Half term fun

Ewan's best friend, Nige, and his three teenage children have been staying with us for the last 5 days, which has been so much fun - the house has certainly been more alive than usual!

On Sunday we went for a walk at Moulin Huett with Ewan's Mum. I haven't been to this beach in many years and I have to say that I had forgotten how stunning it is, quite incredible really, I will certainly be visiting more frequently now.

While Nige and Ewan went off doing boys things, I took the children out to the Fairy Cave at Lihou, I love this place, it has a certain energy about it, the children certainly seemed rather fascinated. We then went and did the obligatory trip to the Little Chapel - again quite incredible really, and I have to say that that valley with its lush green grass and beautiful Guernsey cows is one of my favourite on this Island.



It has been rather fascinating having the children to stay as I had forgotten how much noise and mess they can make. Admittedly a lot of time was spent watching the box set of Gavin and Stacey as the weather was not always great and they were on their half term relax - out, but that aside I have never seen so many towels in the washing basket, let alone done so much washing up.

They left on the boat last night and I returned home from Yoga to find an empty and incredibly quiet house and while the novelty was fantastic (I had not realised how much I love my space and peace), I was soon missing the energy of the children, there is something rather beautiful about their present moment and upbeat existence...we can learn a lot from them actually.

I hope everyone else is enjoying their half term.

xxx

Celebrate the full moon!

It is full moon tomorrow....and an exciting one too....see http://realastrologers.com/full-moon-in-aries-october-22 for more information.

The full moon is a time of immense - and intense - psychic awareness and great fertility. It is a wonderful time to celebrate the moon and its seasonal gifts by outdoor evening meditation and enjoying drumming, fires, gazing at the moon and singing and dancing with friends. It is also the time to resolve difficult tasks, to let go of anything which has been bothering you (it comes back to the fact you have to let go to let the new in), to cleanse crystals and to say a prayer of thanks to the Goddess of the moon.

Moon watching, generally, is a wonderful way of knowing and living with the circular movement of nature. Each of the thirteen moons in a year has its own name and is in harmony with the month it appears in bringing with it seasonal energy. The full moon in October is often known as the "blood moon" as this moon marks the season of hunting and slaughtering (not good for us vegetarians!) of the animals for winter food and clothing. This is a time for thanksgiving, rest and reflection.

Since the beginning of time people have been influenced by the moon and its phases – everyone is “moon touched” although some more than others. The moon can influence our energies in a powerful way. For our ancestors moon watching was a part of life as it helped to light the skies and guide hunters, warriors and travellers safely through the dark and back to their tribes.

Furthermore as our ancestors looked to the heavens, they saw how the moon waxed and waned, how night turned into day, spring into summer, and summer into winter. They saw the seas ebb and flow; plants bring forth grain and life burst forth from the womb. Everything in nature seemed to move in harmony with the phases of the moon, including women’s menstrual cycles and pregnancy.

In fact for women, governed by monthly cycles, the moon was particularly significant and still is, as women we subconsciously know our connection with the moon through our bodies. The feminine qualities of the moon are highly celebrated with many moon goddesses linked to “her”. In fact the Great Goddess worshipped in old Europe became equated with the moon, in whose divine light she was reflected. As the moon waxed and waned, so did the inherent power of the Goddess.

The mystical moon ‘influences’ that people once used to use to improve their lives are still important to many pagans and natural spiritualists today. For example, many people are turning once again to the principles of lunar gardening, something that was developed over 10,000 years ago and handed down over generations until they became ignored and forgotten with the development of chemical fertilisers in the 20th century. For more information please see www.lunarorganics.com.

As well as the full moon, other significant moon times are:-

The new moon – this can be a great time for starting new projects, planting seeds, setting out intentions for the moon cycle. Sit outside, burn candles and incense and connect with flowers and plants and seasonal fruit and vegetables.

Waxing half moon – the energy is building so this is a good time to take steps towards realising plans and intentions, a good time to try new and challenging ventures. Get out there and walk in wild places, connect with the birds, animals and signs that nature puts in your path.

Waning full moon – as the energies of the moon become less, so it becomes a good time to think of letting go, banishing those things from our life that we no longer need, those things that hold us back. This is the time to do less and reflect more, contemplation, meditate, listen to music and tend to the seeds that you have planted.

