Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
Just gazing up at a moon that is high above my head and looking at the stars that are speckled in the darkness of the sky.
I'm out at night time on a cool,
Cool night just breathing in the air and feeling that sense of peace and physical tiredness because I've been on a long walk today.
I went out onto Dartmoor up to a place near Burritor which is a reservoir and there are three tours I climbed with my family.
So I went out with my sister and my three nephews my sister-in-law and we climbed up these three tours.
Each of these tours is roughly the same height so a tour is a hillside on Dartmoor with a granite outcrop on the top and the very interesting thing about these hills these tours is that these three particular tours if you were to draw a line between them actually make an equilateral triangle and not far off these tours there was a beautiful stone row a long stone row magnificent it dipped down the hillside and back up the other side it was beautiful and also nearby there was a stone circle and a very interesting stone circle I've never seen this before but it was four concentric stone circles so they were almost like ripples on a pond as we walked this route and I've come back very tired and I wanted to just spend a bit of time with you reflecting on something that feels important to me as I'm moving forward this week and it's about bringing myself back to a sense of love and kindness and I've noticed in myself that I have this habitual way sometimes of my ego flaring up and feeling like I'm being disrespected and I'll give you a really simple example of it today and how I responded to it so I was meant to be meeting up with a friend online when we'd booked it several weeks ago and then I got a message from her saying she couldn't make our meeting and in that moment I really felt a flare of my ego a bit like a firework going off up into the night sky it just felt how dare she how dare she disrespect my time how dare she pull out of meeting up with me online when I'd been looking forward to it so much how dare she and what was interesting is that because I'm curious about love and kindness and I'm bringing it back to my awareness today I just allowed myself to watch this firework of ego go off in the sky this indignation to explode and rather than get lost in a firework display it was like a single firework going off and I realized that by bringing my awareness back to love and kindness what did I want to communicate and I realized from a place of love and kindness I just wanted to communicate to my friend that that was absolutely fine if she wanted to give me another date I'd see if I was free but absolutely fine we could rearrange meeting up now I say this and it's such a tiny example but I find that my life is littered with these tiny tiny examples and it's the drip drip drip of these tiny examples of ego flaring up and me feeling a martyr or disrespected or trampled on or misunderstood it's these tiny little ego flares that can be really wearing in my life and so for me what I'm aware of is that when I meet these flare-ups of ego with kindness and love then rather than get lost in them I see what else is there and I respond from that place so today is a reflection for me as I explore this further respond with kindness and love and it's also an invitation for you to reflect on that for yourself what would it be like for you to respond with kindness and love and this is a theme I'm curious about pursuing for a few days so I'd love you to join me if you would like to do this so just take a couple of days over the next few days just be curious about what it's like to respond from a place of kindness and love and see what happens in your life and I'm going to do the same and I'll let you know what happens for me too
