Yoga practice and our patriarchal conditioning
My last blog was exploring patriarchy and the effect on our conditioning and began to touch on how this might have influenced our approach to yoga, and whether this has been healthy, especially for us women.
What I mean by that, is whether the style of yoga we practice, whether a trend or not, is harmonising any energetic imbalances, especial from a divine masculine/feminine perspective and helping to set up free from our conditioning and perceived limitations which literally limit us and keep us stuck in more of the same.
My favourite quote of all time as many of you know is by Henry Ford,
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
I have become increasingly curious whether repeating the same approach to practice over and over again helps or hinders and whether repeating someone else’s approach to practice – yin or yang - allows us our freedom.
As I explore this further, I have found it helpful to remind myself of the origins of our modern day approach to yoga and I share a little of this now. Please note that I am not a historian and am relying on information shared with me by my teachers and by what I have read previously.
It all started with Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (18 November 1888 – 28 February 1989), who was an Indian yoga teacher, Ayurvedic healer and scholar, often called the ‘Father of Modern Yoga’. He is seen as one of the most important gurus of modern yoga for his wide influence on the development of postural yoga. Like Yogendra and Kuvalayananda, he contributed to the revival of hatha yoga because of their emphasis on the physical.
Krishnamacharya’s students include many of yoga’s most renowned and influential teachers, notably Indra Devi (1899-2002), K Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009), BKS Iyengar (1918-2014), and his own son, TKV Desikachar. As is the traditional way, Krishnamacharya taught each student depending on their individual needs, which is the reason that they each went on to teach quite differently and yet had a massive influence on the yoga that we know today, probably infusing the style of yoga that you yourself practice.
For example:
Indra Devi – was a pioneering teacher of yoga as exercise, having been the first woman to study under Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace, alongside BKS Iyengar and K Pattabhi Jois. She went to India in her twenties (born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia) and became a film star.
She was invited later to a wedding in Mysore where Krishnamacharya lived and worked, and she asked him if she could study with him but he refused, stating that he did not teach women or foreigners. Indra was disappointed but determined and she approached her friend, the Maharaja, Krishnamacharya’s employer, and he directed Krishnamacharya to instruct her. Krishnamacharya hesitantly took Indra as a student. Apparently, he was strict and difficult with her in the hope that she might quit.
Krishnamacharya ordered Indra to follow a strict vegetarian diet and a difficult daily schedule. To his surprise she showed dedication studying asana and pranayama for eight months alongside Iyengar and Jois.
Krishnamacharya gained increasing respect for her and his son, Desikachar, said later that Indra changed his father’s viewpoint, with Krishnamacharya later saying that “women are the future in yoga and for yoga in the West”.
While Indra started teaching in China, she moved to the US and set up a yoga studio in West Hollywood in 1947, where she taught celebrities including Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, and Gloria Swanson. Here she earned herself the nickname, “first lady of yoga”. Her biographer, Michelle Goldberg, wrote that Devi “planted the seeds for the yoga boom of the 1990s”.
Michelle also commented that for most of her life, Devi’s only goal was to bring yoga to the West, which certainly has been the case and she played a significant role in helping to make it a predominantly female pursuit, even if the yoga that has become popular is much more vigorous than the style Devi taught – and note that the style she taught, is not the style taught to her by Krishnamacharya, she developed her own style to teach to Westerners.
K Pattabhi Jois
Krishnamacharya started teaching Jois, an Indian, when he was only 12 years old. At that time he needed a practice that promoted his growth and vitality through his teenage years. Apparently Krishnamacharya researched an ancient text he called the Yoga Korunta in 1924 and he shared this with Jois. He claimed to have learned the text from his own teacher named Rama Mohan Brahmachari on a supposed seven year stay in the Himalayas. The practices included asana (postures), vinyayas (connecting movements), pranayama (breathing exercises), bandhas (core muscular and energetic locks) and drishti (visual focal points). Jois systemised this approach and went on to share it as Ashtanga yoga.
This is the style of yoga that first drew me in. I was very much in my masculine energy, playing competitive sports and working my way up the career ladder, competing with the men for managerial positions, wearing suits to boot and seeking perfection in everything I did. It’s perhaps not surprising that I wasn’t happy, never quite living up to my idea of perfection, suffering from eating disorder, depression, PMS and a strong dislike for myself.
I was out of balance and yoga was a gift which entered my life at just the right time. While Ashtanga yoga is not inherently competitive, it did allow me to apply my competitive nature to it, because it follows a set sequence and one cannot progress to the next level until all the postures in the first level have been mastered. I was competing with myself as much as I was competing with everyone else in the room.
I had been taught by my patriarchal conditioning to achieve, to prove myself, to progress in some way into a future where I would be successful, perfect, and finally experience happiness. Obviously this is an illusion but I bought into it and invested in it because I knew no different, and yoga was now offering me another path to this end goal of success, perfection and happiness, just I’d do it on my mat now. Ha.
Not only that but the athletic nature of the practise, with its emphasis on strength and flexibility, came easily to my body, it was used to me working out and pushing it. I loved that I could practice many of the strengthening postures comfortably while others struggled, and that my flexibility could be enhanced by really pushing it – I could quickly see the ‘results’ and it didn’t take me long to establish a dedicated daily practice to further ‘progress’. In reality I was really caught up in my masculine energy and had the shoulders to prove it!
This is not to say that things weren’t changing, they were. Yoga by its very nature changes things. Only that this approach to practice allowed me to bypass a lot of my body issues, making me even more obsessed about the external, feeding my obsession with it, and encouraging more of the same in my mind, increased rigidity and emphasis on a linear ‘progress’ approach, and left me frequently disappointed when I still found that I didn’t really like myself very much, despite my trying to perfect my practice.
