The killer!

The killer came with the both the full moon and my dark moon, an interesting combination of the light shining into the shadows to a deep and dark place, so well hidden that I hadn’t noticed how an experience almost twenty years ago continued playing out in my life in subtle (and perhaps not so subtle) ways! Still this is the way of the shadow, and I’m always grateful to the moon for helping me to see the patterns. 

I’ve had this thing about killing for a good many years now, wrapped into the idea of ahimsa and non-harming, the first yama or ethical principle of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.  Yet this has been tested a number of times over the years, not least before lock-down when we discovered a family of mice living in our wing. I didn’t like the idea of killing them, but coming face to face with them, quite literally, I also didn’t want them living with us either.

This happened at the same time that the ants moved in as they do every year on the equinox energy shift. I was challenged by these little beings too but refused to kill them either, albeit I was quite happy if someone else did. My friend, Jo, suggested that all of this was happening to allow me the opportunity to look at my relationship with killing, but even then, while I was quite happy to look at it, I didn’t really understand the lesson I was meant to be learning.

E managed to catch the mice humanely and set them free at the very back of our garden, where the rates live happily (I can’t kill them either). The ants drove me slightly mad as they crawled over my mat while I was teaching Zoom classes from the wing during lock-down, and I prayed to the ant Deva to take her ant family somewhere else and whether she listened or not, I can’t be sure, but they moved out once the seasonal shift settled. So I thought this subject was dealt with, I’d managed to find a way to live in harmony with all these beings (and was quite happy at the thought of living in harmony with Covid too), but alas not.

Then a week last Monday I was really challenged by the zillions of flies that had congregated in our kitchen and were continuously buzzing around me as I tried to prepare food. The flies usually arrive at the end of June for a week or so but this year they were late in their arrival and they were also larger in number, a recognised issue here in the country parishes of Guernsey, with many a household complaint (so too about the number of rats may I add) and distracting E and I each day with our fly ranting.

That Monday I had had enough and I resolved then and there, in a moment of frustration more than anything else, a pre-menstrual rage perhaps, when those things that are bugging us (no pun intended) become crystal clear and I concluded, in that moment of clarity also, that I was done with trying to pretend the flies were OK, and I would embrace my inner killer, ha, I would show those flies! 

I grabbed a tea towel and squatted a few of them, enough to vent my rage, before continuing with the food preparation. I didn’t feel all together happy about it, because I truly don’t like the idea of killing and feel that we should make an effort to live in harmony with other beings in this world, they have just as much right to be here as us, but enough was enough, it was time to look at that aspect of myself that could kill if it chose. Late that afternoon, and I didn’t see the coincidence or put two and two together until the next day, but I finally gave in to my craving for fish.

I’ve been a vegetarian on and off since the age of 13. There have been times when I have needed to eat meat due to acute anaemia, but this has only been short term. I have gone through phases with fish, yet last year, I felt less inclination to eat fish and dropped this from my diet. However, over the last few months my body has been craving it and I became aware of nutritional deficiencies that were likely caused by my vegetarian diet. 

The body always knows best, however I ignored this wisdom for my head had decided I would not eat fish and that was that. It’s very easy to get caught up in labelling and the separation and denial of our body wisdom that comes with this; I see it much more clearly in  others than I am prepared to admit in myself, yet because I see it so clearly in others, I was aware that I had started to fall into that trap too, of having to define myself by my diet…”I am a vegan…”, “I am a vegetarian”…”I am gluten-free”. 

I’m none of these things, not really. I am who I am and sometimes my body needs eggs and sometimes it doesn’t, and sometimes it needs nuts and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it needs warming foods and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes it needs fish and sometimes it doesn’t. I feel that with yoga especially, we can get so caught up in the idea of what we think we should eat that we don’t actually listen to the messages our body is giving to us. 

But that Monday I was listening, because I couldn’t not; I was virtually salivating at the fish counter at Forest Stores, I needed fish and I finally surrendered my mind’s holding that I don’t eat fish, and I bought the freshest locally-caught fish they were selling and ate it with love and respect that evening. It crossed my mind that I was actually harming myself more by denying myself what I needed, than by eating the fish, and it was only in acknowledging my own inner killer that I was able to eat it without feeling guilt. 

The next day, Tuesday, one of my students came for Reiki and there was an annoying fly in my healing room. I commented on this and told her how I had actually killed some the day previously and she shared with me a story of how she had grown weary of the snails attached to the side of her house that she had pulled them off and popped them in a bucket of ale, which she had been told was a humane way of killing them. Later that evening she met a friend for dinner and her friend had given her a really hard time about the snail killing.

