The full moon was helpful. I have felt stuck for a good while now and assumed this would end with the grieving process.
But alas, the feeling of struck continued anon despite me finding my grounding and centring again after a tricky ten months of looking deeper into the shadows demanded by the grieving process.
After all, when death has shaken us up, how else can we truly follow through on making the most of our life if we are still carting around a whole heap of scars that keep us trapped in unhelpful mental and behavioural patterns from our past.
To set myself - ourselves - free, to live a better life in this moment – presently - there is no choice but to open to greater vulnerability and therefore dig deep into old wounding.
Digging deep is hard though. Turning 51 and the Chiron Return that accompanies this age has added to the discomfort. No doubt peri-menopause plays into it too, because this demands a certain honesty, and being honest with ourselves is not always easy.
However, there are times in our life, watershed moments we might call them, where we know we have to make changes. The changes, of course, have to be made on the inside. It is only then that our outer reality can truly transform as it reflects back our inner terrain.
I am reminded of one of my favourite quotes attributed to Henry Ford, “If we keep doing what we have always done, we’ll always get what we always got.” Since turning 51, change has been close on my heels. It’s time to do it differently, shift the priorities.
Yet despite clearly seeing my patterns around the core woundings of rejection/abandonment and making myself wrong, which my journey with grief highlighted, this feeling of stuck-ness continued and the change wasn’t coming in, or at least, it was, just that it was happening subtly so that I wasn’t noticing it – and therefore not in the time frame or way I had imagined. Another lesson.
We cannot control things. The moon made this very clear. And yet we try regardless.
It also asked us to let go of our expectations and ideas of how it should be, and allow something else to enter instead – sometimes spirit has a better sense of our needs than our i-ness does.
During this stuck time a new Reiki client entered my life who became Reiki attuned. I bumped into her a few weeks later and she told me how she had been trying to direct Reiki up the central energy channel, something she had learned about through yoga.
I am always at pains to stress that Reiki has its own intelligence, that we cannot control it or manipulate it, that it does what it needs to do for the greater benefit on all levels of being, but it is difficult for people to understand this, as it cannot be intellectualised, only felt. Furthermore, we have to let go and trust that Reiki knows best and this can be tricky to those who need to control through fear of what might happen if they don’t.
The student sharing how she had tried to direct the flow of Reiki up the central channel was helpful. Not least because it highlighted that despite me sharing about Reiki having its own intelligence, the need to control is hard wired in people – trying to control Reiki, trying to control healing, trying to control an outcome – but also the extent to which we are conditioned to this idea of moving energy centrally and upwardly. It helped me make sense of something.
During the summer I signed up for a Foundation Tantra course with Tantra Illuminated, to dive a little deeper into classical non-dual Shaiva Tantra with Dr Christopher Wallis. I felt the need to look more closely at my mind and its patterning, to support the grief process and heal/let go of old outdated modes of thinking, behaving and relating - Samskāras then.
A few months later I also started studying Sanskrit with a teacher from Tantra Illuminated. Sanskrit demands accuracy, and accuracy demands a certain effort and discipline – something my studious mind and pitta nature loves, yet I can then end up taking it too seriously.
Throughout all this, my yoga teacher, Louise, has been trying to encourage me to let go of everything I think I know and to begin again in each moment. She has also been trying to help me allow my body its natural intelligence, not imposing any pushing/pulling movement or control over my breath and getting out of my logical and analytical mind which wants ‘to know’ and ‘make certain’.
This is quite in contrast to my earlier yoga training and yogic conditioning and it has taken me a while to trust the process. Even then, letting go of breathing exercises is one thing, but beginning again in each moment? Well that’s tricky for a mind which has been programmed since the age of 4 towards productivity, doing, achievement, completion and outcome.
Instead the Scaravelli-inspired approach to practice, if I can even call it that, yoga then, asks us to let go again and again and live increasingly presently, here, now. In this way, it asks us to let go of methodology and alignment principles, and anything else which organises and conditions the mind and indeed body, and instead asks that we pay attention, listen, and respond rather than imposing.