A year into my yoga practice, I ventured to Byron Bay, the yoga capital of Australia at that time to immerse myself in yoga. Here I discovered what was called dynamic yoga, a combination of Ashtanga and Iyengar, which I had not practiced previously.
Iyengar yoga arose from BKS Iyengar, another Indian student of Krishnamacharya, who also happened to be his brother-in-law. Iyengar had been very sick as an infant and throughout his childhood he struggled with malaria, TB, typhoid, fever and general malnutrition. Krishnamacharya asked Iyengar to join him in Mysore and improve his health through the practice of yoga postures. During a two year period, while Krishnamacharya only taught Iyengar for about 10-15 days, these teachings had a positive influence on Iyengar and when he was 18 Krishnamacharya sent Iyengar to Pune to spread the teachings of yoga.
Iyengar’s approach to yoga postures is focused on strict alignment principles, this because he was coming at it from a health perspective and was very specific about how a student should place their body to improve their health. This of course, a different approach to Jois, who had arrived to yoga, not through ill health, but with a need for a practice that promoted his vitality during his teenage years. Both of them, Jois and Iyengar, shared the same teacher, but the practices given to them were very different and what they did with those teachings was also very different.
The way they were taught was also different. I won’t go into this now because it’s a whole massive subject all of itself around heart and compassion and the manner in which yoga influences us on that level. From what I gather Krishnamacharya was tough on his students, easily criticising them and especially Iyengar. It is said that Iyengar never really recovered from the criticism he received, and it was not unusual for him to bark at his students and be hard on them too, sometimes slapping them to wake up a part that may have been unconscious.
Iyengar attracted his students by offering them just what they sought – usually physical stamina and flexibility. He conducted demonstrations and later, when a scooter accident dislocated his spine, began exploring the use of props to help disabled people practice yoga. Propping in yoga has continued to this day, albeit this is not something that is used in the Ashtanga tradition. Here Jois was renowned for giving intense adjustments taking students beyond their physical and psychological comfort zone that at times caused injury in his students, and now we are aware that he was sexually abusing them too. See, a whole other subject about ethics and morality, for another time perhaps.
Here in Australia the dynamic yoga classes sought to combine the two approaches, namely the precision of bodily alignment and the focus that this demands, (the perfection one might say) and the movement of the body linked with the breath through set patterns. Both systems promoted strength, stamina, flexibility and balance.
I was quickly hooked not least because I felt infinitely better for the practice, but simply because of my obsession with perfecting and advancing my yoga practice and here was an approach that not only fed my need for physical workout but also fed my need for perfection, because the strict alignment principles now gave me something to work with – a right way or a wrong way, black or white. This regardless of my body and its needs, or whether putting my body in such a strict shape was healthy for it or not. That didn’t matter, my body needed to fit the pose, not the other way around.
I was soon practising up to six hours a day with two male teachers mainly, feeding an eating disorder by living on fruit alone (I wanted to have the perfect yoga body, which I believed to be very light and lean) and it is perhaps not surprising that my periods stopped. I was jubilant, no menstruation getting in the way of my practice, but really what it showed was that I was not healthy, feeding my masculine energy, which was out of balance in the first place.
It took me a long time to let go of this approach to yoga which I taught for many years and was well received by my students because they too were often caught in the patriarchal conditioning of exercise, perfection and achievement.
Even when I found my teacher who tried to untrain me and open me up to a more feminine approach to practice, I would still find myself practising in my old masculine way, after our lessons together, because in my mind I had to push and jump around my mat if I hoped to see change. What I failed to realise, was that the greatest change, at least on the inside, would come when I let go of my yoga practice having to be a certain way – the way taught to me mainly by men previously.
There was one other influential student taught by Krishnamacharya, namely his son, TKV Desikachar, born in Mysore in 1938. Desikachar had a formal education which cumulated in a degree in engineering. However, shortly after beginning his career in this field, he decided to become a yoga teacher after a realisation of the great skills and knowledge that his father was offering.
He asked his father to be his teacher and guide and stayed at his side and learned from him until his death at 100. Desikachar founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai in his father’s honour.
Early in Desikachar’s yoga teaching and studies, his father asked him to teach the famous philosopher, Krishnamurti. This led to him accompanying Krishnamurti on a lecture tour of Europe and began his involvement with Western students, many of whom then committed themselves to 2 to 3 years of practice with him in India. As they in turn returned home, they set out to spread the teachings to a wider western audience with the main message that yoga practice needs to be tailored to suit the individual, more like bespoke tailoring that “off the peg”.
This was very much the approach of his father, Krishnamcharya, who considered every student as "absolutely unique" and incorporated his knowledge of Ayurveda working with his students on a number of levels including adjusting their diet, creating herbal medicines and setting up a series of yoga postures that would be most beneficial. Krishnamacharya particularly stressed the importance of combining breath work (pranayama) with the postures (asanas) of yoga and meditation (dhyana)) to help them heal and reach their goal.
Furthermore, he believed that the most important aspect of teaching yoga was that the student be "taught according to his or her individual capacity at any given time". Thus, for Krishnamacharya, the path of yoga meant different things for different people, and each person ought to be taught in a manner that he or she understood clearly.
I am now very fortunate to have two wonderful female teachers in my life who very much adopt this approach. I met both ladies by chance – thank you synchronistic nature of the universe - when I was stuck in my dynamic vinyasa practice when my boys were little. That approach to practice had taken me so far, and I am grateful for those teachings, but as I have mentioned, it got to a point where it was merely feeding more of what now needed to be healed and shifted and I absolutely needed to begin to let go of my patriarchal conditioning and find a more feminine approach to practice instead to set me and my students free.
