Staying centred

So here we are on the waxing moon, and another heat wave, despite the smell of autumn in the air in the mornings last week - we are lucky with this summer’s weather, but certainly the evenings are now drawing in. Many of my clients are in their own pattern of shifting too and there have been themes, no doubt reflecting the collective shifting, and the stars and planetary alignments.

The theme of ‘not being good enough’ has reared its head again and people are being asked to dig deeper into this, to see that it is just a mind game, just the mind telling us that we’re not good enough, a core belief we took on at one time or another because of the way we interpreted our world and the feedback we sought from others.

In fairness we are trained from a young age to consider ourselves not good enough. It’s a very good way of controlling us and helping to dumb us down, keeping us stuck in a state of disempowerment, where we feel powerless. It is this feeling that often feeds our anxiety and depression, because we easily lose our centre, our grounding and our faith. I see this energetic patterning time and time again.

Powers that be don’t want us standing in our power, or standing on our own two feet. They want to keep us feeling a little bit all over the place because we are easier to control then. I am not a conspiracy theorist by the way, I just see it clearly. We are literally trained not to like ourselves, criticised from a young age if we try to be different to others, there is an encouragement towards uniformity from teachers, care givers, culture and society as a whole. It can be a real battle to step outside of this AND feel empowered.

But essentially it’s all just a training and we are able to untrain as much as we are able to train. My yoga studies are all about the untraining, removing the layers of training, not least from my previous yoga studies but from my life generally, so that I am not restricted mentally, or indeed physically and emotionally, by how I have been trained to be, so that I might literally see things differently and view life from a shifted and new perspective, and accept and love myself in a way that I was never able to do previously simply because I was trained not to, and all this from constantly changing movement patterns in the body.

Thus much of my yoga practice is about moving in a myriad of ways that bring me to my centre, unsticking it in the process. Many will argue that the centre is where you find the soul, it’s like a gateway. Furthermore, it’s where we find our power, to be centred is to be empowered, or at least this is how it feels to me energetically. When we are in our centre, it is very difficult to be thrown away from it, we are more likely able to then retain our grounding and our openness to spirit and faith too.

More often than not, I see clients when they have lost their centre and are feeling disempowered. This is not always true in so much as there are many reasons that people might find their way to me, but I do notice patterns. Life has a habit of challenging us and we have a way of reacting to that and often that way of reacting is not necessarily helpful and is based on what has happened previously so we end up repeating previous patterns. In many situations, the key to our empowerment is in noticing our patterns and then taking action to change them.

I see a common energetic patterning that arises when people are challenged and triggered. Something will happen, another person will say something or a situation arises that makes that individual feel uncomfortable, maybe they are manipulated or verbally confronted or attacked in some way, or maybe they felt guilty about something, or out of control about how their life is unfolding, maybe they are scared of losing something or someone, or worried about paying a bill, maybe they’re in a new relationships and it is all unknown and uncertain, and immediately they will be thrown off centre to the extent that they might feel anxious or angry, fearful or teary. Either way they will have lost their centre and will likely start stressing about the past or the future.

Generally they will lose their grounding too, as if their roots have been loosened and they have lost the support of the earth, Their mind will take over and can get relentless in its need to analyse, figure out and control things. As a result of this their shoulders may well tighten and their body may prepare for fight or flight. They will close to spirit too, faith dropping away because they figure that they, and they alone must figure this one out. With the grounding gone and the crown closed down, trust also goes out the window and any words that comes from their mouth might will likely come from a place of fear rather than from a place of love.

This is actually another theme which has coming up this last week, one of communication. Communication is tricky because so often we have a whole heap of words and thoughts running around in our head that we want to get out, but we don’t always manage it for fear of how those words may be received. This feeds beautifully into the theme of ‘not good enough’ because simply put we don’t always feel good enough to say what we want to say, because of our fear of having our ‘not being good enough’ validated by others either because they don’t hear us or they criticise us or confront us for what is said. In effect we judge ourselves before anyone else has a chance to do the same.

This feeds into the other theme coming up of self-sabotage, where we create more of our own suffering by basically destroying and sabotaging all goodness in our lives. I saw this played out last week simply because someone reached out for help and was gifted the opportunity to receive that help but when it came down to it, the person sabotaged the possibility by not turning up and laying the blame outside of herself. Quite likely she didn’t feel good enough, quite likely she also didn’t feel she could give voice to the real reason she wasn't able to make it, and quite likely all of this is a pattern - she wants to make changes but lacks the courage to take that step of actually doing the work that will make the difference.

