Always there is a sacrifice - happy full moon!
It’s full moon day! It’s the largest of the full moon’s this year, in so much as it’s the closest one to the earth and it certainly looked huge last night as it was rising into the sky.
I have been feeling rather upbeat on this waxing moon, but have also noticed some themes popping through which Rebekah Shaman mentions in her lunascope, where she writes:
“Feeling sleepless, a bit more anxious, and your inner critic is suddenly becoming a whole lot bitchier, blame it on this Capricorn Full Supermoon...But the biggest reverberations in the night sky, during this moon cycle, is Pluto conjunct the Capricorn moon, Sun conjunct Mercury, and Uranus trining the Moon…These Planetary clashes are going to illuminate a whole load of issues that have been hidden in our personal and collective psyche, especially around family, work balance, and life purpose. Be prepared to have your boat rocked with some home truths, and how best to communicate them.”
I have seen others facing these same issues and while you could argue that that could happen anytime, it does seem as if the moon is trying to make us consider how our lives might otherwise be lived, reflecting a little my previous big around dreaming a new dream. Also, what I have witnessed in others is this theme around wanting our cake and eating it and the consequences of this. The way in which our desires might determine our choices, so that we sell out on our soul, for example, because we want the bigger car or house, or whatever it might be.
There is also a time around perfectionism, how many still buy into this idea that if so and so happens, if they own so and so, or go on holiday to so and so, or whatever it might be, then they will feel better about life and themselves, rather than simply accepting where they are at in this moment and all they have in their lives. Still there is this drive towards more, more, more and this notion that there is a perfect world/perfect state of mind/perfect body/perfect life.
This is of course utter nonsense and the sooner we individually and collectively let go of this the better for everyone, especially the Planet. This idea of perfect has people giving themselves a really hard time and I have seen this with friends recently, how much they can suffer because of their judgements about themselves and their parenting, or their lifestyle or how they earn money, or their performance, and how easily it can feed patterning around failure.
It is this pattern that I have witnessed the most on this wax, with friends and family who hold onto this notion of “I am a failure” due to something that possibly happened in their past that they bought into as a truth and which can get triggered from time to time. This of course linked with the idea of perfect. If people could just let go of perfect, the there would be nothing too fail. There is nothing to fail. You can’t fail at life any more than you can fail at being a parent.
On the whole everyone is doing their best and the best they can do for themselves is shift any negative mindset to something much more positive, so that the collective psyche is positively changed into something that is empowered and hopeful rather than disempowered and hopeless.
Life is as it is and we always have a choice. This awareness around choice is not to give ourselves a hard time, but just to consider the nature of the way we make our choices, what motivates them? Do we make choices through fear or through desire, or through combination of both? The Yoga Sutras will infer that both are an obstacle to our self-realisation.
I noticed myself reaching out for a potential change in my life that was based on fear and not heart, a wobble I might have called it. The fear of the increasing cost of living made me consider whether I should go back to living a life already lived. When I dug deeper I was aware that my rumination came as a result of a deep fear around loss of security and were not of the heart which speaks of trust and faith and staying true to self. We easily flip flop between the two and can make choices in a speedy fashion, not considering the potential consequences, which catch up with us later.
But even then, even if the consequences are not favourable, this doesn’t mean we have failed. Only that we made a choice and that choice created a particular result and every moment provides us with the opportunity to choose again, to shift the perspective, come from a deeper place of trust and faith, of heart and also of reality, in so much as we haven’t disappeared into unrealistic fantasy. Sometimes we want things that are not for us. Sometimes we convince ourselves we can have those things regardless. Always there is a sacrifice.
This for me actually is the message of this waxing moon - always there is a sacrifice and we need to find a way to be OK with that and to accept the sacrifice. It’s taken me over nine months, but I finally see the sacrifice I have had to make and am finally accepting this and letting of of my conditioning that tells me it should be different and of the guilt that has arisen with it. Once change has come in, life can never be lived the same and sometimes our mind has to catch up with our reality and the physical body in this moment.
It is always about being in the moment, body, mind and soul, unified. And it is about being OK with where we’re at, because this is the result of what came before, and that came about because of the choices we made in that moment. It is pointless looking back with regret, as much as it is pointless drifting off into an imagined future when you consider that then, then, all will be OK. We really do only have this moment and this moment is utterly beautiful - perfect in its imperfections! Being gracious for that is key, and accepting the sacrifices that came to enable this, and letting go of anything which stands in the way of this (usually a mental imprinting about it having to be different)…I’m grateful to the moon for illuminating and reminding me of this.
So enjoy the full moon and all the lessons and blessings she brings and see you on the wane.
Love Emma x
Dreaming a new dream
I was sorry to hear about yet more mass shootings in America earlier this week, and reference made to this becoming an ‘American tradition’ quite in contrast to the notion of the American dream.
Strangely I was reading about that the American dream the same night I heard about the shootings, but in the context of drugs and poverty and how this notion of the ‘American dream’ leads to disharmony for so many because there is this notion of this ideal that people are fed as a reality, and yet many never attain it due to a combination of factors including socio-economic conditions and cultural/ethic and racial discrimination.
This then leads to feelings of discontentment and frustration, of never being able to make it, which feeds all sorts of neurosis and can, in theory, lead to numbing out in all its many vices from illegal and legal drugs to excess food and other destructive activities/tendencies, let alone the anxiety, depression, resentment and hopelessness it creates. And of course the need to go and shoot people.
But let’s face it, how real is the American dream anyway. Sure, there is this notion of it, and people try their hardest to manifest it, but even they appear to be living the dream – thinking celebs here – it comes at a cost to their mental wellbeing or relationships status, highlighting that you can’t always have it all. Yet in the West we are continuously fed the notion by media that you can, that it is a reality if only this or that happens.
