Happy Beltane!

The word ‘Beltane’ comes from Old Irish meaning ‘bright fire’ and marks the transition between spring and summer. It is a celebration of the fertility and rampant potency of life force, when earth energies are at their strongest and most active and there is greater union between earth and sky and the merging of the self with the Self (the sacred marriage). This is a powerful time for union and for bringing dreams into reality; creating a new and greater aligned world in the process - it very REAL!

I LOVE Beltane. The energy is remarkable. Last year my life was changed immeasurably by this energy, in a way I could never have imagined or predicted, the Goddess did enter and weave her magic, strengthening my trust and faith in the process and reminding me that we are never in control, that there are always higher forces at work - read the beginning of the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras if you need reminding of this.

This year too, off the back of the new moon solar eclipse with all its new beginnings, the Beltane energy has weaved its magic into my life, helped no doubt by the Tantric and Taoist practices helping to deepen my connection to heart and yoni, to encourage greater clarity and the inspiration to create again, in a more aligned way, what has been sitting in the shadows awaiting my connection.

I suspect you too are feeling clearer about the path ahead, more connected to that part of you that longs to create and fertilise more of your dreams. This Is Beltane. It encourages greater union on all levels of being, like joining up the dots so that you can see a little more of the bigger picture, and it will awaken dormant energy in yoni, my whole being feels very alive with it, nature is incredibly vibrant, encouraging this opening and desire to move forward in one’s life in a potent way.

Potency really is the word! I managed to catch sunrise this morning from a neolithic sacred space, and enjoy the tranquility of being up so early while many are still asleep! I visited the Goddesses, we are so lucky here to have these menhirs and I had been beaten to it with adorning them, my spring flower offering looks a little simple in comparison to those beautiful garlands, thank you to whoever left them, they look beautiful.

Beauty is the word today. The land is beautiful. Nature is really abundant. We are off to Sark to celebrate and enjoy the beauty and potency of that land, which is so very magical and so very much alive.

For those keen to celebrate, then I am teaching a Yoni Yoga class tomorrow, Tuesday 2 May, in St Martin’s Community Centre, 6-7pm. All women are welcome but please book ahead, https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/events-calendar/yoni-yoga-for-beltane

 Happy Beltane, enjoy the wax, we have the full moon Friday, I can’t wait!

Love Emma x

Being in our nature - needs and not really caring

I know, I can feel it too, there’s a shakiness in the air, but we shouldn’t be surprised, the eclipse gifted us new beginnings and here they are. You only have to look at nature to see how vulnerable new beginnings are, think about baby shoots or baby birds or baby saplings, let alone human babies, we’re all at that stage delicate in our newness and needing of support, from caregivers, from water, from sun, from oxygen, from life force.

I’m feeling into new beginnings too, a new way of relating and being and while I am aware of the triggers, the old patterns that have only just been let go of, I have discovered a trust that was not there previously, a trust that allows the edginess and the slight restless feeling that I might have labelled anxiety before now, but which I can re-label as excitement and anticipation, which changes things and I know now to not get caught up in the mind games, to acknowledge that the thoughts are there that used to send me into a spin, down a well trodden pathway, but I have chosen to move away from those pathways now and create new ones, so I breathe, catch myself and get out into nature.

Nature positively changes things for me. I am nature. You are nature. The problem arises when we separate ourselves from it. If I can be in it, in the thick of it, then I am brought back to my thickness too, to my solidity, to my part in the whole. And if I am quiet and watchful then I notice how nature is constantly communicating with me and how that helps me to rest more easily. How there are blackbirds everywhere currently, because my friend is a blackbird and away from me in space, but with me always, checking in, being present, and I can watch the buzzards bring their message of flying the thermals, resting into the energy, and the tinkering of the water flowing gently down the streams, and the beauty…

…oh my gosh, so breathtakingly beautiful, the beauty of the spring flowers adorning, literally adorning the hedgerows, if ever we doubted abundance then here it is, and the fact that the universe loves to give, that there is beauty there if we open our hearts to see it, beyond the darkness and the fear and the imaginings of what might be, of trying to make life known of the potential disasters upon us, be that political, environmental or otherwise, I just can’t buy into conspiracy. If we can just let go, for a moment and surrender to the experience, then when we are in nature, we realise that there is only presence and this presence is indeed the present, the gift, in the moment, where everything is truly OK.

I practised yoga yesterday with this view (see image) and while my focus was primarily inside myself, and my eyes were closed for the most, there were moments where I stared out at this delight and it struck me, of course nature was, in that moment, teaching me openness. Just look at those blackberry leaves, on the left, and how open they are. They trust. They ask for their needs to be met. They don’t shy away, considering themselves unworthy, or unloveable, no, they open themselves up, ready to receive the sun and the rain and all they need to grow and thrive in this world. They are what they are and they have no question or shame about it.