It's tricky, because even when we do take that step and make the most of the help given to us we can be up against ourselves and the depths of our conditioning. We can also be totally blindsided by our patterning to the extent that we don’t understand why we keep doing what we are doing, however harmful and damaging it may be to us, because we are so rigid in our thinking and the way that we see ourselves. More often than not, unless we are truly conscious and attentive, then we will make choices based on fear rather than intuitive choices that come from the heart.

Paying attention to what drives our decision making can be really fascinating and we can be very surprised, because often our decision making is based on alleviating our fears rather than truly based on the guidance of the heart. First though we have to identify our fears, whether those be fears of financial insecurity, fears of not being liked, fears of not being seen, fears of not being heard, fears of new relationships, fears of uncertain origin! There are all sorts of fears that we will have adopted over the years that we will do our very best to avoid looking at because it is uncomfortable to us and yet when a fear is triggered it can cause us to lose our centre.

This then causes us to lose our power, and when we’ve lost our power then we lose ourselves and the pattern repeats itself. True power comes from being centred regardless of external circumstances. This means maintaining our centre regardless of what is going on around us – can we stay centred whether contented or sad, whether life appears to be going our way or not, can we stay true to ourselves in a relationship, can we speak our truth without fear of vindication, can we be in our centre when we lose someone we love or a relationship comes to an end or a child leaves home, can we stay centred when we start a new job?

Staying centred is a constant practice and one that is absolutely supported by yoga, Reiki and other holistic practices that will help us to look more honestly at ourselves and notice our patterning, so that we can do something about it, get to the root of it, so that we stop feeding the pattern and  can rest more easily in our centre whenever challenged. We have to work at it though, be curious to know ourselves on that deeper level, to take responsibility and be with the discomfort of it.

There’s a wonderful centring exercise that we can do too, which I have found really helpful in my own life, working with my solar plexus. Basically, when waking, rather than rushing out of bed or reaching for your phone, just pause for a minute and take your hands to your solar plexus, just above your navel centre. If you are Reiki attuned then you have the advantage that you can channel Reiki to yourself at the same time (don’t forget you can now get attuned to Reiki Level One online now, we have a package available on the website, at a mere £49.99, which might be the greatest gift you give yourself https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/shop/online-courses/reiki-level-one-online).

Then ask yourself “Where am I?” and “When am I?”. In theory the answers are “In my centre, NOW”. Keep repeating this to yourself until you are sure that your awareness really is in your centre now! Then you could ask yourself what kind of day you’d like, and notice any resistance you have to whatever comes up. Maybe you don’t feel you deserve a lovely empowered day full of goodness, for example, and that can be an interesting awareness because then you can dig deeper into that, why is that?

Once you have established the kind of day you’d like, the you let it all go and literally go about your day. if you get a chance during the day, maybe you roll out your yoga mat or you take a moment to sit under a tree or out in the garden, then you can come back to your centre, gather it in. Even better, if you notice that you are losing your centre is to consciously gather your awareness back to your centre and notice resistance to doing this - it is incredible how much we feed our dramas and victimhood, giving our centre away simply because that’s what we’ve always done and therefore it is known and there is certain comfort that comes in the knowing, even if it is suffocating our soul and disempowering us.

This is actually what I find the most fascinating - the way we give our own power away simply because we are fearful of our power (our light) and of the uncertain and the unknown. Yet I find this so ironic, because life is uncertain and unknown. And actually the more we can sit into the uncertain and unknown, be with the moment to moment awareness of this, the less we get thrown off balance and lose our centre in the first place.

Orientating back to centre re-sets everything. In the evening, lying in bed, just before you go to sleep, come back to this exercise and re-orientate to the centre in the NOW and reflect on the day you actually had and whether it is in alignment with your earlier intention.

Keep doing this daily for an awfully long time and gradually you will notice that you orientate increasingly in the here and now in your centre and you are less likely to be thrown off centre. Or, if you are thrown off centre, you’ll start noticing that you’re being thrown off centre and you can bring yourself back to centre and change whatever patterning is causing you to go off centre in the first place – more often than not it is because the mind is playing games and sent you spinning back to the past or into the future.

And whichever way you look at it, past or future orientation isn’t allowing us to live in the nitty gritty of the present, so a constant re-orientation to the present is required because this is the present, the gift, true presence is being OK with whatever is happening and not wanting to make it different. This is where we find our grounding in the unknown and uncertain, standing on our own two feet regardless and trusting, so important, in the support of the earth and the universe, cultivating greater faith and staying in our centre.

Enjoy the waxing moon and all it reveals to you, keep remembering to orientate back to centre and to know that you are good enough just as you are and it is OK to voice how you truly feel with love and compassion!

