Happy Yule!

Well what a year it has been - so many changes for so many and so many more on their way. The moon is definitely shifting things for us as it nears towards its 18.6 year major lunar standstill in June/July.

I am so grateful to all of you who have supported Beinspired this year. Our community has grown in ways I could never have imagined with so many of you finding the courage to deep dive into the various spiritual practices and come to know yourself on a deeper level, letting go of unhelpful conditioning, habits, beliefs and thinking patterns (Samskaras) in the process. It has been an honour and a privilege to witness the transformation. 

We can expect more light flooding in now with Yule upon us (thankfully!). The sun has reached a standstill and won’t continue rising/setting any farther south, and will start swinging more northerly instead. It will rise higher in the sky too, bringing much needed light and warmth to the northern hemisphere, and energy to all those dormant seeds.

The annual solar movements along the horizon from one solstice to another describes a year. Thus the winter solstice, known in the olden times as Yule, celebrates the return of the light, from now onwards the hours of light lengthen each day.

This is a time for us to begin to tend to our seeds too, taking little steps in the direction of our hopes and dreams. The path ahead may not be clear and this can be scary - the unknown and the uncertain have a habit of bringing up fear - but we are asked to trust the light as it appears, just taking one step in front of the other, following the nudges and signs from the universe while balancing the heart and discernment. 

Ultimately this is a time to open to greater trust. We trust the sun will rise in the east and set in the west each day. We trust that the inhalation will be followed by the exhalation. And so we must trust in our intuition, inner guidance and inner knowing - we always know what to do, even if the self deprecating ego tells us otherwise or makes us doubt ourselves. 

If this does happen - if we get in our own way - then we can ask the question,

“If I keep doing this, how will things be in three months? … in six months? …in a year?”

Typically things will have come worse, sometimes much worse. Let this help to inform your choices and the decisions you make as you head increasingly towards the light, enlightening yourself in the process.

Happy Yule all of you and thank you from the bottom of my heart for the love and the energy which you each bring to Beinspired - even if it is simply reading these blogs!

As a gift, please find another video so that you may practice at home. This is for you Helen and all the rest of you who might explore the letting go that emphasis on the forearms brings. A huge thank you to my teacher, Louise, for helping me appreciate just how amazing the forearms are in helping us breathe. 

Thank you too to Helen for all the philosophical sharing and the pranayama practices too. 

I look forward to seeing some of you over the festive period and more of you during 2025.

Love Emma x

Stepping forward

Well that was another potent full moon asking us to let go and move forwards in our life. It wasn’t comfortable for many of us because of the courage needed to do the letting go an the faith needed to overcome the fear of stepping forward into the unknown. It reminded me a little of a quote from one of Rebecca Campbell’s books:

“In order for the new to arrive, we must first allow the old to shatter. Sometimes this happens on its own. And sometimes it requires that we do the smashing. To tear apart what we’ve built because things have changed, including you. To admit that while it was once aligned, now it no longer is. This smashing requires both courage and faith. Courage to let go and faith that the pieces will come back together again in a way that was more aligned than it was before”

I certainly seem to be going through a re-alignment in my own life as the moon follows its major lunar standstill pattern and I know many of my clients are in a similar position. What fascinates me is the manner in which my menstrual cycle has shifted, so like when trying to conceive, evaluation occurs around the creative potency of the full moon, as if allowing more energy to make the changes which need to be made, to allow the potential birthing of a new way…the menstrual cycle never ceases to amaze me with its moon connection and it’s inherent wisdom.

For those new to the idea of working with your menstrual cycle as a spiritual practice to greater levels of consciousness, then take a look at our resource section on this website and have a read of our free Menstruation and Moon Pack. I also highly recommend Lisa Lister’s book called Code Red. If you don’t have time then just remember that the moon is always communicating with us and our menstrual cycle too will allow you to understand where you are out of alignment with your truth - it literally helps you to navigate your life in a more conscious way. I wrote about this in my own books, available on Amazon, called Dancing with the Moon and From Darkness Comes Light.

On a completely different note, but talking of consciousness, I recently watched The Corporation, a documentary on, well, corporations, and their impact on consumerism and greed, and this at the exploitation of people and indeed this beautiful planet. I am sure you know much of it already, but it clearly hammers the message home - that if we want to see positive change on this planet, then we need to make those changes individually, this is where the true power comes. I am always reminded of Gandhi’s famous quote,

“Be the change you wish to see in the world”

Really though, this was the theme of the moon and will be as the lunar standstill unfolds; to step into our power individually and indeed collectively. I feel that we have a really good chance of changing things, lessening our grip, our greed then, on consumerism and making different choices, which are more aligned with heart and the needs of this planet, our real needs too, not the ones we have been conditioned towards, but the ones that truly make us thrive as a spiritual being having a human experience on Planet Earth.

The documentary will remind you to choose your products carefully, to be mindful of the impact of their production on this planet and indeed the many humans involved in the chain. It is very easy, especially at this time of year, to turn a blind eye and just buy for the sake of buying without considering the welfare of the workers who produced the product, or the implications on the planet, but we have to try to be conscious because everything has a vibration and you are bringing that vibration into your home or into another’s.