Dark moon – this is often a time to take the pressure off, give into the low energy that you may experience, it is a great time to reflect on where you want to go next in preparation for the new moon. So give yourself a break and enjoy sitting outdoors and allow quiet into your life.

So happy full moon everybody, I hope you enjoy the energy as much as me!

Lots of love Em xxx

Weekend of enlightening Yoga, hoorah!

I have just had a great weekend on the local Art of Living course. It was absolutely fab to be able to sit and immerse myself in my breath, be led through asana, meditation and relaxation by someone else, meet new like-minded and spiritually interested people, eat vegetarian food with others and only have to journey a mere 4 minutes every day unlike the usual trips I have to take to other places in the UK and indeed the world to gain the same sort of Yogic experience.

Needless to say I was slightly high after finishing the course, although lucky old me finally has a cold - this is actually not a bad thing, colds help the body to let go of stuff it no longer needs, so a healing of sorts, although it has gone to my lungs, which is not good and I can't help wondering if all the Pranayama over the weekend has taken it deeper than it would otherwise have gone. Oh well.

Change seems to have happened very quickly all of sudden. I had felt "stuck" for ages, lacking in any clarity and all of a sudden over the last 3 weeks everything has become clear again and I realise - again - what I want from life, which may sound awfully dramatic, but just means I know where to direct my energy rather than simply all over the place. It is all rather exciting really!

I have been a slacker on the swimming in the sea front and it may well have helped ease my cold now I come to think of it - not so sure about the lungs however! I did do a castor oil liver pack on Saturday night while watching XFactor all warm and cosy in front of the fire. I then had a super hot epsom salt bath to try and shift the toxins...I guess I'll do the same all over again tonight, not only should it help to quicken the healing process, but generally results in a good night's sleep.

I managed to catch sunset last night down at Vazon, it was great, in fact it was a lovely crisp Autumnal night last night, we are building up to a full moon at the weekend and the moon was shining brightly as were the stars, and there was just that lovely Autumnal smell in the air - amazingly, despite the cold, my sense of smell seemed to improve enormously over the weekend. This is one of the things I love about doing these intensive Yoga weekends - your senses become more alive and everything looks clearer and brighter. Got to love it!

So I am off to snuggle up on the sofa and eat some homemade Thai butternut squash soup for dinner, and try and attempt to shift this cold before I teach tomorrow evening!

Sweet dreams. xx

A weekend in the UK and a fresh perspective

Ewan and I have just returned from a weekend in the UK visiting friends in London and Brighton.

As always it was good to get away, as much as I love Guernsey the energy can be stifling at times and there is a sense of freedom which one feels when landing in Gatwick and being anonymous for a change!

Ewan and I spent some time wandering in London and took the bus so we could gain a better idea of how everything fits together, it is easy to lose all concept on the underground. We also walked through Regents Park and along the Canal to Camden...as well as visiting London Zoo. I must admit it was Ewan's choice and I was reluctant, caged animals are not my thing, but I do appreciate the conservation work they zoo are doing and I must admit seeing a Tiger moving and up close too was quite a highlight and made me realise how much joy one can feel by simply watching animals do their thing (as much as they can caged in a zoo of course!).



The weather in Brighton was glorious and the sea front rather busy but still a lovely place to enjoy the mini Indian summer! Ewan and I wandered around the lanes and came across a few alternative shops, I just love them, all those books on esoteric subjects, the smell of incense and all the angel paraphernalia and spiritual stuff, it is just great, I could spend days in one of those places just absorbing the energy and pottering around, a bit like a child in a sweet shop I guess.

I saw a naturopath on our last morning and she used one of those machines to read your vibrational energy and discover what is out of balance. It is a fascinating device and really does help you to make sense of what is going on as often there is stuff which can go undetected in other tests an diagnoses. So it seems I no longer have a virus and am no longer sick...so I am very happy and strangely am feeling much more energised and myself again. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

Thank you to everyone who made the weekend so much fun and enlightening...the focus is returning!

xxx

Sunday in nature

My gosh hasn't it rained over the weekend! Not that we didn't need it, but I did still experience this sinking - oh no, please don't say this is going to continue all autumn and into winter - feeling because it can get awfully claustrophobic inside all the time and I loathe driving in the rain as it gets rather slippery through the lanes.

