The inner and outer landscape
It’s the arrogance of humanity that gets to me the most. Our egotistical need to be recognised as ‘someone’, to define ourselves by our busyness and our obsession with acquiring stuff, and our delusion that this is the way, that we can buy ourselves happiness regardless of the greater implication.
There is a distinct lack of responsibility for the planet and the way that we use its resources, just as there is a distinct lack of responsibility for our own wellness. We are constantly looking outside ourselves for something bigger, better, brighter, only seeing what we want to see, and ignoring the mess in the shadows, pretending that it’s not there.
Most would have felt a little uncomfortable, even slightly depressed, watching David Attenborough’s ‘Extinction’ as the programme sought to convey an important message – that each one of us is individually responsible for the continued exploitation of this beautiful planet, which is indeed being exploited by us humans.
It was a bold documentary which shone a light onto some of the many shadows, potentially making us - the British public at least - more aware of the ways in which wildlife is being killed and the land destroyed in our pursuit of money, which underpins our consumer culture and motivates ‘progression’.
People are out to make a buck and they don’t care how they do it. Never is the ego more manifest than in its sole pursuit of money and wealth; we continuously sell out in the chase of this, and often find ways to justify our behaviour around money, deluding ourselves as we try to delude others and simply feeding our egos.
I was humoured to see the furore around Lululemon’s promotion of a yoga workshop advertised as an opportunity to “resist capitalism”. This being a company which encourages us to buy into the illusion that we need to buy $180 yoga leggings to practice yoga!
As Amy Swearer of Heritage Foundation was quoted as saying: “Lululemon IS capitalism. It is literally a privately-owned corporation that raked in half a billion dollars in pure profits last year, merely by selling overpriced yoga pants to women willing and able to pay for this luxury. All this begs the question … WUT?”
Sadly the yoga world has sold out to our capitalist consumer culture as much as the rest. This is now an ‘industry’ where you are sold the idea that you need to wear particular clothes, use a certain mat, drink from a specific type of water bottle and practice in a dedicated all singing-all dancing yoga studio if you hope to practice yoga properly. I’m yet to find any reference to any of this in the ancient texts btw!
But this is so typical of our culture, in that we have to commodify things, make money from it, even those things that by their very nature are not about money but about something very different, such as yoga. It seems to me more obvious than ever before, the way in which we fall into the illusionary trap that it is about the external and about what how other people perceive us and our place in this world.
The reality is that we are really very insignificant in the grand scheme of things and life will continue anon without us in it. It’s a hard lesson for us to learn, but a necessary one if we are serious about trying to make the world a better place to live upon. The trouble is, people buy into their need to be someone and take themselves far too seriously, to the detriment of the bigger picture.
Look at social media and the manner in which this is used to promote ourselves in our attempt to ‘be someone’. Look at the politicians who put their own egotistical need to be elected for the sake of being elected beyond the greater interests of the society and the planet as a whole. We are all of us in some way feeding into our need for recognition at the expense of something – be that our values or our children or our health.
The more important we think we are, the busier we have to be, as if to justify the labelling we have given ourselves around our own self-importance. Our lives become a mere creation of the mind – we imagine ourselves important and live it out, impacting on the way we treat others, and the way we expected to be treated by others too.
The ego is often so subtle and our conditioning so deep, that we don’t even notice that we are doing it. We turn a blind eye to the way we are living our lives and justify the choices we make based on it being OK because it is me…just me. Yet a whole heap of ‘me’ makes up this planet, which makes for a whole heap of people living in a way that isn’t necessarily responsible, let alone harmonious, and definitely not conscious.
I keep thinking that clearly our way forward cannot be one based on our past, as it is our past that got us into this sorry mess in the first place. We have, many of us, learned a lot, but there are still some that are reticent to take responsibility – look at President Trump and his inability to accept that climate change is real, because then he might have to make some hard decisions and this might lose him his electorate ratings. See what I mean about the ego!
My Ayurvedic doctor will always say that ‘ever action has a consequence’ and she is right. Even the most well intended actions, such as people switching to veganism in an attempt to save the planet, will have consequences - all of a sudden there is greater demand for nut milks, for example, which means more nuts need to be grown, which means more monoculture and greater demand on water and land, to the expense, often, of another crop and biodiversity of land.
