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.
Today the word on my mind is perception.
And I've been seeing something about this quite recently in a number of ways but the first one I'm going to speak to is my physical health.
Now I am a woman of a certain age right now,
I'm 50,
And I've been going through some health issues,
I suppose you might call them,
Over the last few years related to the menopause,
Related to the adrenal burnout that I suffered a number of years ago,
Some issues around my thyroid.
And I guess what they've meant for me is a very up and down sense of myself energy wise,
Feeling okay sometimes but then finding my energy falling off a cliff sometimes too.
And I've been getting some practical help with that.
I've been seeing an amazing functional medicine doctor,
I've been having acupuncture,
I've been doing all sorts of,
You know,
Addressing my diet and taking all the right supplements and all those kind of things.
And I'm noticing that I'm feeling better.
But at the same time I have been studying deeply and looking in the direction of the fact that my perception of anything,
Whether that is outside in the world or inside in me,
Is playing a,
Well it's 100% of what I experience.
And so I find myself looking into this space that feels a bit like the space,
I don't know if you've ever considered the size of the universe and got a bit lost in that.
It feels a bit like that space where I don't know how much my physical body is functioning better and how much my perception has changed.
And it's really,
It's impossible to know.
It's impossible to know how much of my improved health is because I'm doing physically the right things to help my body and being helped in the right ways and how much is my perception of me getting better.
Perhaps me noticing less or getting less caught up in the symptoms and therefore them being less part of my attention and therefore less experience.
And a place where I think it's even clearer for me to see this is in physical,
Actual physical pain.
So I had got into what I thought was a really healthy habit of drinking kombucha every day and those of you that don't know,
Kombucha is a brewed thing,
Maybe the thing called a scoby.
It's supposed to be very good for your gut bacteria.
It's quite popular now.
You can get it in cafes and restaurants and supermarkets and places like that.
And I had been drinking this stuff on a daily basis for quite some time and I'd developed horrendous headaches and I hadn't realized that the headaches had been caused by the kombucha.
But what was interesting when I had these headaches was that,
I don't know,
Can a headache come and go?
Like I felt whenever I noticed the headache that it was kind of there.
It was there every time I noticed it.
So but then there were times when I didn't notice it because I was doing something or focused on something else and my attention wasn't on the pain.
I suspect the physical,
No the physiological thing that was going on in my body caused by me drinking kombucha was sustained.
But noticing how much my awareness of that changed through a day was amazing.
I don't know whether the pain came and went or my awareness of it came and went.
But I think it was the latter.
And currently I have,
I sound like a right old moan,
I don't know,
Hypochondriac.
But I've currently got frozen shoulder.
And again the noticing of that is flows in and out of the day.
Sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not.
And so that's to do with kind of my internal physical health.
But the other place I've really seen this is in other people.
Like in my seeing of other people,
In my awareness of other people,
In my judgement or thinking I know what other people are like.
And there's been a few relationships which seem to have been transformed in the last year or so.
And I don't know what's happened.
I know there's been something around me,
My realisation that when I am feeling off about another person that that is me doing that.
So when I connect to that off feeling and in that space where I would have said,
Oh that other person is making me feel this way,
It's there,
It's them that are doing it,
They're making me feel that way.
Now there is a knowing that my thinking is off when my feeling is off.
And that means I tend to,
I guess,
Respond to people in a different way,
Allow myself space to respond in a different way.
And so there are some significant relationships which have changed dramatically in the last year and a bit.
And I get that there's probably an offshoot of me responding differently to those people and them then seeing me differently,
Connecting to me differently.
But I also think there's something in my perception of them.
There's maybe a bit more ease around how I see them.
There's a bit more compassion,
I think,
Because I'm really starting to see the psychological innocence of everyone.
You know that old,
I'm sure it's Shakespeare said they know not what they do.
Do tell me if I've completely misquoted and that's somebody else's quote,
But it is the truth because in any moment somebody behaves the way they behave because they think the way they think.
And that's the only thinking they have available.
Not strictly true,
They have a range of thinking available.
They probably have something in them saying,
No,
Don't do that.
But the thinking that looks real in the moment they do what they do is the thinking that they do.
It doesn't mean that later we don't go,
Oh,
Oopsie daisy,
Probably shouldn't have done that.
I mean,
Oopsie daisy actually because we're not five.
But we don't,
We don't,
We don't,
We do often realise,
Don't we,
Later,
Even in terms of what we've done,
That the thinking that looked real then suddenly doesn't look so real now.
You know those times when you snapped at somebody and then later regretted it.
But I think as well that is a place for compassion with ourselves.
So there is something unbelievably powerful in realising that all day,
Every day perception is creating your experience of life.
It doesn't matter who it is or what it is outside of you.
It doesn't matter what the experience is inside of you,
What is happening to you physiologically or psychologically.
Your experience of that is created via thought.
And the simplicity of that is sometimes a bit mind blowing.
That's what most people I work with say,
I had no idea this was the way it was.
And it's mind blowing because life has not been taught to us in this way.
How life works has not been taught to us in this way.
And all there is to do with any of this is to just bring some awareness to it.
Can you notice how much can you start to just look in the direction that there is something else going on other than what you think you're seeing as reality?
It just allows a space for a bit of ease,
A bit more calm and a bit more clarity.
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 Calmcast with Clare Downham,
Queen of Calm.
Take care and keep listening.
