The social dilemma

Twice today I have been told to watch Social Dilemma on Netflix. As I exited all social media in May, I asked one of the people whether it might make me want to go back on the social media again and I was assured that no, the documentary would instead make me feel like saying, “ha ha, I told you so!”.

Now obviously I’m not going to say that to anyone because we all have a choice in how we live our life and it’s not for me to judge anyone for making different decisions and having a social media presence. I made the decision for many reasons and have very much enjoyed having my life back again. In the nicest possible way, I don’t need to know the ins and outs of other people’s lives and I don’t want another reason to be distracted from my children and wasting my time.

I’ll admit that I did have a wobble, when I doubted the decision I made, questioning whether I may have been foolish to let go of Beinspired’s presence on there, not least for the community and sharing side of things but to keep people informed of classes and offerings. 

But I am also very aware that there is always another way, and I’m conscious that I don’t want to encourage people to spend any more time on social media and/or to feed into the marketeers and their obsession with selling and profiteering at the expense of all else.

I do what I love and I love what I do and I have faith and trust in something that I cannot name that will bring those to me who need to find me and take me to those who I need to find and connect. This to me is the other way, and when it happens, when there is synchronicity and coincidence then it is rather magical, like this sacred world going on that others don’t notice with their head in phones.

What clinched it for me recently was practising the yoga posture hanumanasana, the monkey pose, or commonly known as the splits. For years I have practised this pose but always by stretching my hamstring on the front and my hip flexors on the back, to the extent that it has not been without some forcing and the general discomfort of stretching legs apart.

Yet recently, practising with my teacher, she has guided me to experience a different way of accessing and being in this pose that does not in any way resemble the way I used to practice it. This way of being in the pose does not put so much pressure on my hamstrings and does not at all stretch the hip flexors and therefore brings with it much greater freedom to the spine and lightness within this.

It was certainly a process to get there though, a few weeks of practice and me struggling to access it in the way she was teaching me so that I resorted to how I had always practised it, stretching, and yet this triggered something in me, brought up an old pattern around the external and self-worth, which was uncomfortable and outgrown, yet here I was still feeding it because I couldn’t find another way.

I knew though that I couldn’t continue to practise like this as I knew it was unkind to my body and I was also selling out a part of myself, compromising it for the external glory of looking like I was in hanumanasana, but with none of the freedom and lightness that I knew could be found in it.

My mind let this go eventually, not without a struggle, the mind always holds on to the old, because it is known and comfortable, and yet eventually we outgrow it and the comfortable can become uncomfortable and then we are caught, to continue doing what we have been doing because it is safe and known and yet knowing that that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable because we know we need to let go! 

I can’t remember how it happened, I think someone said something that resonated, and I realised what I was doing and the bigger picture and pattern, and I knew then that I might not be able to go so far in the posture as I may have forced myself to do previously, but that there was no option but to practice the gentler way, that things have changed and that I now have a lot more respect for my body than I did previously. I was reminded that there is always another way.

So it is too with social media. There is always another way, and I know that we will try and convince ourselves that there isn’t. That if we are running businesses or have families overseas then this is the only way for people to know that we exist or for us to keep in touch with our families respectively. But this is really just a story that we tell ourselves and because we believe in the stories we tell ourselves then they become our reality – our thoughts create the world we live in and our experience of it.

Thus when I began to doubt whether I should be on social media, I felt disempowered by my thinking and my mind imagined my worst case scenario, that I wouldn’t have any students to share yoga and Reiki with, that no one might find their way to me and I would have to give up the one thing I love doing more than anything else. Because of my negative thinking, I gave out that energy and experienced a momentary loss of faith and lack of trust that ended up making me feel depressed and a little bit anxious for a future which wasn’t real but just imagined in my catastrophising. 

The experience with hanumanasana allowed me to change the script, to see the pattern I had around negative thinking and disempowerment so that I was able let it go simply by becoming aware of it. The fact I was able to experience another way of practising the posture allowed me to embody the fact that there is always another way, one that is more sacred perhaps, and works on a different level to the mundane, of which fear is such a limitation and pushing and pulling becomes the norm. This whole experience strengthened my faith.