As a humanity we really do need to change the narrative, to shift the collective consciousness around this concept of ‘reality’. Reality is what we make it, it is a projection of the way we think. The more we buy into the conditioned idea of what life is about, the more we feed the illusion of what is reality. But it’s no easy feat to change the way we think and to open our mind to greater possibilities because we are always up against the depths of our conditioning.
I have been stumbling up against my own conditioning these last nine months as my heart has demanded that I make changes, that cause my life to be lived less traditionally or main stream, les goal orientated and achievement based. It’s not easy! Not because of anyone else and their opinions and judgements (although that did used to concern me a lot, which is silly, to limit ourselves because of our fear of what others think about us, when we know that thoughts and opinions change like the wind), but because of my own mind that says, “hang on a minute what about this or that, about the way you’re supposed to be living to feel secure, fulfilled and like there is a point to your existence”.
This because my mind’s been taught to see the world a certain way and to open it to other options can, at times, be frankly terrifying. But I’m also aware that there is no choice, not really, not if we are attempting to live consciously and with awareness of the heart and bigger picture. I mean we always have choice, but it becomes uncomfortable when we ignore that part of ourself that knows that life has be to be lived differently, that there are other ways that may be different to the way that we have been trained and taught to see and live within this world necessarily.
We can bumble along convincing ourself that all is fine, that we are happy toeing the line, but there comes a tipping point, the squish then, a moment when we just know that the nudges from our body and heart are trying to tell us something that requires our deeper listening. The deeper listening generally reveals a knowing that’s been bubbling away but we have been ignoring, a deeper knowing of another way, which offers no certainty beyond the moment by moment unfolding, which by its very nature can be both - paradoxically - contained and yet freeing at the very same time.
We’re not taught or encouraged to live moment to moment, always there is a future orientation towards some form of achievement; education, exams, career, professional qualifications, certainty, security, mortgage, organising, children, planning, pensions, making things certain. And that’s all good and well. I know how it is to have children and the need to organise, but we can plan our life to the extent that we’re not necessarily even conscious of what we’re doing, of the choices available to us and the decisions we’re making because we do what we do because there is an expectation and a belief about how it should be, based not only on how we’ve been taught to see the world but also how we’ve been taught to think.
Essentially we’re taught that we can have it all if we work hard enough and do what is expected of us. It’s not the American dream per se, but it’s an illusion nonetheless. New age spiritualism doesn’t help with its focus on ‘love and light’ and ‘the dream’ and I’ve had to dig deep into my conditioning around these, because I did buy into new age spiritualism for a good while, and allowed it to shape my mind. What I’ve realised though, is that we cannot have love and light without the shadow and to deny that will only create greater inner disharmony, war then, which will be reflected to us in the outside world, which of course is what we are seeing now.
Furthermore, we prevent our true authenticity being expressed and seen by the world, which has implications, not least in our relationship with ourselves but also with others - people like authenticity, they like knowing the truth of a person. This point was highlighted to me recently when a student mentioned how shocked she was when her spiritual teacher, who promotes herself as love and light, showed anger around something that had happened in the class. The student was struggling to come to terms with the humanness of her spiritual teacher, because she had put her on a spiritual pedestal, fed by the spiritual teacher herself, who usually only let her students see the love and light, not her darkness and shadows!
There are many lessons in there of course, it’s a common pattern, we pop our spiritual teachers up on spiritual pedestals, falsely thinking that they’re more evolved and have made greater peace with themselves than we have done, and are lucky to experience a constant state of peace and harmony. Then we realise that these teachers are as human as we are, and are still working through their karma and patterns and we can feel disappointment to the extent that we might reject them.
Later, we will come to realise that the spiritual path is not what we thought it was, that it’s a constant process of letting go and surrendering everything which isn’t our essential self – and that this can be messy and challenging. That it’s not about the external and the image we choose to present to the world, but about the internal and about being our self regardless of the company we keep and the situations we find ourselves in. Essentially it’s about deeper love and compassion and freedom.
The mindset around the dream has been tricky to shift too. I do believe in dreams and our ability to realise them, but I have expanded a huge amount of energy over the years in trying to control the process and turning them into goals, something to achieve, which leads to a constant orientation towards the future and a lack of ability to be truly present to the moment, impatient for the dream to manifest and for life to finally settle and make sense. I realise how I had merely continued feeding my old patterns but under a spiritual guise, still buying into the illusion that life will be better in the future somehow.
Furthermore, in focusing solely on achieving the goal (the dream) I neglected to pay attention to the present moment and frequently overlooked the abundance in it, not being grateful for what I had, simply because of my emphasis on what I didn’t have - my mind had been trained to always want more, accomplish more, experience more, achieve me, be more, desire more, more, more, more, more!
I remember clearly after having Elijah, which had been a dream for so long, feeling almost empty because I didn't know what my dream was now. It was much the same after publishing my first book, while I was jubilant in making that dream come true, but the feeling quickly passed, my life carried on as it had done previously, and I tried to work out what my next dream might be, so that I could shift my focus to that instead rather than face the emptiness of just being OK with the moment and its emptiness.
I realise now how much I have used ‘dreams’ as a way to distract myself from my current reality because of the lack of alignment and balance in it. It took me an awfully long time to realise my patterning – that when life got tough and desperately uncomfortable, that I would throw myself into my work and into manifesting the dream so I could pretend that whatever was happening wasn’t happening. In the process I kind of numbed myself from the actual reality, rather than facing it head on and doing something about it, or even just acknowledging it.
Over time I have come to realise that we don’t need to force our dreams to come true, that we just have to follow our heart and all that this reveals to us moment to moment. Furthermore, the dream is never as we imagine it to be and always there is a sacrifice that needs to be made. These have been difficult decisions for me to learn as there is a certain trust and faith that is demanded and a continuous letting go of trying to control outcome and making things the way we think they should look like.
