Be careful what you think...

Recently, I have been noticing how many people create their own suffering through their tendency to catastrophise. This means that they imagine the worst possible outcome of an action or event, thinking about it as being a catastrophe or having a potentially catastrophic outcome, without having any concrete evidence to suggest that this is the reality of a situation.

This is often what feeds our anxiety - worrying about things that haven’t actually happened, but we imagine might happen, and we will seek evidence to suggest that these things will happen, whatever they are, in the future, that will somehow cause us pain and suffering. It’s kind of ironic because we create our pain and suffering simply by catastrophising and by thinking in a way that promotes anxiety and negativity (that is, believing our thoughts are real).

I’ve seen this in action, clients self-sabotaging new relationships because they catastrophise about what could happen, so stop themselves going there in the first place. I’ve also seen students completely ungrounded and destabilised because of reading too much material about ‘end of the world’ conspiracy stuff, without any actual evidence to suggest that what is being suggested is actually going to take place.

It doesn’t help that much of the spiritualism conspiracy movement is currently obsessed about the soul being taken away or controlled by the new world order, and yet the irony being that many of the people buying into this notion are creating their own soul separation and are caught in the mind and all its various imaginings.

In essence we are just soul. But we are mostly ignorant to it and mainly identify with the mind instead. The soul is eternal, it cannot be taken away from us or controlled. but as for the mind? Sure, we can be brainwashed, I mean look how brainwashed we are by media, let alone conventional thinking and societal, educational and cultural conditioning. We can easily lose our mind to all this.

We have to be careful how we create our anxiety. My yoga teacher always says, if something is agitating the mind, it is best to stay away from it. So it is with media or conspiracy theory or anyone’s opinions or notions or imaginings that somehow agitate us. We should know this from Covid, the panic and drama that accompanied this, always worst case scenario to the extent that some people stopped living as their fear was so great.

I don’t really look at the news, not because I don’t care, but because me reading it and getting upset about say the suffering in Ukraine is not going to positively change things, it’s just going to agitate me and put me into a more negative spin, which will have a negative effect on all those around me, and because I’ll be in a more negative spin, I’ll attract more of it into my life that day, by he very nature of the law of attraction.

And this is what concerns me about all this catastrophising and conspiracy theorising especially if its done in the name of the soul, because it’s really helping no one, which seems completely at odds with soul expansion and heart opening. You see we create our reality based on the thoughts we think and if too many people are thinking negative ‘end of world, soul being take thoughts’ then they will collectively create more of that in the world.

As Freddy Silva writes, “As one note in the chorus of creation, the human being is special. Its thoughts become sounds, sounds become words, words generate actions, and coupled with intent, actions manifest all manner of consequences. This makes every one of us responsible and accountable for what we manifest. Fifteen centuries of European history teaches us that if a greater mass of people hold an overly pessimistic image of the future, chances are that image will manifest as reality. Apocalypses are seldom the result of predictions and more the release of pathological behaviour in society which creates the situation in the end (Wall and Ferguson 1998). Humanity’s war record of teh twentieth century alone is reason enough to want to change, but to achieve it we must first overcome the cultural illusion that we are somehow separate from the Creative Spirit.

For more than six thousand years, Eastern and pagan mysticism have shown that we cannot connect with Spirit through our very own antenna, the human body. Through the simple act of pressing the palms together, fingertip to fingertip, we adopt the pose in countless sculptures of figures frozen in the act of praying, a ritual instinctively practiced a billion times every day throughout the world, without many of its participants being aware that it is an action far beyond a call to prayer: By pressing the palms you are activating an electronic system which connects you with teh Onesness of creation and allows you, as a part of that Oneness, to intercede upon your own behalf through your thoughts. As the saying goes, “You have the whole world in your hands”.

I really wish that we would remember this. That every moment we have a choice about how we relate to Spirit and to soul and often it is not that anyone is taking that away from us, but we are limiting ourselves in our connection to it by filling our minds with triviality and media litter. We have a choice about how we spend our time and the environment in which we rest our mind - online or in nature? It’s always a choice.

