Happy Yule!

Well what a year it has been - so many changes for so many and so many more on their way. The moon is definitely shifting things for us as it nears towards its 18.6 year major lunar standstill in June/July.

I am so grateful to all of you who have supported Beinspired this year. Our community has grown in ways I could never have imagined with so many of you finding the courage to deep dive into the various spiritual practices and come to know yourself on a deeper level, letting go of unhelpful conditioning, habits, beliefs and thinking patterns (Samskaras) in the process. It has been an honour and a privilege to witness the transformation. 

We can expect more light flooding in now with Yule upon us (thankfully!). The sun has reached a standstill and won’t continue rising/setting any farther south, and will start swinging more northerly instead. It will rise higher in the sky too, bringing much needed light and warmth to the northern hemisphere, and energy to all those dormant seeds.

The annual solar movements along the horizon from one solstice to another describes a year. Thus the winter solstice, known in the olden times as Yule, celebrates the return of the light, from now onwards the hours of light lengthen each day.

This is a time for us to begin to tend to our seeds too, taking little steps in the direction of our hopes and dreams. The path ahead may not be clear and this can be scary - the unknown and the uncertain have a habit of bringing up fear - but we are asked to trust the light as it appears, just taking one step in front of the other, following the nudges and signs from the universe while balancing the heart and discernment. 

Ultimately this is a time to open to greater trust. We trust the sun will rise in the east and set in the west each day. We trust that the inhalation will be followed by the exhalation. And so we must trust in our intuition, inner guidance and inner knowing - we always know what to do, even if the self deprecating ego tells us otherwise or makes us doubt ourselves. 

If this does happen - if we get in our own way - then we can ask the question,

“If I keep doing this, how will things be in three months? … in six months? …in a year?”

Typically things will have come worse, sometimes much worse. Let this help to inform your choices and the decisions you make as you head increasingly towards the light, enlightening yourself in the process.

Happy Yule all of you and thank you from the bottom of my heart for the love and the energy which you each bring to Beinspired - even if it is simply reading these blogs!

As a gift, please find another video so that you may practice at home. This is for you Helen and all the rest of you who might explore the letting go that emphasis on the forearms brings. A huge thank you to my teacher, Louise, for helping me appreciate just how amazing the forearms are in helping us breathe. 

Thank you too to Helen for all the philosophical sharing and the pranayama practices too. 

I look forward to seeing some of you over the festive period and more of you during 2025.

Love Emma x

Stepping forward

Well that was another potent full moon asking us to let go and move forwards in our life. It wasn’t comfortable for many of us because of the courage needed to do the letting go an the faith needed to overcome the fear of stepping forward into the unknown. It reminded me a little of a quote from one of Rebecca Campbell’s books:

“In order for the new to arrive, we must first allow the old to shatter. Sometimes this happens on its own. And sometimes it requires that we do the smashing. To tear apart what we’ve built because things have changed, including you. To admit that while it was once aligned, now it no longer is. This smashing requires both courage and faith. Courage to let go and faith that the pieces will come back together again in a way that was more aligned than it was before”

I certainly seem to be going through a re-alignment in my own life as the moon follows its major lunar standstill pattern and I know many of my clients are in a similar position. What fascinates me is the manner in which my menstrual cycle has shifted, so like when trying to conceive, evaluation occurs around the creative potency of the full moon, as if allowing more energy to make the changes which need to be made, to allow the potential birthing of a new way…the menstrual cycle never ceases to amaze me with its moon connection and it’s inherent wisdom.

For those new to the idea of working with your menstrual cycle as a spiritual practice to greater levels of consciousness, then take a look at our resource section on this website and have a read of our free Menstruation and Moon Pack. I also highly recommend Lisa Lister’s book called Code Red. If you don’t have time then just remember that the moon is always communicating with us and our menstrual cycle too will allow you to understand where you are out of alignment with your truth - it literally helps you to navigate your life in a more conscious way. I wrote about this in my own books, available on Amazon, called Dancing with the Moon and From Darkness Comes Light.

On a completely different note, but talking of consciousness, I recently watched The Corporation, a documentary on, well, corporations, and their impact on consumerism and greed, and this at the exploitation of people and indeed this beautiful planet. I am sure you know much of it already, but it clearly hammers the message home - that if we want to see positive change on this planet, then we need to make those changes individually, this is where the true power comes. I am always reminded of Gandhi’s famous quote,

“Be the change you wish to see in the world”

Really though, this was the theme of the moon and will be as the lunar standstill unfolds; to step into our power individually and indeed collectively. I feel that we have a really good chance of changing things, lessening our grip, our greed then, on consumerism and making different choices, which are more aligned with heart and the needs of this planet, our real needs too, not the ones we have been conditioned towards, but the ones that truly make us thrive as a spiritual being having a human experience on Planet Earth.

