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!

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. 

The Mother with the Moon

As we approach the summer solstice and the new moon solar eclipse on Sunday, I feel that the ‘mother’ in all her guises, both literally and as Gaia, is very much in the field at the moment. 

However, it might just be me, because I have been immersing myself more in the goddess recently, listening to a series of lectures by Kathy Jones, who is a Priestess of Avalon and a Priestess of Goddess and the Founder of the Goddess Temple, Hall & House in Glastonbury, and I am reading her book too, Soul and Shadow, so am fully in that zone. So perhaps it is a case of law of attraction, given the information coming in. 

Yet, and as I always say, I am merely a micro of the macro so it is likely that you are feeling it too and I suspect it will become clearer and stronger the closer we get Sunday. For me the body has been getting my attention, a sensation in the breast and a change in consistency of monthly blood (sorry, probably too much information but this is how the body talks to us, how the wisdom comes through, as a result of changes in our own nature, the very bones and muscles and skin of our body in this very lifetime on Planet Earth).

It’s in this way, through the body, that we are made aware of stuck energy that is often the result of old repressed emotions that have not been allowed expression, this is e-motions (energy in motion) that need releasing, of wounds that still need healing, for the energy to be able to flow again and for us to feel increased wellbeing and greater presence (less weighed down by the energy stuck (and sticking us) in the past). 

I dropped into the body sensations, and tried to listen. I’ve channelled quite a lot of Reiki recently and this has undoubtably helped in me understanding a little more of what my body is trying to tell me, although there’s still always more to know (one of the many wonderful things about working with Reiki is that you receive as you give!)

I realise how much I have been giving myself a hard time for my perceived mothering failures, about the decisions I have made in the past about how I might live in relationship with my children, about going back to work when Elijah was only 3 months old, and how this has pained me for six years now, to think that I felt I had little choice and the guilt at leaving my son albeit with my own beautiful mum, which of course made it easier. 

I know that I made that decision as consciously as I could at that time, and that if I knew then what I know now, I might have found a different way and made a different decision instead, which would have enabled me to spend more time with my son when he was still so young. Yet I recognise that we can only ever make decisions based on what we know in that moment, depending on our level of consciousness and our perception about where we are and what we feel we need/want from life. 

 It is all too easy to reflect back now and consider how we might have done things differently if only we had known then what we know now, and to give ourselves a very hard time in the process, focusing on our perceived failings rather than the bits we might have got right, that feel more comfortable to us. I know also that this ‘hard time giving’ serves no one, not us, and especially not our children. There is nothing to be gained by being negative towards ourselves, yet as mothers we do this. 

Sometimes the weight of what it means to mother can be overwhelming, simply because we are desperate not to mess it up, not to cause pain to our children or to damage them in any way. Yet we are only human and life is messy and uncertain, and we are all of our own nature, which means with the best will in the world we can never do it for our children and we may never truly understand the way that they see the world, as much as we may try, which means that we may not always be the person that they need us to be, regardless of how much of ourselves we give to them.

I know all this, and yet I have been so conscious of trying to be all that is needed and to understand their needs and their wants and accommodate these as best I can without losing myself in the process, which is the trickiest bit, because sometimes we do lose ourselves, despite our best efforts! The trouble is that mothering cannot be delineated. There is no line to say that this is where I begin and this is where I end, that this is what I will give and this is what I will keep for myself, as this too is always in flux and it cannot be pinned down or made concrete from one day to the next. 

Today I am this way and tomorrow I might be another way, and I know now that that is OK. Somehow we will find a way. And the way weaves this way and that, and the wind drops and the sun sets and all is calm, and then the storm comes to turn this all on its head and there is no sunset that day and the wind does not stop blowing so that we cannot hear so clearly, and we are flustered and full of rage, and then the rain comes and it cools us down, and we start again, the heart open closing open closing, wanting always to be open but there are moments when it cannot be that way. 

So too it is with mothering and being mothered. How much do we open to the vulnerability of being loved and of loving with all our heart? It sounds so easy but sometimes it is not. There are moments when we lose the awareness that allows us to be so present, even for a split second and we might say something that is not aligned to heart, because we are protecting our own heart, because there is some wounding, some resonance of some hurt that we didn’t like very much.

