Some of my medicinal plants!

I am so delighted to finally have the plants in my moon garden, ahead of then next moon cycle next week. We’ve been in Sark and it has been hot and I could almost hear them asking me to get them in the ground as soon as possible…the marshmallow had already started rooting through the pots!

So here they are, the plants en masse…

And here they are individually:

Gypsywort

Woad and wormwood

Mullem and motherwort

Hyssop

Marshmallow

And this is the pot marigold soaking in sweet almond oil awaiting me finding time to make calendula salve infused with moonlight, sunlight and Reiki, oh and some love…

There’s still a significant number of plants in my parents’s greenhouse needing to be planted out, this is next on the list. The airing cupboard is now full of flowers and leaves drying so I can make teas and oils. Here’s some marshmallow and calendula flowers about to go to be dried.

The beams in the kitchen are being used to dry lavender, sage and rosemary to make beautiful oils. Here’s the sage oil on its way:

I love my plants, they actually communicate. I’m so grateful for their abundance and all they give. It’s a learning curve trying to work out what to do and its costing a small fortune in bits and bobs, but I am enjoying making my own potions and feeling the benefit. The bath scrubs I am enjoying the most, especially with the homemade lavender oil, although the sage oil is definitely potent and great for clearing the energy - very calming when applied to the head.

I made some cough medicine for the boys recently using thyme from the garden. It actually worked! I was really excited about this, despite the amount of honey required by the recipe, made me realise how much we can do to help ourselves, it’s just about finding the time!

I’ve got to learn what to do with the St John’s wort as these are flowering…I shall share photos once those are in the ground too!

Happy Friday!

x

Opening to greater intimacy

Dr Christiane Northrup talks about the intrinsic link between the low heart of the sacral chakra and the high heart of the heart chakra. Yoni yoga, a practice I developed inspired by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s womb yoga, is centred on this because it is my experience that this connection and relationship between these two energy centres is very real; when the energy of the low heart is blocked through trauma or abuse then the high heart is also affected.

Those of you who read my book Namaste will know already that I suffered trauma in my sacral chakra in my mid-twenties as a result of a destructive relationship that negatively affected this area of my body. The greatest harm done through was not so much what happened to me physically, although there was a significant energetic imprint, but more so the repression of my experiences and the attached emotions.

There was an encouragement to continue life as normal, to put one of the experiences into the shadows and pretend it hadn’t happened. This approach alone brought with it intense feelings of guilt and shame, let alone confusion that arose because of the conflicting feelings of relief and loss and sadness. This based on a cultural expectation that we must keep going, linear, brave face, everything is fine, I’d learnt from the best, the stiff British upper lip so deeply ingrained.

I went out of my body with the second destructive experience (and yet later I would come to reframe this, as we must with our painful experiences, for they are a treasure, a blessing, an opportunity to learn and awaken), fragmented, tried to pretend it never happened, didn’t mention it to a single person because for all intents and purposes I had forgotten about it and I didn’t know how to process it or make sense of it, and yet it informed who I was to become and defined the level of intimacy that I would allow into my life after then. 

As we know, that which is repressed into the shadows, which we try to ignore, will find a way for expression, will have an impact on our present. It was this relationship, which brought me to my knees, which shut down (I would later realise) my lower heart and my upper heart, and cause me to contemplate taking my own life, and I am writing a manuscript about this at the moment, about the depression that followed, although I had been dipping in and out of depression for a few years before then.

What I have become aware of over the years is the manner in which so many women suffer with the effect of trauma and abuse within the sacral chakra, whether this be from casual sex, rape, non-consensual sex-doing what’s expected in a relationship, unintended pregnancy, termination, miscarriage, challenging pregnancies, internal examinations, birth etc. So much of this goes unsaid, not talked about or given expression. Sometimes the words are difficult to find because there is shame and guilt and worry about being judged, and often the hurt is too much, and the vulnerability too great, and this all impacting on our heart chakra and our ability to love (ourselves especially).

I feel vulnerable even now sharing this, but there is a part of me that is tired of it not being said, and yet there is a part of me that questions boundaries, raising questions about what needs to be voiced and what doesn’t, about how much of my life experience needs to be shared in the quest to help others, and to help myself. It feels sometimes that these things need to be voiced, because it is one thing finding forgiveness and quite another clearing it out from our psyche.

 For many years I suffered with PMS and it was this really, and the depression that accompanied it that led me to yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda and helped me to change my life. The quest was always about healing the PMS, changing my diet and my lifestyle, taking potions and doing energy work. I knew that I had issues in my sacral chakra around relationship with self and with significant others and especially around intimacy, but I didn’t realise the extent to this until it became clearer earlier this year, almost twenty years on from the wounding done. 

There has been signs along the way, a yoga pose practised one day that brought back a memory that literally floored me (fortunately I was on the floor) reminding me and causing me question the nature of the harm, so repressed and hidden was it in my body, yet the body never forgets, more fool us for thinking that we can bypass it. Then there was EMDR that was intended to resolve residual issues surrounding disordered eating and up it came that memory again, central to everything, so that I could no longer ignore it and I recognised that how much of my life had been spent skirting the edges, trying to do the work on myself but ignoring the gem in the middle, in the shadows of the solar plexus.

I did not want to spend the rest of my life denying my femininity yet this scared me because it took me to a deep place inside, and it asked me to step more into my sexuality and my Goddess nature and this in the past had only caused me pain. Yet it was impacting in immeasurable ways in my life, in my relationship with myself, with those I love and with my ability to surrender to those deeper places of sexual and spiritual bliss, simply because of the confusion between pain and pleasure and the residue of those experiences; the energetic imprint and emotional repression that didn’t know how to express itself without me feeling as if I might fall apart or drop into an abyss.

I had spent all those years keeping myself safe by building my armour (albeit unconsciously) and escaping into my spiritual practice, so that I wouldn’t have to feel all those things again. PMS was my body’s way of trying to get my attention, of reminding me of what lay in the shadows, simply because every cycle there was a rage that would come with the pre-menstruation, in that dark phase. Like the dark moon, every month I was taken into that thin void where you have the opportunity to see more of your truth, yet I couldn’t see it because I was so caught up in it and had learned to settle so comfortably into my denial and yet the comfort was killing me.

I don’t suppose I mean killing in the sense that I was dying, although there was some part of me dying inside for recognition, dying to be set free, dying to take me to that deeper place, to the ecstasy that lay below the scar that had grown thick over the wounding, dying to make me surrender into the edges of my awareness, and let go, let go, let go. Always it is about letting go, and this is the toughest thing; to let go we have to let go of something mentally, some attachment, often the attachment to our pain and the victimhood and blame that comes with this.

Unconscious as it was, I held on to my wounds and allowed them to continue to play out; there was my relationship with ahimsa (non-harming) and the harm caused in my quest not to harm (there is always such paradox and contradiction), and there was the trying to make myself invisible and deny my feminine attributes for fear of…I’m not even sure what the fear was, fear of actually being kind to myself, fear of allowing all of myself, fear of falling apart when I let go into all that I am…

Even when I stared to work with menstruation consciousness as a spiritual practice, the darkness was too dark for me to see, or perhaps it was just that I wasn’t ready, because we can only handle so much in our healing, and there are layers and all the hardness of the armour to dissolve and that itself is tricky because we have put it there for a reason and it has a narrative and a story and there is that blame and victimhood already mentioned, and always some stubborn unforgiveness.

