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 little exploration entitled There is a Middleman Involved.
Of course,
It could be a middle woman,
But I'm just going to stick with man for the processes of this recording and making it easy enough for me to speak.
So it really can look,
Can't it,
Like there's a world happening,
Circumstances,
People,
Things,
Weather,
Other drivers,
Partners,
Children,
The list,
Bosses,
Of course,
Mustn't forget them.
The list is endless and it really can look like our experience.
And by experience,
I mean how we feel,
What emotions come up for us when various things are happening around us.
It can really look like that outside stuff is directly almost putting those feelings into us,
That our response to that outside stimulus is direct,
That he made me feel angry,
She's upsetting me,
That circumstance is making me sad,
Etc,
Etc.
And if we live in that pure outside in paradigm,
Quite frankly and simply,
We suffer.
We suffer a lot,
Either by being completely in a victim mode where we're just feeling like life is against us and creating a terrible experience for us,
Or sometimes by the control that we feel we then have to take in order to be okay.
That for me was what led to burnout.
If I get all these things under control,
These people,
These circumstances,
This part of my career,
You know,
If my kids' careers are going well,
If my ex-husband is behaving as he,
I think he should.
Because everybody aligns and everything aligns in my life,
I'll be okay.
I'll feel like I've cracked it.
And you can imagine why that led to burnout,
Especially as at the time I threw online dating into the mix as well,
And I was therefore wanting to control the behavior of random people I met on the internet.
So you can imagine the exhaustion that came with that every time they didn't do what I thought they should do.
They didn't respond to me as I thought they should.
That was another thing that wasn't okay,
That was upsetting to me.
And so when we exist with this idea that there is no middleman,
That there is just stuff,
And then our experience,
That is what our life is like.
Either we feel kicked from pillar to post or we become,
I think probably most people default to trying to control everything and everybody and therefore suffering.
And I think all there needs to be is a starting to glimpse that there is a middleman.
And I can't remember where I first glimpsed it,
But one of the things I often invite you to look at is some lighter things in life where people don't have the same emotional response.
So that might be a film.
When you sit and watch a film,
Especially if you do that with more than one person,
Maybe with your family or group of you go out and watch a film or a play or a concert or whatever,
Have you noticed how you can come out having had a completely different emotional experience?
Everybody's got a different thought about the value of what you've watched,
About how good it was,
But also if you,
You know,
Don't spoil your movies by doing this,
But if you start to just notice the emotional journey that other people in the group are going in,
Going through compared to you,
You can see there is a movie happening and then there is people's emotional response to that.
And that differs for every single person who you happen to be with.
Music's another brilliant example.
How much does music evoke emotion?
And one piece of music can evoke such different emotion.
I sometimes play a sad piece of music.
Well,
It is telling a sad part of the story because it's from Madame Butterfly and it is sad,
The actual section that I play.
And the responses in the chat or the responses from the people listening to that piece of music are so variable.
Some of them do hear the sadness in the music and other people just say that it makes them feel calm or peaceful or tranquil and some hear trauma and sadness and death.
All those things are on such a spectrum of emotions,
Aren't they?
So the invitation is always to just keep looking in this direction.
Where can you see this playing out?
Where can you see this variance in people?
Where can you see the middle man at play because everybody has their own middle man working or middle woman,
Of course.
Everybody is experiencing life through their own unique filter.
And one of the things that's helped me with this is seeing that I'm not right.
I'm not seeing it 100% yet,
By the way,
Just so you know,
But starting to see that I'm not right.
Everybody else has got their own version of right,
Which for me is letting go of a huge part of control,
Which feels quite emotional right now because it is a letting go of something huge for me,
That was huge for me.
And what happens when we start to bring some awareness to the understanding that this middle man is operating,
That this thought in the moment,
This perspective is what's creating our experience.
Every time we remember that,
It's like we've caught him at it or her and we fall back to ourselves and ourselves are that peace and that calm and that innate wellbeing.
We just have to see it happening.
We just have to be aware that that's what's occurring.
Every time we come to that place of awareness,
There is a falling back into calm and that's all the invitation is.
This is an exploration of what it means to be human.
You don't have to do that by focusing on you.
You can explore it in whatever way makes sense to you.
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 Claire Downer,
Queen of Calm.
Take care and keep listening.