The documentary will remind you to choose your products carefully, to be mindful of the impact of their production on this planet and indeed the many humans involved in the chain. It is very easy, especially at this time of year, to turn a blind eye and just buy for the sake of buying without considering the welfare of the workers who produced the product, or the implications on the planet, but we have to try to be conscious because everything has a vibration and you are bringing that vibration into your home or into another’s.

This isn’t just the big things, but the little things too. What toothpaste do you put in your mouth and what impact is that having on your health and energy field, let alone the planet? What about the deodorant you put on your armpits, is it full of chemicals? Where was that crystal mined? Did children manufacture that football kit? How was the cocoa for that box of chocolate’s grown and collected? What about that tree, where was it cultivated and at the expense of what land? How many chemicals were sprayed on the food you will eat? Were those prawns farmed in really crappy (literally) waters? And what about that turkey, how much did it suffer?

Of course there is no perfect. We have to weigh it all up depending on our economic position as much as our level of integrity and general awareness and access to information which might allow us to make a more informed decision. But we have to remember that it does all make a difference, not least to us individually, but to us collectively too. If we just go along with what we’re being sold by marketing companies and those who are trying to be ‘in control’, then we can just expect more of the same, we always have a choice…but we don’t always realise this.

So choose wisely. And yet know that your choices will change as your level of consciousness shifts too. We cannot regret, because decisions made in the past were made based on our level of consciousness at that time, and all changes, including us.

This is a time for taking a deep breath and stepping forwards. It does take courage and faith because we don’t always know where we are headed and that is when the fear comes in. But we have to dig deeper into trusting ourselves and the messages we might be receiving from the moon and the stars and the universe at large. We just have to take that first step and allow the light to unfold bit by bit, making the path ahead clearer as we embark into the unknown and the uncertain but knowing and being certain that we are held and protected in the process. It is in this way that we will reclaim our power and experience greater love.

Happy realigning and conscious buying as we head towards the solstice.

Love Emma x

Grounding ourselves in these shifting times

It would appear that we are being asked to release and let go whatever is holding us back and is unhealed from our past, at the exact same time as being asked to step into our future self. It is discombobulating and a little overwhelming as I know some of you are feeling too.

The energy is intense, we are being upgraded for want of a better word, our hearts are being cleared out and old patterns are being brought to the surfaces along with the related thoughts, emotions and conditioning. Forgiveness hangs in the air and a release of anger and frustration and indeed sadness and grief that underlays this.

Guilt and shame are in the ‘field’ too. We are beginning to see more clearly through our own stories and narratives and the ways we may have taken responsibility for others’ poor behaviour or inability to do the work on themselves and we are realising that we don’t need this additional weight in our life and on our shoulders.

We are beginning to feel our auric holes too. I stumbled up against my own around guilt, for example, and how we may have taken on such a detrimental emotion since childhood and because it is there - because we take on the blame (or whatever the emotion is) - we attract more of it, allowing others to dump their blame or shame or whatever it is on us. It’s funny really because during this revelation, I had a few missed calls from the police station and immediately felt guilty, even though I had done nothing wrong, proving my point to myself!

Shame is popping through too and I know I am not the only woman who has had to work through this. We can’t win in our society, we experience judgement whether we are a stay at home mum or one who works all hours she can, same with termination, there is still so much stigma so that many women suffer intense feelings of guilt and shame, even though it takes two to conceive, and the other option, of potential single parenting isn’t received well either.

We have to remember that our emotional states are often linked to a sub-conscious thought or thought pattern. Whenever we are pulled away from our natural state of being to a more contracted state of being then we can be sure that we are thinking about our reality in a way that allows a particular mood to arise. Disliking the mood or yourself for having the mood is pointless. This because the mood expresses our need for self-reflection (Kriya yoga).

As I have been reminded, nature never acts without reason. Therefore every form of disease, physical or mental, encourages reflection. There is a note of caution here - we must not fall into patterns of thinking that we deserve whatever is happening to us as this is nothing more than a form of self hatred. Nor does it mean that the universe has it in for us, and is trying to show us something, This follows on from my previous blog post in that we still subject ourselves to the Judeo-Christian god of judgment under a different name (be discerning about new age spiritualism as it encourages this judgement with its emphasis on only perceived positive emotions and states of being, we have to move away from this conditioning).

If we are honest with ourselves - and this current energy is helping us with this - we will find that our ‘bad day’ (or weeks, months etc!) was/were probably caused by a negative thought-pattern, which we may not have noticed at the time, but which we believed and spun into a story about our reality, which is actually untrue and merely disempowers us.

Nothing exhausts us more than our well-spun stories which are not in alignment with reality.

Do we really need to feel guilty or shamed about what happened? Is the story we have created around the emotion and/or the thought true?

The trouble is we don’t realise our stories because we are so immersed in them, which is why it is helpful having someone mirror them back to us or question us on them (spiritual life coaching is brilliant for this btw), or for us to take time for self-reflection through various yogic practices. This is the joy of yoga. It has been prod for thousands of years and understand ALL of this and the ways we create our suffering and certainly the ancient texts offer our grounded guidance in how to set ourselves free. This is another reminder not to fall victim to new age approaches which are not grounded in any ancient wisdom.

