Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm strolling through a park on a sunny afternoon and you might hear the occasional car go by,
You might hear children shouting or playing in the background.
It's a quiet gentle afternoon and the sun is not quite as intense and it's brought people out I think just to get a bit of fresh air.
And it's been an interesting day because I'm in Exeter as you know.
I look after my mum and come and stay and give her a bit of support and today's been a really interesting day for me,
A strange day.
I felt a real sense of sadness today.
My thoughts went to missing both my dad who died last year and also my thoughts have been hovering around my dog who we said goodbye to just a few weeks ago.
And for some reason I have been feeling like tears are very close,
Not far away,
Really feeling that sense of sadness.
And also when I have looked at the news and just seen some of the news stories and some of the things that are happening in the world and that sort of added to this sense of melancholy.
And I say it's interesting because I find myself usually in a fairly settled space and today it's just felt different.
And I thought I would share with you as I'm kind of going through this because I think it's really helpful for us all to realise that sadness and happiness and joy and depression and frustration and gratitude,
All of these different emotions that we feel,
They're all part of the human experience.
And for me what's been so helpful as I experience this wave of sadness and it really feels as though I've been knocked over with a wave of sadness,
For me as I experience it what I know deeply and the thing that has me feel like I'm absolutely on solid ground is just the knowing of who I truly am,
That sense of clarity and connection to the energy of life,
The God energy,
Universal energy,
Spiritual energy.
I'm not sure what word works for you,
It's the deep intelligence behind life.
And I have this propensity and capacity to both be in the sadness and to feel it,
Really feel it,
And also to bring my awareness to that space that feels grounded and rooted and settled and peaceful.
It's like both presence and sadness can be side by side within me and for me that is so reassuring.
And I say that because in the past I might have tried to change my sadness to happiness or I might have gone down a bit of a rabbit hole,
A whirlwind,
An eddy of thoughts,
Negative thoughts and concerned thoughts about why I was unhappy and what did it mean and was this gonna mean that I was gonna be unhappy for the rest of my life and just those,
Do you ever go do that where you have this sort of like rabbit hole,
You fall down of a negative thought cycle.
So what I know is that these waves of sadness,
These cycles of emotions,
They come and they go.
It's the same as if I'm sort of overtly excited or happy,
Happy,
Happy.
It's like those emotions come and they go,
They're not meant,
They're not designed to stick around.
But looking beneath those emotions is like looking beneath the waves on the surface of the ocean and really going to the depths of the ocean and feeling that stillness and sense of rock solidness that exists there.
So I just want to share this with you now as I'm going through it,
As I'm experiencing it,
So you can see that it's not wrong or bad to feel sadness or loneliness or any of those emotions.
They just do their thing and that's why it's so important to look within,
To look within,
To that core within you,
That essence,
Because that's where you truly reside and when you live from that place that's when you can navigate these tougher times in life with so much more ease.