 I thought I had dealt with it, and yet I hadn’t even started, it wasn’t that I was spiritually bypassing but most definitely my spiritual practice allowed me to avoid it, and the EMDR took me deep into the wounding, and I felt my energy moving from sacral chakra to heart, but really it was the solar plexus that kept grabbing my attention. Here is where we might hold onto our undigested life experiences, like food that has been undigested by our stomach and small intestines, and it creates problems, not only physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually too. 

By then I hadn’t experienced PMS for years, not really, I had managed to heal much of the harm done by then, at least I had healed some layers. Yet there are always more layers, for we are not linear any more than life is lived in a linear fashion, and healing isn’t linear either, you only have to think of the depth of the chakras and the roundness of the earth, the moon and the sun. The PMS symptoms re-appeared from no-where, grabbing my attention, and this when my ability to surrender to intimacy had already deepened and yet still the body was crying for my attention. 

It’s a process that I now know well and I can be with it more calmly, spot it quicker, settle into with greater ease, make space and create stillness for it after all these years, and people will think me crazy, this obsession with healing, but there is a reason; I want to feel life moving through me, I don’t want my energy to become stagnant, I do not want to invite dis-ease into my being because the energy cannot flow – e-motion is energy in motion. Plus there is a motivation towards opening to spirit and increased consciousness, stepping into the truest of self, oneness and peace then.

I do not want to repress my emotions as my culture has at times demanded and my breasts were getting my attention, telling me that there was still some repression in the heart chakra and I know the link with the sacral – the sacred. I want to be all that I can be in the present, not weighed down by my past, settling for second best, not experiencing the feelings of spiritual bliss that are inherent in all of us if we can allow ourselves the vulnerability that this demands, that I spoke of in my previous blog post when I wrote about Scaravelli-inspired yoga.

It is this really and Ayurveda, Reiki and TM, that has helped to take me to this deeper place, to feel the holding in my sacral chakra and in my heart, so that I cannot ignore the connection between the lower heart and the higher heart. I went outside and I ran to make sense of it, to get in the body, move the energy, out my head, and there was rage that found me screaming into the air, the half-moon above me, dusk settling, bats flying around, and this calmness that held me, and I felt my heart about to burst with the pain of the stubborn unforgiveness.

I battled with it in my head, why could I not forgive? It hurt and I had been harmed by this story of needing to hold on, of the inability to express those old emotions, of denying my most soft and vulnerable parts, and I was angry, angry at being told that this was the way, at being sold a lie, and I wanted those that fed this story to know how much they had harmed me. Yet here was the inability to forgive, the stubbornness, and the realisation that accompanied this; as it always does, that the inability to forgive was now the bit hurting me.

If we hold on to resentment and anger then it is likely it will lead to dis-ease be that of the body or the mind because of the tension it creates and the inability to be at ease within ourselves, peaceful then . I know this and so I asked myself these questions; why did I want to be a victim of this? Why did I want to hold onto blame? Oh the gut wrenching awkwardness and discomfort that comes with knowing you need to let go but the power of the need to hold on. 

This sense of being harmed and being hurt and needing to blame someone else is the cause of so much disharmony in this world. I know this too. Yet still we hold on. I ran some more and I thought about how it might feel to let it go and I played out the scenarios and I knew I had no choice, not really, not if I wanted to set myself free, be free, release the burden from my energy body, find greater ease in my sacral chakra and let go of the pain and the sadness and the heaviness in my heart that was causing me physical sensation. 

I passed an old abreuvoir that had called to me during lockdown but then it had been completely overgrown. Now it has been cleared and I was able to sit in the quiet space, with the trickle of water and the mosquitos that hovered, and I noticed the half-moon shining in on me, and I remember the crystal oracle card that keeps appearing around ‘ancestors’ and I surrendered to them. “Show me the way”, I asked, “you keep calling to me and now I call to you, help me to move on”. 

I ran on some more, and I attempted a half-hearted effort at forgiveness, but I could sense there was still resentment; I’ll forgive you but I need you to know how much it hurt me type approach, which means you’re not quite there in making peace with whatever has happened (for a reason, as part of the need for the soul to experience and come to know itself). I dug deep, it felt so uncomfortable, because I had to let go of the story and all that this meant and then who would I become and what of the story? 

Yet I was done, and I noticed the sky tinged orange and clouds turning red as the sun set deeper below the horizon and the airplane trail moving away into the distance, and the half-moon still there reminding me that the light will shine brighter into the shadows in days to come, that there is nowhere else to hide, not when you have become conscious of what needs to go; and also that there is always duality, black and white, right and wrong, love and hate, and it is only in recognising this and embracing both, seeing that we hold all aspects inside ourselves, killer, pacifist, that we might settle into the peace of the oneness of it all.

I knew I had a choice, airplane flying away from me, it’s path clear and I know I could do the same, I was at the top of donkey hill, the path ahead was clear, I had to let go into it, and as I ran down the hill, I finally found the courage, because I felt held, the earth was calling, and I called back to her and I finally managed to find the words, stuck in my throat for too long now, gave voice to that which needed to be said, to be heard by the earth and I forgave those who needed forgiving and I forgave myself.

At the bottom of the hill is another abreuvoir and I felt called in here, as if these are the portals, the ancient way that we might connect more deeply into all that is, with its mystery and wisdom, that is beyond time, because the past greets the present and creates the future all in one, reminding me of the distance healing symbol in Reiki – no past, no present, no future. 

I sat here and I talked to the ancients, connecting to my root, to the solidity of the earth and I put my hands and wrist joints into the water as if I was letting go into the flow of the water of the sacral chakra, the element of water of the sacral chakra, breathing the air of the heart chakra and the fire in my solar plexus was cooled and there was an ease to the space of the throat, now the words had been spoken, and I smiled and I congratulated myself because that has been a long time coming and I knew then without doubt the connection between the low heart and high heart.

If you are reading this then I suspect you will understand and be tiptoeing in your shadows too, dipping in and out, and knowing that the full moon is due and she is asking us to look at our wounds, and to come to know our cycles as she too cycles through our life and brings with her the light so that we might go deeper to set ourselves freer. I’d also like to share this article with you, I came across it by chance and feel it might be helpful for those also exploring this path - https://www.drnorthrup.com/energetic-breast-and-heart-disease-prevention/

 The morning after the letting go and the forgiveness, and the releasing of the residual tendrils of the repressed emotions and stuck energy, I picked up a nerf gun and I played with my youngest in a way I have never done previously. As I heard his squeals of delight and his laugher as I chased him around the kitchen tablet pretend shooting, his favourite game, I realised that I hadn’t allowed myself to play in a very long time, not really, not properly, I had even killed my own joy (kill-joy) in my mental imprinting of what I considered right and wrong, and the hangover from my past experiences around killing and joy, pleasure and pain. 

I was reminded that we never know what might shift for us when we do the releasing into the deeper places; the idea of being more alive and intimate with the self, will manifest in ways we could never have imagined (often what we resist: playing guns!) and yet those ways will always bring more joy, because our hearts will be more open. It’s not only our ability to feel joy and bliss that becomes positively affected, but also our ability to be in relationship with those we love, and with the earth, and ultimately with our self.