Sometimes we can be mothered so much that we don’t even know who we are, because we are smothered by the weight of another trying to protect us, to the extent that we cannot hear our own heart and we cannot therefore find our own path with heart . And others not mothered enough, so that their heart lays heavy with the sadness of the rejection and the abandonment so that they reject and abandon a part of themselves and the possibility of love because they do not consider themselves worthy enough, or because it is too hard. 

And speak to me also, of how you might mother yourself?  I reflect on this too. The breast talks of nourishment and the womb talks of sacred space, of ancient wisdom. Both talk to us of our unique spiritual path, our path with heart, our way. This is in contrast to the way that seeks to include everyone in the same ‘mundane’ expression of life according to the rules and order and constrictions of society.  

The womb is our power, we know this, the dark space, the void, the deep mystery. Babies grow inside this, inside ourselves. This blows my mind even now, even having grown two real live human beings inside me, even having felt it for myself and seen the heart beat alone of both babies when they were six weeks in utero (we are alllllllll heart and there was validation as I wrote about in Dancing with The Moon). The breasts that nourish new life, that allow new life to grow, that bring baby to heart, so that there is a heart-resonance on a very deep level from the moment the baby enters the world and suckles. 

Even now, at three and a half years I am frustrated by those who tell me that he is too old for milk. It is not just milk! This is one of the most natural things that my body does. It brings my son directly to my heart and it nourishes him beyond the calories and vitamins of breast milk. It is the most beautiful thing in the world to me and I am grateful to my Ayurvedic doctor for recognising this, and normalising this and knowing that in Sri Lanka, her mother breast fed all the children until they were ready to let it go, maybe six, maybe seven, whenever they chose. 

These are the messages that I am receiving. And I know now as I write this and share with you that there is deeper meaning. That this is about following our own unique spiritual path and it is about breaking free from all that constrains us and prevents us from doing this - from our conditioning and the conditioning of those from whom we seek validation, and from society. We each have our own unique nature. An oak tree is an oak tree, it cannot be a beech tree however much someone might wish it to be, it is not its nature. 

There is this wonderful song by José González, called In Our Nature, which goes:

It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.

Put down your sword.
Send home your dogs.
Open up your doors.
Let down your guard.

It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.

Put down your gun.
Ignore the alarm.
Open up your heart.
Let down your guard.

It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature.
It's in our nature

This has always spoken to me, of the need to allow our true nature by letting down our guard. It is only in letting down our guard and allowing our vulnerability that we can truly know our heart. Our heart speaks of our truth and our truth speaks of our nature and our nature speaks of our soul.

Mother Earth she knows only the song of the soul, she sings of love and truth and justice for all, she weaves the magic of earth, water, fire, air and ether, and it is this, manifest, that nourishes us all, the big mystery, the dark void, the essence of all we are is the essence of all she is too, yet she knows only heart, she knows only vulnerability, because this is her nature and she trusts in that, and it this that is the ultimate lesson. She trusts in her true nature, she trusts her soul. And this, my friends, is where we find ourselves now, at the crossroads of the new paradigm.  

Can we trust our soul to nourish and sustain us? Can we find the courage to allow the deepest vulnerability, the greatest intimacy? Can we let go of all that distances us from our own nature?

The moon will tell us a tale, and the eclipse will tell us a tale too. And the sun and the rain, they tell us a tale too, of violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. We walk the rainbow bridge and she holds our hand as a mother holds a child, and we know that we will be safe, because we are held by the…great…mother…earth.

Love x

The full moon lunar eclipse this Friday: the mother

It’s the Sagittarius full moon lunar eclipse on Friday and I am certainly feeling the heat. Phew. Not only am I literally burning hot from having spent a little bit too much time in the sun today, but the fire within me has been ignited a little bit more with news of what a return to pre-school will likely entail for my three year old, Eben.