This isn’t just the big things, but the little things too. What toothpaste do you put in your mouth and what impact is that having on your health and energy field, let alone the planet? What about the deodorant you put on your armpits, is it full of chemicals? Where was that crystal mined? Did children manufacture that football kit? How was the cocoa for that box of chocolate’s grown and collected? What about that tree, where was it cultivated and at the expense of what land? How many chemicals were sprayed on the food you will eat? Were those prawns farmed in really crappy (literally) waters? And what about that turkey, how much did it suffer?

Of course there is no perfect. We have to weigh it all up depending on our economic position as much as our level of integrity and general awareness and access to information which might allow us to make a more informed decision. But we have to remember that it does all make a difference, not least to us individually, but to us collectively too. If we just go along with what we’re being sold by marketing companies and those who are trying to be ‘in control’, then we can just expect more of the same, we always have a choice…but we don’t always realise this.

So choose wisely. And yet know that your choices will change as your level of consciousness shifts too. We cannot regret, because decisions made in the past were made based on our level of consciousness at that time, and all changes, including us.

This is a time for taking a deep breath and stepping forwards. It does take courage and faith because we don’t always know where we are headed and that is when the fear comes in. But we have to dig deeper into trusting ourselves and the messages we might be receiving from the moon and the stars and the universe at large. We just have to take that first step and allow the light to unfold bit by bit, making the path ahead clearer as we embark into the unknown and the uncertain but knowing and being certain that we are held and protected in the process. It is in this way that we will reclaim our power and experience greater love.

Happy realigning and conscious buying as we head towards the solstice.

Love Emma x

Grounding ourselves in these shifting times

It would appear that we are being asked to release and let go whatever is holding us back and is unhealed from our past, at the exact same time as being asked to step into our future self. It is discombobulating and a little overwhelming as I know some of you are feeling too.

The energy is intense, we are being upgraded for want of a better word, our hearts are being cleared out and old patterns are being brought to the surfaces along with the related thoughts, emotions and conditioning. Forgiveness hangs in the air and a release of anger and frustration and indeed sadness and grief that underlays this.

Guilt and shame are in the ‘field’ too. We are beginning to see more clearly through our own stories and narratives and the ways we may have taken responsibility for others’ poor behaviour or inability to do the work on themselves and we are realising that we don’t need this additional weight in our life and on our shoulders.

We are beginning to feel our auric holes too. I stumbled up against my own around guilt, for example, and how we may have taken on such a detrimental emotion since childhood and because it is there - because we take on the blame (or whatever the emotion is) - we attract more of it, allowing others to dump their blame or shame or whatever it is on us. It’s funny really because during this revelation, I had a few missed calls from the police station and immediately felt guilty, even though I had done nothing wrong, proving my point to myself!

Shame is popping through too and I know I am not the only woman who has had to work through this. We can’t win in our society, we experience judgement whether we are a stay at home mum or one who works all hours she can, same with termination, there is still so much stigma so that many women suffer intense feelings of guilt and shame, even though it takes two to conceive, and the other option, of potential single parenting isn’t received well either.

We have to remember that our emotional states are often linked to a sub-conscious thought or thought pattern. Whenever we are pulled away from our natural state of being to a more contracted state of being then we can be sure that we are thinking about our reality in a way that allows a particular mood to arise. Disliking the mood or yourself for having the mood is pointless. This because the mood expresses our need for self-reflection (Kriya yoga).

As I have been reminded, nature never acts without reason. Therefore every form of disease, physical or mental, encourages reflection. There is a note of caution here - we must not fall into patterns of thinking that we deserve whatever is happening to us as this is nothing more than a form of self hatred. Nor does it mean that the universe has it in for us, and is trying to show us something, This follows on from my previous blog post in that we still subject ourselves to the Judeo-Christian god of judgment under a different name (be discerning about new age spiritualism as it encourages this judgement with its emphasis on only perceived positive emotions and states of being, we have to move away from this conditioning).

If we are honest with ourselves - and this current energy is helping us with this - we will find that our ‘bad day’ (or weeks, months etc!) was/were probably caused by a negative thought-pattern, which we may not have noticed at the time, but which we believed and spun into a story about our reality, which is actually untrue and merely disempowers us.

Nothing exhausts us more than our well-spun stories which are not in alignment with reality.

Do we really need to feel guilty or shamed about what happened? Is the story we have created around the emotion and/or the thought true?

The trouble is we don’t realise our stories because we are so immersed in them, which is why it is helpful having someone mirror them back to us or question us on them (spiritual life coaching is brilliant for this btw), or for us to take time for self-reflection through various yogic practices. This is the joy of yoga. It has been prod for thousands of years and understand ALL of this and the ways we create our suffering and certainly the ancient texts offer our grounded guidance in how to set ourselves free. This is another reminder not to fall victim to new age approaches which are not grounded in any ancient wisdom.