I have also noticed that sometimes things just happen, those moments that we could never imagine, that change the course of our life and its future direction. They don’t look like the dream as we imagined it, but they will likely lead us there in a convoluted and strange way that doesn’t follow a path that has been lived previously, that is unknown and uncertain and likely turns our world completely upside down. We need to be aware of what we are wishing for and the dream we would like to live!
For example, a chance encounter in a dolmen at sunrise back on the spring equinox in 2021 changed my life in immeasurable ways, it wasn’t something I could ever have imagined and while I had no idea at the time, it fed a dream that I had previously given up on in my quest to control things, that has become clearer since then so I am now aware how much the universe was prodding me and providing the opportunity, even though it didn’t make any sense for a good year or so, and brought with it many lessons including one of sacrifice, trust, faith, cosmic joke and going with the flow.
All of this helped me to re-orientate to the present moment in a way that I hadn’t previously. It is a constant awareness and work in progress however, because living in the present is not easy when society is conditioned towards a future orientation. As a company secretary much of my professional life was about organising future events and my mind easily falls into this patterning as it is comfortable and known, and I notice how I do this when I am particularly stressed or feeling insecure about how life is unfolding, and want some certainty - I’ll plan something!
I also started playing around with the idea of not having a dream or a future orientation and found it initially uncomfortable, as if my life was then purposeless, and my big thing has always been about living a life of purpose. I started realising how much that idea too is also an illusion, a mind game. Is it not enough to simply be alive? Is that not purposeful in itself? Just by playing a role in the balance of things, of breathing oxygen in and carbon dioxide out?
It was a helpful enquiry and shifted my perspective and awareness and there was greater recognition of all I have and gratitude for the abundance and joy in my life NOW. This was brought home to me one morning recently, when I was walking back up the cliffs after swimming at the naturist beach below, and just realising that I have everything in my life that I ever wanted or needed and that the moment itself is the dream in reality and while it demanded a sacrifice, the sacrifice was worth it for the shift in perspective that allowed me to see the joy of the moment.
This helped me to realise that the dream is often about a state of being, of what is happening on the inside, rather than how it looks externally. Ultimately it is about harmony; living in harmony with ourselves and living in harmony with others. When we set up a false notion of reality, like the whole idea of ‘the American dream’ then we can easily fall out of harmony with our heart and soul – our essence then - because we try to live in a way that has been sold to us as being ‘the way’ but isn’t necessarily the way for us individually.
We all have our different ways and they certainly don’t look the same. Yet often we end up following the trend, believing it will give us all we seek, as it has been sold to us as the way that we all need, just look at the way the trend has moved from say smoothies and yoga to cacao and shamanism. Somewhere along the way we have to accept our reality and the chaos and messiness within it and do our best with the choices available to us.
Over time the need for props drops away too, we realise we all the crystals in the world won’t make us happy, any more than the most expensive all singing and all dancing yoga mat (still flummoxes me how there can be so many yoga mat choices on the market and so many that are so ridiculously expensive, you don’t even need a mat to practice yoga!). That really all that is important, is inside of us. And all the props and trends, while helpful at times, become even more of a distraction, certainly when we come attached to them.
Collectively we need to shift the narrative of ‘the dream’. We might not be party to the American dream living here in the UK, but we are party to this notion of having it all, come what may – feeding the power/control/money patriarchal paradigm. We need to realise that this approach to living on planet earth is not sustainable and doesn’t provide us with the peace and harmony that we seek, that all is does is keep us trapped in an illusion of always needing more and this being about the outside, not what is within.
It seems to me that the universe is prodding us to make changes, that the escalating food and fuel prices are asking us to evaluate our priorities and reflect on the way that we are living and indeed thinking, and taking note of what is essential and what is not - what actually fills us up and what doesn’t, what helps us to experience greater harmony and what doesn’t, what allows us to feel more positive and what doesn’t, what helps us be a better version of ourselves and what doesn’t, what allows us to be in true presence, and what distracts us from this, from our being.
Furthermore, it feels as if we are being encouraged to live a simpler life, the kind of life that so many enjoyed during the pandemic lock-downs that talks of greater freedom despite the containment (again the paradox). Much of this is mental, in so much as
Ultimately though I have a sense that it is time that we started dreaming the dream for the entire planet, that talks of love and freedom and contentment. That encourages us to live lightly and respectfully on this earth, with greater harmony and settling more fully into the reality of being – and being our true selves beyond the mind games that keep us feeding into more of the illusion. Once again this asks that we make a sacrifice, but hopefully the sacrifice is worth making, the cost of not making it will only lead to more disharmony and war and more people suffering.
Happy end of week.
Love Emma x
New moon ramblings
It’s the new moon in cancer tomorrow, my star sign as it happens and so I know only too well how sensitive the cancer moon can make us feel, emotional too with all that water element.
However after a rather turbulent previous moon cycle, I feel strangely calm on this dark moon day and I know others feel the same. Many of us have been particularly emotional as we have been forced to see (or perhaps better to write, we haven’t been able to ignore!) more of the shadows, often mirrored to us in others, since the full moon, and as uncomfortable as this has been, majorly testing many of us, I know that in some strange way i actually feel better for it.
In fact there’s this quote from Rebecca Campbell that sums it up perfectly from my side at least:
“Be open to being cracked open. Wide open. It is the difficult times that help us grow in leaps and bounds, and in ways we could only dream possible. But first they have to crack us open. And sometimes it hurts like hell. It’s nature’s way. And, whether you let it happen or not, it is going to happen. So surrender to the process and let life do its thang. It’ll be worth it. It’s how the light gets in”.
