Sark and yoga
We were thoroughly spoilt on Sark for our second autumnal retreat last weekend. The weather was amazing! I felt blessed, as if we might have done something right in a previous life, until my dad reminded me that we’ve had some dodgy weather ones over the years and last year the October retreat was even postponed due to strong winds, so you can never be quite sure.
However, the weather was very well received, life has been a touch on the challenging side these last few months with curved balls coming in. I’m very aware that every curse brings a blessing, and that sometimes we have to go through the mill to come out stronger the other side, seeing more of our unhelpful patterns in the process, but a break, quite literally, with sunshine and yoga was perfectly timed.
Adam and Katie even made it out to the dolmen with me one of the nights and we were treated to a wonderful dark night sky with the milky way overhead and fairy glimpses. I went one night on my own too. It is one of my favourite places, you feel like you’re getting away from it all, even on Little Sark. There is something very special about this place, untouched as it is in many parts by civilisation. I accidentally left my rods there that second night so had to hot foot it back there the next day before our boat and felt as if the dolmen was drawing me back there for a reason, and it was, but it won’t mean anything to anyone who’s not already a fan of dolmens!
As for the yoga, well I LOVED it. The students were all amazing, Jan was on super form over the weekend, and I felt as if there really was a deeper enquiry going on. I know I keep going on about it, but I suppose it was reinforced earlier by stumbling across an interview with Angela Farmer on YouTube. She is an inspiring teacher and what she said totally resonated when she explained that all of a sudden she woke up one day to realise that while she was passionate about yoga and it had undoubtably changed her physical form, it was merely feeding her motivation towards achievement to the extent that she was stuck on the inside. She realised, really, that she was practising from a masculine perspective, single focused, goal orientated and linear.
This awareness changed her, as it did me too when i had a similar realisation before that first lockdown when I visited a Scaravelli teacher in Littlehampton, who had been recommended to me by a local yoga teacher in a village in the Outer Hebrides on our trip to see the Callanish stones. It was one of those synchronistic moments that you know as meant to be, because it totally changed my life simply because it changed my approach to yoga in a very big way. This is exactly what happened to Angela too and I take great comfort from that, because it can get lonely on the classical yoga path of raising consciousness (opposed to refining physical form).
Like my yoga teacher, and me in turn, Angela was drawn to focus on releasing the belly so that there could be much greater femininity and inner transformation in her practice. My regular students will have noticed this themselves, as we keep coming back to the belly and sorting from there too. It’s a very powerful place of transformation - you only have to think of what happens in the digestive system to know it is a place of inner transformation!
Like Angela, I had gotten to a point where I was stuck with the same mental and emotional patterning, albeit that my physical body had grown in strength and flexibility over the years. It has been truly life changing to go deeper and transform from the inside out - becoming downward facing dog, inhabiting the body rather than just doing a posture for the sake of it, to tick a box, in my mind as much as in any sequence structure.
Angela was explaining that after this revelation she wondered how she might teach. That first class she saw a lady in a forward fold. Normally she would have helped her go further by applying pressure to her back to push her deeper into the posture, something I too might have done in the past. Instead though, she could see that her back looked very tight and rigid both under and inside and that she was carrying tremendous emotional pain or something similar. So instead she put her hand softly on the student’s back and it started to melt, the student started to cry a lot and the back completely softened down.
That was a turning point for Angela, and she comments that you can push and pull yourself and other people and the body will respond like a tired horse but eventually it breaks down (many of you know this with your shoulder, knee and back issues). Eventually we might then realise that everything we feel and everything that happens to us is experienced and lived in the body. If there is some great pain from the past in the body then it won’t go away until we go into it and let it unravel itself. Pushing, pulling, repressing and denying it won’t let that happen. I couldn’t agree more. This is exactly where yoga has taken me too, and while it goes against the grain, I am so grateful for that.
The body is not designed to follow a straight line and why would we want it to do that anyway. It is a body of curves and round spaces. Thus the body might find a straight line but from a curved path. Sadly these days yoga often overlooks the energy of the body, and it has instead become a form of physical training, contracting the muscles and pushing and pulling to change external form. This approach might be helpful for athletes, or those who need to strengthen themselves physically, but it doesn’t help us to get in touch with energy and emotions so that we may notice the energy blocks within us.