We also have to be very mindful of the patterns we have created to avoid the self-reflection. Say we have a bad day because we feel we did something wrong, perceived a criticism from a boss perhaps and even though the boss didn’t mean it that way, we internalise it so, and while the boss moves on with his/her day, letting go of the moment the caused us to enter a bad mood and begin our bad day, we take it home with us and reach for wine or TV or social media or tub of ice cream to buffer our mood rather than feel into it.

What really happened was the interaction with our boss reignited our persistent and incessant subconscious story that we “always screw things up”, or we “are not good enough”, or we “should have known better”, which creates deeper self loathing and hatred. This negativity, buried deep within us, creates our experience of reality. Especially as we will see evidence of it everywhere now in our reality. This like my experience with guilt - because I was so used to feeling it, I called more of it, from the police who never did call back btw, once the lesson was learned - a cosmic joke to highlight my unhelpful and outdated pattern.

All of this of course, removes us from our natural flow and presence.

So the energies currently are helpful in that they are helping to bring the sub-conscious to the conscious so that we can let go of unhealthy stories and move our lives forward in a more positive direction.

It’s an amazing opportunity really to be the change we wish to see in the world.

The more of us who can find the courage to dig deep and shift the stories, the more this will influence the whole and the more we will let go of our disdain for self and our fears and become increasingly self-loving and whole.

Generally people have had enough of the patriarchal crappiness, of world leaders behaving like boys in a playroom with their missiles and guns, playing our their unresolved inner child. So we must look at our unresolved inner child too.

The pace of life is too much for many, but the only way this will change is if we step off the treadmill and draw a line in the sand. Increasing numbers are choosing simplicity and shifting their understanding of abundance away from material gain at the expense of everything (including the planet and their fellow man) and realising the abundance in walking in nature, or being quiet at home with children, or watching the sun set, or any of the other gifts we experience in our lives which we don’t always value because they are not material (and we have been conditioned to the material).

Increasing numbers are questioning our education system and the confusion over gender identity that our children are having to navigate, let alone the damage caused by online living and social media, and the detrimental vibrational effect of holding mobile telephones and iPads endlessly (I see how jittery the later makes my boys, displacing their Vata), and the manner in which they cause a loss of ability to focus and concentrate.

More are seeing through the many ways that we are being harmed by the big companies, and the drive towards profit at whatever cost to us as an increasingly sick society.

At the end of the day we have to take responsibility for us and our healing and certainly the powers that be are encouraging this. We can do this! We can make the positive changes, to free ourselves of patriarchal, Judeo-Christianity and new age conditioning, so that we can increasingly see reality as it is and free ourselves from our false stories and narratives, and ease our self-inflicted suffering simply because we don’t see ourselves - our true Self -clearly.

Yoga helps, Reiki too, but any spiritual practice grounded in reality, will give us the support we need at this time. The word to really drop into is ‘grounded’. Our grounding, our base chakra, our being in the body, our attending to our basic needs for sleep, good food and healthy relationships, our hands ion the earth, salt baths, baking with love, walking in nature, sea swimming, all of this will help enormously.

Sending love xx

Interdependence in community

We’re deep diving people. Pluto has entered Aquarius (which appears to be a big deal) and Mercury is retrograde, but that aside the moon has also entered its major lunar standstill year and the last two weeks especially have been intense - well since the eclipses in September/October.

And you can expect more as the energy is really ramping up ahead of the peak of this 18.6 year major lunar standstill which takes place in June and July of 2025. This when the moon will rise its lowest in the sky, and up in the Outer Hebrides, for example, the full moon nearest the solstice will only be present for a few hours - the stones of Callanish have been aligned with this so that on the major lunar standstill it appears as if the full moon rolls along the hills.

The last time we experienced the major lunar standstill (which basically means the moon rises and sets the most extreme of the sun, and will be super high at full moon around the winter solstice rising and setting the opposite of the sun, so more northerly and then around the summer solstice it will be very low in the sky, rising and setting most southerly, again the opposite of the sun) was 2006, which funnily enough was the year I set up Beinspired.

In fact it was the year that yoga really exploded into the world. It moved away from being practised in church halls by ladies wearing leotards, into the huge billion dollar industry it is today where commercialism encourages us to invest in expensive mats and yogis clothing to realise our inner nirvana - or not, as the case may be.

In fairness here in Guernsey we are protected a little from what it has become elsewhere in the world, and the pandemic sorted some of it out in any event, because yoga started losing its widespread popularity and yet those committed went deeper - at least this was my experience and with my students too; my student base is vastly different now to how it was pre-pandemic, there is much greater commitment, students are in it for the long term, not just as a fad.

Anyway the point in sharing this, is to highlight that the year that the moon does her major thing, is a year where things are renowned for changing, like significantly, like we take a step forward in our individual and collective evolution, consciousness then. How this manifests remains to be seen, but I do have a sense that increasing numbers of us are called to play our role in making holistic therapies and alternative healing practices more available to the populace to allow greater opportunity for healing.