We also have to be very mindful of the patterns we have created to avoid the self-reflection. Say we have a bad day because we feel we did something wrong, perceived a criticism from a boss perhaps and even though the boss didn’t mean it that way, we internalise it so, and while the boss moves on with his/her day, letting go of the moment the caused us to enter a bad mood and begin our bad day, we take it home with us and reach for wine or TV or social media or tub of ice cream to buffer our mood rather than feel into it.

What really happened was the interaction with our boss reignited our persistent and incessant subconscious story that we “always screw things up”, or we “are not good enough”, or we “should have known better”, which creates deeper self loathing and hatred. This negativity, buried deep within us, creates our experience of reality. Especially as we will see evidence of it everywhere now in our reality. This like my experience with guilt - because I was so used to feeling it, I called more of it, from the police who never did call back btw, once the lesson was learned - a cosmic joke to highlight my unhelpful and outdated pattern.

All of this of course, removes us from our natural flow and presence.

So the energies currently are helpful in that they are helping to bring the sub-conscious to the conscious so that we can let go of unhealthy stories and move our lives forward in a more positive direction.

It’s an amazing opportunity really to be the change we wish to see in the world.

The more of us who can find the courage to dig deep and shift the stories, the more this will influence the whole and the more we will let go of our disdain for self and our fears and become increasingly self-loving and whole.

Generally people have had enough of the patriarchal crappiness, of world leaders behaving like boys in a playroom with their missiles and guns, playing our their unresolved inner child. So we must look at our unresolved inner child too.

The pace of life is too much for many, but the only way this will change is if we step off the treadmill and draw a line in the sand. Increasing numbers are choosing simplicity and shifting their understanding of abundance away from material gain at the expense of everything (including the planet and their fellow man) and realising the abundance in walking in nature, or being quiet at home with children, or watching the sun set, or any of the other gifts we experience in our lives which we don’t always value because they are not material (and we have been conditioned to the material).

Increasing numbers are questioning our education system and the confusion over gender identity that our children are having to navigate, let alone the damage caused by online living and social media, and the detrimental vibrational effect of holding mobile telephones and iPads endlessly (I see how jittery the later makes my boys, displacing their Vata), and the manner in which they cause a loss of ability to focus and concentrate.

More are seeing through the many ways that we are being harmed by the big companies, and the drive towards profit at whatever cost to us as an increasingly sick society.

At the end of the day we have to take responsibility for us and our healing and certainly the powers that be are encouraging this. We can do this! We can make the positive changes, to free ourselves of patriarchal, Judeo-Christianity and new age conditioning, so that we can increasingly see reality as it is and free ourselves from our false stories and narratives, and ease our self-inflicted suffering simply because we don’t see ourselves - our true Self -clearly.

Yoga helps, Reiki too, but any spiritual practice grounded in reality, will give us the support we need at this time. The word to really drop into is ‘grounded’. Our grounding, our base chakra, our being in the body, our attending to our basic needs for sleep, good food and healthy relationships, our hands ion the earth, salt baths, baking with love, walking in nature, sea swimming, all of this will help enormously.

Sending love xx

Setting ourselves free of false ego identity

The moon has gifted many insights this cycle, but the one that has struck me the most is the reminder that we are not broken and don’t need fixing and that we need to shift this mindset if we truly want to thrive and appreciate our true divinity.

I have also been reminded that our mind is our worst enemy and creates our suffering through our forgetfulness that we are neither our thoughts nor our feelings. However, we have this self-depreciating tendency to allow both to run riot, getting caught up in, and stuck, the same mental and emotional patterns over an dover again, and creating our reality from this limited perspective.

We are not our thoughts and we are not our feelings. They come and go. You only have to ask your mind, “what thought is coming next”, to realise that you are not your thoughts. And you are not your feelings, because emotions are simply energy in motion. When we stop their motion and cling onto them, then we stop their flow and mis-identify with them as who we are - “I am sad”, I am depressed”. Not, you’re not! You are merely feeling sadness and depression. But they are not you. It is important to realise this.

Same with your thoughts. Did you know that ego simply means , “What you think you are”. So it’s just your ego that says, “I am fat”, “I am thin”, “I am a victim”, “I am clever’, “I am stupid”, “I am unloveable”, “I am ugly” and every other “I” statement. The collection of these thoughts creates our ego identity, so the ego is nothing more than a raft of self images bound together by your belief in them. Thus the way you identify with yourself is nothing more than fictitious construct, consisting primarily of self-images that exist because of your belief in them and attachment to them.

What is crazy is that each self image is based on a particle moment or moments of past experience that created a mental construct, “a story”, that was taken as static reality. For example, the moment you were praised or punished for something, told you are this or that, you believed it to be so, you bought into the story and by buying into the story, you acquired a self image to add to your forming ego that became a static reality - you believed it so and in believing it so, you made it so.

