Hello and welcome to the Calmcast,
A time to feel calm and think clearly.
I'm Claire Downham,
The Queen of Calm,
A transformational life coach.
I was a burnt out head teacher who finally made the journey to calm after years of trying and I want to prevent you from having to do the same.
The Calmcast is a series of short explorations gently guiding you back to your natural state which is calm and clarity.
Just listen like you would listen to music with an open mind and curiosity.
There's nothing else to do.
Now let's relax into today's episode.
So today's pondering is about Dory and I hope most of you know who Dory is but if not please do go and watch the film Finding Nemo because I think you will enjoy Dory and her characteristics.
So in Finding Nemo,
Nemo is lost and trying to get back home and he has a little friend called Dory who has a short term memory problem.
So it doesn't really matter what happens to Dory,
She turns up in each scene completely fresh and new.
She doesn't retain any of the memories of what's happened.
So for example in terms of her interactions with other characters in the film,
In the cartoon,
She will have an interaction with somebody and they may well even try to eat her in the scene and the next scene that comes up she doesn't really remember that and she starts off fresh and new.
She's got no previously held opinions about those other characters and she has that kind of lightness to her because of that I think.
She doesn't have any judgment,
She doesn't carry the burden of her previous opinions about anything and she comes in fresh and new to every single interaction.
And I realise of course as I'm saying this that human beings perhaps wouldn't want to be more Dory,
100% Dory anyway because we would forget that buses hurt when they hit your body and we would get into all sorts of scrapes and we would perhaps not keep the learning from our previous experience.
The thing is we do an awful lot more than keep the learning from our previous experience don't we?
We keep a lot of additional stuff that perhaps isn't so helpful.
Now it is absolutely helpful for me to know now as a grown woman that to touch a hot flame is going to burn me and I will have learnt that probably when I was quite young and it's been useful because it stopped me from burning myself.
But there are some chunks of the past that are not really helping us to negotiate the present moment and that is things like having the idea that just because something went a particular way usually because it went wrong in the past necessarily means that's going to go the same way in the present moment or more likely when we're thinking about the future.
And those things can really stop us doing things in life because we assume they're going to go wrong like they did before and so we perhaps don't try again.
And that can be really unhelpful really as some of that thinking from the past.
And the thing is when you think about the past that's what you feel.
You feel the uncomfortable memories,
You feel the things that went before,
You feel perhaps the awkwardness or the embarrassment or whatever it is that came with that experience.
And then we carry that into the present moment with us and that can be really,
Really,
Really unhelpful.
And the thing is about the past,
We're really not that good at remembering it.
When you consider that when we're experiencing anything in life we're always experiencing that through thought and through our state,
Our current state of mind.
So when you reflect on the past,
When you think about the past,
Not only is your past thinking playing a part but then your present moment perspective on that past experience is playing a part too.
And it all gets a little bit skewed in a similar way that as our present moment experience gets skewed by the filters of thought that we see it through,
That we experience it through.
That's always at play but particularly when we consider the past because our memories aren't 100% accurate and we're looking through the more layers of thought when we consider the past.
So as human beings we are going to have thoughts about the past that is completely unavoidable.
You might experience something today that seems to bring back a memory of something that happened in the past,
Something that seems similar.
So we can't be 100% like Dory because well first of all we would be in danger and second of all that's just not how our system works.
Our system throws out thoughts fairly randomly and they appear in our conduit then we become aware of them and we become conscious of them.
But what we can do is we can understand the nature of thought and that can help us to perhaps be a little more Dory and find a little more ease around taking those thoughts from the past with a pinch of salt,
Taking them a little less seriously.
And that is that thought is random and particularly thoughts that pop in from the past I think it seems that they're quite unpredictable,
They're quite random in the way they appear in our heads and they're not,
They're fluid,
They're moving,
They're not solid,
They're passing through us.
You will have noticed that about thought it has the tendency to pass,
It does pass,
That's just how it flows.
It's a bit like how the clouds flow across the sky when there's a gentle breeze those thoughts are meant to flow through us not hang around in us.
And the other thing to know is that there's an impersonal nature to thought.
I know it looks like it's got something to do with you and it looks like it's part of your personality and it's part of who you are and therefore it's perhaps quite important but when you start to see that there is an impersonal element of thought that is coming to you from the energy that powers everything else and that randomness that's seen in nature like the rate at which the leaves and the trees go brown being different even just on the one tree let alone across the trees,
Thought is part of that randomness of life,
A random kind of energy.
And when we just start to see thought in a different way when we remove the personal nature of it when we start to see that it's random and we start to make less of it mean something about us that can allow us not to not have the thoughts in the first place because that's just really not possible and we can't stop thoughts coming in but to have a different relationship with them when they arrive to look to be more dory to look to allow those thoughts to pass it becomes more easy when we have less of an attachment to them and that means we're looking towards what's inside which is that calm and the clarity and the peace that's always available to us and that comes quite naturally when we just change our relationship with thought when we see it differently to how we might be seeing it at the moment and so we can't be like dory because I don't think we'd function very well without the bits of stuff we do carry around with us but we don't have to carry everything around with us and in the seeing of how thought works and how it creates your experience there comes more and more ease around just letting thoughts go and not hanging on to them quite so much you don't have to change them just know what they are and they pass more easily.
Thank you so much for listening there's nothing to do now but bring some awareness to how this is working out in your life listen regularly to experience longer and longer periods of calm this has been the calm cast with Claire Downer Queen of car take care and keep listening.