Working with people, I often have the conversation about needs not being met, of blaming others without recognising and appreciating that only we can truly meet our needs by being honest about what they are in the first place and being able to voice them. I have a wonderful friend who always hates her birthday because each year it is a disappointment and yet I can see so clearly that this is of her own making, on some level she doesn’t feel worthy of making the day her special day, and on other level she doesn’t ask for what she needs to make it a special day and instead expects others to know, and then ends up disheartened when they don’t meet her needs because they don’t know what they are because she hasn’t voiced them let alone owned them.

It’s the same sexually. Many women end up frustrated as their needs are not met and yet many don’t know what those needs are, and lack the confidence or the courage to give voice to them when they do know - to ask to be touched a certain way, or to allow greater intimacy, or to just be without having to reach an outcome - orgasm, for example. I’m fortunate to be immersed in Tantric and Taoist exploration and have a couple of wonderful female friends with whom we can talk very honestly, and with the Tantric collective, very honest sharing, because this conversation is so little heard, we don’t talk enough about our sexuality and our needs as women (or indeed men). We are still so limited by media and the pornographic industry.

I always like to share something that my Ayurvedic doctor told me about the root chakra, and how there were three pillars to it, the one of sex and procreation, as a survival of the species and another of food, to nourish and fuel us and the third, the sacred. At some point in time, maybe when patriarchy marched on in, or maybe it was later, I’m not sure, but at some point, society whipped the sacred out of both and we end up with sex having to look a certain way, think of pornographic imagery, let alone Hollywood film industry portrayal, which has made us collectively feel that that is the way. It isn’t. At least, if you want to explore and experience the sacred in sex, allow it to be a pleasurable and spiritual experience, increasing vitality and positive relationship to self, let alone a path to enlightenment and the alchemy and the sacred marriage, then turn off the TV and turn in instead.

Food too, has had the sacred removed from it. It’s an industry now, about money, always about money, so that people don’t necessarily eat ‘food’ as I might describe food, as something that has prana in it, that nourishes every cell in our body, that enhances our health and wellbeing on all levels of being. Many will take a protein shake or some ochre food stuff manufactured in a factory, devoid of the loving touch of human hands, of hearts and love, of the sun and the moon and the stars, which might infuse our vegetables and fruits growing outside or in greenhouses and we wonder why our digestion is messed up, why we feel bloated and get constipated or have heart burn and acid reflux.

Furthermore, we eat food transported half way around the world, flooded with pesticides and other questionable chemicals, grown in soil devoid of nutrients, handled by people who don’t care, and we wonder why we’re not thriving as a species, increasing numbers of people needing medical care. The sacred has been ripped from our lives. We don’t even necessarily take the time to sit down to eat, we munch at our desks, completely oblivious to what we are shoving in our mouths, not aware of chewing, let alone of whether we’re eating what our body truly needs, not giving ourselves the space the feel or to digest properly (our life experiences as much as our food stuff!)

Life is busy, the demands on us are great, there is little time to just be, unless we have cultivated it, consciously made it so, so maybe it’s not surprising that we don’t always know what our needs are. And when we do, maybe we struggle because we haven’t been taught how to give voice to what we do need, because it’s not always the same as others, and we might have to own our differences and be OK with that, with our non conforming, when we have been taught to conform and be the same - think of school and the uniform and all those rules and regulations, as if some book was gifted when the world was first created about how human beings should live and behave. There is NO book btw, just someone else deciding something at some point and insisting that everyone else live that way. Sigh.

But it is more than that. More often than not, our poor relationship with our Self (note capital “S” as in soul, as in our essence, as in all that is and all that will ever be, our true self) means that we are always looking outside ourself to be filled up, made whole, accepted, loved, make everything OK. Unfortunately this doesn’t work, not long term. To be dependent on another to make us feel whole, creates not only co-dependence but neediness which merely compound our insecurity and lack of worthiness and love for self.

Someone shared this lovely imagery, of holding your hands out together and cupping them as if to receive, because the cup is empty, and how this becomes a begging bowl when we hold it out to others asking them to make us whole, how old we can truly fill ourselves up and make ourselves whole.

Thus every time we notice that we are looking to others to give us love or respect or in some way to value us, we need to pay attention. Rather than blaming them for not giving us this, we need to come back to self and appreciate that it is more often than not us who is not loving, respecting and/or valuing ourselves. This is where the work is required, not on ‘fixing’ the external or changing someone else, but on changing ourselves instead. This doesn’t mean doing anything. It means the opposite. It means letting go of all the doing, of all the conditioning, of all the training, of all the studying that has caused us to relate to self in an unhealthy way - that has caused us to be anything other than who we are at core.

And of course there’s the not caring. This conversation has been coming up increasingly too since the eclipse. We care too much this is the problem. We have been trained to care too much because this keeps us dumbed down, disempowered, insecure, needing validation, and this makes us controllable and causes us to lose our connection with Self, which is emPOWERing, brings us home.

Notice how many times a day you care what others THINK about you. Notice how many THOUGHTS you have in a day. Notice how many times in a week your THOUGHTS change. Yes, you’ll begin to notice the transient nature of thoughts and indeed feelings and most certainly opinions. Honestly, who cares what others THINK about us. Thoughts come and go, come and go, and yet people spend their lives being limited and restricted by the thoughts of others, to the extent that people suffer simply because they don’t feel that they can be themselves.

