The winds of change
The winds of change have been blowing in. Change is in the air and the winds the last month have definitely been ushering this in.
At yoga this morning, there was an agitation in the air as people were reporting a range of symptoms form sleeplessness to tiredness to not being able to switch off. This is vata. Wind is vata. There has been a lot of vata in the air of late!
The one helpful thing we can do is lie on the earth, or at best, get our bare feet on the earth instead. The earth grounds us and literally brings earth into the body to counter all the air.
The other thing we can do is practice yoga. Yoga is a practice, I’ve written about that before, so we just need to roll our mat out, lie on it, breathe and connect with our body. Yoga will also help to earth us and ground us and calm us right down. It relieves our suffering - is the unlinking of our link to pain (see the Bhagavad Gita!).
We can practice Reiki too. Only this week a Reiki practitioner/yoga teacher asked me if it was safe to continue giving Reiki/teaching yoga while pregnant and whether she needed any particular protection technique. This interested me. I practised Reiki throughout both my pregnancies, my boys were infused with Reiki while they were eggs in my ovaries, let alone in the test tube and later as embryos inside me. I also practiced yoga literally up to the birth of both my boys.
Reiki by its very nature cannot harm, and yoga taught consciously should not harm either, but this highlighted to me how separate we are from our soul and our intuitive guidance, that even as Reiki practitioners and yoga teachers, we might question it. I never have, as it happens, because Reiki and yoga saved my life and connected me to soul and I have trusted in all this ever since.
This is not something you can learn from books or you can be taught by others. To cultivate faith we have to practice and feel it for ourselves, deepen our connection to spirit, to soul and to our intuition. It is not always easy, and it doesn’t tend to happen overnight. I have been practising daily for the best part of 17.5 years now, people forget that. Spiritual practices are exactly that, practices. We have to put in the effort.
Kriya yoga highlights this, that it is not enough then to talk about it, or imagine it, or read about it, we need to take action and we need to have awareness and not be attached to outcome. Unfortunately, in this day and age, the focus is always on outcome and the fruits of our labour to validate our place in the world - look at social media.
Yoga has in many instances become nothing more than an exercise class devoid of any philosophical or spiritual underpinning and basis, the soul has been ripped from it, as it has become instead a billion dollar industry. Like any fitness industry, it is becoming a fad. I can see it happening. People know that yoga could help them, by its very nature it relieves suffering, but people aren’t altogether prepared to practice it. To experience the benefits we have to practice and we have to be ok with practising for the sake of practising without being attached to outcome!
This is difficult in these times of instagram where it is all about what you look like in a posture rather than how you are living your life. Even the idea of the outcome is an illusion! We get lost in form and forget about the reason we came to yoga in the first place, and sometimes when we hit an emotion or some kind of obstacle (an injury or tightness) we give up, because it all becomes too much like hard work.
Reiki doesn’t let us bypass quite so easily, and this is the reason I really love it. Despite various organisations trying to organise Reiki and therefore running the risk of taking the soul out of it, it won’t let itself be abused like this. Reiki is Reiki. It is a spiritual healing technique. It is the energy of love. You cannot strip the soul from love, it’s an inherent part of it thank god. Like yoga though, it is a spiritual practice, so one does need to practice to truly connect with it.
Which brings me full circle. It is in the practising that we cultivate faith in the practice and also in ourselves. We begin to get out of our own way, to notice our neuroses, our insecurities and all those unhelpful and limiting core beliefs about our lack of worthiness and not being good enough. These drop away the more we practice and get beyond the mind and the ego and touch something deeper inside us that we know on a deep level is beautiful and pure, despite our inability to recognise it on the mundane level of our existence, instead filled with a lack of love for self.
This comes too in time, a deeper respect for our soul and inner light, for all that we are and have been and all the gifts we have brought with us into this lifetime. We bring with us lessons from others lifetimes too and karma that needs releasing and settling, so that we don’t keep taking it with us - and more - into any future lifetimes (yes Jan, we sometimes have to go to past lives too and the Akashic records, the records of each soul:-))
Often the questions we ask of others, are the questions we should be asking ourselves, tuning inwards and deepening our connection to our intuition (being in-touch). This asks us to lie still on the earth sometimes and breathe, practising yoga and Reiki for the fun and joy of it without any attachment to outcome. It asks us to drop our crap and our feelings of victimhood and blame hood and be present to this wonderful life that we have been gifted, if only we can realise it.