I value what I do and the teachings that are passed to me by my teacher, and I have no doubt that those who are meant to find their way to me so I can share what I have learned will do so because the ‘something’ that drew me to my teacher will draw us together too. I have questioned whether this is egotistical of me, but I don’t believe it is, more so that I am extremely grateful for having found this sacred practice and a community of yoga practitioners who are also off grid and who have experienced this other way too – who don’t want to sell out on it. 

I don’t want to sell out on my childen either, they are worth so much more than that and our time together is always so precious, especially now they are back to school/pre-school. It’s all too easy to lose ourselves, get caught up in that which isn’t important in the grand scheme of things, to buy into other people’s dramas and to find ourselves anxious and disempowered by the experience. I really don’t think there is anything social about social media, but heck that is just my experience of it. All I know is that there is another way, one of spending time actually communicating with those who matter, getting outside and having fun.

The inner and outer landscape

It’s the arrogance of humanity that gets to me the most. Our egotistical need to be recognised as ‘someone’, to define ourselves by our busyness and our obsession with acquiring stuff, and our delusion that this is the way, that we can buy ourselves happiness regardless of the greater implication.

There is a distinct lack of responsibility for the planet and the way that we use its resources, just as there is a distinct lack of responsibility for our own wellness. We are constantly looking outside ourselves for something bigger, better, brighter, only seeing what we want to see, and ignoring the mess in the shadows, pretending that it’s not there.

Most would have felt a little uncomfortable, even slightly depressed, watching David Attenborough’s ‘Extinction’ as the programme sought to convey an important message – that each one of us is individually responsible for the continued exploitation of this beautiful planet, which is indeed being exploited by us humans.

It was a bold documentary which shone a light onto some of the many shadows, potentially making us - the British public at least - more aware of the ways in which wildlife is being killed and the land destroyed in our pursuit of money, which underpins our consumer culture and motivates ‘progression’.

People are out to make a buck and they don’t care how they do it. Never is the ego more manifest than in its sole pursuit of money and wealth; we continuously sell out in the chase of this, and often find ways to justify our behaviour around money, deluding ourselves as we try to delude others and simply feeding our egos.

I was humoured to see the furore around Lululemon’s promotion of  a yoga workshop advertised as an opportunity to “resist capitalism”. This being a company which encourages us to buy into the illusion that we need to buy $180 yoga leggings to practice yoga!

As Amy Swearer of Heritage Foundation was quoted as saying: “Lululemon IS capitalism. It is literally a privately-owned corporation that raked in half a billion dollars in pure profits last year, merely by selling overpriced yoga pants to women willing and able to pay for this luxury. All this begs the question … WUT?” 

Sadly the yoga world has sold out to our capitalist consumer culture as much as the rest. This is now an ‘industry’ where you are sold the idea that you need to wear particular clothes, use a certain mat, drink from a specific type of water bottle and practice in a dedicated all singing-all dancing yoga studio if you hope to practice yoga properly. I’m yet to find any reference to any of this in the ancient texts btw!

But this is so typical of our culture, in that we have to commodify things, make money from it, even those things that by their very nature are not about money but about something very different, such as yoga. It seems to me more obvious than ever before, the way in which we fall into the illusionary trap that it is about the external and about what how other people perceive us and our place in this world.

The reality is that we are really very insignificant in the grand scheme of things and life will continue anon without us in it. It’s a hard lesson for us to learn, but a necessary one if we are serious about trying to make the world a better place to live upon. The trouble is, people buy into their need to be someone and take themselves far too seriously, to the detriment of the bigger picture.

Look at social media and the manner in which this is used to promote ourselves in our attempt to ‘be someone’. Look at the politicians who put their own egotistical need to be elected for the sake of being elected beyond the greater interests of the society and the planet as a whole. We are all of us in some way feeding into our need for recognition at the expense of something – be that our values or our children or our health.

The more important we think we are, the busier we have to be, as if to justify the labelling we have given ourselves around our own self-importance. Our lives become a mere creation of the mind – we imagine ourselves important and live it out, impacting on the way we treat others, and the way we expected to be treated by others too. 