I asked my student whether her friend ate dead cow meat. She laughed and said that actually, as it happened, they had been eating steak at a local restaurant when the conversation took place. I laughed at the irony and commented that perhaps her friend was in no position to judge her, given that she was eating dead cow, albeit that she had not killed it herself, yet someone had had to kill it for her to be able to indulge in her choice of eating it.  

 All of a sudden it dawned on me, this issue we have around duality and seeing things as black and white and right and wrong and being averse to something or attached to something and judging of the opposite. I realised how much I had been creating my own suffering by holding on so strongly to my sense that one should not kill, and yet how that was always being tested, not least by the mice and the rats, the ants and now the flies, but also my youngest son and his fascination with guns.

I honestly don’t know how he even knew about guns because we never talked about them, he never watched anything with a gun in it but one day he wanted a gun and that was that. I resisted but he persisted until his auntie bought him one. Even then one was not enough and on and on he went. I eventually did some research, discussing the matter with friends whose boys were allowed nerf guns and also with a gun professional from the local shooting club. 

This man told me that from his experience children will find a way to what they want, so if I was to keep denying him the opportunity to get guns out of his system now, and in a responsible and controlled way, then my son will likely find his way to guns in the future and when I had less control over it. I knew what he meant. I have seen children denied sugar and screen/TV time during their childhood, who then go on to spend their early adulthood eating as much sugar and junk food as they can while watching as much screen/TV as they can. Extremes don’t work. 

When it comes to killing, while I absolutely don’t condone killing for the sake of killing, all of these experiences have helped me to recognise that by denying my own inner killer and judging others for killing – and yet expecting others to do the killing for me - is contradictory and causes inner conflict and disharmony. How can I expect to experience peace of mind when I have not reconciled various aspects of self and judge others so openly (and myself may I add)? Simply put, I can’t.

I have recognised that we all possess an inner killer, and I have finally owned this. While this doesn’t mean that I am going around killing things (I’ve not killed a fly since, it was just part of me understanding the lesson, they’ve virtually left us now anyway…always the way when the lesson is learnt), it does mean that I have become less judgmental about it, because I know that if someone was trying to kill me or my boys that I would likely try to kill them first in self-defence – this is inherent within us, the need for survival and to protect those we love; we all have the capacity to kill whether we like it or not. 

I realise that in my quest to not kill I was trying to kill a part of myself that I did not like, to put it in the shadows out of the way, to deny it. This in itself will kill me - as I have mentioned a number of times recently, anything that is repressed will find expression through inner dis-ease. It was quite a revelation, and a difficult one to stomach at that, but all part of the process of gaining a better understanding of the workings of the mind and of ahimsa, which is not there to give ourselves an even harder time, far from it, it is about being conscious of what we are doing and the reason for it. 

This does not make it right or wrong, it is all just an experience anyway and it is one that will change depending on the day and the circumstances. Like so much in life it is not certain, and this is the trickiest thing to get one’s head around; that everything is subject to change, including our opinions and judgements. Once we can settle more into the middle ground of uncertainty, of things not being this way or that way, into that quieter unknown space, then I believe we are more able to hear our body wisdom and embrace all aspects of ourselves, including the inner killer!

Happy Lammas!

Today is Lammas, the celebration of the first grain harvest, a time for gathering in and giving thanks for abundance. This cycle continues to Mabon or the Autumnal Equinox bringing the second harvest of fruit and then Samhain and the third and final harvest of nuts and berries.

The word lammas is derived from ‘loaf mass’ and is indicative of how much the first grain and the first loaf of the harvesting cycle was honoured. I thought I would honour this today by making bread for the first time, at least on my own.

In theory the fullness of the present harvest already holds at its very heart the seed of all future harvest. I have had a sense of this recently with my medicinal plants and I’m pretty sure they have been telling me to get them out of their pots and get them into the earth so that they can self seed. I spent today preparing. We had to move a whole heap of granite from out of the pigsty, to make space for about 150 saplings that we are nurturing as part of our Plant A Tree Project (more on this in the spring). It was hard work!

However in many respects this was the easy bit. Once we had shifted as much stone as we could for now, and moved all the saplings, we then had to prepare the earth in a spot in the garden which has not been dug over before. I was up for the challenge though and possibly the mood I was in, what with the full moon approaching and here in my dark days of releasing, I set to task with the spade and turned it all over while the family watched a film!

This morning I had it in mind that I wanted to establish a moon garden, a part of the earth dedicated to the moon in celebration of Lammas, but I hadn’t figured out how that might work. However as I dug the earth I suddenly realised that this patch of land faced the rising full moon. Perfect! I had prepared my moon garden without even realising it; I’m pretty sure my medicinal plants will like the space and we’ve let it settle with the waxing moon energising it. With any luck the plants will settle into the ground on the waning moon and rest easily into it.