The first to come in was Helen, who is a TSYP teacher, this the Society of Yoga Practitioners who follow the teachings of T Krishnamacharya and TKV Desikachar. She has taught me Vedic chanting, philosophy, especially the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and asana and pranayama. Her approach has always been about what I most need and while it has been difficult at times, calming and slowing things down, I can now really appreciate the benefits of practicing in a way that is so very different to the dynamic vinyasa approach.
I was also led to Louise who is a Scaravelli-inspired teacher. Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian yogini was taught by both Iyengar and Desikachar as well as being good friends with Krishnamurti. She never wanted a lineage named after her, albeit she does have a following of students who will align with her as Scaravelli-inspired teachers. She developed an interest in the breath, gravity and the spine and her work has influenced the teachings which I receive, on a one to one basis mainly, to give me what I most need. Practicing like this has been life changing, no longer does my body have to fit the pose, the pose finds expression through my body.
And maybe that is where I was getting to with all this. Because my teaching has inevitably changed in recent years as I have connected with parts of myself that were previously not allowed expression, the parts that I rejected because they didn’t fit my patriarchal conditioning, but which were desperate for my attention. It is in this way that my body has healed and my relationship with my menstrual cycle and what it means to be a woman and my sexuality and creativity have improved exponentially as I have reclaimed more of my feminine energy.
Not only that but some of my fundamental core beliefs about the world and my place in it have changed as I have progressively let go of some of my conditioning and rigidity of mind, seeing through a little bit more of the illusion in the process. The joy of the Scaravelli-inspired approach to practice is one of energy and working with the body not against it. The joy of the TSYP approach to yoga is one of truly connecting with the breath and allowing more calmness because of it. Both approaches have helped me to let go of the notion of things having to be a certain way on my mat – black or white – which has been increasingly reflected in my life.
There is always more practice to be done, more to learn, and more to let go of in the process, more undoing, resting, being and trusting, but one thing that stands out as I approach 20 years of almost daily practice, is the need to honour our needs and what we most need in any moment, not because it is a trend, or someone has told us so, but because we are being increasingly honest with ourselves and the way we are living our life and what might then need to change.
As a society it seems to me that we need less power and fast and push and rush and external, and more slow and gentle and inward and letting go and being and accepting and receiving. It’s about wholeness essentially and taking from the practice what enhances this rather than takes away from it. It’s an ongoing journey, an imperfect one at that, but this is the thing, life is perfect simply because of its imperfections and our honesty and authenticity.
This exploration has been helpful because I can more clearly see why we have gotten to where we have gotten to these days as yoga begins to lose some of its popularity, this because people were sold more of the same – perfection, yoga body and endless calmness, happiness and joy. We have to be realistic. Life is messy and chaotic. We cannot expect a continuous state of being. Even enlightenment comes in flashes.
Hopefully this sets us free from the patriarchal conditioning of perfection and achievement even on our mat and allows us to be more accepting of each moment as it arises and passes. We are part of a whole. My previous blog post explored this. Always a death leads to a new beginning. To try to maintain a linear approach is merely feeding more of what is out of balance in this world. Honouring our own nature is essential, so too our natural constitution.
Practising in a way that creates greater harmony, encourages more of our whole is perhaps where the emphasis should be nowadays. This requires discernment and the courage to be true, to sift through our conditioning which runs deep. We have grown up in a patriarchal world and it has affected not only our world view but our relationship with our self and – at times – our choice in our approach to yoga practice. We need to be conscious of the effect our practice has on us.
Patriarchy and yoga on the new moon
Patriarchy and our conditioning. It’s coming up with today’s new moon. Also, the impact of our patriarchal conditioning on our approach to yoga and the manner in which this can further imbalance our energy, especially as women, if we are not conscious of the practices we are choosing and the impact on our subtle energy. Let alone how much yoga has fallen victim to patriarchal commercialism and almost sold itself out.
But first, let’s talk about matriarchy.
Just previous to what we call the historical period, that is the upper Palaeolithic era extending through the Neolithic era (think of standing stones and dolmens – a crystal grid no less, we were really on it and conscious back then), humans worshiped the Earth Goddess. Here on Guernsey we are lucky to still have two carved Goddess-menhirs highlighting the reverence for the Goddess, one at St Martin’s church (who has shown up frequently on this blog over the years) and one at Castel church.
During this time the entire physical earth was held to be her physical body, the hills and valleys were considered to be her breasts, hips and thighs for example, and the rivers were the sacred waters flowing from her womb etc - Glastonbury Tor is said to resemble a great goddess and there is the Sleeping Beauty mountain on the Isle of Lewis near Callanish stones. Needless to say, this era in history gave the highest spiritual position to the feminine principle and created an intimate connection between us humans and nature, hoorah.
However, a little over five thousand years ago this phase of human evolution dominated by the feminine principle ended as trading began, a nomadic lifestyle became more common (not in terms of indigenous cultures and their nomadic tendencies within a locality, but in terms of moving for trade and commerce) and connection with locality was severed. This marked the end of matriarchy and the beginning of patriarchy and was in contrast to the earlier populace who were deeply integrated with the streams, trees, rocks animals and plants of a particular locality, and had an intimate connection with the spirit nature of the physical environment – think indigenous cultures.
Lots changed. Monotheism and the belief in one God came in. Animals were domesticated. The Earth was tamed to the needs of people. Conflict arose with the environment and the harsh realities of long migrations encouraged masculine qualities and the production of a patriarchal system with a chief in control. Lands were invaded and indigenous Earth honouring populations were sadly subjugated or destroyed. The spiritual relationship between humans and the earth was broken and Mother Earth was now exploited, desecrated and plundered, along with the feminine energy in general.