Love Emma x

Happy Lammas

Happy Lammas! This is the cross quarter festival, essentially making the beginning of Autumn and while the sun is indeed shining and the temperature is currently warm here on Guernsey, when I went to watch sunset this morning, I was aware of the shifting light and the slight smell of autumn in the air.

This feast day celebrates the first harvest, this of the grains. The second harvest is at the Autumnal Equinox for fruit and the third and final harvest at Samhain for the remaining nuts and berries. Interestingly, the word 'Lammas' comes from 'loaf mass' and is indicative of how much the first grain and the first loaf of the harvesting cycle is honoured and indeed central to our ancestors.

As it happened I found myself making bread this last week. I’ve been meaning to make it for ages, my home school mums are really good at making bread and one of them passed on her no kneed recipe, which suits me perfectly. The amazing thing is, it worked! I actually made bread. Not that the children would eat it and there’s only so much that E can eat. But nonetheless it was a rewarding experience, I didn’t realise how therapeutic it can be to make bread and will continue on, the boys will love it one day perhaps!

Lammas brings with it the knowledge that the bounty and energy of the sun is now beginning to wane, and this is therefore a time of change and shifting energy…active growth is slowing down and the darker evenings will increase as we continue ur descent to the winter solstice. This darkness brings with it the opportunity for greater reflection…

This is also a time to acknowledge the various blessings in our life, expressing gratitude for all that we have, the abundance then, shifting our perspective to something increasingly positive, especially if we have a tendency to focus on all that we don’t have in our life and our continuous wants and desires and manifesting something other than what we do have!

It easily happens, our society is all about wanting more…we are conditioned to always want what we don’t have, so pausing to celebrate what we do have can actually be powerful experience. The more we work with this, the less we actually desire anything different and the more settled our mind becomes. We recognise the joy of true presence!

We celebrated Lammas at a Yoni Yoga class yesterday, which was so lovely to bring together a room full of women, in circle, to practice yoga together, it has been a few weeks now and I forgot how blessed an experience this is, and we continued on with Kirtan which I love too. So there is indeed much to be grateful for, let alone this beautiful weather, long may it continue.

Signs of autumn are here though, I’ve already eaten my first blackberry and my medicinal plants are definitely on the wane. I have a clearer idea of what to grow next year, the milk thistle was super sharp and took up a lot of room, the arnica is just stunning with its gentle flowers, the blue vervain too, and I will grow more of those, and more Tulsi, which I have enjoyed drinking. The echinacea take a year or so to truly take root, but I hope that they flower next year as they are beautiful.

Anyhow enjoy the shifting season and making the most of the sun while we can.

Love Emma x

New moon!

Happy New moon!

I hope you are feeling OK as we touch the new moon. There is a big push to release old patterns and emotions and many of my clients have found themselves in tears the last few days, up against it, and yet knowing that it is all part of their ongoing personal and spiritual development.

So just to say if you are feeling weepy, emotional, all over the place and just not yourself, then don’t worry, blame it on the moon! Try to go into whatever feeling is coming up for you, and try to own it and be with it without giving yourself a hard time or rejecting some aspect of you. It’s all good! Also try to see any situation from an elevated perspective, there will be a lesson in it and an opportunity to clear an old pattern now no longer needed.

We start again today, a clean slate, and it does feel like that in many respects. Take note of where a door is closing and be patient for the new one opening…and remember to follow your joy…

It’s Lammas on Monday, the cross-quarter festival of grain, the beginning of the grain harvest (time to make bread) and the start of autumn too believe it or not…we are celebrating with a Yoni Yoga class on Sunday 9.30-10.45am, followed by Kirtan 10.45-11.30am with Katie (optional) outside (if weather holds) at St Martin’s Community Centre (or in the Parish Hall if not). Please come and join us ladies - here and the details and online booking https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/events-calendar/2022/7/31/yoni-yoga

Love Emma x

Insecurity and caring too much

A theme that keeps coming up these last few weeks is one of insecurity and caring too much about what others think. I’ve found myself regularly settling a hand on a client’s solar plexus and letting the Reiki bring up a whole heap of tension and knotting of feelings of insecurity, anxiety, fear and sadness too, around this.

The solar plexus holds a lot of stuff, especially the unresolved stuff that we haven’t been able to process and that eats away at us, quite literally in some cases, and causes us to adopt all sorts of behaviour patterns to attempt to numb ourselves from this uncomfortable sensation, especially the restlessness and yuckiness of the anxiety that accompanies our poor relationship with self - our inherent insecurity about who we are and how we live in this world and our imaginings about the future, or our fear of loss of safety, and out caring too much about what others think, which can feed our inherent insecurity if we let it.