I am always reminded that we are not in control, that despite our best planning, sometimes things are just not meant for us. I am always reminded too that we don’t create alone - sometimes the universe’s plans for us are indeed very different to our own idea of where our life is going - a reminder not to plan too far ahead (but we do this because we want things known and certain). Ultimately decisions are often made for us if we give them the space, if we don’t restrict their freedom by over planning our life and making it rigid instead.

I have done my fair share of over planning and pushing and of using will power alone through ambition, desire and impatience, but it never quite turns out the way I had hoped, and I then have to unpick what was created, and allow something greater to enter in. Maybe it was always meant to be that way. There is no perfect either and the only way we learn is through our mistakes. This is where forgiveness is helpful. Forgiving ourselves, letting go and moving on.

I don’t feel we know yet where our lives are headed or what it is we should do. Instead our focus might be on knowing what not to do. .Thus we might start asking ourselves, what can we discard? What emotions are we holding onto which can be let go of now? What belief systems are we still buying into which limit us? Which negative thoughts still shape our reality? What are we carrying for others which is not ours to carry?

As I know only too well myself, a degree of honesty is required.

And being present to ourselves.

For me that means being very quiet on my mat and allowing my body’s intelligence to reveal more of the stuckness and holding. It means being in nature as much as I can be so that I can hear more clearly and recognise increasingly that I am part of the whole, not separate from it. It means communing with standing stones and the moon to elevate my perspective.

At times it is scary.

At other times I am filled with deep love and gratitude for this process.

But mainly I am grateful to receive the support of all the wonderful beings, Earthside and Ethereal, who support me, the people, the birds, the plants, the guides, all are there, communing with us, reminding us that we are not alone, that we are part of this whole wonderful dance of creation…and destruction…and creation again.

I have also become increasingly conscious of something that seemed important to me when I set up Beinspired, but without really knowing the reason: the idea of creating a Beinspired community where people could feel safe being themselves without fear of judgment, has always been one of Beinspired’s main intentions, but it is only now, all these years on, 18.6 in fact (ain’t that funny, a whole lunar standstill cycle) that I can see how that has finally manifested (reminding us of the need for patience!) into something rather magical.

I have never loved teaching and giving treatments more than I do now, with such a beautifully dedicated and committed community of clients and students who are truly committed (there’s that word again) to their healing and ongoing spiritual and personal transformation. We have a laugh. It’s fun. We care about each other. Being in community really does enhance each of our healing and transformation in ways I never imagined.

My Mum shared this beautiful quote by Ernest Hemingway this morning, which sums it up well, how a hand can help:

In our darkest moments, we don’t need solutions or advice. What we yearn for is simply human connection—a quiet presence, a gentle touch. These small gestures are the anchors that hold us steady when life feels like too much.

Please don’t try to fix me. Don’t take on my pain or push away my shadows. Just sit beside me as I work through my own inner storms. Be the steady hand I can reach for as I find my way.

My pain is mine to carry, my battles mine to face. But your presence reminds me I’m not alone in this vast, sometimes frightening world. It’s a quiet reminder that I am worthy of love, even when I feel broken.

So, in those dark hours when I lose my way, will you just be here? Not as a rescuer, but as a companion. Hold my hand until the dawn arrives, helping me remember my strength.

Your silent support is the most precious gift you can give. It’s a love that helps me remember who I am, even when I forget.

Then I read the I Ching, and I loved what it said in the translation I use:

“It is the nature of being human that we are dependant in many ways; dependant on water, air and food for nourishment; dependent on shelter for warmth and protection; dependent on each other for family life and friendship. We are also spiritually dependent: when challenges arise, each of us must have some place to turn for guidance and support”.

This is what Beinspired is all about. We are deep diving. It is tough. Endings. For the new beginnings. Emotions are coming up, deeply buried ones too - anger, sadness, grief, the heart is releasing, lightning itself so that more love and compassion can enter instead, the centre is feeling the fear but encouraged to rest more easily into it, not numb or run from it - we are being asked to transform, to let go over and over again without falling into patterns of victimhood or revenge. We are being asked to take responsibility and compassionately find a new way forward, independent and yet dependent, on our own and yet together, interdependence perhaps. It is the paradox of life to be able to hold both sides of tension and allow something else.

Please do reach out if it all gets too much. Know that you are not alone, that we are here at Beinspired to help, that we can be interdependent within community.

And thank you to all of you for taking responsibility, allowing your vulnerability and being part of this magical little community by just being your beautiful selves with warts and all!

Love Emma x

Self-policing

I have had a revelation thanks to one of my friends, around this self-policing which we all seem really good at. You know, the one where we give ourselves a hard time because we don’t live up to our idea of right or wrong, good or bad, perfect or imperfect, and how we can even take this into the spiritual realm. The trouble is when we judge ourselves, our heart and spirit flags. And the more we judge ourselves, the more we are likely to be judging others too, so we end up in a vicious cycle of negativity and stuck in this ‘judgement’ conditioning.

