We are not our thoughts and feelings!

This is quite some wax, full moon approaching on Saturday, in Virgo, albeit I’m not so up there on planetary alignment etc, it’s challenging enough to follow the moon such is its nature to do what the sun does in six months in a two week period!

This full moon is definitely packing a punch, ramping up, encouraging us to go deeper still. We might find physical pain appearing, highlighting where we are holding old feelings and thoughts from our past, especially from childhood, which we have repressed or suppressed maybe because they weren’t validated, or we didn’t know what to do with them, had to be ‘brave’, leading to confusion and fragmentation.

It’s been a ride that’s for sure, but a helpful one too, as we let go of what we are holding onto, so it makes space for the new to come in. I am reminded at this time of that wonderful quote from Rebecca Campbell (started below), which certainly seems relevant in my life now as I have processed another layer of the past which was negatively impacting my relationship with myself and the way that I choose to live my life.

Sometimes we do have to destroy all we have created so that we can begin again and both Beinspired and I are going through changes to find a new way which is less burdened by the past and by what has passed. Also, less driven by what other people think and the conditioning which tells me that things have to be a certain way, not least personally but in livelihood too. I am reminded that there is no rule book, no one way. And that we each have our own way, if only we can hear the gentle whisperings of our heart which nudge us until we truly start listening.

I am reminded also how we are the prisoner of our making, how we allow our mind with its relentless thinking to jail us, keep us constricted and limited, caught in past patterns of relating and being - often driven by a subconscious need to avoid previous pain. Yet pain is our friend if we can be with it and not collapse into it. Pain highlights where we need to do the work, where we are out of alignment with our truth, where we are limited and limiting ourselves - as Kahlil Gibran writes, “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” We have to feel the pain on the way to breaking through to then other side…I think The Doors wrote about that!

I am also reminded time and time again that we are not our thoughts anymore than our feelings and it is indulgent to lose ourselves in them, especially our feelings, leading to patterns of victimhood and judgement (both to self and to others). Sure, we might feel lonely, depressed, empty, angry, weary, but this is not us. These are emotions that move through us, so I am not suggesting that we deny them or repress them, they are very real. What I mean though is that we stop identifying with them as if they are us and preventing them their movement.

Thus we do not identify as a lonely person, anymore than a depressed person. Instead we are a person who is experiencing feelings of loneliness and depression. This is important. Why make ourselves something we are not? Why restrict ourselves to being one way or another. Somehow we have to find a way to let go of the mids-identifications, and allow our energy to flow - emotions after all are simply energy in motion, or not, as the case may be.

When we go into our emotions, when we let them move, whether that be through Reiki or yoga or Ayurveda, for example, then we will feel so much lighter, there will be space, we will stop misidentifying, we will realise that we are more than these feelings. Often there is a thought attached to the feelings, a way of relating, a pattern. These thoughts and feelings will get triggered from time to time by situations in our life - the universe draws these situations to us to trigger us so that we can become much clearer on what needs healing and letting go/moving on.

Thus, if we keep finding the same old patterns coming up over and over again, the same thoughts around not having enough money for example, which triggers a feeling of anxiety and insecurity and cause us to grasp and hold on for dear life, then we know we have work to do, that we are holding onto a belief from our past, a fear, which is causing us to lose our centre and also causing us to keep repeating more of what we have done previously - overworking, doing jobs we don’t enjoy but at least appease our fear of not having money, choosing relationships not based on love but on financial security etc, etc.

I could choose many other examples of patterns that keep us trapped such as fear of rejection or fear of not being good enough, both of which will cause us to make choices to minimise the risk of these fears being triggered, playing it small, giving more of ourselves than is necessary, making people dependant on us, over caring, all of these patterns of being just to avoid feeling our deepest pain, and yet these patterns and the way we live causing pain just because of the pattern and the underlying wounding being there in the first place!

We sometimes feel we have no choice. This is an interesting one. We can sculpture our life to such an extent that we stick ourselves in our routines, our mind feeling that it is then in control and less likely then to be triggered, but it takes an awful lot of effort to maintain this level of control. And furthermore, we deny our opt freedom, we tell ourselves this is how our life is and just learn to accept it, meanwhile our heart and soul are pining for our attention, “there its another way”, they try to whisper, but we are determined, stuck, seeing only one way and all the while suffocating inside, caught on the treadmill of life, living for holidays and retirement, anything to change the heaviness of the relentless nature of living so routinely.

To set ourselves free we have to have the courage to go deeper still. To notice our triggers and to follow the thread, to work our what is underneath it, what has caused us to lose our centre, what has caused us to enter our pattern, what is the unconscious driver that causes us to make the choices we make, to keep repeating more of the same.