There are people who will readily share their thoughts and opinions about you. Do you care? Probably. It’s hard not to be at times, when we feel judged and therefore vulnerable, when we are forced to question some aspect of our self or the way that we are living our life, even though we are/were entirely comfortable with it. But really we shouldn’t care, because those people are merely projecting on us their own conditioning and limitations and also there own insecurity, shame, guilt, or whatever it may be, some feeling in them that they are uncomfortable with, or some way that they have been trained to see the world which is different to the way we might might see the world.

When we are feeling vulnerable and unsure, especially now, as we begin again, new beginnings, a new venture, whatever it may be, especially if we are putting ourselves out into the public domain, then this vulnerability, this urghness in the solar plexus and throat, let alone the shakiness in our root, may well invite in (not consciously but from a higher perspective) some challenge, some opportunity for us to look at how much we care and be done with it.

There will be someone who will trigger us, who is triggered by us in the first place. People hate it when we step up and step into our power, they feel threatened by it, because it highlights their own inability to do that. So they criticise and judge and do what they can to try to make us feel uncomfortable - it’s an energetic power game. It’s sad really, because a some point we need to realise and recognise that we are in this together, it’s NOT a competition. I see it played out in the new age spiritual realm, in yoga too, the ego has such a hard time sometimes accepting that whatever is meant for us all not pass us by and that we EACH have a role to play on this planet in serving humanity/the planet in some way and the more doing this, the better I say.

Remember though, that NO ONE can make us feel a certain way. It is US who choose how we feel in response to another person and whatever it is they are bringing to us. No one can make us feel unworthy. No one can make us feel unloveable. Only we can choose to feel these things and if the path is well trodden within us, then we will easily fall back into that thinking. I hope that makes sense. It is our mind! It is always our mind! And believe it or not, you have a choice to change your mind.

So when the challenge comes and someone triggers you and you immediately go into response, buy into your unworthiness, your unloveableness, your insecurity, your imposter syndrome, whatever it may be, stop and breathe. Catch yourself. Go into the body. Feel it. Own it. Accept it. Don’t resist it or reject it - remember what we resist persists. Just breathe into it. Is it a truth? No. It’s someone else’s stuff that they are projecting to us - trying to pass on like a hot potato. Smile. Thank them for being the wonderful teacher that they are. And change the patterning. Own your love, your worthiness, you inner security. Delight in your whole.

And then, like the blackberry leaf we can STAY OPEN. So even when we are vulnerable. Even when we are unsure. Even when it is cloudy and there’s no chance of rain, even when someone is trampling all over us, we can stay OPEN. And we can TRUST that our needs will be met because we know what they are and we are open to receiving them - we know we are worthy, loveable and therefore feel secure in ourselves.

So therefore, even when we are putting ourselves in those new situations that make us feel shaky, we can stay open and not close down our hearts and our soul - we can maintain our faith and trust in the universe and in the process. And the more we do this, the more we will start to notice how often we close down and go into defensive patterning because of the fear of the pain of the rejection or criticism or just not getting our needs met, or not making our dream come true.

We will notice how we close down to spirit (close the crown), close down to our intuition (close the third eye), tighten in the throat (close the throat chakra), close down to heart (close the heart chakra), feel empty in the stomach and do what we can to fill this up in unhealthy and unhelpful ways (think wine, chocolate, junk food, drugs etc) (floppy solar plexus), turn in on ourselves, self deprecating, self depriving, self hatred, self negligence (close sacral chakra) and stop testing the support of the earth and NATURE - our own nature, we slip out of the body and up into the head, creating separation, just as we have been trained to separate ourselves from nature (close root chakra). It’s not surprising we lose connection to self.

So we have to learn to stay present, to life as it unfolds, to all that is happening. Remember it is never happening to us, but for us. We can meet our own needs. We are worthy. TRUST. OPEN. It’s not easy, but like everything, the more we practice and the more we cultivate this state of being then the easier it becomes until we’re being it without even noticing that it could be any other way.

There’s a lot to learn you see by just sitting in nature. The ancient yogis did exactly this and this gave rise to the yoga postures that we still practice today, there’s a reason that many are named after the species from which they derived. Nature provide all that we need to thrive. Knowing our own nature will empower us more than we can imagine, so that we step beyond our limitations and experience greater freedom. Maybe I’m biased, but for me, it is all about freedom - freedom to be in our nature and not caring if anyone else has a problem about that!

Happy wax, we have a penumbral lunar eclipse coming on Friday 5 May…a week away…but Beltane first on 1 May, which we will be celebrating on Tuesday 2 May at the Yoni yoga class in St Martin’s Community Centre 6-7pm, all women are welcome to drop-in for £12 but you will need to book via the website. Please don’t forget the new Wednesday morning yoga class in St Martin’s Parish Hall 9.30-10.30am, which is literally drop-in, no need to book.