The ego is often so subtle and our conditioning so deep, that we don’t even notice that we are doing it. We turn a blind eye to the way we are living our lives and justify the choices we make based on it being OK because it is me…just me. Yet a whole heap of ‘me’ makes up this planet, which makes for a whole heap of people living in a way that isn’t necessarily responsible, let alone harmonious, and definitely not conscious.

I keep thinking that clearly our way forward cannot be one based on our past, as it is our past that got us into this sorry mess in the first place. We have, many of us, learned a lot, but there are still some that are reticent to take responsibility – look at President Trump and his inability to accept that climate change is real, because then he might have to make some hard decisions and this might lose him his electorate ratings. See what I mean about the ego!

My Ayurvedic doctor will always say that ‘ever action has a consequence’ and she is right. Even the most well intended actions, such as people switching to veganism in an attempt to save the planet, will have consequences - all of a sudden there is greater demand for nut milks, for example, which means more nuts need to be grown, which means more monoculture and greater demand on water and land, to the expense, often, of another crop and biodiversity of land.

Try as we might, us being here and living on planet earth places a demand on the earth’s resources. We cannot escape it. But one thing we can do is try to become more conscious of our impact on the earth, taking our head out of the sand and looking more honestly at how we are living and the choices we are making about that.

We do not have to do what everyone else is doing, blindly following like a sheep. It is healthy to ask questions, especially if what is being asked of us does not make sense. There is lots about the way we are currently living that does not make sense to me, from education to our health and wellbeing. 

Often there’s this resignation that because things have been done like this in the past, it’s OK to continue doing them like that now. Our approach to life needs to change and fortunately many people are making a shift and doing some really positive things that are beyond their own ego, and for the greater good. The more that follow suit, the more we stand a chance of making this a healthier planet for our children to live on.

I can’t help thinking that the more we come to know ourselves, explore more of our inner landscape and recognise the way that we are treating our physical bodies and managing our mental health, the more this will be reflected back out into the world. The more conscious our relationship with our self, the more conscious our relationship with the outer world, and the more we might begin to recognise what is important in life (and I don’t believe it is the life that is being fed to us by marketing companies, social media and private enterprise). 

We can all do more to help, but it is actually in the doing less that we might achieve this – there is always the paradox! In letting go of trying to be someone, of having to label and separate ourselves from everyone, of thinking that we and life needs to look a certain way, well perhaps we might just become a little more conscious of what really matters and find a new way; usher in the paradigm shift that is needed now for our wellbeing as much as for Planet Earth. 

Rest

I was heartened to read Karen Brody’s recent blog post where she talks about rest and how many are using it as a tool to be more productive, missing the point entirely.

I’ve been questioning this for a while now. Yoga Nidra has become a popular practice in the yoga world, and the concept of rest too, but I have concerns that it becomes yet another tick box exercise, “done my rest- tick”, yet another ‘thing’ to fit into already busy days.

I also like what Karen  says when she writes, “If we are resting to be more productive then we are feeding into the same paradigm that's making us all sick and tired”, because I believe she touches on something that is underpinning so much of life right now, this constant feeding into the same paradigm that has the world sick and tired and in need of change.

Frequently I see people coming up with ideas and schemes, which they feel will positively change the way we live, yet from my side, all they are doing is simply reinventing the wheel and in many cases, losing themselves in the jargon of it. Women especially are doing this, believing they are supporting a move to a new more aligned way of being in touch with the deep feminine, yet actually they are still feeding into the male paradigm.

Patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in our psyche and in our society that it is very difficult to see through it. I was reading an article about Jane Fraser being appointed as the first female CEO of Citigroup, making her the first woman to lead a major US bank and I congratulate her for piercing the glass ceiling and yet I find myself questioning whether it will actually make a positive change. If she is playing the game the male way, focused on objectives and achievement and feeding into the linear, then what difference does it make if she is female, she’s still supporting the same system; nothing changes.

I’m not sure that we can create a new world based on sex anyhow, nor on what’s happened previously, because memory doesn’t always serve us well, its laden with perception, and false perception often too. I wonder if it might be the dreamers that will see us through to another way of being, those who have tapped into a much deeper place within themselves that is not based on history (at least in their minds), but imagines a whole new world that we have not yet ever seen. This is one of heart and creativity, not one of fear and safety. 

