The Secret Kissing of the Sun and the Moon

There’s this wonderful Hang Massive song called ‘The Secret Kissing of the Sun and the Moon; and Got to experience this for myself on Sunday, such was that amazing full moon energy.

I just had this feeling I needed to head to Le Varde to sit with the ancients. My soul has been craving calm and never is it calmer than here, even Elijah felt it, there’s something incredibly incredible about that place, I sometimes wonder if I might be transported to another place in time and space in there, like a portal just awaiting the right alignment.

I also had this feeling that we needed to head to Fort Le Marchant. I’m pretty sure I must have headed out there at some point in my life but not consciously and I couldn’t get over how amazing it is out there and this on my doorstep, I pay a fortune to travel to other parts of the world to find this albeit there were lots of dog walkers and it’s the solitude I pay for in the Outer Hebrides etc.

We were out on our own at the Fort ever so briefly until we chanced upon another yoga teacher as it happens who was out there to enjoy sunset. Our timing was perfect and totally unintended, but as we left, we got to see the sun set to the west and the moon rise to the east, my goodness, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven! The universe was abundant in all her glory and there too followed a skinny dip and howl in the dark sea lit gently by the light of the full moon above, this with a soul swim friend, thank you Jo.

Monday I awoke forgetting it was E’s birthday, and settled into my meditation before I remembered, whoops, so gave that up, there were presents to be opened, by the children obviously! Once that was completed though my pendulum called me to the Bach floral remedies and the Star of Bethlehem appeared, I don’t know that I’ve ever dowsed this one before and lo and behold brought with it the word ‘shock’. Of course!

This last week especially I have noticed a pattern in bodies I’ve been interacting, and souls too of course, this deep distrust in heaven and earth and here of course sitting in the centre is a deep shock, covid will have escalated these feelings, the shock of arriving on planet earth probably set the scene, the arrival into the bright lights of this world, unless you were fortunate to arrive in the dimmed lights of a maternity room or at home. Many more these days appear in theatre, bright lights and clinical introduction to planet earth, was that what was intended?!

I did think to myself that if it is true and Le Varde was a fertility chamber and with that a portal for new life to enter, then what a space! A calmness that you might not find in the hospital environment or in the stressful and chaotic nature of our lives lived these days. But I am reminded that we have a choice and it is up to us the choice we make, the thoughts we allow ourselves to think and the manner in which we relate to our environment, externally and internally, a reflection of each other perhaps. Something somewhere always has the possibility of shifting, of pausing so that the change can come in.

I was talking about this with my philosophy teacher yesterday and I am blown away by the Sutras and the manner in which they address all this! The first step is to become aware. To notice that which no longer serves us and at least then we get to choose. Until that point we have no idea that what we’re doing is even a choice, or that it is no longer serving us. I’ve always found yoga and Reiki so helpful in helping to show up the patterns so that we start to become aware of what might need to change.

Then we start to make a conscious decision to do something different, little steps, baby changes, one glass of wine less each night perhaps, chocolate only once a week, an earlier bedtime if we can manage it, an earlier start so we might incorporate a 5 minute mediation, committing to a yoga practice twice a week, little things that we can commit to, that we consciously decide to change and as we do we make space - inside and outside - for the mystery to weave her magic in our life.

That’s what the full moon revealed yesterday, more of my own patterns, around stress and rushing, around shock that I can continue to ignore and hope will go away, or I can take ownership and responsibility and change something, me, mainly! So I’m grateful to the moon and her illuminating more of where the path is right now, not where it’s going, because I’m becoming increasingly aware that we can really only be aligned with it in this moment…this moment right now. Let’s breathe to that!

Trust on the full moon

The message this full moon is trust.

I’ve worked with a number of people this week and there has been a common theme, this I feel in my own body too, a deep distrust, in the earth below and heaven above, not consciously, but from a very old place, past life, and from this life mental imprinting, which causes us to hold on extremely tightly, especially around the centre of the spine and in our solar plexus.

