Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
It's just spitting with rain as I make my way back home on Dartmoor.
Quite a dimpsy night.
I know the lane I'm going to walk down is going to be dark so I'll need a torch to find my way home.
The nights really are coming in so much more quickly now.
And today's reflection is all about living from a place of joy.
And it came about very unexpectedly from a meeting I attended online.
With some women friends who we've been working together for about a year.
We meet up every month and we've had this vision of supporting people who work in the community with the inside-out understanding.
And what we had found was happening is that we were starting to more and more get involved in things that we weren't particularly enjoying.
Gathering emails,
Setting up events so people could log on,
We were uploading videos,
We were writing meeting notes,
We were creating agendas,
We had to-do lists after each meeting.
And it came to a bit of a head today in a really healthy way.
It was a bit of a sticky meeting to begin with.
And then it suddenly became clear as we became really honest with each other.
That we didn't quite know why we were doing what we were doing.
It started out from a really good place.
We wanted to create a container to support people working in community in the world.
With the inside-out understanding.
That was the reason we were doing this.
But it had become quite arduous.
I don't know if this resonates with you.
What we had taken on as a vision that felt light and lovely just became heavy.
And was becoming more and more heavy as we were working towards an event that we were about to put on online.
And it occurred to us suddenly.
In different ways that we had inadvertently started playing a game and doing something that we weren't inspired by anymore.
And none of us were.
So we were all doing things that we didn't really enjoy doing because we kind of thought everybody else wanted it to go in this same direction.
Have you ever done that?
You end up doing things because that's the way it's done.
And at the end of this meeting,
I came away and it felt as though something had deeply shifted inside me.
Because what became clear is I want to step into life with joy.
Like joy in my heart.
Step into life with a lightness,
With a sense of wanting to be expansive.
And finding myself wrapped up,
Tying myself in knots,
Created by me,
And we'd created them,
Nobody else had imposed them on us,
That we had to do things a certain way.
We had to get a certain number of people along to the events.
We had to provide them with a service.
We had to communicate with them.
We needed an email platform.
All these things that we had created,
That we made up,
That we needed to do.
When they fell away and we realized we didn't have to do any of them.
There was an incredible lightness and freedom,
Certainly that I felt,
And I feel the others felt as well.
And instead of talking in terms of almost slogging through and trying hard and getting things done,
We dropped it all.
It fell away.
And instead,
We decided that we wanted to walk through life in this group with joy,
To do it with lightness in our hearts.
That's what felt really inspiring.
To us.
I don't know where it's going to go,
But what I was left with is I started to think about my whole life and think,
What would my life look like if I stepped into it with joy?
What if I let go of the things that I've kind of made up that I should do,
Even though I don't need to do them?
Things that I do because I've told myself I need to do them?
What if I was just to let go of that stuff about how I should run a business,
What I should say to people,
The kinds of clients I should get hold of?
Can you hear all those shoulds?
What if I just stepped up and walked through life with lightness and joy?
What would be different for me?
Now,
I'm aware that there are practicalities that I need to abide by and there are bills that need to be paid.
I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about the additional stuff that I've made up that I need to do in order to.
That's the stuff I really don't want to invest my time and energy in anymore.
And as I speak to you now,
I feel a real lightness of spirit just imagining what it would be like to walk through life with lightness and joy in everything I did.
How does that resonate for you?
Can you see that as a possibility in your life?
Let me know your reflections.
And of course,
Don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