For me, it’s about understanding more of our body, and being kind and compassionate to it. Does the inner being get the nurturing and enlivenment it requires, does it feel empowered, do we feel more comfortable in ourself and in our surroundings, so that we need the outer form less and less? These are really valid questions to ask ourselves. If yoga is merely fuelling our neuroses and focus on external form, keeping us stuck in unhelpful inner patterns (of lack of self worth and self belief and not being comfortable in our own skin, for example, of needing to dramatise our life and blame others and negate responsibility for ourselves and our decisions made) and feeding our need to achieve for the sake of achievement alone, then maybe we should take a moment to check in with it and ask ourselves if it’s truly helpful.
It takes courage to recognise that we are no longer practising in a way that is feeding and sustaining us, enlivening us then. It takes even more courage to do something about it and find another way. More often than not, we are led that way. Maybe our teacher makes changes and we go with the flow of it, or maybe another teacher enters our life, perhaps we have some coincidental or synchronistic moment, maybe you are reading this now and questioning things a bit. It’s never easy taking a new path, and yet really it’s all part of THE path, it just feels a little different and it takes time to settle into that.
I’ve said it before, but when my teacher entered my life in that synchronistic way, it took me a good six months or so to let go of my old vinyasa and relatively unconscious push and pull way of practising. Because at that point, I still associated yoga with exercise and felt that I had to exercise in my practice to feel as if I’d practised properly on any given day. Thus I’d take an hour session with my teacher where we might explore just one or two postures, and then I’d do another 45 minutes or so, to do the ‘proper’ exercise practice.
At some point I came to the realisation, like Angela, that what I was practising was keeping me stuck in the past and that I was now ready to move beyond the notion of yoga being about exercise. It was a huge shift for me mentally. But my body absolutely relished it. It was so weary (as was my soul) of all the pushing and pulling and the mental patterning that followed all this, all the hardening and masculine energy challenging my inner feminine. I haven’t looked back since.
Plus it keeps changing. Yoga is organic and when I don’t see my teacher for a while then it starts to move into something that comes from the inner teacher instead. Initially I had to be mindful not to let old habits come back again, but with time they’ve just dropped away. I did try an online vinyasa class a few months ago and I had to turn it off, it lacked depth and vitality, I was simply moving for the sake of moving, in and out of postures without actually inhabiting my body, or the postures themselves. They were not alive and the practice did not make me feel alive either.
I love yoga and I love how it takes us on these journeys, to the softer and more vulnerable places on the inside. It’s funny too as one of my retreat students was saying how she struggles with some of the visualisations, the ducks in the sacred lake for example, given to explain the fullness and sacredness of the pelvis and the direction of its flow (ducks was the first bird to come to mind!) was a step too far for her. Yet the body loves visualisation, it loves imagery, but the rational mind does not. In yoga we are trying to get beyond the rational mind, as this has a tendency to limit us in some way. We are trying to get to the belly really, of releasing the need to control and to let go into each moment as it unfolds. Tricky I know.
Anyway I could go on for hours, but it was really just to say how deeply inspired I was by watching Angela and all the students on Sark because she was and they were validating all I feel about what yoga really is. If we refer to the classical yoga texts, the Yoga Sutras for example then, yoga is about the containment of the mind so that one can realise purusha, the eternal self. So we have to go deep to remove all the crap that causes us to misidentify with this. We have to let go of even believing that we know the self. It’s deeper still.
So we keep going deeper. And with luck we’ll be able to enjoy many more Sark retreats so that we can be so beautifully held by the vibration of this sacred land. When you look at the geology of the place then it really is mind blowing. There was a large boulder of rose quartz found in the north of the island from the neolithic age. There’s also serpentine balls to be found and all sorts of quartz, red jasper, yellow jasper, pyrite copper, the list goes on…and even a Goddess. The island is blessed. And we are so very lucky to have it on our doorstep here on Guernsey.
Love Emma x
New moon ramblings
When I look back over these blogs, I see a very clear theme - one of Goddess and moon weaves itself into so many of them! My life has increasingly become orientated by both and over time my connection to nature has deepened and expanded into something I never truly new was possible. I have always loved this planet that we live on, I have always had an affinity to the sea especially, and I have always been drawn to trees. I have always been curious about faeries and ethereal beings too, but with no way of knowing how I might access these other realms.