What strikes me the most about this ‘caring what others think’ is how much it prevents us from living a life of true authenticity, how we might keep ourselves small and limited simply to fit in and feel accepted by others, frequently compromising our own values and way of seeing things, believing we have to act, behave and be a certain way to maintain a status quo, people please and protect our fragile self-esteem through fear of being confronted or challenged by others for the way we see things or for the gifts we have been given, and the way we feel about ourself, caring more about them and their thoughts than we do about ourselves and our inner truth.

This caring about what others think weaves its way through so many lives, almost like an external validation system; we often need others to validate us in some way and to obtain that validation we need to ensure that we accord to a certain way of being in this world, to ensure our feelings of safety and security. The opposite of this is to not care and to then be up against any feelings of insecurity and be OK regardless of the feedback we receive to the choices we make and the way we live in this world from the clothes we choose to wear, the career we choose to follow, to the way we behave around others and the feelings and opinions we share.

Often though, these choices are dictated to a certain extent not least by our conditioning and the way we have been trained to see the world (which will likely change the more we expand consciously and let go of the conditioning that prevents us from seeing through the illusion in the first place) but by our own feelings of security or lack of security, and the extent to which we can hold our centre and stand our ground regardless of what is happening around us and anyone else’s input into our lives, however well meaning they may be.

I’ve written about it before, but the pandemic really changed things for so many of us and asked us to look more deeply at the way in which we validated our worth in this world, as jobs, titles, earning potential and ways of being dropped away for so many of us. This all certainly brought me face to face with my feeling of inner security and I noticed the many ways that I lent into the external to obtain much of this, seeking external validation for my worth in this world, as I have said previously, from social media feedback to the number of students attending my classes, from my earning potential as a company secretary and the security that the title alone gave me, even if this was illusionary and meant nothing to anyone else.

The vaccination debate also highlighted to me the fear about compromising one’s reputation, simply because of holding a certain opinion that differed to the mainstream, and this because of seeing things so differently and operating from a place of intuition. Opinions are just thoughts and thoughts come and go like the wind, anyone who watches their mind for ten minutes knows this only too well, the thoughts will just keep on coming, we can literally ask ourselves, “what thought am I going to think next” and along comes another one, taking our mind in a different direction. thoughts can become tortuous though when we give them too much energy and buy into them as if they are a concrete truth. It’s the same with opinions, we can take them far too seriously, overlooking the fact that these are subject to change too.

I am frequently changing my mind, because life is frequently giving me opportunities to see things differently. I might hold a strong opinion about one thing, and then I’ll meet someone who will challenge this, or something will happen which will help me to see the other side of the coin so to speak, so that I realise that there is always another way of seeing things. This awareness stops us getting too self righteous and judgmental, too pious and stuck in our ways, although I can be all of that at times too, because I forget and consider that it’s my way or the high way so to speak. Albeit with compassion for self, I have gotten better over time at appreciating that there are may different ways and mine is only one of those, and as I’ve said, even that is constantly subject to change!

But nonetheless the whole vaccine debate did highlight to me the way in which we can be vindicated for our choices about what we put in our body, let alone our choices about a myriad of other things, such as the way we choose to live, or the way we choose to raise and/or educate our children, the clothes we choose to wear, the body art we choose to adopt, the food we choose to eat, the places we choose to holiday, the way we spend our time from resting to playing, from exercising to relaxing, we have opinions and judgements on everything and sometimes we care far too much about what other think to the extent that our choices are motivated by others, not from our inner guidance system.

Sometimes we’re the other side, the ones doing the caring too much about what others are doing. We’re the ones judging and evaluating and giving opinions, trying to control others, knowing how to manipulate and coerce them, wanting to see them live their life the way that we imagine for them, the way that we feel will best suit and work for them - we think we know what’s best for them and while we might say we come from a place of love, really we’re coming from a place of fear, fearing for their safety and so we try to direct them down a certain path that we think will keep them safe and at the same time bring out the best in them.

We should never confuse control for love. If we are trying to control someone then this is not love. This is fear - and we are fearing for our and their safety. We have no trust in the universe or in that other person’s intuition and inner guidance system. We’d be better helping them connect with this and deepen into their own truth, making decisions for themselves, allowing them to learn from their experiences, without having to label them good or bad, passing or failing. The soul is here to experience itself simple as that, it’s only us humans that have decided if something is positive or negative.