It was explained to me that if Hinduism had been the triumphant religion in this part of the world and all our law, religion, ethics, literature, medicine, art etc. had been based upon it, then our ideas of good verses bad would have been different to the ones we have, in this Christian dominated part of the world.

Now don’t think I’m about to lash out at Christianity or indeed Hinduism, or any other religion for that matter; I’m not. I have no preference, I’m not pro or anti any of it. I have just become increasingly aware that whether we wanted it or not, religion has seeped into our cells, our minds and our ways of thinking, and sometimes to our detriment – at least in terms of our relationship with our Self.

You see when Christianity came along, it behaved very much like a terrorist group, at least to the Pagans, who were living life deeply connected to the Earth and the Goddess too. People were beaten and bullied, temples and statues were smashed or buried (think of our glorious Goddess statue at St Martin’s church which was broken in half, and the one at Castel church which was buried to rid the church of links to Pagan beliefs), then when more established/popular, the church just started burning anyone who disagreed - those of you reading this would probably have been burned, I definitely would have been!

So our modern society’s adoption of Christian morality to determine good/bad, right/wrong, perfect/imperfect is basically to agree or disagree. This showed up marvellously during the pandemic and was a divider. In fact those of us who chose not to take the vaccine, were in many respects persecuted by our modern form of religion, namely science, just like the witches back in the day, although fortunately we weren’t burned at the stake albeit it did get rather ‘hot’ at times.

Anyway the point is, to question in this geographical reason is tricky, because there is only more Christianity to measure it against - there are no alternative reference points unless one has a spiritual practice.

And even then we’re up against it, because while spiritual practice helps to release us from the conditioning of our mind, we live within a conditioned society so we’ve always got that ongoing external conditioned influence – and it also depends on the nature of our spiritual practice, because even that doesn’t necessarily lead us to freedom depending on whether it actually has any roots to it.

Not to say, it isn’t possible to release ourselves from the conditioning, but it does demand more courage to increasingly live differently, namely outside of the box and the mainstream programmed way of believing how life should be lived.

But the bit that really concerns me, is this self-policing as a way of gaining control of the populace and how this control keeps us, well, controlling ourselves.

Because that’s the thing with Christianity, it wasn’t enough to control us on the outside, it also sought to control us on the inside, inside our own minds. It was very clever really.

And whether Christian or not, this continues on today, and the scary thing is, we don’t even realise it. It has become so normalised that we don’t question that our minds could be shaped differently. That is, until we wake up and realise that we have been brain washed, programmed then, to behave and consider our life a certain way.

It’s pretty scary - like a form of amnesia.

And when we wake up and realise this, it raises all sorts of questions – how might we relate to ourselves and live our lives differently if we let go of this internal control based on our brain washing?

It is my hope that we might start loving ourselves more as a starting point. Because if there’s one commonality amongst most clients and students is this lack of love for self, which manifests in all sorts of unhealthy and unhappy ways, and I know only too well the damage that is done, when we are at war within ourselves.

In fact it was this war that brought me to this path. I really didn’t like myself back then, over 20 years ago now, I didn’t consider myself good enough, worthy enough, enough of anything really, and I was constantly giving myself a very hard time as I judged myself against these crazy ideas of right/wrong, good/bad based on what society had taught me let alone school, family members, friends and peers. This led to years of self-harm, some techniques more obvious than others.

New age spiritualism didn’t help with its focus on love and light and its rejection and suppression of so called ‘negative’ emotions. It took me a long time to free myself of that conditioning too, the one that told me that to be a sincere spiritual seeker I needed to behave a certain way, feel a certain way, eat a certain way, present myself a certain way, look a certain way and use certain vocabulary. Not true incidentally. Spiritual practice encourages us to be us, your true Self, without aligning to any notion of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect etc.

Slowly, slowly, I have tried to let all this go but it isn’t easy, it requires work and awareness. Needless to say, the conditioning pops up from time to time, usually some guilt around doing something which brings me joy, at least if it is criticised or judged by others. Because for some strange reason, not everyone likes us following our joy. We’re named selfish or self-centred. In fact we’ve been conditioned to associate self-love with selfishness and self-depreciation with virtue.

This of course makes it really bloody hard work to actually love ourselves and put our needs first without feeling selfish, self-centred or indeed – as I was saying - guilty. But this is just a conditioning. And if more of us can free ourselves from it, then it gives others permission to do similarly.

I have been leading a series on Self-Love and yesterday I asked the ladies what brings them joy. It was interesting to hear what they had to say and to notice commonalities in that often their greatest joy occurs when they are participating in activates on their own and generally in nature too. This quite in contrast to society’s externalisation of joy, as being something that we find outside of ourselves, that we have to buy  – we have commercialism and capitalism to thank for that, yet more conditioning!

Sex is another factor that sometimes brings up this conditioning. Following a Tantric path, there have been moments where I have stumbled up across old feelings of shame, because to be sexually liberated was once hugely frowned upon and we would have been shamed and labelled a whore.