Try as we might, us being here and living on planet earth places a demand on the earth’s resources. We cannot escape it. But one thing we can do is try to become more conscious of our impact on the earth, taking our head out of the sand and looking more honestly at how we are living and the choices we are making about that.
We do not have to do what everyone else is doing, blindly following like a sheep. It is healthy to ask questions, especially if what is being asked of us does not make sense. There is lots about the way we are currently living that does not make sense to me, from education to our health and wellbeing.
Often there’s this resignation that because things have been done like this in the past, it’s OK to continue doing them like that now. Our approach to life needs to change and fortunately many people are making a shift and doing some really positive things that are beyond their own ego, and for the greater good. The more that follow suit, the more we stand a chance of making this a healthier planet for our children to live on.
I can’t help thinking that the more we come to know ourselves, explore more of our inner landscape and recognise the way that we are treating our physical bodies and managing our mental health, the more this will be reflected back out into the world. The more conscious our relationship with our self, the more conscious our relationship with the outer world, and the more we might begin to recognise what is important in life (and I don’t believe it is the life that is being fed to us by marketing companies, social media and private enterprise).
We can all do more to help, but it is actually in the doing less that we might achieve this – there is always the paradox! In letting go of trying to be someone, of having to label and separate ourselves from everyone, of thinking that we and life needs to look a certain way, well perhaps we might just become a little more conscious of what really matters and find a new way; usher in the paradigm shift that is needed now for our wellbeing as much as for Planet Earth.
Autumn came
I thought I didn’t want summer to end,
Until it crept back in again.
Then I longed for the crispness and light
Of autumn time, it was so bright
With its crinkling leaves and browning hue,
And fluffy clouds hanging in the sky.
I wondered how the caterpillar might know when
it should transform into a butterfly?
Or the deciduous trees, are they told too
When to let go of their summer leaves?
Perhaps there’s a whisper that now is the time.
Maybe there’s a spark, a certain sign.
Whatever it is it, it forgot to tell summer this year
Or perhaps summer held on
Rebelled, didn’t want to let go, savouring its moment,
One final show.
Is this what we do. Hold on, let go, hold on again,
Don’t know, wide open space.
It’s time now though, for the change that comes
When summer lets go of the sun.
Then the earth can breathe her sigh of relief
And settle into her deepest sleep,
And all around will follow her lead as if the magic
of rest has been cast, twinkling, over the fields
Will we rest too when autumn comes, shut down,
Close in, restore ourselves?
This morning light talks of autumn again, there’s
No going back now, we must let go into it.
Rest
I was heartened to read Karen Brody’s recent blog post where she talks about rest and how many are using it as a tool to be more productive, missing the point entirely.
I’ve been questioning this for a while now. Yoga Nidra has become a popular practice in the yoga world, and the concept of rest too, but I have concerns that it becomes yet another tick box exercise, “done my rest- tick”, yet another ‘thing’ to fit into already busy days.
I also like what Karen says when she writes, “If we are resting to be more productive then we are feeding into the same paradigm that's making us all sick and tired”, because I believe she touches on something that is underpinning so much of life right now, this constant feeding into the same paradigm that has the world sick and tired and in need of change.
Frequently I see people coming up with ideas and schemes, which they feel will positively change the way we live, yet from my side, all they are doing is simply reinventing the wheel and in many cases, losing themselves in the jargon of it. Women especially are doing this, believing they are supporting a move to a new more aligned way of being in touch with the deep feminine, yet actually they are still feeding into the male paradigm.
Patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and in our society that it is very difficult to see through it. I was reading an article about Jane Fraser being appointed as the first female CEO of Citigroup, making her the first woman to lead a major US bank and I congratulate her for piercing the glass ceiling and yet I find myself questioning whether it will actually make a positive change. If she is playing the game the male way, focused on objectives and achievement and feeding into the linear, then what difference does it make if she is female, she’s still supporting the same system; nothing changes.
I’m not sure that we can create a new world based on sex anyhow, nor on what’s happened previously, because memory doesn’t always serve us well, its laden with perception, and false perception often too. I wonder if it might be the dreamers that will see us through to another way of being, those who have tapped into a much deeper place within themselves that is not based on history (at least in their minds), but imagines a whole new world that we have not yet ever seen. This is one of heart and creativity, not one of fear and safety.