This whole security or insecurity theme sent me on a bit of an exploration to further understand the extent of it, to look more clearly at my motivation for doing certain things. This started last summer with an attempt at re-wilding myself by just letting things be, physically that is, to see how my motivation towards various things was due to conditioning and external validation of my worth in this world and how this impacted on my feelings of security. So I set off on a mission of growing all body hair and stepping away from make-up.

This was an interesting experiment. I was OK with the body hair until I found myself teaching yoga and then I became really self conscious of my hairy legs and arm pits and imagined how others may judge me for them, as I judged myself. I realised I was up against my conditioning around what is acceptable and what is not. Admittedly it has become more common place to wild the body in this way, and I had always been very happy about having hairy legs until it became socially unacceptable to have them, at school I recall boys commenting on them when I was around 15, and that was that, I started shaving so as not to stand out and be ridiculed for hairy legs.

Avoiding make-up was much easier, and didn’t concern me in the slightest, it was easier in many respects, I’ve never been someone for plastering on make-up, I’ve never been too concerned about how my face looks, and never felt the need to change it, my concern has always been more so about the size of my body, which initiated an eating disorder at the age of 17 and has caused lots of inner work over the year to try to accept myself regardless of this - so in comparison, not applying eye liner was really no big deal!

Still, towards the middle of summer I was done with the not-shaving, not because of what others thought as I had worked through this by then, but because it felt hot and uncomfortable and I longed for silky smooth legs, so I delighted in shaving and have fairly much continued ever since. The difference now is that I do it for myself, not for anyone else. It’s the same with make-up. The Tantra course changed things for me and my perspective in how I relate to my body and what I do or don’t do to it and all of a sudden I longed to adorn it in feminine clothes and make-up too, I wanted more colour, painted nails, and a bit of eye shadow. But again, I was doing it for me, not for anyone else, it wasn’t coming from a place of insecurity about my looks, for example.

This experiment highlighted to me how unconscious some of our decisions and how we do certain things to ease our feelings of insecurity and because we care more about what is expected of us by society and/or others, than how we care about ourselves. I started noticing those times when I did things I didn’t want to do simply for these reasons - caring too much about others may think if I said no or turned down an invite or whatever it might be. On the opposite side, I started to really appreciate those special friends who were truly honest about how they felt, so even if we’d arranged to meet and they felt tired maybe they were hormonal or in overwhelm, then they told me so and we made an arrangement to meet another time instead, which usually suited me better too, just I hadn’t felt to tell them so.

Mainly though, I started to notice how much my caring about what others think prevented me from living authentically, how I might hold back from saying certain things, how I might agree to certain things, how I might avoid certain situations, how I might behave around certain people, how I might make decisions about how I’m spending my time, how I might avoid writing a certain thing, how I might change what I was wearing, how I might tone myself down a bit, how I might limit myself in some way, simply because I cared what others might think and how they might judge me.

I reflected wider on it and I realised how much we might compromise on our dreams, or give up on them all together, simply because of caring what others think and considering that our creations - the book we want to write, the picture we want to paint, the remedy we want to make, the business we’d like to set up, the room we’d like to decorate - how all of this we can give up or never get going simply because we’re too concerned about what others think and how we might be judged or the options and feedback we might receive. It’s incredible really, how many lives go unlived simply because of caring about what others think!

It was a really helpful exploration. Because underneath the caring I came face to face with insecurity. This caused me to dig deep. I realised that the only person who can make us feel secure is ourself. We can spend our whole life seeking external validation for our feeling of inner security but this is extremely fragile and is dependent on constant feedback from others and the continuation of whatever it is that is giving us this false sense of security. Furthermore, I realised how much we compromise our authenticity in our quest to appease others and their expectations, opinions and judgements.

I also realised that if we are judging others then we are usually judging ourselves, because of our inherent insecurity. And if others are judging us then it is because of their inherent insecurity. At times we are simply up against ourselves, in that no one is really judging us, that too is an illusion, what’s really happening is we are simply judging ourselves based on our conditioning and the contracts we bought into and signed up to in terms of the way we see the world. When we start breaking those contracts and seeing through the illusion then we can be on rocky ground for a while because we might well judge ourselves based on what’s been, until we’ve settled into the transformed version of self.

I noticed my inherent fear of rejection, of being rejected for being myself, and my fear of confrontation, of having to stand my ground and stay in my centre when being challenged by others. I noticed the uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach that this all created, an anxiety that I hadn’t realised was there, that had been there for an awfully long time, but which I had avoided feeling through various tactics over the year from starving myself to binging, to smoking cigarettes and joints, to drinking too much wine, to keeping myself very busy, to obsessional cleaning, to overwork and even to too much yoga at times.

