Happy letting go on Mabon!

Another turning of the wheel finds us in the balance of the autumnal equinox, the harvest festival of Mabon, when day and night are of equal duration and we have the sun rising directly east and setting directly west; the balance tips tomorrow and we descend into the darkness.

I managed to see the sunrise yesterday, knowing that it would be raining today, not that you wouldn’t still get the boost, but nonetheless, i like to see the play of light on the neolithic stones, which are perfectly aligned. It blows my mind every time I watch a sunrise from one of these places, that the ancients so perfectly aligned stones, when you cannot ever be sure of an actual visible sun from one year to the next.

But then life was very different back then. I am reading a fascinating book about the breath and about how the skull was different in ancient times, and how we breathed better, through the nose, maximising prana, so that our whole energy field would have also been more vibrant, purer, we were purer, the earth was purer, we respected her. Those were magical times, I have no doubt we were far more intelligent then too, could move the stones that even our modern technology would struggle to do today.

Interesting times for us now though, as we step further into this new age of Aquarius, which Rebekah Shaman wrote so helpfully about in her recent newsletter, and which you should be able to access through our Facebook page, if not on her own website/social media. We’ve lost our way along the way, forgot what is important, disconnected from nature, saw ourselves separate, separated within ourselves too, mind and body, and soul.

But it does feel as if things are changing. That more people are beginning to realise that we are nature and the more we try to separate ourselves from it, or control it, the more disconnected and chaotic we feel. But that doesn’t stop us being sick as a species - the mind especially is struggling with the pace of what is expected of it to live in this ‘modern’ world, and the body too, that struggles on, more autoimmune issues, people not liking themselves, we are our own worst enemy at times in the way we talk to ourselves and treat ourselves, let alone how this reflects out into the outer world.

What we put out comes back. We judge ourselves, we judge others, we are judged back. We put out sadness, we see sadness come back. We put out our victimhood and this will be reinforced over and over again, simply because of the way we seek it with the energy we put out in the first place. Our mind is rushed and the world rushes back to us. If we find inner peace however, well imagine what a world we would be able to collectively create, if we ALL found inner peace.

I can dream of such times. When we loved ourselves, cared about ourselves, treated ourselves with respect and, just as importantly, treated nature with the same love and care and respect. Alas, nature is a commodity now. Even we’re a commodity. Tax payers. Slaves. It’s all about productivity for the sake of productivity, a linear path taking us to?

I’m much keener on curves. The moon. The sun. The stones in the dolmens. The stone circles. Heads. Shoulders. Knees. Heels. Hips. I love the play of the dance, of the light and the dark. I love the menstrual cycle and all it reveals. I love traveling the world and never quite knowing what might happen next. I love the turning of the wheel and the seasonal shifts it brings. I love random encounters with wonderful people. I love polarities and the gentle balance of their meeting. I don’t particularly enjoy linear living. And I’m not a fan of productivity because it sucks the soul from our very being.

This week has been about meeting the extremes, the root below and the crown above and not seeing it as a linear thing, but of a coming together in the centre, into the balance, and allowing that to move, to draw apart but also when to draw back to centre again. Our centre. Being in our centre. Self-centred. Our self in OUR centre, not anyone else’s. Some may think this selfish but I don’t. We’ve been trained to think it’s selfish but seriously, why on earth would we want to be in someone’s centre? Why would we give our power away to others, losing our centre in the process?

Well sadly, people do it all the time, women especially, still that patriarchal undertone of having to be there for others, of having to give too much of ourselves, of not having healthy boundaries so we know where we end and someone else begins, of enmeshed families where we lose ourselves in the drama of what is expected of us, of the life others want us to live, of their dreams for us, of their caring too much about what others think, of their unintentional denial of our souls and our deeper yearnings to live a life of heart, of our dreams and of spending our time wisely, in our centre, for us, without - so important - without feeling guilty, or judging ourselves for it.

Be in YOUR centre. That’s the message coming through this week. This ahead of the Libra new moon on Sunday, Libra being a sign of balance. This is about balance. This is about living a balanced life in terms of how we relate to ourselves. Breath in and breath out. Give and take. Action and inactivity. Joy and sadness. Gladness and regret. Sunrise and sunset. Moonrise and moonset. High tide and low tide. Man and woman. Young and old. Light and dark. Happiness and depression. Empowerment and disempowerment. We are a world of polarities, of opposites and tensions, yet within all this the balance and a softness - the paradox of life.

However one of our greatest obstacles to this inner balance between the two tensions and to finding our own inner softness (why do we think it’s all about hardening, why are we obsessed about hardening the body/mind, even some approaches to yoga harden the body and therefore the mind?), is our judging one way to be the right way and one way to be the wrong way, one way to be good and one way to be bad. These are just thoughts running through our head. And our thoughts of course create our reality. We are always at war with something it seems, because we are always at war within side ourselves, to different degrees, because we haven’t accepted all parts of ourself.

This not accepting ourselves just as we are feeds our inherent insecurity. We’re trained to be insecure because then we can be more easily controlled. A spiritual path helps to set us free from this training, helping us to love and accept all parts of ourselves, reclaiming our power as we let go of our insecurity about not being good enough, loveable, worthy blah blah blah. It’s all lies. All an illusion. Something we bought into it and believed to be true, a truth. But really it’s just the mind, and its mis-perception of reality, of not seeing the truth of our essence.

This world feeds on insecurity. A whole economy is based on people feeling insecure, of needing something outside themselves to fix them, heal them, make them feel better about themselves. But really, we have all we need inside ourselves, if only we could stop this inner war, learn to accept and love all parts of ourselves, and put two fingers up to those who judge us for standing in our truth and our power, for living life the way we choose, secure in the support of the earth beneath our feet and the heavens/spirit above. The key is to draw this energy into our centre and keep it there.

We will be challenged, there will be obstacles, to test our ability to truth and maintain our faith. It’s interesting to catch ourselves and watch ourselves when the test comes in. To witness what we do. Do we panic, lose our grounding, switch off from spirit and grip on in our centre and to anything concentred we can find, losing ourselves in self destructive and self sabotaging behaviour patterns, or can we find the courage and the strength to stay present to whatever comes up for us, however uncomfortable, and breathe our way through it, leaning into the earth and the heavens rather than turning away from them?

It is this process that brings us more deeply to our centre and to our essence. But we have to find the strength to face it and say a bold ‘no’ to everything else. This is how we build security. This is how we learn to stand in our power, on our own two feet, here on Planet Earth. This is how our soul shines brighter out into the world. This is how we find greater inner balance.

We are safe. We are lovable. We are worthy. We are held in love. The universe has our back. We live in a world of polarity, where there is no good or bad, no right or wrong, only what is. Breathe. Inhale. Exhale. A long Exhale. Let it go.

This is really a time of letting go. We’re on the wane to the new moon on Sunday and the descent into the deepest darkest day of the year at the winter solstice. All that we don’t need. All of the crap that we carry that makes us lose our centre and feeds our insecurity, that causes us to give our power away and neglect our boundaries, that can all be let go of now…the guilt, the shame, the malice, the judgements, the victimhood, all of that, can go. The moon and the sun are supporting this shift…it has to get messy because it gets clean…

It’s a time to clean ourselves up. We incarnated now for a reason. So enjoy the ride, because I have a sense it’s going to get a lot more intense if we don’t just get on and do the work...

Happy equinox!

Love Emma x