Light always follows the dark

Wow, that was some intense full moon and I know I am not the only one who is still feeling the ripple of it as the moon wanes. Usually the energy drops away pretty quickly afterwards, but not this time and I know some are still being squeezed, this intense sun energy not helping matters - and actually when you think about it, it was the closest full moon to the summer solstice next Tuesday and the full join merely reflects more sunlight onto the planet, and it was a super full moon too, so we have a lot of energy coming in!

Anyway I will never forget being sat up at a menhir watching the moon rise on Tuesday evening with one of my stone friends. It was incredible. The moon was huge! I had watched it building in the sky the few days prior to that, had been out walking, as I shared in my last blog, and ventured down to Fermain for a swim in her light as she rose on the Monday evening, menstruation having just literally started as I ventured down Fermain hill to meet a friend. I did feel an alignment it has to be said. So i shouldn’t have been surprised by the intensity of it, rocking cores and roots, the cards had all said it was coming and we all knew on some level…

But alas, I wasn’t expecting it to arrive so suddenly. My friend said something as the huge moon rose, her light lightening the landscape, it had been strange wandering about, and not having her light to guide us, she rose late, or at least it felt later than usual, and lower in the sky too as she followed her path around to the west, and that was that. The way the words were spoken, or, more to the point, and it really is more to the point, the way I received them and interpreted them triggered me big time. A very old pattern was squeezed and my power was automatically sucked from me.

I spent the next couple of hours trying to process. I was extremely tired. Tired in a way I have not been for an awfully long time. So tired that I had to give in and leave earlier than I would usually. So tired that I barely remember the drive home as I was so incredibly desperate to get to bed. I never feel that tired. I never have that much of a need for my bed. It was the strangest feeling of all this stuff coming up for me and this feeling that the life forcs had literally been sucked from me. In my mind I blamed my friend, it was he who had taken my power away, and with that blame the victimhood came in, poor old me.

I awoke the next morning totally depleted. I hadn’t had enough sleep, Eben awoke super early and i was not impressed my this, but alas, one has to keep going. I was well and truly stuck in victimhood albeit I couldn’t see it at the time. Very old feelings of hopelessness, despair and just being sick of this world came in. I’m familiar with this feelings, i spent much of my later twenties feeling them, and I write at length about that in my book From Darkness Comes Light, for they were the feelings that fed my depression for many years.

It’s a feeling that when it’s acute, makes me want to take myself away from the world, because it seems so pointless and hopeless being here. I feel utterly powerless to make changes and just feel very angry with it all. It’s not a feeling I experience these days so it was interesting to be able to witness it, knowing on one level it was an old pattern which had been triggered and which now needed healing and releasing, and on another being caught up in it to the extent I ranted at home, shouted a bit, and then cried a lot.

But fortunately it passed quickly and I could see it for what it is/was. I could see that my friend didn’t take my power away, how could he? No one can take our power away, sure they can trigger us, find our weak spots, but it is US who GIVE OUR POWER AWAY. The tone of his voice had triggered a memory, of being criticised, and my reaction to the notion that I was being criticised has been to internalise it, consider myself bad/wrong/useless and with that step into victimhood and give my power away and enter into a state of depression (and sometimes anxiety).

I was so joyful to finally see this pattern and understand what I have been doing since a child. We all have patterns, that become unhelpful, that constantly keep us stuck in the past, that cause us to react in the same way we’ve done our whole lives. While this pattern hasn’t been triggered for a long while, it was clearly still there, and needed to be gone, for me to find another way to be, that does not automatically pop me into victimhood each time there is a trigger and especially on which I interpret as criticism. But it could be any other trigger, that somehow makes me feel insecure and not worthy.

Anyway, I realised too that the process of reclaiming my power has always been transformative, so the perceived loss of power has played a role in my knowing more of myself. However it used to take months, if not years, of bobbing around in and out of depression, until I found yoga and Reiki and came to understand a little more of what was happening, and these modalities helped me to strengthen and reclaim my power when it dropped out. I now I realise that those were the times, which I might have named ‘times of awakening’, the times when rally all that happened was I reclaimed my power, and with that my centre and greater wholeness.

Usually that process caused me to dig deeper into practice and into heart and to follow my inner guidance, even though it always tends to go against the flow of society and of others’ expectations for me. Again this all feeds the pattern around victimhood - often in life we do things not because we want to, but because others want us to do them - and this causes us to give our power away because we are going against our own wisdom and nature. We can also give our power away to the extent that the only way we can think to gain some back again is to find some way to control our inner world, whether that be through eating disorder or obsessive behaviour, some way that we can feel that we own our life, just a little…

This all became very clear to me on Thursday, it took a whole day of swimming in the discomfort of the muddiness, trying not to sink, and yet tempted by the sinking, to find the light and my way again. I should be grateful though, in the past it might have taken me weeks or months to clear an old pattern, being stuck in my discomfort during that period, reaching out to therapists for help. The other day it took 24 hours of going deep into myself with lots of Reiki and paying attention to what each of my clients was saying as they each carry a message (we learn from each other), and to a soul friend, who helped me to shift my perspective.

Now I’ve seen that it is not about being criticised, because that’s just my mind that determines that anyway, as fas as my friend was concerned, he wasn’t criticising me, he was trying to help me understand something, so it was literally my mind that interpreted it a certain way because the context is clearly a weak spot for me, and my ego didn’t like it. Always the ego!

