Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and here I am up on the moorland of Dartmoor on another glorious day.
I'm sitting on a rock and I've been here for so long the sheep have come up close grazing,
There's some cattle nearby,
I've seen riders and dog walkers,
Crows,
Rooks,
There's so much going on I could just sit here all day,
It's lovely.
And today I want to share something with you which is about not getting a medal for being miserable and I love this phrase,
A friend came up with it when I went for a walk with her today.
So I'll just give you a bit of background about my friend,
We decided to get up early to watch the sun rise,
It's not that early it rises sort of a seven o'clockish at the moment and we decided to get out watch the sunrise and go for a walk and she's been going through some really challenging times and as she was talking she was explaining how she's starting to see things differently and she's moving into a different phase of her life and she'd been upset and miserable for quite some time and that one of her friends had said to her you don't get a medal for being miserable,
You don't get a medal in life for being miserable and I really liked that.
It's something that resonates for me and sometimes I can tell stories to myself or things happen in my life and I feel like I'm the victim and the martyr and I'm the one that's put upon and I get all a little bit agitated inside and the truth is that's a similar thing,
It's like I don't get any medals for being the victim,
I don't get any medals for being the martyr in a story that I'm telling myself and it's so easy to fall into the trap of feeling that we're stuck in victimhood or misery and I want to share something with you that I hope will give you a different perspective on this and to do that I'm going to share another way of looking at this.
If you imagine that those thoughts of being a victim or those thoughts of feeling miserable are actually thoughts rather than reality then that's where things can start to free up for you.
Let me explain a little bit more.
We are not by nature victims and we are not by nature miserable.
What we are is that we have a lot of thinking and this thinking is telling us that we don't like to be in the place that we're at,
We're in a place that we're resisting.
It's the resistance to what's happening that has us feel miserable or has us be a victim and there is another place and that place isn't about rolling up your sleeves and fixing the world or fixing other people or fixing your life.
That isn't the first stop.
I mean that might happen but the first stop is to look within to your own wisdom.
That's the place to look and what tends to happen is as you look within to your own wisdom,
Look within to your own loving presence and awareness,
What you'll find is that you cease to water and feed the stories of victimhood or misery and if you imagine that it's a little bit like a seed,
I don't know if you've seen a dandelion seed blow on the wind,
That dandelion seed will only take root if it's in a place that is watered and has nutrients.
It won't take root otherwise and it's the same with our thoughts.
We have thoughts that tumble through our mind a bit like dandelion seeds and these thoughts will take root and will deepen if we give them water and we give them compost to grow in.
So those thoughts,
Those unsettled thoughts of being miserable or being a victim,
If you water them and you give them attention,
They become stronger and that's why the first place to look when you notice that you're feeling miserable or you're feeling a victim,
The first place to look is bring your attention within.
Bring it to that space of loving awareness within you and then from that settled space,
See how the world looks then.
It's the only place to look and what I found is that often what happens is that when I come to that space,
Well those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings and those unsettled feelings of life,
Me feeling guilty or anxious or worried or put upon or a martyr,
They just fly on through.
They don't take root.
I might see them,
They still appear in my life but they no longer take up residence in my life.
Today is just a reminder that you don't get a medal for being miserable.
And a reminder that if you don't water those thoughts of misery or victimhood or guilt or anxiety or unsettledness,
Then they won't take root.