The wind is ushering in this change and the super full moon (as it is close to the earth) will be ushering in more of this next week too. We really are being asked to see beyond the illusion of this life that we are all living here on planet earth, to remember the dream and the way it was meant to be, and to let go of giving our power away to politicians, institutions, organisations and anything that tries to take the soul out of our being.
My yoga teacher and I were talking about the way modern yoga tries to train the body to be a certain way, much like our education system, as if we are all in a sausage factory and being churned out the same way, all of us the same sausage for ease of fitting into this world. Only that we’re not all the same, not at all, and nor should we be treated as such. She was telling me the story of the tiger trained for a circus. We can train a tiger to do something, much like we can train the foot to do something in yoga. But in the process, not only do we remove the tiger ness, the intelligence, the soul then, out of the tiger, but we remove the intelligence and soul out of our foot too.
Who are we beyond what we have been taught by our parents, education system and society? Who are we when we really drill down. It’s scary because the more we peel the layers away, the more we realise how much we have been limited by all our life experiences to date, and the more we have taken on everyone else’s stuff, their beliefs, prejudices and ways of seeing the world. We cling to our sense of right and wrong, forgetting that there is always two sides to a coin.
The only way out is to get deep within, being still and quiet and practising. Then we come to know our truth and we come to trust in it. We don’t doubt the soul despite the obstacles which will be place din our path to challenge it and to deepen our faith to it. It’s not all love and light on the spiritual path, more fool new age spiritualism for leading people down the illusionary path in thinking that this it is and for people buying into it. It’s not about wearing crystals or attending courses, it’s about doing the work on ourselves by ourselves and believing in it.
Enjoy the waxing moon energy, a fab time to plant seeds and cleanse crystals, also to go in and feel into the changing energy. Don’t forget to ground yourself too.
x
Plant a Tree
As part of our Plant a Tree Project, we have been growing a variety of saplings for you to plant yourselves in your garden. The project will officially launch in Autumn 2021, but until then, if you are keen to get going, please email emma@beinspiredby.co.uk to organise collection of your sapling.
Saplings are free and available to everyone!
What you will need
Compost
Spade
Rooting compound (optional)
Water
How to plant your tree
Gently press the pot from both sides, turning the pot around.
Place the sapling on its side, gently pulling the sapling with one hand and the pot with the other.
If the root is still a bit tight loosen it a little with your fingers or a trowel.
Dig a hole slightly deeper and wider than the pot.
Water the hole if the earth is dry.
Place a mixture of general compost and earth in the base of the hole. If you have any, mix in a little rooting compound (about 25ml) in the hole and the earth compost pile.
Place the sapling in the hole with the top of the covered root ball level with the ground (i.e. don’t bury the stem)
Compact the earth around the root ball with the heel of your hand as you fill in the hole with the remaining earth compost pile.
Water the base of the sapling.
Continue to care for your sapling per instructions below!
Ongoing care
Ensure to water regularly for the next 6-8 weeks. A young tree even up to 1.5 years old will require regular watering during a dry spell.
Talk to your tree and place your hands on it, maybe even giving it Reiki if you are Reiki attuned!
Slowing down with yoga
Life is busy, that’s the message I’m receiving, people working 50-60 hour weeks, not coming home until 10pm from the office, working weekends, never able to properly switch off, always on the go, checking phones for messages and emails, rushing from one meeting to the next, never feeling truly in control or on top of anything.
It’s a funny old world we now find ourselves in post-lockdown, still so much uncertainty hanging in the air – life has always been uncertain but now more so than ever before – and no one really sure what might happen next with the threat of vaccine-resistant mutations, and travel plans taking shape last minute now. There’s no guarantee even then, that plans won’t have to change at the last minute, and do people want to take that risk?
Life has been changed. Even life in the yoga and wellbeing world has changed. Yoga classes are no longer what they were, people have found other ways, online yoga is huge, you can practice from the comfort of your own home and for free, squeezing it in with the myriad other things that have to be achieved in a day. There are pros and cons to this, a pro that people are still able to get practising, but it’s a shame when yoga becomes little more than a tick box exercise, or is a rushed activity, where we’re not truly present.
There’s a lot to be said for getting to a class, not least because of the collective energy that comes from connecting with others on the same vibrational field, but also because it is not so easy to zone out or bypass, there’s no chance of checking your phone when you hear it ping as you can so easily do at home, nor fast forward your way through the bits of the practice that you don’t like (yep, we all do it!), and finish early, and not taking or making time to rest at the end (often the most important part of the practice!).