The body never lies; eclipses and shadows

That was quite some eclipse season just passed. Phew. It probably didn’t help (or rather, it massively helped) that it happened to coincide with me holding two Reiki Level One attunement sessions and going through a twenty-one day cleanse.

They say that eclipses shine the light into the shadows and it certainly felt like this for me. The process itself was painful, quite literally as well, but I am always grateful when I come through the other side of it and awaken to patterns that no longer serve me in my life and that I can finally let go.

One pattern was around harm and the harm that we do to the self and the lack of love for the self that might underpin this. I have been exploring this theme since 2019 and it did feel that the understanding of this, the ‘aha’ moment was a long time in coming. But I got there in the end and I cannot tell you the relief to finally be able to acknowledge the love for self, but to know that I am both worthy of it, and deserving; I blogged about this last week.

What is interesting to me though is the way in which our internal dialogue, our thought patterns, especially the negative ones, manifest physically. For a long while now there has been some inner tension around this idea of self-love and I have battled with this more than ever before since having children, simply because this gave me even more of an excuse to give myself a hard time, in all my perceived failings as a mother.

I have found it so difficult to forgive myself for the moments when I may have acted out of anger, let alone the moments when I feel that I may have let my children down in some way, working more than I might do now or putting my needs before their own. My skin reflected this tension; the anger and resentment that I was harbouring towards myself for not being a better parent. Every time I got stressed because of my perceived short comings or because I wasn’t living up to my expectations my skin would get even worse.

 Tied up in this was the idea of the face that I might put out into the world – the face of someone who wanted so desperately to look like she was in control, who didn’t want to show her vulnerability, and yet was floundering underneath the weight of it all. My skin told the true story, the skin is the largest organ in the body and will give your inner game away. The skin is also connected to the heart chakra, because it is through touch that the heart tenderly expresses itself; this is where we feel and touch life, and we learn to truly feel and touch others and to be felt and touched by others too.

It was extremely reassuring to me actually, because I had been getting a touch (no pun intended) frustrated that despite all the dietary changes, all the Ayurvedic medicine, all the inner work, that I was still seemingly incapable of healing my skin. I have no doubt that all of this helped, but it did feel that it took an awfully long time and a lot of inner reflection and finding my way in the dark, to finally get to the point where I understood the root cause of my skin condition. This of course is one of the main benefits of Reiki especially – it helps us to know our own truth and understand the reason for any loss of wellbeing.

I was beside myself with relief therefore, when I finally got it, and quite amazingly my skin began healing. I’m sure there is a way to go, that this is only the beginning, but it has been a few years in coming! Mind you, if I thought things would calm down with this realisation then I was to be disappointed. Because almost immediately after recognising the pattern and the connection with self-love, I started experiencing heart pain. This was on my birthday and I had a feeling it might be connected to the revelation about self-love and this was the ‘felt’ harm coming to the surface. And it may well have been, for there were moments when I felt a stabbing pain as if I did indeed have a knife in my heart – all the stabbing that I have done to my own heart over the years.

But when the pain started shifting and continued on as one day between two and so on, I did start to wonder if it might be another pattern. It was really unpleasant actually. Sometimes there was a pain in my actual heart and other times it was over my energetic heart, and sometimes shifted to the back. I noticed that I was becoming increasingly panicky with it, convinced that I was breathless, and wondering if my days of smoking had finally caught up with me, yet I had this sneaky suspicion that it was purely metaphysical and my pendulum kept confirming this.

I was aware that a full moon lunar eclipse was upon us and I was expecting that the pain might ease once this had passed. But yesterday it was still there, despite daily Reiki on myself and even going for a session with Sue on Friday. Something did not want to release easily! I was teaching a Reiki attunement session yesterday and I hoped that that might pass it through, working as I was through the heart chakra, but alas the course ended and still there was the pain, only now it was increasing in intensity to the extent that I actually googled signs and symptoms of heart attack and contemplated a trip to A&E.

However it suddenly crossed my mind that this was merely anxiety manifest, and funny that, given that I have been writing about anxiety in a manuscript I have been editing. It felt almost that I needed to be reminded how awful this feeling to be able to dig into it consciously and understand what lies underneath it. Back in my twenties, I used to feel anxious, but I was very good at numbing myself from it, by smoking or drinking or starving/binging. By the time I found yoga and Reiki when I was 28, I had managed to do a very good job of actually taking myself out of my body so I didn’t have to feel anything!

What’s happened over the years is that yoga has brought me back into the body, and never more than now with the Scaravelli-inspired approach which takes you deep into your flesh and bones where there is nowhere to hide! Vinyasa yoga absolutely served a purpose but it got to the point where it wasn’t taking me deep enough anymore, it was just skirting the edges, not resting into them and exploring them – it was easy to bypass them.

I’ve noticed then that the more I have dropped into my yoga practice and the more I edit the manuscript I initially wrote over two years now and have been editing and re-writing and setting aside and then picking up again ever since, the more I am asked to go deeper. It is like my soul has demanded it. I had this in my mind, despite my panic and my fear that actually this was nothing to do with metaphysical healing and I needed to get a grip on reality and join the rest of the world and go see a doctor!  

So I kept dipping into the anxiety and sitting with it, as uncomfortable as it was, and as much as I wanted to numb from it, I didn’t, I stayed with it. I had hoped it might pass yesterday evening after working with the moon’s energy with forgiveness and manifesting, but I awoke with the pain this morning and felt rather weary and very sorry for myself. Maybe E was right after all and I needed to go and see the doctor (I had checked my blood pressure a few days ago and it was absolutely normal btw, and my parents weren’t overly concerned, they had a sense it was anxiety too).

A client cancelled a Reiki session at the last minute this morning, no fault of her own, it was divinely guided as it happened because it gave me an extra 90 minutes to myself, which is a complete treat what with having the boys home so much recently as we contemplated the home schooling approach. I locked myself away in the wing as the plumber was in the house finally re-fitting our bath, which some of you will recall has not been in action since March and the week prior to lockdown when we had a flood. I can’t tell you how challenging it has been for a Cancerian like me not to be able to bath daily! 

I felt drawn to listen to a 38 minute Yoga Nidra from the Yoga Nidra Network, this one all about new beginnings, which felt appropriate because this is definitely the message I have been receiving, and I feel this strongly, that we have been asked to let go of patterns and ways of thinking that have been holding us back so that we can begin anew, wipe the slate clean…new beginnings. It is unusual for me to listen to such a long recording, but I just knew I needed to surrender to something! 

As it happened this recording took me deep into the heart so I could sit deeper into the sensation, which felt very real, I wasn’t imagining it. I followed this practice with a yoga sequence, where I was exploring how I might move on my mat without gripping the groins, some of the armour that I have developed over the years as a way of protecting myself from perceived harm. I am always keen to unravel the movement patterns that are stuck – and stick me – in the past.

It is difficult to say what it was or if it was a combination of these practices, the bath going back in, the swim in the sea this morning, a past life awareness, a comment made to me by Eben’s pre-school manger as I dropped him off crying again this morning, or whether it was something I read or someone else said, but I returned to the kitchen after 90 minutes and the chest pain that has plagued my every waking hour since last Tuesday had finally eased, and I felt an incredible sense of relief and peace. 