And if you are wobbling and need to talk it through, then book in for a Reiki session. While healing, often these sessions end up being a spiritual coaching experience, I often find myself trying to help clients shift perspective and work through whatever is coming up for them, which I might intuitively pick up to help validate how they are feeling. Again, book in via the website.

Love Emma x

New Moon - New Beginnings - New story can now be written...

The build up to this new moon solar eclipse energy is intense, but in an exciting way, well for me at least. I can feel the shift that it is bringing towards greater freedom and simplicity, of the opportunity to shed what is no longer needed and re-identify in a more positive way with who we are at heart, beyond all the labels and woundings and traumas that hold us back and limit us from shining more brightly into the world.

I know many of you are feeling the squeeze, the discomfort of the not knowing and the uncertainty and the chaos that ensues, the challenges, the obstacles and just coming up against yourself over and over again. This my friends is LIFE. It is the NOW, and the now and the now. And as I am always reminded when I pick up the Yoga Sutras, the practice is for the NOW. NOW. With all its drudgery and suffering, all its confusion and discomfort. It is not for when everything is rosy and lovely and light fulled, because that would be to reject the NOW and to live in Disney world again.

Yes, beautiful beings, it is indeed a harsh day when we realise that so much of what we have been told about life here on Planet Earth is actually an illusion, that there is no happy ever after, no Prince Charming appearing after we kiss the frog (no Prince appearing when we buy new shoes that feel so right either for that matter), no gold under the rainbow and no finally, finally, finally, feeling that it all fits together and we can float on our cloud of love and light and beautiful radiant ever lasting harmony. Ha, ha, bloody ha.

I wanted to believe it, so badly. And I DID believe it for a good while. That was the problem. And I held myself up against the Disney ideal for too many miserable years of never quite making it and believing I must have it wrong, or be wrong, or not be good enough, or worthy enough, or just not be in favour with the universe. You know, the one you see in the movies, where everything is seemingly wonderful and perfect - the perfect marriage, the perfect family, the perfect home, the perfect body, the perfect job, the perfect blinking life. Companies make an absolute fortune feeding this illusion - it is the reality of capitalism.

Obviously I was disappointed. No happy ever after? No perfect, well anything? Because I had been sold it. I had bought into it. I did believe in it. Crickey, I even tried to live it - the perfect me, goodness, what an exhausting concept and even more exhausting reality, trying to make it so. It’s not surprising I aways felt so hopeless. New age spiritualism only complicated matters. This told me that if I just imagined it, visualised it, cut out images that represented it, thought only thoughts that allowed it, kept orientating to love and light, fixed myself a little bit more, then I’d make it so IN THE FUTURE. Ha, ha, ha. More of the illusion.

Nope my friends. This is IT. NOW. This messy and tricky moment, this squeeze, this uncertainty, this urghness, this coming up against ourselves. All of this, is IT. And it seems to me the sooner that we can accept this and stop rejecting it, or fighting it, or trying to avoid it, deny it, get any from it, or in any way try to make it different, the easier our ride will be. The way supports us. We’ve just got to get out of our way first. IT truly is about living in the PRESENT. It is a gift. Not what happened previously and not what might happen eventually.

In fact it is this ruminating, towards the future, our imaginings, when it might just come together, that screws us up the most, that feeds us an unrealistic expectation of what might happen when we have our shit together. WHEN WE MIGHT have made all the changes that we feel we need to make to make life easier than it is right now in this moment if only this hadn’t happened to us, or this person did this for us, or the weather didn’t get in the way of our plans.

We need to let go of our attachment to outcome, of believing it needs to look a certain way - this is without doubt one of our greatest sufferings. We need to let go of trying to control things, possibly one of the most difficult things in the world because so many of us are control freaks because of the fear of…well, being out of control of course…which arises because of our fear of….usually it’s around loss of feelings of security and safety, usually because we’ve experienced that feeling at some point in our life, maybe as children, and we do all we can to avoid feeling the feeling again…

Of course it’s the EGO. And yes, we need the ego, it’s our friend at times trying to keep us safe, but also our enemy at times too, keeping us limited because of its fear of repeating painful experiences from the past and therefore keeping us trapped in unhelpful patterns. It has this annoying tendency to believe itself to be right, and therefore makes the mind rigid which makes it hard to let go because the mind will do all it can to prove that it is right, and will give us a very hard time if we question it, until something happens and we finally surrender and feel lighter and freer for it, until we do it all over again, buying into the idea that there is a right/wrong, good/bad, black/white, fixing ourselves one way and having to prove it and generally trapping ourselves in the process.

It’s a perspective shift for sure, and a letting go of the conditioning too. We have been conditioned to believe that we can have it all. We can’t. It’s an illusion. Instead we take what we need and we leave the rest…simplicity is the way of ease, why overcomplicate things? But here we are again, conditioned to complicate things.