This path of spiritual practice helps to set us free from all that is not real. Yet this process is not easy. It is NOT all love and light as new age spiritualism will have us believe. This too is a trap. I see it played out repeatedly, people try to do the work, but when the going gets tough, they give up, because they are still living in the mindset of perfection and Disney ideals, of THINKING and BELIEVING that life should always be just lovely and light and happy and if their experiences does not match this thought/ belief then they think there must be something wrong with them.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience and our humanness is messy! Life is one of cycles. Sometimes up, sometimes down, and sometimes somewhere in the middle, ‘middling’. This is ALL valid. We are in error when we believe it has to be one way or another. Just look at nature, it follows cycles. There is always a dance of expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction. This is how energy moves. We need to contract to expand into the more current version of ourselves. The key is not to get lost in the contraction but see it as part of the whole.

I am reminded how we are really our own worst enemy. We shouldn’t blame ourselves for this though, for the most part we have been taught not to like ourselves, to feel that we are at fault because maybe we see the world differently to the mainstream. Our education system, of which most of us have been subjected, teaches us to see ourselves and the world one way, it encourages uniformity and this notion of being right or wrong. If we grew up never quite fitting in, of being told that we are not quite good enough, not always getting A grades, not always winning races, then we can feel pretty crappy about ourselves and we can take this into adulthood.

Furthermore, when our life doesn’t go the way we want it too, when we suffer one failed relationship after another, when jobs lose their interest, we can blame ourselves, not realising that it maybe none of this was a good fit in the first place. But we need to know ourselves to know this. if we don’t know who we are, if we don’t recognise our own needs, then how can we find a good fit, or expect our needs to be met.

The mistake we often make is THINKING that other people can meet our needs, forgetting that they are having a hard enough time knowing and meeting their own needs. Our parents, for example, are just trying to survive in an unforgiving and hard world, and yet we can hold onto so much angst about the fact they didn’t parent us better, but for the most part they were doing their very best just as many of us are trying to do our very best now as we parent our own children -sometimes it flows and sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes its fun and sometimes it’s just day after day of hard work, but this is life, neither good nor bad, just sometimes a little bit boring and other times a good laugh.

so stabbing ourselves in them heart for our perceived wrong doings, giving ourselves a hard time over and over again, being our own worst enemy, feeling guilty, well it doesn’t really solve anything. It just lowers our vibration and suppresses our spirit and makes us feel really rather crappy about ourselves and this from someone who hated herself to the extent that she used to hit herself, starve herself, attempted to cut herself and even thought it might be a good idea to kill herself such was her feeling that the world would be better off with our her in it (if you are interested, maybe suffering with depression and low self esteem yourself then you maybe have a read of my book From Darkness Comes Light).

It’s been a long journey to let go of all that crappiness and learn to love and accept myself and realise my worth. And there are layers. Always there are layers. We are onions. We heal and peel one layer and then another reveals itself. And this is what this moon is gifting us. Another layer. I hit it and I’m sure some of you are hitting it too.

Urgh, the heaviness when we bring up another layer from the past, because while it feels familiar, the vibration is heavier, and this is the indication that the past has come up to be cleared. This is when we might seek help, be that Reiki or Shen or shadow work so that we can move it through us. Not to say we can’t do it on our own, but personally I have always appreciated others helping to hold space for me, so I don’t get lost in it, wallowing in my own self pity and allowing myself to become a victim of it, rather than just gently moving through it and letting it go over and over again.

It is only when we let go internally that our external world truly changes. Sure we can try to change our external world but I’m pretty sure we will find ourselves up against the same old rubbish in time, the same inability to be in an intimate and loving relationship, the same self-depreciating inner narrative, the same inability to stick with a diet that sustains us, the same old over and over again. It’s not easy doing the inner work, but it’s really such a gift for our heart and soul and a balm for this planet with all its chaos arising from people seeking their validation of worth through the accumulation of money and power, all external living which is some reason celebrated in our current technological and “me, me, me” society.

This because to really make changes, they have to be internal ones. If we keep living from our past experiences then we will keep repeating more of the same. And this is why we are drawn to spiritual practice, because spiritual practice, if truly practised, changes our internal landscape. But it’s not easy. It’s messy. That’s my point. But we have to keep with it.

The Yoga Sutras reminds us time and time again to practice, to choose one approach and stick with it, none of this modern day butterfly approach to practice, where we flutter between one practice and another, dipping in and out of offerings, never truly committing to one particular path, so that we never have to go deeper into our self. It’s indicative of our modern day online living, swiping away that with we don’t want to look at - we do it with our own minds and hearts.

