This week my partner and six others stand before a jury for their action at the Shell headquarters during the XR protests two years ago.

XR haven’t always got things right. They gave incorrect legal advice to us and said they had money to pay for fines when it turns out they don’t. My family has sacrificed a period of sanity as part of this process and things got bad enough to force me to go deeper.

I remembered the natural and intuitive care for the pains of the earth that I used to feel as a child. I would fast to collect money for the Amazon rainforest and would walk through the small patches of wasteland in my town picking up litter.

And then as a young adult, the mess of my personal psyche became too much to bear and I dedicated 15 years of my life to finding a resolution. Through meditation and mantra, I felt the harmony of the natural laws of our universe maintaining everything in a perfect flow and harmony. It was a relief to realise that this domain of being existed beneath all the vicissitudes of life and it was easy to stay there.

But I am also part of the responsivity of this harmony, and the movements of life called me further. Our family found ourselves in the gap: the meeting point between the legal system of our land and the heartbreaking atrocities committed against this land. And over the last four weeks, I have felt the power of this gap rising into our collective consciousness as my attachment to my sense of the personal has been eroded by the continual stream of loving service that we have received.

XR continue to make mistakes, they have alienated many and angered some. And they have galvanised a shared love for the spirit of life that sustains us all, offering us a chance to experience a heartfelt and full participation of life; a chance to make conscious an aspect of that which we may already deeply feel.

The goal of yoga is ‘kaivalyam’, ‘in service to the one energy of life’. During these weeks I have experienced the force of a collective joining together in service to something bigger than the self and through it I have felt a joining with the fundamental movement of life. As I have been held, I have allowed myself to feel the unending vulnerabilities of the consequences of this action, and through it, I have been broken open.

And so I thank you XR for exploring the gap, for coming together and making mistakes, and for creating an opportunity for us to feel how the movement of service can play out through our uniqueness.

Thank you to all the people who don’t know us and have sent heartfelt cards. Thank you for the delicious meals that have been brought to our door. Thank you to those who have held me and the vast nuance of this subject, and for the connections, it has brought. Thank you to the teams of people that have come together; well-being, research, media, and finance. There are more people that I could have possibly imagined who have stepped forward with a shared love for this earth.

And so here I find myself broken open.

in the gap

In service.

T h a n k Y o u