This might be a world where family and health are viewed as more important than material wealth and the bottom line, where stress is taken seriously and so too the needs of our children for parental interaction and time. A world where simplicity is viewed as more important than filling our houses and our minds, our world then, with ‘stuff’ that adds no value beyond the sophomoric and numbing that is so entrenched in our society.

We are always trying to find a way to numb our pain. I could write a whole blog post on this alone. The almost daily reporting of court cases over here in Guernsey about people found illegally possessing cannabis and being found drunken in a public place is indicative of this, so too the drive towards legalisation of recreational drugs and the explosion of CBD oil as a pain reliever. I always think of Kahlil Gibran’s poem entitled ‘On Pain’, which reads:

“And a woman spoke, saying, Tell us of Pain.

     And he said:

     Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.

     Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

     And could you keep your heart in wonder at the daily miracles of your life your pain would not seem less wondrous than your joy;

     And you would accept the seasons of your heart, even as you have always accepted the seasons that pass over your fields.

     And you would watch with serenity through the winters of your grief.

      Much of your pain is self-chosen.

     It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

     Therefore trust the physician, and drink his remedy in silence and tranquillity:

     For his hand, though heavy and hard, is guided by the tender hand of the Unseen,

     And the cup he brings, though it burn your lips, has been fashioned of the clay which the Potter has moistened with His own sacred tears. “

I like how he writes, “much of your pain is self-chosen”, because this is my experience. Having suffered with depression for much of my 20s, and having made an attempt to study and understand my mind and the source of my suffering, I see that so much of it was because of my mind and my perception of life as it was lived moment to moment, but so often lived based on memory, and even this a perception, an illusion all of itself. 

 It was my pain that made me go deeper, that asked me not to numb myself from it with antidepressants and to gradually let go of my reliance on smoking cannabis and drinking alcohol, but to delve right deep into it, to understand it, and to make peace with it. In the process of this, turning as I did to yoga and Reiki, I connected to a part of myself that I knew on some level from my teenage years as a surfer and a contented childhood spent so often in my imagination, that there is more than what we can see. As Gibran writes, there is this part of us that is “guided by the tender hand of the Unseen”. It was the connection to the tender hand (the hand an extension of the heart space lets not forget) of the Unseen that eased my pain and supported my healing.

It is this perhaps, the Unseen, that will help to change things if only we can trust in it. It is tricky though, to trust in something that we cannot see, to trust in something that is difficult to define because definition limits and this cannot be limited, to trust in something that is felt from a deep place inside us that comes and goes, cannot be held down. This is not a world where we trust. This is a world where we try to make life certain, ordered, controlled, because we don’t trust and look how Covid-19 has challenged that! 

This is not about patriarchy or feminism or the divine feminine movement, this is something entirely different. This is about a paradigm shift deeper into the heart, that is not separated in the quest to understand and compartmentalize. It is about resting into that deeper place within ourselves, within our body, that cannot be intellectualised, that cannot limit us like our mind, but that can help us navigate our lives into the unknown. It can be very messy, but this is the way of the heart, as my yoga teacher says, “Deep grace isn’t always pretty or easy to witness. Sometimes it is necessary to howl.”

 It seems so simple to me at times. If we look to those who might inspire us like Mother Teresa or Mahatma Gandhi, and for me Diana Beresford-Kroeger, there is only deep integrity, heart and simplicity. These are people who learned how to rest into themselves. I don’t know that this meant they took time to lie down and be still, which is how we might think that ‘rest’ looks, although it is likely. If you look at a definition of rest, ‘cease work or movement in order to relax, sleep, or recover strength’, then being still must surely play a part in it. Yet it is more than resting for the sake of getting anything and more an opportunity to ‘strengthen’ through non-doing, the connection to that which is always present and yet often overlooked in the quest for productivity.

As Brody writes, “Productivity is not bad. But the problem with using rest practices to fuel more productivity is that not only can productivity put us in a hypnotic state of masculine overdrive, but productivity feeds a culture that is fundamentally not working for most of our bodies and minds. When we tell people to rest so that they can be more productive, even if it's couched in values asking us to slow down, we are still selling a flawed paradigm.” She gets it! This is the trouble with our society. We grasp onto something as if it might be the magic pill that makes everything OK, yet still, still, we do it to get something; we expect an outcome, and a positive one at that.

