapped. I could trace it down into my ankle too, I couldn’t move forward. 

I realised later how much this represents where we are at currently. We have all been restrained, maybe not by reins but by patriarchy. This is what also came up on the moon, the extent to which patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in us, held in our cells, our wombs, our hearts, our throat, keeping us limited and restrained to a certain way of seeing the world, of relating to self. 

There is so much more to us than we can ever realise but we have been trained to only access a certain part of it. When we begin the process of training, of liberation and setting our mind free, then we find other aspects that often set us aside from the rest who begin to perceive us as mad because we are suddenly living and behaving differently. We see things differently, quite literally. There are other realms within this realm for example but very few have the capacity to access these, they have been literally trained against seeing. 

 The moon was highlighting ALL of this. And it was no surprise that I found myself with a lump in my throat that I couldn’t shift. I went for SHEN in the end and I discovered that it was the lump of frustration, of rage, of emotion that I had not expressed, that sat there waiting for me to find my voice, not only to scream, but to express myself without fear of censorship by myself or others - feel that I can speak my truth without being reprimanded by anyone. 

Because let’s face it, while we say we’re free, we’re really not and Covid has highlighted this too. We are told we live in a world where there is freedom of speech but this isn’t true. Many people have not been able to speak their truth, have not been able to say what they want to say, even if those word are, “I didn’t get the vaccine”, or “I didn’t get the booster” or “I don’t agree with wearing masks outside in the playground when our children are in school together all day and in a few minutes we could all go to a café or the park together and stand closer and not wear a face mask”. You know, there’s so much that has had to go unsaid for fear of…

Which brings us full circle to safety. Something caught my eye about this today and again it is in reference to the vaccine and it’s not intentional that I use this as an example, I’m not anti-vaccine (see how I have to validate that for fear of…), it just stood out to me as a good illustrator of how far we’ve gone.  The BBC website quoted Dr Nikki Kanani, medical director of primary care for NHS England as saying: “…and think about the best way to make sure that we’re all protected, and that we’re all as safe as possible, because we are very much in this together and it’s down to us to look after each other too”.

Safe! You’d have thought that by now, two years into the pandemic, we’d have realised that a vaccine, like money, is not going to make us safe. It’s just feeding more of the illusion. Politicians, pharmaceutical companies, scientists, they all promote our safety with their narrative, their drugs and their statistics, but are we truly feeling safe? I know plenty of people who are vaccinated and boosted and they still don’t feel safe. I know plenty of people who earn a lot of money but they don’t feel safe, there is always the risk of losing everything they have. There is always the risk of losing everything we hold onto in a vague attempt to make us feel safe. 

Safety doesn’t come from outside of ourselves and fortunately more people are beginning to realise this, to wake up to the narrative we have been fed. That society as we know it, with all its systems and attempts at control, our hangover from patriarchy, even this does not make us feel safe. No amount of anything will prevent us from dying if our time is up. This is life and this is karma. It plays itself out and we cannot stop it.  

Thus the only time we’ll safe is when we accept our reality, find our feet and trust in the earth and our sacred path here on Planet Earth. Earth meets us if we meet the Earth. Nature holds us if we let her. She makes us feel safe. She holds us. She will protect us too, if we let her. If you feel stressed and anxious, get out into nature. You cannot help but be calmed by being in nature. One of the greatest gifts to come from taking Elijah out of school is the time we now spend outside, in nature. We are in nature a huge amount and funnily enough he’s a much happier child for it.

He climbs trees, he runs wild on the beach, he makes fires, he cuts wood, he whittles, he is finding a new way of being that allows more of his nature, that allows him to be him, that doesn’t try to make him into someone who fits society, he is learning to be his own person and stand in his own truth. He’s lucky, he has an amazing support network supporting him. But he also has this land here on Guernsey, the earth to sustain and nourish him and we are each in this family benefitting. 

The shift we are anticipating, is not about feeding more of our patriarchal conditioning around competing with each other for the sake of perceived ‘success’ and ‘achievement’, obsession with results and outcome. That way has to come to an end. This is a way about being much more present and living in harmony with each other and the earth. Of supporting each other as a collective and appreciating all that nature has to offer us. Essentially it is about re-discovering and appreciating the sacred both inside us and outside of us too.

