Be here now.

It feels as if life has imploded a little since the Sark trip and I know that others are also experiencing this. Whether we want it or not folks, we are being encouraged to close a chapter on our life and prepare ourselves for the next.

I hear you, the new can be scary because it is unknown and uncertain and totally unscripted, however, if we can dig deep we will find that there is much excitement in this. But one has to be open to going with the flow - any resistance will just make life harder work.

While we like to think that we are in control, we’re really not. And trying to resist change in an effort to feel as if we are staying in control will only cause suffering in the long term - that which we have outgrown needs to drop away, so that a more aligned and authentic way of being can enter instead.

This year I decided I would do things differently. I let go of the visioning and manifesting, the dreaming and the wishing, and I figured I’d just let life unfold in its own way without trying to control outcome or make it look a certain way. This because over the years I have expanded vast amounts of energy making things happen, of manifesting my dreams, only to find myself still feeling empty and unfulfilled. And so off I’d go again, another mission, another dream to manifest, another project, another focus and the outcome would be exactly the same and yet I’d keep repeating!

I began to realise that this in itself was a pattern of mine. To take that away was challenging. What next? I found myself up against my internal judgments, the inner critic, my conditioning around what it means to drift and be lazy ad realised that this prevented me being present. For the first time in years, I didn’t seek any courses or trainings, no qualifications to obtain, nothing to fill time, nothing to achieve, nothing to work towards, nothing to prove my worth. Many of you will have read my ramblings on this in earlier blogs.

The problem is we are so conditioned and trained to be productive, to be slaves essentially, workers for a system, ‘tax payers’, we’re not even human beings anymore, just here to bring taxes to the government and keep the whole system ticking over. Well this doesn’t sit easily to me. I don’t want to be a slave. I don’t want to keep feeding then system that keeps me disempowered by telling me that I am not enough unless I have bits of paper to validate my worth and a bank balance to match, that unless I’m always busy, always productive, always achieving something then I am nothing.

I didn’t realise how much I was conditioned to all of this until I started to question and strip back the layers that told me how to see the world and my place in it and look more honestly at how it might be, if I can only get beyond my own restlessness and insecurity about just being, all of who I am, without needing to prove that externally to anyone else, without being triggered when people tell me the zillion courses they are doing, all the trainings, the endless trainings, all the many ways that they try to advance themselves.

It wasn’t comfortable at times. I was triggered. And this in itself was revealing, because I noticed how my conditioning around achieving had found its way into the spiritual realm. How even here, I was caught up in the notion of achieving and progressing, of it being about outcome and results, a linear path, always taking me away form the present moment, always that sense of the future, “when I gain this qualification or do that training, then I’ll be…”. What? What will I be? More evolved, a better person, calmer, more peaceful, accepting, happier? Or maybe just more secure in myself.

I realised that this was also part of the illusion, this future goal orientated orientation, even in the spiritual realm. There is only this moment. We are exactly where we need to be. And we’ll miss it, because of always wanting to be somewhere else instead. And if we can’t accept ourselves right now, why do we think we’ll accept ourselves anymore then? At some point we have to start befriending ourselves. We have to put down the stick that beats us up for all our perceived imperfections, we have to lay down the armour, lighten our load, open our heart and learn to love ourselves regardless of…

I noticed all sorts of things. That I could lose days lost in thought about future travel and miss the moment., That this in itself had become a pattern, of always wanting to be somewhere else. I started asking what it was about those other places that I missed by living in Guernsey. I realised that it wasn’t about the place, but about my frame of mind, about being more at ease within myself when I am anonymous, of feeling a greater degree of freedom.

I realised how much I was restricting my sense of freedom simply because of feeling I had to be a certain way, wear a mask, because maybe I was working or maybe I was meant to be home schooling, as if each of these different activities demanded a different mask and a different version of me. They don’t. It is only my mind that tells me so.

I recognised how it was this lack of true authenticity that was actually creating so much of my suffering. When I dug deeper still I realised that this all came about because of me caring too much what others thought of me and because my mind had this notion of how I should behave in certain situations, simply because of my training.

I’m reminded of Glennie Doyle’s book, Untamed, in which she writes about the tiger in the circus being trained and how in that training the tiger loses its essence, so that it is no longer itself but a trained version who puts on shows.

I don’t want to be tamed. I don’t want to be trained to lose my essence. And yet we are. Each time we do a course or a training (the give away is in the name), we are training ourselves to be something other than who we are and we are frequently denying our own intuition and wisdom. We feel that unless we do it the exact way we have been taught then it won’t be right. And because we don’t want to run the risk of doing it wrong, we often never get going in the first place.

This is the reason I love Scaravelli yoga, Tantra and Reiki, because these spiritual practices help us to realise more of our true self by helping us let go of all that gets in our way, without training us to another way. Instead they each help us connect with OUR way instead, and begin to trust in it and live it, empowering us in the process. We don’t need a qualification to prove this, quite the contrary.

Ultimately I realised that my mind and its conditioning has a lot to answer for.

That I cared too much about other people’s opinions and thoughts, despite knowing that my own thoughts and opinions change all the time, that these are not fixed. Giving myself permission to not care was extremely helpful.