It’s so not that. In the fleeting moments of the rest there is nothing to do and nothing to change, for we become, fleeting, fleeting, fleeting, like a bird fleetingly visiting a bird table to feed, more of who we already are, underneath all the stories and labels and ‘things’ and ‘stuff’. It is not that we trust the Unseen, it is that we are the Unseen, so why wouldn’t we trust in it when we know it to be all that is actually real. Fleetingly it goes. But like the bird that fleetingly feeds at the bird table, we fill ourselves up on it each time that visit it. It is this for me, that is truly rest. It doesn’t try to change anything! It allows us to live from a deeper place in heart, that’s all. Then everything changes!

 It is not therefore for us to find a new way on the outside, but to rest more fully into the deep presence always available to us from within our own body, on the inside.  This is when rest becomes much more than the opportunity to become more productive or to achieve something or produce an outcome, to separate, divide and conquer, but to take us back home to the mystery and magic of the self. 

I’ll leave you with this poem from Rainer Rilke

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.”

P.S. Pride was AMAZING tonight!

Autumn snuck in!

Autumn is here, it snuck in when we thought it might never arrive. It takes me by surprise each year, and yet it shouldn’t, not really, it’s part of the wheel, like clockwork, will always appear. I’m resistant though to its arrival, I’m a summer baby, a water one too, I love the heat and the energy of summer, and although I know that it tends to burn me out in the end, I never actually want it to end.

In many respects I’m grateful then, that autumn suddenly appears. If I think about it too much I get a longing for the warmth which I know is about to disappear. I cling on tightly, not wanting to let go, yet autumn does it for me, because there’s nothing to hold on to when it arrives. And actually i’m always blown away and spellbound by its clarity of light.

The last few days I have caught myself mesmerised, cycling and having to stop and be still and watch the most incredible evening skies as the sun as setting. I could have shouted to the universe, “you are so beautiful”, I wanted to, but I didn’t, because I did’t want to scare anyone, but it was that stunning.

Then yesterday at the beach. I was lost in the revelry of the clouds. Oh my goodness, those autumnal clouds; the most perfectly puffy clouds, cumulus clouds, their name deriving from the Latin cumulo, meaning heap or pile. These are piles that are welcome in my sky, suspended, low in the bright blue sky, a gift from God, I was mesmerised. I love clouds, could watch them for hours, but these have to be my favourite, in autumn, when the light is bright and the sky so full of life.

I swam out as far as I could into the bay and lay on my back and gazed at this clouds, and the land, and I could see the Guet in the distance, an arch of green, and I thought maybe I had died and gone to heaven. To be held like this, held, oh my goodness, you know you’re alive, that there is a mystery that we cannot name that permeates our being and in moments like that, moments, we are suspended in its glory, I didn’t want to be anywhere else on this Earth, this beautiful earth.

It got me again later, out on the bike. I had to just stop. It reminds me of Scotland, this autumnal light. There is something about that place, the space, the light, the clarity, it’s made for people like me, the artists and the poets, the seekers and the wanderlust. We bathe in this stuff; it does something to us. Every time I visit my best friend in Scotland, I spend the first few hours commenting on the light, mesmerised by it, blown away, stunned, nothing else seems important but embodying it somehow, anyhow.

Autumn does that to me too, beyond the initial resistance, when I can smell it creeping in, the mornings, sometimes the evenings, when summer is still in full swing, but there’s a shift, the leaves, already browning, the acorn, the blackberries! How can I write about autumn and leave it so long to mention blackberries., Now these are another autumn gift. This is the season of the harvest, fruits and vegetables, what is there not to like. We are awash in the bounty, is this the most abundant season? I can’t be sure, they all usher in a gift, but there is something special, ok it’s the light, I’m still lost in the light.

