Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm standing up on Dartmoor,
The moorlands up above my home and I've come to a pond.
It's not very big but this is a man-made series of ponds with a small trickling waterfall between them and I can count one,
Two,
Three,
Four little ponds that run down off the hillside gathering the dampness and the water that gets soaked up into this moorland peat and I'm really excited because I have been looking for signs of spring and here in this pond I can see thousands and thousands of frog spawn.
So these are little jelly,
They almost look like thousands and thousands of eyes,
Little jelly circles with dark spots in the them and I know that in a few weeks time these will have hatched into tadpoles and this pond,
Which at the moment is quite clear and you can see right down to the bottom of it,
It will be a mass of black squiggly tadpoles.
This is a real marker that spring is on its way and I am standing with my back to the easterly wind and it's a cold easterly wind,
There's a dampness in the air but contrasting with that easterly wind is the sunshine.
So there's a warmth in the sunshine,
It's a weak warmth but it's there and I can feel both the warmth of the sun on my face and then if I turn my face I can feel the coolness of the easterly breeze just brush against my face and I've come to the pond and I've brought a stick with me because it just occurred to me as I was walking past this pond earlier that this pond is such a good representation of our minds,
My mind.
So there are times when it's really clear and now is one of those times I can look right down to the bottom of the pond,
It's probably not very deep,
I could stand up in it and not get water over the top of my wellington boots so it's it's not a deep pond but it's got quite a muddy bottom to it.
Let me just get a bit closer and if I pop my stick in I can wiggle the stick around and the sediment at the bottom of the pond suddenly clouds up,
It sort of looks like the clouds in the sky as it swirls with brown little particles of mud and I've just taken my stick out again and I'm just watching that sediment in the pond and of course where I've stirred it up I can't see the bottom of the pond anymore all I can see is a mass and a swirl of sediment that's spinning round and round and it reminds me so much this pond and the the way that the sediment rises up and clouds it,
It reminds me so much of my mind and the way that our minds work and when we find ourselves in a time of upset or unsettledness,
A bit like watching the sediment on the bottom of this pond,
When we find ourselves in that place of upset the temptation can be to get a little bit panicky because we can no longer see clearly.
Has that ever occurred to you that you find yourself in unsettled thinking,
You feel like you're on unstable ground and there's something in you that feels an urgency to feel better again and the temptation can be to try and fix that unsettled thinking with more thinking,
Trying to think more positively,
Trying to think better,
Trying to think different beliefs like powerful beliefs rather than limiting beliefs and we get busy trying to fix the cloudiness of our thinking and just as I've been speaking with you now and I will look down in the water again I can now see the bottom of the pond again because that sediment has settled and that's what happens with our minds.
You see the temptation is always to try and fix thinking that feels unsettled or unstable but that's exactly the wrong thing to do.
It's the equivalent of me stirring up the pond even more.
When I do that I get more sediment,
More cloudiness.
When you try and fix your thinking you get more unsettledness,
More thinking.
So my request is that you are curious about this today.
Notice your thinking and notice that when you feel unsettled that's okay.
Allow that thinking to settle because it will and like the pond and the sediment in the bottom of the pond it will eventually settle and from that space of settleness you can find clarity again.
