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!

This way or that way

Yesterday I was cycling my electric bike from Vazon to Pleinmont, with Elijah on the back. It was windy and I was having to cycle into it, which started to becoming annoying, because it was hard work and because the wind aggravates me, as it does for so many.

It crossed my mind that rather than be annoyed and irritated by it (as it was not going to change the situation reacting like this), I might just go with the flow of it. Yet I wondered how I might go with the flow of wind that is blowing against me, I could hardly turn around, although I did wonder if this was a sign that I was going the wrong way, off to a school outing.

I turned inland when I could, to escape the wind, and it was here, on the brow of a hill that I passed a crossroads and saw a sign someone had made that said, “This way”, “That way”, “Other Way”, “Wrong way”. This made me laugh. Which way was I going? I was going this way, but it could be that way, or it could be the other way, it could also be the wrong way. How do we know?

So much of our lives is spent trying to navigate the ‘right’ way. I have spent hours running questioning which way I am going. Sometimes it might feel like life is going the right way, and sometimes it feels that it is going the wrong way. regardless, it is going on anyway.

We walked out to the fairy ring out at Pleinmont and Elijah spotted a fishing boat and we wondered which way it was going. All I really saw were the orange buoys, which made me think about the times I tried to explain to both my boys the nature of buoys, “they are called buoys, but they are not boys as in, you are a boy, it’s a different buoy”. It was confusing, and still is, even though they know that a buoy is a buoy, they do still ask me why, why is a buoy and a boy so similar in sound. I can’t answer that, just like I can’t answer the reason that “sea” and “see’ sound the same, but are spelt differently.

We lost sight of the boat and never did know which way it was going as we were distracted by the tiny fairy door that someone has placed on a stone near the fairy ring itself. Is that a way too? I like to think so, into a world that is yet unknown. The wind was whipping around this extremity, it’s always windy here, as if the wind itself is leading the way to the fairy ring, because once you get around the corner it calms a little, and you can make a wish without being blown away.

I don’t know that there is a right way anymore than there is a wrong way. My life has been about navigating between the two, because my mind like’s to distinguish the good from the bad, as if I might be judged by some higher power, as if life is a game of snakes and ladders, and who wants to land on a snake, let’s be honest. I’ve become less certain about this, about anything, is there really any certainty?

There have been times in my life when my soul has suffered because of the decisions I have made. When I have not been paying attention, because I didn’t know that I had a choice, so what was the point in being attentive if I was going to have to do what I was going to have to do because it was expected of me, or because I didn’t even question it. Or did I?

Perhaps it is age that brings with it a different perspective, or perhaps it’s a shifting relationship to the soul, as one realises that the way was compromising something, but you couldn’t quite put your finger on it, until it screamed at you in the dead of night, it is always the dead of night, when we have lost the soul that we might recognise it. There is something about this witching hour, as if it might be a portal to all those lost bits of ourselves. I heard an owl, I was pretty certain I could hear an owl, that other worldly sound, maybe the moon as up, I can’t be sure, I didn’t know that back then. But I did know that something didn’t feel quite right.

If only I had know then what I know now. Perhaps then there might not have been so much suffering. At the end of yoga classes, I regularly repeat, “may all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering”. Recently it has crossed my mind and sometimes I even say it, “may all beings be free from their suffering and the causes of their suffering”. Because we create our own suffering. Our mind creates our suffering. This way, that way, which way. The mind loves to debate, question, wonder, ponder, make sense.

Am I going the right way? I can’t be sure. It’s a way, that’s all I know. The moon is rising later. I know that too. Later and later each evening. Until it rises in the morning. Is that the right way? It’s just it’s way. That’s the way it is. I see the sea. The sea I see. It’s just the way it is. It’s liberating, lets us off the hook, to know that it is not about being right or wrong, this way or that, who cares, as long as we can make a decision and be OK with that. It’s the inability to make a decision, to continuously question which way might be best to the extent that we never make a decision, it’s this that harms us the most.

The wind blew me the way I needed to go, to see what I needed to see, to think differently. I didn’t notice much on that journey, my head was down mainly, desperate to get to the destination in time - don’t even get me started on how much of our lives are defined by the ticking of a clock - but it did open my mind, free it a little. The flow will take us where we need to go, even if we feel that we might be going against it, we will get there, somehow, it is up to us how much we suffer in the process.