Conditioned too, by modern psychology, to ruminate indefinitely about our PAST. Which can cause us to get stuck there, over-identifying with what has happened to us. This has formed part of my enquiry of late, which arose on reading Gabor Mate’s new book about trauma. I noticed, having never really come across him previously, that he identifies very much with his childhood trauma story and it made me question whether we ever stop being defined by our past and our perceived trauma, or whether we constantly allow it to inform our present and therefore our future too - so that in effect we become our trauma/condition and reinforce it over and over again by our (over) identification with it.

It is my experience that we need to be careful here. It may just be words but words are powerful things. Is it MY depression or did I just suffer WITH depression? Because I suffered with depression, does that make me a depressive all my life, or was it just a momentary thing, an experience?

Personally, depression was not a part of me, I existed before depression and I existed after it. And yes, while I wrote a book about it, in a quest to process the story and share it in the hope it may help others, I do not want to be defined by it. I am so much more than that experience. The story has been told and I don’t now feel to re-live it, or be limited by it.

It’s the same with the life experiences and perceived trauma that contributed to the depression. I am aware that it is very easy to get caught up in these, to lay blame and hold onto stubborn unforgiveness. I have worked hard to overcome this in my own life, to accept that life happens for us, not to us and t find peace with this and forgiveness too. Forgiveness sets us free but is one of the most difficult things in the world, when we feel we have been harmed in some way and harbour anger about this. At some point we have to find the strength to let this go too - more often than not the hardest bit is forgiving ourselves and letting of the related defensive patterns that thread and weave their way through our various energy centres like invisible thread.

The trouble is, unless we do find some peace, then we allow ourselves to keep re-living the pattern, because there will be triggers and our mentality will be thus affected and it is easy to drop into a pattern of negativity all over again. We have to realise that this too is a choice. Our mindset is a choice. It was a revelation to me the moment I realised this and noticed my tendency towards the negative. It takes effort to change this, one has to gently cultivate a more positive mindset, it doesn’t just arise easily, we have to witness our thoughts and notice our patterning and question it and consciously change it.

Always there is the opportunity for change. And changing our story is entirely possible, when we change our mindset and decide to move on, let go, move on and begin again. Personally I have no interest in perpetuating old stories. I look back at old photos and there was a time I was really down about these, about the way I behaved, about the person I was back then, because I was so unhappy and often drunk (at least in the photos) and I noticed how my spirit flagged, almost giving myself a hard time NOW for what happened THEN.

I decided to set myself free. We can only work with our level of consciousness in any one moment. I was not conscious back then. I was suffering. In the midst of eating disorder, hating and loathing myself on a daily basis. I found solace in drinking alcohol, it number me from my pain. I didn’t know another way back then. But the way found me. And many of you will know this from reading my book. There is always another way. And I took it. And while it’s not been easy at times, I know there is no going back. That there is another story, always another story, not yet written.

I am happy to make peace with that part of me that knew no better. What is the point in perpetuating my suffering by giving myself a hard time about it? Only we can truly set ourselves free. And we have this moment to do it. NOW. I’ve had an amazing life thus far and I’m grateful for all the crazy experiences, even those very drunken ones, they were fun! But I didn’t want that story to be the only one.

The trouble is, people love their stories to the extent that they can get trapped by them, boring the pants off others with their re-telling and over-identification, frustrating others too, because of the manner in which it prevents them living in the PRESENT.

But letting go is tricky. Who are we without these stories?

For me, it’s very EXCITING when we reach this moment. When we realise that we don’t need to be burdened by our past anymore. That we can let go and write a new story now.

And this is what is exciting about this new moon because it is gifting us the opportunity to be more than how we have labelled, defined and limited ourselves from our PAST experience. We are being given the chance to break free. NOW is the time to change the story.

Remember, life happens for us, not to us. Our higher self draws in experiences to help us realise more of itself in this lifetime. We are never given more than we can handle. And we are always supported. We are never alone. There is always a WAY. We just have to keep surrendering moment to moment because life will rarely turn out the way we expect, or want it to. BUT it will always give us what we need - helping us to let go of trying to control outcome, of being able to rest more easily into the flow, of being able to find a greater depth to our love than we could have ever possibly imagined…

The moment we think we’ve got it, made it, found it, is the moment we probably haven’t, and is the moment the universe will usher in another challenge or experience or obstacle for us to navigate, to bring us deeper into the PRESENT.

It’s an illusion to believe that only love and light exists. It doesn’t. This is to deny the shadow. We all have shadows. Usually they’re being mirrored back at us. The moment we are triggered by another, is the moment to pay greater attention, because that other will be mirroring back to us the aspect within ourselves that we have rejected and/or not integrated, that in some way annoys us about ourself to the extent that we deny it…

When we find ourselves blaming others for our experience, take note. It is ALWAYS about US. Not someone else. Take responsibility for each experience and truly own it. You are NOT being punished. You ARE enough. You have ALL you need within you. Switch off, switch IN.

We each have the choice each day, to close to fear and the negative or to open to love and the positive.

The mind can be both our greatest enemy, and our greatest liberator. It is a choice.