This programming (and indeed fear of caring too much what others think, because we might have been killed for that at some point in history) runs deep and having attended various Tantra courses, I am conscious that many women suffer from this, unable to experience sexual pleasure, whether from themselves or another or even touch their body gently, let alone their yoni.

It is a real shame as there is a huge amount of power residing in these lower chakras, in yoni especially, but this is the point – the powers that be back in the day were fearful of women’s potent sexual and creative energy, and so in came the virgin ideal, so that we women then feared our own power and being killed for it and  therefore learned to supressed our true nature.

If you look back pre-Christian, to the Neolithic times it was fairly much all about sex, in terms of creative energy and the consciousness that results when we tap into it. Menhirs are penises essentially, piercing the land, dolmens and cairns are like yonis entering to the womb, the space which creates new life. This is the reason so many are aligned to a rising or setting sun, the sun is the masculine principle so it comes into meet with the feminine. Stone circles, with all their various menhirs are aligned to capture the energy of the moon and further sex the land.

We once celebrated this sacred union, think of the maypoles at Beltane, May Day, and how they represent the masculine penetrating the female land. A mortar and pestle used by Witches to mix magical herbs is worked on the same principle.

Nowadays we have totally lost our way. The sacred has been stripped from sex and a whole industry now exists in its place. Sadly the younger generation are growing up thinking that sex is all about strangling each other, which is such a shame because they miss out on the potential intimacy, tenderness, heart-felt, blissful and all body connection that sex can create.

I digress.  But let me just say that this is for me one of the greatest woundings of this self-policing brainwashing, is the way the body and mind have been separated and the body’s intelligence and indeed power has been supressed. This still plays out in allopathic health care – the body is treated in one building and the mind in another and there is a lack of cohesion between the two, or indeed respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the body.

Even new age spiritualism leans heavily into this paradigm of head being best, with its emphasis on the upper chakras, over the lower chakras. Yet the real juice  - or so it feels to me - is found in the lower chakras and our connection to the earth, but this is tricky, because we hold a lot of crap down there (quite literally sometimes!), far easier to hang out in the upper chakras, where we don’t need to look at our stuff, or be in the body for that matter.

I stumbled across this blog post written by Sharon Salzberg which highlighted this lack of self-love in our Western world

“At one point during the event, I had an opportunity to ask the Dalai Lama a question, so I ventured, “Your Holiness, what do you think about self-hatred?”. He looked at me seeming somewhat confused and asked in response: “What’s that?”

It powerfully sums up a fundamental difference between our Western, ambition-focused value system and the Buddhist moral compass. While I came to meditation at 18 as a result of dealing with feelings of inadequacy and self-judgment for my entire young adult life, the Dalai Lama didn’t even know what the meaning of self-hatred was. When I explained to him what I meant by the term — talking about the cycle of self-judgment, guilt, unproductive thought patterns — he asked me, “How could you think of yourself that way?” and explained that we all have “Buddha nature”.

In other words, he simply didn’t get the fact that many of us are often overcome with fundamental feelings of negativity and inadequacy. I revisit this story repeatedly because there was, and still is, something so freeing about the fact that the Dalai Lama was so surprised about this negative way of relating to ourselves, an attitude that seems so common in today’s day and age.

I don’t want to deify Asian culture, or Tibetan people, or Buddhist thought. There are problems in every society, group, and philosophical school. But, I think it is powerful to reflect on what we think we will find within if we look underneath our habits and our desires and our fears. Is it a capacity for love and awareness? Or is it pretty much nothing, or nothing good?

In particular, I’ve thought about this in the process of writing my upcoming book this past few months. I’ve found that many, if not most, of the people with whom I’ve spoken, feel the greatest sense of struggle around the question of cultivating love for oneself. We are conditioned to associate self-love with selfishness, and self-deprecation with virtue. It often seems easier to access feelings of judgment and anger about ourselves than towards those around us.”

At some point we have to let off our self-policing and our inner control, which judges and harms us. We have to let go of the idea of right/wrong, good/bad, perfect/imperfect based on something external to us - some imaginary rule book.

We also have to find the courage and strength to set ourselves free, because let’s remember, no one else can do it for us. This is sometimes our biggest obstacle because we still live within an allopathic care model, which causes people to give their power away to others, hoping to be fixed. More often than not they simply find symptomatic relief, without getting to the root cause of their loss of wellbeing.

We have to take responsibility.

But how?

By noticing our thoughts. Watching them. Remembering that we are not our thoughts any more than we are out emotions. They simply come and go, like clouds in the sky. The trouble comes when we hold onto them and identify with them as if they are concrete – like making the sky permanently grey, rather than letting the clouds come and go and allowing the weather to change.

This is not easy. But there are various tools available to us on this spiritual path which can help. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras offers us the 8-limbs of which yoga asana is a part. But there are other activities such as those which feed our joy, which take us deeper into that quieter space within ourselves where we become less beholden to our thoughts and feelings and orientate increasingly to the moment and to our heart, gut and soul.

