Strong female character
Well that was certainly a beautiful full moon in libra last Thursday. I managed to watch it rise from a neolithic site, a huge ball of orange rising into the sky, quite a treat! I’m on a mission you see to try to follow and understand it’s movement patterns ahead of the next major lunar standstill in 2025.
The moon fascinates me. It does what the sun does in a year, in a month, it is always on the go, much like me! It also moves through its prior of waxing and waning, as we women do too, with our monthly cycles, and is never constant, reminding us that we also don’t need to be constant - that’s a very masculine and linear energy.
I love how each month the new and full moons gift us new insights and opportunities to go within, to know ourselves on a deeper level. This full moon was no different and my perspective has certainly shifted as I have been encouraged to consider my sensitivity in a new light and reminded that there is nothing to fix, just an allowing instead. I’m grateful to my bold friends for reaching out.
I’m reading this really amazingly honest, like truly breathtakingly honest, book at the moment, written by Fern Brady about her journey as a woman with autism called Strong Female Character. As written in the synopsis, “Fern Brady was told she couldn't be autistic because she's had loads of boyfriends and is good at eye contact. This is a story of how being female can get in the way of being autistic and how being autistic gets in the way of being the 'right kind' of woman.”
This is a book that refreshingly cuts through the right/wrong, good/bad bias and gives one permission to just be oneself regardless of social norms and expectations, which is so often the root of all of our issues around our identity and relationship with self.
Even in spiritualism we can get ourselves caught up in this, if not more really, holding ourselves up because we are not meditating enough, able to practice ‘advanced’ (or indeed so called ‘basic’) yoga poses despite our years of practice, of not being confident enough yet in ourselves despite all the circles we have attended, still feeling wounded, despite all the therapists we have seen and the crystals we wear, still uncomfortable in our own skin despite all the different nutritional approaches we have tried, with all their powders and supplements and probiotics. If we’re not careful we can get caught in the same paradigm we are trying to escape - the one of labelling and judgement.
The trouble is, our own conditioning is often so deep, that even when we make some breakthroughs in terms of how we see the world and other people in it, we still hold ourselves up to our internal judgement system, still giving ourselves a hard time if we don’t live up to our individual sense of perfection, until we finally realise that perfection doesn’t exist and all we’ve done is transfer perfection in the mundane world to perfection in the spiritual realm instead.
I did this myself so I talk from experiences, of popping myself up on a pedestal when I first started teaching yoga, not because I thought I was better, but because I thought I had to be a certain way and almost causing a break down in the process because of the tension and stress of trying to be someone I wasn’t and giving myself a bloody hard time for my inability to be as spiritually perfect as I felt I needed to be to teach yoga in the first place.
Back then I was still smoking roll-ups and joints when off island and I would give myself such a hard time, because this absolutely wasn’t what yoga teachers should be doing. I also put myself under a huge amount of pressure to look a certain way, because in my head, yoga teachers had to be slim and lithe and all this did was keep triggering my eating disorder at the time, so that I was never truly healing, just masking, and disappearing regularly down a rabbit hole instead.
I also felt I needed to know everything, because of the intensity of the imposter syndrome and not wanting to get ‘caught out’, so I attended an extensive number of yoga workshops, some of which were a complete waste of time and money because I either wasn’t ready or wasn’t engaged simply because I find it so difficult to sit still and focus for hours on end to someone talking - as many of you know who try to send me audios to listen to or videos to watch, sorry, but I can’t do it, I have the attention span of a nat, unless it totally engages me, I’ll drift off within minutes. Thus, I was always far more engaged on the courses which involved practice and first hand experience.
I’ll never forget attending a yoga therapy course in Vancouver with the most lovely bunch of women and being offered dark chocolate as a snack during the course. This was revolutionary to me - chocolate on a yoga course, but um, isn’t that bad? Actually no, it’s wonderful and one of the many attractions of attending Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s courses in London (another truly inspiring lady) were the chocolates on the altar that we could snack on during the day to keep us grounded, what with all the yoga nidra.
As many of you know, I like to bring chocolate or energy balls along to my courses for this very reason, to ground, and also to remove the association of chocolate somehow being bad or unspiritual. It isn’t. Nothing is. It is only our mind that creates the separation and division and determines something good and something bad. We can find the spiritual in everything. One of my friend’s went to prison one time and he found that one of the most spiritually growing periods of his life. I had a yoga teacher who spent time surrounded by death at some funeral pyre in India for months on end and for him that was his most enlightened experience thus far.
I have always found that my most enlightening experiences have been in the dross, when I have been severely challenged and have had to learn, ta da, to surrender…and this is really what it is all about, surrendering the mind and it’s conditioning to see ourselves, each other and life a certain way, to set ourselves free from our judgements and our limiting sense of right/wrong, good/bad etc. It is whatever you make it. And when you reflect on it, you realise that initially you’ll make it what you were told to make it, how you were trained to make it.