I emailed a friend and in that email I finally admitted what it was that had been bothering me and the pattern that needed to heard. The chest pain and the anxiety were there to draw my attention to a fear of dying. Not a fear of dying in so much as a fear of me losing my life, I can’t be sure that I am scared of that, I think once you’ve self-harmed and contemplated taking your own life, death doesn’t seem as scary as it might do to others, but I do have a fear of dying and the implications of this for my boys, that scares me, how they might be harmed by it.

I realised then how much of my life since becoming a mum six years ago has been lived with this fear bubbling away in the background. It ties in very well with self-love too, because I suddenly realised how much I have given myself a hard time since becoming a mum if I have done anything which I considered might make me ill, be that working too hard, eating the wrong foods, not exercising enough, drinking too many glasses of wine or whatever it might be. I have felt this enormous pressure too to heal past wounds so that any ingrained negative thinking patterns do not manifest as physical illness through toxicity to the liver or any other part of the body for that matter; cancer or otherwise. 

Imagine the pressure to live up to such high expectations as I have set for myself these last six years! As a healer it has been torturous at times – it’s almost like too much knowledge is a not a good thing – the more I learn about healing and about metaphysical healing, the more I know that our health and wellbeing is a reflection of our thinking. I know this, yet it is the hardest thing in the world to change our thought patterns! For a start we need to become conscious of them, and secondly they are often so ingrained that we identify with them. We literally become our thoughts. So the more negative our thinking, especially out thinking towards ourselves (the inner critic), the more our health will suffer in the long term.

But it’s ironic really, because we can almost give ourselves a harder time when we are aware of this, simply because we think we should know better in the first place – but of course we are only human and we can only ever look at ourselves and our inner world from our current perspective and level of consciousness. It is only in recognising our patterns that we become more conscious and yet somehow we have to recognise them in the first place and so we almost have to fall into the trap first and then find our way out of it – from darkness comes light and all that.

So from the dark it came to light that all of this has been about fear of dying and a loss of safety. I am pretty sure that this is the reason both my boys suffer with separation anxiety, because they will be picking up on my subconscious fears around our collective safety, of something happening to them when they are not with me, and of something happening to me when I am not with them.

It is a loss of safety that is at the root to many of our neuroses. It gets to a point where we have to ask ourselves on what basis have we decided that we feel unsafe. Is it real or perceived? There is nothing to validate that mine is real, it is in my mind, an imagining, a collection of negative thinking. The mind is a powerful thing!

Reflecting over all of this in my mind, I was suddenly very clear the reason I have had such resistance to schooling, not the schooling itself, although I do have some reservations about the education ‘system’ but about leaving my children with people who are not immediate family. This has made me incredibly uncomfortable despite knowing that the people with whom they are left are very lovely people and would never intentionally harm them. But the mind is tricky like I say!

 Needless to say the chest pain has totally gone now, as I knew it would, and my heart feels much lighter and my faith restored, because I was starting to doubt my whole perspective on life and on healing and on knowing thyself. I have also of course noticed other minor patterns that arise from this one and that has been welcomed too. The body doesn’t lie, I know this and wasn’t doubting it as such, but I was beginning to doubt my ability to understand what my body, my soul then, was trying to convey to me through the body.

What I have noticed actually, and what kept me holding off from following up with a health care professional, was that during times like this, when I know something is trying to come through and things need to change, when life feels stuck and dark and stagnant, I start desperately looking for things I can change. I question my career, my home, my relationships, thinking that if I change something on the outside then everything will be OK. 

Yet I know in my heart of hearts that something has to change on the inside if it is true happiness and contentment that we seek, if we truly are committed to a path of awakening and consciousness. It is we who have to change, and the only way we can do this is by letting go of something on the inside, of surrendering our fixed mind, and seeing what reveals itself to us from inside the body where we are living during our time here on planet earth.

I’m grateful to Reiki and to the moon and to yoga and to the eclipses for shining a light into teh shadows and helping us all to wake up to our true selves, to peel away the layers and be less inhibited, limited an restricted by our old patterns and by how life has been lived. Together we can create a brand new future, and one bathed in light, from the heart…we just got to keep being courageous and doing the work to love ourselves; the rest will take care of itself.

Love Emma x

P.S. Pleased, if you do get chest pain and you are not sure it is metaphysical, then please do seek medical advice immediately!

Eating disorder as a journey to the soul

I turned 45 today. I’d been preparing for a while, because it felt like it might be a momentous occasion, a real mid-life moment, something that needed to be acknowledged in some way. I had initially thought we might go to Glastonbury on pilgrimage and swim in the white spring, then I decided I’d go and watch the sunrise at Stonehenge on the solstice and celebrate on my own, early.

 But then Covid arrived and we have come to Sark instead, which has started to feel a little bit like a second home, a spiritual home at that. There is something about the energy here, the combination of the ancient rocks and the wild sea, the space, the peace, the fact that it hasn’t been ruined by modern civilisation or mass tourism that I find uplifting, grounding and profoundly healing.

It allows deep knowing to surface, space between thoughts, a re-prioritising of life and a consideration and rejig of what might be important. It also offers wonderful walking and scrambling, and swimming and cycling, all my favourite things and with my favourite people too. It is a place that touches deep into the heart’s core and transforms things. You cannot help but be changed by time spent here.

I needed this time if truth be told, to step away from the maelstrom of Guernsey, the pressure of the schooling debacle, and the routine, to say nothing of the building repairs being carried out on the cottage, this after the flood right before the beginning of lockdown; how I have missed my bath! Here I get to lay in a bath. I cannot tell you the joy. It is like nothing else. If bathing was a subject, then I’d be giving it my effort for a grade A. 

Life always feels better after a bath. Like sea swimming. I have never once regretted a swim. I’ve never once regretted a trip to Sark either. Although there was a drunken work event back in my twenties, when I ended up staying the night at the last minute, and drinking even more wine than was needed and paying for that the next day, not least with an invoice for the hotel room, but with a sore head. Those days are long gone thankfully. 

However, this has definitely been a year of reflection. When I turned 44, I was aware there were still aspects of my past that needed resolving and I thought that if I don’t do something about this soon, then when will I? My mum had highlighted this to me when she had read the first draft of a manuscript I had written and commented that I wasn’t really in a position to write about how one recovers from an eating disorder, for example, when I clearly hadn’t, not totally. She had a point. But the question is, do you ever truly recover? 

It’s a question that made me curious, and it began a process that has found me exploring how this might still show up in my life.  I developed an eating disorder when I was 17 yet I had never taken professional help to understand the nature of it. It was something I skirted around, the elephant in the room, it went unspoken, and yet I could write about it, which is strange isn’t it, that we can sometimes write publicly about the things we can’t talk about intimately.

Yet it is tied up in intimacy, as is so much of the life that we live in our heads, because intimacy is tricky, as anyone will know, who has tried to explore this. The  process took me into intimacy and into harm, and it shook me around, as I tried to make sense of when and why it had all began, and I started to see themes and patterns in my life even now, so that while, these days, I might eat ‘normally’ (whatever this means), an eating disorder is so much more than food. It’s about our thoughts and our relationship with self and about our mind and our heart, our body, our soul and how we relate to the world.