We visited La Gran’mère du Chimquière this afternoon. I left some bread and a bouquet of herbs gathered from the garden, I left them perched on her right shoulder as E said they’d attract rats if I left them on the ground; he’s forever the health and safety one! I love this goddess, she’s so calm and so centred and so peaceful. There’s no drama with her. I know that sounds ridiculous but when you see her, and especially when you touch her you’ll know what I mean.

I went out to La Varde this evening too, with my friend Chris to have a look at the goddess who resides within this beautifully calm and peaceful space. It really is a wonderful place and we felt welcomed and awed by it. The guardians were there as usual, keeping a watchful eye, and there was a quiet opportunity to say thanks. The skies were magical when we left too, as if the earth was kissing us with her beauty - or perhaps we were kissing her too.

I don’t have expectation about the harvest, I think that’s what has made the growing of the plants so enjoyable. There has been no expectation, and no attachment to the fruits of my labour. That is except for one little fella, the liquorice! I had been told that liquorice is challenging to grow from seed but I was confident, because I had no reason not to be, perhaps a little arrogant when I reflect on it, after all, the rest of the seeds had been so abundant for me (apart from Culver’s root, that was tricky too!).

My competitiveness came out with the liquorice and I did my best to nurture the seeds, but to no avail, or so it seemed. And then finally a shoot appeared and I was excited, it looked like I might get my liquorice plant after all - non-attachment out the window with this one! I watched it grow and tended to it with lots of love and Reiki and was curious because the leaves didn’t look like what I imagined liquorice would look like.

And alas there was a reason for this, because last week a daisy blossomed from what I thought was my liquorice plant and I laughed out loud at the cosmos joke, reminding me to let go of expectation and attachment to the fruits of our labour, and to grow for the love of it, not to feed my ego. It was a fabulous lesson and never more so because daisies represent joy and happiness; grow for the joy of it! Lesson learned! I’ll try a liquorice next year instead!

I am grateful, from the bottom of my heart and from all of my being because those little seeds that Fi offered out to her friends on Facebook just before I deleted my account has been life changing. A whole new world has opened up to me and I have discovered or perhaps rediscovered a love of growing and of tending to the earth and I can’t get enough of it. I am thoroughly enjoying drying the flowers and leaves in preparation for more potions and teas.

Recently I’ve using dried lavender, rosemary and sage to make bath oils, which just smell divine and are healing in their own ways, I have made bath salts with them, and this just makes for such a beautiful bath experience. The sage is very cleansing after energy work and the lavender definitely prepares you for a good night’s sleep. Nature knows best and I am grateful to have the opportunity to learn more and be guided by her. I’ve got calendula flowers soaking in almond oil out in the moonlight, I’m excited about making that into salve in a few week’s time. This all infused with Reiki from seed to salve, I’m grateful for that too.

I’m also grateful for my family for all their love and support, for the challenges and the joys, the sleep deprivation and the minecraft and the guns! There is never a dull moment and I love that they entertain all this, the witchery stuff, the hanging herbs drying in our kitchen, the time spent in the garden, the help with the potion making and the fact Elijah loves nothing more than that “yellow bath stuff”! They indulge me with my Reiki requests, they are both attuned now and will slowly learn what this means, for now it is magic hands and that’s good enough for me.

It’s a marvellous beginning harvest and I hope for you too. I can see the results of the seeds planted, and yet i in ways I could never have imagined, a bit like the daisy. Sometimes things just happen. In the last few years I have really steered away from vision boards and forcing an outcome, because I noticed that in my life the most life changing things have just entered from nowhere without any effort on my part. So I celebrate that too, the great mystery and being OK with that, with the not knowing and just seeing where it all goes as you try to keep in alignment; that’s all you need to do. Plant the seeds, tend to them and keep open to all possibility.

Sending love on Lammas.

Opening to greater intimacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The choice for the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga

Each week my yoga teacher asks me what has happened since I have last seen her, what I’ve been practising, how my teaching is going, that sort of thing. This week I heard myself telling her how difficult I have been finding it, how the practice takes me to a much deeper place than I have ever gone to previously, and how tough this can be at times, not only because of my own processing but because I cannot teach in a way that isn’t respectful of this, and authentic, and how that takes me to a much more vulnerable place and this demands more of me; greater involvement. 

Since discovering the Scaravelli-inspired approach to yoga my life has changed significantly, perhaps not visibly to others on the outside but certainly the inner landscape has shifted and some of the holding and old patterns have dropped away, and yet still there are more layers that continue to reveal themselves to me. I am always surprised by this, that which we think we might have resolved pops up again later for even deeper exploration, another thread, another connection, because there is always somewhere else to go.