And this demands honesty. Because like I wrote earlier, doing what we want, that which makes our heart glow, that fills us with joy will often be judged by others as being selfish. Yet if we give of ourself, like some perpetual charity worker, being both the people pleaser and the good girl, then we never please ourself and are constantly up against our perfectionist tendencies and loaded sense of good/bad and right/wrong. And then we wonder why we feel so frustrated, angry and overwhelmed.

Instead we might watch our thoughts and notice when we have fallen into the trap of self-policing or judging others, and take a step back, detach, change the pattern, be mindful and cultivate greater love and compassion for Self and others in the process.  In this way we gradually – very gradually - let go of the negative conditioning imposed on us over the centuries and set ourselves increasingly free.

Happy Samhain!

Today is Samhain, the day of the dead and the dying parts of us that now need to be let go so that we can make way for the new beginnings that the new moon may usher in tomorrow. It’s a poignant time, the veil is thinnest between the worlds, a great day for meditation and communing with other realms, entering them if you can.

At Samhain the dark half of the year commences. It is a truly magical time. We have to remember that death is always followed by rebirth and I love that the new moon appears so soon. Tomorrow then really does mark the beginning of a new year. But remember celebrations today begin at sunset, when the darkness arrives. Light is always born out of darkness. We must remember this. Darkness is fertile with all potential - embrace it!

My concern these days is that new age spiritualism rejects the darkness and the darker parts of ourselves, in its quest to fulfil the light and love potential. Yet we do not know light an love without darkness and dismay, without the anger and the frustration and our sheer rage.

Today offers you the chance to rest and reflect on the past and to dream new beginnings. The seed now hidden in the earth let us not forget, will germinate in its season. So we look for seeds within ourselves. Yet, we also have to remember that there is a timing to everything and certainly the rug was pulled and doors closed for many of us with the recent eclipses and it may be just a little bit too soon to know where we are heading. We might just have to sit in discomfort of the not knowing for a little while longer yet, and that’s OK too.

What’s called for is patience. This is a word which is coming up a lot for my clients lately. Sit patiently and wait. This is a time to rest, renew and clear out the old. The new will appear in just the right time.

Enjoy it all!

Love Emma

Our yoga practice

I am increasingly aware of the many layers, which accompany our yoga practice, and the need to get quieter and quieter.

I am becoming increasingly conscious too, of the deeper teachings of yoga, and the limitless potential offered by this ancient practice, of the wisdom of the Vedas and the knowledge ‘downloaded’ by the ancient Seers.

This knowledge is tried and tested over thousands of years and I am sometimes astounded at our collective lack of consciousness over this, how we are always trying to reinvent the wheel, how science is placed on a pedestal and yet knows so little in comparison to the ancient keepers of wisdom on this planet.

We each have the opportunity to know ourselves on a much deeper level than the superficial and to experience greater freedom and contentment as a result. So much of our suffering comes from our lack of connection to truth and to self, of feeling confused, isolated, discombobulated, merely because of this lack of deeper relationship to heart, soul and indeed cosmos. So often we are out own worst enemy, at war with our self.

Yoga offers us a sincere path. But it does ask of us something in return. We cannot know yoga by merely reading a book, yoga is a practice and to gain the wisdom, to free us from our suffering, then we must practice. It is the same with Reiki - this too is a spiritual practice and asks us to do exactly that, practice. Ayurveda is no different, reading about it will make little difference until we start to put the wisdom into practice, eating more appropriately to ease imbalances and making changes to our lifestyle.

As far as yoga is concerned - at least if one follows the teachings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras - our practice is anything which takes us towards attainting or remaining in a state of yoga. This state of yoga means that the mind is contained. Or at least more contained than it would be without a practice.

We are required to put in a certain effort. This is not just going to happens we have to put in the hours and have a certain degree of discipline and self regulation.

Furthermore, to really feel the benefits we have to practice for a long time and without interruptions.

We also need to have a positive attitude. This because we can start out with enthusiasm but then it can wane, especially if we come upon against an obstacle such as a mental or emotional block, which can be uncomfortable to work through.

Krishnamacharya always said that we should love our practice - that we should not stop until we reach our goal.

Yoga is real. It is in touch with realism. It helps us to realise our highest potential. This is potential to obtain clarity and stability.

Desikachar used to say that once we have stated on this path, the destination is assured. It is simply a matter of time. It holds open possibility. We can all do this.

Yoga is an extraordinary practice for us ordinary people. It is accessible to everyone, you simply start where you are and keep turning up and tuning in.

I love nothing more than sharing my practice with others and helping them individually where I can. Traditionally yoga was taught one to one for this very reason - so that the practice could be tailored to the needs of the individual, yoga is not one size fits all, we are all different, all at different stages of our journey and require a practice that will help us to grow an d thrive individually.

So practising with a teacher is best, so that we don’t fall into old habits and patterns in the body and mind complex that might limit us and keep us trapped. The body has a habit of following the path of least resistance, the mind too, yet this doesn’t mean that it is healthy for us, sometimes we simply reinforce more of the same and wonder why things are not truly changing.

