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's exploration is about patterns.
I've been listening to another podcast by a lady called Claire Diamond and some of the things she said about this today really struck me.
So I thought I'd share it with you.
My own thoughts on it,
Of course.
So we have so many patterns of behavior,
Of thoughts,
Of feelings.
So many that it's so tangled up that we probably would struggle to isolate them all.
But there is something amazing that happens when we spot them.
Now quite often just having the understanding that we have patterns is the place to start.
As we're growing up,
There is no,
I am never in denial of the fact that the behavior of other people establishes in us thought patterns,
Beliefs,
Repetitive habitual ways of being.
What I never ever encourage you to do is go poking around and trying to find where it all came from because that is too entangled and too complicated and could take you the rest of your life.
And trust me,
I did a good few years of it to know that it could have potentially taken the rest of my life to get to the point where I knew where all my stuff came from.
And I think even then our remembering of the past is so shady,
Shall we say,
That we can't ever really know.
And it's a relief actually to put that to bed,
To go,
Oh,
Actually I don't know why I'm being the way I'm being other than in this moment there's some habitual thinking or some new thinking perhaps that isn't helpful.
But generally it's the habitual stuff that is the tricky stuff,
The stuff that I guess we mostly want to not have going on,
We'd like to change.
So I mean,
There's a few examples that I've come across both for me and for other people.
So I know a woman who has had difficult relationships and had to leave four jobs on the trot with fairly short,
You know,
A year or two in between jobs.
Every job she goes into,
She has difficult relationships.
And you know,
She's now self-employed,
So we'll see how that pans out.
But you know,
And I feel a deep compassion because while we're in it,
We don't see that it's us that are the common denominator in that pattern.
That may look like a pattern of why am I so unlucky that I keep finding people who aren't kind to me,
But our perception of other people is created by us anyway.
So that's one example.
One of my examples recently was how quickly a pattern changed when I just noticed that it was a thing that I did.
And it was,
We were traveling in our motor home and a few months ago,
And we were chatting in the motor home about money.
So,
You know,
Obviously the last couple of years have been difficult for lots of people,
Including us.
And we were just chatting about how we've been okay,
But we've been chatting about how we could,
You know,
Save a little bit more money,
Not spend as much money.
You know,
What could we look at?
Just opening up the conversation.
I know it's a conversation that lots of people find difficult to have.
And then we stopped at a service station on the main road on the motorway.
And as I was waiting for my fiance to come out the toilet,
I noticed there was a Marks and Spencers.
So if you're not in the UK,
You won't know that Marks and Spencers was always a clothing shop,
But they have food that's really expensive.
It's quite expensive,
It's probably our top end of supermarket food.
And I was thinking to myself,
Oh,
We'll just nip in there and we'll get something nice for breakfast from Marks and Spencers.
And then I just was aware of that.
And that's a habitual thought,
Like popping to Marks and Spencers for something nice to eat is something that I've done a lot.
And then spent money that really was a bit unnecessary.
And we had a motorhome on the car park full of food.
So there was just no necessity to go spend that money in Marks and Spencers.
But I noticed it probably because we'd just been having the conversation about money.
That was helpful.
But I just thought,
Oh God,
That's a thing.
That's a thing that I do on perhaps a little too regular basis.
I don't need to do that.
I don't need to judge myself for having that thought.
I didn't feel bad.
I was just,
Oh,
That's a thought I've had before.
I don't actually need to do that.
And it was in that moment of noticing that that was a pattern for me,
A thing that I frequently did.
It was almost like I'd just shone a light on a dark patch in my psychological makeup and my thinking really,
Not my psychological makeup.
It was just my thinking.
I just shone a light on something I hadn't shone a light on before.
And in doing that,
It just suddenly didn't make sense to carry on doing that.
And then I got back in the van and we ate some food that was already in the van,
In the motorhome.
One of the other places where I've noticed a pattern and then I've found that I'm just doing it less is my pattern of ranting about other people's behavior.
There's not many people who come a cropper of this,
But there's one or two people in my life who I've often got caught up in and there the pattern broke because I noticed it made me feel terrible.
And it was a change in an understanding about that feeling.
The feeling is unpleasant when I rant about someone and I used to think that feeling was because they were being out of order.
And I now know that feeling is because I've got some thinking about how they're being,
Whether or not they're out of order is a judgment,
Of course,
I still get involved in,
But try not to.
There's always that,
There was just this moment of noticing,
Oh,
I feel horrible when I do that.
Don't really want to do that to myself anymore.
And then the noticing of that pattern,
Claire,
You rant about other people's behavior became the thing that just means that it happens less.
I cannot guarantee it doesn't happen at all,
But it happens a lot less than it used to.
So where I'm pointing to today is for us to look in the direction of where our experience is coming from and how therefore that easily brings about change when we know this to be true that thought in the moment is creating our experience,
Our feelings,
Our behavior.
And all that really is needed is a little bit of awareness and no judgment because ordinarily I think our pattern of changing these things is I'm doing wrong,
I'm thinking wrong,
I'm feeling wrong,
I'm behaving wrong.
I need to go outside of me to go and resolve this,
Sort it out,
Fix it,
Make myself better by doing a tool or technique or a therapy or whatever it is.
But actually without the judgment that it's wrong,
But with the inclination to try and spot the patterns that are perhaps getting in the way a little bit of us having a quiet,
Calm,
Happy life,
Just bringing the awareness to them with no judgment is like shining a light on something that was in the dark before.
And once it's been seen,
It can't be unseen.
It's a bit like what happens when we go to see a movie that's awful.
I went to see an awful movie.
I don't know if I should mention which one it was.
Anyway,
It was too violent for me.
And I said,
I'm never going to get that two and a half hours of my life back.
Once you've seen these patterns,
You can't unsee it.
You then start to notice it.
Oh,
There's that little pattern again.
But without this horrible judgment,
Because guys,
You did not put that pattern there yourself.
It's all the stuff,
Other people's stuff.
They call it generational stuff,
Don't you?
Don't they?
It's just what's been handed down,
Handed on to you,
Said to you in anger,
Wherever else it came from.
It doesn't really matter.
That bit doesn't matter.
But that's the part that lets us let go of it being about us and needing judgment.
Doesn't need judgment,
Just awareness.
And with that awareness,
These patterns and these ways that we think are part of who we really are,
Really can melt away so easily.
Really enjoy playing with that.
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.