We’re often repeating the same narrative fed to us by media, whether that be mainstream or alternative. I’ve been reading a book about the secrets of the fields and the mysticism of crop circles, and in there appeared this wonderful quote which you might think was written now…

“Preceding these energy shifts and changes are times of confusion and apparent self-destruction, and few will doubt that we are now living in turbulent times. Gregg Braden sees this as one indicator of a vibratory shift:

“Some individuals feel it rippling throughout every cell in their body, perceiving that time, and their lives, are speeding up. Others are experiencing a new kind of confusion, as if nothing in their lives fits any longer…the systems that provide the infrastructure to life and society, inclusive of personal systems such as health, read cycle or not, one fact remains. Within a relatively short period of human historfinance and relationships, are in a state of dynamic flux. …Whether you believe in the near-term close of a great cycle or not, one fact remains. Within a relatively short period of human history, regardless of your age, you have witnessed events that rocked the very foundations of who and what you believe your world is about” (Braden 1993) as quoted from Secrets in the Field by Freddy Silva.

Yes, that’s right! That quote was from 1993! But reading it we could think it was just yesterday. And this is partly what I mean. We’re constantly saying the same thing, because we seem to forget that life on Planet Earth is in a constant state of dynamic flux. Always we are trying to make it certain and known, but by its very nature it simply can’t be. But nonetheless we put in all these societal structures and ways of being to make us feel as if it is constant and known. Then say Covid-19 comes in, or a natural disaster and we’re thrown into disarray and try to make sense of it, to understand how it is that we lost the stability of life on Planet Earth, without appreciating that this is how it is - we never really know what’s going to come next, despite our best efforts.

We live this reality daily, because it is reflective of the battle between the head and the heart. The head wants everything known and certain, so it bases its analysis on what has happened previously, keeping us therefore trapped in the past and what’s been…parents will often raise their children as they were raised because they know that that kept them safe, even if it stifled their soul in some way and does the same to their children, but they don’t question it, because, well, it’s known, it’s what’s done, it’s conventional thinking in action.

The heart however isn’t beholden to the same need for safety as the mind. The heart likes adventure and taking us into unknown territory, of possibility, beyond the limitations of the mind. There is no certainty when we follow the heart, only a sense that if we don’t, well the heart will be suppressed, depressed, unhappy somehow and we will never be able to rest easily, not really, we might convince ourselves that life can be lived easily without the input of the heart, but we tend to have to numb ourselves somehow from the pain of separation that this creates.

This then brings us all the way back to the thoughts we think. Our reality is exactly a reflection of this. And that’s what I love yoga and Reiki, because they help to expand our mind so that we see things differently and think differently in the process, so that we let go of outdated ways of thinking or negative patterning that keeps us limited and trapped in conventional thinking. It’s not easy. The mind and it’s ego identification does not like being slowly annihilated so that the mind can be opened and expanded, but of course the mind needs to let go to be able to expand into new territory. The break down is not always pleasant, but a necessary process for our spiritual growth.

But what kind of world are we trying to create? As love is the foundation of the universe, it seems to me that if we could all drop deeper into love for Self then we might start to create more of this vibration in the outer world too. Imagine a world of love! Like the ancients we too can learn a lot from nature. Nature nows only unconditional love. Look how it gifts us the breath for free, all we have to do is receive it. Yet we have a very tricky time living unconditionally. We are always at odds, trying to pop in conditions, just in case…

It’s one to ponder, not only how we relate to our Self but how we relate to others. Also to watch our thoughts and our tendency towards negativity and neutralising anything positive. And as for catastophising, it’s worth watching that too. Seeing how we’re all individually adding to the collective dream around end of world and end of soul neurosis. maybe then we might ease the collective anxiety that seems to be pervading our society, as if this too, anxiety, has become a pandemic all of its own and this…because we struggle with the transitory and dynamic flux nature of life on Planet Earth.

The key is to keep going within and connecting with our centre and our own nature and appreciating that all is in flux and being able to flow with this, noticing our thoughts and the manner in which these create our suffering. It helps enormously to connect with nature too, to get outside, amongst the trees and bathing in their energy and consciousness, or on the beach, anywhere that brings us back to earth and calms our entire system. And really we also need to shift from being egocentric to cosmocentric - creating a vision of reality that places the emphasis in the universe or nature, as opposed to the view that focuses on humankind as the most important element of existence. Maybe then we’ll realise more of the eternal nature of the soul.

Coming home to ourselves

There is something afoot, the energy is really unsettled and the anxiety and general pain of humanity can be felt in the air. I feel like we’re being squeezed again as we wax to the full moon next week, and eclipse season ahead next month.

