Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
Oh this is glorious.
It's a late afternoon,
The sun is shining.
I'm strolling back along Dartmoor's paths back home in the fields below me in the Southams which is a part of Devon.
I can see the green pasture land which is separated by dark green hedgerows.
It reminds me a little bit of a chessboard with all these little rectangles and squares of fields that stretch out for miles and miles all the way to the ocean and I can't quite see the ocean at the moment.
I wonder if there's a bit of a sea mist.
It's about 10 miles away.
Usually from this vantage point I can see it.
I'm just breathing in the air and just feeling a huge gratitude for being alive.
And today's theme is all around overthinking and it was prompted actually by bumping into a neighbour today.
She was out walking her dog and we stopped for a conversation and she said how much she enjoyed walking and said you know what happens when I walk is that my mind settles.
She said usually my mind is really busy and she used her hands whirring them in a circular motion around her head to indicate what her thinking is usually like.
She said usually my mind is really busy but when I walk I settle and then she said and she said when I settle I find myself talking to the bumblebees or the the sheep and I and I kind of laughed and said I know I know that feeling.
I said I like to talk to the trees and we had a little bit of a laugh at what we experienced.
But what she was really experiencing and sharing with me is what happens when our minds settle.
You see what happens when our minds settle when we allow them to settle is that we connect with the energy behind life and that energy has a feeling of being loving,
Compassionate,
Wise.
It has this feeling of being full of gratitude because in the absence of a lot of agitated thinking and thought that's what's actually left.
That is the essence of who we are.
Our thinking and thought and worries and concerns take us away from experiencing who we truly are and when we have those little moments of returning back to who we truly are and feeling this absence of noise in our minds we feel it.
We feel that sense of deep present love,
Presence and love and it's a it's a wonderful respite from the noise that we often feel in our minds.
Now she attributed that settling in her mind to the walking and I can totally understand that.
Often when I'm out in nature I feel this expansiveness and this sense of being at one with the environment and the animals and the birds and the flowers and the grasses and all all that's around me.
But the truth is that it's even more powerful when you start to get an inkling that it it isn't the thing you're doing that gives you the feeling.
So it's not the walking that gives you the feeling or maybe you do meditation.
It's not the meditation that gives you the feeling or maybe you like yoga.
It's not the yoga that gives you the feeling.
The feeling of love and connection is the essence of who we are and what we are made of and what happens is that when our agitated thinking and unsettled thinking subsides we get an experience of that.
We get an experience of that loving peace of mind.
So today is just a reminder that the temptation can sometimes to be if you're in unsettled thinking to fight that thinking to get rid of it to think more positively to try and through willpower and and trying and tools and techniques is to get get rid of those unhelpful thoughts and feelings.
But I'm offering you something else here.
When you understand what's going on when you realize that all that your unsettled thoughts and thinking and feelings are telling you is reminding you to look within to your essence.
So that universal energy,
God energy,
Divine energy to remind yourself of who you truly are.
So today is just a reminder of looking within to who you truly are and from that place experience love and peace and wisdom.
Don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature and let me know your reflections on what we've been talking about today.