Life has a tendency to give us what we need when the timing is right. It blows my mind at times, the way that this works. When my stone friend entered my life last spring equinox, I had no idea how much my life would be changed by this and there isn’t a day that passes when I don’t give thanks for this. Sometimes we just don’t know what might happen next, such is the nature of life and its uncertainty. I am continuously reminded too, how abundance takes so many forms, if only we can see beyond the material.
Marie’s passing has changed things for me, I don’t have so much patience for the nonsense in this world, for all the polarity and judgements and division. Life is just too short. We forget that. We can be ever so arrogant in assuming we’ll live forever. Our choices are often made for our own gain, without a thought for future generations. That’s the reason i so love the ethos of The Children’s Forest Project and of Embercombe, where there is an underlying awareness, a Native American Indian thing, of making decisions based on the next seven generations.
I have to dig hard not to drop into judgment myself, when I get pushed on my bike to the sides of the lanes by huge cars driven by one person. So many decisions made to feed the ego, to give us a sense of self worth and allow us to feel like we have somehow ‘made it’. A friend of a friend was honest about this in her choice of luxury vehicle admitting that it is far too big and she has trouble driving it but it shows she’s made it in the world. ‘Made it where?’, i might ask, before realising that i’m about to enter polarity, judging, making her wrong and me right.
I suppose it doesn’t help that I am continuously reminded of our impermanence. We are impermanent and we cannot take it all with us. Watching a friend clear our his family home since the death of his parents, I am also aware that our ‘stuff’ simply becomes an annoyance to future generations, something that has to be cleared out, to sit in landfill or clutter charity shops in the vague hope that it might be loved again by someone one day.
It could all get very depressing. Life continues to throw curved balls. But the funny thing is, the more I see the chaos, the ways in which we play out our stuff, the more amused I am by it. I can laugh at myself a little more easily these days. Not take myself and my stuff quite so seriously, I see how much of our lives can so easily be lived by someone else’s narration if we are not careful, with conditioned responses and expectations - the norm. With discernment we can choose another way. It’s not always an easy way. Its often a very uncomfortable way. But it can be extremely fulfilling if we choose it.
The new moon is upon us Wednesday lunchtime. It’s a Libra full moon, air. This is an airy time of the year, not least the autumnal dryness, which sadly seems to have passed, but the winds. It can throw our vata off balance if we are not careful, make us feel ungrounded, out of body, blown about a bit. Libra also brings up balance and this is really where my thought process has been taking me. Balance. Not balance in so much as whether we are living a more balanced life, but where we sit within the balance of life on this planet.
We might ask ourselves how we feed polarity and division, and the ways that this takes us further away from unity consciousness. The vaccine rumbles on, highlighting our division and the extent of our suffering and opposing viewpoints. I got bored of this a good while ago as you know, could feel the harm being done by holding on to one narrative or the other. I also started to see the many ways people were allowing themselves to become victims, on both sides of the coin - feeding our victimhood never serves us either.
So where does this leave us?
I suppose it leaves us where it always does. Learning to know more of ourselves and live in greater inner harmony. We always have a choice about that, depending on the thoughts we think and buy into, and the choices we make. We can be ever so judgemental and close minded at times, if we are presented with something or someone out of our comfort zone. I find it helpful to observe this and have had ample opportunity these last six months as my stone friend has opened my eyes to my many self-imposed limitations and ways of seeing this world (and others).
We have to be careful when we begin judging. Because usually it’s an indication that we are judging ourselves, that our vulnerability has been triggered in some way. There’s nothing more confronting than realising that there is more to us than we could have ever imagined, that there is another way, if only we can get out of our narrow mind and allow it, if only we can open to greater possibility. It’s worth exploring. Notice how much you judge others just in one day and ask yourself why that is.
I have been judged over and over again by people who are confronted by what i have to say, of the way I teach yoga, that takes us deeper into ourselves. It breaks the mould of the norm, of the external and superficial, of feeding existing patterns and habits of movement, that keeps the mind stuck. People struggle to let go into new ways of being. It’s huge! To change perspective means that we have to let go of how we once saw life and that rocks our very foundations. Like finding out the tooth fairy isn’t real (or is she?!). It feels like betrayal and no one wants to be betrayed.