This was probably the most radical change – the impact of this new approach to life on Planet Earth on the feminine. Previously the psychology of Earth Mother did not try to perfect, idealise and abstract but accepted life and nature as the inseparable connection of opposites. This is important to note. There was an acceptance of the relationship between life and death. It is the Earth Mother who celebrates destruction, death then, for the sake of rebirth – for life to renew it must also be destroyed.
This is the cycle – much like the seasons, the tides and the moon, let alone our own cycles as women, from ovulation to menstruation, maiden to old crone, everything that is created is destroyed as part of a whole. This is the paradox – within what seems to be separation, there is in fact union, a beginning becomes an end and an end a beginning.
But now life changed. The union of opposites was no longer encouraged. Society was soon dominated by rationality, perfection, competition, logic and abstract structures imposed by evolving patriarchal rulership, which led eventually to the great wounding from which we are still as women recovering today, namely the witch hunts and with that – and life generally - the rejection of the feminine. Out went the intuitive, timeless, sensuous, non-linear, synchronistic, empathic and experiential approach to life and in came the analytical, linear, sequential, logical, rational and perfected approach instead. This has impacted our life view which continues today.
And it is this that concerns me with our modern-day approach to yoga, how the practices we choose can merely feed more of the same, more of our need for perfectionism (the perfect pose, the perfect body, even the perfect mat!) and competition (within ourselves as much as with anyone else), just look at the number of yoga ‘businesses’ and indeed teachers competing against one another for the maximum number of students etc.
Let alone all the teaching ‘training’ courses training people to teach a certain way even if that is not natural or intuitive to them or indeed to their students and can create imbalance. This in addition to the slightly questionable motivation at times. Yes, we all need to make a living to survive on this Planet currently, but when that motivates the offering of a course alone, without heart and soul, then it’s bringing a very different energy to a practice which was once shared with deep respect in times gone.
It concerns me that as a result of all of this – of financial gain and trend, yoga has sold out on itself. But this is what we do. This is our patriarchal conditioning. We make things into products we can sell. We have produced a billion-dollar yoga industry in the process, well done us. Now there’s such a wide range of choice of styles of yoga, that people have lost sight of the one-to-one and personalised approach that yoga has always encouraged, which works for the individual body, mind and soul. There are increasing numbers of people being harmed by yoga because they are practising in a way that is not safe for them and hinders rather than supports their genuine healing and spiritual growth.
But back to patriarchy. Because the truth of the matter is that the absolute masculine and absolute feminine are different. When one takes over, the rest of us are excepted to adhere to it, even if it is going against our very own nature – my point above about yoga. For example, males have a greater capacity for logic and reason, while women very often operate more so through a deeper sensitive and intuitive quality of awareness.
Furthermore, the archetypal female does not separate her logical and ethical judgements from sentiment and instinct – she cannot separate the abstract so easily. Archetypal males however, have the ability to set up abstract systems of intellect, logic and ethics. These fundamental differences are the reason men and women should be understood in different values and standards. And the reason yoga should be taught appropriately.
However, in our Western world, there has been a tendency for women to be measured on the male psychology of intellect, perfectionism, rationality and logic. Women then subject themselves to a system of values that is not within their nature and in the process run the risk of dong a great violence to themselves and to their femininity in their effort to fit in.
For example, practising strong dynamic yoga, a combination of Ashtanga and Iyengar, born of two different men, taught this way for two very different and specific reasons by another man (albeit an incredible yogi and Ayurvedic healer called Krishnamacharya, more on him next time) and taught to me by two male teachers simply fed more of my masculine energy to my detriment – I stopped menstruating and my competitiveness and perfectionist tendencies increased. I touch on this in more depth in my book From Darkness Comes Light.
Let me be clear, men too can cause violence to themselves by denying their feminine. We all each are born with a mix of masculine and feminine energies and men are also denied their feminine. And I know from talking to men that trying to reclaim their feminine is not easy but look what happens when it is all out of balance – the toxic male is known to all of us, and the pressure for the younger men to conform to this stereotype of what one should look like as a man is huge, it feeds a gym industry, and much unhappiness too.
Fortunately, the tide is turning. The pendulum swings back and forth. And we have to be careful idealising matriarchy over patriarchy. It is entirely possible that towards the end of matriarchy it too was immersed in the excesses and corruption that we see today with patriarchy, where life as we know it is dominated by the need for power and control, which results in a war and greed. We are encouraged to be at war. As Robert Lawlor writes:
“Simply put, the story of Parsifal, [from The Myth of Parisal and the Holy Grail, describes the great number of inner problems and challenges a male must face to achieve his sense of individualisation and his conscious personality] provides a male model that encourages a man to develop by improving himself, rather than by proving himself. The constant wars of self-assertion that mankind wages (the war against nature, the war on viruses, the war on drugs, the war on illiteracy, and the battle against time) all reflect an exclusive devotion to the archetype of male combat, which has now grown to the extent that it threatens us with self-annihilation.”
I find it all very fascinating. So too the patriarchal dream of permanent peace and the perfect world to live in. It doesn’t exist. Life is not consistent and more fool us for buying into the notion that it could be, that we might experience a constant state of bliss. Yet patriarchy will have us believe it so, and we wage war on anything that tells us otherwise. I like what Robert Lawlor writes on this too:
“The patriarchal dreams of permanent peace (afforded by massive weapon arsenals), of classless societies, of modern democratic or socialistic welfare paradises of functional world legislative organisations, of economic systems of productivity and wealth are now revealing themselves as nightmares of alienation, repression, violence, and a degeneration of the human spirit. We are learning that society cannot be founded on abstract, rigid ideas imposed directly on a living reality.”
