Walking our talk and seeing both sides

I hope all of you are well. August is always a bit of a funny month because we are out of the usual schedule and the energy becomes all dispersed and fragmented, the pace slows a little and there’s a general distraction in the air, especially if we have visitors and family members hosting annual catch-ups.

It’s a brilliant time though, not least to enjoy the beach (when it’s not lashing with wind and rain, ha) but also to catch up at home with clearing out stuff that the children/family have outgrown. That’s as long as we don’t over schedule catch ups and playdates, which I am trying not to do because I have realised that these make me stressed, not least all the chatter, but the always having to be somewhere when really we just enjoy, the boys and I, going with the flow a bit.

The trouble is, that I’m not a fan of human time, I’m pretty good at being on time when I’m teaching, but I’m pretty rubbish at it otherwise. I haven’t worn a watch since I was a teenager, and I don’t currently have a phone (yep, that’s two lost to water damage, quite beyond my control, over the last two months, clearly my body doesn’t like phones - so actually any of you trying to get me by phone it’s pointless, albeit I do have another dumb one on order…) so time is not something I’m particularly aware of, and I always feel there’s more time available to me than there actually is, so I am notoriously late for play dates and general catch ups.

I have tried to make it a work in progress. I remember reading a book once where the author suggested that being late indicated a lack of interest in the person you are intending to meet - a rudeness and indifference, I suppose an arrogance too. This is not my intention in my lateness, I just always try to cram too much into the time available to me, simple as that, and, like I say, I struggle to fit myself into our human concept of time, it ruins one’s flow, with all its edges and angles.

It’s kind of funny, like a cosmic joke, that E is obsessed with time. He loves watches and the stop watches especially. The boys get regular count downs, for dinner, for the bath, for transitions. In theory it’s great, helps them prepare for the next activity but for me it is really irritating, especially when I find myself on the receiving end of a 10 minute count down, in the bath for example, prior to the children joining me! It used to drive me mad, being allocated 10 minutes in the bath, because I am someone who could spend a whole hour in the bath if I get stuck into reading a book - which I did the other night, just couldn’t get myself out the bath. I have therefore learned that it is best to bath on my own after the children have gone to bed, if I intend to chill out in it without being timed!

Time is therefore something which is a regular conversation in our household, E’s obsession with it and incredible timelines, and my complete lack of it. I do sympathise with him, it must be very painful not knowing for sure exactly when I might be home, as much as it is painful for me, feeling the pressure to keep to a time when I might just want to flow a bit. Somewhere in the middle we find a happy medium - or at least we do now after 15 years of living together - this mainly because we realise the other is unlikely to change and we are far more accepting of that!

This feeds nicely into my themes of the week, seeing things from both sides and walking our talk.

A few times this week I have found myself hearing both sides of the story of a disagreement or judgement between two parties, to the extent that I have to accept that the universe is trying to teach me something because some of the situations have been totally random with people on the other side magically appearing after me having not seen them for years and them offloading their story almost immediately, knowing that I have been told the other side…

I suppose it helps me to realise that remaining neutral is best, and honouring each individual’s need for offloading without becoming attached, nor attacking or defending but just letting it unfold without me having to get myself involved in the judging or the taking of sides. The other thing though, that this has all highlighted, is how much energy we lose when we make our lives one of drama, falling out with others because we are holding on too tightly to our way of seeing things, forgetting that there are multiple different perspectives and we are all trying to do our best in our current circumstances.

Linked in with this, is one of acceptance. A bit like the fact E and I have had to learn to accept that our relationship with time is different and will always remain different, so there is no point getting angry and upset with each other, or for me to roll my eyes when the timer is presented, better just to accept our differences, that we are each more comfortable with our own way of dealing with time and let it be so. Then there’s less aggravation, less roughness and edginess to rub up against and we can live together more harmoniously - in theory anyway!

Like I wrote, the other theme coming up this week has been walking the talk and noticing when we’re not doing that. I have seen this played out in two different ways, albeit all with an emphasis on stepping up and getting out of our way. Some people are really good at doing the talk, whether that be about spiritual teachings or clean living, for example, but not so good at doing the walk and actually living it. There is a lack of alignment therefore between what comes out of their mouth, and the imaginings of their mind, with the reality of how they are actually living and the energy they are putting out into the world.