I did find it depressing when a lady told me, a beautiful lady incidentally, who has some experience of working with people with eating disorders, that it is just something you come to live with. I don’t know about that, it doesn’t settle easily with me. I pull weeds out of my veggie patch so that the veggie plants can thrive. Isn’t it the same with us too, can’t we pull out the weeds from their roots and make our internal earth richer, our inner landscape clearer. The sea goes in and the sea goes out. The moon rises and it sets. Are we so very different? 

 Sure the clouds come and obscure the moon, and the winds whip into a bay, disturbing the calmness of the sea, but their very nature stays the same. Is it not the same with us too? I believe it is and I wondered then, whether it may be a matter of making peace with our own nature, living in harmony with ourselves, with our true self. This I have explored too. You can lose your mind in the process. Some people might think you mad, but I think it makes you feel very alive.

What is life if we do not lose our minds? There’s nothing worse than a fixed mind, believing this or that as if it was a truth, when really a truth is only a perception captured in time, your perception, and this can chop and change, like the sea, like the moon, if you catch it from a dodgy angle, or when you’ve drunk too much wine (which I haven’t done for a long time now, I’m so pleased about that), or you think you see something and yet it’s not really what you thought it was when your eyes focus properly.

So where was I going with this, as we’re going out to see a fat pig, on the farm here on Sark, owned by friends, and the boys love pigs, which always amuses me as they love to eat sausages. They understand the connection too, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. I’m more bothered and I’m not even eating the dead pig, ingesting it’s energy – if you buy into that sort of thing, which I do btw, because we are all energy…

Picking up the thread, OK so I think I thought that my mission might be, by the time I am 45 to have explored and understood more around the subject of harm, because this really is the crux of an eating disorder. I mean let’s face it, you can’t harm yourself much more than depriving yourself of the very thing that might nourish you, namely food, or stuffing your face to the extent that you tax your digestive system and counter any potential for nourishment.

It’s a really cruel and nasty state of mind to find yourself in. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. It’s very difficult to be satisfied by life when you don’t allow yourself to be satisfied by food, when the very thing that night nourish you is turned into a weapon by your mind. It’s very difficult to suddenly switch the mind away from that, especially if it has become an ingrained pattern over a long time, and it often is with an eating disorder because it is very difficult to treat – even the ‘experts’ don’t really know how to treat it, at best they might help you manage it.

But I didn’t just want to manage it. I tried that for years and it was a daily consideration, because every day you have to eat. Not that it’s even about the eating, it’s about everything else, and I suppose this is the point that I have been trying to make. It is about allowing yourself to be satisfied by life, of feeling that you deserve to be nourished and loved and cared for by yourself as much as by anyone else, by life then! It is about all these wonderful things, but ultimately it is about love and it is about intimacy, and it is about being deeply honest and truly forgiving and compassionate. 

I have learned a lot this year and I’m proud of myself actually, I congratulate myself, because it has not been easy. There have been dark nights of the soul, as you know, and not because I’m losing my mind, going mad, oh cripes is there something wrong with her sort of thing, but because I don’t want to be continuously limited by my past, and by the patterns I have developed to help me feel safe, that are actually no longer – and never were if truth be told, but you’ll have to wait for the book to read more about that – useful or helpful, that are anything but that.

Accepting and loving the self is not something that happens over-night, you’ll know that if you are reading this. You’ll know because we all have moments of questioning our worth, when we catch sight of ourselves in a mirror and wish we hadn’t and then quickly find something to distract us from ourselves so that we don’t need to go any deeper, get busy, busier, drink more wine, do more yoga, always doing, rushing, being somewhere other than exactly here right now looking at ourselves honestly in that mirror.

Those of you with eating disorders will know this more than most. It is not easy to recover, to find your feet again, to mend your heart (for it is the greatest wounding to the heart, to harm yourself in this manner), to be able to look at your reflection and love what you see, to be compassionate to yourself, respect, love, cherish your body (so conditioned are you to push it, starve it, abuse it, try to change it, control it), to nourish, care for and be at peace, to put yourself and your needs first, to listen and be heard.

But it is possible, bit by bit. I know this because I have had to face my demons. I had a choice. Last year, the year before and every year before that too. My birthdays came and highlighted to me my ongoing issues and neuroses. Birthdays do this. It is as if a portal opens for us so that we may see more clearly. What used to happen though, was I’d ignore it, because it was too painful to acknowledge that another year had passed and I was still carrying this burden. I’d drink wine. At birthdays you drink wine. It was the perfect excuse to pop my head in the sand and just hope that things might change by the next year.

The trouble is that we don’t change unless we do the changing. Unless something shifts. Unless we look honestly at ourselves and do what is needed, lose our mind usually, because it is only in losing our mind that we can find a new way to be, in the unknown that is not fixed by what has happened previously. The mind is a terribly powerful thing. Ask anyone who has experienced an eating disorder. They will tell you. The mind is truly fascinating, ingenious and beautiful and yet at times extremely disconcerting. Thank god for the heart! The heart keeps me sane. So does faith. 

Two years ago all my birthday cards seemed to be about yoga and drinking wine. The yoga was fab but the drinking wine made me uncomfortable, and I was aware that I wanted this to change. It’s a silly thing to notice, but do notice the birthday cards that you are sent, they speak volumes about where you are at in your life. I was stuck and I needed to go a bit deeper, to stop skirting on the edges, not really getting into the centre. Yet I didn’t know then what to do or where to turn, because on the surface life was great, I was writing books, teaching yoga, living the dream. 

Last year, my birthday was uneventful to the extent that I don’t remember it, I had to look at photos to remind myself, and yet I knew that I liked turning 44, that there was something about the number, and 4 my lucky number, so double luck and I suppose there was a sense that I had to get on with it now. You get moments like that, where you’ve been coasting along, you know there’s stuff there in the background, but you can ignore it, you’ve gotten used to ignoring it. But then all of a sudden you just think no. There’s a line in the sand. 

You can keep on keeping on, pretending that everything is OK, or you can dive right in. In moments like that, when I suddenly become aware of something that needs healing, there is no choice. I don’t want to live a half lived life, denying my potential, too fearful to make the changes that might need to be made, too scared to feel what needs to be felt. I’ve spent too many birthdays in tears, a combination of overwhelm and just because they’ve never felt quite right, a reminder that I still hadn’t quite found that place inside me where I might feel satisfied, deserving, and OK with everything. The inner critic was always just a little bit too loud. 

Mary Oliver writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion”, and she is right. This year I have been attentive. Really attentive. The Scaravelli-inspired yoga has helped this, it is all about being attentive, and about devotion. It is through attention that we come to notice all that we had previously ignored, because there is nowhere else to turn, not when we have taken the step inwards, towards the heart. We are all heart, we know this.

Some will argue that we are the breath, because the breath gives life, yet without the heart, there is no breath. IVF allowed me to see this. At six weeks gestation, both my boys were visible on the screen as beating hearts. Beating hearts! They were alive and yet there was no breath. Not directly. This would follow when the heart was ready for expression in the outer world. Did they choose? I still don’t know about that. There is always mystery, this is what feeds our soul. 