There was a time when I thought our experiences were linear, much like I thought our life was linear too, the path between birth and death, although now I know that it is not so clear-cut. That our past informs our future as much as it informs our present and that there are past life experiences that weave their way through our current reality, and decisions made in the future that will impact how we consider our past, all connected but not linear with a clear beginning and ending. 

Life is a cycle, much as our breath is a cycle, the moon follows a cycle, the seasons follow a cycle too. We are a cycle manifest as we also wane and wax, and yet there is this conditioning to live in a constant manner, controlled, linear, a start and a finish line, an objective to achieve, a result to gain, a right way and a wrong way, something to validate a sense of certainty and sureness in a life and the world that is ever changing.

I see this played out in yoga too. Only this week I witnessed a student really struggling in class with my touching her, encouraging greater ease, changing things a little, trying to facilitate her letting go of her armour, the conditioning, but this was taking her completely out of her comfort zone. She had spent her life refining this armour, of keeping herself safe, and while she has found her way to yoga and actively encourages a hands-on-approach, she struggles when it comes to truly letting go into those deeper places, to the areas that are uncertain and vulnerable, to the parts that cannot so easily be controlled. 

Vinyasa yoga allowed me to hide behind my armour too and control more of where I didn’t want to go, keeping me stuck at a point that was comfortable, that did not give too much of myself, not deep down. The Scaravelli-inspired approach entered my life, took a hold and wouldn’t let go, and as a result I have had no choice but to explore more of these places and let go of some of the armour that I had created to keep me safe, yet was suffocating me and denying me the depth of sensation that I have since experienced. 

It’s only now I realise how my yoga practice and the flow and strength of a vinyasa approach were, in many respects, helping me to hold on to patterns and emotional repressions that were no longer serving me, yet to look at them honestly was impossible, because the practice did not allow that depth of feeling, it was too fast-paced and encouraged only superficial involvement of muscles and of awareness.

There was an expectation of outcome, of being more flexible or stronger, of being able to practice advanced postures even if I had to pull, push or somehow force myself into the positions, as if that alone validated my worth in the world, and demonstrated my progression on my yoga mat. I know that yoga offers us so much more than this and I embrace the other limbs, but from an asana perspective, I found it very difficult to move beyond this pattern on my mat. 

It is my experience that it is very easy to get caught up in the superficial and in the illusion, you have only to look at the images on Instagram. Yoga teachers are often the worst, filling their websites and Facebook pages with photos of themselves practising advanced postures as if this proves their worth as a teacher and encourages students to want to engage with them on this basis alone. I’d rather know how they are living their life, and the love they are bringing to the world and to themselves, how they are in relationship to self and to others then what poses they can practise.

This is really for me what yoga is all about; our relationship to self and letting go of anything that prevents us living our truth and our potential in this lifetime. The more we enquire into the nature of self and accept our own true nature, the more likely it is that we will find greater intimacy in all our relationships, deepening our experience of love, living a life of increased freedom and harmony, experiencing bliss (ojas) and recognising more of the sacred that resides in everything – we become more conscious and this feeds the collective.

Yet it’s a courageous heart that goes deeper, and not everyone is ready for this and I am in awe of my students for being open to greater possibility and potential. These are students who are not scared to do the work, to look at themselves and their lives honestly and be open to the change that yoga can bring with the tears and the sighs and the yawns and the releases. 

This is the path I know in my heart that I have to take, even though there are times that it is very difficult and while I never question showing up on my mat each day, I do question whether I want to keep teaching because this is not easy either. Yoga has changed everything, and the deeper I take my practice, the more I read the scriptures and try to live my life from an aligned and authentic place, the harder it becomes, because there is no place to hide, I can’t numb out like I’ve done in the past. 

The universe made it very clear the path to travel with its nudges and synchronicity and coincidence. During 2018 I had a real desire to visit the Outer Hebrides to see the Callanish Stones. I don’t even know how I had heard about them, but they entered my awareness and that was that, it didn’t matter how challenging it was to get there (and with a young family in tow), or the cost, I just knew I had to go. Interestingly I had always been drawn to a song called ‘Stornaway’ by a band introduced to me by a friend, and I’m pretty sure this laid a seed as the idea of visiting Stornaway fascinated me.

I didn’t know until we were there that the Callanish stones are said to be aligned to the moon and of course there is a Goddess association too. It wasn’t the stones though that had the greatest impact, although they are remarkable and I could have spent much longer hanging out there were it not for the children, but it was the yoga that was to change my life in ways that I could never have expected and yet in the very back of my mind I was starting to realise that I needed a change and there was a hankering to further address some issues that I had been trying to pretend had been healed around disorder eating and intimacy.