For example, we know we’re not walking our talk when we have made commitments and not kept them, or we don’t say what we actually mean (we have an inability to say ‘no’ for example), and we don’t do what we say we’ll do, or we hold very high standards for ourself that are difficult to make manifest, and we just keep talking the talk instead. Even worse if we kid ourselves into believing that we are walking our talk, when we’re really not - living an imagined life in our head and another life in our 3D reality.

Furthermore, the trouble with not walking our talk is that we are likely restricting our connection with our authentic selves. This disconnection can lead to feelings of fear and anxiety, creating stress and reducing our capacity to live a more aligned and harmonious life. We can become scared of taking the next step, so we keep talking about it, and in our heads we’re moving towards it, but in reality we’re just a little bit stuck. At some point we have to face our fears, and our sense of not being good enough or our lack of trust and faith in the universe, or whatever it is, and work through it so that we can step beyond the fear to align our head and heart and take that next step to walk more of our truth and make it manifest in our 3D reality.

I see this playing out with people wanting to take the next step and finally start teaching yoga or working a as a Reiki practitioner, for example, or making career changes, or even going back to work after a period of not-working. They have the relevant qualifications and they have done the practise and they tell me that they want to teach and/or practice and/or work again, but they just don’t seem to be able to make it a reality. The words are there but they struggle to walk the talk. Often this is due to imposter syndrome and not feeling good enough or due to a lack of confidence in their ability, and all the other self-depreciating stuff that the mind brings up to keep us safe and yet miserably stuck.

It can also be around a lack of trust and faith in the universe. They might tell you that they trust the universe, and they have the spiritual practices, in place, but when push comes to shove they just don’t believe in it enough to be able to take the plunge, worrying that the support won’t be there, financial or otherwise, and this therefore becomes a stumbling block to their ability to live their truth and make manifest their intention. At some point we do have to put the practice into practice, otherwise the words are empty and the teachings pointless and again, we just stay stuck.

Being stuck is, in my humble opinion, a really horrible feeling, like being a caged bird, wanting to fly free but not able to do so. Often the cage is our own mind. It hates the unknown and the uncertainty, it loathes leaps of faith, would much rather stay stuck where everything is known and certain. The trouble is the heart and soul are really challenged by this because they cannot express more of themselves in the world. And it’s not that we need to be always striving to be better or pushing ourselves to achieve - I really don’t feel we should be doing either of these things - it’s more so that we’re not able to be honest with ourselves or live authentically therefore.

Other than coming for spiritual life coaching to help work through blocks, whether those be mental, emotional or simply limiting beliefs, which literally limit and reduce confidence, I find it helps to remind people how much they are depriving others of their gifts by not stepping up and sharing whatever it is they could offer to the world - in Reiki we pop this under the principle of having gratitude for their work and earning their living honestly, and in yoga this would come under the yamas of ‘Satya’ truthfulness and ‘Asteya’, non-stealing. Because if we deprive others of something they could benefit from, like yoga and Reiki, then we are essentially stealing from them and we’re also stealing from ourself too, our truth at least.

As an example, one of my friend’s was desperate to teach yoga but was really struggling to be able to make it a reality as she didn’t believe that any one would want to come to her classes and she worried that she didn’t have as much to offer as a teacher who was more experienced, such as me. Of course this is all nonesense, we have to start somewhere, including me, I had to start somewhere, at the very beginning, and then we build on that.

Furthermore, people come to us for their reason and the people who go to my friend’s yoga classes are likely to be different to the people who come to mine. My friend and I teach different style of yoga, we have different energy, we have different life experience, we have different friends and wider community, she’s going to attract those from her her various circles and who align with her energy and what she has to share from her life experience and what they can learn from her, and I am going to attract those from my circles who align with my energy and from my life experiences and what they can therefore learn from me (and obviously we are learning from our students too - they each teach us something, it works two ways).