We are realising this though. Slowly and surely people are waking up to the imbalance and more are doing the work on themselves to reclaim the rejected and overlooked aspects of the feminine – this in men and women. The chaos and disturbance we see is indicative of this change – always change creates chaos and disturbance. Things are changing. When one considers that martial rape was only made illegal in 1992, it shows how far we have come in that time, how the feminine is nudging more of itself back into our lives.
Yoga is following suit, the more dynamic practices, the vinyasa and power yoga approaches are dropping away in trend, a much gentler, feminine and empathic approach is beginning to gain attention instead, and for good reason, we need this approach to yoga, we need to be radical, we need less rationality and logic, we need more of the mystery, more of the soul, more of the magic that cannot be intellectually understood.
When I stopped teaching vinyasa yoga during the pandemic people thought I was bonkers, literally, stepping away from mainstream and the profit which could be made. But I had found a much softer, paradoxical and feminine approach to my practice, which changed my mind and my body and my life in ways I never imagined, and continues to do so today, thanks to the teachings and sharing of three inspiring female teachers who fully embrace the power of the feminine, two of whom I am still lucky to study with directly today.
There was more balance. The competitive and perfectionist tendencies finally began to drop away. I had more respect for my body, I wasn’t trying to push it or make it do what it didn’t want to do. I wasn’t trying to force it to achieve more, be better, hold poses for longer . Quite the opposite. I had to begin a long journey of un-training myself. Of letting go of all I had been taught about alignment and a right way/wrong way, of false strength and stamina for something far more beautiful instead.
For once, I was truly in my body, and I was more present to the patriarchal tendencies of my mind to push, achieve, rush and compete and I was able to slowly let go of their grip, let the conditioning slip, slow down, rest in and feel more myself, my true self, beyond my conditioning to be a certain way (and the journey continues anon, always another layer to strip away).
Needless to say, I couldn’t teach that old way anymore, which I realised was feeding more of my students’ imbalances, more of their need to be right, logical, perfect, of being attached to the external, not the internal, of feeding, maintaining and at times promoting more of their patriarchal conditioning, limiting their mind essentially by doing the same thing over and over again. I would have been selling out and creating more imbalance in the world in the process.
My next blog will talk more on this, of how modern day yoga came to be and of the benefits but also the limitations. But for now, this new moon is about being true to ourselves. Of not caring what others think, not because we lack compassion, but because opinions come and go like the tides ebb and flow and the moon waxes and wanes and more fool us for being bound by someone else’s liming thoughts anyway. Only we truly know what is best for us, in our nature, a mix of feminine and masculine energies, so the message of this new moon is to stay true, to trust, to honour our nature and to keep walking our own path.
Happy new moon!
Love Emma x
The cusp of Autumn and nature's abundance
The current weather might suggest otherwise, but we are now on the cusp of Autumn. In Ayurvedic terms, this means that it is time for us to release any excess pitta (fire) which has accumulated during the pitta months of summer, and begin to plan for a seasonal cleanse. This doesn’t mean we need to deny ourselves or give ourselves a hard time btw, it just means we can support this seasonal shift by trying to eat well.
Nature makes this super easy though, because she provides all that we need to help us to make this seasonal and indeed energetic shift. You see the summer is all about fire, not least because of the heat of the sun but because of all the activity it brings and indeed demands. It’s very difficult to be still in the summer with the lighter mornings and evenings and the energy which encourages us to be increasingly sociable and inter-acting.
However autumn is dry, rough, windy, erratic, cool, subtle and clear. These are all qualities shared by the vata dosha and because like increases like, autumn is considered a vata season. Autumn is a time of transition. Many trees and shrubs are quietly preparing for winter, leaves are browning, crisping, curling and falling. There is a subtle browning to the earth generally. Soon there will be a crispness in the air and a wind slowly gathering strength.
It can be an empty time making us feel uncomfortable, and yet it is filled with possibility as we too can strip down to a quiet place of being and savour the simplicity in life. This is an amazing time to maintain our closeness to nature which summer encourages, or to begin to cultivate it with foraging to help support the transition, let alone tapping into the hedge veg full of nature’s bounty.
So let’s talk about taste. Rasa, which is the Sanskrit word for ‘taste’, is a fundamental guiding principle that helps us to balance the doshas (the fault). In Ayurveda there are six tastes including the following:
Sweet
Sour
Salty
Pungent
Bitter
Astringent
Pitta dosha (which comprises the elements of fire and water) is pacified or calmed with sweet, bitter and astringent tastes. And rather remarkably and magically, nature provides us with lots of sweet, bitter and astringent tastes in its autumnal offerings.
For example, we have the sweet hedgerow fruits such as blackberries, the astringent sloes, and the bitter nettles are back for their second offering this year, lucky us, as nettles are so rich in vitamins and minerals, a great anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant too.
Furthermore, in the garden, there are sweet apples, pears and plums, astringent green beans and spinach and bitter nettles, basil and chard.
I don’t know about you but this makes me very excited because September is a fabulous month to enjoy all of these offerings and get my hands dirty in the kitchen. As my Ayurvedic doctor always says, this is a really effective way to calm and centre the mind and ground one’s energy, a much better form of meditating, especially for those affected by the ‘air’ quality of autumn, than sitting and trying to meditate on the breath.
Furthermore, its really empowering to make your own goodies from nature’s abundance, especially medicines that will see you through the winter months ahead and batch cooking, filling the freezer so that the supplies last.