We happened to be staying in Uig,  which I didn’t appreciate when I booked, was an hour drive from the main town of Stornaway. I like to attend classes wherever I am travelling in the world, because it takes me off the beaten track and gives me the opportunity to widen my experience of yoga, it’s become a passion. Fortunately, it turned out that a lady called Julie teaches yoga in Uig village hall from time to time and as luck would have it she was on the island the same time as us.

I only attended two classes with her but they left quite an impression on me because they were so very different to how I had practised previously and I was aware of my ego wanting to go faster and to show that I had a stable practice and Julie was probably very aware of this too as she tended to my ego at the same time as showing me that there was another way. 

The practice was slow in pace compared to what I was used to, but absolutely what I needed, even if my head and my ego had a hard time letting go of the idea that I needed to be ‘exercising’ my body to be practising yoga. This was a hang-over from my earlier days of yoga and the manner in which – I now realise – I was using asana practice as a way to maintain my eating disorder and feed my negative relationship with self, remaining in denial of both.

Julie suggested I contact a lady called Sophie Whiting who lives near Brighton as she knew that this wasn’t too far from Guernsey. I dismissed it initially, I had no knowledge of Sophie beyond the recommendation, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I contacted her on a whim really, and she responded from Thailand where she was teaching, and we arranged that I would visit a few months later in March 2019 for a one-to-one, tying it in with a regular visit to Brighton to see Ewan’s best friend. 

Sophie is a wonderful lady, totally different to any other yoga teacher I have met previously and I shall never forget that first session with her in her mobile home in Littlehampton. I lay on my mat and she asked me to begin by taking apanasana, the wind relieving pose, knees to chest, and I did so in my usual way, hands on shins, gripping knees to chest, and she was immediately on me, highlighting all the many ways I was pulling, pushing and both harming and exhausting myself in that one pose. 

I had never thought about it like that before, never considered the manner in which my practice was adding to my pattern of self-harm and my already sleep deprived and exhausted state of being; I’d become so used to feeling tired all the time by then and completely conditioned to the notion that vinyasa yoga was good for me, that I never truly questioned it (although in the back of my mind from an Ayurvedic perspective, and I was studying Ayurveda by then I knew it was not the best approach for my pitta tendencies). That one session of mainly lying and breathing on the mat was utterly life changing. 

It took me to a place that I had never been before, to a very calm and centred place that I cannot even describe or put into words because to do so would limit it and it cannot be limited, that is the thing, and I realised then that I had found something very special inside myself, sacred, and I knew that I needed to look more honestly at the way I was practising and the impact this was having on me.

I discovered that Sophie is a Scaravelli-inspired yoga teacher, not an approach to yoga I had ever consciously tried previously and this alone fascinated me, because despite the many countries and the many yoga studios I have visited, I had not connected with a Scaravelli teacher. Although a few months later I would realise that I had, in London, a few years previously attended a class with John Stirk, again on a whim, and I know now that he is Scaravelli-inspired.

But then, I didn’t know that, I just attended the class because I liked the sound of it, of going deep, of finding the inner calm and centring, and I clearly remember returning to the hotel to join Ewan and Elijah, and saying that it was the strangest class I had ever attended; I didn’t feel like we had done anything, we certainly hadn’t exercised the body or moved much from our supine position, yet I felt so different; calm and centred!

It was the same with Sophie. The way it made me feel grabbed my attention and I spent that evening and every evening thereafter reading all I could on Scaravelli-inspired yoga and on Diane Long who was one of Vanda Scaravelli’s two main students, and who had been Sophie’s teacher for many years too. I noticed that Diane was due to hold a workshop in Scotland that September with another Scaravelli-inspired teacher, Louise Simmons, who was also a student of Diane. I contacted Louise to find out if there were any places remaining on the workshop, yet knowing that it was unlikely I could attend, but I felt to make contact anyway.

There were spaces and Louise was keen to know how I had found my way to her, and I explained the sequence of events and she was very welcoming, and I apologised for wasting her time as I knew I couldn’t attend the workshop, but I knew even then that it hadn’t been about that, that I needed to book a session with Louise who offers one-to-one sessions via Skype. That was over a year ago now and I have been studying with her since then, weekly for the last six months, and she has guided me to places that my yoga practice had allowed me to avoid all these years.

Yet it took me a while to settle into this new way of practising and of moving and of being, despite knowing on some level that I had been shown this way for a reason. And as if to confirm that, and yet even then it took me months to accept it, last summer, a few weeks into studying with Louise and a few weeks after taking my Ayuvedic exams and when I was run-down and exhausted, I went on a weekend workshop with the energetic Stewart Gilchrist in London.