This might be a world where family and health are viewed as more important than material wealth and the bottom line, where stress is taken seriously and so too the needs of our children for parental interaction and time. A world where simplicity is viewed as more important than filling our houses and our minds, our world then, with ‘stuff’ that adds no value beyond the sophomoric and numbing that is so entrenched in our society.
We are always trying to find a way to numb our pain. I could write a whole blog post on this alone. The almost daily reporting of court cases over here in Guernsey about people found illegally possessing cannabis and being found drunken in a public place is indicative of this, so too the drive towards legalisation of recreational drugs and the explosion of CBD oil as a pain reliever. I always think of Kahlil Gibran’s poem entitled ‘On Pain’, which reads:
“And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.
And he said:
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.
And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;
And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.
And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.
Much of your pain is self-chosen.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:
For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,
And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. “
I like how he writes, “much of your pain is self-chosen”, because this is my experience. Having suffered with depression for much of my 20s, and having made an attempt to study and understand my mind and the source of my suffering, I see that so much of it was because of my mind and my perception of life as it was lived moment to moment, but so often lived based on memory, and even this a perception, an illusion all of itself.
It was my pain that made me go deeper, that asked me not to numb myself from it with antidepressants and to gradually let go of my reliance on smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol, but to delve right deep into it, to understand it, and to make peace with it. In the process of this, turning as I did to yoga and Reiki, I connected to a part of myself that I knew on some level from my teenage years as a surfer and a contented childhood spent so often in my imagination, that there is more than what we can see. As Gibran writes, there is this part of us that is “guided by the tender hand of the Unseen”. It was the connection to the tender hand (the hand an extension of the heart space lets not forget) of the Unseen that eased my pain and supported my healing.
It is this perhaps, the Unseen, that will help to change things if only we can trust in it. It is tricky though, to trust in something that we cannot see, to trust in something that is difficult to define because definition limits and this cannot be limited, to trust in something that is felt from a deep place inside us that comes and goes, cannot be held down. This is not a world where we trust. This is a world where we try to make life certain, ordered, controlled, because we don’t trust and look how Covid-19 has challenged that!
This is not about patriarchy or feminism or the divine feminine movement, this is something entirely different. This is about a paradigm shift deeper into the heart, that is not separated in the quest to understand and compartmentalize. It is about resting into that deeper place within ourselves, within our body, that cannot be intellectualised, that cannot limit us like our mind, but that can help us navigate our lives into the unknown. It can be very messy, but this is the way of the heart, as my yoga teacher says, “Deep grace isn’t always pretty or easy to witness. Sometimes it is necessary to howl.”
It seems so simple to me at times. If we look to those who might inspire us like Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi, and for me Diana Beresford-Kroeger, there is only deep integrity, heart and simplicity. These are people who learned how to rest into themselves. I don’t know that this meant they took time to lie down and be still, which is how we might think that ‘rest’ looks, although it is likely. If you look at a definition of rest, ‘cease work or movement in order to relax, sleep, or recover strength’, then being still must surely play a part in it. Yet it is more than resting for the sake of getting anything and more an opportunity to ‘strengthen’ through non-doing, the connection to that which is always present and yet often overlooked in the quest for productivity.
As Brody writes, “Productivity is not bad. But the problem with using rest practices to fuel more productivity is that not only can productivity put us in a hypnotic state of masculine overdrive, but productivity feeds a culture that is fundamentally not working for most of our bodies and minds. When we tell people to rest so that they can be more productive, even if it's couched in values asking us to slow down, we are still selling a flawed paradigm.” She gets it! This is the trouble with our society. We grasp onto something as if it might be the magic pill that makes everything OK, yet still, still, we do it to get something; we expect an outcome, and a positive one at that.
It’s so not that. In the fleeting moments of the rest there is nothing to do and nothing to change, for we become, fleeting, fleeting, fleeting, like a bird fleetingly visiting a bird table to feed, more of who we already are, underneath all the stories and labels and ‘things’ and ‘stuff’. It is not that we trust the Unseen, it is that we are the Unseen, so why wouldn’t we trust in it when we know it to be all that is actually real. Fleetingly it goes. But like the bird that fleetingly feeds at the bird table, we fill ourselves up on it each time that visit it. It is this for me, that is truly rest. It doesn’t try to change anything! It allows us to live from a deeper place in heart, that’s all. Then everything changes!