We have already made the decision to home school Elijah, our six year old, for the rest of this term and then take a view on this in September, but I had intended to settle Eben back into pre-school, as he is a very different child to Elijah, much more sociable and in need of constant entertainment, he is a vortex of energy, this having kicked his way out of me six weeks early on the supermoon back in October 2016! He hasn’t stopped kicking and running and moving and generally challenging me, and yet delighting me with his zest and passion for living and life, ever since.

The eldest is super sensitive and has never truly been conformable with school, there was constant tears and I have been picking up for lunch for the last two years because he hates the noise of the playground and gets anxious with all the other children. Returning to school now, after a three month absence, with all the changes and the social distancing and the constant hand washing, just wouldn’t be healthy for him, it takes him a good while to adjust to new situations and he’s gotten used to being at home, and to be honest his learning has improved with the one to one attention.

Pre-school though, I thought I’d be OK with that, until we received the communication today about the changes to procedures. After being assured back in September that parents were able to stay and help settle their children, now we have to drop and leave as quickly as we can. I know only too well how traumatic this can be to a child if they are not ready for it, I’ve blogged about it before, but we foolishly did this with Elijah back in the day, as everyone told us this was the way, only to return three hours later to find a shaking and sobbing two and three quarter year old.

We did it again, twice, because we kept being told you had to do it, until we realised this wasn’t right. He started getting anxious at night, his behaviour changed, he clung to me, he cried as we drove to pre-school, he virtually begged me. It wasn’t until the last full moon last month that i finally forgave myself for that, almost four years on. It was almost unforgivable as a mother to just leave your crying child with a total stranger, and dash off, when that child has never been left with anyone other than family and does not know a single person in the rooms and can’t stand noise! He was traumatised.

So I won’t be repeating that mistake with Eben. Not that he will get the opportunity as he has a persistent cough, has done for about three weeks now. Apparently there is a persistent cough on Guernsey, I think people have been fretting they have Covid and contacting the health care professionals accordingly, so it’s become more well known that it’s not Covid, that there is another virus with similar symptoms circulating. So until Eben no longer coughs, and no longer has a snotty nose, which might also be some time as he is three years old and many children have snotty noses, it’s the Kapha, part of the period of their life that they are in, then he won’t be returning to pre-school.

If he does go, they’ll be taking the children’ temperature on arrival, which is not part of the public health advice and does seem to go a little far for me, but is part of their risk management strategy. I do wonder what kind of world we are wanting our children to grow up in and I’ll be honest, the way things are going currently, this is absolutely not the way I would like the world to become, with us being totally paranoid about germs, to the extent that children will become anxious at the slightest hint of them, and also won’t be exposed to them impacting on their immune systems when they are exposed to them and what of OCD around cleanliness and cleaning the hands.

Today we also found out that the States are trying to get children off the bus and on the road, with walking or cycling the norm. I don’t have a problem with that per se, but isn’t that going to result in more cars on the road? Those who take the bus often living farther away from school, and so it might not be practical to cycle or walk. Certainly from where we live to school it would take me twenty minutes to walk, and as Eben comes with us and as he won’t walk, I’d have to carry him. That’s there and back. And he would be too small to cycle, and even Elijah is too small to cycle to school. I just don’t think people are thinking these things through properly. We’ll just end up with even more cars on the roads.

I also find it hilarious (in a sad way) that months ago we were making progress in getting rid of single use plastic, and now we can’t get enough of it. I was told that at one of the private schools, children have been told they must bring their lunch box into school in a plastic bag. And then there’s all that single use plastic gloves, and with everything being cleaned within an inch of its life, we’ll be going through a number of those as a society.

Of course i care desperately about Mother Earth and how she is tended, but I also care deeply about the children, the next generation. I can’t help thinking that in the quest to protect the vulnerable, children are the ones to suffer. Their desks are spread apart, no group work, or small team work, none of the play activity that was in place, at pre-school, plastic toys are back in, out goes the sand and the water, and presumably free play goes too as everything has to be controlled and managed and risk assessed. Argh.