I didn’t know how it might be today either. I found myself in tears on my mat yesterday, they seemed to come from nowhere but I wonder if it might have been apprehension, ahead of the big day. I bumped into someone I know from back home, not well, but we had this intimate conversation about home schooling in a very short period of time, on our bikes, along a grass track, our respective partner’s chatting, our children remarkably quiet, and she confessed to crying that day too, in the Avenue. Albeit she is five months pregnant so has an excuse!

But today was the most wonderful day. I felt I deserved it and I felt satisfied by it. I allowed myself to receive all that was offered. I did not get overwhelmed or upset and I didn’t drink wine or in any way numb out. I awoke with Eben’s head pressed to mine and when I reminded him it was by birthday (given he is three, I didn’t expect him to remember!), he excitedly told me of the gifts that were waiting, “the most beautiful Buddha, beautiful crystals and gardening gloves”. I couldn’t help but laugh. He opened my presents anyway and yes, there they were, all chosen by him.

I got to meditate, to drink tea, open my cards, take it easy, before we scrambled across rocks and swam naked in the Venus Pool, a first! We visited the Sark dolmen and Eben learned how to use my pendulum. We cycled and walked, and we swam some more at La Grande Greve, also a first. We ate fresh Sark eggs, homemade chips, and local salad with roasted pumpkin seeds, we drank tea and ate Caragh’s amazing dark praline chocolate, and we got wet in the rain. 

I wrote until my heart was content and I didn’t feel guilty one bit. We visited our friends and their huge pig and I sat in a tractor. I went to a yoga class, I can’t tell you the joy, and I lay in a bath and read my book. I did all these wonderful things that nourished and satisfied me and it felt great. The inner critic was quiet. I cannot tell you the relief.

That part of me that doesn’t self-congratulate easily, that holds back for fear of being judged for being egotistical or big headed, well that part of me is coming out of the shadows, because it is needed, it is so very much needed. I congratulate myself, because it has not been easy, but I know now that it is OK to feel satisfied and deserving. 

It is OK to express our needs and allow ourselves to receive what is needed. It is OK to damage our hearts as long as you find ways to heal it. Then it is OK to let go of the need to keep fixing, because we can get lost here too, playing out the old themes about not being good enough or worthy enough and forgetting that we’ve moved on and all we’re doing is keeping ourselves stuck in the past. Heal and move on. I know that now too. 

It is OK to feel proud of ourselves, to accept ourselves, to love ourselves. And I do, honestly I do. I couldn’t have told you that before. I would have cared too much about what you might have thought and not enough about me, packaging my poor little heart away in a box, whispering, “maybe next year you can come out and shine”. But now is the time. I hear you beautiful heart. And I rejoice in me and my life and my soul. And I hope you rejoice in all that is yours too. 

Stuff happens to us in our lives. We harm ourselves in many ways. I harmed myself with an eating disorder for many years and it would be foolish to pretend that that life is ever the same after an eating disorder comes in, but in many respects it can be reframed as a blessing, as something positive, as it might take you on a journey to the deepest parts of yourself, that you might never have otherwise known. It’s like depression, but more on that another time.

Losing our mind is only the very beginning, and it’s worth beginning, because a mind lost is a heart gained, and really, it can only ever be about love. It is a pilgrimage all of its own, to our soul, to the deepest part of ourselves that can spend a lifetime being unknown, yet with devotion to the self, we can find a depth that we didn’t know possible. This is a continuous exploration, one that I truly believe, is worth making; an act of devotion.

xxx

P.S. My cards this year were about the moon and flowers, goddesses and living your dreams…

Dancing on the edge of certainty

I chanced upon this beautiful poem by Mary Oliver called ‘Angels’; it was appropriate timing as I question edges and margins and lack of certainty, all the places that my practice currently takes me. Here it is:

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of 
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of 
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything. 
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not 
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not 
entirely anyway, other people’s 
heads. 

I’ll just leave you with this. 
I don’t care how many angels can 
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance. 

Life is a dance, and never more so than when you invite the angels into it. They are such a part of my life, that I forget that for other people this might seem rather strange. I love sharing angel cards with people especially for the first time and seeing their eyes open wide with the surprise at the angel card that has presented itself to them - always with an appropriate message, something that means something to them, and often fits in witty the context of a treatment or healing session.

Life is uncertain, and never have we been more aware of this than recently, with Covid. Yet still we try and find something concrete, something to hold on to, something to make us feel safe, be that our jobs or a relationship or possessions, even if we have outgrown them. We will hold on to the certainty of a yoga practice too, the familiarity of a sequence that we have practiced many times previously, and a style that we can almost do in our sleep, because it is so familiar to us and to our bodies.

Yet I have become increasingly aware, through the paradox and contradiction of the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga, that certainty in our practice can lead us down the superficial path of least resistance, the path well trodden, and not necessarily in our lives, but in our minds. It is easy to zone out of the body during a fast-paced asana practice, trying to keep up with the flow, trying to move the body and breathe, and put our bodies into the positions asked of it, always trying to further our practice, make our bodies bendier come what may.

I’ve noticed that we can stuck in movement patterns, feeding into the superficial muscles, allowing them to take over, and in the process denying the wisdom of the deeper muscles. So too in our life, we can lead very superficial lives, only allowing ourselves to delve so far into what may offer greater depth, but often this lacks certainty, it’s on an edge, a margin, a path not yet travelled, not yet lived, there’s resistance, and this send us straight back to where we were previously, to somewhere safe.

It takes courage to explore the backwater, to go deeper, to delve into the shadows, to let go of that which inhibits our growth, on the surface, to explore the edge of the inner landscape, to consider a life lived on the margins, neither here nor there, beyond definition, for it is a life lived with a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, not quite sure how it might unfold, not striving to be anywhere in particular, allowing the body to breathe rather than imposing the breath on it, and not trying to control an outcome, come what may, deeper truth and wisdom, compassion, forgiveness and the self, greater connection to the heart.

Our fears will keep showing up, reminding us of the reason we were searching for certainty in the first place, to conform, to feel secure, because everyone does that, and sometimes it’s difficult to live a life that goes against the flow, that tries to find a different path, a new way. Yet once touched, we know that we have to keep going, that we cannot stop, that we cannot go back, that we can no longer compromise that part of ourselves that craves a different life, that wants to go deeper than that life lived superficially, however much we may try and convince ourselves that that is OK and adopt anyone of our usual numbing strategies, so that we might forget that life could be lived differently.

I’m enjoying finding different ways of moving my body that is less harmful than the patterns I have adopted over the years, the patterns that I kept reinforcing on my mat, that allowed my body to maintain its armour, and it’s yang tendencies - albeit the tendencies are not so much of the body, but of the mind, which has dictated my practice for me. Now I get to sculpt the body, to do things differently, to chip away the armour and change the cellular memory, let go of the past which is still held in the body, informing my present.

The weight of responsibility will often weigh down the shoulders and impact on our ability to breath, tightening our upper spine, clipping our wings. We will struggle to truly find the comfort and ease of breath and body encouraged by the Yoga Sutras, forcing the breath, forcing the body. So too the hips, holding all those years of repressed emotions, the anger and hatred, sitting on them, impacting on the mobility and freedom of our spine, or our mind, we keep doing what e have always done and yet hope for a better outcome.

