Containers

Containers come in all shapes and sizes and they are often made to for certain objects. Packaging is a great example. Pringles fit perfectly into their cylindrical container but if you tried to get square Jacob's cream crackers in there there will be broken crackers everywhere. This is a beautiful metaphor for life because much of life is outside our control. We can moan, get upset and be furious but it will not change anything, E-V-E-R! Life will continue and you cannot control it.

Transcript

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 headteacher 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 we're going to talk about containers and this is not a packaging seminar but I think they're a great metaphor for life.

I don't know if you've had small children or been around small children but you'll have come across those shape sorters where you have to push,

There's usually a triangle,

A circle,

A square and some other shape like a hexagon or something in the top of a container and the child has to put the shape,

The right shape into the right hole and of course when they're first learning this skill it's tricky and they keep trying to put the circle into the square and the toy is made very carefully so that obviously sometimes you could get a circle into a square hole couldn't you and you could even get a square if it's small enough into a circle hole but the game is made very carefully so that really you can only get the right shape into the right hole there's no other way to be successful in that game.

And it also comes in packaging.

I think I've shared a little bit there about a Pringles tube which is a cylindrical tube that contains oval shaped crisps,

I think they're ovals and if you tried to push some square crackers like Jacob's green crackers,

Other crackers are available by the way,

Also other crisps are available,

Into that cylindrical tube you would just have a lot of mess.

There'd be biscuit crumbs everywhere or broken biscuit,

You might get the biscuits in the tube but they'd be all in bits and isn't that a beautiful metaphor for what we often try to do with life.

If you haven't got it yet,

If you hadn't got it before March 2020,

I'm hoping there's been an element and I have noticed this from speaking to people of you noticing now that you're not in control.

You can't make the world be a different shape to the way it is.

Just like you can't make the,

Well you could try and make a Pringle tube go square but again the Pringle tube would just be a mess then wouldn't it?

You can't change that container,

Life is a particular kind of container and that's the first thing to consider is that how much of the things that seem to be creating discomfort in your life,

Creating suffering are the things where you want something to be other than how it is.

Now there are so many aspects of life that we could point to in this.

There's our jobs,

There's our businesses,

There's social media,

There's our partners and our kids and endless relationships are a great one here because how often do we try to make a person be a different shape than the shape they are?

It's not really up to us and anyway our perception of all those things is to do with how we're thinking about them.

I had a lovely interaction yesterday where a couple were on a networking event together and they were talking about various things that one is fine with and the other one doesn't like so the first thing was the man in the conversation didn't really like there to be more than a very few emails in his inbox whereas the woman really wasn't bothered,

She just let go of it,

She wasn't going to care,

She had thousands of emails in her inbox and you could really hear that she really didn't care about it and then she was saying that if she sees a bit of fluff on the carpet she feels the need to kind of deal with that,

Pick it up,

Back it up,

Whatever,

Whereas her husband just kind of walks past,

He's not bothered about bits of fluff on the carpet.

I'm on the same page as the husband on this one and me and my fiance,

We have different levels of tolerance for mess and untidiness and things.

I'm quite a tidy person but he's another level,

He's on a different level and I know those are fun,

Fairly trivial examples but they are pointing to the fact that it's not the shape of life,

It's not the container of life that is creating our experience,

There's something else and all this ever is is an invitation to start to get curious about how that something else is playing out in your life and you can call that something else,

Whatever you like,

You can call it perspective,

I call it thought in the moment,

It's how you connect to the world around you and the thing is when we're trying to change the shape of the container,

When we're trying to make life be different to how it is now,

It comes from that misunderstanding that it's that thing,

That person,

That circumstance,

That container that's creating our experience.

It is like saying that my feelings are coming from the fact that my square Jacob's crackers don't fit in my round Pringles tube.

We can all say that,

We can all say well that's ridiculous why would you get upset about square Jacob's not going in a cylindrical Pringles tube but why is any other part of life different?

I guess because society's put weight on certain things and at the moment there's a lot of weight around certain things,

Being able to do certain things,

Being able to go certain places and us not being able to do that or that we have to do certain things when we go into shops or whatever else is going on or even the snow,

We had snow here the last few days and people upset about the snow.

I mean it's the weather guys,

You can't do anything about it but of course when it looks like you know I have to drive in the snow or the snow is causing me a problem,

I can't do what I want to do because of the snow then it looks like that container snow as a thing is not okay,

It's making me feel bad,

I don't want to feel bad so I want the snow to go away.

I mean it makes complete sense when there is an innocent misunderstanding of where our feelings come from and if you've heard me speak before you'll know that for me that meant a level of trying to control my outside environment that was ridiculous and that eventually led to me burning out.

I was trying to control the people,

I was trying to control circumstances,

I double crossed every T and double dotted every I to try and stop things happening that I thought would go wrong in the future,

There was a lot of worrying and future thinking involved and it was exhausting and it did exhaust me in the end.

Life is going to keep happening whether you like it or not and it is not always going to be the way you want it to be,

That is just a fact of life and that's all I ever deal with really is facts and when we stick with the facts we can have more ease and a better experience of life and less suffering.

The fact is that you are always feeling thought in the moment and never your circumstances.

When you realise that,

That brings freedom and that doesn't mean you just lie on the sofa and go right life's happening and I'm just going to lie here and just let it happen and I'm not going to take action in the world.

That's not what happens as a result of that as you can see and here I do take action in the world.

It doesn't mean that I don't come from a place of wanting to affect change and you can too but there's something that brings ease to a situation when you're okay with what turns out,

You have less skin in the game and then there's just more fun and more lightness around it.

So as usual I'm pointing to the truth about where your experience is coming from and that does not mean I don't have a deep empathy for you if you're not feeling so good at the moment but just by starting to see a glimmer of where your experience is really coming from some of that suffering can fall away and fall away unbelievably quickly.

It's never coming from the container of life and you don't have to change the container of life for you to be okay.

That's just one less thing to have on your to-do list isn't it?

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 Clare Downham,

Queen of Calm.

Take care and keep listening.