This is the reason I love yoga because it is all about containing the mind. It is only in containing the mind that we can realise more of our eternal self, the part of us that doesn’t need stories or labels or false identifications. Not to say that those stories and labels and identifications don’t help us access more of our eternal self - our soul - because they can, only that we have to make sure that we, at some point, let them go…

It is about FREEDOM.

Celebrate your differences.

Being completely selfish. After all, who really wants to be selfless? I mean what is the point in that? I’ve never understood why we celebrate selflessness. At core, we are Self. Why give our Self away to others?

This new moon is gifting us freedom. Freedom to choose again. Freedom to write new stories. Freedom to let go of all those responsibilities and burdens we have been carrying that are holding us back, all those old stories and labels and identifications that keep us tied to the past. Freedom to let go of ANYTHING that is holding us back. Freedom to just BE…positive…loving…trusting.

Ultimately it always comes down to trust, faith and love. Trust in the self. Trust in the path. Trust in the practice. Trust in the Earth. Trust in spirit, Trust in Source.

But trusting has to be cultivated. Faith has to be cultivated. Love has to be allowed to flow.

Acceptance of what is happening NOW is truly helpful. Not projecting to a future when it all works out. This is IT.

So really there is nothing that needs to be DONE. Instead we have to undo the doing and the trying to be anything more than our unique and wonderful and beautiful selves, each a drop of God, radiating out into the world…and this brings us back to simplicity and to this MOMENT and to our HEART.

Sometimes we just have to trust…and pay attention…listen to our heart…and try not to buy into the ILLUSION.

Happy new moon solar eclipse, may it bring you exactly what you most need to write a new story now of what happens next.

Love Emma x

The menopause - a fresh perspective

This is a copy of an article I wrote for the Guernsey press, which was published on Wednesday 5 April.

On the one hand it is good news, the menopause is no longer as stigmatised and shamed as it once was, but we still have a long way to go to welcome it as the potentially empowering and positively life changing transition in a woman’s life that it can be.

Sadly there is still a lot of fear around menopause and the medical mindset is often one of deficiency and ‘management’, requiring women to take medication for fear that as soon as they ‘go through’ menopause their bodies will simply fall apart and waste away, that ‘normal’ (whatever that means) will never be quite the same again.

Hoorah I say. Who wants to be ‘normal’ anyway. We are all of us different and unique with different and unique needs and often all the menopause is highlighting is where we are out of alignment with our individual needs as a human being, both mental, emotional, spiritual, psychological and physiological.

If we can find the courage to go within, to cultivate respect for this natural process, then we may actually find it an incredibly empowering and life affirming experience, as we literally transition from one way of being to another. 

There is much I could write about the pressures of our ageist culture, about our attractiveness as women as sexual objects and the accompanying fear around how we might become dry, brittle, parched and devoid of our sexual energy, or how we might turn into the eccentric crone or witch of fairy tales with our hairy moles to boot, or simply become invisible to the rest of society, redundant now that we can no longer pro-create.

But really this is all nonsense, general cultural negativity that is not true and yet feeds some of our fear around the changes that the menopause creates. Yet in reality, no other time in a woman’s life provides quite the same potential for understanding and tapping into a woman’s power as this one. This of course, if a woman can negotiate her way through this cultural negativity that has clouded and indeed shrouded menopause for centuries - and supports any nutritional depletion in her diet – otherwise a negative and self-destructive experience of menopause can manifest.

However if a woman can challenge the negativity and address her specific nutritional needs after years of most likely being all things to many different people - raising children, running a household, building careers, founding businesses, looking after elderly parents, supporting friends and extended family members – then she has, during the menopause, an opportunity to discover a deeper layer of self, which brings with it increasing freedom and self-love/worth.

Essentially, at menopause, women find themselves at a crossroads, where they have the choice to both burn away much of the rubbish from the first half of their lives and complete some of the tasks that they started in adolescence. At this time, a woman may look back at her life and question her journey, where she has been and what she has done, achieved and experienced.  Now is the time to let go of and grieve broken and unrealised dreams, and prepare the foundations for the later stage of her life. It is possible that a crisis ensues which has nothing to do with hormonal changes, but is more so about where she has directed her life thus far and whether she feels that she has fulfilled earlier dreams and ambitions and allowed herself to follow her passions.

It is at this stage that women begin to feel a deep need for self-expression that likely went ignored after adolescence as women instead did what was required to “fit in” and ignored various unique aspects of self.

As Dr Christiane Northrup writes in her fabulous book, “Women’s bodies, women’s wisdom”, “I like to think of midlife women like myself as dangerous – dangerous to any forces existing in our lives that seek to turn us into silent little ladies, dangerous to the deadening effects of convention and niceness, and dangerous to any accommodations we have made that are stifling who we are now capable of becoming”.

Menopause is a time when women may scrutinise all aspects of their lives and let go of dead end relationships that lack the love and intimacy that she craves, quitting jobs and ending careers that she has now outgrown, that are no longer aligned with her deepest truth and may well never have been, but she lacked the courage until now to do something about it. Essentially she begins to clear all dead wood that no longer serve who she is becoming, that waste her time and energy and in some way limit the truth of who she is at heart and soul – that person she was in adolescence!