It doesn’t help that yoga has reached a saturation point and become so trendy that it might well soon begin to go out of fashion. This is the trouble when we extract just one part of a practice, like mindfulness, being extracted from Buddhism and now used as a tool to increase productivity and the bottom line in many working environments. It’s not that management don’t care, more so that wellbeing has become another tick-box exercise, to ensure the business is seen as caring, even if it’s not so much about staff’s individual wellbeing, but about how the business is performing.
Yoga is a victim of all this too. Always we are told that yoga can make us feel better, is the panacea for our loss of mental, physical and emotional wellbeing. And it can be, of course, but to be truly effective, on a long term and transformational basis, it needs to be viewed holistically, not simply as another exercise routine. It has benefits of course, keeps us nimble, fit and – in theory – healthy, but for yoga to be truly effective it needs to be practiced regularly, with attentiveness and awareness.
Kriya yoga is the yoga of action as detailed in the second chapter of Patanjali’s yoga sutras. This particular section is aimed at people who have an unsteady mind and are subject to the kleshas (the afflictions, including ignorance, ego, desire, aversion and fear (that’ll be all of us then!)). Patanjali details what can be done to calm down a little bit before being in a position to meditate.
This is what people forget and the whole mindfulness craze has done nothing to ease this. If your mind is unsteady, the worst thing you can do for yourself is attempt to meditate. My Ayurvedic doctor has always said this, that it is essential the digestive fire is balanced first as this will create a calmer mind, which will feed the heart and immune system and allow us to sit for meditation without being de-stabilised by it.
If you are all over the place, your digestion is causing heartburn and acid reflux, or you’re constipated, then you absolutely need to address that first, before you even begin to contemplate sitting quietly in meditation. It is absolutely essential that you do what you can to calm the mind before you begin, and what we eat is one of the easiest ways to positively impact our state of mind – we are what we eat. The process of preparing food can be a meditative, grounding and centring practice for us, helping in its own way to calm our minds.
We should also never overlook the benefit of getting our hands in the earth. My Ayurvedic doctor regularly recommends this to people; get your hands in the earth and see how your life will be positively changed by this experience (my life was totally changed by getting my hands in the earth). Growing our own vegetables and fruits has benefits beyond the process of growing, as it can help to nourish us physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, and prepare us to meditate!
Throughout chapter two of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali offers a practical approach, a path to practice (sadhana) including purification, reflection and surrender. He introduces kriya yoga, the yoga of action, which comprises three parts:
Tapah – to heat/purification and make a certain effort towards doing things that are positive and constructive and in the right direction, such as getting on our mat and eating better.
Svadhyaya – reflection, reading texts such as the Yoga Sutras, and reflecting on them as a guide and holding ourselves up to them – how are we doing?
Isvarapranidhanani – surrendering to a higher principle, this the idea that we are not in control, that the world does not revolve around us. This awareness encourages an acceptance of our place in things, that there is something higher.
Thus, like karma yoga in the Bhagavad Gita, we are encouraged to do the work on ourselves, to practice yoga, for example, without attachment to the fruit. Instead we surrender our efforts and make them as an offering to the greater good. Most of the time we have a motivation of gain, so it can be helpful letting go of things that don’t work out. We can remember these attributes of kriya yoga by the 3As:
Action
Awareness
Acceptance
This is yoga in action then, taking action, with awareness, and with acceptance of where we are at, without expectation of gain. It’s a practice, like Reiki, it cannot be learned just by reading about it in a book, we actually have to get practicing, whether that’s on a yoga mat or not! There’s this wonderful quote that I often share on retreats from Vanda Scaravelli’s book, Awakening the Spine:
“Why are we doing yoga?
For health reasons? Perhaps a walk in the park would be better. To help someone else? There are so many ways of helping people. To make money? This is surely not the best way. Out of a sense of duty and discipline? Or for some obligation towards ourselves coming from our puritanical background?
No nothing of the kind. No motivation no aims, only an agreeable appointment for the body to look forward to. We do it for the fun of it.
To twist, stretch, and move around, is pleasant and enjoyable, a body holiday.
There is an unexpected delight in meeting earth and sky at the same moment!”
Talking of retreats, I’m writing this on Sark, a few hours before the final yoga class of the weekend. There is something extremely special about Sark and about retreating here. I heeded the call to the dolmen here yesterday, it’s a magical place, first time I’d been able to get out there on my own. This was only an hour before kirtan with Katie and Adam, which took me to another place, the vibrational shift from kirtan is very real, for me Bhakti yoga is the most direct path to the divine and absolutely calms the mind.
