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!

Soul and Shadow on the moon

Phew that was an intense full moon, I did chuckle when I realised that this happened to coincide with me receiving and starting a new book called ‘Soul and Shadow’ for this was indeed the moon of soul and shadow! The world itself was having to face its shadow around discrimination and inequality. Will then world change now the shadow has been brought to the light? I hope so, but I have become a little weary of late, there seems to be greater division that ever!

My soul friend, Christine, mentioned to me yesterday that there is a theme around “I can’t breathe” and it did dawn on me that this is so true on so many levels. Not least George Floyd, but Covid and Gaia herself. This week too I have become aware of women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer, the heart chakra, of air and nourishment. This really is a time of the heart versus the head and interesting that the throat sits in-between and people are voicing their options.

Here on Guernsey I have been told that social media is filled with toxicity around those who are arriving into Guernsey and not self-isolating, and people vocal about sharing their opinions. Is this from the heart though? To be truly effective, a voice from the heart, rather than the solar plexus of fear, ego and bullying is much more effective. The world needs the purer heart voice to be truly heard.

It’s been a funny old time. Busy, bringing with it remnants of the old, and yet different too, the busyness has a softer energy, busy doing things that we enjoy, rather than busy doing things for the sake of doing things or because others have been demanding from us. I don’t feel therefore that it is busyness for the sake of busyness, not avoidance, or distraction, more so a renewed sense of purpose and keenness to share.

I soul searched too, around classes and what to do about these and have decided to change things a little, take yoga inside, because I have always preferred teaching inside, there is less distraction, nature does distract by its’s very nature, because it is so beautiful! Plus the sun and the wind was aggravating my pitta and vata and the uncertainty over the weather was slightly tricky to manage! So I have elected for smaller class sizes where I can work more intimately with students, it does mean some will miss out, and I’ll be honest, it is my main source of income, so I won’t be earning so much, but I feel that this is the way, for now at least!

If there is one thing we can learn from covid, is that everything changes, life is in a constant state of flux. All we can do is keep flowing with the heart, keep checking in and seeing where we might adjust. Yoga helps us with this, the scaravelli-inspired approach, that is now influencing my teaching, is all about sitting with the not knowing and with uncertainty, and honouring our own nature, our flesh and bones. This is our nature! And it has become increasingly important to me that we don’t deny that in the pushing and pulling and the forcing that comes with so many of the other approaches to yoga that I have been trained in and have studied and shared with others.

I can’t now return to vinyasa or to dynamic yoga, it feels so soulless, and yet I am grateful because it got me from where I was to where I am now, and I feel like I have come home, to a deeper place in myself, that is less focused on achievement and being someone, but on just being with what was there all along, yet I was so busy in my practice, always moving from one pose to the next, always considering the alignment being right or wrong (there is no such thing incidentally, we’re just conditioned to believe in that, to make our life certain, life by its very nature is uncertain!), that I did not allow for the fluidity of the practice, of life, with the flow and with the sacred that talks through the breath, that comes, not because the breath is imposed on the body, but because the breath enters in, like a gift, a re-membering.

Mainly now I yawn through my practice. Louise says that this is because the breath is finding itself again after years of forced breathing. Who would have known! It is so interesting, that there is always so much still to learn. So breath has been prevalent in my life too of late, because it was strange to find the breath coming initially, and this not looking like the old paradigm, of Ujaii breath come what may, which I realise now might actually have been hardening things. Certainly my solar plexus has softened and now I am drawn more into the heart.

I am used to the yawning now, it comes, it comes, and I cannot control it, it is years of stuff that was held deep in the diaphragm that was now allowed expression. I’m pretty sure this may have been the reason for a hernia at my navel. Well that and all the many planks and chatturangas, that I avoid now, because they were absolutely not benefitting my body or my mind, let alone my soul.

So there has been shadows coming to the light and the soul has been finding greater expression. There has been the breath and there has been the heart and I am curious to see where this eclipse season takes us these next few weeks.

With love

Being human

If there is one phrase I loathe about the moment, other than ‘social dancing’ and ‘stay safe’, is ‘catch it, bin it, kill it’.

I was saddened to see that the primary school that Elijah usually attends, but is not attending at the moment (and thank goodness he isn’t, seeing what going back to school now entails, not the teachers fault by the way, public health gone mad it seems) will reinforce the ‘catch it, bin it, kill it’ message regularly. I suspect they have been instructed to do so by public health.

But is this really a phrase we want reinforced in our children. Yes it might be related to the virus, but isn’t it indicative of where we have strayed as a humanity, where we feel we have to be killing all the time. Look where that’s gotten the US with their emphasis on guns and the killing culture - ‘but I need it for self defence’. What are we so scared of all the time, that we have to kill, a fly, a mouse, a virus? What’s the difference, really, because it’s all life.

We have learned to live with flies yet they can harm us, infect us with malaria, transfer their eggs to the food we might eat, just be a really annoying nuisance, and yet does that give us a right to kill them? A mouse in our house, it happened to us just before lockdown and there we were not sure to do, initially there was the notion that we might set traps, but that seemed just too cruel, so E caught them as humanly as he could and released into the back of the garden, set free, no killing necessary, and no longer a nuisance to us either.

‘Humanly’ means with human feeling or kindness. I ask myself how humanly we are currently living. I ranted yesterday and thought that might clear it a little, but today the same old stuff just comes up again. We need to move on from this old paradigm of always thinking that something is harming or hurting us, and rather than trying to find a way to live humanly with whatever it is, we have to eradicate it, get rid of it, exterminate it.

