Alderney and chamomile
We just enjoyed a wonderful few days in Alderney courtesy of my parents, being treated to the Blonde Hedgehog cottage and numerous wonderful meals. The island is amazing! I can’t believe it has taken me 16 years to get back there again, but I know I’m not alone and others are saying the same.
There’s a real sense of community and those people we met were really friendly and welcoming. The food was amazing too, I love the emphasis on fresh, seasonal and local and only wish we had more of the same approach here.
We explored on bikes, my legs might take a while to recover, missing the electric cargo bike and pulling 3.5 stone of Eben behind me in a trailer! We explored at length too, managing to find a number of neolithic stones as well as some beautiful spots, especially Saye Bay!
The boys enjoyed the many forts and bunkers, not really my thing, but I was rather struck with the roman walls and it did cross my mind that the land must be truly sacred to have been protected by so many different men over the ages.
We even managed a boat trip out to Burhou and Gannet’s rock, to see puffins and gannets, which was a real treat and quite unexpected - it was really amazing to see the land from this angle too and all the shapes in the rocks.
Back home in Guernsey the chamomile has flowered and my nature friend, Fi, was right in that it is a labour of love harvesting the flowers for tea. The evening primrose’s have started flowering too, the garden is alive even if the hedgerows have been sacrificed for the car, always such a shame but there we go.
I’ve been practising some Qi gong recently, having been inspired by my friend Caragh. Loving weaving this into my daily practice and finding more of then earth in the process. It feels necessary with the solstice approaching and another full moon next week - sadly it looks like a wet solstice sun rise but at least this makes me feel less sad about not being at Stonehenge for another year.
I’m curious to see what the next week brings, I was too busy with the family in Alderney to feel into it but hopeful the insight comes soon…change is afoot I can tell you that, this is the year of stepping up and I am finding that manifesting in ways I hadn't appreciated. Let’s see…
Sing's Vegan Chocolate Recipe
INGREDIENTS:
60g Raw cacao butter
50g Raw cacao powder / cocoa powder
2-3 tbsp Sweet freedom / agave nectar
METHOD:
Place a clean bowl over a saucepan of hot water. Ensure the bottom of the bowl does not touch the water & no water goes inside the bowl
Grate the cacao butter, add to the bowl & allow to melt slowly. Don’t keep the water boiling, turn the heat off and just give it a quick blast every so often if necessary
Once melted, add the cacao powder & stir in thoroughly with a balloon whisk or fork, until it starts to slightly thicken
The chocolate should be runny & easy to pour
Add 1 tbsp of Sweet Freedom & stir in very thoroughly. It will thicken as you add the Sweet Freedom
Taste it and if you prefer it sweeter, add more 1/2 tbsp at a time, mixing thoroughly and tasting after each
When the mixture suits your taste, pour gently into the mould using a jug or spoon
Place it in the fridge to set for an hour or more (or in the freezer if you can’t wait that long)
Any remaining chocolate is the chocolatier’s treat!
STORAGE:
Keep in an airtight container in the fridge for up to 4 weeks (even longer in the freezer)
The Eclipse Message - In Our Own Nature
Well that was a potent shifting eclipse, helping to release a deeply held core belief that was no longer serving, bringing with it a surge of energy and clarity.
For many there has been a deep holding in the solar plexus, asking us to literally dig deeper into the wounding around loss of love for self, while paying attention to the many ways we harm the self, the words we use to talk to ourselves and the way we live our lives in relation to self - are we kind and loving to self or do we give ourselves a hard time.
It is often so deeply ingrained that we can’t see or hear it. We may have an idea that we have work to do around self-love but it seems so vast and vague a concept that we have no idea where to begin, other than repeating positive affirmations and going for some healing sessions. Little do we realise the extent to which our inner voice is tainted by criticism, because we are so used to hearing it that we cannot separate it from ourselves - we confuse it with our true selves, believing that we have no choice but to think the self depreciating thoughts, and give ourselves a hard time in the process.