It’s important that we are all different, and allowed to be different - encouraged to celebrate our differences - because it gives others permission to be different too - for each of us to feel increasingly comfortable being our authentic selves. Which is the reason there are always two sides to every story, because we are all different, we think differently, and I believe that once we appreciate this, it helps us to appreciate all the various perspectives in this reality and let go of holding on to only one version of this, so that we are less likely to take sides and therefore feed dis-harmony, seeking the harmony and the balance, of holding both tensions simultaneously and letting it all be.

It’s worth highlighting this - we do think differently. Sometimes we think we all think the same so we hold people up to our way of thinking and our high expectations of them based on our thinking, but really we all think differently. From the moment we were born our lives have been different and we have each been shaped differently by them, even in the same family we are all having a different experience of being in that family and our experience of life generally will therefore be different and our memories definitely so.

So the point is we need to get our thinking mind out of the way. And come back to heart. We each have something to share with the world. By getting going with her teaching of yoga, my friend made yoga more accessible to her friends, family members and wider community. They felt much more conformable starting yoga with her because they knew her and therefore the whole experience was less stressful than joining a class where they didn’t know the teacher or the other students. Obviously it’s different for some - they might like to go to a teacher they don’t know, and it’s wonderful therefore, to have the choice.

There is another side to this of course and it is the pressure we place on ourselves to be the person we feel we have to be to teach yoga or be a Reiki practitioner, for example. I was a victim of this in the earlier days and I definitely write about this in one of my books, probably the latest one, From Darkness Comes Light. When I first starting teaching yoga, and especially as I had spent the best part of five months immersed in the Byron Bay yoga scene, I felt I had to be a certain way - that my body needed to be super trim and lithe, that my mind needed to be settled and calm and that I needed to basically have all my sh*t sorted. Ha!

The reality was that I was still smoking sneaky roll-ups given the chance and harbouring an eating disorder hidden under the guise of clean living, I was also incapable of sitting still for meditation and much preferred jumping around my mat trying to master headstand jump backs than focusing on the quality of my breathing or reading the Yoga Sutras or other spiritual texts.

I was also always giving myself a really hard time, I was absolutely my own worst enemy, I had these high exceptions of who I should be, and was therefore always holding myself up because of my inability to meet these high standards and each time I gave myself a hard time (which would happen frequently throughout the day) then my inner toxicity levels increased, my spirit flagged and my poor heart would close down, feeding my old patterns of depression.

Furthermore, this all fed my imposter syndrome and affected my confidence - who was I to feel I could teach others yoga and help others to heal when I was struggling to heal old ingrained patterns in myself? Who was I thinking I could help others find their way to better wholeness and authenticity when i was struggling to experience this for myself and accept who I was with all perceived faults? Well the truth is, it is all a journey and we never reach a destination, so the sooner we let go of this and our high ideals, the better for ourselves and everyone else in our life, especially those nearest, dearest and closest, who suffer as result of our poor relationship with self and our high ideals which we may hold them up to too.

What I finally realised at the root of all this was how much I didn’t like myself, how much I - no one else - was causing my own pain, how it wasn’t about my relationship with my parents or my friends or my extended family but about my relationship with myself. Of course I kept blaming others, just like I blamed my past, but really, at the end of the day, it was just that I needed to befriend myself, learn to love myself and therefore let go of the inner critic who was much noisier than the kinder aspect of myself and was always on guard, narrating my life and highlighting my various perceived sort comings.

I tell you what, if there is one gift yoga and Reiki gift me, and there are many, then it is the easing of the voice of the inner critic which used to control my life to the extent that I wasn’t able to eat a single meal without that critic joining me and commenting on every morsel that passed my lips. That inner critic (the ego then) was very much in control of me back then but thankfully has eaed over time and while the journey of self-love is ongoing, there are always deeper levels, there is love where once there was only hatred - as many of you will have read from my book From Darkness Comes Light where I write about my self loathing to the extent that I wanted to kill msyelf, and indeed slice off my tummy at some point - one should never underestimate the toxicity of our own inner critic - who needs enemies when we have our self-depreciating ego!).