We’re on retreat here again next weekend, and back on holiday a couple of times over the summer, before retreating again a few times in the Autumn. People are in need of the opportunity to take time out from these busy lives that they are leading and to go within and actually see what’s happening on the inside. It takes courage because we don’t always like what we see, but the soul is calling for greater embodiment and yoga, kriya yoga can take us there, and retreating on Sark absolutely gives us the space to be held in our practice too.
I hope you’re not too busy to lay out your mat and go inside yourself and be truly attentive to what is happening. Classes are still there, for when you know you need to be less distracted by everything else going on in the outer world, both online and in person, and there is always the earth to walk upon, barefoot is best, hug a tree, find a power spot, sit down, feel the sun on your skin, smell the air, be present to life as it is unfolding moment to moment – watch the moon.
Love Emma x
Fairies!
I took possession of a pair of copper dowsing rods recently. It had been on my mind and I’d started reading some books on dowsing in relation to ancient and sacred sites, then I went for SHEN and Jo had some on her table, so I took it as a sign!
We took the rods out to this ancient track near St Saviour’s church here in Guernsey, the whole area is alive with ancientness, and while I’d thought I’d found the ancient stone that a doswer guy had told my stone friend about, it transpired that that wasn’t the stone! It gets confusing, all these stones, but apparently this stone, was hidden behind a hedge, not quite as obvious as the stone I had found instead.
So I set off with my dowsing rods down the track, asking them to lead me to a neolitic stone and they did! And it turns out it was the stone, hidden, as I had been told, behind a hedge. Beginners luck! I was inspired that’s for sure, and Eben then set off with the rods, trying to find more Neolithic stones, Elijah is not interested, nor E for that matter, but they’re still happy to entertain my love of these ancient places.
This one is special. I have been back at night and I am pretty sure this is a place of ethereal beings. Guernsey used to be awash with them, fairies especially. We talk regularly with the magic fairies in this family; they have gotten us out of many a tight spot with our need at times for parking spaces or to make it up Saints hill and to school on time. We really do believe in them in our household, but seeing them is another matter.
I’ve always had an infinity with fairies. My stone friend loves them too and it is perhaps no coincidence that my parents recently had a clear out and passed to me a couple of fairy books that I had stashed at their house. One was from childhood, a little flower fairy book, but the other two I had been gifted in my early thirties when I had opened up to the possibility of fairies again, this because I had returned to Guernsey from all my yoga training and I had a sense that I needed to connect to the energetic landscape and beings of Guernsey. Again another sign – things appear and reappear in our life at just the right time.
We have a couple of fairies (statues) in our garden, and I have actively tried to create an environment where they will feel safe, especially with my moon garden and healing herbs growing strong. Guernsey was awash with them one time, you only have to read the Guernsey folklore books of Edgar Mac Culloch and Marie de Garis to realise that fairies played a prominent role in our local folklore, together with witches, let’s not forget them!
We have the fairy cave at Albecq where I spent a lot of time in my teenage years, albeit we called it Barnacle Point and went swimming off the rocks there. Then there’s the fairy cave up at L’Eree, where I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 15 years, and only now does it reveal more of itself to me, these places have to trust us first, and the fairy ring out at Pleinmont, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to wish my dreams true out there, and they do come true in the end, it really is a magical place if we can tap into the energy of it. There’s ancient pathways throughout the island too that you just know are home to the fairies, my boys have grown up appreciating the reality of this.
My cousin Yo is another fairy fan and has pointed out places where we might see them, but always reminds me that I need to quieten things down a little, be a little stiller on the land, if they are to reveal themselves to me. I have been quieter recently, many late night wanderings and sitting out in nature, at places where fairies traditionally were said to live. They have revealed more of themselves to me, there’s a certainty that wasn’t there previously but as always they need to trust in us and their trust in humanity is continuously challenged with all the roads and buildings destroying their homes.
Many of you will think me mad of course, our mind can only sometimes accept what it sees, and doubts the existence of other realms. But we live in a world of realms, our perception of reality is always different, one sees life one way, one another, there is an illusionary quality to it, nothing is really black and white, because our perception is always tainted by our conditioning, and this is different for each of us too. We can never truly know how another sees life, even those who have grown up together will see life and experience reality very differently – there’s the well-known notion that every child will have a different experience of family life.