It’s worth noting that all of these foods are full of fibre to help clean the digestive tract. As the weather begins to turn we will need to prime our digestion for the heavier foods of winter but more on that another time. For now, let’s get making…
Apples and blackberries
I’ve been making the most of the blackberries and apples and followed this recipe, which was well received by E and another friend who loves puff pastry.
I’ve been adding apples and blackberries to my smoothies. I just bung a variety of fruits in my Vitamix with some avocado and sometimes some seeds, together with hazelnut milk and whizz it all together and there you have a yummy lunch.
Pears
I just love pears and am happy to eat these as they come, but they can also be added to smoothies and you can even make pies. They’re lovely with walnuts, and if you are into goat’s cheese then add some of that too, for a super yummy meal.
Elderberries
I love the Elder tree as it offers us so much yumminess. I made elderflower cordial in the summer, just before the solstice, and now just before the equinox I have made some elderberry syrup, to help keep up healthy over the winter months and save on the expense of being this from Hansa! This is a recipe I have followed, it tastes absolutely yummy, so will have to make more before the summer is out! I foraged for the elderberries on sacred land in a clearing by a spring and a couple of wells, free of exhaust fumes. Hansa sells raw honey by the way and there is a lovely organic Acacia one, which works well and is the cheapest they offer!
Mugwort
I’ve been drying mugwort. This is a protective and visionary herb as well as a great cleanser. You can use it to clear space much like sage, but you can also use it as a drink to dream and enter a visionary state of being. Just hang the stem upside down now (the top two-thirds) to dry and then you can use it.
Basil pesto
I just play around with this, adding a handful of basil and spinach into my Vitamin together with some seeds, garlic, olive oil, salt, pepper and whizz it together. There’s this walnut pesto recipe my mum created which is also yummy, especially if you can get hold of fresh walnuts too. I am happy eating it by spoon from the mixer, or adding it to rice cakes and humus, to keep it simple and avoiding the heaviness of pasta at this time of year.
Nettles
You can literally add some boiling water to a handful of nettles and drink as tea, yummy and very supportive of the digestive tract with its anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties. It is also high in iron.
Nettle soup is also yummy. I tend to fry a little bit of onion and garlic and then add a variety of vegetables such as beans, broccoli and courgettes, all plentiful at this time, I might add an apple too to encourage sweetness and then the nettles, together with some vegan and yeast free stock and some herbs from the garden such as rosemary, thyme, oregano and basil. Once its all softened I whizz it in the vitamix. This looks like a yummy vegan nettle and coconut milk recipe too.
There’s really no end to what you can create. Much of my offerings are trial and error, go for it!
More on autumn and Ayurveda another time…
Love Emma x
From land to mouth
“We walk along the estuary, watching silage being cut in fields along its banks. Small meadows of tall grass being invaded by an army of tractors, trailers, tedders and silage blowers, which ravage a hundred acres of land in ninety minutes. The fields are stripped bare of grass and with it every living thing that existed within them, no time for wildlife to escape or insect life to move on. It feels as though we’re witnessing an Armageddon for a huge area of biodiversity. Like so much of the farmland in this country [UK], this isn’t privately owned land, it belongs to one of the huge corporations, so the sileage isn’t stored in the neighbouring farm buildings, but transported for miles to a vast dairy until beyond Lancaster. For the corporations, biodiversity isn’t part of the equation and certainly can’t be balanced against the desire for higher and higher profits.
On the mudflats a rare white stork searches for food, driven, like so much of our wildlife, to the very edge of existence. I wonder where all the life that these fields supported has gone. Has it even survived the day? But this is the choice we make every time we shop, like the dairy cows that never see grass fields, or the hens that never see daylight, this vast area of land stripped of insect life in minutes is the true cost of cheap food. No matter how many wild flower seeds we sow in our gardens, it’s an equation that can’t be balanced.”
Raynor Winn
This is one of many poignant points Raynor Winn raises in her latest book Landlines, one that none of us really wish to look at, because it is not only distressing to consider how much our food choices are impacting the environment, but how much our reality is now controlled by big corporations, how profit has been put ahead of nature and our collective wellbeing, how patriarchy still reigns in its need to control and influence and how politicians do not necessarily have our best interests at heart. Sure, they might talk the talk, but policy is only driven forward if it’s got a commercial value to it – and we are all of us, on some level, hypnotised by consumerism and enslaved by commercialism.
Going into the supermarkets here in France, after shopping in Guernsey, is for me, overwhelming. There’s too much choice and I find myself asking why we need all this choice, why we have the option to buy fifty different types of yoghurt and what happens to those which don’t get bought, and how many of those bought actually get eaten? I struggle to grasp the vastness of the scale of what’s sold, not just in that one supermarket but in the other three in this small Carnac vicinity let alone throughout France and into Europe and further afield, throughout the world. I cannot comprehend the size of the fields, the quantity of trees, the sheer man hours, chemicals and destruction to produce what we human beings appear to need to exist.
I know how many walnuts a tree can produce as my parents have a beautifully abundant one in their orchard, but I also know how labour intensive it is to lovingly shell the walnuts so that we can eat the nuts. And here in the local Lidl, I see packet upon packet of cut price walnuts, and I wonder where they grew, who cultivates them, the amount of chemicals they have been subjected to and the love, or lack of love which went into the process. I wonder whether the people involved were fairly paid and fairly treated. I consider the additional cost of buying organically and bio-dynamically. Shopping can quickly become a moral dilemma, a tricky experience, weighing up our options, calculating the choices available to us, the environment, our health, and the cost to our bank account.