At the end of the day we are all doing our best. The sooner we appreciate this in ourselves the better. Otherwise we end up fragmented. There’s the high ideal of how we should be living our lives stuck in our heads and the reality and it is very exhausting trying to live a lie, trying to cover up who we truly are for others to perceive us as we want to be perceived - and yet this too a fallacy as we cannot control how others think or how they perceive us so it is all a ridiculous waste of energy. Furthermore , if as teachers we are not living authentically, then how can we expect others to live authentically too, we have to give others permission, by being true.

A note here - when we put teachers on pedestals then we need to be careful. If they are giving the impression that they have all their sh*t sorted, then be discerning. It’s very easy, believe me, to live up in our upper chakras giving then impression that we’re all spiritual and have all our stuff sorted, quite another to live in the nitty gritty of the lower chakra here on Planet Earth in THIS incarnation - not when we were a mermaid or a general in the Second World War…

More often than not though, the teacher is being true and real, just that we pop them on a pedestal, which is dangerous because at some point they in their humanness and honestness will fall off it and we will find ourselves bereft and have no one else to blame but ourself for putting them up there in the first place - please never put me on a pedestal, I’m very human, I drink tea, I get angry at then children from time to time, I feel hopeless about the state of the planet and I still sometimes give myself a hard time!

I cannot tell you the relief when I went on a Yoga Therapy course in Vancouver a few years after I started teaching yoga and dark chocolate and tea were offered as snacks, moving away from the idea that the diet had to be absolutely clean to practice and teach yoga and the teacher herself was just living her life in her way without feeling the pressure to conform to the ‘yoga teacher’ ideal which I had crafted in my head.

This follows when I studied with Uma Dinsmore-Tuli and she was her beautiful authentic self with all her radical opinions, not trying to people please, but just being her wonderful outspoken self and with her chocolate and date offerings (albeit organic and dark). Both experiences, of this true authenticity, helped to set me free from the ideals in my mind and I realised how damaging the quasi-spiritual communities can be promoting a false idea of spirituality where we have to be something other than who we are, merely feeding more of the patriarchal conditioning of striving and achievement and being anywhere but where we are right now, in this moment.

Because true spirituality takes place in the here and now with all its messiness, not in the imagined idea of who we should be or who we want to be sometime in the future when we have sorted our sh*t. Because if there is one thing I have learned along this path, is that we never do sort our sh*t because life has a habit of throwing challenges our way, and obstacles and life is life, we keep on living it, and all we can do is keep learning from it and making more conscious choices and continuously letting go of whatever is not helpful and living more of our truth instead, warts and all. And this is the other thing - authenticity means living with all parts of ourselves included, even those aspects we don’t particularly like.

Which brings me back to seeing both sides of the same story - we embrace this within ourselves too, we are all these things, the yin and the yang, the light and the dark, the challenge is in letting it all be and keeping the balance - inner harmony - and not, therefore, setting unrealistic expectations or high ideals. It is also about choice and the choices we are making for ourselves and others and whether these are in alignment with our truth.

Which then brings me back to walking our talk and being authentic and true and remembering that every day, with every move we make (or don’t), we are creating, reinforcing or expanding and contracting our spirit and the image we have of ourselves. And since our self image determines our experiences in the world, we do need to be careful. What are we putting out about ourselves? We need to choose wisely, we might talk a good talk, but are we walking a good walk? Are we thriving? Or could we be doing things differently and with greater alignment?

At the end of the day only we know if we are being honest and living our truth and only we can be the change we seek, overcoming the obstacles and limitations we have constructed, which prevent us walking or best walk and integrating all aspects of ourselves and befriending (or trying to befriend) the bits we don’t like on the path to wholeness.

This has all been an interesting enquiry and I am grateful to them universe for ushering it in. I’m trying to become more conscious of the words coming out my mouth, the promises to the children, for example, and whether I am making them manifest - which is why I find myself now having to go to the bed shop to look at the mattresses I have been promising... All of this of course without giving myself a hard time but just awareness. So too trying to remain neutral, remembering there are two sides to every story and we’re not all perfect, that perfection doesn’t exist so to let go of those ridiculous high ideals. It’s all just about awareness, and living more of our potential and truth on this beautiful planet.

Happy rest of week!

Love Emma x