It is not enough to continue along the path of least resistance, the linear path, the safe one, certain, holding on to what we have always known and putting our heads deeper into the sand, even in ur yoga practice, even on our mat, even following prompts and instructions we can avoid being truly in the body, noticing it, but not noticing it, not knowing it, not knowing ourself, how can we know ourself if we are not truly present to the muscles, the bones, the ligaments, the flesh, our very nature, our nature.

So much of our physical tension of the result of mental tension, of lack of inner harmony and wholeness, fragmented, the good voice and the bad voice, the us before a yoga practice and the us at the end. How can we bring greater harmony to our whole being? I believe that this is the paradox. We might feel that life needs to be certain before we can find greater harmony and peace, and yet really, it is in the uncertainty, that this will reveal itself to us. A glimmer, a smidgen, a robin, a feather, a sign that this is the dimension where life might be lived, with the angels, a possibility, a potential.

Once we begin the journey to greater depth, once we step away from the superficial, once we notice more of the mind, with its comfortable and yet restricting and sometimes unhealthy patterns, then we can begin to notice more of the breath, and the certainty of this, and yet know that this is the breath between life and death, that the spine is the joint between life and death, that the exploration of the ancient sites is the space between life and death, that all of life is a dance between life and death and it is full of uncertainty that provides the joy that we seek, the possibility for inner harmony and peace. It is on the edges and the margins that life, the depth of life will reveal itself to us.

The eclipses and rage

This is some eclipse season, helping to shine a light into the shadows. I’m in the middle of a twenty-one day Reiki cleansing too, which probably doesn’t help, let alone all the work with my teacher and the energy work that I have been doing, to say nothing of the connection with the ancients and the ancient sites and their transformative energy. Yet I know that I am not alone and others have been going through it too, so I take comfort in this – I am not as insane as I might have thought! 

The rage when it came was all consuming. I could feel it coming. Over the years I have gotten better at feeling this and knowing that I need to find a way to release it, usually from  deep within the liver, which lends itself perfectly to holding  unexpressed and repressed anger, frustration and resentment - the solar plexus. It’s a horrible energy, which is probably the reason that we don’t always allow it expression, because it can be so damaging, at least if expressed unconsciously, which is often the case.

But it needs to move and be released somehow, it needs expression, to move, stuck energy does us no favours, it sits there in the shadows, our past still impacting on our present in patterns that might no longer serve us. It is helpful to let go of the past, so that we are not weighed down by it in the present, yet it can be so tricky sometimes because we don’t always know at the beginning what we are letting go of, the pattern only revealing itself when we are in process, so there is trust and faith involved.

 I could feel my skin bubbling with the holding on to all this hot rage and frustration, and I tried to access this, and allow it a path of expression on my yoga mat. I became aware of the need to forgive myself for something I had been giving myself a hard time about, and to forgive others who I felt had harmed me in my past (even though it wasn’t their intention to harm).

It is sometimes difficult to forgive if we believe that we have been harmed by another, because on some level we might want to hold onto the notion of ‘you harmed me’, so we can continue to play out our victimhood and buy into the blame dynamic. Yet at some point we have to take responsibility for our wellbeing, and we have to find the courage and strength to let our past and our unhealthy patterns go, so that we can free ourselves, and release the toxicity and negativity that may impact on us (not them), that clogs our livers and digestive systems. 

To do this, our higher self will call in a situation that will allow us to see more clearly the patterns that have been laid, because it will bring up in us the emotions that have been repressed, so that we might be able to shift things, shine a light into the shadows, allowing us to become more conscious in the process, less impacted by our past. Eclipses and solstices help to support this process, they will always shine a light for us, so I should have expected it, yet it still surprised me, the ferocity and intensity of the energy around the eclipse.

 The eclipse took place on the Sunday and on the Monday I felt the energy building. The pattern was becoming clearer, it was playing out around Elijah’s home schooling, and the same old feelings of helplessness and not being heard, old uncomfortable feelings around my worth and my power and powerlessness came up, feelings of annihilation and desperation, of harm and of sheer frustration. It was all there for me to see and feel how much the repression of all this was creating toxicity. 

 The healing process fascinates me, how we still, years on, find ourselves holding onto strands of all the stuff that we think we have looked at and resolved, as our lives move on in brighter and more empowered directions. Yet there is still sometimes a resonance and we don’t even know how this continues to play out, until the moon and the eclipses might help to make it clearer somehow.

I probably sound completely mad unless you too have been through this yourself because there is a moment when you  feel as if you might be losing your mind, as if you might now have reached a place of insanity because you see the world so differently to others, and this of course feeds into the dis-harmony and the lack of inner ease, because you consider that maybe you have gotten it wrong, that perhaps your inner truth, heart, guidance system is somehow flawed because others struggle to understand you.

I picked a fight, I did this consciously too, because I knew it would help me to release the pent up energy that needed expression. It worked and I found myself screaming with the rage of it to the sky and to the universe, as if now I really had reached a degree of madness, and yet it felt so good, to allow the rage, that aspect of self that is often denied. The tears came, big fat tears of anger, and then of sadness and then of nothing in particular, exhaustion perhaps, spent. 

 It’s like a storm, or a fireball that comes from nowhere and takes hold, wreaking havoc for a short time, churning everything up, moving stuff, and then blows itself out, and everything returns calm, if a little bruised, settling. It’s inner child stuff usually, the adult self needs to hold the child self that feels as if it has been harmed, needs to reclaim it and hold it safe. I always have this need to find my teddy bear when this comes up, this is the give away!

The whole process can be so healing and yet sometimes so difficult to navigate without falling into further patterns of victimhood and blame. If you can navigate it, as consciously as possible, allowing it then, it can be an extremely liberating process, leaving you with a renewed sense of self and compassion too. How it then unfolds is difficult to tell, but the attachment has lessened, because your present is not so informed by your past, limited, so there is greater potential.

You might notice this coming up for you these next few weeks as we approach another eclipse and a full moon. Be assured that there is nothing wrong, you are just being cleared out so that the new can enter in. So welcome it, whatever it brings, be with it, try to be conscious of it and avoid the usual coping and suppression mechanisms, be gentle and witness as best you can the process as it unfolds within and outside of you too. 

These are potent times, and I find it very exciting the potential of the new world we might create if we can go to those deepest and darkest places. Life will undoubtably becomes brighter the more we can embrace the vulnerable parts that we often keep hidden. Let’s see…the eclipses are here to help us create a brighter world and we can each be part of that, individually affecting the collective. 

Abundance!

I met some friends on the beach with our children today and two of us were talking about the seeds that we had been given to plant, by our mutual friend, Fi. It seems that mine have been rather more abundant than my friend’s seeds, and she quite rightly pointed out that abundance comes in many forms, and this did make me think, because life can be abundant in so many different ways.

I have been lucky or perhaps it’s the result of my being a touch over-enthusiastic, because I have been blessed with about 500 pots of medicinal plants (sorry Tara, not to rub it in!!) (There are lots still to re-pot!). Typically the ones I am most excited about, the pot marigolds (so I can make calendula cream) have not been as abundant as say hyssop, or mother’s wort, or even gypsy wort now I come to think about it. Goodness knows what I’ll do with them.