We’re told we’re living in a ‘cost of living crisis’ and yet I go to somewhere like Lidl and I don’t see that. Food is cheap, ridiculously cheap. Even the organic stuff is cheaper than it would be in Guernsey, which makes it difficult not to fill the car with as much as I can take home. But am I then merely supporting more of the same, more of these huge corporations and their need to maximise shareholder return, what of the smaller cooperatives, the Bio shop down the road, and our own family-run health food shop, Hansa, back at home, who are doing their best to live more consciously, support the environment, the smaller producers, the Earth?
And I wonder, whether we are fed the story that we are living through a ‘cost of living’ crisis to make us orientate to these super stores, feeding more of the same mass agriculture and corporation gain – after all I don’t see governments lowering interest rates to make housing more affordable. If we’re told we’re living in a cost of living crisis we start to believe it whether it’s true or not and all of a sudden the organic and more costly options become less of an option, at least so we tell ourselves. This is the power of government, media, corporations and consumerism for making us believe whatever they want us to believe to feed the bottom line.
I am reminded of the child catcher, a fictional character in the 1968 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. The Child Catcher is employed by the Baron and Baroness Bomburst to snatch and imprison children on the streets of Vulgaria. He lures the children with the promise of sweets, and they, hypnotised by this thought, are easily caught. We too are easily hypnotised by the what is being offered to us, the perceived sweetness and before we know it, we to are caught in the trap and we don’t even realise it, feeding all that is out of balance and reducing our freedom as a consequence.
We have to be so careful in believing what we are told, especially from media who don’t always have our best interests at heart either. We have to be conscious of the way they influences how we think and therefore the choices we make and the impact on the collective – because the one thing we do have in this world is free will to make conscious choices, appreciating that these choices affect the collective. We are the micro of the macro. If we want to see change in the world, we have to be the one to make the changes.
We have to weigh up our options, notice our resistance to change, to doing things differently, the arguments we use, the way we kid ourselves into maintaining the status quo, of justifying to ourselves our choices made not for the greater good, but for our own short term gain. At the end of the day we always have a choice, and we always have ourselves to face.
Later in the day we found ourselves out at Locmariaquer beach, home of Pierres Plates dolmen, a marvellous dolmen not least on account of its rock art but because of its bent corridor. The car park was surprisingly busy, not for the dolmen fortunately, but because it was low tide and this beach, we now realise, is marvellous for cockling and there were many locals making the most of this. We went down to take a look – Elijah is mad about sea life and wanted to have a go at cockling himself – and people were literally foraging for their dinner. On the way back up the steps I noticed sea beet and sea samphire, you could have quite a feast, especially if you picked the blackberries in the carpark too.
On the way back to the campsite, we ended up at La Trinite-sur-Mer and happened to find a spot on a slip way where we could watch the rising tide and the marine life below. Here we had the privilege of witnessing a shore crab trying to eat a mussel, pulling the shell apart with its claws, perched up on the wall. We also saw a little fish attack a crab for the food the crab was carrying, and two crabs fighting over yet more food, and it really highlighted to me that it is all about survival and having enough to eat.
It made me think how disconnected we are from our food source – that we just rock up at a supermarket and hope that it has what we need, without considering where it was sourced and how it came to be there in the first place, the amount of effort involved. I know how difficult it is to produce enough vegetables to feed a family, my veggie growing this year would have had us starving if we had had to survive on it. I also know how tricky it is to catch fish. And as for killing animals, no thanks, I just couldn’t do it.
All of this of course, before even considering whether it’s adding to our vitality or taking away from it. I am amazed what passes as ‘food’ these days. My children were talking the other day about energy drinks, assuming they must be OK because they are sold in supermarkets. Their joyous innocence means that they cannot comprehend how something can be sold, which might harm them – that a corporations profits are more important than their health and wellbeing, that everything has a price, including their immunity and vitality – after all Big Pharma has to thrive off something (call me cynical!).
I was reading that food security will be the next crisis, that producing enough food to feed us al is becoming an increasing issue. And I suppose where I get to with all this, is whether we need to be eating as much food as we do? As an organism can we survive on less? With obesity levels rising, one can only assume that as a society we are eating too much, or too much of the wrong foods perhaps. Food is a commodity that’s the problem, it’s sold not simply for our survival but to make money and we buy into it, easily influenced by the new trends.
I’ve got a whole heap more I could say about this, but will share instead some thought provoking commentary from Robert Lawlor in his brilliant book The New Male Sexuality, where he talks about consumerism in the context of sexual attitudes and self-identity:
“In the 1960s, the American economy changed from being predominantly a production economy to being predominantly a consumption society…Just prior to the 1960s, the industrial process began to turn out a vast excess of goods. To keep the economy growing, it became necessary to remove the old ethic of saving money, conserving and maintaining materials and equipment, and associated frugality of postponing gratification. Advertising, armed with society’s new liberalism concerning sexuality, moved into high gear, creating endless needs and desires in general teaching people to consume…The new ethic became spend, consume, allow no desire to go unsatisfied, either material or sexual. With the credit card society now established, a rapid consumption of both goods and sex ensued. Little attention was paid to the exhaustion of natural resources or the stress on the social, spiritual, and ecological fabric of life caused by this constantly expanding economy”.