So that’s another summer done and gone, although it won’t be done just like that, it bobs in and out, snatches of it, reminding us, “here I am”, it says, “yet but here I am”, autumn calls back with its apples and tomatoes, its squashes and berries. Then it will just disappear, a memory, a reminder, a motivation towards next summer, next summer we will do this - maybe next summer I’ll make it to Petit Port, I meant to do it this year, but summer ran away with itself, the same bays, the same beaches, there’s something comforting about familiarity, of witnessing the shifting landscape, then passing seasons, the subtleties.

We’re headed towards the equinox now, they say many of the dolmens are orientated towards the equinox shift, the equal duration of days and night when all is in harmony, the light and dark, the tipping point, another turn on the wheel of the year, taking us this time towards the darkness, the waning down, the dropping within, the introspective time of reflection and stillness. There is much to be celebrated. And we will celebrate, a perfect time for bonfires, for the letting go of what is no longer needed and the tending to the harvest, of the seeds planted, finishing off those projects of which I have many.

It’s an exciting time, full of its own potential, the opportunity for transformation by the grace of God, the grace! Oh the grace of the transition, we have much to learn. I’m trying to learn, to allow, allow, allow, the mystery, flow, not hold on to that which needs to be gone, an identity, perceived, imagined, made real, who cares who cares?! Puffy clouds, that’s the image I’m going to hold, still, full, just being, be-ing. I like that. Autumn. Light. Clarity. A glimpse of the mystery. I felt that. x

You're not a fraud!

It’s been in the ‘field’ recently, because a number of people have shared with me how they feel a fraud for working in the capacity of Reiki healer or yoga teacher when they are still healing themselves and dealing with their own trauma, insecurities and lack of self-worth.

I have fallen into this trap in the past too, of believing that I had to have all my ‘stuff’ sorted to work in a healing and yogic capacity. I used to put all my yoga teachers up on pedestals, for example, thinking that they had it sorted, that they were wiser and somehow better than me; healed and enlightened. Not that I had any evidence that this was the case, beyond my own perception of what it might mean to be a ‘proper’ yoga teacher and/or Reiki practitioner. 

And this is often the problem that we face; our own minds and what we believe to be right or wrong and our (mis)perceptions and expectations of what a particular ‘role’ in life might look like. Others will feed into this with their perception and expectation of what they think your life should look like too. Many yoga students assume that yoga teachers are vegan-eating, calm and centred semi-enlightened beings. This couldn’t be farther from the truth!

 We are all human and we are all doing the best we can, and those of us yoga teachers and healers are trying to find our way just like everyone else. As E always says, we’re probably more neurotic than most, and it is this, and our own suffering, that has led us to yoga and healing in the first place. More fool anyone for putting themselves on a pedestal and putting out to the world that they are sorted, because it will always catch up on you in the end.

I suppose this had been on my mind, when quite by chance, or not perhaps, I stumbled across reference to Michael Stone on a yoga website a few weeks ago. Michael was a psychotherapist, yoga teacher, Buddhist teacher, author and activist, committed to the integration of traditional teachings with contemporary psychological and philosophical understanding. He hosted sell-out seminars, retreats, conferences and workshops related to Buddhism across Canada and around the world. 

Married with two children and another on the way, he died from a drug overdose in Victoria on Vancouver Island at the age of 42 in 2017. Unbeknown to his students or the outer world, Michael was suffering quietly with bipolar disorder and several months before his death, his mania began to cycle more rapidly. Until that point he had been managing his mental health through Buddhism and yoga for years, but had sought medical help in the months leading up to his death.

A statement at the time of his death said, “He went to bed early. He ate a special diet…He saw naturopaths and herbalists and trainers and therapists. As things worsened, he turned to psychiatry and medication as well. Balancing his meds was ever-changing and precarious”. The statement went on to say that Michael kept his condition private because he “feared the stigma of his diagnosis…[but] he was on the cusp of revealing publicly how shaped he was by bipolar disorder and how he was doing”.

I was shocked when I read all this and felt sad that Michael hadn’t felt he could share his suffering with his students, as if he might be judged, or his sharing might somehow negate his teachings, cause others to question them. His website reads, “Michael was on the cusp of revealing publicly how his life was shaped by bipolar disorder. It was complicated though. As a spiritual teacher for whom so many looked to for stability, he wondered if it was better to hide his own fragility. As a psychotherapist, he was trained to put his own stuff aside in order to work with others. He was also a human who felt—and was allowed to feel—the stigma, shame, and self-consciousness that comes with a mental health diagnosis in a culture that largely doesn’t know how to deal with neurodiversity.”