I have lost count of the number of clients who are stuck in mis-identification, believing they are this or that, usually something negative because of what has happened in their past. Not only does this keep them locked in the past, but it prevents them from expanding because they have limited themselves to the thought, “I am unloveable”, “I am unattractive”, “I am fat”, or whatever it is. The more we keep buying into these false identifications the more we make them so. We believe them into reality and create our own prison bars in the process.

It doesn’t have to be like this! Every moment of every day offers us the opportunity to remove the prison bars and set ourselves free. We choose how we relate to ourselves. I cannot tell you how liberating it is to bat those thoughts away, like they are tennis balls, to challenge every single idea we have about who we are, and to let our feelings flow, see them quite literally as the energy in motion that they are.

Yesterday we had an incidence at the beach where a very important person got annoyed at us for dumping our bags near to her shoes and towel. We’ve spent hours at Fort Grey this summer, hours an hours, and everyone has been really friendly, it’s one of the reason we love it there so much, let alone the opportunity for jumping, kayaking, paddle boarding, rock pooling and just absorbing it’s sacred energy, so it ws quite a surprise. It wasn’t until we got home, E told me that the lady in question, who actually accused us of intentionally leaving our stuff near her stuff to annoy her, is a reputable lawyer on the island, recently returned.

I realised then the reason for her reaction - she has over identified with her job title and believes herself better than everyone else, she has that entitlement that certain occupations encourage. This is not to say she isn’t divine, she is. We are all divine. But her ego has made her believe herself to be better than everyone else. But one day she will retire and what then? What identity will she take on. The lawyer that was? This is the reason so many company directors have heart attacks following retirement - they lose their job title and with that their identity and they no longer wield the same level of power that they did in the organisation.

So we have to be careful. One day we will die and we will become nothing more than dust or compost. There’s this lovely bit in Hamlet, in scene 3 of Act IV, when the King asks Hamlet where the late Polonius is, Hamlet replies, “At supper”. The king, knowing that Polonius is dead, asks Hamlet what he means, to which he curtly gives this riposte:

“Not where he eats, but where ‘a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end…A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of the worm.”

Hamlet is very clever as he skilfully catches the audience off guard with his initial reply, “At supper”. This because we tend to think of the phrase, ‘at supper’ as, as meaning a person eating a meal. However Hamelt is referring to the person being eaten and emphasis with force the upheaval of hierarchies - the fat kind (and the lean beggar) serve the appetites of the imperial worms, “two dishes” end up on “one table”.

I’ve always thoughts this quote really interesting, reminding us that we are essentially all the same, and all part of the whole - of the continual cycle of life and indeed death on planet earth. Also a reminder that we are no better than each other. In death and indeed in life, we are essentially all equal. Admittedly some are more evolved than others, born with different karma and special qualities, but in terms of our treatment of each other, it is only our ego that says we are better, or indeed worse.

Anyway my point in all this, is to remember that we are not the stories we create about ourselves. Which is the reason I have some concerns about our over identification with labels, because we then make it so and again limit ourselves in the process. We over identify with our states of being too and continue to perpetuate the story, buying into victimhood at times, and keeping ourselves stuck.

At some point we have to realise that we are more than our thoughts and feelings and the stories we tell ourselves - or the stories others tell us. We have to remember that other people’s opinions of us - which they share readily with us, especially when we are children - are just thoughts. They are just someone else’s perspective. They are not true. They are not based on a divine reality but on someone’s judgement which is based to their conditioning and way of seeing the world and our place in it.

I have lost track of the number of people who suffer simply because of being told they were lazy at school, or sloppy, or whatever it may be, that they have taken with them into adulthood and believed it to be a truth. Who cares what other people think?!

It’s our conditioning actually that needs shifting. We have layers and layers of it and much of it patriarchal and christianised. This is something else that has really struck me lately. As women especially we talk of being empowered, yet we are still subjected to our conditioning that tells us we can only be empowered if we dig into our masculine energy and do it like the men. We still buy into the idea of power and money equalling success. We still pedestal masculine traits of achievement, outcome, rationality and consistent and linear ways of being in this world over the feminine qualities of empathy, intuition and cyclical ways of being.

We still pedestal science as if this is King. Nothing is believed if it hasn’t been proven by science. Yet science in itself is so limiting. The ancient Rishis knew the workings of this universe and the teachings have been shared for thousands of years. But unless science proves it so then we are not to believe it. Of course science has its place, but our intuition cannot be proven, nor our empathic feelings, but that doesn’t make them any less meaningful or important. We also have this annoying habit of reinventing the wheel and then commodifying it.

We strip the sacred out of everything. We are hell bent on externalising our view of the world. It doesn’t become about your meditation, it becomes about the cushion you are sitting on and the room you are sitting in. Even yoga has become less about recognising our divinity and more about how your body looks in a certain pose. We have to be careful what we buy into. In my day you didn’t need a particular water bottle to remind you to drink water. You drank water from a water fountain when you felt thirsty and I am still here to tell the tale. I’m actually honoured by the many ways we buy into commercialism.