It’s an old pattern for us all, eons ago, and the full moon is bringing into the collective consciousness. I’m pretty sure you’ll be feeling it too.

This isn’t about letting go for the sake of letting go, this is about deeply trusting instead and in that deep deep part within yourself. This is knowing that even in the darkness and most challenging moments of your life that your soul has your back and that life can still be meaningful and hopeful. That actually it is sometimes those darkness moments, which will bring the most meaning and sense of hopefulness into your life, give life greater meaning.

So we trust in that and we start to notice the mental imprinting which conflicts with that, the need to control and make certain, to plan and organise and try to mitigate (and litigate) all risk from our lives. Covid taught us that. We can’t! It’s not easy, it’s one of the most challenging spiritual lessons, to overcome our deep distrust and need to control outcome and brings us right back to duality and to the mind and the manner in which this is really our problem!

It starts by noticing and the body provides us with this opportunity, in our yoga practice to notice where we are gripping and holding on for dear life, in all postures, not just those that take us out of our comfort zone, and the way we are challenged when presented with something new, a different movement pattern or way of practising a posture, and of the way we cling to notions of principles. Do not be fooled! The more you cling on to what you’ve been told, to an idea or a notion of something that’s concrete, absolute and somehow certain, the greater the fall when you realise that contain the soul.

It takes us to the path. I’ve finished writing my book about depression and I write in there about how the ‘sod it’ moments of my life have often been the most fruitful, not the carefully planned ones, not the arranged ones, but the ones that happen when I let go into spontaneity, and when I am therefore least expecting it, something new will pop in to lead me down a different path that I had literally not imagined.

This quite in contrast to the vision board and moon manifesting that I have done in the past, and which exerts a certain amount of will and a lot of energy to create an outcome. This approach started to settle uncomfortably with me, because even though I might have felt it came form heart, there was a lot of pushing and expectation of outcome, which took up a lot of headspace.

My yoga teacher just this week commented that if you think you’re following your path, you’re probably following someone else’s instead, because you’re path reveals itself to you moment to moment. This morning I stumbled across a quote, “trust in the path your soul is leading you to”, which just sums it up beautifully for me. It helps to turn it all on its head, so it is not about directing the path but about allowing the path to unfold moment to moment as your soul reveals itself to you.

This helps us get out of our head and out of our need to control and asks us to go deeper, to come from a different place entirely, not just of heart but of deep trust…of root and crown and everything in-between. There is a point where they meet, where the path reveals itself, in the down and the up and the up and down and it is that place that we let go into, the deep mystery and the deep unknown. This is where we find what we have been seeking and it will only reveal itself to us when we go within.

As Rumi wrote:

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about."

There is no language for what we might find, no need for adornments, no need for anything other than courage and vulnerability and an openness to all that might be revealed when we find that place beyond the limitations of the mind.

Trust. Undoing. Releasing.

Enjoy the full moon!

xx

Beinspired is finding its voice

I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the duality of this world we live in; with good there is bad, with black there is white, with hate there is love, and all this in the context of that which I most resist or have a strong opinion about, which might cause me to lose my centre because of orientating one way or the other. 

For example, since May I have turned my back on social media and while I have felt much better for it personally, I have recently found myself questioning the impact of me holding onto the perspective that it is ‘bad’ without also considering its inherent goodness too. 

It was not that my experience of social media was not bad per se, I was not vilified or bullied, but it never made me feel very good on the inside and I wasn’t sure it was bringing out the best in me, or in others, or in the wider world per se. I didn’t want to be doing something just because others were doing it and I certainly didn’t want to post for the sake of posting to satisfy an algorithm that has been set up to keep us online. It didn’t make sense to me and made me feel increasingly uncomfortable.

