Butterflies and community

We might not have made it to Sark last weekend, but we were lucky to get there this weekend instead and what a special weekend it was too.

I love Sark and its beautiful skies and this weekend was no exception, I often just stopped and stared, mesmerised! We managed a few beautiful swims too and the butterflies were just amazing! This morning the path was just lined with butterfly after butterfly, even E was taken away by it. 

 Butterflies seem to be the theme today in a strange kind of way. I’ve been thinking a lot this weekend about community and about yoga and Reiki and teaching and about the bigger picture. It’s easy to lose sight of this in the drama of life, and get sucked up in the minutia of the ‘me’ culture that permeates society and forget that we are all in this together.

Yoga and Reiki saved my life and I was so passionate about these practices that I threw myself into them, and this led to me qualifying as a teacher, simply because I wanted to learn as much as I could and share what I had learned with as many people as possible for the greater good.

When I set up Beinspired, I hoped that this might encourage a sense of community where people could discover, embrace and share their own uniqueness without fear of prejudice and have fun as they experience the benefits of yoga and Reiki for themselves. I’m hopeful that Beinspired has achieved some of this, certainly we have had some fun over the years.

Over the years I have tried to do fundraising for the community, and his year E and I have set up our Plant A Tree Project where we hope to help grow more trees on Guernsey. Plus we financially support projects in Nepal, Sri Lanka and Greece so that we can try and positively impact on the wider global community.

 However I have been thinking that it needs to be developed further, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I got a little bit of clarity walking back up Dixcart Valley on my own today. There is something quite magical about that valley as there is about Sark generally and I was grateful for the time on my own this morning to immerse myself in it. 

I’ve just got this sense that even in yoga and Reiki, in our quest to be someone, we can almost sabotage it’s potential benefits to humanity and to the planet generally because rather than pull together we can pull apart, doing our own thing.

It’s a tricky one to explain, but I have noticed that in my own life even though there are now more yoga teachers teaching yoga and Reiki practitioners channelling Reiki, which can only be a good thing for humanity and the planet, I have a certain resistance to it.

I question whether what is being taught is truly yoga, albeit appreciating that every new teacher has to start somewhere, just as I wonder whether Reiki is being diluted because people are seeing it now as a career choice rather than a calling. Yet who am I to pull someone up for their motivation in doing the work that they do? if income generation is the only motivator for teaching yoga and Reiki, does this make it any less spiritual or helpful than someone who wants to share to promote peace as a primary motivation?

It’s something I have questioned all weekend, because I can see that even in the holistic world which is meant to be all caring and sharing, we often lack a cohesive sense of community as people compete for business accolade, financial gain and a sense of being good. We can’t help it, this is our conditioning, the need to be someone and be recognised for it. It makes us feel better about ourselves and eases our inherent insecurity.

I can see how I might feed into this from time to time, losing sense of the bigger picture and the role we each have to play as part of the whole. It’s a bit like the butterfly effect, this idea that the small things can have non-linear impacts on a complex system – the concept of the butterfly flapping its wings and causing a typhoon. In reality a single act like the butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause a typhoon but a small event can serve as a catalyst…

In theory each time someone gives/receives Reiki and/or practices yoga their vibration increases, which raises the vibration of the planet. So really it doesn’t matter who is doing the teaching or the practising or the giving, the important thing is that someone is doing it. 

If we truly wish to live as a community and help humanity and the planet to heal then this is all that needs to take place; the teaching, the receiving and the practising, and it really doesn’t altogether matter who does which of these!

So it is that my moment of clarity today found me wanting to establish a list of Reiki practitioners with whom people might receive a treatment, and yoga teachers who might help students to develop their practice. Simple really. So that it isn’t about me, not really, it’s about all of us, and about community, about coming together and about the bigger picture. Let’s see!

Tonight after yoga one of my students shared a stunning photo of two butterflies that she had taken. I thought this rather appropriate given my ponderings and my interactions with butterflies this weekend. I’m also aware that the butterfly is about transformation, and I know that this process if occurring too, as it brings with it a slight contraction, which is uncomfortable but also – perhaps for the greater good. Let’s see on that too!