Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
Well you find me a little bit further along the south coast of England at a place called Weymouth.
It's a seaside town and I'm walking with a view overlooking the sea and there are people in swimming already.
It's early in the morning.
It's quite pleasant as you know we've had a lot of hot hot days but what's quite pleasant is there is a miserly rain about which is very refreshing actually and I'm out with a lot of dog walkers people out and about just being up early and enjoying the day even though it's not like I say a bright sunny morning that we've had for the last few mornings.
And my reflection today comes from a message that came from Brandy.
Now,
I love the messages you leave,
And I'm always really keen to answer questions or anything you would like me to further reflect on.
And Brandy just said it would be good to hear more about your practice of moving from previous thinking about improvement to the three principles.
And what Brandy was referring to is that when I came across the three principles,
Which was probably about 12,
13 years ago now.
I had up to that point been on a real self-improvement drive and it involved courses and reading books and I'd trained as a counsellor and trained as a coach and I'd spent just a lot of time and money and energy wanting to improve my life,
Wanting to improve myself.
And when I came across the three principles,
Things started to shift.
And it was imperceptible.
It was very different from anything I'd been across before.
Usually when I came across a new tool or technique,
I just dove into that tool or technique and practiced it day in,
Day out,
Avidly.
But the three principles was different and it's different because the three principles is an understanding.
It's explaining how life works,
How your psychology works.
It's not a how-to.
So you don't do the three principles.
It's like you go,
Oh,
That's how life works.
And because you understand the nature of life,
You align yourself to it.
A really good example,
As I look at the ocean here in front of me,
Is that the ocean here is tidal.
And if you want to go out on your boat,
It's really helpful to know what the tides are doing.
For a swim.
So you can align yourself with how the tides work.
It's the equivalent of trying to change the way the tides work as opposed to working with the tides.
And that's the same as I saw it with self-improvement.
It was like trying to change how I thought and the way that I was in the world,
Or actually just aligning myself with the way that I actually work in the world.
The three principles gave me an understanding,
A metaphor to go,
That's how it works.
So the difference or the practice when I moved from my previous thinking about improving myself to how I am now engaged with the three principles as I see it unfold in my life and align myself to it.
I think the thing to say is that it was very slow for me and I didn't particularly have a practice.
What happened for me is that there were things that made sense about the three principles.
That once I understood and saw to be true in my life,
I just rearranged my life around them.
And one of those things was about thought.
It was about that when I have a thought storm come in,
I used to try and fix that thought storm,
Try and get one of my tools that I'd learnt,
Self-improvement techniques out,
To try and get rid of that thought storm.
But what I saw,
Because the three principles helped me understand the nature of thought is I just saw that thought and thinking will settle down in its own time,
Because that's the nature of thought.
I don't have to do anything to make it settle.
The thing with the three principles is it's going with what I see experientially,
Not what I see intellectually.
So I experiment with things,
And if it turns up so in my life,
Like if I realize that thought storms will pass in their own time,
And I pay attention to that,
And I see that actually that is the case,
Then I know I can trust that.
So it took some time,
But over time,
As I began to explore the three principles,
I began to see what I could trust in life.
And in a nutshell,
What I saw that I could trust is that I had an inner intuitive wisdom that I could absolutely trust.
And I began to distrust what my thinking was telling me,
Particularly when my thinking was in an agitated state.
So I just gradually began to see more and more about the three principles.
And as I did,
More and more old habits fell away.
So I hope that helps you see what happened for me.
And please do ask me more questions.
There's a course here on Insight Timer about the three principles.
Do feel free to have a look at it and don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