We might try to give ourselves a break, do something loving for the self, but we’ll likely take away from it at the same time, feeling guilty, or stressing about finances or whether we’re worthy enough to receive. We frequently self-sabotage, limiting ourselves by the stories we tell ourself, focussing on our perceived failures and uselessness, rather than celebrating the many amazing things we do on a daily basis, making sure our family and friends are cared for, let alone trying to be a kind and respectful member of the human race, for example.
It’s difficult to shift perspective and let go of the mind-set that sees us as flawed and always in need of fixing. New-age spiritualism and healing has done nothing to alleviate this, and in many instances merely feeds the illusion established by orthodox medicine, so deeply ingrained in our psyche that even those of us who live in the holistic healing world don’t realise that we’re still buying into elements of the old paradigm, believing that there’s aways something we should be doing to fix and heal ourselves, improve our imperfections, signing up to yet another course that promises to take us on an inner journey to clear our stuff and help us to love and accept more of ourselves in the process, give us back that which we (mistakenly) believe is missing.
Inevitably we come away feeling better for taking the time to be with ourselves, even transformed and changed, and we’ll talk about ‘clearing some stuff’, of ‘feeling lighter’, of finding more of ourselves. It’s all wonderful and valid and we feel great, until the buzz drops and we find ourselves back in a similar old place of feeling uncomfortable in our own skin and we start looking outside ourselves again for another book, another course, another crystal, another full moon ceremony, another nutritional approach, more supplements, another potion, another latest trend in new age healing, and off we go again, forgetting that we need to go within.
In Sri Swami Satchidananda’s translation of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali he writes: “Many saints were illiterate. They never knew what a school was. But we read their ideas even now. None of the Upanishadic seers went to colleges or universities. They merely sat under trees and watched nature. But their words are crest jewels now. What did their learning come from? It came from within. There is a wealth of knowledge on the inside. The scriptures say, “Know the One by knowing which you will know everything”…
Saint Thirumoolar said “a person was running and running in search of the Light. He spent his whole life doing that. Ultimately he collapsed and died because he couldn’t reach it.” Millions and millions of people collapse this way because they don’t know that the Light is within.”
It’s absolutely true. It’s often the hardest thing, not least loving and accepting the self but taking back our power to the extent that we come to know our own truth by going within. It takes time though, to sift through the many layers of conditioning that prevents us from accessing our true voice, the one that knows no harm, that is aligned to the greater plan, that understands nature and its working, that knows that there is nothing to be done, there is no personal action, just a sense of our place in the grand scheme of it all for the greater good of the cosmic plan.
This can bring a huge letting go of all we once thought was the way, was our nature, the one of achieving for the sake of achieving as if to prove our worth in the world. Even in the spiritual world we see this played out, always this need to be someone, feeding the need for validation and acceptance, because we struggle to find that within ourselves and therefore externalise it instead. There is a risk of judgment too, judging those who don’t feel the same way, but even this just boils down to the same thing, judgment of self ultimately. Self-love is key in setting us free. Self love is also key in helping to free us from polarity.
I’ve certainly noticed a positive shift since spending more time being still and quiet in nature, as if nature comes to greet us and we become less separated from it. It helps us to recognise and accept more of our own true nature, that we are the way we are, and even thought that’s different to others and doesn’t necessarily tick a box, whether that’s in the spiritual world or not, doesn’t matter because ultimately there’s nothing wrong with us - we’re all inherently perfect, we just need to recognise it.
In this way we start to hear more of our own wisdom and that which comes to us from nature, that connects us in to deeper levels of consciousness. We are more likely to do what we can to lessen the external noise, to switch off and switch in, to draw a line in the sand, know when its time to put down the self-help books and take a break from the ceremonies and courses and go it alone, into the depths of our own soul that is connected to all of the wisdom, if only we could quieten our minds to the extent that we could hear it, if only we love ourselves to the extent that we believed in our ability to receive it.