But my golly, the mind has a hard time getting go. The ego has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It has spent a lifetime protecting this option/judgement/way of seeing things and to realise that they’re is no truth to it, to realise that it is just a conditioning/training/fabrication is a tricky process to go through because the ego fights to hold onto its way of seeing things, it’ll hold on and on, and get very annoyed if anyone challenges it, and only after some time, some experience, some challenge, something that the universe brings in to help us let go will we do so, but often anyway, not without a lot of anger and tears and frustration…it’s a big deal, our pride has to drop away too, our righteousness, never easy for those of us pitta folk!
Mind you the kapha folk don’t have an easy time ether as they loathe letting go. And the vata types will often disappear into anxiety and might struggle then to move on because the anxiety can be all encompassing, almost freezing them, until they can gently let go into a new way of being as they come to terms with whatever mental patterning is no longer serving them. We are all different in ours ways of surrendering and the drama that may or may not accompany this, let alone the physical symptoms and emotional outpouring.
It’s interesting to me to pull it all the way back and to wonder how our mind as a human being was right at the beginning of our existence on planet earth. When there was no religion, no culture, no social norms, no education, no systems, no technology, no media, no medical industry, no BigPharma, no social media, no nothing other than us as part of nature - not even us and nature, or us in nature, but us literally as a part of it all, no separation. No wonder neolithic man and women were capable of creating such amazing stone structures, connecting areas of the earth, like one big crystal grids charged by the sun and the moon, and living in harmony.
Over the years I have found myself questioning my inability to fit in to conventional society, my always being different, which is not a choice, it’s just what it is. I mean we’re all different in our own ways, but it is one thing being different and trying to fit in, and quite another being different and being ok with that to the extent that at some point you stop trying to fit in. It was a relief when I reached that point. It was also a relief when one of my friend’s gave me permission to celebrate my differences. Celebrate the differences!
I remind my clients of this when they are battling away with their uniqueness and trying to see it as something that needs fixing or changing. No! Embrace it. It’s what makes you YOU. Why try to be someone else? Yet we do this from an early age, such is our social conditioning to be accepted and liked by others, so that we can easily lose ourselves along the way. Others stay true and have to endure the bullying and judgements that comes because they’re not the same as others, whether that be because they dress or behave differently. We’re really not very nice at times, threatened by others for this very reason - they’re being themselves.
That’s the reason I loved Fern’s book so much, because she is herself. This is one of the many gifts of autism. I see it with Elijah and I see it with my friend’s son too. They are very much true, and wouldn’t even consider that there could be another way, because their sense of honesty is so embedded. Women are different though. Women try to camouflage to fit in. And this is the reason it is more difficult to diagnose autism in girls and more so in women.
And I know that there are many judgements about diagnosing or not, about the benefit of doing so versus the stigma that still remains, but research does indicate that for the autistic person receiving a diagnosis is usually a huge relief and allows them to make sense of the reason they are different and to be in a better position to celebrate that or indeed just be ok with it. And let’s be honest, at the end of the day, it’s just our society’s way of trig to make sense of their sensitivity and higher vibrational frequency - we know that they are the lighter ones sent in to help us to make changes here on planet earth, because their brains perceive life differently and therefore they can help create a different, lighter reality…
Anyway, for me and my clients/students, the full moon was digging deep into the solar plexus and heart, asking people to take back their power and within this, their identification with self, and to truly celebrate who they are IN THIS MOMENT, not as the person they feel they should be, or want to be in the future, but their core self right now in this moment. And to love, obviously, themselves for who they are, not to give their power away to others seeking external validation of worth, or requiring love from others to make up for the love they don’t feel for themselves. Self-love is key.
Thus letting go of our judgements about ourselves and others is important. To question why we feel the way we do, why we hold an opinion one way or the other. And to consider the many ways we look outside ourself for validation of worth and love, and what therefore prevents us finding this within ourselves.
Also, just to accept all the ways we are different, to make peace with ourselves and to let go all the striving (as I know only too well) and the stress that accompanies this need to be someone other than who we are - to be more evolved or spiritually awake or any of the other new age terms that end up limiting us by their very nature - and just accepting ourselves in this moment with all our awkwardness and quirkiness and strangeness and beautifulness too.
Now we’re on the wane, which is usually a gentle time, but let’s see, we have an eclipse coming on the new moon on April 20th…
Those of you keen to get more into your cycle and embrace the yin energy, especially with Beltane approaching, then my next Yoni course starts on Tuesday 26 April and there is a drop-in option this course, because of all the bank holidays. You can sign up here, https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/events-calendar/april-may-yoni-yoga-course
Love Emma x
