Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
It's a very cold damp February day up here on Dartmoor.
We usually have southwesterly winds coming in off the Atlantic but today the wind is from an easterly direction and it's really chilly and damp.
I'm just sheltering,
The path goes down and it's a bit sheltered amongst some hillocks and there's a couple of sheep grazing nearby and up above me I can see the hillside that is silhouetted against a very very grey sky.
I do hope I don't get wet,
It does look like rain is in the air.
And today's reflection is all about living from love and not fear and I'm going to actually keep with this reflection for seven days.
There's a course on Insight Timer I ran called Living from Love and Not Fear and if you're inspired I would really encourage you to go and have a look at that course and I was prompted to talk about this because today when I was speaking to a client she told me about a situation that she found challenging and she explained that she had really got concerned and worried about a meeting and she was worried that this meeting was coming up.
She was a leader,
A manager in her business and she was meeting with other leaders and managers and she was really worried that she was going to get to this meeting and she was going to get challenged on things that she said and what she put forward and for her this idea of challenge had a sense of being layered with meaning that she wasn't good enough,
That she was on the verge of losing her job,
That if people challenged her she felt like a rabbit in the head,
Like she got really scared by the whole situation.
And we had a really useful conversation around this unsettled thinking that was going on around the whole idea of challenge and as we talked a bit further we started to reflect on the difference between that unsettled space that we can sometimes get lost in and that sense of groundedness,
That feeling of being authentic.
For her she said yes well there are times when I feel really grounded and I am authentic and I feel like I'm just being myself as a leader,
I really feel strong when I'm in those positions and for me this is such a great example of the difference between living from love and not fear.
When she feels grounded and strong that's her living from a place of love.
Another way of putting it is she's living from a place of settled reflection rather than unsettled scary thoughts and when she's living from a place of fear well that's just unsettled thinking,
That's when she's believing stories that she's telling herself about whether she's good or not good or how well people perceive her or whether she's going to lose her job.
For me that's living from a place of fear.
And so for the first day of this seven day experiment of living from love and not fear my request is that you make the distinction yourself and you'll need to reflect yourself on what it means for you.
For me there are feelings that are attached to living from unsettled thinking which is usually quite uncomfortable and I feel overwhelmed or I'm not good enough that's how my unsettled thinking comes up for me and then when I'm in settled thinking or when I'm in no thinking is probably a better way of putting it,
I just feel this sense of groundedness,
Peace of mind,
A sense of knowing,
That's the best way I can put it.
It feels very different.
Another way to describe it might be that unsettled thinking,
That fear-based thinking is a bit like a nagging child.
You know a child if they want an ice cream they are insistent and persistent,
I want an ice cream,
I want an ice cream,
You go no you can't have an ice cream,
I want an ice cream,
I want an ice cream,
No you can't have an ice cream and then eventually you cave in and give them an ice cream.
Well often those nagging thoughts are a bit like that,
They just keep repeatedly coming back.
If you're experiencing thoughts like that you know that that is not a place of love,
You're just experiencing unsettled thinking and thought and that's fine.
So today is all about just discerning the difference between love and fear when you're living from a place of love and fear and the question for me to ask you is what does that feel like for you?
I'll be back tomorrow with another five minutes in nature and day two of living from love and not fear.
