Staying centred

So here we are on the waxing moon, and another heat wave, despite the smell of autumn in the air in the mornings last week - we are lucky with this summer’s weather, but certainly the evenings are now drawing in. Many of my clients are in their own pattern of shifting too and there have been themes, no doubt reflecting the collective shifting, and the stars and planetary alignments.

The theme of ‘not being good enough’ has reared its head again and people are being asked to dig deeper into this, to see that it is just a mind game, just the mind telling us that we’re not good enough, a core belief we took on at one time or another because of the way we interpreted our world and the feedback we sought from others.

In fairness we are trained from a young age to consider ourselves not good enough. It’s a very good way of controlling us and helping to dumb us down, keeping us stuck in a state of disempowerment, where we feel powerless. It is this feeling that often feeds our anxiety and depression, because we easily lose our centre, our grounding and our faith. I see this energetic patterning time and time again.

Powers that be don’t want us standing in our power, or standing on our own two feet. They want to keep us feeling a little bit all over the place because we are easier to control then. I am not a conspiracy theorist by the way, I just see it clearly. We are literally trained not to like ourselves, criticised from a young age if we try to be different to others, there is an encouragement towards uniformity from teachers, care givers, culture and society as a whole. It can be a real battle to step outside of this AND feel empowered.

But essentially it’s all just a training and we are able to untrain as much as we are able to train. My yoga studies are all about the untraining, removing the layers of training, not least from my previous yoga studies but from my life generally, so that I am not restricted mentally, or indeed physically and emotionally, by how I have been trained to be, so that I might literally see things differently and view life from a shifted and new perspective, and accept and love myself in a way that I was never able to do previously simply because I was trained not to, and all this from constantly changing movement patterns in the body.

Thus much of my yoga practice is about moving in a myriad of ways that bring me to my centre, unsticking it in the process. Many will argue that the centre is where you find the soul, it’s like a gateway. Furthermore, it’s where we find our power, to be centred is to be empowered, or at least this is how it feels to me energetically. When we are in our centre, it is very difficult to be thrown away from it, we are more likely able to then retain our grounding and our openness to spirit and faith too.

More often than not, I see clients when they have lost their centre and are feeling disempowered. This is not always true in so much as there are many reasons that people might find their way to me, but I do notice patterns. Life has a habit of challenging us and we have a way of reacting to that and often that way of reacting is not necessarily helpful and is based on what has happened previously so we end up repeating previous patterns. In many situations, the key to our empowerment is in noticing our patterns and then taking action to change them.

I see a common energetic patterning that arises when people are challenged and triggered. Something will happen, another person will say something or a situation arises that makes that individual feel uncomfortable, maybe they are manipulated or verbally confronted or attacked in some way, or maybe they felt guilty about something, or out of control about how their life is unfolding, maybe they are scared of losing something or someone, or worried about paying a bill, maybe they’re in a new relationships and it is all unknown and uncertain, and immediately they will be thrown off centre to the extent that they might feel anxious or angry, fearful or teary. Either way they will have lost their centre and will likely start stressing about the past or the future.

Generally they will lose their grounding too, as if their roots have been loosened and they have lost the support of the earth, Their mind will take over and can get relentless in its need to analyse, figure out and control things. As a result of this their shoulders may well tighten and their body may prepare for fight or flight. They will close to spirit too, faith dropping away because they figure that they, and they alone must figure this one out. With the grounding gone and the crown closed down, trust also goes out the window and any words that comes from their mouth might will likely come from a place of fear rather than from a place of love.

This is actually another theme which has coming up this last week, one of communication. Communication is tricky because so often we have a whole heap of words and thoughts running around in our head that we want to get out, but we don’t always manage it for fear of how those words may be received. This feeds beautifully into the theme of ‘not good enough’ because simply put we don’t always feel good enough to say what we want to say, because of our fear of having our ‘not being good enough’ validated by others either because they don’t hear us or they criticise us or confront us for what is said. In effect we judge ourselves before anyone else has a chance to do the same.

This feeds into the other theme coming up of self-sabotage, where we create more of our own suffering by basically destroying and sabotaging all goodness in our lives. I saw this played out last week simply because someone reached out for help and was gifted the opportunity to receive that help but when it came down to it, the person sabotaged the possibility by not turning up and laying the blame outside of herself. Quite likely she didn’t feel good enough, quite likely she also didn’t feel she could give voice to the real reason she wasn't able to make it, and quite likely all of this is a pattern - she wants to make changes but lacks the courage to take that step of actually doing the work that will make the difference.