These last few weeks have reinforced in me how much our thinking patterns and core beliefs create so much disharmony and suffering in our lives because we think our reality should be different to how it is. This causes us to excessively ruminate about the past or to obsessively stress and imagine a future, all of which takes us further away from the present and this moment with all its messiness and humanness that allows us to know what it feels like to be truly alive.
I’m always surprised though when this pattern reveals itself to me, and I realise how much I have been buying into an illusion of life being a certain way and measuring myself up against it, as if that ‘certain way’ is an absolute truth; that love should look a certain way, for example. I mean on one level I know that there is no one way, but that doesn't stop me buying into it from time to time as the conditioning is subtle and runs deep. I’m a romantic at heart and us romantics sometimes have a hard time of it because we have a tendency to romanticise life, we believe in the fairy tale and of course the fairy tale looks a certain way an involves endless happiness!
But in truth it is never about what it looks like on the outside, and when you are trying to live consciously, then it can get really bloody messy. It also ends up being very different to how you thought it might be, because of course thoughts are based on the past and on conditioning and this is now and this present moment and like I said, it is never as we imagined it might be! Sometimes it’s surprisingly joyful in its unexpectedness and spontaneity, when we let go of our control and just go with the flow of things, from an intuitive nudging.
This happened yesterday when the boys and I joined Ross, Star and Willow on Portlet for a BBQ and one of my friend’s came along with her son and then another joined us and another came down with her daughter by chance and friendships were formed and the sun came out and the high tide collected us all in for a swim and I certainly left feeling joyful in my present moment experience of an unexpected Monday evening on Guernsey.
In fact I’ve also become aware how serious we can get on this path of heart, and how much we sometimes need to literally lighten up and allow more heart - the irony! I’ve come increasingly aware how much I value family and friends and a soulful community. I’ve been blessed this last six months to make some really deep friendships with some lovely real women, the ones who don’t pretend to be anyone than who they are with all their rawness and edginess and earthiness and to also have my beautiful soul sister swim friends.
In these changing and shifting times when the light dims these friendships can make a huge difference, holding space for all that is felt, for then tears and anger and the moments of intense vulnerability when all seems so shaky that you wonder how you might make it through the day. But you do, not only because you have to, but because there are those souls holding you, maybe not literally, but a message here, a flower there, a moment of being present to your anguish as you work through whatever needs to be worked through, as the darkness ushers in the light but takes you on an inner journey to do so.
I mean these times are needed. I relish the discomfort of them because I know that they are bringing gifts. They always cause me to deepen into practice, to shift the practice, make changes on my mat, step up the chanting, carve out more time for meditation or at least for silence, get out walking, feel stones, be quiet and still. And after a time, when the storm has passed and the emotional intensity has eased, then the light returns and with it a rush of inspiration, creativity and passion for what now needs to become more of a reality.
This moon cycle has especially made me eqnuireinto the notion of stability because of the shakiness of life this year with all the many changes happening in my personal life as much as out there in the bigger world and vice versa - we are the micro of the macro of course - and my concluding that it has to come from within. This was confirmed to me today on this dark moon as I practiced with my teacher and felt the joy of being truly in the presence of the breath in the moment in the body, and it was there that I found my stability, not somewhere external to me, not in my external reality, in the usual places we might seek stability such as bank balances and homes, but in the very centre of my being.
I realise again that so much of our experience of life is about our perception, and how we interpret what is happening to us and the thoughts that we allow ourselves to think and buy into as if they are a very real truth. And how we also assume that other people think the same way when they really don’t, how we all have different backgrounds and experiences that shape our impression of reality and the way that we then interpret what happens to us.
Elijah reminded me of this only yesterday as he ruminated over a throw away comment someone said about him being as bad as his brother, and as he already, at the tender age of 8, developed a fear of being perceived as bad, thus already orientating his behaviour in a way that he feels will be perceived as good (sigh), he got upset, because he thought the person’s comment confirmed that he was indeed bad. The relief he felt when I confirmed that there really is no such thing as good and bad and that he’s the most wonderful little soul I know (well and his brother), was palpable, i even heard him telling E at bed time that he was relieved he could let go of worrying about being bad.
Obviously he’s not bad. No one’s truly bad. I mean Eben’s behaviour isn’t always easy, but he’s not a bad child, but can easily get labelled so, because we are so conditioned to think this way - that we should be good, and therefore if we’re not good and our goodness is not frequently validated, then we met be bad. But it’s more than that, it’s the fact that we can convince ourselves of something, simply because of the way we have interpreted what has been said, simply because of our sensitivity to a particular subject or our inherent vulnerability and shaky self worth.
Somewhere along the line, not only do we have to learn to not care, but we also have to learn to catch ourselves with the story we tell ourselves, about our unlovability, our lack of worthiness, our unattractiveness, our loneliness etc., because essentially, it's not what happens to us that defines us, but how we interpret it - it's a choice! Furthermore, it’s so important to let the unexpected open us up to being fully present in our lives so that we can be embodied and immersed in all our feelings (those we define good and bad for example!), rather than shielding ourselves from them and trying to seek/control a particular outcome.
So here’s to another fruitful and enlightening moon cycle, albeit a gentler one would be most welcomed! Thank you to all you beautiful souls who read this blog, because without you there would be little point writing it and this brings me much joy as I process and try to make sense of my experience of the world - and let’s not forget that this always changes, so please take everything I write with a pinch of salt as I might feel differently by the next cycle!
Happy new moon!
Love Emma x
Please let's end this war on cannabis!
I’m really sorry to hear about fellow Reiki teacher, lady of the moon and healer, Lucia Faith’s sentencing, highlighting the patriarchal world we are still living in. Us healers and witches may no longer be burnt at the stake but we are still being silenced for trying to heal with plants from the earth.