Still Ewan and I managed a swim in the sea on Saturday afternoon, down at Amarres, a good call on Ewan's part, we have never swam there before and it is great as you can go off the jetty and immediately you are in deep water,so you are forced to swim about for a bit...which is what we did, before getting out and getting changed in the rain, yuck. Still we were comforted by a trip to Costa on the way back home - there is indeed something very comforting about warm and frothy soya milk, washed down with a shot of decaffeinated coffee!

Saturday night we watched Nikita, well I didn't watch that much of Nikita as I had my head buried in a pillow for much of it as I just cannot stand watching violence these days - it just fills the head with all sorts of negativity and is not conducive to a restful night's sleep. And I have to admit while we may have been in bed by 10.30pm (and on a Saturday night too, I love it, back to the olden days!) and not up again until 9am the following morning, I did not feel I had rested in the slightest with all those Nikita induced weird dreams.

So Sunday dawned raining and windy, and it was indeed rather challenging to drag oneself out of bed, but we did as we had decided to go on a mission to collect fallen pine combs at the Guet. Only it was about 10.30am by the time we made it there (not like the olden days with my parents when they would drag us out of bed before dawn to be the first ones at the Guet to have our pick of the fallen branches and pine combs)and there were quite a few people milling around already so we really did have to get off the beaten track to find our stash.



Actually it was a fun 30 minutes, not that I am anywhere near as competitive these days as I may have been in the past, but still it is a bit of a game, seeing if you can find more pine combs than anyone else. There as a moment when I almost - and quite literally - jumped out of my skin. There we were wandering around the middle of the Guet when all of a sudden I noticed 4 guys in camouflage lying on their stomachs, completely still, about 5 metres away from us, with guns pointing in our direction. Ewan did not seem the slightest bit perturbed as he changed our course away from them rather into them as we had been walking, while I was having a mini melt down, my heart was pounding and I had to stifle a giggle (nerves you see).

I guess they were playing some sort of game or it was a training exercise or something, I saw them later on, moving silently from tree to tree, good grief, there should be warnings about this sort of thing - admittedly there were a few women and children in combat attire up at the main carpark, which should have given it away a little, but still, you really don't expect to see men with guns on a nice sedate "picking up pine combs at the Guet" Sunday morning walk with the churc only down the road!

I spent the afternoon with my Mum helping her start to clear out the greenhouse for the winter time. We weeded all the beds and took out the melon plants, the massive courgette plants (have you seen the size of these things, quiet incredible in comparison to the size of the courgettes!)and some of the tomato plants which have produced their best for the season. We collected all the squash in from outside and cleared away the plants - the squash are disappointing this year, in fact lots of things are disappointing this year, nature seems to be all over the place, the squash are much smaller than usual, which is a shame as Mum and I both love eating them and they are so good for us too!

There were tons of tomatoes to pick and also aubergine, red peppers, courgettes and beans. Then we pulled up some carrots and new potatoes and also picked a few blueberries and raspberries (see nature has gone strange, these should have finished weeks ago). I love being in the greenhosue - well actually I like being outside more - but I love being around all the plants and learning from my Mum. She has done so well, she even has Thai basil and lemon grass growing these days and is keen to establish some tea plants and even grow coffee at some stage. Pretty cool.

We had a bonfire to burn a lot of the fallen and dried leaves and dried out brambles from a few weeks ago. There are a couple of apple trees in the orchard outside so I picked some of these - incredible how many earwigs are eating their way through all the fruit - and then I wandered up the lane, down the road from my parents' house, where there is an overgrown patch of a field with the biggest and most juicy blackberrries I have seen this season. Great stuff. We also managed to do all the composting, now that is a smelly job!

So by the time Ewan came to collect me at 6pm I was a touch on the tired and yet elated side, completely dirty and smelly but with a box full of organic and fresh produce, great stuff! We did the recycling before going back home and while Ewan popped out to see his Mum I set to work in the kitchen, roasting off lots of the tomatoes to make into tomato puree as a base for sauces in the next few months, and making a ratatouille mix for Ewan's dinner, as well as boiling some seaweed and eggs and simmering some quinoa to stock the fridge for lunch the next few days.