It is not therefore for us to find a new way on the outside, but to rest more fully into the deep presence always available to us from within our own body, on the inside. This is when rest becomes much more than the opportunity to become more productive or to achieve something or produce an outcome, to separate, divide and conquer, but to take us back home to the mystery and magic of the self.
I’ll leave you with this poem from Rainer Rilke
“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”
P.S. Pride was AMAZING tonight!
Autumn snuck in!
Autumn is here, it snuck in when we thought it might never arrive. It takes me by surprise each year, and yet it shouldn’t, not really, it’s part of the wheel, like clockwork, will always appear. I’m resistant though to its arrival, I’m a summer baby, a water one too, I love the heat and the energy of summer, and although I know that it tends to burn me out in the end, I never actually want it to end.
In many respects I’m grateful then, that autumn suddenly appears. If I think about it too much I get a longing for the warmth which I know is about to disappear. I cling on tightly, not wanting to let go, yet autumn does it for me, because there’s nothing to hold on to when it arrives. And actually i’m always blown away and spellbound by its clarity of light.
The last few days I have caught myself mesmerised, cycling and having to stop and be still and watch the most incredible evening skies as the sun as setting. I could have shouted to the universe, “you are so beautiful”, I wanted to, but I didn’t, because I did’t want to scare anyone, but it was that stunning.
Then yesterday at the beach. I was lost in the revelry of the clouds. Oh my goodness, those autumnal clouds; the most perfectly puffy clouds, cumulus clouds, their name deriving from the Latin cumulo, meaning heap or pile. These are piles that are welcome in my sky, suspended, low in the bright blue sky, a gift from God, I was mesmerised. I love clouds, could watch them for hours, but these have to be my favourite, in autumn, when the light is bright and the sky so full of life.
I swam out as far as I could into the bay and lay on my back and gazed at this clouds, and the land, and I could see the Guet in the distance, an arch of green, and I thought maybe I had died and gone to heaven. To be held like this, held, oh my goodness, you know you’re alive, that there is a mystery that we cannot name that permeates our being and in moments like that, moments, we are suspended in its glory, I didn’t want to be anywhere else on this Earth, this beautiful earth.
It got me again later, out on the bike. I had to just stop. It reminds me of Scotland, this autumnal light. There is something about that place, the space, the light, the clarity, it’s made for people like me, the artists and the poets, the seekers and the wanderlust. We bathe in this stuff; it does something to us. Every time I visit my best friend in Scotland, I spend the first few hours commenting on the light, mesmerised by it, blown away, stunned, nothing else seems important but embodying it somehow, anyhow.
Autumn does that to me too, beyond the initial resistance, when I can smell it creeping in, the mornings, sometimes the evenings, when summer is still in full swing, but there’s a shift, the leaves, already browning, the acorn, the blackberries! How can I write about autumn and leave it so long to mention blackberries., Now these are another autumn gift. This is the season of the harvest, fruits and vegetables, what is there not to like. We are awash in the bounty, is this the most abundant season? I can’t be sure, they all usher in a gift, but there is something special, ok it’s the light, I’m still lost in the light.
So that’s another summer done and gone, although it won’t be done just like that, it bobs in and out, snatches of it, reminding us, “here I am”, it says, “yet but here I am”, autumn calls back with its apples and tomatoes, its squashes and berries. Then it will just disappear, a memory, a reminder, a motivation towards next summer, next summer we will do this - maybe next summer I’ll make it to Petit Port, I meant to do it this year, but summer ran away with itself, the same bays, the same beaches, there’s something comforting about familiarity, of witnessing the shifting landscape, then passing seasons, the subtleties.
We’re headed towards the equinox now, they say many of the dolmens are orientated towards the equinox shift, the equal duration of days and night when all is in harmony, the light and dark, the tipping point, another turn on the wheel of the year, taking us this time towards the darkness, the waning down, the dropping within, the introspective time of reflection and stillness. There is much to be celebrated. And we will celebrate, a perfect time for bonfires, for the letting go of what is no longer needed and the tending to the harvest, of the seeds planted, finishing off those projects of which I have many.