It’s about love, because it’s always about love, because we’re here to learn more about love, to experience greater love, to be love. But obviously there’s an opposite to that, and it’s very easy to close our heart to the pain of the world because, well, it’s painful.

We’ve just gone through two years of a pandemic that has caused so many to close their hearts to those they previously loved, simply because they held different opinions and perspectives on say vaccination or lock-down or whatever it might have been. Friendships have ended, siblings have fallen out, families have been split, people haven’t felt they could speak their truth, at least not without being judged for it. The heart beat of the world dimmed.

And now we have a war and the media is filled with accounts and photos of acute suffering, of people killing people, because they were born in a different country, have a different perspective, don’t speak the same way, whatever it is that motivates one to kill another for some cause they truly believe in. It’s yet more separation and division, yet more closing of the heart, yet more us and them, yet more buying into the notion of good and bad, yet more ego-fuelled living that further closes the heart.

It would be easy to lose hope, to flounder in the pain of it all, the anxiety and the feelings of helplessness and despondency, but this serves no one either, not really. Sure we may feel it. I am very aware that the energy of anxiety is very much felt by many and this general tiredness and weariness because we’ve been through so much already, lives have been significantly changed the last few years and there’s no respite, not period of integration, nothing stable and certain. But we can’t. Because of all this gives a wonderful opportunity to find more heart.

As a humanity we really do have to dig deeper. We’re here to find more of our heart and we each have a responsibility towards that, if not for ourselves then for the future generations ahead. We are the micro of the macro, what we do influences everyone else around us. Take our aura, this extends out, or can extend out a metre or so depending on how healthy we are. If we’re feeling joyful and open hearted our aura will be strong and positively influence everyone around us. If we feel angry and annoyed, then our aura diminishes and we repel others away from us, separating and divining ourselves from others.

Our incessant need to define ourselves doesn’t help either. Always this need to separate and divide, to be someone other than everyone else, forgetting that we’re all human and all in this together, and really can’t we just all get along and move beyond all this obsessive labelling. Us humans have gone mad in our quest to be somehow different, the ‘me me me’ culture that we’re breeding. If only we could find more of our heart and open to it, beyond our fear of pain, of not knowing, of having no certainty, of being ok without it having to look a certain way, life, love, whatever it might be.

To love without putting up the barriers, without adding in conditions can be the hardest thing. Yet this is where a spiritual practice like yoga and Reiki takes us. To place where we can love unconditionally, which means being open hearted and living regardless of what comes back at us and being absolutely OK with that. So much easier said than done, and I talk from my own experience of observing this and the conditions I suddenly put in place because of my vulnerability and inherent fear of being rejected and/or experiencing pain.

Yet I’m very aware that pain is actually our friend. With pain we have something to work with, an opportunity to go deeper, to see more of our patterning and the manner in which we create our own suffering due to our mental constructs and conditioning and our need to avoid pain, this being the irony! To be truly vulnerable take great courage and strength of heart, takes knowing the Self on a deep level.

Always, always, always it has to come back to us each individually and how we are relating to ourselves and to others. It’s all very well looking outside of ourselves and moaning about the behaviour of others, of the atrocities of war, for example, but what about the atrocities in our own lives? What about the way we label good and bad, evil and pure, spiritual and non-spiritual overlooking that there is balance to everything, light and dark, all part of the greater whole, so why do we keep rejecting always half?

This takes deep honesty and yet more courage, because it is one thing recognising how badly we talk to ourselves, how much we give ourselves a hard time and loathe aspects of ourselves (how good or bad we are, sigh) and quite another to do something about it and find the strength to change it, to begin to love and accept ourselves, to forgive those we feel have harmed us and to stop the blame culture that always has us looking outside ourselves and that changes nothing in the long term, just keeps us locked in a pattern of blame and victimhood, of not taking responsibility.

Yes, we’ve all been harmed. Yes, we’ve all got wounds. Yes, we’ve all felt pain. But we have a choice. We can wallow in it allowing all of this to continue to define us, or we can do something about it, take responsibility throw ourselves into practice and into healing and go for it, make a real difference in this world, deepen our relationship to heart and truly open our heart to the world, love unconditionally come what may, positively shift our vibration, strengthen our aura and help to shift our perspective into something far more positive and heart-based in the process, lighter. Heck, we might even start to live more lightly on the earth in the process…