I was so inspired by Mac Macartney’s book The Children’s Fire: A Heart Song of a People. In this he writes about Indigenous peoples in Northern California who came together and agreed that, “No law, no decision, no action, nothing of any kind will be permitted to go out from this council of chiefs that will harm the children.” Essentially, “The Children’s Fire is a pledge to the welfare of unborn future children (human and non-human alike) but more profoundly it’s a pledge to life, a commitment to the responsibility carried by each successive generation to safeguard the vitality and regenerative capacity of the earth. It insists on a circular economy and it views any action that compromises the wellspring of creativity from which our species has emerged as sacrilege, an act of betrayal, evidence hinting at insanity.”

You can read more about this at https://macmacartney.com/portfolio/thechildrensfire/

We are the micro of the macro and what we do individually does have an impact on the greater whole. It’s the butterfly effect. So if we all focused on the earth’s dream of living in greater harmony then imagine how life might be lived for future generation. For here is the other thing, we are all in this together, I do agree with Dr Kanini on that, and it is down to each of us to look after each other, but not in the way she intends, not simply by taking a vaccination. Covid is offering us an enormous opportunity to look at how we’re living and make changes. 

We each need to learn to stand in our own nature, because when we approach life from this perspective, of recognising our own sacredness, then we are more likely to recognise it in everything around us. When we make decisions, these should be based on future generations, of protecting the earth for them, of passing on a way of living that is worth living. We need to change our ways, appreciate what is not working and have the courage and faith to find another way.

I have no doubt in the Earth’s capacity to help us, I trust in it. The Earth wants us to find another way, one that no longer destroys nature for the sake of wealth and power, one that no longer keeps us collectively stuck in fear. We need to move away from patriarchy’s deep conditioning and we each have a role to play in this, to unstick ourselves bit by bit. There are many ways that we can do this and we will each find our own way if we open to it and follow the path that is then gifted to us.

But we do need to cultivate trust and faith. We do need to dig deep into our root and crown chakras, and clear away the weeds that keep us stuck, that prevent us deepening our connection to earth below and sky above. This is about the sacred marriage, as above, so below, this is the balance of masculine and feminine energies, of all of creation being in balance. This is what the ancients celebrated, this is the whole point of dolmens and menhirs, of spiritual landscape. It is all about shaping energy to find greater balance – the meeting of sun and moon. [Listen/see Hang Massive’s The Secret Kissing of the Sun and the Moon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvmOoSFhhJ4

We need to listen to the whispering of our heart and be brave. We need to drop deeper into the innate wisdom and power of the womb space and be brave. We need to return time and time again to our centre and be brave. We need to open to our third eye and our inner knowing and be brave. We need to free our voice silenced all those years ago, by the church which attempted to silence those of us in the knowing of ancient ways of being and healing and living, all of those who were labelled heretic because they threatened patriarchal power.  

It’s time to heal those wounds in men and women. It’s time to stand our ground in our truth and appreciate our inherent gifts of clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience. It’s time to shift the perspective. To view Planet Earth and our time here on the earth in a whole different way - to value our life differently and to positively shift our collective values. It’s time to appreciate all the Planet gives us and to give back in return, not to destroy and take, take, take for wealth’s sake. It is time to put our personal agenda’s for glory aside and be in service to something greater than ourselves, for the generations to come.

That’s the mind shift – one that starts to not only see but live the bigger picture. So that our actions are considered for the greater whole, not just for our selfish gain, not just to give us a false sense of safety that merely feeds our fears and takes us further away from love. In the process I have a feeling that we’ll feel much more fulfilled and safe, part of something that brings us together, so that we hold each other simply by our presence – by being in our own nature and appreciating the sacredness of nature. It’s bold I know, but I have a feeing we’re all being prodded in that direction. We just have to step beyond the fear and let go and let go and let go into greater love.

Phew. That was a long one. I could waffle on, but I’ve got to get going. Have a good day!

Love Emma x