The breeze of Autumn blows a gentle end to Summer

End of Summer

The schools are back and the weather has changed. The gentle autumnal breeze has added a coolness to the air. The summer is officially over when the children go back to school and the young adults start college. In the Celtic Wheel of the Year we are still experiencing Lughnasadh energies until the wheel turns at the Autumn Equinox on Monday 22nd September where we will experience equal day and night.

Final days of Lughnasadh

We are in the final days of Lughnasadh. How does that feel for you? Is summer a time where you enjoy the flurry of activity, the bright evenings, the warm days? Or are you looking forward to the inward journey of Samhain? Lughnasadh is traditionally a time where we celebrate the fruits of our labour. We celebrate how we have travelled through the Celtic Wheel of the Year, what was seeded at Imbolc and what has come to fruition. If any seeds have not grown can we bring awareness to them. Are they still seeds we want to nurture? Or are we ready to let them go with the Autumn Equinox? As we let ourselves release the old to give energy to the new. We would ask you reflect on how the seeds you planted have helped your relationship with Rest. Remembering that Rest can be productive, so can you bring awareness to the fruits of your Rest at this time.

Showing Up to What Is

Soul Matters took a summer break to enjoy time with friends and family. Sinéad moved house and county in July. Anne-Marie went to Italy. Our summers were very different than we expected and the seeds we planted at Imbolc grew differently than we wanted. The medicine of the Celtic Wheel is to face this with an open heart rather than withdraw and ignore. This is not easy medicine yet it can be such a powerful way to nurture the unexpected events that life throws at us. As we continue our journey through the Celtic Wheel of the Year our experience deepens with the medicine. Rest through the Celtic Wheel has been our place to come home as we honour the cycle of life with all its ups and down. As we learn to embrace the polarities, the joy with the sorrow, the love with the fear, the light with the dark, we can learn to accept life as it is. This is medicine of cyclical living which offers us the ability to experience life challenges as they arrive. Life is neither fair or unfair, Life just is. We hope you will join us at one of our in person events to experience the deep medicine of Rest through the Celtic Wheel.

How Yoga Nidra can help with Trauma

Yoga Nidra is a safe and gentle way of allowing unresolved energy from an overwhelming event slowly begin to unwind and be released. You do not need to dig into the past and relive the event while practicing Yoga Nidra. This prevents the practitioner from becoming traumatised again and therefore allows healing to take place. The body will naturally dissolve what it is ready to release in a relaxed state.

Old fragments of trauma are often released outside of conscious awareness. People often feel lighter as if a weight has been lifted after practicing Yoga Nidra for a while. This happens in deep states of relaxation where the body can let go completely. In the meditative state the practitioner is resting in a safe place. Yoga Nidra re-teaches the body how to turn the light switch off so that it can return to a balanced state. The nervous system can reset itself so that it can operate normally rather than in a hyper-tense or dissociated state. The body can enter a state of homeostasis which allows the body to heal itself naturally. During a practice of Yoga Nidra the practitioner deliberately slows and deepens the breath to induce a state of deep relaxation. A deep breathing practice alone helps regulate the nervous system and bring the body back into a state of balance.

The practitioner becomes more ‘stress-resistant’ amidst the pressures, insecurities and difficulties of everyday life, and learns to thrive on the same difficulties which would lead others to the brink of mental anguish, emotional self-destruction and physical breakdown. This is the great secret of Yoga Nidra. It is not only a way of coping with stress; it also provides a means of transforming and positively utilizing tension as a steppingstone to greater awareness, efficiency and achievement in life. At the basic level the practice of Yoga Nidra helps us to process, integrate and release the experience of existing day to day.

For more information we recommend Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep by Kamini Desai.

What is a Sankalpa?

San = truth Kalpa = vow

Sankalpa is one of the defining tools within the practice of Yoga Nidra. We use a Sankalpa to repattern and reprogramme the mind. One of the most important things to remember when practicing Yoga Nidra is that you are already perfect, you are already whole. You are everything and nothing at the same time and are pulsing with polarities.

Sankalpa is placed twice in the Yoga Nidra script. The first placement is to bring the statement front-and-centre into your experience before we surrender the intellect. The second placement comes at the end when the bliss body is centred and you are beyond your patterned, conditioned mind. It is here you can affect the underlying energy of your life and have the potential to experience miraculous healing, sudden remission of a limiting belief, or welcome an aspect of your potential to life.

Sankalpa is a vow. It resembles an intention, but it is so much more because you are more suggestible where you use it in the practice. It is a resolve to create a difference in your lived experience. According to our teacher Jana Roemer, there are two main ways to use Sankalpa:

1. To transform a limiting belief into a liberating belief.

2. To plant seeds of intention of something you want to create.

It is most potent to have a short, concise Sankalpa. Create a statement that includes the personal pronoun “I” and very little after that. For example: I am worthy.

It is also helpful to use the present tense and positive language. For example: I am calm and peaceful.

What is Trauma?

What do we mean when we talk about trauma? Trauma is our response to something that happens in our lives that we can’t make sense of and so our nervous system gets overwhelmed. A fragmentation or disruption occurs internally and we cannot stay present to what is happening right now. We all have our own responses with some of us becoming more reactive and some of us becoming absent. When we are acting out of a trauma response to something that is happening in the present moment we are responding from an unintegrated and fragmented sense of self. We lose our sense of interconnectedness which leads to separation and othering. By creating space to practice group coherence we hope to create safe opportunities to heal this separation.