Hello and welcome.
My name is Liz Scott and you join me on day 22 of a 30-day experiment.
The experiment is one where I'm living from a place of love rather than fear.
In other words,
When I feel those unsettled thoughts and feelings that pull me off track,
I bring my awareness back to that settled space of love within me.
And I've been exploring this for 22 days.
This is day 22.
Every day I write a journal and then I record and share a lesson that I've learned from the day.
And today has been quite ironic because I realised today that I was feeling a sense of agitation.
And the agitation has been kind of building in me.
You've probably noticed over the last couple of days I've talked about this idea of time feeling like it's rushing away or galloping away,
That time is slipping through my fingers.
And it all came to a head today where I almost realised the irony of what was going on because this experiment was actually the thing that was creating a lot of thinking and agitation in my world.
And isn't that ironic that this experiment where I bring my attention back to love should seemingly look like the cause of agitation in my life?
Let me explain a bit more.
You see,
When I started this experiment,
I had this idea that I would every day write a journal and then the next day record a track for Insight Timer,
Letting people know what I'd learned on a daily basis.
I've kept writing the journal daily and it's been a godsend.
However,
The recordings were hard to fit in.
So what felt like a nice easy way of doing one recording a day meant that it increasingly began to feel like I had a stack of recordings I needed to make and I just didn't have the time to make them.
I felt like I wasn't doing a good enough job,
Like I wasn't doing what I set out to do.
And today I just felt this extraordinary agitation that I wasn't managing to keep my time,
To be organized,
To create these recordings and to release them when I wanted to release them so people could enjoy them on Insight Timer.
So it's been one of those feelings of hurry up that actually I realize appears quite a lot in my life.
So actually today has been an extraordinary lesson of learning and it's come directly from this experiment because I realized and I noticed when I brought my awareness back to love that I had been giving myself a hard time.
I've been giving myself a hard time to keep to a deadline that I had invented.
There was no reason for this deadline.
There was no reason I should record on a daily basis.
It was something I had invented,
Created,
Made real and was now judging myself against.
Now that has been hugely useful to understand.
It's really enlightening to understand that about the way I operate.
I do this a lot.
I set myself something to do.
I create the deadline.
I create the goal and then what I do is I get agitated because it's too ambitious.
It means that I've got to let go of other things.
What I really saw today is that I didn't have to keep to the goal and the deadlines that I had set.
I know this sounds a bit strange and it sounds so small but it was so big in my life when I realized it.
I realized that I had been trying to do these recordings every day and trying is a good word because I hadn't actually been doing them.
I'd just been thinking a lot about them and thinking how unsuccessful I was about doing and creating the recordings on a daily basis.
That had actually clouded everything during my day.
It felt like everything was just rushing away with itself.
And when I brought my awareness back to love and I settled,
Love showed me something.
It showed me that I could record when I had time.
It sounds so simple but actually it was huge and of course these little simple lessons of learning have a ripple effect throughout your life and my life.
And when I realized this,
I just knew that all I needed to do was create my journal which I was doing anyway and when I had time I would record the pieces for Insight Timer.
As soon as I had seen that,
It was like the agitation dissolved.
I could feel and sense the relief at what I had decided and seen.
And for me,
This is such a great lesson.
For me personally,
I have the tendency to set myself goals.
I have the tendency to give myself deadlines and commitments.
Often it's really healthy.
It feels like it's a healthy thing to do and there are occasions when I misjudge a deadline or a goal and it becomes a burden.
It's taken me 22 days to realize this and what I'm hoping is that this lesson is something which means that next time I start to fall into the trap of creating goals that are just too tight,
That I will learn the lesson sooner.
So I'd created the goal.
I had created the pressure.
I had created the agitation that I wasn't keeping to the goal.
I was creating how annoyed I should be at myself for not keeping to the goal which I'd made up in the first place.
It was a microcosm,
An ecosystem of agitation.
And when I realized what was going on and saw a different way,
It disappeared.
So today has been about realizing.
It's a realization that love points me to a space beyond agitation.
And when I don't get lost in the story,
I'm just more likely to experience a fresh way forward.
So that's been a really good reminder for me today.
I hope you're enjoying this experiment,
Living from a place of love rather than fear.
And if you get a chance to let me know what you're seeing for yourself or what you're learning as I go through it,
It would be really good to hear from you.
