Hello and welcome to 5 minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
What a glorious day!
Blue skies,
Sunshine,
Coolness in the air.
The ground is still hard.
We've had quite a lot of cold weather recently and the ground is still pretty hard from the cold snap that we've had and it just feels really beautiful.
It feels really easeful to be out just feeling the last of the sunshine on my face as the sun gets ready to dip behind the hillside and call an end to another day.
And today is a reflection on what it is to be lost in a thought storm and even more than a thought storm maybe a depression or a real sense of mental imbalance.
A friend of mine,
A dear friend who I don't see that often but she's such a beautiful soul,
Such a beautiful spirit.
I heard recently that she's been really struggling with her mental health and she's in a very dark place and it surprised me because I always experienced this friend as someone who's just kind and compassionate and seems very grounded and happy and sort of loves life so it really surprised me to hear that this was a space that she was inhabiting at the moment.
And I know for sure that people often when they listen to someone who is in a distressing mental space really feel as though they need to make them feel better.
So the first thing I want to say is if you find yourself listening to someone or with someone who's in a mentally distressed state,
You know your job is not to make them feel better.
Your job is actually just to point them to who they truly are.
Point them back to that space of love and compassion and peace of mind.
Point them back to that space in them that is completely and utterly clouded over in that moment.
And I was just trying to find a way of explaining to myself really what might be going on with someone who really is lost in a whirlpool of unpleasant distressing thoughts and feelings.
And for me what came to mind,
And we live close to the ocean so this metaphor probably works for me and I'll explain it to you so you maybe understand,
Is that when you go swimming off the coastline here you've got to be careful because there are some places where there are some very strong currents and there are currents here called rip currents or rip tides and it's the play of I think the tides and just the motion of the ocean which means that if you get caught in a rip tide and you're swimming you can get dragged out to sea very quickly.
I've never been in that position myself but I understand it's really frightening and one of the things that people do when they're caught in a rip tide if they don't understand the nature of a rip tide is they try and swim against it and you can't beat a rip tide it's so strong so all that happens is that if you try and swim against it you exhaust yourself.
The way to deal with a rip tide is first of all to notice you're in one,
To secondly realize it probably is going to feel very frightening and then thirdly,
Surprisingly you might think,
Is it just to allow the tide,
The rip current,
To take you out to sea and the reason you do that is because the rip tide,
The rip current,
Eventually lessens.
It reduces in its energy and capacity to pull you out to sea and when it does so and when you're free of it you are then able to swim back to shore.
You might be far out to sea but you can swim back to shore but you can't swim against the current and so for me it seems that when people get lost in these really dark spaces of upset and horrible thoughts and feelings,
Frightening thoughts and feelings,
It's a little bit like being in a rip current and the first thing to do is to notice you're in that space so if you're feeling lost in a whirl of thoughts and anxiety and unsettledness well if you're noticing it that's really really important that's the first important step because once you notice it and you understand the nature of it then you can align yourself with how it works and fighting it,
Fighting those thoughts and feelings or getting lost in them,
Those maybe feelings of lack of worth or feelings of darkness,
Of feelings of depression,
Of sadness,
Of not being good enough,
If you try and fight them you'll just find yourself feeling exhausted.
Instead just realize they will rise up and you will notice them and see them but they are not who you truly are and eventually they do reduce in their intensity.
If all you can do is not fight them or invest energy into them you will find that eventually they reduce in intensity and when they do that is metaphorically when you are able to swim back to shore you're able to come back to yourself again.
So today is just a little reflection on what it is to get lost in a dark place and to realize that there is hope and it won't be forever.
You will eventually be able to make your way back home.