Certainly my experience reflects this. I have studied yoga with a number of different yoga teachers over the years, dipping in and out. There has been change of course, mainly because of practising every day on my own for over twenty years now. But it wasn’t until I met my teacher, Louise, that things really began to change. This was maybe 5 years ago now and I have practiced with her on a one-to-one basis since then, sometimes weekly and sometimes monthly, depending on her traveling schedule.

It took me a long time however to let go of the way I used to practise yoga, the more hardcore athletic body orientated and slightly masculine and superficial approach of vinyasa yoga, which of course had its benefits, but it started limiting me, keeping me trapped, my mind trapped, in its need to make things certain and known, to follow a certain methodology, to make things right and wrong.

Of course this approach is never going to free the mind, it’s just going to feed more of its neurosis, the ego loves it of course, and the body, but the body was also restricted, being forced to practice in a way that didn’t allow it it’s own freedom and intuitive nudges, that kept reinforcing old movement patterns.

Many of these movement patterns had been developed based on the thoughts/feelings that were repressed and suppressed and stuck in the body. So in many respects I was just reinforcing my trauma, the body keeps score, until it doesn’t anymore, until we find the courage and strength to change the way we relate to it and move it, to set it free of what happened previously.

This scares people. We might move our body on a yoga mat which suddenly brings up an old memory, or touches an edge and we find ourselves crying. Students then think there is something wrong. There’s isn’t! This is the gold! This is the release. Every emotion that is released has a thought attached to it. When we let go of both, there is so much more space, not least in the physical body but in the mind too. What was bothering us drops away. Old patterns of relating to ourselves and others positively changes. We have ideas. Our creative flow flows again. All because of space - we need to give our body and mind space to be, space to allow the breaking down of the old and space to allow the new to enter in.

Talking of space, I visited my yoga teacher in Findhorn in January and I was reminded how important it is to give myself space to be without the family, and space to practice with a teacher in person so that they can get their hands on us if needed. This made all the difference and caused me to truly trust the practice in a way I possibly hadn't’t been previously, simply because it is radical and my mind has had to let go to keep on keeping on with it. There is no methodology, nothing to hold onto, nothing to make it known and certain, only this beautiful opportunity to go deeper into my body and listen to it and allow it, beyond the noise of the mind and the pull of the feelings. This is yoga though and it takes time, it’s not a quick fix approach to healing and spiritual growth.

The Yoga Sutras remind us that the practice needs to be for the long term, without interruptions, with a positive attitude, with enthusiasm and thoroughly, this if we wish to experience the fruits of the practice - namely entering a state of yoga where the mind is contained and we can access purusha, our eternal Self. The butterfly approach to practice is unlikely to lead us to this place simply because of not giving ourselves the opportunity to deepen into any one practice.

Practice gives us space to be and the space to be gives us the opportunity to hear, it is simple really. We increasingly notice our unhelpful mental chattering, the endless nature of the thinking mind, but this gives us the opportunity to detach from it too, to become the observer, watching our thoughts without becoming absorbed into them. So it is the same with our feelings, watching and observing them coming and going without being lost in them.

This moon is gifting us this opportunity to see what is and isn’t flowing in our lives, to see where we need to let go of our mind thinking it is running the show, to allow something far more beautiful and aligned to enter in instead. Remember, if we always keep doing what we have always done then we will always get what we have always got. Sometimes even changing the route we take to get to work can make all the difference, or trying a new activity, or practising a yoga posture in a more gentle and introspective way.

As I believe (but obviously this doesn’t make it true) we have to be the change we wish to see in the world. The moon is encouraging these changes and as difficult as it is, I am grateful for the light into the shadows to be clearer about I’m holding onto, the fear of safety and rejection that has driven many of my choices these last however many years, let alone caring too much what other people think and taking it all too personally in the process, let alone the extent to which my mind and its tendency to over identifying with thoughts and feelings has been my own worst enemy getting in the way of our greater freedom and capacity to give/receive LOVE.

So the more we can let this all go, the old patterns of holding on, the thoughts and feelings that got trapped along the way, the greater the freedom and love we begin experiencing in our external world too, and that is worth celebrating - it makes all the inner work worth it. This is Spring after all, we are being gifted new beginnings…but first we must let go of the old to create the space…and then be conscious of our choices and what is driving them, love or fear?…having the courage and strength to begin anew.

Here’s the quote:

“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” Rebecca Campbell

Obviously I am always very happy to work with any of you individually to look deeper into your shadows and help you bring them to the light. Spiritual Life Coaching is brilliant at helping to make real life changes, but even a single Reiki session can create this change, and obviously private yoga is brilliant at looking at stuck and restrictive movements patterns.

Happy full moon!

Love Emma x