It's tricky, because even when we do take that step and make the most of the help given to us we can be up against ourselves and the depths of our conditioning. We can also be totally blindsided by our patterning to the extent that we don’t understand why we keep doing what we are doing, however harmful and damaging it may be to us, because we are so rigid in our thinking and the way that we see ourselves. More often than not, unless we are truly conscious and attentive, then we will make choices based on fear rather than intuitive choices that come from the heart.

Paying attention to what drives our decision making can be really fascinating and we can be very surprised, because often our decision making is based on alleviating our fears rather than truly based on the guidance of the heart. First though we have to identify our fears, whether those be fears of financial insecurity, fears of not being liked, fears of not being seen, fears of not being heard, fears of new relationships, fears of uncertain origin! There are all sorts of fears that we will have adopted over the years that we will do our very best to avoid looking at because it is uncomfortable to us and yet when a fear is triggered it can cause us to lose our centre.

This then causes us to lose our power, and when we’ve lost our power then we lose ourselves and the pattern repeats itself. True power comes from being centred regardless of external circumstances. This means maintaining our centre regardless of what is going on around us – can we stay centred whether contented or sad, whether life appears to be going our way or not, can we stay true to ourselves in a relationship, can we speak our truth without fear of vindication, can we be in our centre when we lose someone we love or a relationship comes to an end or a child leaves home, can we stay centred when we start a new job?

Staying centred is a constant practice and one that is absolutely supported by yoga, Reiki and other holistic practices that will help us to look more honestly at ourselves and notice our patterning, so that we can do something about it, get to the root of it, so that we stop feeding the pattern and  can rest more easily in our centre whenever challenged. We have to work at it though, be curious to know ourselves on that deeper level, to take responsibility and be with the discomfort of it.

There’s a wonderful centring exercise that we can do too, which I have found really helpful in my own life, working with my solar plexus. Basically, when waking, rather than rushing out of bed or reaching for your phone, just pause for a minute and take your hands to your solar plexus, just above your navel centre. If you are Reiki attuned then you have the advantage that you can channel Reiki to yourself at the same time (don’t forget you can now get attuned to Reiki Level One online now, we have a package available on the website, at a mere £49.99, which might be the greatest gift you give yourself https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/shop/online-courses/reiki-level-one-online).

Then ask yourself “Where am I?” and “When am I?”. In theory the answers are “In my centre, NOW”. Keep repeating this to yourself until you are sure that your awareness really is in your centre now! Then you could ask yourself what kind of day you’d like, and notice any resistance you have to whatever comes up. Maybe you don’t feel you deserve a lovely empowered day full of goodness, for example, and that can be an interesting awareness because then you can dig deeper into that, why is that?

Once you have established the kind of day you’d like, the you let it all go and literally go about your day. if you get a chance during the day, maybe you roll out your yoga mat or you take a moment to sit under a tree or out in the garden, then you can come back to your centre, gather it in. Even better, if you notice that you are losing your centre is to consciously gather your awareness back to your centre and notice resistance to doing this - it is incredible how much we feed our dramas and victimhood, giving our centre away simply because that’s what we’ve always done and therefore it is known and there is certain comfort that comes in the knowing, even if it is suffocating our soul and disempowering us.

This is actually what I find the most fascinating - the way we give our own power away simply because we are fearful of our power (our light) and of the uncertain and the unknown. Yet I find this so ironic, because life is uncertain and unknown. And actually the more we can sit into the uncertain and unknown, be with the moment to moment awareness of this, the less we get thrown off balance and lose our centre in the first place.

Orientating back to centre re-sets everything. In the evening, lying in bed, just before you go to sleep, come back to this exercise and re-orientate to the centre in the NOW and reflect on the day you actually had and whether it is in alignment with your earlier intention.

Keep doing this daily for an awfully long time and gradually you will notice that you orientate increasingly in the here and now in your centre and you are less likely to be thrown off centre. Or, if you are thrown off centre, you’ll start noticing that you’re being thrown off centre and you can bring yourself back to centre and change whatever patterning is causing you to go off centre in the first place – more often than not it is because the mind is playing games and sent you spinning back to the past or into the future.

And whichever way you look at it, past or future orientation isn’t allowing us to live in the nitty gritty of the present, so a constant re-orientation to the present is required because this is the present, the gift, true presence is being OK with whatever is happening and not wanting to make it different. This is where we find our grounding in the unknown and uncertain, standing on our own two feet regardless and trusting, so important, in the support of the earth and the universe, cultivating greater faith and staying in our centre.

Enjoy the waxing moon and all it reveals to you, keep remembering to orientate back to centre and to know that you are good enough just as you are and it is OK to voice how you truly feel with love and compassion!

Love Emma x