I get it, that there is a law in place and the law was broken, but what’s really broken is the law itself and our attitude towards cannabis usage, which is frankly archaic. It’s also nonsensical, because here on Guernsey we can obtain cannabis on prescription for medicinal purposes but if we are caught in possession without a prescription then we face a criminal and potential prison sentence, this because we’re using cannabis ‘recreationally’.
Yet let’s be honest the line between medicinal and recreational purpose is super thin. I know this from my own experience of being an ex-cannabis user back in the day when I used to travel regularly spending months at a time in Nepal and India where cannabis was readily available. While I may have told myself it made me more spiritual and creative, opening me up to expanded states of consciousness and creative potential, this wasn’t really true, and actually it was only when I stopped smoking cannabis that I truly started deepening my spiritual practise and finally wrote something worthy of reading.
Over the years I have reflected on my cannabis usage and I am aware that while I may have labelled it ‘recreational’ as I did enjoy smoking with friends from time to time, really I was self medicating because life was tough, I still suffered bouts of depression and I was carrying a lot of emotional ‘stuff’ that I still hadn’t worked through. It didn’t help that I’m sensitive and sometimes the sensitivity would just get too much, I’d feel too much and I’d be keen to do anything I could to numb myself from my feelings and temporarily ease me from my perceived suffering.
Immersing myself in yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda I threw myself into my healing journey. All of these healing modalities focus on the root cause of any loss of wellness so seek causative factors - this much like pulling out the root of a weed rather than just removing its leaves. I began to notice how cannabis was just another way of creating symptomatic relief, it wasn’t helping me to get to the root cause of what was out of balance in me and, actually, it was keeping me stuck in old patterns that were not longer serving me.
Over time, as I healed and came back to myself and to my true nature, easing energetic imbalances, connecting more with my heart and soul and letting go of some of the unhelpful mental conditioning and core beliefs, my need for cannabis dropped away and I haven’t touched it ever since. I just simply lost my taste for it, a bit like alcohol and junk food over the years.
However I am still grateful for the role cannabis played in helping me on my healing journey because it served a purpose beyond just being used recreationally. But even then, what’s the big deal? Yes, I know that in excess cannabis can create health concerns; it certainly didn’t do my mental state any favours if I smoked too much of it, the paranoia at times could be severely anxiety inducing and I did sometimes live for days in a fog, let alone the implications of smoking. Plus I have seen people lose themselves to it to the extent that they cannot function in the ‘real’ world and can suffer mental disorder as a result of this.
But the thing is, anything used to excess can create issues, just look at the legal recreational activities of alcohol drinking and food eating. Excessive alcohol drinking is hardly healthy and can lead to increased rates of violence both in the home and in public, causing huge harm for those involved, let alone all the health implications, liver damage, heart disease and depression. Over here in Guernsey we are currently experiencing higher rates of drink driving, a hangover (no pun intended) from the trauma of the pandemic and the squeeze of life generally perhaps, but putting other people’s lives at risk let alone the driver. We just don’t think so clearly when we’ve been drinking.
Excessive recreational eating has also become more common place in recent years with increasing rates of obesity to prove it. While this is normalised to a certain extent, the motivation is still very similar to the reason people take cannabis - a form of self-medication to numb their inner pain. Many people eat recreationally to fill that big black hole within them, easing the intensity of their emotional pain and numbing themselves from the world and from their mental suffering. This excessive eating not only harms the individual but places additional pressure on over-pressured health services.
The truth is, most people are self medicating from the pain of life in some way. Life is hard and sometimes we need something to numb ourselves from the intensity of it. I don’t see why alcohol and junk foods should be classed legal and cannabis not. Cannabis is a plant after all and is used medicinally, so why not decriminalise it and let people access it for themselves without the need for a prescription. One thing is for certain, less lives would be destroyed and the States of Guernsey wouldn’t have to waste money policing cannabis importation, usage or resulting incarceration.
And good try Deputy Prow, writing in today’s Guernsey Press, page 15, with a bunch of reasons why cannabis shouldn’t be legalised, including the perceived negative impact to the island’s finance centre and the impact on the island’s reputation. Really Deputy Prow, I think its time we all let go of our outdated perception of cannabis and expand the awareness a little. Imagine how much more tourism we would receive here in Guernsey if we did indeed become the Amsterdam of the British Isles - at least then we wouldn’t be so reliant on finance and there would be more career options!
Furthermore, Deputy Prow’s listing the impacts of cannabis usage as detailed on the NHS website just seems lame when we’re talking about plant medicine - drinking alcohol can make you feel demotivated, confused, anxious and paranoid. Eating too much food and doing no exercise increases your risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke. Smoking cigarettes can be harmful to your lungs. Stress can affect your fertility, so too mobile telephones. Really, in the grand scheme of things, the pace of modern day life can all have an effect on our health in more ways than cannabis usage, if used moderately.
We really need to wake up here in Guernsey and do something to shift this nonsense. There is absolutely no benefit in my mind from incarcerating individuals for cannabis growing, possession, usage and selling. It achieves nothing other than further destroying lives. It certainly doesn’t help the community, nor the family members left behind, especially those children separated from their parents, and particularly when their parents were simply trying to ease their pain and suffering and/or the pain and suffering of others.
At the end of the day we should be free to choose our own form of healing. I’m not a fan of the drug industry, or of drugs that harm people, pharmaceutical as much as recreational. As a holistic practitioner of Reiki, Ayurveda and Yoga, I wholeheartedly suppoort an approach to healing that helps people get to the root cause so that symptomatic relief is not required, and people can live without the need for numbing out.