I love Stewart, he’s dynamic and inspiring and his approach to practice was everything I used to love, hard, strong, fast, go, go, go, push, pull, achieve, get into postures you haven’t gotten into before, on and on. Even the breath was forced. It is a yang and masculine practise and yet he has a huge following of female yoginis in London, who also love this approach. Run down, I had developed a cough by then, which just got worse over the weekend, yet I pushed through, sucking cough sweets as I practiced and sat for relaxation to ease the coughing. 

I barely ate and barely slept, my energy was all over the place feeding into the remnants of eating disorder and this association I had of ‘doing’ hard yoga, not eating, getting caught up in the body and forcing it to do things, look a certain way, all about the external and getting this crazy energy going on that is uplifting and slightly euphoric, like a natural high, but one that finds you running on nervous energy, and far from calming your mind, it makes it race, but it is addictive like drugs and you want more of it even though you know (or I know by now) that it is doing you harm. 

Returning home I was in a mess, my pitta tendencies and pitta vata imbalances, of the need to over work, over extend and over-do, had been pushed to a new edge, both with the exams and now with the yoga and I crashed and burned. The doctor diagnosed a virus, but I wonder now if it was simply exhaustion, the exams and my drive to do well, my ambition then, had challenged me and the yoga, well that had merely added to the general mess I found myself in and I was done; the rest of the summer I wasn’t able to function properly, my immune system needed some tlc. 

I know now that that this was really the turning point, that I had to look very honestly at my life and see what wasn’t working. Yet what I realised is that the changes that needed to be made had to be made inside of me, not outside of me. It wasn’t about getting a new job or a new house, or changing my diet, it was about letting go of all the stuff that I was holding onto that were no longer serving me, and this centred around my linear and masculine approach to being, reflected back at me every time I got on my mat – they say that our approach on our mat reflects our approach to life, so true!

The only time I showed up on my mat and didn’t buy into the old energy of trying to achieve and over extend was when Louise was teaching me, and I had such resistance! The practice calmed and centred me but my ego couldn’t cope with it. I wasn’t achieving! If anything it felt like I was going backwards, having to be so present and attentive and still, moving so slowly and with postures adapted as if I was a beginner, and yet the irony is that I was a beginner, I am a beginner, because there is always so much to learn.

I struggled to the extent that when our session finished I would spend the next hour practising in the way that I had always practised because unless I pushed and pulled the body and moved in an exercising the body way, then I didn’t feel like I had practised yoga, such was my conditioning! This need to practice in the old way only dropped away during lockdown when I finally accepted (and there was a dark night of the soul as I let go of holding on so tightly to the mind-set that maybe there was another way) that I could no longer practice in a way that was harming me and continuously feeding my imbalanced tendencies and ego.

I am always reminded of my favourite quote, “If you always do what you’ve always done, then you will always get what you have always got”. I remind myself of this when I know that change needs to come in. It’s very easy to keep doing what we have always done, always taking the same approach and yet wondering why we don’t get a different outcome. 

I recognised that I no longer wanted to live my life harming myself with my striving or from a masculine and linear perspective. I wanted to embody more of the deep feminine that is my nature. I wanted to be all that I am, not all that I am not. It is exhausting trying to be something that you are not and yet it is difficult  trying to be all that you are! This demands that you let go of the stories and the narrative and the ideas that you have taken on board about who you are from your friends, your family, your colleagues, your teachers and society at large. 

So much of who I had allowed myself to become has been shaped by my reaction to my life experience and to the notion of goodness and being good. I had given myself a hard time for much of my adult life, harming myself in immeasurable ways, hating myself, starving myself, destroying myself, sabotaging myself, trying to disappear from myself, out of body, denying my own nature as if it is somehow flawed because we are all so different yet judge ourselves by this misperception that we all need to be the same and thus deny our very own beautiful nature.

Louise has enabled me to reclaim more of my nature and let go of the crap that’s in the way. The journey thus far, our studying together has been illuminating, because there is nowhere to hide, I have had to step both out of the shadows into a place of greater vulnerability, and look back into the shadows to see all that is hidden. I could no longer zone out in a vinyasa flow, or push myself further away from where I needed to be going, not deeper into the superficial muscles which were already over gripping, but to soften into the softer places that I was always ignoring. Soft meant fat and when you have had an eating disorder the last thing you want is to do is acknowledge those soft places.

Yet it is the soft places and their vulnerability that have been the most giving of places to me. There has been a focus on undoing the tension, the holding in the inner thighs for example, that has prevented greater intimacy, part of the armour that I have developed in my quest to not feel deeper sensation for fear of what this might mean; feeling is tricky, especially that space between pleasure and pain when there has been harm done previously.