Menopause is truly an exciting time if women can do the developmental work – the inner work – that her body and her hormone levels call out for. This is a time for her to honour her heart and soul and to live from this perspective, to truly give to herself what she most needs, and to let go of anything out of alignment with this. When she dares to take herself seriously and realise her power, then she can truly prepare for the unfolding of the second half of her life.

Strong female character

Well that was certainly a beautiful full moon in libra last Thursday. I managed to watch it rise from a neolithic site, a huge ball of orange rising into the sky, quite a treat! I’m on a mission you see to try to follow and understand it’s movement patterns ahead of the next major lunar standstill in 2025.

The moon fascinates me. It does what the sun does in a year, in a month, it is always on the go, much like me! It also moves through its prior of waxing and waning, as we women do too, with our monthly cycles, and is never constant, reminding us that we also don’t need to be constant - that’s a very masculine and linear energy.

I love how each month the new and full moons gift us new insights and opportunities to go within, to know ourselves on a deeper level. This full moon was no different and my perspective has certainly shifted as I have been encouraged to consider my sensitivity in a new light and reminded that there is nothing to fix, just an allowing instead. I’m grateful to my bold friends for reaching out.

I’m reading this really amazingly honest, like truly breathtakingly honest, book at the moment, written by Fern Brady about her journey as a woman with autism called Strong Female Character. As written in the synopsis, “Fern Brady was told she couldn't be autistic because she's had loads of boyfriends and is good at eye contact. This is a story of how being female can get in the way of being autistic and how being autistic gets in the way of being the 'right kind' of woman.”

This is a book that refreshingly cuts through the right/wrong, good/bad bias and gives one permission to just be oneself regardless of social norms and expectations, which is so often the root of all of our issues around our identity and relationship with self.

Even in spiritualism we can get ourselves caught up in this, if not more really, holding ourselves up because we are not meditating enough, able to practice ‘advanced’ (or indeed so called ‘basic’) yoga poses despite our years of practice, of not being confident enough yet in ourselves despite all the circles we have attended, still feeling wounded, despite all the therapists we have seen and the crystals we wear, still uncomfortable in our own skin despite all the different nutritional approaches we have tried, with all their powders and supplements and probiotics. If we’re not careful we can get caught in the same paradigm we are trying to escape - the one of labelling and judgement.

The trouble is, our own conditioning is often so deep, that even when we make some breakthroughs in terms of how we see the world and other people in it, we still hold ourselves up to our internal judgement system, still giving ourselves a hard time if we don’t live up to our individual sense of perfection, until we finally realise that perfection doesn’t exist and all we’ve done is transfer perfection in the mundane world to perfection in the spiritual realm instead.

I did this myself so I talk from experiences, of popping myself up on a pedestal when I first started teaching yoga, not because I thought I was better, but because I thought I had to be a certain way and almost causing a break down in the process because of the tension and stress of trying to be someone I wasn’t and giving myself a bloody hard time for my inability to be as spiritually perfect as I felt I needed to be to teach yoga in the first place.

Back then I was still smoking roll-ups and joints when off island and I would give myself such a hard time, because this absolutely wasn’t what yoga teachers should be doing. I also put myself under a huge amount of pressure to look a certain way, because in my head, yoga teachers had to be slim and lithe and all this did was keep triggering my eating disorder at the time, so that I was never truly healing, just masking, and disappearing regularly down a rabbit hole instead.

I also felt I needed to know everything, because of the intensity of the imposter syndrome and not wanting to get ‘caught out’, so I attended an extensive number of yoga workshops, some of which were a complete waste of time and money because I either wasn’t ready or wasn’t engaged simply because I find it so difficult to sit still and focus for hours on end to someone talking - as many of you know who try to send me audios to listen to or videos to watch, sorry, but I can’t do it, I have the attention span of a nat, unless it totally engages me, I’ll drift off within minutes. Thus, I was always far more engaged on the courses which involved practice and first hand experience.

I’ll never forget attending a yoga therapy course in Vancouver with the most lovely bunch of women and being offered dark chocolate as a snack during the course. This was revolutionary to me - chocolate on a yoga course, but um, isn’t that bad? Actually no, it’s wonderful and one of the many attractions of attending Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s courses in London (another truly inspiring lady) were the chocolates on the altar that we could snack on during the day to keep us grounded, what with all the yoga nidra.

As many of you know, I like to bring chocolate or energy balls along to my courses for this very reason, to ground, and also to remove the association of chocolate somehow being bad or unspiritual. It isn’t. Nothing is. It is only our mind that creates the separation and division and determines something good and something bad. We can find the spiritual in everything. One of my friend’s went to prison one time and he found that one of the most spiritually growing periods of his life. I had a yoga teacher who spent time surrounded by death at some funeral pyre in India for months on end and for him that was his most enlightened experience thus far.