But nonetheless I do appreciate that at times medicine is required, to help with the healing, and to ease ongoing pain and certainly this has been my experience with cannabis - it can help medicinally, but as with everything, we have to be careful not to abuse it, otherwise we merely become a victim of it and it does more harm than good (I have experienced this too). But ultimately we should be free to choose and to work with plant medicine in a respectful way, with thanks to the plant entity, and in a moderate and intuitive way, not as crutch but as a true medicine. And heck if its used moderately for recreational purposes then why not? if alcohol is legal, why not pot.
I really hope Lucia that you are not silenced by this state. I really hope that you are able to use this as a platform to truly bring about change here on Guernsey, and move us into the 21st century from a drug legality perspective. Every cause brings with it a sacrifice and I am sorry that your sacrifice has been so great, but take comfort that the moon and the stars and Mother Earth are holding you strong, and to keep trusting in your inherent knowing and wisdom. All good will come.
Love Emma x
Stonehenge for solstice sunrise and other adventures
Our stone adventure began at Stanton Drew on Monday, the third largest stone circle complex in England. This was Elijah and my third visit, we needed to complete the three, and were guided where we needed to be. I walked barefoot and accidentally trod in a cow pat. Elijah thought this highly amusing, with my squelchy cow poo toe.
I found it amusing too, especially that his memory of Stanton Drew on this trip will not be one of wandering around and climbing on the stones as I connect with the place, but of my foot, and the dreaded cow pat. We dowsed a few spots to stand and the stones told him they didn’t really like him standing on them, a whole new level of respect arrives at age 8! We also visited the Cove, which is my favourite. The stones spoke; “Be gentle, let go”.
We weaved our way to Stoney Littleton from there, a long barrow nestled in beautiful countryside. I was amazed to find a couple here, there has been people at Stanton Drew earlier, very unusual, we’ve always had the place to ourselves previously. Now here we had to share Stoney too, although we did get a few minutes when those people left before the next people arrived.
This stone and earth tomb was thought to be built in the early Neolithic period, probably between 3,800BC and 3,400BC but really who truly knows. Elijah dowsed it as being much older than that and who am I to tell him otherwise. It contained the buried remains of several individuals, perhaps three or four generations of men, women and children. It’s also thought it might have been a religious shrine for the living. To me it’s utterly amazing and to build something like this as a container of energy for the dead and the living is a testament to how much people used to care…
Chambered long barrows are thought to be the oldest monuments in Britain and about 200 were built in the Cotswolds and elsewhere in Southern Britain. They say that Stoney is one of the finest surviving examples and I certainly felt it’s incredible energy. It’s an amazing place, feels clean, clear, and very welcoming. What struck me most was the plethora of wildflowers growing along the way including the medicinal plant, clary sage, and a selection of thistles reminding me of the clary sage and milk thistle that I’m growing back home.
I would’ve liked more time here, as the landscape is stunning, off the beaten track. There is a pretty river too, always a water source close by, and the smell of the elderflowers fills the air, how I love elderflowers, having made my second batch of cordial just before we left (as an aside, if you walk up the St Martin’s side of Petit Bot hill here on Guernsey, it is awash with elder trees and the smell of the flowers is a tonic for the soul)
The place near where one can park is perfect for a picnic, but we were headed onwards, this time for Elijah, and a visit to Bowood House, a Georgian house, and the playground. We’ve taken him, E and I a few times over the years as Tractor Ted world used to be located here and he has always been mad about tractors – in fact one of the joys of these trips, for him at least, is seeing all the tractors we pass along the way, he knows them all, and gets super excited by the size of some of them.
The adventure playground at Bowood House is fun, Elijah enjoyed it, especially as there were only a handful of other children there, quite a different experience to when I took Eben on a bank holiday and the place was packed. He was happy to walk through some of the Capability Brown landscaped parkland (not the whole 100 acres!), with its grotto and lake. I studied Capability Brown at uni and while I don’t really like the landscaped approach, it’s still a stunning place with a ton of amazing specimen and mature trees and I could have spent the whole day just wandering amongst these.
But alas, we were on a schedule and from Bowood House we drove the ten minutes or so onto Avebury, the largest stone circle in Britain. I was particularly keen to access the coves but the whole of the village was lined with ‘no stopping’ cones, which I can only imagine had something to do with the solstice. Even the carpark in the pub was closed so I couldn’t stop there, nor up the Avenue where I usually park. It was all a bit random but I ignored the cones, momentarily leaving the car in a field exit at Adam and Eve cove and we ran out to the stones. I LOVE these stones, and needed to hear their message, continuing a theme.
I parked up the car momentarily again at the bottom of the Avenue and rushed out to the first two stones, I love these stones and I had a message to deliver, Elijah running with me, to touch the stones, before running back to the car again, no harm done and no parking ticket! It does seem ridiculous that on one of the most auspicious days of the years, at least from a Neolithic stone alignment perspective, one cannot park at Avebury, sigh!
Leaving Avebury, I kept accidentally missing our turn off and on third time lucky, the road took us all the way past Alton Springs, which I’d strangely wanted to visit but didn’t think we’d have time. So we stopped, as I wanted Elijah to see and touch the supposed 1,700 year old Ewe tree in the church grounds, and we managed to make it into the small medieval church itself to sign the book and absorb the stained glass windows . They found a trap door in here with a sarsen stone buried so a bit like the goddess statues found hidden in two churches in Guernsey, one imagines this was a special site from a Neolithic perspective.
We also saw the Alton white horse, this our second white horse of the trip having seen Cherhill white horse earlier. This created much excitement for Elijah as he hadn’t seen any previously. There is something quite remarkable about these white horses carved into the limestone – something to look out for in this area of the world!
Alton springs seemed all overgrown since last time, clogged by greenery and not nearly as vibrant and alive as they had been when I visited with Eben back in spring, reminding me how the land changes season to season. It’s interesting actually, visiting these places at different times of year, I noticed this at Adam and Eve, the once exposed and windy field was now a scene of beautiful wild flowers including lots of ox daisies.