Yoga is helps to release us from unhelpful conditioning and beliefs but sometimes we need someone to shed a light on these. I am eternally grateful to my teaches for sharing their wisdom with me and the teachings of yoga.

Practicing at home online is better than not practicing at all, but a guide is extremely helpful.

The practice makes the body, breath and mind healthy - but we have to remember that these are just side effects, not really what yoga is for. They help us to stay supple and healthy into late adulthood so that we have more time to work on ourself and sit for extended periods in meditation.

Essentially, yoga is very much a movement from the gross to the subtle. The more we practice, the less distracted we are with the things around us in this world. It is a gradual practice, not a goal focused process.

In fact we have to let go of the conditioning around achievement and our modern definition of success. Yoga is non-competitive, which is also difficult for people as we have bene conditioned by our society and education system to be competitive. We have to be careful not to take our perfectionist tendencies into the spiritual realm.

Saying all that, there is a goal - to realise the self - and we can reach for that, but without grasping.

Happy practising. And on that note, many of you know this already, but I now teach intimate group yoga sessions on Sunday mornings at STYX., just five students in each class, £28 each for the 90 minutes. If you are interested then please ping me an email as I give thought to my schedule in 2025. Meanwhile do feel to join a general class as I try to give people individual attention here too, I do ask for commitment however, and an awareness that I don’t teach exercise yoga.

Love Emma x

I am increasinof the need to become quieter as we go deeper inside ourselves. I am also increasingly conscious of the deeper wisdom contained within the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and how our interpretation can be limited if we are not careful.

When is it time to let go of our trauma and move on?

Trauma has become a bit of a buzz word these days in holistic and healing circles - we’re all meant to be looking at our trauma and talking about it and - one imagines — healing it.

I don’t have an issue with this as such, certainly it has been helpful to acknowledge traumatic events in my own life and the impact they have had on my body and indeed my mind and it’s way of perceiving the world and all its very experiences - and the behaviour patterns that follow.

But it is also my experience that if we are not careful we can get caught up in our trauma to the extent that we never quite manage to move on from it and it just become set another opportunity to either drop into our victimhood, or distract us from living more presently.

Shit happens. I have a sense that incarnation in itself is traumatic, certainly for new and/or sensitive souls, and our societal structure certainly doesn’t help. School traumatises many for example but is normalised - break the spirit to fit in is an accepted approach to living. The workplace sometimes doesn’t help, modern day slavery plugged into terminals for hours on end, devoid of fresh air and nature, many have no idea what the weather is doing, let alone the phase of the moon or the state of the tide. We are increasingly disconnected from nature - to me this sounds like a major human trauma, but it is rarely considered as much.

So we’re up against it these days. I stumbled across this article which kind of says it all - we’re living in a mad world! https://uk.news.yahoo.com/unemployed-given-weight-loss-jabs-200000593.html

Somehow we have to find the courage to maintain our sanity when all around us there is distraction and denial of responsibility, of corporations profiteering by making us obese and pharmaceutical companies profiteering from trying to rectify it. Something is amiss.

In holistic circles too, we need to be vigilant. Our only true protection is discernment and never have we had to be more discerning about what we let into our lives, of the people we mix with and the environments we spend time in, let alone the messages we buy into from media, which are always trying to distract us and keep us caught in our fear and negativity and advertising companies trying to externalise our worth so they can sell to us the latest thing to make us feel better about ourselves.

We have to be discerning about our trauma too, of clearing it, not getting caught in it, of recognising that whatever happened happened and noticing the many ways it may have shaped us and still causes us our suffering and then have the courage to do what we can to clear it. Reiki, yoga and Ayurveda all offer us tools, which help to get to the root cause rather than skimping around with the symptoms and numbing outlives with anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds and the plethora of other pharma sold to keep us numbing to the deeper wounding underneath.

We have to recognise when it is time to move on, when we have healed our traumatic past and can finally live more presently in this moment. Otherwise we run the risk of getting stuck, of continually identifying with ourselves as we were and never truly beginning again. This is one of the many reasons I love the Yoga Sutras, and the ancient wisdom, often the Sanskrit word ’Atha’ appears, meaning now. Because right now we have a choice. Now we can begin again or keep repeating more of what we done previously. Now we have a choice. Now we can start over. Now we can be les burdened by our past.

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I love that each new day offers us the possibility to begin again. That each now and now again means that we can do things differently if we are conscious of it.

So as we approach this moon, it might be time to reflect on what we are still burdening ourselves with from the past, of all the weight we are carrying which can now be let go of. We are in that time of the year. You only have to walk the lanes to see how many leaves are falling from the trees. This is a fabulous time to let go and begin again, and we are headed to Samhain at the end of the month which marks the end of the Pagan year, for good reason, as it is supported and led by nature.

And for those who still need to work through your trauma then book in, maybe it’s time to do that deep dive and truly clear it from the mind, body, psyche and spirit. So then you too can begin again.

Love Emma x