Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
It's still grey,
It's still blowy,
It's still very autumnal here up on Dartmoor.
And I've just paused in a hollow because it's so blowy it's hard to speak in the wind.
And I'm right beside the Ludbrook,
It's a stream that rises not far up,
In fact I might walk up there in a second,
It rises higher up on Dartmoor and then rushes down towards the River Urn which then heads into the sea.
And today I want to just explain a bit about the inside-out nature of life.
If you remember yesterday,
I shared how important it feels for me at the moment to overtly express how transformational the inside-out understanding has been for me and for the people that I've worked with.
And the stream is a really good metaphor for this.
So just imagine I was standing beside the stream here and little bits of rubbish kept floating by and every time a bit of rubbish went by I would scoop it out of the stream.
That for me is a little bit like seeing the world from the outside in,
That I need to fix the stuff around me.
Whereas when I see the nature of how life really works,
And that's from the inside-out,
That's the equivalent of me going upstream,
Seeing where the source of this pollution is,
So I see where the rubbish is entering the stream,
And then I stop it.
Because when all you do is you deal with the symptoms,
You're dealing with life and it's never-ending.
It's a never-ending cycle of trying to stop things from being stressful,
Or stop yourself being anxious,
Or trying to fix your thinking,
Or trying to fix other people,
Or trying to save the world.
It's never-ending.
If,
However,
You go upstream,
And rather than just keep picking the rubbish out of the stream,
You go upstream and you see the source of what's going on,
And when I talk about the inside-out nature of life,
When I see deeply the truth of who I am,
I am this spiritual being having an experience of being human,
When I start to realise how life truly works,
Then it doesn't make sense just to fix symptoms.
Instead,
What I'm doing is I'm realising I am looking in the wrong place for solutions.
So with the inside-out nature of life,
The solution lies within.
It lies with you realising the truth of who you are.
I have a friend who I met,
She used to be a participant on one of my courses,
And we've become firm friends.
And she tells me so clearly the difference this understanding has had with her.
She says,
Before I met you,
I had had a lifetime of different people telling me that I was broken and I needed fixing.
And she said it was frightening,
Because I felt I could never,
Ever be truly whole.
But she said what was even more frightening is I looked at my daughter,
Who was having some really stressful and anxious episodes,
And I was scared that she would never,
Ever be right.
And that we were both fated to live in the world forever having to battle against stress and anxiety.
We were never going to be fixed.
It was impossible.
But when I came across what you were talking about,
You were the first person to say and to listen and point to my own resilience and well-being.
And I had the experience,
And had the experience I didn't need fixing.
I was whole.
And she said what was more exciting was I realised my daughter didn't need fixing.
She was just experiencing anxious thinking.
But underneath it,
She was whole.
And that is the difference of going upstream.
When you realise the depth of who you truly are,
You,
Me,
Everybody,
We are all part of this universal energy taking form and experiencing life through the power of thought.
When we realise that,
It's not frightening living life,
Because we have understood deeply the inside-out nature.
Of course we're human,
Of course we'll have our ups and downs,
And we'll feel wobbly at times,
And we'll forget who we truly are.
But ultimately,
When we remember who we truly are,
We notice our thinking is taking us astray,
And we know deeply that we are not broken,
Cannot be broken,
And at the level of soul,
We are unbreakable.
When we realise that,
Then we're able to live life with more ease.
So that's what I want to share with you today.
I want to share the power of the inside-out nature of what it is to be human.
We're human and we forget the power of who we truly are.
But when we realise who we truly are,
We're able to live as human beings without the anxiety and fear that can dog us during our lives.
I hope that makes sense.
Let me know what you take from it today.