It’s an exciting time, full of its own potential, the opportunity for transformation by the grace of God, the grace! Oh the grace of the transition, we have much to learn. I’m trying to learn, to allow, allow, allow, the mystery, flow, not hold on to that which needs to be gone, an identity, perceived, imagined, made real, who cares who cares?! Puffy clouds, that’s the image I’m going to hold, still, full, just being, be-ing. I like that. Autumn. Light. Clarity. A glimpse of the mystery. I felt that. x
Disillusionment about teaching yoga
This week I was hit by this overwhelming sense of disillusionment about teaching yoga. I think it had been building, but it did take me a little by surprise nonetheless. For the first time ever, I also found it difficult to get on my mat one day, that’s definitely a first! I made it in the end, and was pleased for it, it felt like a cross-roads, a no going back and perhaps on some level that was where the resistance came from!
The not teaching yoga anymore though, that one I have been sitting with. It comes in part from a disillusionment with the yoga ‘industry’ and the fact I don’t want to be a part of that. When I trained as a teacher 15 years ago now, teacher training courses were sparse, and I had to apply to get on the course that I chose, with a reputable teacher in Australia.
Now anyone can learn to teach yoga, or what the West now perceive to be yoga, which for many is nothing more than an exercise regime. It’s sad really, that our culture has once again taken something and turned it into an opportunity to make money. Many courses are focused on this alone, how you might make money and run a business from teaching yoga; not about the love of it, the calling, the passion!
But it’s more than that, it’s just this weariness I have about being a part of it, of somehow unintentionally feeding into the illusion of it, just because I teach yoga, when really it is so much more than that to me, because it is my life, my all, my whole being. It is the practice and the sacred and the deep mystery. I don’t want to sell out on that and I don’t want to be confused with those who are, and to maintain all that it is, I wonder if it might be better not to share it and have it be diluted in the process.
I realised though, once I had chatted it through with my brother (my spiritual advisor!!) and my yoga teacher, that it is about boundaries and trust; the boundaries to know with whom to share it and to trust in the mystery of the practice, both of which sit deep in the solar plexus. Perhaps it was no surprise then that my teacher has been taking me deep into this space the last few weeks, to the gateway that lives in this space,, which will reveal itself to us when we are still enough to rest into it.
Strangely, or not so strangely, I have also been aware this week, of insects landing on my skin, to the extent that a random flea (a flea!) jumped onto my foot completely out of the blue, freaked me out a bit! There’s been a theme this year with the mice and ants before lockdown and now the insects. So it came as no surprise, less so because I had had a strange inkling for a while now, that something wasn't right, but the same day I had an ‘ah ha’ moment about boundaries, I found out that I have a parasite living in my gut!
It was a relief actually, to finally have the diagnosis, because I knew something wasn’t right and my skin was indicative of that, yet I knew that I hadn't quite got to the root of it…and might still have some way to go. But let’s face it, there’s no greater boundary issue that letting a parasite enter your gut! The universe couldn’t make it clearer, the other parasites showing themselves this week (the flea!) and me questioning the parasites who are sucking the life out of yoga and feeding into the illusion of the wellness world (an illusion because we couldn't be a more unwell society if we tried!).
Boundary work takes you deep into the heart and the solar plexus. There is an element of self-worth and self-love; how much do you value your time? Do you put other’s needs ahead of your own, or that of your family and those you care about the most? Do you know how to best mange your time? Do you protect yourself from the parasites that suck the life from you? Do you know how to meet your own needs as they arise? Are you capable of looking after yourself? Do you give too much of yourself?
Yet it is never black and white, never quite as clear cut as we might hope it to be, because wrapped up in this is the passion for helping others, for being in service, for living a life of purpose, for exploring what it means to be alive. so that our boundaries might change from moment to moment, depending on where we are at in our life. And tied into this is trust, and settling more fully into that, so that we let go of our attachments, our pushing and pulling and trying to control and make things happen…which is the reason there has to be some flexibility around our boundaries too, to allow the mystery to enter in.
But at its heart of course is ourselves, our true self, and releasing and surrendering any patterns or behaviours that are no longer serving that truth. The universe will make this clear to us, will give us signs, will help us step up and drop in, to hear more clearly that voice within, to trust in where it is taking us, even if we cannot see how life might unfold, if we could only let go into it without having to control it or direct it or in any way sabotage it. There’s a lot of strength in living like that, because we have to develop deep trust in something greater than what we can see and discernment too. But sometimes, like with teaching and practising yoga, we have no choice, there is no other way, we know that deep down!