I am very aware that we all of us have a choice about how we utilise our time and while I might rather be writing or practising yoga or outside with the children than stuck inside online with social media, others may have a totally different take on things and it might for them be a lifeline. So while coming off social media has been a very positive experience for me, for others it might be a very negative experience. 

My ponderings have also caused me to watch Social Dilemma and consider more of the effect of social media on the mind and our sense of self. I’m very aware how social media can negatively impact our mental wellbeing, playing into our insecurities and making us feel as if we are missing out or don’t know what’s going on if we’re not on there. This to the extent that we can get hooked without even realising it, so that our mind cannot imagine a life without it such is our dependency on it. 

I’m aware how much the big corporations play into this and make every attempt to ruthlessly profiteer from our dependencies and the need to be someone and fit in to a world that tries to control through organising and boxing us into labels and definitions, organisations in fact, and common ways of being. I am fascinated by all this too – how we try to buy an identity and a sense of self, as if we too can be commodified, often looking outside of ourselves, just look at the yoga ‘industry’…

There’s a sutra in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras which talks about ‘pratipaksa bhavanam’ (Chapter 2, Verse 33), which basically means looking at things from a different point of the view. It’s used in the context of ‘when we find ourselves disturbed/unsure of what to do, not sure of the best way forward, try and look at it from the other perspective’, and I have tried to put this into practice with my resistance to social media.

I have no qualms whatsoever with removing myself from all social media platforms, I have made complete peace with that, but I was beginning to have doubts about Beinspired, not least because I have finally accepted that I am running a business, albeit one with a heart and a genuine orientation towards the community, but because I’ve been feeling increasingly that it needs its own voice. 

Since last May, as lockdown in Guernsey eased, I have stood back a little to feel into things. 2020 has thrown life up in the air and I wasn’t quite sure how it would settle and where I would settle with it. There was a point where I wasn’t even sure I wanted to continue teaching, which surprised me a little as I have always imagined that I would teach until the day I die, but the questioning was there nonetheless.

I even found myself questioning what yoga means to me, and perhaps this was has been the most challenging  aspect of all my questioning, because even this has changed too. It’s been gradual, but picked up a pace this summer the more I practiced with my teacher and began to heal old wounds around eating disorder to the extent that I stopped considering asana (postures) as just another way of controlling my body and feeding into old patterns of self-harm (the ‘push through it/overextending mentality’). 

I began to see the way in which my old way of practising had been feeding into my imbalances and keeping me stuck. My practice had taken me so far, I could practice all these fancy poses but I couldn’t be sure that it was truly changing me, or at least it wasn’t getting at some of my deeply ingrained patterns that I knew needed shifting and releasing. There was nowhere to hide anymore, and actually I didn’t want to hide or use my practice to numb out from feeling and from deepening my experience of yoga. 

While I have always approached yoga as a spiritual practice and tried to share this in my teachings, it has become clearer and clearer to me over the years that it really is a spiritual practice, that not only connects us more fully to the ‘self’, but that calms our mind to the extent that we are even able to recognise, let alone ‘hear’, the self. Thus it becomes a practice to literally freeing us from the limitations and restrictions of the mind, and not just a form of exercising for the sake of exercising. 

Of course yoga does involve movement as we practice asana (postures), and this – in theory - to ensure that the body is healthy enough to enable us to live to a ripe old age where we might have more chance to sit comfortably and realise the self. Of course the postures offer many benefits and the attentive practising of them with an awareness of the breath, can, without doubt, help to still our mind and enable us to access deeper parts of ourselves in the body, but of course we have to be in the body to begin with, not lost in the thinking mind.

Being in the body enables us to notice where we are stuck and holding onto emotional pain which hasn’t been processed. This will often create physical discomfort as much as it will mental and emotional, and also spiritual suffering. With a regular practice we might begin to notice restrictive thought and behaviour patterns that both create and compound our own suffering an keep us tied in the past and limit us in some way, keeping us stuck.