It has hurt at times, triggered feelings of rejection and vulnerability, but I can’t betray my soul and the practice and lineage. I can’t give up on the hopes and dreams, of the drive towards greater consciousness and freedom from suffering for all beings. For me, it has to be about more than just myself and how I’m viewed by the world. It doesn’t interest me whether I’m seen as having ‘made it’ or not, I’ve had to do a lot of letting go of caring about such things, about titles and other people’s perceptions, of people pleasing and insincerity, saying one thing but meaning another. This serves no one.
It has to be about integrity. There is no one way to live our lives, really there isn’t. Integrity comes from knowing more of our true self and living increasingly from this place, trusting in it. Sure there will be tests along the way. I’m being tested now. We have themes that come into play, to allow us to literally play out our stuff. Mine is around safety and security. I have to be very gentle with myself as I am triggered, feeling in my body the discomfort and sitting into it. I notice the way my mind seeks to resolve it, as quickly as possible. I have to stay with this too, dig deeper, let it come and let it go.
At the end of the day, there is a reason we are here, have incarnated right now at this interesting time in humanity’s time line. We each have a gift and a purpose and the moment you find it, life changes beyond recognition. We don’t care so much about all the other stuff, about materiality and outward expression of who we believe ourselves to be - when we know who we are, we don’t need to prove it, we start to live it instead. Its like Reiki. By Master level you’re not ‘doing’ it, you’re being it, it’s your life and you have embraced it.
This is what the new moon is currently bringing up for me. This year has been about stepping up and stepping in, of taking responsibility, of making changes - or having them made for us, the eclipses back in early summer certainly helped with this. We have to wake up, really we do. get beyond our own limited narrative, try to see a wider perspective, put ourselves in someone else’s shoes before we judge, and consider the underlying nature of our judgements. I’m trying to be aware of this too, of not allowing myself to become disappointed by other’s choices and to reflect that back at myself - cultivate greater compassion.
The new moon reflects back the sun’s solar energy, this changes things for us, can take us to dark places. The dark places are often where the magic can be found, I am increasingly aware of this out on the land. Maybe we ask ourselves what scares us the most, and we watch and see how that awareness changes things for us. It’s also a really good time to see the blessings in the curse, to appreciate that ever polarity has a different side to it and to embrace it all - is it really bad, or can it be good? What’s one person’s treasure is another one’s junk. I suppose really, it’s about cultivating the other perspective, this shows up in the Yoga Sutras, and is definitely worth further exploration another time.
For now, enjoy the new moon!
x
The moon and menstrual cycle awareness
I love the moon and working with it, so too working with my menstrual cycle. I know that idea freaks some people out, I could see the eyebrows raised when I announced the release of our online moon and menstrual cycle awareness course, as it is out of the comfort zone for many. So too, some just don’t get it. Why would anyone want to connect with the moon, to help them connect with their own cycle, and why would they want to connect more deeply with their own cycle anyway?
I see it with yoni yoga from time to time too. Yoni means amongst other things vulva, cunt, womb and place to call home. Yoni yoga is all about coming home to yourself, but when I mention womb wisdom for the first time, I can sense some women having a hard time accepting that. If I mention bleeding then this totally freaks some out. Yet they have experience of it, monthly on the whole. But sadly the shame runs too deep, so too, the effect of patriarchy on women’s own perception of their bodies, wisdom and power.
But the course is now available for those who want to explore further. My life has been infinitely enriched by inviting the moon into it, and as for getting intimate with my menstrual cycle, well that has been deeply empowering and helpful too. I bleed on the earth each full moon and I make no apology if that freaks you out. We are all nature. My second cousin bleeds on her plants, to give them greater vitality. I like to swim naked in the sea too if I can and especially when menstruating, it just feels right.