It is complicated. There is a certain vulnerability that comes with being deeply authentic in this world with all its expectations, and especially when we have such high expectations for ourselves too. As many of you will know I have a history of depression and have been trying to write about it in a manuscript these last few years. The writing has taken me on an inner journey as I have been required to dig deep and resolve those aspects of self that still held an emotional resonance, that were still impacting on my mind, feeding into false perception and continuing to support – in many respects – my suffering.

During lock-down I dropped into a dark night of the soul and the depression felt all too real. It was all part of the process, and was necessary for my writing and own self-healing. A friend asked how it was that I could continue teaching and I remarked that it is in the teaching and the attempt at being there for others that keeps me grounded and helps support my own healing – life continues anon and I want to be a part of that, not hide away from it, because I feel that my life should look a certain way if I am to be a compassionate and effective teacher or human being. 

This is reflected to a point by Michael’s website, which further reads, “Michael loved his students and he loved his work. The practices he shared through workshops, retreats, and writing were a life raft for him. His work inspired and grounded him. As a neurodiverse person living with internal instability, he channelled his challenges and the insights gleaned from his experience into tools that he could share with others. It could be argued that it was in experiencing these challenges that Michael became so effective as a teacher and communicator. For someone facing his kinds of suffering, he did really, really well.”

This raises a very important point, especially for those who are battling with their ‘goodness’ and ability to teach/heal others when they are going through the mill themselves. It is only through our experiences that we grow as conscious human beings, that we gain insight and are en-lightened of the human condition. Let us not forget that we are in this together – we are all connected and are a micro of the macro. Our challenges are here to help us to grow and it is through our compassionate sharing that we can help to support others as they too navigate their challenges; empathy, understanding and compassion are paramount to the healing process.

Authenticity is crucial too. Without this, we are kidding ourselves as much as we are kidding others and we are setting ourselves up for a fall. This also comes with experience, the dropping away of the layers that prevent us from being honest with ourselves and allowing more of our vulnerability. It is a never ending process and demands patience and kindness towards the self. Unfortunately our ‘quick fix’ culture, especially influenced by the allopathic world, does very little to support this, and it is common place to find yoga and Reiki students grasping for the ‘cure’, the course, workshop, training and/or attunement that will suddenly make them whole and fix them.  

It will all help, of course, but it takes time and honesty, getting out of our denial, and the tendency towards self-sabotage and the misperception that we have to have it all sorted otherwise what right do we have to help others – buying into the idea that we are indeed a fraud. It’s tricky territory, because as soon as we start buying into this, we start to give ourselves a hard time and our internal critic reigns as we feed into the negative self-talk and add to the weight of our lack of self-worth, which underpins so much of this.

I went through this not that long ago so write with some degree of experience. Fortunately my healing friend, Jo, pulled me up on it and I am more aware of catching myself now. I have had a skin condition for three years now, which has gotten worse over that time. I have been trying to treat it holistically, mainly through Ayurveda. I can see so clearly why it is there from an Ayurvedic perspective, but have ‘struggled’ (this word is the give-away!) to heal it myself. I felt like a fraud – how can I possibly help others to heal Ayurvedically, when it didn’t appear to be working for me. 

This train of thinking did nothing to ease the bout of depression. I was giving myself a really hard time, to the extent that my spirit flagged and I questioned whether I might continue working in a ‘healing’ capacity. I went to the doctor in the end, which was a big deal for me, because until that point, despite the many lessons I have learned through my experience with conception and birth, I still held onto the notion that allopathic treatment is bad, holistic is good; the mind was buying into the separation and thus creating some inner-disharmony.