Public Health need to really think about the messages they are conveying to the wider public. Those in power, need to really think about the wider implications of the decisions they are making, and the reason they are making them, and is it from a place of fear or from a place of love, are these humane decisions. And we the general public, we do have our own power, we can make a stand, we can opt out, we can find another way, if there are enough of us who question these decisions being made. We do not need to follow like sheep, asleep.

My Mum was always keen that I was never a sheep. She has lived to regret that decision many times over as he has watched me drop further away from what others are doing. Where once I was frustrated about her attitude because I wanted to wear the same dress as the other girls in my class at primary school, but was not allowed to do so, because she didn’t want me being a sheep, I am grateful to her now for this.

To have your own mind is not necessarily easy, because there is a responsibility, and there is of course still a fear of getting it very wrong, and yet there is such freedom because the choices are your own, not someone else’s, not because you have been told ‘this is the way’ and you have blindly followed, but because you are conscious of the reason that you are doing what you are doing. And you are more than happy to admit when you don’t know and that you might have got it wrong.

I truly feel we need to change the story now. Let it go. Of the victimhood and the harm done, of the way that we have killed aspects of ourselves, and bring those aspects back to life again, reclaim the power that we might have been giving away our whole lifetimes, because we never questioned, we never hesitated, we never thought, hmm, but is there another way, can we live more harmoniously, more humanly, within ourselves, within our own true nature, our own flesh and bones, and the nature of the wider world in which we feel ourselves at home, with the divine, with heart and with soul.

I am reminded of this poem from Hafiz:

“Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about 'His great visions of God,' he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying 'Are these wondrous dreams true?'

I replied, 'How many goats do you have?'

He looked surprised and said, 'I am speaking of sublime visions and you ask about goats?'

And I spoke again, saying, 'Yes brother -- how many do you have?'

'Well, Hafiz, I have sixty two.'

'And how many wives?' 

Again he looked surprised, then said, 'Four.'

'How many rose bushes in your garden? How many children? Are your parents still alive? Do you feed the birds in winter?'

And to all he answered.

Then I said, 'You asked me if I thought your visions were true. I would say that they were if they made you become more human, more kind to every creature and plant that you know.'"

Love Emma 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

The mystery

It’s funny how you can spend so much time trying to make a decision, trying to cover all bases. Yet as I keep being reminded of late, we cannot know, and it is in the unknown that we might feel more alive, more vibrant, because in the unknown we have opened ourselves up to the great mystery. If we always know, then we leave little space for grace, for the magic, for the mystery.

Yet we all know, from lockdown, how difficult it is to live with uncertainty, to not know. Our whole education system and our society is based on knowing. We want to know, to understand, to be able to control, or feel as if we have some control over things. The scientists are especially spun out by Covid-19, because they don’t know its potential, and they are not yet able to control it, or make sense of it. The very foundation of our society as we know it, of knowing it, has been rocked.

I keep hearing of people who have injured themselves, or who have suffered physically in some way of late, and I wonder whether it is due to this deep shaking of our roots, as we are asked to uproot ourselves from the world we knew, to a new world, that has yet been spun. We’re in the liminal zone, between one way of being and another. It’s a beautiful space, because it is not known, a space of transformation, where true change begins and ends, of shifting space and being neither here nor there.

Coming off Facebook is certainly me stepping into the unknown, and yet it is also so known, because there was once a life lived without Facebook, I didn’t miss it then, because I didn’t have anything to miss and yet I don’t miss it now either. The decision took so long to take as I weighed up the options, but at the end of the day, the decision was already made, I already knew. I just needed to take the leap.

Deciding to keep Elijah at home for the rest of this term and ‘school’ him ourselves in our way, is also a step into the unknown, one I have contemplated for many years but have never had the courage, nor the support, nor the opportunity to put into practice. It was a decision that I played with over and over again and then all of a sudden it just became clear. This is not a school system that I want to put him in, for him to learn a new way, when it has taken him so long to settle into the old way, and here he is thriving at home and learning with all the one-to-one attention.

Once decisions are made, it is a like a weight is lifted from your shoulders that you didn’t even know what there, that your heart has been set free and you didn’t even realise that you had imprisoned it in any way. All that going backwards and forwards and back again, is at once resolved and you wonder what all the fuss was about in the first place. A new normal sets in. Life changes. But it happens in a way that feels aligned, and with ease, not as dramatic as you thought it might be.

I am reminded as always of patience. Of being OK with being in the unknown, and of not needing to rush to resolution or to fix, or to somehow create some form of security, whether that is real security or not. It’s tricky, but I feel more alive that I have felt these last few months, as if there is this whole new world that awaits, that I don’t yet know, so that it is unscripted and can be whatever we make it if we choose.

The first of my pot marigold flowers is now in bloom. I can’t tell you the joy of seeing a flower that I planted from seed, reveal it’s beauty to the world. It’s a healing plant too, although I’ll have to cut off the flowers and dry them, before soaking in oil, to make calendula oil that I can then use to make calendula cream. This is also a step into the unknown, of making my own healing portions for myself and the family, and see what might happen!

There’s no lockdown easing party for E and I. We’ve realised that too, over lockdown, that we live quiet lives, socially at least! Even my parents get to go party tonight, having maintained a weekly catch up with their group of friends on Zoom each Friday too. E has managed to escape Zoom this whole lockdown. I’m pleased to take a break from it too, and am looking forward to teaching in person again.

I’m still looking forward to the day though, when I can touch again, and share Reiki and I am sure that time will come. For now though, it is time to enjoy the unknown and the new of this world as it unfolds, allowing for the great mystery to weave its magic through our lives, come what may, thy will be done, and we have the opportunity to feel increasingly alive in the process.

Love Emma x