Mind you, Fi did say to me that it’s not so much what you do with them that will bring the joy, but the process of actually growing them. This is so true and one of the fundamental teachings from the Bhagavad Gita, about not being attached to the fruits of our labours. There is a verse that can be translated as follows: “You have the right to work, but for work’s sake only. You have no rights to the fruits of work. Desire for the fruits of work must never be your notice in working. Never give way to laziness either”.

If ever there was an opportunity to put this into practice then it has been growing the medicinal plants! I had no expectation or attachment to outcome, I was growing them simply because Fi had given me the idea and something in me said, “yes, 'let’s do this”. In fact it was Ewan who planted some of the seeds, I just gave them Reiki and have tended to them ever since. I’ve planted more along the way, although I wonder now the reason I did this, because I already had so many, and I am considering that in the context of my wider pondering on greed, which has come up in recent weeks as I witness the effect of greed playing out in the wider world and I have been considering it in my world too.

The thing is with the plants, I have just grown them for the sake of growing them and because it felt like my heart wanted me to do it and it has been hugely enjoyable. I have no plans of what to do with them, beyond the pot marigolds. This too has been wonderful, to not have placed pressure on myself to do anything with them really, albeit I have bought a couple more books on herbal remedies and what I might make, if I have the time and inclination, let alone the financial resource to buy all the bits and bobs that are often required in this whole ‘making things’ process!

The message from the Bhagavad Gita, is to renounce attachment to the fruits so that you can remain even tempered in success and failure, and that it is this evenness of temper, which is yoga. It is said that work done with anxiety about the results of the work, is far inferior to work done without anxiety, because this brings with it self-surrender. We surrender all attachment to outcome and just do it for the love of it and because - on the whole - it is our dharma, our reason to be in this world. There is an understanding that those who work selfishly, for the fruits alone, for the results of their actions, will end up miserable!

It is difficult though, because of course generally, we do need to earn money to live. This pandemic has certainly challenged so many of us with this. I heard myself saying today, “double the amount of work, for half the amount of income”, because this is what the pandemic has brought with it, and I know I am not alone, because others are saying it too. The additional administration these last few months to adapt to the changing circumstances has been huge and the income has been much less than it would be ordinarily because of restrictions caused by social distancing.

Yet I know that for me work is not just about income. I teach yoga and share Reiki because I love it. It makes me feel alive. I was positively depressed during lockdown when I wasn’t able to touch people and share it face to face, E was finding life with my dull mood hard work! So I am just so happy to be able to teach again, regardless of the fact that it helps me earn money. And while I know not to be attached to the fruits of the labour, I am grateful for all the abundance that fills my life, the plants, the vegetable patch, the friends, the bird that visit each days, the time with my children, the peacefulness of dusk, and the abundant sleep now my younger son doesn’t wake us as much.

Life is full of abundance. I suppose we just have to notice it, and step out of the conditioning, which always sees abundance in terms of monetary gain. We have to remember to enjoy the process, to do the work for the sake of the work that needs to be done, not because of an outcome. It’s much easier said than done. Even in yoga there is the grasping for an outcome. I noticed it tonight for the first time, when I asked students to establish an intention, something they might like to receive from the practice and I realised that this was setting them up to expect an outcome, to see their practice as something leading them somewhere, rather than just practising for the love of practising.

I notice it playing out during the practice too, this attachment to a pose needing to look a certain way, so that there might be pushing and pulling and a loss of the magic that might arise if only we could just be OK by allowing the body to unravel when it is ready, not because we are forcing it in some way. As if we might achieve more, whatever that might be, peace and harmony perhaps, a better body. I don’t know, we all have our different reasons for practice, our different attachments, our different ideas of how it might be.

But really, it is my experience, that just turning up on our mat is enough. Just being there with our body and with our breath and honouring both and surrendering to the process and to the practice. There will be greater abundance, simply because there will be a change, that will help you - if nothing else - to recognise it, because perhaps it’s always been there but you have just never recognised it, because so often we focus on what we don’t have, and miss all that is already filling our lives, the love, the silence, the noise, the craziness, the solitude. It is all abundant, it’s just our perspective that sometimes needs shifting.

We begin to notice more of the joy that comes with the work. In letting go to the fruits, we begin to see all that we had previously dismissed and overlooked in our quest to always be somewhere other than where we are. It’s actually liberating to live like this, albeit it demands another step outside the box, living in a society that is generally focused on outcome, always working towards a future date to improve from a past date already taken place. Life is so abundant, let’s give thanks for that!

The Chakras

I love working with the chakras, it has underpinned my work for many years now and I am always keen to share them with others, be that through yoga, Reiki and/or Ayurveda. I thought it about time that I blogged about them again, in case they should be of interest to you, or you might learn something helpful or interesting by exploring more of your own chakra system.

Basically, the chakras are wheels of energy that form the energy system in the human body. There are seven of them in total (the magic seven!), and they are responsible for overall health, providing a sense of mental, physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. 

The chakras are also junctions of consciousness (mind) and the physical body, nourishing particular organs and controlling various psycho-physiological pathways. They are responsible for transporting neuro-electrical and spiritual energies of the spinal cord and also for conveying stimuli from the higher centres (for example the brain, pituitary gland) to the lower organs.

Furthermore, the chakras correlate with the endocrine system (hormone system) and therefore a chakra imbalance will present as a problem within the endocrine system e.g. thyroid gland or ovaries etc. The endocrine imbalance happens as a result of chakra imbalance, not the other way around, and therefore you are always encouraged to get to the energetic imbalance if you hope to heal the physical manifestation of that imbalance.

An imbalance in a chakra is created by an obstruction in the energy flow. This might be caused by deep buried memories within the subconscious mind from childhood trauma, or from tension build up at the chakras, which can affect posture, metabolism, emotional state and breathing for example. Physical ailments may develop by the chronic repeated obstruction to energy flow. 

When one chakra is blocked, the other chakras begin to compensate and either become overactive or under-active and you might start to notice issues arising here too. That’s the reason it is so important to truly get to the root cause of any physical complaint and consider the energetic imbalance. 

This can be addressed through yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda. In many respects I have found Ayurveda to be the most powerful modality, because it works not only through diet and lifestyle, but incorporates massage, yoga asana and pranayama too, working on physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and energetic levels simultaneously.  Like with any holistic approach to healing, you will need to take responsibility and do the work, no one can do it for you. Plus it can take time!

I think this is often the greatest obstacle to our healing. We have a tendency to want the quick fix approach, forgetting that it may have taken years of living out of balance with our innate wisdom which has led to our loss of wellbeing in the first place.  It will take time and it will demand our attention, if we truly wish to heal, then we must be prepared to look into the shadows and reclaim those fragmented and lost parts of self. We have to be truthful with our selves. 

This is the reason I love working with the chakras though, because the transformation is very real, and deep, you can’t get much deeper than working energetically, because this underpins everything, and connects us through all our lifetimes, so that past life stuff can come up too. It’s all in there! The more you work with the chakras the more life makes sense and the more you can live a life of freedom and genuine sustained contentment. 

The root chakra will follow…

xxx