In short there were a whole heap of choices made and behaviour patterns created that helped me to avoid feeling my inherent insecurity that caused me to live my life caring too much about what others thought, and negating my own inner wisdom and knowing instead. At times, I couldn’t even hear this, simply because I was so used to looking to others to inform me about what I should be doing, how I should be behaving, and how I should present myself to the world. And even when I did start hearing it, my inner voice, my inner knowing, my intuition and gut instinct, I doubted all of it, because I was still so used to listening externally.

Gradually I started going deeper within, and being more honest with myself about how I might feel in any given situation, about what works for me and what doesn’t and I discovered all these lovely things, like self worth and self appreciation, healthier boundaries and the ability to say no. Over the years the unhealthy behaviour patterns have dropped away, I mean not all of them, I still have a tendency towards busyness, and I don’t like mess, but I am no where near as controlling of myself, my environment or others as I may once have been.

I care less now too about what others think of me. I’m more honest, more authentic then, more true to my essence. I can now say ‘no’ to offers of coffee and big parties and leave it at that, rather than dancing around it, saying yes but meaning no and somehow having to extricate myself from any arrangement made, rather than just being honest from the outset. I loathe small talk and am fortunate now to have a group of soul friends who talk the deep stuff, that keeps my soul nourished, I can’t be doing with situations which drain me otherwise.

I care less about whether people think me mad for the choices I make, for the way I chose to live my life, for the clothes I chose to wear, for the way my children look with their wild and unkempt hair (actually it’’s very well kept, it’s just crazy hair!), for the way I chose to raise them with less consideration of academic achievement and more focus on learning from wild living, for the way our family is finding its own way of being that doesn’t necessarily accord to societal expectations of what a ‘happy family’ is meant to look like, for my sensitivity and emotional volatility, for the opinions I have, which changes like the wind as the universe always brings in an opportunity for me to see things differently and see more of the wider perspective to things.

I have realised that the only thing which truly brings us security, is not the amount of money in our bank account, or the kind of house we own, nor the number of likes we receive on social media, let alone the feedback we receive from others about the work we do, or the make-up and plastic surgery, nor the expensive clothes and jewellery and definitely not the relationship or love we seek from others. All of these can be taken away from us and then there we are again - right bang centre in our insecurity. Security can not be bought, nor can it be given, it has to be cultivated, because our inherent feeling of security comes from deep within us, deep in our centre, in our solar plexus.

This is where we must come back to time and time again and sit deep into it, as deep as we can, and feel whatever is moving through us, really feel it, not turn away from it, or avoid it or numb from it, but truly feel the uncomfortableness of being right in it and allow it to ease, noticing what is behind it and facing it rather than running away from it. We cannot avoid it, not really, all the other stuff, the external stuff is just part of the patriarchal and commercial illusion. I repeat, we cannot buy security, we really can’t, and no amount of job title or likes on social media will give it either, not really.

When we start to pay attention, we’ll notice where we are people pleasing, where we have energetic imbalances with others and compromise our boundaries, where we are being manipulated, controlled and/or influenced by others (and therefore compromising our boundaries), where we are being inauthentic, when we are saying one thing and meaning another, when we are giving our power away, entering into victimhood and blame hood (we know then, WE have given our power away, no one can take it from us) and when we are caring far too much about what others think because some part of ourselves has not been properly owned and accepted, where we are, therefore, not yet whole.

We’ll also notice that at its core, at its very core, is the mind and the games it plays with us, the mind games as I call them. We’ll notice that it is our mind that creates our feelings of insecurity, just as it is our mind which tells us that we are not worthy enough, beautiful enough, good enough, perfect enough, that we are not enough, and never will be. It is our mind that tortures us and creates our suffering, that causes us to care too much about what others think simply because we’ve gotten very good at projecting and looking outside of ourselves for the very thing our own mind denies us - feelings of security.

I have a feeling this moon cycle has been bringing this all in and will ramp up now until the new moon, so do pay attention, do get into your centre, lay a hand, especially if you are Reiki attuned, and keep coming back to centre. Remind yourself where you are and when - ‘in your centre now, in the present’. This is the gift that the centre brings, the ability to be in the centre, not sent off balance by what has happened previously, or with imaginings of what might happen in the future, but by being truly present to what is happening in any one minute, in this secure and centred moment. This, lovely beings, is the gift of true presence.