E’s more than used to it all now, doesn’t phase him. The boys too, know no different. We do laugh though, about how things change generation to generation. Fortunately my parents were always open with me, there was no shame around menstruation. It was never celebrated as I might do if I had a daughter of my own, but nor was it brushed aside. I’m grateful to my parents for that, amongst many other things I’m grateful to them about. It seems a pity to me that women can have such a hard time with it. But such is the depth of our societal, generational, cultural, educational and parental conditioning, to say nothing of our discomfort at truly knowing our own body and getting intimate with it.
So often I see people who are so out of touch with their body, it’s literally screaming at them for help, but they would rather give it a pill then try and listen. I see it all the time in yoga too, people who have injuries, say an issue with a shoulder for example, who are dead beat on pushing through with plank and chattaranga, even though their shoulder is screaming at them to stop. I’ve stopped teaching those postures regularly, simply to prevent people further damaging themselves. I did it for years myself, pushed through even though my body was saying rest, for example. Eventually the body finds a way to make us listen, albeit for many it can be too late and surgery is required, or another form of medical intervention, I’ve learned the hard way with this too.
I write a lot more about this in my book From Darkness Comes Light, which has finally been professionally edited, Now the hard work begins and this is where my energy will no doubt rest the next few months. That and with the family. And getting our Plant a Tree project off the ground this Saturday - do feel you can come and collect a tree to plant and do your bit (another bit, I know) for positive climate change and making this world a better place to live. We could do with something positive to watch grow and flourish in the years ahead. Let’s hope us humans grow and flourish too.
Trees help bring some continuity in an ever changing world. It’s been noticeable these last 18 months, how uncertain our lives can be and how easy it is to experience a change of heart and perspective depending on what happens to us and how we are affected by it. For many of us life will never be the same. There is greater depth somehow in living more presently and moment to moment, less able to plan ahead, at least with any certainty. This is one of the gifts I take from Covid, and there have been many.
Finally managing to get the moon and menstrual cycle awareness course off the ground has been another. I know it can help, that it works, that there is power in embracing the moon cycle and our menstrual cycle too and I really hope that some of you will take the plunge and immerse yourself in it. You can find out more about it here https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/courses/the-moon-and-menstrual-cycle-pack, but for now I am off to bed.
Love Emma x
Finding the goodness
I’m delighted that the States of Guernsey have decided to end the discrimination between vaccinated and non-vaccinated travellers to the Common Travel Area (why it makes any difference elsewhere I have no idea, Covid is Covid is Covid the world over). I’m sorry to all those people who took the vaccine simply to be able to travel.
It’s a weird state of affairs isn’t it, that these days we take vaccines for purposes other than health and wellbeing. Back in the day that WAS the reason we took vaccines, but with Covid, for many, it became about travel instead.
Mind you, I’m not sure why I’m surprised, we live in a topsy turvy world where we think that happiness is found in material possessions and self-worth is found in recognition on social media. As I mentioned in one of my recent blogs, my friend, Marie, who recently died from cancer, taught me a lot about this - that happiness is found mainly in love; everything else becomes quite irrelevant in the end, I mean you can’t take your possessions with you and social media, well, I won’t even go there.
I always remember a successful businessman friend saying to me that he’d rather be rich and unhappy than poor and unhappy, and I did think this made a lot of sense. But it seems that the more we ‘progress’ as a society, the unhappier we become and the more we feel less human.
I love Steve Biddulph’s new book, Fully Human, as he says it like it is:
“The hyper capitalist life - rushing, stressing, consuming - takes a terrible toll on families, which we just assume is normal. And if it’s normal, then there must be something wrong with us - and our family - that we can’t keep up. Just as women in the 1950s thought there must be something wrong with them when they weren’t fulfilled in aprons, cooking scones, contemporary men and women feel inadequate that they can’t sustain the lonely, competitiveness harshness of twenty-first-century life. Our children too are growing up in a world that’s increasingly nasty, aggressive and punishing of everyone who does not meet impossible standards in things that really don’t matter at all - such as fashion, body shape and possessions. So many really terrible problems that readers will recognise - divorce, anxiety and stress in children, rebellion and self-harm in teenagers - are the direct consequence of this”.