Furthermore, so many women I see are still beholden to feelings of guilt and shame for wanting to step into their sexual energy. This because the christianised concept of purity runs deep in our DNA. We hold ourselves up against values which were forced upon our ancestors. They didn’t have a choice. But were do. We don’t need to keep perpetuating the story that we are good or bad, pure or dirty, virginal or whore, pretty or ugly, success or failure. All this duality kills the soul and keeps us trapped in our ego identity.

We are EVERYTHING. Our spiritual practicer can be anything because everything is essentially a manifestation of the Goddess. One of my friend’s loves playing AirSoft. He takes his spiritual practice seriously. Seeing an AirSoft gun hanging on his wall, someone made the comment, “well that’s not very spiritual is it!”. but actually why is yoga spiritual and playing AirSoft not? What differentiates the two. If they both serve to take us deeper to the truth, and into this present moment where we realise our divinity, then why is one good and the other bad?

It is from this understanding that the Tantric tradition arose. Tantra teaches that even the most mundane actions like washing the dishes and hanging out the washing are opportunities for experiencing the joy which flows from being truly present - of being in full Presence. We don’t limit ourselves then to our spiritual evolution, our recognition of our divinity, arising only on say our yoga mat or meditation cushion. For me this is incredibly liberating, to realise my deeper Self by being immersed in the world, rather than separate from it, of being deeply in the body, not denying it, of feeling pleasure and pain and not making one good and one bad.

The other point here is around evolution. My use of that word is perhaps not helpful as it implies moving outside ourselves and leaning into our existing conditioning that we need to do more/acquire more/fix more/future orientation “to be ……”. We have to remember that we are already perfect in our divinity and that all our spiritual practice is doing, is helping to remove the layers which prevent us from seeing this clearly. Our suffering arises because we have forgotten our own true nature and we buy into our thoughts and feelings as real.

This moon is gifting us the opportunity fort greater freedom by acknowledging all that has been and letting it pass into the ether, loosening our attachment to it. What is done is done. We have all suffered trauma - the trauma of incarnation is felt widely, for example. We have all made senseless decisions at one time or another. We have all held false views and perspective which we have shared with others. We have harmed and been harmed. But at some point we have to let it all go. We have to wipe the slate clean and realise our inherent divinity and allow more of this to shone forth in the world. We are EVERYTHING. Our playing it small, our not loving ourselves, our giving ourselves a hard time is really pointless. We have one life. Let’s live it well - kindly, loving and compassionately.

I could continue, there’s a theme around pain and suffering bubbling through but I will leave you with a quote by Christopher Wallis, a Tantric scholar, which is food for thought on this full moon:

“The great master Abhinava Gupta suggests to us that if you practice from the perspective that you are not good enough as you are, or that there is something wrong with you that needs fixing, then your yoga cannot fulfil its ultimate purpose because it is a practice founded in wrong understanding. It can only go as far as fulfilling the limited purpose that has been conceived by your limited ego-mind. However, if you undertake the practice of Yoga with the right View of yourself, that you are doing yoga to realise and then fully express what is already true, then you have empowered your practice to take you all the way”.

Happy full moon!

Love Emma x

But it is more than that. We have to stop believing all we have been told about ourselves and buying into it as if this is a truth. Our teachers, caregivers, friends, family members, general public, all will have had an opinion about us at one time or another, but it doesn’t make them real or concrete, they are just someone else’s thoughts. Yet our whole life can be based on these thoughts, because we ignorantly take them on as a truth and then make them so - creating our own reality in the process.

My other concern is our over identiifcation with

Happy Winter Solstice!

Friday December 22, 2023 at 3:27 AM marks the winter solstice

On this day, the sun is at its most southerly point on  the horizon as it rises, and it assumes its lowest position in the sky at noon. This day is called midwinter’s day and it is the shortest one of the year.

The annual solar movements along the horizon from one solstice to another describes a year. This apparent movement results from the earth’s orientation in space and the motion of the earth in its orbit around the sun. 

Early man was conscious of these movements along the horizon, as evidenced by the many dolmens which are aligned to the sunrise on both the summer and winter solstices, and the equinoxes too. 

One imagines that the winter solstice was especially significant, as confirmation that the light does indeed increase again. Until that point, one might have felt as if the world was descending into a darkness, from which there was no return!

Thus the winter solstice, known in the olden times as Yule, celebrates the return of the light, from now onwards the hours of light lengthen each day. It is also a time to celebrate our inner light, which keeps us going during dark days – there are inevitably times in everyone’s life when we feel as if the light may never return, but it generally does and we must not lose sight of that, everything is part of a whole, a cycle. 

Our ancestors understood that winter is the hardest time of the year, so the solstice was also a moment to stop, to look backwards in inner reflection and to look forwards to a more active season as the sun’s returning power brings increased daylight, growth and indeed activity. From now on the days will lengthen and the warmth will return. 