I realised that the only person really judging me is me. That those who judge me are doing a really good job at judging themselves too. I realised that if I could have compassion for those judging me, then I could also have compassion for myself and heal the root of the insecurity that caused me to judge myself in the first place. We can only know what we know based on our level of consciousness in any one moment.

All of this helped me to be much more accepting and to BE HERE NOW. There is no rule book. No particular way to be, we don’t have to be the way that society and our culture has determined, that is reinforced through education, family, friends, media etc, we have a choice…

I realised how much of my life has been spent fighting reality. How much I have wanted it to be different, tried to make it different, and as a consequence, the more I lived in the future, an imagined future when suddenly everything would come together…as if the dream could really come true just like that, feeding more of the illusion of perfection. Disney has a lot to answer for.

I also couldn’t ignore the fact that the most profound moments of my life have occurred without any effort on my part, those moments which change everything. My bike accident in December was one of those moments meeting my stone friend by chance in a dolmen on the spring equinox sunrise was another such time, literally bumping into my Nepali yoga teacher on a road in Dharamasala, mini Tibet in India was another, meeting a yoga teacher in the Outer Hebrides who led me to my current teacher, meeting my Reiki Master through a random yoga class that I was desperate to attend and then finding her flyer in the kitchen at work the next day, all of these moments have re-orientated my life in ways that I could never have imagined, reminding me that we are never really in control, that spirit infuses all of life…we just have to keep walking our path.

It’s been wonderful really. I realise how much I have been my own slave driver over the years, as if I was holding a whip to myself, pushing myself all the time to work harder, achieve more, accrue qualifications as if all of this proved my worth. I realised the extent of my need to be needed, because of my inability to meet my own needs, putting others’ needs before my own with poor boundaries and giving too much of my time, often at the expense of time with my children as if they didn't matter so much, as if being a mum was not enough.

It’s been quite a shift, a re-prioritisation of all the various aspects of my life, which I didn't know was possible because of my slave worker mentality and my inherent insecurity and lack of self worth which drove so much of my previous choices. Having reclaimed my worth and found a depth of love for myself that I didn’t realise was possible, has helped me to make very different choices, supporting the notion that the only changes we really need to make are internal - the external will shift to reflect this.

I have gone deeper within, I have opened to my joy and made an effort to follow it, and to realise that I have nothing to prove to anyone else and that it is absolutely OK to just be myself. The task master has let go a bit. I realise the nonsense of our conditioning towards perfectionism and the manner in which media and industry feeds this, not least to disempower us, but to keep us spending money, as if we can somehow buy the dream, buy our happiness and self confidence and self worth, as if this is a commodity and comes from outside ourselves. Ha.

All we need to know is within ourselves. Life throws us challenges and obstacles to encourage us to dig deeper, to find parts of ourselves that we have kept hidden or denied, to look more clearly at the pattens which limit our freedom and keep us repeating the same old crap over and over again - we might find ourselves in a different relationship or a different country, for example, but unless we change the way we relate to ourselves, then we’ll just keep coming up against ourselves over and over again.

I’ve enjoyed not studying or having something to work towards. I have loved the time spent immersed with the children, not distracted by a phone or by thinking I should be doing something more productive with my time. I have enjoyed growing without having a plan, of just planting on intuition. I have loved my work with a new found passion, simply because of giving myself permission to just be me, not feeling I have to put on a mask because I am working or representing a company or a charity. It’s the small things.

I know I’m not alone in all this. We have been encouraged to come back to basics and simplify and re-prioritise this year, to step away from mainstream collective consciousness and become more of who we are.

And now we are being encouraged to look back at all that’s been and to acknowledge the victories and the learnings, the joys and the sorrows and to bless all of them for helping to make us who we are today. I am grateful for all of it and while it is never easy looking back and making peace with what’s been, forgiving and letting go, it is essential to create the space for the new to come in.

We’re in this space now. The void. Neither here nor there. Where nothing is known or certain. Where one chapter has ended and another had not yet been written.

Even here I noticed my patterning to cling on to what’s been, to find something stable, to make life known. I now know that when I do this, it is a sign that I actually need to keep going. That I need to step up and believe in myself and my ability to be OK with uncertainty and a life not yet known. That it is a gift, even if it seems to go against the grain. There is no going back. Not really. There is only this moment and the one after it and the one after that too.

So if you too are in this void, where you have turned the page on the last chapter but aren’t yet ready to start reading the next, then take heart. Whatever brought you to this point in your life will help you to navigate your way to the next. We can trust in that.

But it takes time. We need to be patient. Not push. Not try to control. Not try to ensure a desired outcome. instead just breathe and take it one day at a time, noticing our patterns, noticing our vulnerability, noticing our attempts at closing and yet making every effort to stay wide open.

Meanwhile I’m off to Carnac for the solstice, which is a big stepping into the unknown as I am not taking the children with me, which has opened up a whole new line of inner enquiry and shifting patterns..

So if I don’t have time to write, enjoy the new moon tomorrow and the solstice on Wednesday and enjoy the light flooding in and the clarity this brings and the shadows it highlights and just keep flowing.

Love Emma x