The doctor diagnosed peri-oral dermatitis, which was a huge relief, to finally have a diagnosis and something to work with and I wished it hadn’t taken me so long to ‘surrender’ to seeking allopathic help (and having to therefore let go of my notion of right/wrong, good/bad – it amuses me how we create so much of our own suffering through our perceptions). I was prescribed three months’ worth of anti-biotics, which caused me to actually laugh out loud in the doctor’s surgery, because of course I know only too well that what we resist persists - I have been a vocal advocate against antibiotics for a good while now and this was strengthened when I saw for myself the damage they caused when Eben was prescribed them at birth; even now his tummy is still not healed.  

It was a big deal for me to take the tablets, and yet I learned so much about my mind during the experience, that has been helpful. It kickstarted too my research into peri-oral dermatitis, which is of course not straight forward to treat, why would it be, how would I grow if there wasn’t a healing challenge to resolve! The anti-biotics will help to an extent, but will not get to the cause - any skin condition, as I know only too well, is linked to the heart and involves a good look at self-love and the manner in which we self-harm, and it is intrinsically linked to stress too, which is ironic, is it not, for a yoga teacher to be stressed! 

Yet stressed I can be, in my effort to be all things, to live up to my cultural expectation and my own inner drive towards achieving and being of some use and purpose in this world - living life to the full, helping and knowing more of my own mind in the process; in short, becoming conscious. Reading about Michael, it struck me that this might well have underpinned so much of his motivation too and I couldn’t say it better than the words used on his website:

“Considering his practice and teaching, it’s easy to wonder how he could’ve died. We could instead ask, how did he live so well considering the power of his neurodiverse wiring? What can we learn about our own minds and hearts from someone who visited the front lines of the mind? There is an all too common theme in yoga and dharma worlds: if you practice deeply enough, you will heal, and if you don’t heal, your practice or something in you is flawed. This is not true.”

 I agree; I know that those teachers and friends who have inspired me the most, are those that have gone through, and are going through their own mill. These are the people who are doing work on themselves, who embrace the challenges, because it gives them something to work with. Yoga and meditation are practices, they provide us with tools to help us navigate our way through life, they are not the cure in themselves, it is only when we work with them that we might come to heal more of ourselves. So it is the same with Reiki and Ayurveda – we adopt the principles so that they become a part of our life; we live them. 

There are times when we need help from others, when we need counselling or therapy, when we need allopathic medicine. All of these I have called on over the last few years; nine months ago I went through a course of EDMR because the yoga and the Reiki and the Ayurveda had got me so far, unravelled some of the trauma, but I was struggling to let it go and EDMR helped me through this process and I shall be forever grateful to Marni Alexendra for that (life changing) processing.

We should not feel it is a sign of weakness or be shamed by the need to seek professional help or to allow our students to know what we are going through; we are all only human, even those of us teaching yoga. We need to give ourselves a break and allow the break downs to help us to break through whatever is getting in our way. Sometimes we are our own obstacle because we feel we have to look, act or be perceived a particular way. It takes a lot of energy to keep up this pretence and half our problem is letting go of that and this idea of an image that we want to present to the world. 

I am grateful to the depression and also to the peri-oral dermatitis, for both have given me a reason to dig deep and learn more about healing and about myself. My learnings have helped me to be kinder and more compassionate to myself, forgiving and letting go of stubborn unforgiveness and having greater compassion and empathy for others too, so that my experience informs my work and I may share from a place of deeper awareness and integrity.

I suspect the depression will always come and go for it is a messenger that shows me where I need to let go of holding in my mind, of mental constructs which are limiting me and the process of letting go allows me to breakthrough to another level of consciousness so that the world appears brighter, with more potential than I could have ever possible imagined - as if a new world awaits if only I could get out of my own way (depression helps this). As for the peri-oral dermatitis, I’m not quite sure where this is taking me, but I’m flowing with it as best I can and increasingly accepting that we are more than the face we put out to the world! 

To those of you battling with this idea that you have to be whole and healed to do the work you do, give yourself a break: it is your humanness that will inspire others, and allow them to be more of who they are, not your denial of it. The more you can allow your authentic self its expression, with all its messiness and contradictions, the more it gives others permission to awaken and acknowledge those aspects of self that might require attention. It is in our healing that we help others to heal, it is in our growing and expansion that we allow others to grow and expand too. I’m grateful to Michael, for his story has allowed me to own more of my truth - thank you.

Love Emma x