Megalithic monuments acknowledged the return of the sun. More famously, Newgrange in Ireland has a winter solstice alignment, when – quite remarkably – for around 4.5 minutes, the sun shines down the ‘roof-box’ of the Neolithic passage and illuminates the floor of the main chamber 18m away. Only lottery selected individuals get to experience this amazing event – pray for clear skies!

The outer Sarsen ring at Stonehenge also has a winter solstice alignment and it is possible to enter the site for free at sun rise – it is well worth the visit if you happen to find yourself in the area, to be able to access the stones up close only happens on the solstices unless you have arranged a private visitation. In Carnac in Southern Brittany, the majority of the remaining dolmens are aligned to the winter solstice sunrise – it was clearly a special time. 

Even here on Guernsey we have a winter solstice alignment, where the sun is directed by a little groove in one of the outer stones, all the way through the dolmen to where the male and female stones meet. It has been quite an honour to witness this over the years and I am grateful to the dolmen for revealing some of its mystery. 

It is important to realise that this festival is not the beginning, in a linear way of looking at things, but a rebirth within a cycle of wholeness. Traditionally homes were decorated with evergreens such as holly, ivy, mistletoe, yew and pine, all of which represented the cycle of life. We would do well to remember this too – life is full of ups and downs, we just have to keep on keeping on and nudge our way back to the light. 

Here are some suggestions for celebrating the winter solstice and honouring the return of the sun:

Go for a walk 🚶🏽‍♀️

The eve of winter solstice is a special night to go out for a night’s walk, embracing the changing energy of the land.

Watch the sunrise 🌅

Get up early and go to a special place to watch the solstice sun rise or the lightening of the sky in the South East. These are magical moments you will always remember.

Celebrate! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

With friends and family around a fire with a bowl of warming winter vegetable soup. 

Add a yule log to the fire 🪵

This tradition began in Norway, where a giant log was hoisted onto the hearth to celebrate the return of the sun each year

Collect & decorate 🌲

Holly, ivy, evergreen boughs and pinecones, symbolising everlasting life, protection and prosperity. Use them to decorate a table or mantle or to make a wreath. You could always gift this to loved ones

Watch sunset…

…knowing that the evenings will soon be extending

Dance 🕺🏻

Put on your favourite music and dance on the energy of the new beginnings that the return of the light brings

Light a candle and make a wish 🕯

A powerful way to symbolise your inner light

Join a yoga class or spiritual celebration 🧘🏽‍♂️

There is a Yoni Yoga class to celebrate Yule for women of all ages and levels of experience, including absolute beginners, at St Martin’s Community Centre this Friday, 6-7pm

The antidote to fear is love - happy full moon!

So it’s the Gemini full moon today and there’s a real push in it to let go, let go and let go again of what you don’t need to be carrying with you as we head towards the winter solstice, unburdening and lightening ourselves in the process.

This moon is especially highlighting fear patterns, it has been coming up since the last eclipse, whether it’s this life time, societal, generational, ancestral or past life, it doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that we recognise it, keep going to the feeling it brings when we are triggered by it and then allowing it to keep moving through us.

This is not easy as I know only too well myself, but necessary though, unless we intend to keep repeating old and unhelpful patterns over and over again, impacting our mental and emotional well-being, let alone our physical vitality and spiritual connection.

When the moment takes me I love a full moon ritual, but it has to feel aligned, there is absolutely no point doing these things because we think we ought to, or because someone else has told us we should. It needs to flow. Instead maybe enjoy a warming dead sea salt bath - or do both!

If the moment takes you and you have the space for it, then maybe you might do something like this:

• Light a candle, smudge yourself, centre yourself, have the intention of letting go.

• Lie down, make yourself cosy, take a few deep breaths, hands on heart, taking a moment to connect to your heart - what does it need to let go of? Is there grief, stubborn unforgiveness, anger, rage, frustration, sadness. What do you no longer need to be holding onto? How did it come to be there, what it is you really need to let go of, a thought, a behaviour pattern, a way of being, a mind set, a fear?

• Listening to a yoga nidra - choose from here https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/free-audios - while working with the intention of letting go.

• When you’ve finished, write down ten things you would like to let go of from your life and really feel into them as a possibility. Notice where there is resistance.

• Fold the paper and place in your hands, giving it Reiki if you can.

• Then give thanks to the moon for helping with your healing as you tear up the paper and burn it with the help of the candle. Make sure you have a bowl of water to hand to pop the burning paper in.

• Take the bowl of water and burnt strips outside and pour onto the earth (in a respectful way, especially if the paper is still not properly burned) or pour down the sink, but again respectfully.

• Say a little prayer of thanks and blow out the candle.

It’s a lovely ritual and helps you connect with your deeper self as well as the moon energy.