I have always found that my most enlightening experiences have been in the dross, when I have been severely challenged and have had to learn, ta da, to surrender…and this is really what it is all about, surrendering the mind and it’s conditioning to see ourselves, each other and life a certain way, to set ourselves free from our judgements and our limiting sense of right/wrong, good/bad etc. It is whatever you make it. And when you reflect on it, you realise that initially you’ll make it what you were told to make it, how you were trained to make it.

But my golly, the mind has a hard time getting go. The ego has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. It has spent a lifetime protecting this option/judgement/way of seeing things and to realise that they’re is no truth to it, to realise that it is just a conditioning/training/fabrication is a tricky process to go through because the ego fights to hold onto its way of seeing things, it’ll hold on and on, and get very annoyed if anyone challenges it, and only after some time, some experience, some challenge, something that the universe brings in to help us let go will we do so, but often anyway, not without a lot of anger and tears and frustration…it’s a big deal, our pride has to drop away too, our righteousness, never easy for those of us pitta folk!

Mind you the kapha folk don’t have an easy time ether as they loathe letting go. And the vata types will often disappear into anxiety and might struggle then to move on because the anxiety can be all encompassing, almost freezing them, until they can gently let go into a new way of being as they come to terms with whatever mental patterning is no longer serving them. We are all different in ours ways of surrendering and the drama that may or may not accompany this, let alone the physical symptoms and emotional outpouring.

It’s interesting to me to pull it all the way back and to wonder how our mind as a human being was right at the beginning of our existence on planet earth. When there was no religion, no culture, no social norms, no education, no systems, no technology, no media, no medical industry, no BigPharma, no social media, no nothing other than us as part of nature - not even us and nature, or us in nature, but us literally as a part of it all, no separation. No wonder neolithic man and women were capable of creating such amazing stone structures, connecting areas of the earth, like one big crystal grids charged by the sun and the moon, and living in harmony.

Over the years I have found myself questioning my inability to fit in to conventional society, my always being different, which is not a choice, it’s just what it is. I mean we’re all different in our own ways, but it is one thing being different and trying to fit in, and quite another being different and being ok with that to the extent that at some point you stop trying to fit in. It was a relief when I reached that point. It was also a relief when one of my friend’s gave me permission to celebrate my differences. Celebrate the differences!

I remind my clients of this when they are battling away with their uniqueness and trying to see it as something that needs fixing or changing. No! Embrace it. It’s what makes you YOU. Why try to be someone else? Yet we do this from an early age, such is our social conditioning to be accepted and liked by others, so that we can easily lose ourselves along the way. Others stay true and have to endure the bullying and judgements that comes because they’re not the same as others, whether that be because they dress or behave differently. We’re really not very nice at times, threatened by others for this very reason - they’re being themselves.

That’s the reason I loved Fern’s book so much, because she is herself. This is one of the many gifts of autism. I see it with Elijah and I see it with my friend’s son too. They are very much true, and wouldn’t even consider that there could be another way, because their sense of honesty is so embedded. Women are different though. Women try to camouflage to fit in. And this is the reason it is more difficult to diagnose autism in girls and more so in women.

And I know that there are many judgements about diagnosing or not, about the benefit of doing so versus the stigma that still remains, but research does indicate that for the autistic person receiving a diagnosis is usually a huge relief and allows them to make sense of the reason they are different and to be in a better position to celebrate that or indeed just be ok with it. And let’s be honest, at the end of the day, it’s just our society’s way of trig to make sense of their sensitivity and higher vibrational frequency - we know that they are the lighter ones sent in to help us to make changes here on planet earth, because their brains perceive life differently and therefore they can help create a different, lighter reality…

Anyway, for me and my clients/students, the full moon was digging deep into the solar plexus and heart, asking people to take back their power and within this, their identification with self, and to truly celebrate who they are IN THIS MOMENT, not as the person they feel they should be, or want to be in the future, but their core self right now in this moment. And to love, obviously, themselves for who they are, not to give their power away to others seeking external validation of worth, or requiring love from others to make up for the love they don’t feel for themselves. Self-love is key.

Thus letting go of our judgements about ourselves and others is important. To question why we feel the way we do, why we hold an opinion one way or the other. And to consider the many ways we look outside ourself for validation of worth and love, and what therefore prevents us finding this within ourselves.

Also, just to accept all the ways we are different, to make peace with ourselves and to let go all the striving (as I know only too well) and the stress that accompanies this need to be someone other than who we are - to be more evolved or spiritually awake or any of the other new age terms that end up limiting us by their very nature - and just accepting ourselves in this moment with all our awkwardness and quirkiness and strangeness and beautifulness too.

Now we’re on the wane, which is usually a gentle time, but let’s see, we have an eclipse coming on the new moon on April 20th…

Those of you keen to get more into your cycle and embrace the yin energy, especially with Beltane approaching, then my next Yoni course starts on Tuesday 26 April and there is a drop-in option this course, because of all the bank holidays. You can sign up here, https://www.beinspiredby.co.uk/events-calendar/april-may-yoni-yoga-course

Love Emma x