Maintaining it is the work though. It is a moment by moment awareness. I have to stay vigilant. You will have to stay vigilant, or maybe you are already. We will all have to stay vigilant. The mind is super powerful and will easily follow tracks and pathways laid. We cannot fill these in, but we can start again. We can form more positive tracks and pathways that tell us that we are enough, that recognise that there is no such thing as perfect so just let go of that and just be all that we are, authentically, even if that means we’re totally different to everyone else, in fact celebrate that, we should all celebrate all our differences for this is what makes us us and not someone else.

We need to catch ourselves time and time again when we feel those old patterns coming in and like a mantra, we repeat “its just my mind, “it’s just my mind and it’s mind games”, “it’s just my mind”, “it’s just my mind games” over and over again until we re-programme ourselves and reclaim all those bits we keep rejecting because of our insecurity around being our true beautiful selves in this crazy world we live in. It’s the path to freedom. And its in each of us. Never outside. Never in someone else’s way or someone’s else’s words. It’s deep within each of us and freedom is our birthright…we just got to own it.

What I will add, is that if we want to go deeper into our centre and free the knots and tension and old patterns of insecurity, anxiety, paranoia and depression then we would do well to release our knees and shoulders first. It is my experience from my practice and from working with others, that the shoulders and knees take us to our centre, because these also hold our insecurity, as we shoulder too much responsibility and carry the weight of our over thinking mind, and struggle to firmly place our feet on the earth and allow movement, becoming rigid and stuck in the knees through fear of the earth dropping away or not being able to stand on our own two feet.

This is where yoga, with deep awareness, can help enormously, going into our knees and shoulders and listening to them, while simultaneously releasing tension from them, not from changing them, but from allowing more of them, more of the roundness of the joint of the knee, and the roundness of the shoulder joint, and allowing their greater freedom. You will feel how this starts to unstick you in the centre, but be aware, because the old feelings will come up to come out, this is the nature of true healing. Obviously Reiki helps with this hugely, each of these modalities worked together, yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda, compliment each other, loosening the soil and pulling out the weed, getting to the root of whatever now needs to be lifted and released.

Enjoy the waning moon!

Love Emma x

The magic of Sark

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there is no place on this earth quite as magical as Sark. For me it is absolutely the sacred isle and I’ve been really fortunate to have spent the last three nights there, and over the heat wave too!

I went over with the two boys and my brother, Ross, sister-in-law, Star, and their daughter, Willow, who are visiting from Byronshire in Australia. We stayed in wooden pods at La Valette Campsite out on the East coast, some distance away from my favourite spot of Little Sark, but glorious nonetheless.

Three nights of no WIFI was amazing in itself, let alone the switch off from emails and technology generally. Not to say the boys didn’t watch their iPads, the thought of no WIFI for three nights was enough to send Elijah into a spin, but he survived nonetheless, and iPad watching usually meant a much needed rest from all the activity, well deserved, both boys excelled in their walking and cycling efforts.

The hotter weather didn’t deter us, and we made the most of all Sark has to offer, but of course barely scratched the surface, this is the island that gives, gives, gives. Not having a phone means I don’t take photos, so I’m grateful to Ross for taking his phone and taking photos for us all, this when we remembered that there was such a provision on his phone.

This means there are no photos of our first night or our first day when we visited Port du Moulin for a high tide morning swim. I’ve swum here many times previously but never on such a high tide and we were lucky to have the beach to ourselves allowing for a naturist swim, nothing quite so freeing. The children thoroughly enjoyed rock jumping and I kept going in the sea for as long as I could, before swimming them back in.

The tide was too high to get around to the pyrite caves but the children had fun finding pyrite stones on the beach, Eben has this knack of finding good crystals and we did return home with one - we asked permission, and will take it back one day soon.

That afternoon, I took the boys down to Port a la Jument, the bay along from port du Moulin. It was hot, but well worth the traipse down the cliff and the rock leaping to access the beach at low tide. We had fun the three of us, more swimming and rock jumping and enjoying the views afforded towards Herm. There were three other people on the beach when we arrived but we were soon on our own and this on a busy Sunday in July, another reason i love Sark, is you can get away from people, and while I can be very sociable, I thrive on quite space.

The second day was heatwave day and it was intense, but we kept going in it! We spent the morning out north at L’Epequerie, which again we had to ourselves and what a treat it was. We walked down an ancient path in a valley and along part of the cliff path to get there, catching sight of a seal along the way. The tide was high again and with no one around we were able to swim freely, more rock jumping for the kiddos and neolithic stone noticing for me.

This island is awash with neolithic stones, hardly surprising though when one considers the geology of the island. Sark is made up of a collection of metamorphic and igneous rocks, some of which are so beautiful that its not surprising they attracted the attention of people back in Neolithic times who no doubt found the island as special as I do. There’s some stones around here and a beautiful oak tree up above the bay, which the children like to climb and hang from!