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…

Uncertainty in practice!

Two hours after publishing my previous blog post about living with uncertainty, I almost laughed at myself as there I was, on the Sark Belle, a river boat, the less sea worthy of all the Sark boats, heading to Sark from Guernsey in rough seas. All the other sailings that day had been cancelled but I did not know this, just as I did not know that the sea had been described as ‘lumpy’.

It was a surprise to me actually, that before we had even left Guernsey harbour the boat was already lolling. I usually like this boat, I always favour it over the other boats as it brings with it happy memories of calm summer crossings to Sark, and especially to the Sark folk festival, one of the highlights of the year in years gone by.

Yet here I was today, oblivious to what lay ahead, as the boat lolled from side to side hit by southerly waves, as we entered beyond what was actually the safety of the harbour, even though that didn’t feel exactly calm. Before too long I had both boys sitting on me, “a leg each mummy”, was the agreement as usual, not particularly comfortable, bony bums sitting on both thighs, but it’s what we do, to spare the arguments.

Not long after then I was gripping both of them into me as the boat appeared to lurch up and down and side to side, the bottom of the boat crashing back down each time a wave had passed. I sunk my head between them and gripped in closer, wondering how I had missed the weather forecast, as I glimpsed the a younger lady ahead and to my left side burst into tears and her boyfriend wrap his arms around her.

It got worse. The boat was really at the mercy of the waves and we were at the mercy of them too. My whole body was locked in stress and I noticed that my right foot was attempting to find a solid place to rest itself, to push into something, to find some certainty in my world that was now desperately uncertain.

I noticed what I was doing and I almost laughed out loud as I considered how funny the universe can be allowing us to put into practice that which we teach. How comfortable was I living on the edge, in an uncertain world as I perceived it in that moment? I’ll be honest, I wasn’t very comfortable at all. I was totally out of my depth, desperate for some certainty that all would be well in the end.

The boys hugged closer into me and into each other and I considered my fear. What was my fear in that moment? It wasn’t difficult to work it out, I had already run through in my mind where I might find an exit from the boat, if it rolled onto its side and overturned, and yet I had also considered that the whole experience would be so shocking and disorientating that I wouldn’t have any control over an outcome of survival however much I planned for it.

It struck me that my greatest fear then was not losing my life, although this was a consideration, but my sons’ lives. I wanted to protect them and keep them safe. It struck me then that this has been the source of much of the underlying tension I have felt these last few years. It is not so much the tension between all the different aspects of self, or the tension of the pace of the outside world with all its perceived expectations, but the tension that arises with trying to keep children safe, of the lack of trust in the inherent safeness of life on planet earth. 

In that moment, I did not feel safe. I was out of my comfort zone and was very aware of this. I know that yoga is all about living with uncertainty and I moved my awareness to my breath hoping that this would calm me and it did. I remembered Reiki and put my family and the whole boat in a Reiki bubble. I also prayed to the angels and asked the boys to ask the magic fairies to look after us, their equivalent. This all helped.

Yet, I was very aware that I needed to let go, and allow myself to be moved by the boat, by its rhythm as it navigated it’s path through the rough seas, and trust in that and in the captain. I was aware of other people on the boat, a group of guys ahead of me (beyond the lady who vomited) talking avidly, seemingly unaware of the risks that the rest of us had perceived, our concerns about seasickness and the boat rolling over. This made me think how much of our lives are lived in our heads, through our mind’s perception of reality, and how small the gap between truth and imagination.

To me that was one of the toughest boat journeys I have ever taken, that is my truth and my reality, yet to those guys (hardened sailors as it turns out) it was no big deal, and all the risks I perceived, were stuff of my imagination, not real, there was no truth in them, their mood remained unaffected, high spirited, just another boat journey. I was high spirited when the seas calmed as we got closer to Sark, and as I recognised how much my fears were imagined, and how much they are linked to my boys and not being able to – always – ease their suffering or keep them safe. 

Yet really we were safe. The universe has our back. It is our mind that doesn’t always recognise this. Life lived with uncertainty is not easy, but I see how it can make us much more conscious of the moment, come what may. And really the lesson, as always, is about perception and shifting to a more positive mindset. This too is something I am exploring at the moment, so more on this another time. We made it, and with more lessons learned before having set foot on beautiful Sark!

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.