Needless to say it was an early night for me although I got woken when Ewan came to bed as the cat has fallen asleep at my feet and Ewan insisted she went into the spare room, but of course as soon as we put her in the spare room she wanted to come straight backs into our room, you know how it is with cats, they like to be warm and snug and get their own way. Finally she stopped making a fuss the other side of the door and we managed to get some sleep, in fact I slept for abut 11 hours, lucky me!

xxx

Ramblings of relative creativity

I wrote some poems at the beach yesterday morning, and when I read them this evening I realised that my brother leaving affected me more than I realised and I am thankful to him for encouraging a creative release:-

Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time
There I was
golden and bright
But then the light
went out and my
heart wept
With sorrow.
I can hear the
seagull
reminding me
of who I am
and the urge to
be free.
Free from what,
your heart demands. For
it knows only love and with
that, abandonment.
Maybe one day
soon, the light will
shine again,
and I'll hear
the whispers
beyond the pain.
Love is blind,
love is cruel,
but what
else can the
heart to do?


Night time mood

And in the darkness
of the night, my
heart yearned for
eager flight.
Rise up my love,
it calls to me,
go far, be strong,
and all will be.

But in the moment
of the timeless
void, where all is
still and the world
is silent, I sit
and ponder the
path before me.
There are no
signs that I can see.

After my Reiki, swim, teaching and lovely facial (all those healing hands today and I swear that during the Reiki treatment this morning there were more hands on me than simply Sylvia's...seriously, there is no longer any doubt...Ewan may disagree!) and then a few hours hanging out with Vicki (thank you angel, the cards were totally spot on by the way, and it was great to see you again, have a girly night and watch some dancing!) and I feel clearer and, dare I say stronger, perhaps it is because we are now building up towards a new moon.

I am looking forward to the new moon, perhaps not its heightened energy, but the potential healing and new beginnings it facilitates. Healing can never happen without our involvement, there is no doubt, you cannot expect to heal unless you let go of the past, be that yours or a previous generation. And that is not always easy, it is embedded on every level, and how we access it is different for everyone. But we need to dig deep and follow the heart, it will lead us - call it whatever you like, the Holy Spirit, the grace, the angels, the Universe - but it is only accessible within us. All any of us, as healers, or helpers, can do, is facilitate the process but the work and responsibility rests with us alone.

As Dr Usui said at some point, you have to literally take your healing and wellbeing into your own two hands. You.

So we'll get there, I am getting there, I feel it and I am excited by it. Which is a relief.

I am eternally grateful to Primrose and homeopathy for everything. I was sorting all may articles today and came across stuff I wrote about life 5 years ago and I am simply amazed how much transformation and thus change, has taken place. There is always somewhere to go, but the point is to accept the present moment and be self-compassionate and accepting in the process. I am quite sure that illness presents itself to remind us of this. And let's face it, ignore it at your peril, I am not sure it is the last resort but it is a very obvious wake up call. And usually the signals have been there the whole time.

So humility and graciousness, love, light, peace and happiness.

xxxxx

Weather for ducks and windsurfers

Well it looks like the wet autumnal weather has arrived...such a shame as it was so lovely yesterday. Oh well, the ducks will be pleased.

Ross left yesterday, which was all a little sad as I am not quite sure when I will see him again. Thankfully I was teaching in the morning, which was a good distraction, and it was lovely to see so many old faces returning to their mats (not old in age, old in so much as I have not seen them for a while), especially Tara who is looking radiant with pregnancy and also Lucy and Matt who are back on the Island after the first stage of their travels.

After Yoga I met Chris at Petit Bot and we actually managed a proper swim, like for at least 5 minutes and quite deep, I was very impressed, makes so much difference going swimming with a girlfriend as you can chat and you soon become numb to the temperature of the sea...it has to be good for you, in fact I have been reading all about it in this fabulous book, "Cellular Awakening", hot and cold baths and showers, all part of the detoxification and healing process.

I had acupuncture again yesterday with Andre. I can highly recommend this form of treatment to anyone who wants to heal and experience a little bit more energy, I just feel it has so many benefits and Andre certainly knows his stuff. It is a fab way to simply chill out.

The cat has been a frequent visitor these last few days, I wish we knew her name, she is lovely, I am totally hooked, she is rather entertaining, I just love her white whiskers and black nose. I think Ewan has developed a soft spot for her too!

xxxxx

P.s just got back from a swim at Vazon, well more so a dip (known as the tea bag in the sea swimming circles, in and out), it is fairly miserable out there but great waves and wind for the windsurfers, at least some can be happy about this weather!