Don’t get me wrong, of course I don’t want people to die, but I also don’t want children growing up anxious, depressed and having to grow up before their time. They are children and children play. Children have snotty noses. Children touch as they try to make sense of the world, they explore, they hug, they leap and they jump. Children need to be allowed to be children, not controlled within an inch of their lives for a virus that they may or may not get. There is always a bigger picture and every action will have a consequence, and I hope those making the decisions are really comfortable with the choices they are making and what this means for our children’s wellbeing long term, let alone this planet we live on.

I was blown away, just couldn’t get my head around events on Saturday. Not least the appalling and public murder of George Floyd and the rioting that ensued, not so much that I was surprised about this, because the voice needed to be heard, black lives do matter, and it is time, it has been time for an awfully long time now, and I am embarrassed to be part of a humanity which continues to discriminate and separate and silence, and to live amongst those who have such a blatant disregard for the lives of others. Then we have a space shuttle going up in the air!

E and I actually stood outside and watched the space station pass over Guernsey and then about six minutes later the shuttle passed too, it was really faint and I couldn’t see it properly, but E managed to follow it’s path, this with the moon out too. This the dream of Elon Musk, a tech billionaire, who wants to see life established on Mars so that the human species can continue, because he expects us to become extinct here on Mother Earth. He might be right, but I can’t help thing, wouldn’t the money not be better spent on improving the way we live on Mother Earth, so that we might continue as a specie and so that we don’t destroy Gaia in the process?

It just seems so arrogant to me. We’ll exploit this planet through greed, with the focus on money and accumulation of wealth at the expense of everything else, we’ll develop tech, which is meant to solve all our problems, yet from my experience during lock down this just added to my stress levels, and the stress levels of others, yes I might have been able to teach yoga through Zoom, but many of my regular students couldn’t join me because their internet kept dropping out or they had spent so long on the computer already that day with work and online learning that they’d had quite enough!

He’s involved in all sorts of others stuff too, including gentle artificial intelligence whatever that is, and he does some good stuff, helping make fresh water available to communities in the US, supporting companies developing renewable energy. But you know, do we really need to go to Mars? Aren’t we doing a bad enough job looking after this planet? if we all just lived a little more simply. I don’t know about this whole space thing. Why do we have to keep messing with things? We’ll never know, it doesn’t matter how much money is thrown at it, how many scientists are involved, it’s the great is mystery. That is the sacred.

I’ve been watching this series of lectures on the Goddess recently and it has been mind blowing actually, to see how much she was revered all those years ago and the artefacts that have been found and the cave paintings and all this amazing imagery of the big breasts, the big tummy, the big thighs and the public triangle. Often she had no face and no feet, they weren’t viewed as important, not in the grand scheme of things. For she was the provider of life, without her, the woman, the goddess, there will be no life.

Then patriarchy arrived and all of a sudden her image changes, she is sexualised. To see it in artefacts and imagery, really did impact on me. How the manner in which she was visually presented changed. Her breasts became smaller and pert and often now clothed, her pubic triangle, big thighs and big tummy also disappeared, she was masculine physically, with tight stomach muscles in one image, like a six pack, and she was made to be physically attractive to the other sex and demoted too, as less than a man, no longer revered for her ability to give life, but now as the sexual conquest, owned.

Now she rises again, and yet she still has to find her way, because even women reject what she means. Still there is the pressure for the masculine in the physicality, women who have big breast, big tummies and big thighs are always trying to lose them, to change themselves, to become less of what they are, to reject the goddess and her power of life. In Ayurveda this is the classical Kapha, the mother, the nurturer. It saddens me that women naturally designed this way, should give themselves such a blinking hard time for it. You can’t beat a big breasted hug, my mum’s best friend has the biggest boobs I know and I love her the more for it, because it’s comforting somehow, to be hugged by someone that has such power within them, the goddess embodied.

Not to say that those of us scant breasted women should give themselves a hard time either. I’ve still managed to breastfeed both my boys and I’m still breastfeeding Eben at three and three quarters, and I don’t know where the milk comes from, but it comes! I suppose I just mean that we need to embrace all we have , and our children and the lives that we are creating for them, that we allow to be created for them.