I find myself in Brighton on this full moon, after a weekend of reconnecting with one of my oldest and bestest friends in Chesham, who I haven’t seen since the pandemic and then down to a city I also haven’t visited since the pandemic but with very fond memories of many trips with the children, to catch up with another friend I haven’t seen for ages, and a return to the wonderful Infinity Foods and the Brighton Buddhist Centre tomorrow, it has been too long.

All of this feels timely, I have this sense that we’re finally moving out of the collective Covid fear and re-connecting, re-discovering and re-visiting activities and ways of being that dropped away during the pandemic, but that we are changed, and for the most positively too, more clear about the uncertainty of life, more grateful perhaps for all we have rather than all we don’t have, more determined to follow our heart, and let go of our fear.

The antidote to fear is love. If we do what we love there is no space for fear. So let go from the heart, as much s you can, so there is more lightness and more love to be shared and really, what the world needs now, more than anything else, is love. But this has to start with each of us individually. We have to find that love within ourselves if we hope to see it reflected back at us in the outer world.

Love on this full moon

Emma x

Happy Equinox!

Happy Equinox! We are now on the wane down to the winter solstice on Friday 22 December, while the moon is on the wax to full this Friday 29 September. Interestingly it was at half moon as I stood watching sunset on the west coast of Jersey on the Equinox, having watched sunrise on the East coast this morning. If ever an Equinox was about balance then it is this one!

Known as Mabon, this festival marks equal day and equal night and the second harvest festival. It is a time for gratitude, acknowledging all that we have in our life, for the successes of the summer crops in all its many guises, and a time for letting go of that which is no longer required in our lives.

I have been reading a really interesting book on holding space. How easily we can hold space for others but not for ourselves. This is not true of everyone, obviously, but there are some of us who err towards making sure everyone else is OK and forgetting sometimes to take care of ourselves too. It seems to me that the equinoxes gift us the opportunity to witness these imbalances. The seasonal cold which comes in to release excess pitta and kapha in the body is indicative of this as it slows us down. Now, really, is the time to go within.

In our yoga practice we are encouraged to focus on movements that help to keep us grounded as the vata (air and ether) energy of autumn takes over from the pitta (fire and water) energy of summer. Simple practices calm vata and help us to focus on our breath, calming and relaxing our nervous system and supporting our need for letting go into the deeper parts of self that this transition to the winter solstice and the inner darkness encourages.

On a spiritual level, going inwards is of course a return to our true self, purusha, beyond the masking of the ego-self and all the ‘posturing’ which we might do in our lives. Through our yoga practice, we are trying to let go of the doing and proving so we can just ‘be’, connecting to higher and expanded levels of consciousness.

The concepts of purusha and prakriti comes from the Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy, which believes that the universe is made up of two realities. These two forces are purusha and prakriti, male and female, unchanging and changing, divine and natural.

According to this philosophy, we are made up of a balance of purusha and prakriti. Our body, mind, thoughts and actions are prakriti, always subject to change, and thus the challenge of the spiritual path lies in connecting back to our unchanging core, our essence, our soul, which is purusha. The idea is that our bodies change, our minds and ideas and perceptions change, but the core of who we are remains the same from birth to death. The spiritual path therefore, is about connecting to that which doesn’t change and to let go of the things that do.

It is very easy to identify ourselves with all that we do or think - I am a yoga student, I am a mum, I am a Reiki practitioner, I am spiritual etc, but according to the concepts of purusha and prakriti, all of these conceptions are prakriti, subject to change, unreal and not who we truly are in essence. Recognising and realising who we truly are, in essence, at core, means letting go of all our attachments to the perception of ourselves as physical and mental beings. Thus we let go of criticising our bodies, because our physical body is not our spiritual self. We let go of giving ourselves a hard time for ‘not being good enough’ because from a spiritual perspective, our essence ids exactly as it should be. We let go of criticising others too, and instead recognise the divine in them.

Our body, thoughts, beliefs and the roles we play throughout our life is transient. They all make up a whole, but our true self, is the core of the whole self.

On this path, we are encourages to find balance. Not only between the masculine and feminine energies inherent in each of us, but between stability and change, real and unreal, spirit and nature and stillness and the creative force.

We can consider balance in our life from this perspective. Where do we focus our energy, on prakriti or purusha and can we find a balance between the two?

We can also apply this concept to the seasons and to the manner in which these will influence our life and our opportunity to connect more fully to our internal self. The summer, for example, is all about being out there, it is active and fun and can disrupt our ability to go within. The winter, on the other hand, slows us down, encourages us to hibernate and access deeper realms within ourselves. And autumn is the transition between the two, a gradual retreat. This means softening and leaning into the ground, of letting go, rather than having to push ourselves out.

I’m certainly keen to flow with this energy, quieten down, go within and tightening boundaries accordingly.

The equinox was indeed a gift, and no doubt the full moon will help us see more of what needs to be forgiven or let go of ahead of the wane ahead.

