My Journey Inward: The Path To Self-Love
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We welcome Harvest Harris-Jones to the podcast who owns a creative Heartfelt Practice where she interweaves, shamanic, reiki and yoga practices using the power of nature to help empower and transform women to be their authentic radiant selves. Harvest has also set up a sacred women's healing circle connecting to the cycles in nature, which fills her heart with joy. She runs retreats connecting people to their hearts at her award winning ethical holiday cottage business Laverock Law Cottages and Glamping in Northumberland.
MY JOURNEY INWARD: THE PATH TO SELF-LOVE
“When things change inside you things change around you.” Harvest had her first significant spiritual awakening at the age of 38, when she realised what she had experienced as a child was abuse. This set her on a path of self-love and healing as she started to unpick what had happened - the first step being counselling sessions, to work through some of the trauma.
As a child she always felt different - a wild child - she was brought up in an alternative way, living in a farming community in a watermill where her family produced organic flour and worked with the land. Being different became a real issue throughout her life and she was badly bullied at school for this. Harvest shares that as people we wish to be loved, and she had to learn what real love actually feels like. At that time in her life, she felt like her voice had been taken away from her, something that she has now fully reclaimed!
Another part of her healing journey was learning more about boundaries and what setting healthy boundaries actually was. Something that she hadn’t even thought about or considered before. She shared this with her husband and children and at first they weren’t sure about it and thought she was being selfish, but after explaining what she had learned to her family they also started to put healthy boundaries in place and finally Harvest started to give herself permission to do things she really wanted to do. She shares that there is a massive amount of conditioning around addressing your own needs, it seems that we are always made to feel guilty about it.
Another key element of Harvest’s healing journey was re-visiting creativity and being creative. She explains that she lost it during her teaching years and when things felt bleak during the recent lockdowns, being creative really helped her. She started a course in felt-making and it gave her back something she had been missing and things began to turn a corner.
Her story becomes more intriguing when she shares her need to start a new life - away from ‘systems’ and the daily 9-5 grind. So she and her husband brought a piece of property that consisted of semi-derelict cottages with 2 acres of land. Their goal was to restore the cottages and set them up as holiday homes to earn a living that way. Thirteen years later they’ve now got an amazing holiday cottage business that they are both really proud of and makes them happy.
Being in their new home in beautiful Northumberland, gave Harvest an opportunity to heal the wounds connected to nature - that was were she was abused in nature as a child, and had her power taken away from her. As she started to connect to nature more deeply this became the start of her shamanic journey. She signed up for a course during the pandemic that taught her a different way to connect to the spirit of nature, opening a magical door for her.
Before training in various energy healing modalities she shares her experience of yoga - something she signed up for because she had such a sore lower back. Learning about how to feel things through the body made her realise just how ‘disassociated’ she was, and the massive realisation that she hadn’t felt her body at all. She always used to look in the mirror and think she was ugly and not worth it, so why look after yourself. The breath-work techniques and grounding brought her back into her body. She believes that so many people are living in their nervous systems all the time, just like she was.
More recently Harvest has set up a sacred circle for women to provide a space that women can feel completely safe in - she is a space holder. Collectively we are so much more powerful.
If you would like to connect with Harvest, experience a heartfelt yoga or heartfelt reiki session please email: heartfeltexperiences@gmail.com or to find out more about Laverock Law Cottages and Glamping, you can visit her website: www.laverocklawcottages.com.