We have to be so careful about putting people on pedestals. Some will want us to place them there and others we will put there. People tend to fall from pedestals and we run the risk of feeling betrayed and disappointed if they do not live up to our ideals. Furthermore this merely fuels our disempowerment as we give our power away to those we have placed on pedestals believing them more enlightened or sorted than we are, forgetting that we are all mirrors and each one of us has something to learn from another - we will always see our stuff in others if we can remove the rose tinted glasses that encourages us to see the world in a rose tinted way - if we do not know ourselves we will make mistakes in knowing other things and other people too.
The message was clear on the equinox - go within and love and accept the self -be in our own nature. It’s no easy feat, a lifetimes work for many and others fall at the first hurdle and turn back to their usual numbing techniques as a way to avoid having to be with the self and love ourselves for who we are, for our true nature. We all have a choice and equinoxes have a habit of highlighting where we need to chose differently, where we need to re-align and do the work in letting go rather than fixing.
Love Emma
A new perspective - new moon solar eclipse
It’s intense! There’s no other way to describe the energy as we sit here sandwiched between two eclipses, the moon waning towards the new moon solar eclipse on Thursday, this two weeks after the super full moon lunar eclipse. Phew.
For me it’s all about perspective and I am absolutely finding myself in the thick of it as I evaluate the way I perceive things and question this. There are always two sides to every story and always another way to look at things.
This was brought home to me when I was reading a book about paradox and healing, and the fact orthodox medicine view healing in a totally different way to those of us who work holistically:
“Our present assumptions about scientific thinking date back to the time of Rene Descartes (1596-1650). At the age of 23, he had an intuition which led to the publication of his famous essay, “Discourses on Method”.
The essay contains three tenets which have over time become the fundamental building blocks of our modern scientific culture. They are: the certainty of scientific knowledge; the separation of mind and matter; and the universe as a machine”. Dr Michael Greenwood & Dr Peter Nunn
Of course this is in such contrast to how I perceive the world within which I live. As far as I can tell reality is observer-dependent, what is seen depends on who is seeing it, so there is no such thing as objectivity. And the strange thing is, while this has now been accepted by physicists, modern scientific medicine has not yet been impacted.
Furthermore, modern medicine still consider the mind and body separate, to the extent that physical illnesses are for the body and mental illnesses are for the mind and there is no connection between the two. This has led to physical medicine and psychiatry being geographically separated, as we have here on Guernsey, two separate units, one for the body and one for the mind.
This approach to medicine also encourages the reductionism – the idea that the body is better understood if broken down into separate parts. This leads to specialists, specialising on one part of the body as if that part functions solely alone (and without any impact from mind or soul). GPs are seen as a lesser breed because of their generalised knowledge, no specialism.
Often people come to me for Reiki with a specific issue, maybe a sore shoulder, and they are surprised when we find a mental and emotional element to it, and that the source of the pain and discomfort has originated from somewhere else in their body. To me the separation of mind and body is bonkers, so too medical reductionism. But to most of the world, conditioned as people are to this medical model, it is accepted as gospel truth, irrelevant that Chinese medicine and Ayurveda are both 5,000 years old and view the body and health from a totally different perspective.
This is the thing about perspective. There’s always a different way to look at things, but this is dependent on how our minds have been conditioned and trained, our bodies too. My yoga teacher was talking about this recently, how a tiger can be trained in a circus to perform tricks, but in the process the tiger-ness of the tiger is removed from it. So it is too with our minds and with our bodies as well, in yoga we can run the risk of removing our ‘ness’ if we just copy what everyone else does and try to train our body someway as if we too were training to perform tricks in a circus.
The sacred sites that I visit have been teaching me about perspective, my dowsing rods too. I can be at the same site with my stone friend and yet both of us can have a totally different take and perspective on things, even our dowsing tools will tell us different things, because our perspective is different, which will inevitably affect our intention.