It felt at times like feeling my way through a dark wood, seeking some evidence of a path which might lead me back to the light and to a greater understanding of what it means and how best to be with it in this lifetime! Of course there was a bigger picture, there is always a bigger picture, but I couldn’t see it, because on some level I was in the metamorphic stage and wasn’t actually sure whether I would truly end up finding my butterfly at the end, despite the many signs the universe tried to give me but that I struggled to see because I was so caught up in the uncomfortableness and muckiness of it in that moment!

The clarity eventually arrived, the bigger picture became clearer, there are always steps to take on the path to realising our dreams and of course appreciating and loving more of the self, but sometimes those steps make no sense in the moment, until we are later able to look back and go, ‘ah ha, so that was what that was all about!’. And while I may have had the idea, the notion then, that I always wanted Beinspired to be about more than just me, it’s taken it’s time to unfold to the extent that I’d stopped even imagining it.

But seeds that are planted, albeit some time ago, and that are tendered will, one day, potentially grow, and what they grow into, well who knows; look at Jack and his magic beans! So the seeds are growing in their own way and at their own pace, and perhaps it’s too early, I don’t know, but Beinspired is just starting to have a little bit more of its own voice, one that talks of serving the community and raising consciousness through teaching and sharing yoga and Reiki and through charitable projects and giving back to the island and to the land. 

Which brings me back to social media, because if there is one ‘good’ thing that social media offers, is the opportunity to bring together community, to share community based projects and events, which might help to bring together like minded people for the greater good of humanity and our evolution on this beautiful planet we call home. This left me in a quandary.

So I’ve tried to put into practice what I can (with my current level of understanding of the philosophy) of Chapter 2, verse 33 of the Yoga Sutras and ‘when we find ourselves disturbed/unsure of what to do, not sure of the best way forward, try and look at it from the other perspective’, which has found me considering the ‘goodness’ of social media and the benefits it offers. 

This has helped me to get myself out of the way a little and to be reminded that there is always another way of seeing things, to the extent that we might consider what might happen if we don’t do it, compared to what might happen if we do, do it. If we are stuck in an attitude of fear or resentment, for example, then we are asked to positively cultivate the opposite, to see this from a different perspective.

I’ve found this process extremely helpful to help me let go of my fixed idea about something, so that I might see both sides of the argument. Ultimately we all have a choice, that is the important thing, and over time our spiritual practice may help us to become increasingly conscious of the choices and impact of the decisions that we make – so we might ask ourselves, are we feeding something with good energy or bad energy and what might be the implications of this? It reminds me of mirrors, what we put out is reflected back at us. 

At Beinspired we have always intended and hoped to encourage a sense of community where people can discover, embrace and share their own uniqueness without fear of prejudice and have fun as they experience the healing and transformative nature of yoga and Reiki for themselves and never more so than now. If social media can help us to spread more love, joy and compassion out into the world then so be it, who am I to stand in the way of it! 

The way I now see it, Beinspired not being on Facebook will not stop others spending their time online, but it will mean that they cannot find out about us and that would be a shame. For Beinspired to have a voice it needs people who are willing to listen so I’m grateful to all of you who are already following us and thank you for hanging in there. We’re keen to let Beinspired speak for itself and look forward to connecting again soon.

 Plus, we’ve opened the blog up to comments in our quest to build more of our community and because sometimes we all have something that needs to be said, so please feel that you can leave your comments below, just appreciate that we’d like to keep the energy high and respectful too. 

A celebration of moving with lightness

We’re waxing down to the dark moon in a few day’s time and don’t I know it! I haven’t read too much about this new moon yet but what I did read confirmed to me that yes, this is a heavy one. In truth it feels like they’ve all been heavy this year, it is a heavy year, and from what I gather it’s not going to get any lighter just soon.

If ever we need to be reminded that we live in a world of uncertainty then this year proves it and as much as I might try to create some certainty in my life, arranging retreats and workshops in advance, I know that the arranging alone does not make them certain.