I do believe it is a significant time in history, threshold, and we really do need to be conscious of the decisions we make and the choices we take, not only for ourselves but for our children and their children too. I am involved in the Children’s Forest Project and this is based on a book called The Children’s Fire and the work of Mac Macartney. The Children’s Fire is basically a pledge to the welfare of unborn future children (human and non-human alike) but more profoundly it’s a pledge to life, a commitment to the responsibility carried by each successive generation to safeguard the vitality and regenerative capacity of the earth. It insists on a circular economy and it views any action that compromises the wellspring of creativity from which our species has emerged as sacrilege, an act of betrayal, evidence hinting at insanity.
Decisions we make individually and collectively are important. We do not need to follow the common narrative, especially if it doesn’t feel right for us. Covid has helped people to question things, but I don’t know that people are questioning things enough, or caring enough either. The rug was pulled and the opportunity was given, but whether it’s been taken, well let’s hope it has, for humanity needs to be careful what it does next.
I highly recommend Steve’s book, it’s about new ways of using your mind, and forms the basis for a talk I’m giving later on being fully human and checking in, not checking up. There’s a message for us all there somewhere, about what it means to be fully human and being in touch with that. He makes some really valid comments about our ways of defining a human being and how this impacts on our relationship to others and relationship to self - if we see human beings are crappy, what does that say about us?
I’m constantly reminded at the moment of the goodness inside all of us. There is goodness in this world and the more we can find it inside ourselves, perhaps the more we see it outside ourselves, and vice versa too! I’m pleased that the States of Guernsey has showed more of its humanness and goodness these last few days, thank you.
Love Emma x
Happy Equinox balancing!
What an incredible day for the equinox. I was lucky to watch the sunrise at a locally-aligned spiritual site and the moon set the other side. Rather sublime. The tide was super high too for a beautiful swim at Saints. Days like this I feel especially blessed.
I felt blessed too on Monday hours before the peak of the full moon (12.55am Tuesday morning) wandering around faerie paths lit by the brightness of the harvest moon. Nature really did help the farmers with their night time harvesting on this moon and goodness knows what they might have seen. There’s magic on this land, it comes alive at night. I even managed a naked moon dance, which I’ve been meaning to do all summer but it just never aligned.
Alignment is the word though for this time. Everything in and on it’s line. Equal duration of day and night. Like a seesaw held stable, before it tips one way more than the other. There’s fun in that though, I watched the boys on the seesaw at the park the other day, their jubilant faces said it all really! You’ve just got to let go into it.
it’s definitely a time of letting go. Look at nature. She lets go so beautifully. I love watching the leaves fall from the trees, they all do it so differently. We’ve got to wait for the wind, then we’ll be in for a treat, But meantime I’m enjoying this stillness and brightness, it’s a real vata time is the only thing, very ungrounding and drying for some.
Balance, balance, always a good reminder, not getting stuck into a mindset or perspective one way or the other. Being open minded, allowing for change. I was talking a lot about the nature of suffering at the weekend and how the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lists change as the main source of suffering…is not wanting to accept reality as it is. There’s a wonderful quote on that:
“Through practice, I’ve come to see that the deepest source of my misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. Not wanting myself to be the way I am. Not wanting the world to be the way it is. Not wanting others to be the way they are. Whenever I’m suffering, I find this war with reality to be at the heart of the problem.” – Stephen Cope
It’s an interesting quote, highlighting how we do create our own suffering. Covid has really highlighted this. People separating themselves into one camp or the other, and creating suffering in the process. Live and let live. That came through on the moon too. As well as noticing patterns that no longer serve. The manipulator came up for me, so interesting to see what we do to manipulate things and get attention. It’s often a pattern laid in childhood, so subtle that we don’t recognise it, until we do and then we have to be careful not to reject it or give ourselves a hard time for it.
This brings us back to balance again, in our relationship to ourself as much as anything else, embracing all aspects of self, even those that we don’t like. This of course the lesson in non dualistic thinking and constantly separating and fragmenting ourselves. There’s this whole ‘love and light’ bridge (of which I have played a role i the past) that focus only on the love and light and reject everything else. This means they are also constantly rejecting a part of themselves. We all have the capacity to rage and anger. We all have the capacity to kill too. We have to learn to love and embrace all aspects of self, even those darker bits! It’s all good.
Anyway, that’s enough for today, enjoy the wane and the shift down into the darkness again - who knows what we might find, and where we might be at the next equinox in spring time.
Love Emma x