Perhaps some of you have also seen fairies locally, and I don’t mean just when you’ve had too much alcohol to drink! Guernsey is rich in ethereal energy, it’s rich in ancient sacred sites, we have two Goddess statues on this tiny island, there’s something incredibly special about that, and dolmens aligned to sunrise, and menhirs that stand tall over the land. Guernsey is a special place energetically, we had a concentration of witches too, and even now many healers on the island, and this quartz which just amplifies everything – positive and negative!
It’s a potentially powerful healing place if you can find the power spots and lay or sit upon them. These power spots are spread all around the world, and the ancients knew how to access them and created sacred sites to tap into them, honour them and connect all the elements – and create a grid of energy, like a matrix, that links us all together. It goes without saying that elemental beings will collect at these spots too and if you are a sincere practitioner and do no harm, then they may well reveal themselves to you too. It’s an invitation to be still and to connect with the land and ‘see’ what it might offer you.
Love Emma x
Happy Beltane
Happy Beltane!
I celebrated by jumping the fire on Beltane eve, with a Pagan friend, watching shooting stars and the orange moon rising as I cycled home. I managed to get up for sunrise too, wetting my face with the first dew of the morning, before heading out to a dolmen to meditate. It was cloudy so no sun alignment, but I had headed out for sunrise on 30 April so had found alignments then instead, but more of the mystery shall remain for another year as there are only so many sites one can access in any given sunrise period of time!
I honour the Goddess, and clearly others do too, as someone had already made it to Her before me this morning; she is now suitably adorned and I walked the path to the well, for more sprinkling of water and cleansing, and then back home to the family who weren’t at all interested in joining me this morning for sunrise!
”Beltane honours Life. It represents the peak of Spring and the beginning of Summer. Earth energies are at their strongest and most active. All of life is bursting with potent fertility and at this point in the Wheel of the Year, the potential becomes conception. On May Eve the sexuality of life and the earth is at its peak. Abundant fertility, on all levels, is the central theme. The Maiden goddess has reached her fullness. She is the manifestation of growth and renewal, Flora, the Goddess of Spring, the May Queen, the May Bride. The Young Oak King, as Jack-In-The-Green, as the Green Man, falls in love with her and wins her hand. The union is consummated and the May Queen becomes pregnant. Together the May Queen and the May King are symbols of the Sacred Marriage (or Heiros Gamos), the union of Earth and Sky, and this union has merrily been re-enacted by humans throughout the centuries. For this is the night of the Greenwood Marriage. It is about sexuality and sensuality, passion, vitality and joy. And about conception. A brilliant moment in the Wheel of the Year to bring ideas, hopes and dreams into action. And have some fun…”
We’ll be making a wish box charm today, we did it a few years ago, it’s lovely to engage the children.
You will need:
A small shallow cardboard box. Shoe boxes are good.
Rose petals
Sunflower seeds and/or poppy seeds
Paper
A piece of willow bark or piece of willow, an acorn or oak leaf
Something that represents your wish (see below)
Take a piece of paper and write your wish on it while visualizing your wish coming to life and growing. You can do this alone, with friends, or as a family. If you want to, decorate the lid of the box, with a triple moon, pentacle, heart, or any symbol of your choice. Poke a few holes in the lid - this will help your wish/plants, to grow. Take your box and sprinkle some earth into it. Put in your paper wishes, wish symbol (see below), and seeds/bark/acorn. Cover with another layer of earth. Mix the rose petals with the seeds and scatter them on top. Cover with a final layer of earth and place the lid on top, leaving enough of the rose petal/seed mixture to scatter on top of the box when you are planting it.
The best time for planting your Wish Box is just after a fresh cleansing rainfall as this gives you a bright new start, but if the season is dry just give the earth a good watering the night before. Dig a hole two inches deeper than your wish box and lower it into the earth carefully while concentrating on your chosen wish, visualizing it coming to fruition. Imagine your wish growing with the flowers reaching skyward. As you cover the box with earth say:
"Dream that lies within the earth awaken now. Hope that sleeps awaken now. The stars await as so do I. Grow true, grow strong, toward the sky."
If you don't have a garden you can make a mini wish pot that can live on a window ledge and it works just as well. Just replace the box with a terracotta pot - one wish and one symbol per pot following exactly the same instructions as above. Remember that wishes are only to be used for positive motives.
I’ve extracted this from The Goddess and the Greenman, who have a lovely shop in Glastonbury, where I bought one of my favourite Goddess statues. You can read more here https://www.goddessandgreenman.co.uk/beltane
Happy Beltane, may you opportune the potent energy today and enjoy all that life and the Goddess offers you.
Love Emma x