I could rant now about the traffic on Guernsey and the lack of consciousness and responsibility about living lightly, about this planet and our need for big cars on such a small island and all the identity issues tied in here around power and money and control and ego, but I shan’t, I’ll leave that for another day, but cars to me and the traffic just seem to highlight how far we still have to go to shift from ego to heart…from the unconscious to the conscious…and how much healing we still have to do individually and as a collective humanity…

I’ll leave you with this lovely quote by C JoyBell,

“Pain is a pesky part of being human, I've learned it feels like a stab wound to the heart, something I wish we could all do without, in our lives here. Pain is a sudden hurt that can't be escaped. But then I have also learned that because of pain, I can feel the beauty, tenderness, and freedom of healing. Pain feels like a fast stab wound to the heart. But then healing feels like the wind against your face when you are spreading your wings and flying through the air! We may not have wings growing out of our backs, but healing is the closest thing that will give us that wind against our faces.”

If you need some grounding and centring, some coming home to yourself, and you have a yoni then please come along to the Yoni Yoga fund-raiser on Saturday 4-5.30pm at St Martin’s Community Centre in aid of Bright Tights, in honour of my friend, Marie, who sadly passed from cancer of the vulva at the age of 41 last September. This is an opportunity to come home to ourselves, connecting heart and womb-space, the inner guide and inner wisdom, for healing and love and greater connecting to Self, our soul, essentially. No need to book. Thank you!

Love Emma xx

Following joy on the new moon.

So here we are on the dark night of the moon, where there is literally no light. It can be an empty space, unnerving for some, because the moon appears gone, like the sun on the winter solstice, will it ever return? And yet return it does, the new moon tomorrow and soon the beautiful sliver visible in a few days time and waxing all the way to the full moon on the 16th.

It’s an energetic month ahead, we have two new moons in the month which is really unusual and various planetary meetings that are definitely going to shift things up for us and no doubt highlight even more of he division in this world around how we want to live our life and our values inherent within that - love or fear, it’s going to keep testing us…

This is not helped (or perhaps it is, depending on one’s perspective!), by time speeding up, since the Equinox it’s getting faster, and losing an hour didn’t help so that this week has been a major catch pop for so many of us. There is an ungroundedness in the air to, most of my clients his week have had a noticeable imbalance in their root chakra, many up in heir heads trying to figure it all out and not quite down here in the body and on Planet Earth.

We have a terrible habit of doing that. Not just disassociating when things get tough, but of residing up in our heads trying to literally figure it all out. We can’t. We can try. but the magic is not to be found up there. The magic is in the body and down on Planet Earth. This is the paradox. To expand we ned to come all teh way down. The more we can go down with gravity, the more that will take us up. But in a freeing way. New age spiritualism has it all back to front and then practitioners wonder why their spiritual practices don’t seem to work.

We can’t bypass the body. We also can’t live without the Earth. Mind you, we could be excused for thinking that we can. As my cousin highlighted to me last week, isn’t it ridiculous that nature is now reduced to ‘reserves’, as if we should be delighted that we have reserved some nature. I mean nature used to be everywhere. But now we develop on every scrap of it and contain parts of it in our attempt to make it seem like we care, and all the while forgetting that without nature (WE ARE NATURE) that humanity cannot exist on Planet Earth. Stop the development!

As for the mind, we can never figure it all out. The mind likes everything to be known and certain but it can suffocate the heart and soul in the process. Many of us know this, we can feel it for ourselves, but it is very difficult to live in an empty way, without somehow trying to fix it or make it certain. We want assurance. We want to know that all will be well. But to live in alignment withe the divine, well we have to live in the emptiness of the present moment, of not knowing, so that there is space for expanded consciousness to enter, lightening us up in the process.

What has become increasingly apparent to me is the need to fill ourselves up with joy - to follow our joy and let this be our guide, let this be our healer, let this orientate us into the present moment where … all is well. I have been orientating in this direction and using it as an opportunity to enquire within, to see all the barriers I have set up around this, and noticing how our sense of well-worth (or lack in many cases) prevents us in opening to our joy - are we worth it? YES! Should we feel guilt? NO!

This set me off down a path of perspective, another theme this new moon is ushering in. Which perspective are we taking? Our perspective shifts our experience and how we interpret our experience will shift our perspective. I have become increasingly aware how so many catastrophes and see there cup as half empty rather than half full and making things much worse - in their minds - than they need to be and limit themselves and their experience of life in the process.