Perspective has shown up as well with the vaccine and the division this has created. I did write to HSC and CCA this week to voice my concerns about discrimination and separation, but of course absolutely everyone has a different perspective and the last thing I want to do is feed a war, and us against them thing. As I’ve said before, I couldn’t care less what anyone else does, I just feel it is important that everyone is safe to make their own choice without fear of vindication.
It’s not going to help the world if we all start judging each other, because we can only see one side of the same coin. At the end of the day we are all doing our best, and we would do well to remind oursleves of that age old saying about not judging a person unless you have walked a day in their shoes. We will always have a different perspective on things.
This is absolutely showing up this new moon and I am very aware that my mind is being asked to let go on this eclipse, of the way it seems the world and holds on tightly to false and limiting beliefs and in the process, change the perspective. It’s not an easy process, it never is, but sometimes we have to break down to break through and it’s not the first time and won’t be the last time to have to let go of the way I see the world so I can see it from a different perspective.
Eclipses are renowned for bringing change - a new perspective for the collective as well as each of us individually. We might think this means outer change, a new job, a new partner, more money. And it might mean all this, but really, it’s inner change that they bring, which will ultimately change our outer world too, but sometimes in subtle ways, so that perhaps we don’t feel the need for the new job or partner or greater abundance, because we start to see things from a different perspective and realise we had it all anyway, if only we could get out of our way to see it and just get on with living it, rather than flip flopping from the past to the future and back again.
This is a time to open your hands and let go – this is a Gemini new moon, everything is up in the air, so let it all go, everything you have been holding onto and trying to intellectualise and figure out. Whatever lands back in your path again will reveal itself in time and you’ll know then the direction to take, the eclipse will align you to it, trust in that, there’s nothing to do but just open to it and seeing things differently in the months ahead.
In the interim, keep getting on your mat, keep breathing, and keep doing what you can to nourish yourself spiritually. Which is what I am off to do now, it’s almost sunset…
Love Emma x
Nature's abundance
This wasn’t the jasmine I had imagined when I ordered the seeds, but alas, I am now the lucky owner of numerous jasmine plants, which I’ve managed to plant in the ground having cleared a space. Those of you who come for Reiki treatments will see them lining part of our parking area - I have literally had to use whatever space I can this year, digging up bits of lawn to allow more space to grow!
This is the first flower blossoming yesterday, delighted with the earlier rain showers.
As part of an online Reiki course I worked with crystal grids during lockdown, and I charged a crystal with, amongst other things, abundance. I do feel as if my life is infinitely abundant in many ways, but especially with plants this year.
The medicinal plants I grew last year during our first lockdown are in their element this year, truly vibrant in their moon garden. This year I have sown more seeds and am lucky that a couple of batches of lavender have grown, as it’s not always easy to grow this from seed. I also have an abundance of evening primrose oil, chamomile, thyme, mint, oregano and basil. Unfortunately the sage and rosemary were not as abundant, but this is often the way - these were the ones I really wanted, and so I tend with great care those few plants that have grown.
I didn’t realise when I took possession of the medicinal plant seeds from Earth angel, Fi, last year, quite how much the seeds would change my life. All I really want to do now, aside from exploring stones with the boys, getting in the sea and writing, is being with the plants. They have a consciousness and they communicate. I find being in nature extremely calming and nourishing for the soul. A true tonic.
I really long for us to come back to nature, it’s all we need. There’s a wonderful video that highlights this, you can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvzZ56ZbWy8
Life is infinitely enriched by being in nature, communing with plants and stones, even if people think that makes me very weird! There’s a whole heap of other realms than the mundane 3D we live in most of the time. We just need to get outside and be quiet and let nature reveal more of itself to us, and reveal more of our own nature in the process.
Happy Thursday!
Love Emma x