From there, we followed the road straight down (or so it felt), through Durrington and past Woodhenge, to Amesbury, where we had booked a YHA for the evening, before heading down to Southampton airport to collect Star and Willow off their evening flight from Guernsey. I was a little stressed by then, not least by all the driving, having done my usual thing of over extending myself, but also because I was slightly conscious of all the crowds I’d seen at Amesbury presumably intending to go to Stonehenge for the solstice.
We did attempt to get to Stonehenge for sunset, but the traffic queue was so long that we aborted when it became clear that we wouldn’t make it to the stones in time, not with the 20-25 minute walk from the carpark, and anyway, we weren’t really there for sunset, sunrise was the important bit at least from an alignment perspective. The situation was actually a blessing, for it meant we could go back to the YHA and get a few hours of sleep, plus it was already beyond the children’s bedtime and asking them to walk for almost an hour would have been a little challenging, for all of us!
I have already done solstice sunrise at Stonehenge, seven years ago now for my 40th birthday, and I couldn’t remember us having any problems accessing the site, but the queues on the A303 awaiting entry that evening were making me slightly concerned about our morning arrival time. Thus we decided to err on the side of caution, and all three alarms were set for 1.45am, yikes.
As it happened, we could probably have stayed in bed a little longer, as we arrived into the carpark at Stonehenge without any queuing and were out at the stones by 2.45am, giving us a clear two hours until sunrise. Still, I’m grateful that we had this much time to take in the atmosphere, and be able to touch every single stone in the inner and outer ring, stepping our way over sleeping bodies and those nestled against stones. The combined smell of cannabis, sage, frankincense, alcohol and burgers permeated the air – yes, here at Stonehenge on solstice there are fast food vans and I was certainly grateful of the cup of tea.
It was cold and busy, and the children didn’t like the crowds and the noise – the Hare Krishnas were in full chant, there were South American panpipers, a group of men and women dressed all in red sang together, a whole heap of drummers and just general talking, shouting and everything in between – so we hung out at the heel stone, which is a beautifully calming stone and a wise teacher. The half-moon was prominent in the sky to our right and ahead of us the sun below the horizon started lightening the view (the heel stone is aligned with the rising sun on summer solstice)
Star and I took it in turns to stay with the children who had settled themselves on my mum’s raincoat on the grass, Elijah playing a tractor game on his iPad and Willow alternating between watching his game and having a lie down. This created quite some interest from some of the other people, who commented on the coming together of the two worlds – an ancient monument aligned to the moon and the sun, and here my son playing games on the technology that is an iPad. I really loved that, that we can be accepting of it all. They actually had their photo taken at least twice!
People don’t necessarily get this, but stones have a consciousness as does the land, and the two talk more loudly at these ancient sites. Sometimes we might just get drawn to a certain stone or find ourselves by one, as I did with the heel stone, or we dowse, which I also did and there is a funny story with that one. In one of my rambles around the stones on my own, I dowsed a stone to visit and I was taken to one of the ones in the outer circle just to the left of the sunrise alignment. I found a spot to stand against it and take it in before carrying on.
Later, about ten minutes before sunrise, I suddenly remembered my stone friend back at home and thought I should take a small stone from the earth back home to him, so he could feel the Stonehenge energy. We were standing near to the dowsed stone by then so I ran over and nestled my way between the various people to dig my nails into the earth and try and find a little stone at the base of the HUGE stone. I managed to find a few little ones and rushed back to Star, only to realsie that I had collected a heart-shaped shell that someone had clearly left as an offering at some point, as it had wire tied around it.
It was quite mind blowing actually because it’s a big site and I could have gone anywhere to get a stone from the earth (we’re talking nail size here before you think I took a piece of the sarsen stones, nope, this was a bit of stone in the actual earth), but I went to the exact spot where there was a heart shaped shell buried. I couldn’t help wondering how long ago the shell had been placed there, whether it was my friend’s all along, perhaps from another life time, or just a sign that Stonehenge wanted to send its love to him!
We felt the boost as the sun rose, not that we could see it until we were leaving the site, but you can feel the energy coursing through the place nonetheless. The land and stones are super alive and no doubt delighted to have so many make the journey to celebrate, regardless of the differing backgrounds, perspectives and expectations - stones bring unity, such a contrast to our current intense polarisation.
We were definitely guided and I am grateful to the Goddess; the two hours was an absolute blessing on that land and we were lucky to get the bus back to the car park and have an easy journey all the way back to the airport. We were back in Guernsey by 9.15am and home on my yoga mat by 10! I was wired all day and managed to stay up late into the evening catching the sunset from an aligned site here on Guernsey, it was almost a 22 hour day in the end!
Back home I am very aware that the solstice just ushered in a huge shift for us. We are on very shaky ground all of us, as we are each being forced to look at our shadows and where we are living out of alignment with our truth. This is really not easy as our conditioning runs deep and we are living in a way that constantly denies us our deepest truth because of all the expectations placed on us, all the ways that we have been told (and continue to be told) how to be and live and relate to ourselves and this world.
Constantly we are caged and boxed, I’ve talked about this previously, from our culture, religion, tradition, care givers, friends, family, educators, society, from every area of our life, so that we don’t know who we are beyond what is expected of us and the way we have trained to be in this world. There is a part of us that is wild and yearns for greater freedom but this means we must sift through all the layers that prevent us from accessing this deeper part of self, the part that cannot be tamed, caged or boxed away that knows that there is more to us and our life than we are living.