I went to visit the Gran’Mere, the goddess at St Martin’s church today. She still wears the necklaces I hung on her at Beltain, I am surprised that no one has removed them, but perhaps people wouldn’t feel touching her. She too has been changed, an attempt has been made to masculine her, give her a male face. She has been damaged and yet someone was kind enough to try to mend her. I thought as I stood there touching her, that at least her breasts have stood the test of time, that they didn’t take those from her, that something stopped them doing that, that even that was a step too far perhaps, and they sliced her in two instead and tried to hide her somewhere in the church when patriarchy arrived and took over, fearful of the mother and her power.

Yet her power has never gone, not really. It cannot be taken from her. Men cannot carry or birth children. It is women that are afforded the opportunity for the transformation that this brings, for the surrendering that comes from the journey to motherhood and of motherhood itself, because there is a power and there is a connection and there is, without doubt, the sacred. I don’t mean that men don’t necessarily feel it, only that women get to touch it, to grow something within them that is part of the great mystery too.

Recently I have heard of a number of ladies who have miscarried or who are preparing for yet more IVF when they are able to access the clinics again and I am reminded how cruel this world can be, on this journey of fertility and conception, and yet how much light we can find if we surrender even to those most cruelest of moments of shattered dreams and yet more heart ache. This prepares us somehow, some of us, who have had to take that journey, for what lies ahead the faced with the choices we need to make with the children we may have brought into this world, who have chosen us because of the choices we might make for them, because we desperately wanted them and were conscious about inviting them in (others were conscious too, you don’t have to have had IVF or to have miscarried to be conscious about pregnancy and motherhood).

The choices are sometimes challenging, because often you have to go against the flow, your truth tells you so. Your anger and frustration reminds you so. It takes courage to follow a different path that has not been walked before, to trust that the unknown will hold you in its gentle bosom, and reveal a little more of its mystery to you, as you surrender to your own truth, come what may, and recognise that you do not have to be beholden to what others have decided is the way, who may not feel the same about life as you do, not really, to deep inside, not yet. It can be hard. But I find that worshipping the goddess gives strength, and the moon, well she, the beautiful moon, is supporting the process. It’s a fiery one; give voice to your truth, and allow a new path to reveal itself to you.

I hope you get to enjoy her energy and can sit with your emotions as they come up. This is the first of the eclipses in the eclipse season and I am told that this relates to what was happening in your life between 2010 and 2013. Funnily enough this was when we were finally settling with the idea of having children, and went one our journey through IVF to finally birth Elijah into this world. So I suppose it is interesting how much this is on my mind and I am reminded by others sharing their pains on their own journey to motherhood with me recently. The moon never lies, she always brings in that to which we need to give our attention. So I’ll go sit with that and see you on the other side!

Love Emma x

Power and the deep feminine

That was most definitely a potent full moon and I am only now clearer about what it was ushering in. There was most definitely a play on power, and you might have felt that in your own lives too.

I definitely felt a sense of powerlessness with the way that life is currently unfolding and it is only now I recognise the reason for the kidney and liver pain that has accompanied this. The kidneys because of deep rooted fear of not being able to touch or to use holistic therapies to heal (as these rely so heavily on human touch). I feel as if ancestral and past life wounds were touched, around Wicca and the deep memory of the persecution of healers (the witch hysteria during the mid 1400s ).

There was anger in this too, then, for this Wiccan history, and also for the collateral damage of trying to protect the vulnerable from Covid-19 and yet creating so much more suffering and vulnerability in the process. There is a thin line and I don’t envy anyone having to manage this, but I do feel as if a perspective shift is required. The state has done such a good job in conditioning (and controlling) everyone to (through) fear, that now it has a huge job on its hands to condition everyone that life is again safe to be lived.

There is a fear that for those of us who teach yoga or in some way offer our hand to heal, will not be able to do so, in the flesh, for a long time to come. Yet I know that in every ending is a new beginning and I take comfort in this. I am grateful that yoga and Reiki can be shared distantly, albeit it is not the same as physical touch, but at least there is the option. Plus I know that healing can come in so many ways, and I recognise in my own life how this pause, and this space, has revealed other things to me.