But because the mind searches for previous examples of ‘the feeling’ and labelled it ‘criticism’ it followed the pattern…criticise means being attacked, so we must therefore retreat into ourself and give yourself a hard time for not being ‘good enough’ because if we were good enough we wouldn’t have been criticised. See, it’s a very old child-like pattern around the notion of goodness which runs deep - we are encouraged from a young age to be ‘good’ children. And if we take that on as a truth as I did and most others did too, then when we feel we are somehow bad, we will have a pattern of giving ourselves a very hard time and give our power away in that moment of turning in on ourselves.

It serves no one to play the victim and give our power away. I don’t want to give my power away! And yes, it is a process, and yes, the reclaiming as I said, can help us to transform, because we have to, at some point, let go of our victimhood and that process, of digging deeper, can be enlightening, and can cause us to make decisions that change our life in innumerable ways, but at the same time, there are other kinder ways that facilitate, allow and support that too, and I’m definitely done with the old ways that disempower and close down my heart and soul to the world.

So seeing a pattern is helpful, because then we will more likely see it next time it comes too. And it will come. There will be a time soon when I feel like I am being criticised but I will have a better chance at making a better choice, a moment where I will be able to catch myself, and consider how I respond - whether I react the same way I’ve always done of retreat, withdraw, give power away and step into victimhood, or stay in my power, in my centre, acknowledge the situation and make a kinder and more heart orientated way of managing it. What I hope to do is catch myself and laugh at my silly monkey mind with its crazy mind games, to acknowledge what is happening and then just smile and move on.

Someone may well be criticising me, but I still have a choice about how I respond to it. At the end of the day people criticise us from THEIR perspective. It’s from their way of seeing the world and how they think we should ‘be’ within it. And at the end of the day why should we care? That’s their stuff not ours. You can be guaranteed that anyone criticising us, is criticising themselves far more. So we can be compassionate to that, and forgiving of their need to externalise their crap! We can be so good at projecting our rubbish onto others, but as the other, we have a choice about whether we let it affect us or not.

Anyway, its clear to say, from my various conversations with clients and friends that the moon was most definitely bringing up old patterns for each of us that now need to go, especially old patterns around loss of power and insecurity and closing of hearts. With that there may be heightened feelings of anxiety and paranoia, depending on our patterning. Tied in with all this is self worth, and the moon was also bringing up patterning around joy and deserving - do we allow our joy, move towards it, or when it appears do we sabotage it because we don’t feel we are worthy, deserving or enough for it? Further, are fearful of it being whipped away from us, so better not to go there in the first place, keep the heart a little bit closed?

I certainly noticed myself sabotaging joy because of my inherent vulnerability and when I acknowledged this it felt like a huge weight was released from my heart. I realised the subtleties of our defence and how we might think we’re open hearted and able to love unconditionally, but when it comes down to it, we can be very quick to pop up the defences and attach conditions to our love, based on previous experiences around loss of safety and giving our power away/feeling that we’ve lost control etc. In the process we allow our victimhood and start blaming others and we close our heart.

When i close my heart, as i did the other evening, I feel a depression because a part of me is not allowed expression. It’s not easy to explain, I make an attempt in my book on depression, but depression, that feeling of constriction and darkness is generally an indication that I’ve outgrown my life, that i need to let go of a pattern that is keeping my heart closed down and my soul in some way restricted. So when the trigger comes, it’s actually a gift, because itfgives us the opportunity to see it for what it is and break through to the other side. It’s never easy, we have to break down to break through, but this is all part of the journey to greater love and wholeness.

The reason its not easy is because a part of our ego construct, the part that is trying to keep us safe by setting up the pattern in the first place needs to drop away, it needs to be annihilated, but of course the ego doesn’t want to be annihilated so it fights. The fight is the messy bit because essentially we’re up against ourselves, but we can very easily externalise this and blame others and fight with them. It’s tough sometimes to work through our crap and see it for what it is. But if we have chosen the path of heart and spiritual growth then we have no choice. It doesn’t just happen. We have to do teh work. And the work is tough. And many give up and others get lost along the way. It helps to know we’re not alone and to have a good support network who can guide us through to the other side.

At the end of the day the light always follows the dark and sometimes we need to go into the dark to find a new way. It generally involves surrendering, letting go of everything we thought was true and real to instead be shown a new way. The new way will inevitably allow more heart and soul and make us feel infinitely lighter and more joyful in the process.

And on that note as we approach the lightest day of the year, we can anticipate more of our darkness popping to the surface to be cleared. So be gentle and follow the joy, pay attention to the patterns as they arise. I am reminded of Rumi’s poem, The Guesthouse, and how each thing that comes, however testing it might be, is really a gift to one you up to some new delight.

As for me, I’m off to Glastonbury on Sunday, for a little spiritual pilgrimage, ending up at Stonehenge for midsummer’s eve on Monday and sunrise on the solstice on Tuesday… my traveling buddy, Elijah, is coming along with me, so we’ll do some exploring, and my sister-in law, Star, and neice, Willow, are joining us at Stonehenge, arriving as they are from Australia with my brother, Ross, this afternoon. Exciting times!

Have an amazing weekend.

Love Emma x