Love Emma x

Tips for getting intimate with your menstrual cycle

Here are some of my tips for getting intimate with your menstrual cycle and your flow:

• Notice the moon cycle. Get outside and see where she is in the night sky and how your own cycle relates to her cycle – do you ovulate on the full moon when she too is at her juiciest? Do you bleed when she is new, so that you share a dark night together, the night before your period and her before she turns new? The more you notice the moon, the more your cycle will align with hers. But please do note that not every lady’s cycle is 29.5 days, so you might not always be in tune with her to the extent that you bless/ovulate on a new/full moon.

• Journaling is a really helpful way to connect with your cycle, writing down how you feel each day and noticing the differences throughout the month and the commonalities from month to month too.

• Notice changes in secretion and discharge throughout your cycle, especially if you are trying to conceive, so that you will have a better understanding of the time of ovulation and the discharge that this brings with it (like egg white!).

• Notice how you are drawn to different activities throughout the month, sometimes needing to rest, sometimes needing to be active, sometimes needing to be creative, other times needing to be quiet and retreat away from the world. Honour these, it is important that you recognise your cyclical nature as a woman and do not deny this in the quest to fit into a linear and masculine world.

• Notice how you crave different foodstuffs at different timed of the month, and honour this, you might well crave sweeter foods prior to your bleed, chocolate especially, go with it, it might be just what you need!

• Start to notice how you are likely to feel tender and vulnerable just after your bleed, becoming more positive and outgoing towards ovulation, before your energy begins to wane and you feel to retreat as you near your bleed and how the dark days prior to your bleed while often desperately uncomfortable can be extremely insightful and allow you to access deeper parts of yourself than you may have realised previously, such as visions and inner knowing. If you are truly honest with yourself at this time, you will notice what needs to change in your life.

• Pay attention to the messages your body is giving you throughout the cycle, notice any pain and tension that arises as this is your body trying to highlight that something is out of balance, that you are holding onto some inner tension, emotional or otherwise, suppressing some aspect of you that is desperate for expression.

• If you suffer with PMS as I did, then absolutely pay attention, especially in the dark days just prior to your bleed. Notice thoughts and dreams that arise during this latter stage of your cycle when your symptoms are at their worst. Notice any old feelings of shame and resentment, of anger and irritation. Do your best to release old emotions through various healing modalities such as SHEN or Reiki at this time, and slow and mindful yoga can help too.

• When you are bleed perhaps wear something red, so that you come to recognise and ritualise this time of your monthly cycle and be proud of it rather than shamed by it. Each bleed brings with it the opportunity for a deep release, for letting go and endings, before you begin your next cycle and allow more of the new into your life. This is the reason it can be helpful to undertake healing work and any kind of journeying towards the end of your cycle, or on the dark moon of the moon cycle – ideal if the two align!

• It’s a step too far for most but when you are bleeding, take yourself outside into a hidden place within your garden, where no one else can see you, even better if you can do it at night under the glow of the moon if she is in the night’s sky, and bleed directly onto the earth. I know for some it sounds absolutely gross, but there is a deep grounding, intimate and empowering that comes from this act of bleeding back to the earth, she who nourishes you and connects you to all life. Don’t tell anyone, just make it a ceremonial act between you, mother earth and the moon.

• Avoid tampons and anything which prevents your flow, or collects blood and holds it stagnant inside you. Allow the flow. Use recyclable pads if you can

• Cultivate a feeling of thankfulness towards your cycle, of allowing more of your deep wisdom, intuition and inner knowing. We women are cyclical in nature and should celebrate that, we are not linear, nor should we attempt to live our lives in a linear and masculine fashion. Embrace the twists and turns, the ups and downs, the tears and the laughter, embrace it all, and enjoy being more of who you truly are beyond the limitations of our culture, which attempts to shame menstruation and the emotional and cyclical nature of life lived as a woman.

• Let your emotions come and go, don’t try to supress them because whatever is repressed will find a way to express itself and this will show up in your menstrual cycle one way or another through pain or other irregularities. Cry, let the tears flow and cleanse and calm you and clear you out for the new. Don’t be ashamed of your emotional vulnerability, don’t be ashamed of menstruation and talking about it, don’t be ashamed of being a woman.

• Visit a site of ancient worship to the goddess, the mother. Here in Guernsey we are very blessed to have two notable ancient goddesses available to us, one outside St Martin’s church and another outside Castel church. Churches were frequently built on sites of ancient ceremony and worship, often to the goddess who was revered before patriarchy arrived into our world. Go visit a goddess, touch her, talk to her, invoke her energy into your life. You might invest in a goddess you can keep in your spiritual space (if you have one), you can buy them online from the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury (https://goddesstemplegifts.co.uk).

• Listen to my free videos and audios on mental health and wellbeing, available from my website at www.beinspiredby.co.uk.

• There are lots of books you can read, I recommend Code Red by Lisa Lister, Yoni Shakti by Dr Uma Dinsmore-Tuli, Women’s Bodies: Women’s Wisdom by Dr Christiane Northrup and Wild Power by Alexandra Pope. If you are trying to conceive then I highly recommend my own book Dancing with the Moon.