That lunchtime the boys and I traipsed down to the harbour to meet E who was going us for our final night. Here we were lucky to see a huge pod of dolphins in the distance. I was hoping we’d see them later at Dixcart but alas not! It was super, super hot by then and being Monday a couple of the restaurants were closed, which can complicate Monday lunchtime choices, especially as Stocks was fully booked weeks ago - book early if you are intending to lunch there this summer, we missed out.

We ended up at Nova Bistro in the high street, we did attempt to sit outside but it was far to hot so moved inside. The staff were super lovely and everyone was pleased with their meal and the shade! Our favourite place to eat, where we ate every other lunchtime is the Fleur du Jardin, which is family run and very friendly and affordable, at least compared to many places these days. Hathways, which is under new management this year, was recommended to us but we never quite made it there, their menu looks yummy though. Sark does tend to include a good few chips - my boys are showing off theirs in the group photo!

That afternoon we headed down through the valley to Dixcart, enjoying the shade and that magical and ethereal landscape. We sought shade on the beach and managed to get a good swim and a bit of a rock jump in. It’s a busy beach though, which always puts me off, but the forest is just amazing and no trip to Sark is complete without time spent in that valley, it just makes you feel alive.

That evening I traipsed one to Little Sark as dusk was setting. There’s a Goddess stone along the way I like to visit and various other stones that mark the path out to the dolmen. It is another magical spot that I always have to myself, bar a couple of sheep who usually scarper as soon as they see me! The moon wasn’t up until the early hours, so I got to cycle back under the stars. The clear night sky from Sark is incredible and I cannot help cycling with my head mainly up looking for shooting stars.

There were a couple of magical moments that evening, and I felt very held by the land as I was basically blown back to the campsite without having to put too much effort into cycling, managing it on trust, in the dark, I don’t like to use light at night as you can’t see so much. It might well be almost the middle of July but it was really quiet that evening and it wasn’t until I was almost back at the campsite that I passed someone walking. After a shower I stood outside the pod in awe at the stars, the milky way now visible.

Our last day and we all headed over to Little Sark past Grand Greve, which is a beautiful sandy beach but quite a trek up and down the steps! Regardless, I was super impressed with the children (admittedly Eben was on a tag along on the back of my bike and by all accounts didn’t do much peddling!) and their cycling, it’s along way over to Little Sark and all of our legs were feeling it, Sark can be hard on the body, well if you get out and about. It was well worth the effort. We headed out to La Fontaine, which has been on my ‘to do’ list for a while now as I have never managed a high tide swim here, but can tick that now, and I can understand why it is a favourite of my Sark friend.

Again we were on our own and could make the most of this, protected from the rougher seas in the channel and the sound of thunder towards Guernsey, what a treat, the children doing some final rock jumping into the sea, more wetsuits on and off, an art in itself and I have been grateful of the break from that now we are back on Guernsey and I am working the next few days! This bay has a special feel about it and it didn’t surprise me when Ross, our geologist, spotted a quartz seam.

After lunch we headed down to the harbour and hung out in Le Creux searching for more crystals, there is a quartz cave here and the children loved searching for quality bits to take home with them (we asked permission and no doubt will return, like all the other stones we end up bringing home from the beach). The energy in Le Creux is amazing and I love swimming here at high tide, this day it was low and still got us all in, for our final Sark swim.

I’m always a bit miserable when I return from Sark, it’s like a shock turning up in St Peter Port to all the traffic and general busyness, let alone the crazy Guernsey energy, at least in compassion to the higher vibration and sanctity of Sark, largely unspoilt by modern crappiness. However I can’t really complain, the boys and I headed down to Saints for a swim this morning, the moon still up in the sky, and I spent the day quietly and peacefully in my healing space sharing reiki with others.

Furthermore, I’m headed back to Sark again for our autumnal retreats in a few months time, and might even fit in another trip to Sark with the family between then. It’s the kind of place that just calls and I’m pretty rubbish at resisting it…and there is something special about camping out on the land and just getting away from it all, back to basics, and forgetting that the chaos of the rest of the world carries on anon.

For any of you fancying a trip to Sark then amazingly we do still have some spaces left for our soulful Sark weekend Friday 16th to Sunday 18th September. It’s a really amazing opportunity to stay at Stocks at a group rate and enjoy a weekend of yoga and Sark too, it’s the kind of retreat that absolutely transforms you and attracts students time and time again - you can find out more here - https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/events-calendar/sark-retreat-sept-22