After all, from a yogic perspective, direct experience is considered the highest and most reliable tool for uncovering truth and achieving liberation. Both classical and Tantric yogic traditions agree that true spiritual transformation only happens when we experience reality firsthand, rather than just intellectualising it or being told about it by others.
But how often are we truly guided by our direct experience? How often do we do something because someone else, or our mind, tells us it’s a ‘good’ thing only to later discover that it is harming us? It takes a certain discernment to truly honour and ground into our own direct experience.
Food fads are a classic example of this with people switching their diet because they have been told something is good for them without realising that it is causing harm. During the turmeric latte fad, my Ayurvedic doctor was seeing increasing numbers of patients suffering with symptoms of pitta imbalance because of overdoing the turmeric. It was the same with the fermented fad – just because we’re told something is ‘good’ doesn’t mean it is good for us.
It is an easy trap to fall into. Sometimes something starts off beneficially and it is only later we realise the scales have been tipped into harm instead.
I’d started noticing symptoms of stress but it took me a while to link this to the Tantric practices. After all, a whole community of Tantric practitioners were committed to these practices, so I just assumed I would benefit too.
And I did initially. I enjoyed the meditative practices, the visualisations and the breath awareness. We were encouraged to practice for a minimum of 24 minutes each day, combining practices in a certain order. I was using a timer, which was okay initially, but became a bit of a tick box exercise after a few months and meant I was distracted by my phone (the timer) in the yoga space.
After a few months and still not linking the two, I started noticing that I was more in my head than usual. And that my thoughts were becoming noisier, more distracting. I noticed a certain rigidity too. It is difficult to explain; I just noticed that my mind demanded more order to things, was more pitta than usual, stressed. And now there was this pressure to practice the techniques even if I didn’t always feel like it.
Something was afoot. I can’t entirely blame the Tantric practices. There was a combination of factors, which fed into the stress. Life is always busy, I thrive on this, but it had become busier than usual with some extra events to organise including a beach birthday party for my youngest and a home education story telling session, and I felt the pressure of both.
Furthermore, Beinspired was going through an energetic shift and with that my client base was changing, which was both discombobulating and at times, triggering. My sensitivity to perceived rejection can be both subtle and quick, it is a survival mechanism that I developed as a child to keep me safe from feeling the pain of rejection/abandonment/failure.
It is a pattern I have been trying to heal for many years now, but it is deeply entrenched. I am conscious of it at least, but can still find myself ‘triggered’ and at times, in the pattern before I have had time to catch my breath.
My pattern is to close my heart and withdraw, which in many ways is counterproductive, because closing the heart takes us into our head, and we end up rejecting others before they can reject us. It also brings with it an anxiety and a fear of having done something wrong. This depletes one’s energy and self-confidence.
Our Samskāras (scars) and the accompanying behavioural patterns fascinate me, so too the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the feelings. More often than not, until we have seen the patterns, we might well conjure a story to blame others, or project our stuff onto others instead, and enter into an acting role where we might be caretaker or martyr or victim or even righteous one.
Both classical and Tantric yoga texts tell us that if we truly wish to evolve, to liberate ourselves and recognise our truth, our essence, be fully conscious then, enlightened, we need to clear the mind of its scars, these Samskāras, and dissolve the energy blocks (the stuck emotions, emotions being energy-in-motion) so that we are no longer triggered by what’s happened previously and therefore bringing the past with us into the present.
This is what it means to live here now. Not just going; “Oh here I am now, it is 11.31am”, but living entirely in the present so that we are not affecting the present with our woundings from the past. It is quite some challenge, because these scars can lay deep, there is a seed to them that can sprout at any time so we have to be vigilant. It doesn’t help that we might carry scars from past lives too.