There is the softness of the inner arms, how much they love to hug given the chance, and the back of the body, how much this loves to be held, if only we allow it and let someone else carry some of the weight for us. Yet we struggle on alone so much of the time, being strong, and we shove the stuff we don’t want to feel to the back of the heart, hardening it, the shoulders rounding with the weight of it, preventing the ease of breath that allows prana and oxygen and lifeforce to fill our body, as if we are not worthy, damaged, must protect our broken heart that is now breaking us with the heaviness of it.

No, Scaravelli-inspired yoga does not let you hide from that. It brings you right to those places that you have been holding your pain and it asks you to let go and rest into yourself. You. There is responsibility. It cuts through the blame and victimhood culture and lays the responsibility right back at you. It’s your pain, your pleasure, you life, your drama, your narrative, your perception. And its perception that often needs changing. A breakdown to break through to a new way of seeing both yourself and the world around you. 

This is the reason the Scaravelli-inspired approach is so demanding and challenging, because there is no fixed mind, there is no right or wrong, no black or white, no good or bad, and therefore there is no methodology because that alone will fix the mind. The whole purpose of yoga is to free the mind so that it can be fully conscious, oneness, beyond the limitations of needing to separate and divide that creates dis-harmony within ourselves and disharmony within the world generally.

But when you have spent a lifetime living in a society and being part of an education system that encourages separation and division and the notion of something being fixed (look at how we cling to science as if science holds certainty and look at how science has been thrown  by Covid, no one can agree, and yet everyone turns to science as if it might save us, yet science can’t even work out how we are here) and you have been practising yoga in a way that feeds into this with its idea of fixed alignment principles and this being ‘the way’, it is very difficult to let that go.

You feel yourself adrift, not sure where to hold to bring back that certainty that you have lived your life trying to create. If I live this way then I can expect this outcome. Yet where is the joy in that? Where is the fun in the spontaneity of play? Where is the space for the sacred and for the unknown to enter it? How is it possible to grow when you have fixed yourself to something just because it feels safe? You have only to look at children and the manner in which they are enchanted by the world simply because they have not yet fixed by having to look or feel a certain way. 

We have to learn to live with uncertainty and the paradox that comes with this. Today we might move this way, another day we might move that way, all the while being gentle and kind to the body, allowing its own innate wisdom, not forcing our will upon it, awakening our spine and bringing greater freedom to the body and the mind. 

As Vanda Scaravelli famously said, “Movement is the song of the body”. There is something very beautiful in practising in a way that allows this, yet it can be extremely difficult trying not to control it but it is in the allowing that our perception will shift. I came across an extract from one of Ken Robinson’s books which I think beautifully highlights this point:

“As human beings, we love in 2 worlds. There is the world that exists whether or not you exist. It was there before you came into it, and it will be there when you have gone. This is the world of objects, events, and other people; it is the world around you.

There is another world that exists only because you exist: the private world of your own thoughts, feelings and perceptions, the world within you. This world came in to being when you did, and it will cease when you do. We only know the world around us through the world within us, through the senses by which we perceive it and the ideas by which we make sense of it.

How we think about the world around us can be deeply affected by the feelings within us, and how we feel may be critically shaped by our knowledge, perceptions and personal experiences. Our lives are formed by the constant interactions between these 2 worlds, each affecting how we see and act in the other.

What people contribute to the world around them has everything to do with how they engage with the world within them”.

I’m grateful that the Scaravelli-inspired approach and Louise, my teacher, entered my life. For a long while I considered that maybe I would just have to rely on my own inner teacher, yet I knew that my ego and it’s control was getting in my own way and I was stuck, I couldn’t quite make myself practise in a way that I needed, such was my attachment. I can clearly understand now, the reason that Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras imply the need for guidance from someone whom you trust, who has already trodden the path so that they might shine a light into the dark; there is an intimacy that comes with this too. 

Since practising Scaraveli-inspired, and more so in recent months when I have felt I have no choice but to teach this way too, simply because it would be inauthentic otherwise, and lack the sacred, which underpins all of me, there has been greater intimacy in my life, in my relationship to self, but also in my wider relationships, in love and in life generally. There is a depth of sensation that I have never experienced previously, and a deeper honesty about the many ways that I have been harming myself, by my inner critic and my negative thought patterns. There is also greater appreciation for the self, love of self, which has been mirrored back at me. 

I am sorry to those students who have studied with me but find this approach too confronting for them in its slower pace and need for deep attention, and I am grateful beyond words for those who continue to study with me, who trust that I may help them to find more of what they already have inside of them. I am grateful that I have the opportunity to learn from these students too and hear more of the song of their body, so that together there is greater harmony, in the class and in life generally!