I am also increasingly aware how our relationship to ourselves shifts our perspective and the way that we interpret the world. If we have been taught to hate ourselves, as so many have (our society is so good at that, that we don’t even know we have become victim to it until we try to unpick it years later) then even when we are fed a positive comment, we will neutralise it or make it negative. This can make it very difficult for other people, who may feel they have complimented us and are helping to build our self-esteem but have no idea of how we may have interpreted it differently. It’s a reminder that we ALL internalise the world differently.

As for limitation, well there are many ways that we self limit ourselves, not quite taking responsibility for our own feelings or lack and projecting these onto others, blaming them. Only we can fill ourselves up. Only we can nurture ourselves. Only we can discover what brings us joy and fulfilment. And when we know, we should follow it, letting go of any of our crazy thoughts that tell us we are not worth it and that we have all these other things that need to be done. Jeez, we only get one chance on Planet Earth in this incarnation anyhow.

We should remember of course, to offer our gratitude to the universe. The universe wants nothing more than to fill us up with our joy, but it cannot do that unless we open to it and receive. We need to be empty too. Empty of how we think it should be, or look like, of trying to control outcome or make it the way we want it to be, of not grasping…instead we need to get the little mind out of the way and let it be filled with limitless abundance and love instead.

I’ve found it an enlivening wane, these last few days especially, helped by Sark no doubt, with greater awareness of my patterning around grasping and trying to make certain and instead following the joy and settling into the emptiness. Not easy, but interesting! We should soon pop out of this cold spell, ready to fully emerge into the fertility of spring and all we have ahead to create and bring in - joyful times ahead if we choose.

Love Emma x

P.S. Thank you for my beautiful roses my beautiful Russian friend, Natasha! xxx

Magical Sark!

Well that was an utterly magical retreat. The weather was extremely kind to us, but so was Sark generally. it really is a sacred isle and the most perfect place to retreat.

When I wasn’t teaching I was off exploring Sark’s neolithic landscape with a friend who is as obsessed by stones as I. We had a great time finding the remains of dolmens and costs and generally absorbing the sacred energy. This to the extent that the only photos I took all weekend were of the sun, the moon and stones! Katie fortunately took a few more and you should be able to see these on the Facebook page.

Sark has a very special place in my heart and I am always grateful to those who come and retreat with me and open themselves up to all that Sark has to offer them. It is a really healing place that connects us back to nature in so many ways, not least in accessing more of our own nature, but just in slowing down and imbuing a gentler pace that positively impacts our resonance and is a truly tonic for the soul. Practising yoga here is a dream as we can drop deeper more easily, or so it seems to me…an ideal place for a yoga retreat!

I always return from Sark sad to have left but uplifted by its high energy and sacredness, and resolute to return as soon as I can! Fortunately we’re back again in six weeks for the next retreat and I cannot wait. I think there might be a few last minute places available if any one is tempted to join us, you’ll have to email Katie at admin@beinspiredby.co.uk for the details.

Have a lovely week on the waning moon. I’m curious to see what the new moon is bringing us this Saturday, more on that when its clearer.

Thank you Sark, and thank you to those who ventured with me this weekend, you made another dream come true and I am very grateful to you for helping with that.

Love Emma xx

Glorious Sark

Peace! That’s the only word I can use to describe how it feels to be here on Sark. Not least because this is the first retreat where I haven’t brought the family with me, that’s eight years of retreating now with the family, so it’s really rather a novelty. But also because this Island is magical and wonderful and has retained some of the old energy of peace before all the cars and the noise and the hustle and bustle of over development on Guernsey at least.

I really hope that Sark retains its mystical charm, because there are not many places in this world where you can merge with nature quite like you can here. The land is vibrant, potent and awe-inspiring. I literally stood outside in the dark last night, over on Little Sark, jaw open, taking in the wonder of this magical place. It always feels to me that you go to another land when you cross that causeway, it’s one of the most wonderful feelings in the world.

This morning the island is awash in the glow of the red sunrise, and the waning moon, a little way off. There’s no noise - no children, no devices, no radio, none of the normal noise that awaits me each morning, that is the noise of a family, which is ever so lovely, but my ears are grateful for the respite and my attention can be less scattered!

We have a day of Sark ahead, yoga and later, Kirtan with Katie, Chi Gong with Caragh and a plethora of options for walks, sea swims, chocolate making, chilling out at Stocks, general pottering, and just being held by this beautiful island with all its spring joyfulness and beauty and these amazing skies!

Happy weekend!

Love Emma x