The practice, the yoga practice, the chanting practice, the reading of the ancient texts, the listening to the Sri Lankan monks, the Reiki, all of this, well it changes things. Everything changes. I was reading a lovely blog post about this yesterday and quoted from it in class. Even one yoga class will change us in some way, how can it not. But being changed is not easy because always we have to let go of our idea of how life should be lived and who we are, beyond the stories, narratives and titles we use to define ourselves.

I’ve not found that easy this year. I feel almost as if the roots have been lifted, my very foundations shaken as I have repeatedly questioned who I am and what exactly I’m practising and teaching, let alone how I’m living and how much of this is from my conditioning - most of it! On the one hand this is deeply liberating. but on the other it is very shaky and very unstable because I have to find a new way to be that might be more aligned, not just in terms of relationship with self but relationship with society too. The latter is almost trickier than the former.

I feel that each moon cycle has ramped this up a little, shone more lights into those places that I haven’t been able to see previously and there has been very little let up from one shift to another, one pattern showing up to another and all so much woven together.

There was a respite for a night spent on Sark, requested by my eldest for his birthday, his soul needing the peace as much as my own. It was magical as always, Sark air, the most incredible night sky and the rising half moon, cycling, no cars, peace, glorious peace and good friends to sit and chat with, a beach to ourselves to potter and swim. I died and went to heaven all in this lifetime.

There as a definite case of Sark blues returning back and into the thick of other people’s dramas and neuroses because we are all of us being squeezed.

I found my mat with renewed need today, and found my breath and a long yoga nidra. There was mediation and self Reiki later, and a need to come back to the texts, to something grounding. Then I thought maybe what I needed was to watch some yoga practised and I found this most beautiful video, which has warmed my heart and fed my soul and sorry if that sounds’s gooey but it was much needed and worked a treat - look at it, just BEAUTIFUL!!! It reminds me that it is worth it. The going against the flow, the doing things differently and all because my heart said so.

If your heart is saying so too then you’ll know that it’s not easy and that there are days when you just want to stay in bed and be done with it, when you might just throw your hands in the air and say that you’re done with it and join the treadmill again. But other days, when you are not so weary, when your children have slept and are not draining all your patience and energy and you are feeling inspired, that you don’t doubt it.

I don’t ever really doubt it, I just become tired by the challenges to almost help me deepen my faith in it. Then I’ll watch a video like that, or I’ll read this extract and I’ll feel strengthened by it, a bit like an angel card that says it exactly as you feel it, as if the universe really is able to commune with you, and it is, it is, it is. There is no such thing as a coincidence, the signs are everywhere, we’ve just got to open ourselves up to it:

“Freedom from the Known is one of Krishnamurti's most accessible works. Here, he reveals how we can free ourselves radically and immediately from the tyranny of the expected. By changing ourselves, we can alter the structure of society and our relationships. The vital need for change and the recognition of its very possibility form an essential part of this important book's message.”

I might just have stumbled across this book at just the right time, and what fascinates me the most is the fact I have finally stumbled across it, because Krishnamurti has been mentioned to me many times previously but all of a sudden tonight from nowhere, yet from a place of longing for something to shine a light, I find his name popping into my head and then I find my way to this book and this quote that means so much already. What force does that? Brings us to that which we need to connect? It’s not gravity and it’s not magnetism, so what is it, love? Divine? It’s amazing whatever it is.

So this is the video that I was watching that was like a light and gives me more strength to continue in the direction that my self practice has been taking me, with a little more lightness…and shining a light on those aspects of self that struggle with this, the linear, masculine and will based parts of me that have been so used to pushing my life forward over the years, of always trying my hardest to achieve come what may…come what may?! I’m pretty sure there’s a more gentle way. I see it in this lady’s practice and it inspires me on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvSBeujJKAo

Peace. That’s the word that keeps coming to me. Our inner peace. Reconciling all aspects of self, the right, the left, the active, the passive, the achiever and the complacent, the being in the middle of it all, the unknown and being OK with that. I’m pretty sure that the more lightness we can find in our movement on our mats, the less certain we are of form and more we allow the body it’s own beautiful expression, the more too our lives will be shaped by that lightness.