“At this time the media lured women away from their biological and natural roles as mothers and wives and, under the banner of liberation, pulled great numbers into factories and offices. This commercial manipulation is well described in Bruce Holbrook’s The Stone Monkey and is traced by him to the 1950s, when numerous sociological studies commissioned by government agencies in Washington suggested methods to restimulate the faltering, consumer-based society. Several of these studies, in particular those by sociologist and social planner Vance Packard, noted that women spent money much more easily and utilised consumer credit systems more readily than did men, who were more likely to save…
…Social planners suggested that a resurgence of consumerism would result from women having independent money derived from employment. Coincidentally, the beginnings of a feminist viewpoint that stressed the association between “female liberation” and females being employed began to appear. This association may not have been a deliberate manipulation but rather a result of the concurrent relaxation of sexual and consumer inhibitions. However, the result has been, in the last thirty years, an enormous influx of women into the job market and the breakdown of traditional female roles in the family. Consequently, as predicted, the 1960s and 1970s have seen an enormous upsurge in credit spending and an enormous decline in percentage of savings by families. The manipulation of sexual roles provided the desired stimulation of consumerism”.
I really recommend both the books quoted from, they’re thought provoking in their own way and that’s never a bad thing. At the end of the day it’s always about balance and harmony and appreciating that we’re all doing our best with our level of awareness in any one moment and not giving ourselves - or others - a hard time, ha, in the process!
I’m off to harvest my one and only yellow courgette of the summer, we will eat it slowly!
Love Emma x
Carnac's funny stones!
Most people have heard of Carnac in Southern Brittany, not least as a popular holidaying destination in Southern Brittany, but also for the lines of standing stones crossing the landscape, that also attracts people.
Carnac is the largest megalithic site in the whole world and the megalithic monuments are far older than the ones found in the British Isles or here on Guernsey, albeit ours are very old too. Some of them are also far bigger, amazingly so. And there are an enormous number of them, mind blowing really - the Carnac alignments, the best preserved of the stone avenues, contain today slightly over 3,000 stones alone.
Sadly though, archaeologists have estimated that between 85 and 90% of the megaliths in the area have disappeared today. Not that this stops the estimated 900,000 people who come to visit each year and feel the magic which permits the air as a result of these ancient stones.
The Carnac area displays a variety of different kinds of monuments, some of which we see here on Guernsey:
The Menhir - this comes from the Breton for men = stone and hir = long, and basically means a single stone standing alone or in a single or multiple alignments, or in curves known as cromlech or rectangles known as quadrilaterals or lying on the ground as a recumbent. On of our most famous menhir’s on Guernsey is La Longue Rocque along Les Paysan’s (L’Eree hill) and of course the two Goddess menhir’s at both Castel Church and St Martin’s church.
The dolmen comes from dol = table, which is a chamber or corridor where huge horizontal stones are placed on upright support stones. Most dolmens are covered with a cairn, which is a mound built with small stones. We have covered dolmen’s here, Le Creux at L’Eree, Dehus out near Bordeaux and La Varde up on L’Ancresse Common. Les Trepieds is an uncovered dolmen and probably part of a group of dolmen’s out at Perelle.
The tumulus is an artificial hill, much bigger than a cairn, which had mud and clay applied in layers to make it waterproof.
Carnac is mainly famous for its rows of stones, 4km long which are divided into three sections, albeit there are many dolmens and other exciting stone structures and one could spend a month here and still not properly see it all. I went for a week in June over the summer solstice, with my stone friend and we literally spent each day visiting the most famous sites and some of the less famous sites and even then we didn’t see all of it, not even half of it.
That was my second trip. The first trip was back in 2017 when Elijah was 3 and Eben only 8 months and while we happened to be there for the summer solstice, I didn’t know much about the sun alignments at Carnac back then and while I acknowledged sunrise, I didn’t make any effort to go to any of the actual alignments, which is a shame, as there is one just outside the campsite! Still, we live and learn.
On that trip though, Carnac did begin to guide me, and in the evening I often went out walking on my own with Eben in a pushchair to try to get him to sleep. The campsite was right by the alignments and while I walked beside them, my mission was always to get into the forest where I had chanced upon (or not as the case may be) La Quadrilatere de Manio, a rectangle of neolithic stones that - as it happens - has various sun and moon alignments. There’s a huge menhir there too called le Geant du Manio, and I just couldn’t get enough of it, something kept drawing me back.
In fact I didn’t realise it at the time, but I took a photo through two stones of the huge menhir which stands to the side and this is winter solstice sun rise aligned. I found myself back at this place during my trip this June, on midsummer’s eve, on my own, my friend stayed back at the campsite, I was curious to see if I could find it as easily as I used to - I couldn’t as it happened, mainly because I ignored the wooden pathway they have now created through the forest to connect these neolithic sites on account (we believe) of Carnac trying to obtain UNESCO status.
Anyway, when I finally found the stones, it was approaching - as it happens - sunset, and I sat between those two particular stones and watched the sun setting through the trees, getting eaten alive by mosquitos in the process might I add. It was rather magical though, as I had the place to myself and I saw a deer in the distance (this had happened when I had visited with Eben too), and this neolithic alignment holds a special place in my heart, because it draws me and feels safe, even in the middle of a forest as darkness descends..
But that’s the thing with Carnac, it looks after you, and it will take you on an adventure if you let it. As I wrote earlier, my stone friend really helped me to explore more of the area on our recent trip and experience all sorts of different neolithic structures and I was able to feel the difference in the energy. I was especially excited about all the rock art as this is really a passion, and I will share more of that another time, but for now, a selection of stones which have been shaped to resemble familiar figures to give you a taster:
We are off to Carnac as a family the last week in August and will be there while the whole place gets charged off the full moon - hoping it will recharge us all in the process ahead of the new term! We’re hoping for surf on the Quiberon peninsular too, but I am sure we’ll get to visit a few of the sites and no doubt stumble across some more funny stones, which I’ll share another time.
For those of you keen to experience a dolmen, then the next Song of the Earth session is on Thursday 7th September, more details and to book here.
Love Emma x