I’m about to go off on a tangent but I feel it is important, especially if we are truly committed to the path of freedom. Firstly to notice when we are triggered. Secondly to pause and breath. Where do we feel it in the body? If we go immediately to story we will lose the opportunity to heal. Instead stay in the body and feel the extent of the emotion, however uncomfortable it is, as it just wants to be witnessed.
In witnessing it, it dissolves, and the scar heals. We also receive a huge amount of energy that was tied up in the stuck emotion in the first place. Our heart will also expand so we will feel more love than we did beforehand. As I shared earlier, it’s not necessarily an easy process, as we can be deep in the pattern with the reacting behaviours and narrative before we notice it – hence vigilance is required.
So all of this was going on, and the result was a feeling of being out of control. This was inevitably feeding the stress. Not least the patterns being triggered, but the lack of control over the weather in organising a beach party and an outdoor story telling session in October.
I questioned whether my practice was helping. After all, don’t we practice yoga to ease our suffering. It was then that I questioned whether the Tantric practices were merely adding to my stress because of their rigidity or helping me manage the uncertainty of life as it arises?
Then I found myself drawn to Vanda Scaravelli’s book, Awakening the Spine, and something struck me. Of course! She talks about holding/allowing the intelligence of the body. The body is no different to Reiki. It too has its own intelligence. So why on earth was I imposing my will upon it? Why was I forcing it to engage in practices once they have served their purpose? Everything has a timing and it’s knowing when it is time to let something go, even if that is a spiritual practice.
In short, I realised that my body-mind complex was stressed by these two opposing approaches. Was it letting go with my teacher Louise, or being controlled by the Tantric practices?
It’s not necessarily the spiritual practices though. It can be our approach. But nonetheless, I was reminded how our spiritual practices can be counterproductive to our quest for freedom if we become rigid about them, allowing them to feed our patterns rather than free us from them.
But there was something else too. Vanda writes, “Be careful, very careful about organizations. Yoga cannot be organised, must not be organized. Organizations kill work. Love is everywhere, in everything, is everything. But if you confine it, enclose it in a box or in a definite place, it disappears”.
Vanda is completely spot on. We have to be so careful not to engage in an approach or indeed practices that demand a method or organisational quality to them, as this is counterproductive to the essence of spirituality, which is freedom.
I realised that I had allowed the Tantric practices to organise my practice, which had the effect of organising my body and mind and created a certain rigidity in the process. It was time now to let them go.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
My heart opened. I giggled at my patterns, pleased to see them more clearly. Promising myself I’d see them quicker next time now.
The joy returned to my practice; simply lying on my mat and watching my breath.
This is enough.
We have to be so discerning on the path.
It is easy to get trapped.
I had trapped myself in the name of evolution, it’s funny really. I had allowed my own feeling of stuck-ness and I didn’t even realise it.
My mind has been decidedly quieter since I let go of the Tantric practices. They served a valuable lesson. But I have found more comfort in the unfolding of the breath and the gentler movements in my body, listening to it and trying to honour it, rather than impose myself and my will upon it.
It’s a huge shift for me in many ways, something I have been working towards. Letting go of the association between yoga āsana and exercise took its merry time. This is another leap, of trusting Louise and letting go into the unknown as I let go of enforced breathing, of imposing my will over my body and just allowing its gentle unfolding.
The conditioning around productivity, achievement and doing are so deeply, deeply ingrained it’s taken a good while to get here now. But it feels significant. An act of self-love, of ahimsa (non-harm), and of being; yoga then.
I’m curious how my life might change. As my inner landscape shifts, softens, as I notice increasingly the Samskāras as they arise, how I might make more conscious choices, not be dictated to by my past, by duty or guilt or shame or whatever stuck emotion drives us subconsciously.
Let’s see. The mind will no doubt try to bring back in some form of control, such is its egoic nature, and so vigilance is called for, and kindness too.
I’m grateful for the light of the moon in helping me to see where I was creating my own suffering, and it has been lovely to experience the flow again – the robins have started appearing in the most beautiful of ways, always a tonic for the soul and a helpful sign.
Love Emma x