We must not forget that there is always a bigger picture. The stars and the moon and the planets have made it very clear that if humanity is to truly awaken, if we are to live from a more conscious place then now is the time to move beyond the superficial, to go deep as we open to spirit and let this guide us. While it may be tough and there may be tears and yawns and sighs and a deep weariness in the resignation that will follow as we truly let go, the breakdowns will feed into the breakthroughs and life will flow through you in ways you could never have previously imagined. You won’t be disappointed. xx

The second cancerian new moon!

It’s been a while, i have been ensconced in a writing project and just getting through the end of term demands with all the backwards and forwards travel to the school to help where I could.

This is only our second year of school, but I felt it last year and felt it again this year that as soon as school finished, it is like the collective holding that a school provides dissipates and there is a scattering of the energy on the island, as routines drop away and people holiday; it has always helped me to recognise the cohesive nature of a school on the community.

Scattering is probably the word for the energy generally at the moment; I have been trying to feel into it these last few days. Things are still very up in the air and there appears to be confusion, people must aren’t clear yet about paths to take, where to focus they energy, how to plan in a world that appears less certain than it has ever been (although we are always living with uncertainty to an extent) and which path to take.

However saying that, Mercury coming our of retrograde earlier this week, did seem to lift a little of the lack of clarity and begin again the consideration of what might come ahead, and the new moon is - I feel - trying to help with this. But it’s little steps, and probably this is where the cancer crab comes in. I’m not an astrologer but I do know that the fact we have two new moons in cancer this year is unusual and should capture our attention.

I’m cancerian so the cancerian energy is familiar to me. I too can have a hard exterior and yet a very soft and vulnerable interior and this is where we are at collectively, trying to protect ourselves from harm. I keep thinking of rock pooling and the fact that I’m regularly turning rocks on the beach (and back again may I add) to try and find crabs for the children, and I feel like we’re all a little bit like that with the whole covid thing, never quite sure when the rock of protection will be lifted from us, especially here in Guernsey where we are living on our own little covid-free rock.

But it’s more than that, crabs will scuttle sideways and bury themselves quickly in the sand. They’re good at trying to find an escape route, and I do wonder if this energy is up there in the air with us at the moment. There’s the possibility to see clearly into shadows and certainly in the one-to-one work I have been doing with people recently, there has been a keenness to look into the shadows and an openness to seeing what lies there, because on some level we know that things have to change, and we know that now is the time to do some significant shifting.

I can relate to this in my own life too, some family significant patterns have revealed themselves recently and continue to do so, each time I take to my mat I seem to yawn or cry away some of the past as my digraph, which has quite a story to tell softens some of its hardness, a long time in coming, that has has been held there for quite some time with the stress of life and the many moments when I have held my breath with anticipation and perhaps some fear of whatever life has presented at that time, and that has remained in the cellular memory unprocessed and gripping the liver and kidneys let alone my mind.

I do have a sense of where my energy needs to be placed, and a clearer idea of boundaries around then, but there is still greater clarity to come and I don’t get the feeling that this is the time to begin anything new, but to be giving consideration to it instead, feeling into it, like a crab does I suppose with it’s many legs, nit yet able to move forwards so moving sideways instead, because there is always the potential for change, so it’s a bit like keeping all your eggs in one basket for now. It’s a brave soul who does make a major commitment right now with everything so up in the air; perhaps a time to simply put the feelers out.

I always find the summer energy scattered, so whether this moon is enhancing that perhaps - like I was saying earlier there is confusion in the air, and I noticed that even the lunascope I was reading yesterday was confused and lacked a thread, and yet I’m wondering if this thread is difficult to follow, simply because it is sometimes easier to feel into the energy than explain it to others, and let’s face it, we’ll all have our own experience and bias anyway!

So just to bring it all together, I do really feel that this is - as it is every month - a time for considering new beginnings and how we might like our lives to look when the covid situation calms down and the neuroses around it eases, but I can’t be sure that this is the time to take action, not yet, there is more clarity to come through, and the universe will continue to bring signs to support this. I do know this this is a fab time to clear stuff that needs clearing, to get low to the earth, practice yoga, take some Reiki, have a massage, look at your diet, you know, start trying to uncover that which needs healing or expression, and just being with it and letting it drop away.

This is also a time to lighten up a little, and us spiritual bods would do well to remember that. Sometimes the journey can become heavy, we can take it and ourselves too seriously and forget to have fun and be like children, open to whatever comes. As always the words surrender and trust come to mind, let life unfold but try to be present to it so that you can surrender…and trust.

Love! We also need to remember to love.

xxxxx