Simultaneously we are reaping what we sowed and having to deal with those consequences of actions taken that weren’t necessarily in alignment with where we’re at in our lives and within ourselves now. This is highlighting the classic battle that is played out between head and heart and we might have to come to terms with the fact that while we thought we were living from the heart, we were actually living from our head – the ego is a tricky thing and does a heart disguise well. We’re also having to accept the uncomfortableness of the lack of deeper connection.
But in many respects this is all part of the process and necessary. What’s called for now is deep stillness and courage. Courage to sit still and courage to act when the moment becomes clearer. Now we’re just in a squishy and squeeze time. Things are shifting rapidly and nothing will necessarily make sense. We’re all connected but moving at different paces, and there is a divine timing to everything. Essentially though, we are being encouraged to free ourselves from anything which binds us to an outdated idea, narrative or belief about ourself and the old world that we are being asked to leave behind.
There is a real shift towards new beginnings and this on a fundamental level, in terms of not only how we relate to ourselves but how we live in this world. I’ve had numerous conversations with people about this these last few days on Guernsey and in Glastonbury. It’s time for wholeness and to walk our truth, make the changes we have been talking about but haven’t necessarily done anything about, the changes that the pandemic tried to usher in, but isn’t quite there yet in reality.
Essentially it’s about simplicity and shifting our perspective away from the human centric view of the world where money, power and control are seen as the motivation for all that we do and the way that we live on planet earth, to one where we appreciate our place within nature and attempt to live in greater harmony not just with nature but with our own nature too. So much of the way we have been living, not only destroys nature but denies our own inherent nature.
The pandemic slowed us all down and encouraged us to begin the process of seeing through more of the illusion, it gifted us the opportunity to live a different way, at a different pace. Many people preferred it, the slower more home and family based life, where they had time to appreciate nature, and others fought it as it went beyond their conditioning and what had become ‘normal’ to them and therefore felt safe. Because we seek safety outside of ourselves, many have been keen to rush back to the pre-pandemic way of life without appreciating that life has changed and will never be the same again.
We see this with air travel. People have been desperate to travel again but the industry has changed and there are no longer the staff levels to support it so people are finding flights and holidays cancelled and many are left stranded. It’s a lesson! Life has changed! I’m also having to come to terms with this and I did decide in Glastonbury that all this air travel has to stop. It’s not easy living on a small island but we each have to play our bit. We really do need to be the change we’d like to see, and I’d like to see less airplanes up in the air, as much as I’d love to see less people with their heads in their phones and 5G killing us all quietly.
Really though what’s happening is an intense polarisation between those waking up and those staying asleep. Our opinions are divided on everything and the systems no longer fit. This is potentially a huge shifting time for humanity on planet earth and I can’t help wondering if there’ll be something else that wakes up more of those asleep, so that they too can see beyond the conditioning that keeps us trapped in the illusionary world.
I mean there are other realities beyond the one we can see, but even in the one we can see, we are all looking at it from different perspectives and with different interests and even amongst friends, opinions can be divided. There is little middle ground. This can lead to greater disharmony as we see the other as bad and wrong…overlooking that again this is just more of the illusion…it’s not real, just more conditioning helping to keep us caged to maintain systems. The minute we take a side, is the minute we lose ourselves to it. Really, what is the right thing? Or the good thing?
No doubt we can come up with an answer quickly, but what is this based on? I suspect it’s based on something someone told us or taught us or programmed into us. To put it another way, at some point we took on a contract that told us that we would see the world a certain way. And now we’re being asked to break that contract, because it’s no longer real. There are new contracts to form instead, contracts which offer freedom. But first we must set ourselves free. We must break everything that is misaligned and outdated, that has us believe we need something outside of ourselves to be happy.
We must let go of the idea that we need more technology, bigger and better houses, a brand new Range Rover to prove we’ve made it, inflated lips to look like a celebrity, bigger boobs to prove our attractiveness, or a smaller waist to show that we’re great, or more qualifications to show that we can use our left brain and be trained to use it a certain way too (denying the right side), so that we might see more of the world the same way that others want us to see it, or that somehow gives us a false sense of worth, much like the need for ‘likes’ on social media because we can’t find this within ourselves and need the external validation and us women up against ourselves, trying to be all things and slowly dying from tiredness and frustration on the inside.
We must let go of the endless doing to be anywhere but where we are now, of continuously focusing on outcome and overlooking the joy and beauty of the process, of denying our creativity because it’s undervalued and pouring all our efforts into achievement for the sake of achievement, of feeling guilty when we put our own needs first, of feeling shame because a relationship didn’t work or we fell in love with someone else, of caring what others think of us to the extent that we dress and behave a certain way, not because it’s our nature but because we care more about them than our own sanity.
We must let go of it all being about material gain, about upwards flows being good and downward flows being bad, of good and bad in its entirety, of right and wrong, of should and shouldn’t, and find the joy and abundance in all of it. It is all of it spiritual, the only difference is our perspective and whether it fills us up or depletes us. This is an abundant universe, but true abundance goes beyond materialism, it is about cycles and nature and the joy that comes from being ourselves, without our petty concerns, worries, doubt, uncertainties and anxieties exhausting us.
We need it all, the ups and the downs, the dark and the light, and everything in the middle. Look at nature. See how the sun now wanes and the moon too, we’re on the wane too if we allow it. Even this messiness is OK. It’s all OK. Our pain is needed, as much as our joy. For now we have to settle into the messy transformational energy that’s triggering old patterns so that they can be seen and let go of. Within all this is trust, always trust and an invitation to be more discerning between the voice of the head and the voice of the heart…and to orientate towards our true self, beyond all our conditioning…and live simply, treading lightly on this earth…good luck!
Happy turning of the wheel!
Love Emma x
PS. A HUGE thank you to Star for many of the Stonehenge photos and for joining us for 13 hours of adventure, fun and memories made, sometimes we just have to do these crazy things!