Enjoy the squeeze of the dark moon and her insights, and the new moon lightness that should follow…

xx

Our Herm Retreat

That was a truly memorable, enjoyable and magical retreat on Herm. We’ve been retreating on Herm, Vicki and I, for almost 12 years now and I don’t know that there’s ever been a bad retreat, some have been more stressful than others, and some more enjoyable than others, but they’ve all been magical in their own way.

This year the retreat coincided with a blue moon and Samhain, the first time that has happened since 1944 and I was keen to celebrate that and make memories. I don’t think I’ll forget waking that Saturday morning and E telling me to look out the window at the most amazing sunrise, only to laugh and remind him that we were looking west and seeing the moon set! Amazing was definitely the word!

Only a matter of minutes after that we were swimming at high tide in Herm harbour, 13 of us in total, a good show, especially considering that it was very blustery and only 7am! Later that day, in an attempt to celebrate Samhain, the festival of the dead and the end of the Celtic year, I encouraged a walk to Belvoir via the dolmen on the common. I was carrying a sleeping Eben at the time (this because he was wired on the eve of the full moon and slept poorly, as did I therefore!) so merely managed to lay a hand on the stones, while Vicki and Elijah investigated further!

At Belvoir, while the boys played in the surf and managed to soak their feet and clothes, E and I enjoyed our second swim of the day, the sun shining by then, and beautiful views of Sark ahead. This was just what I needed to clear my energy and set me up for the Vedic chanting class that followed next, one of my favourite classes on every retreat because I love chanting and I love being able to share it with others; I was positively vibrating thereafter!  

Don’t get me wrong though, I loved teaching the asana classes too, there was a real sense of commitment shown by all students over the weekend and it was wonderful to witness some break throughs and smiles, let alone the calm energy after the evening yoga nidra, and seeing everyone enjoying themselves. 

That Saturday evening we met at 9pm, 9 of us this time for an evening swim at low tide at the beach opposite the hotel, wading through seaweed and just praying (or at least I was) that a seal’s head wasn’t going to pop up as it did a few years ago, albeit that in the morning light. Jo and I howled to the moon, even though she was hidden by cloud, but we wanted to acknowledge her anyhow.

 It was late and I was tired so my Samhain celebrations were short, a bath, a mediation and a tiny bit of magic work. Let’s see, it’s the ancestors really we need to thank for all of this. I only hope our future generations look back at us, ancestors too one day, and feel we are worth celebrating for all we are giving to this world (rather than taking away from it); I’m sure they will, we’re all doing our best aren’t we.

Sunday brought with it a little of the retreat drama about weather and boat sailing times, and while we prepared for a potential earlier sailing, 8 of us (I think) meeting for a 6.30am swim this time, and an earlier class time of 7am, the boat left as planned at 11am, so we had time to take a walk through the new trail and enjoy the wind blowing residual cobwebs away!

Herm is a beautiful place to retreat and I am very grateful to all the lovely souls that have supported our retreating there over the years, and those especially who have facilitated, through running (JP and Debbi), jewellery making (Athene Sholl) and the various treatment ladies who have all made the trip across to give massage, Reiki, Shen and reflexology (but sadly not this year due to the poor weather). 

I am also grateful to all the students who have attended time and time again, some making it a bi-annual, let alone annual trip. However it is time for me to take a break. I’ve loved it, but part of my heart is in Sark right now, and it’s here that we will continue retreating, and freeing up some time and energy for me to focus on other projects during 2021 instead. 

A big thank you to all of you and I hope to see you on Sark during 2021 instead!

Love Emma x