I keep returning to Rebecca Campbell’s marvellous quote about all this, well about letting go really, which is what this is all about, and how the power comes into it too, because I have a feeling that this is where it’s at really, coming to understand the nature of power, beyond labels and this idea of being someone. There has been so much emphasis these last few years for women, especially within yoga, to step into their power, and yet I can’t help thinking that we have been attempting to do so while still ignoring the deep feminine.

“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 once was aligned, now it no longer is. This shattering 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” Rebecca Campbell

I’m not sure that the deep feminine, the inner witch, the healer, the carer, the mother, the grandmother, the wisdom keeper, I don’t know that she needed to be any more than what she was. She didn’t need to be on a pedestal, or splashed across social media, nor rushing around the world sharing her wisdom. She was contented to live it and share it with those who sought her, not because she was ‘someone’, but because she was her-self. There was a sacredness to her life and to her offerings too. There was the power, in the sacredness of it all.

I have found the break form social media thus far extremely liberating, empowering. I don’t miss it. It’s refreshing not knowing how others are living, and not concerning myself with it. There is less external noise and more time to be with those who matter the most. It has also freed me in my teaching, to offer what I love and what I have learned over all these years of studying the self, with those who most value it, there is (for me at least and I hope this doesn’t sound arrogant as that is not as it is intended) a deeper sense of the sacred. This too came through with the moon.

There is a re-alignment of power at play and for us women this means that yet more ideas of what this might mean need to drop away. We are entering a new paradigm and the idea of what it means to ‘step into our power’ also needs to change. The joy is that life will create this shift, the universe, the moon, the stars and the planets, they will all play their role to ensure that we have the opportunity to listen.

We might not heed the call, we might not make the space, we might grip on so tightly to how we think it should be, that we don’t hear the whisperings of another way. But the signs will be there anyway, the illness, aches, pains, tensions, the dodgy skin, the irregular period, the people, birds, animals and insects that cross our path, they are all message keepers, if we pay attention.

It’s not easy to pay attention though. Sometimes when working with my teacher, she is asking me to be so attentive that I find it difficult because I have to be very still and very present, and very much inside myself. Yet I know that if I can stay with it, then I will touch something that I cannot touch when life is lived externally, or busy, or noisy. The practice comes in being present and attentive, and this is tricky beyond the yoga mat when there is so much distraction.

Yet I have feeling that this is the power of the deep feminine. It is not about what we might create or produce in the external world (that’s the illusion, the trap), but how life is lived in relation to the self. That’s not so easy to teach, and not so easy to explain, because we all have that wisdom, and it is for us to reveal it to ourselves, given the right conditions.

As I am writing this, and as I searched for the above quote to share with you, I came across this other one, and feel like leaping with joy because while I have read it many times before, I feel as if it is only now I have an embodied sense of it being my truth too. Which means it is possibly yours too. This is where the moon has been taking us. This is the power of the deep feminine and it is not at all what others might have us believe, those making the noise and yet still living from a masculine perspective of results and external adoration.

“The deep Feminine, the mystery of consciousness, She who is life, is longing for our transformation as much as we are. She holds back, allowing us free reign to choose, nudging us occasionally with synchronicities, illness, births and deaths… But when we make space for Her, she rushes into all the gaps, engulfing us with her desire for life and expression. This is what She longs for, this is what we are for: experiencing the Feminine through ourselves. We simply need to slow down, and find where to put our conscious attention. And it is this, this willingness to look again, this willingness to put consciousness onto our places of unconscious, to express what we have always avoided, which starts the process of unblocking, so that She may flow through.” Lucy Pearce

All is well. That we must remember. Power is power is power. Knowing the self is power. Healing the self is power. Retreating into the self is power. Finding courage, that is power. Being still is also power. There are so many ways that we can embrace our power without losing ourselves in the power of it, of trying to be anything other than what we already are, and this, this is the key to true power - and it is found in love, and it is found in surrender, and it is found in vulnerability and it is found in being deeply attentive.

Love Emma x