Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott out and about on a blowy autumnal day on Dartmoor.
Above me on the hillside I can see a flock of sheep grazing steadily and higher up on the hillside I can see more little dots of white contrasting against the brown of the bracken and the green of the grass as the flock of sheep has stretched up the hillside almost up to the top actually and I can just see little speckles of white ahead of me.
And today we're just following on from yesterday.
Do you remember we looked at the quote by Epictetus who said people are disturbed not by the things that happen but by their opinions about the things that happen.
And I'd shared how the two contrasting examples of one me being party to a conversation where I and two of my colleagues had received an email and I had felt completely neutral about the email but my companions had felt like it was insulting and were frustrated by it.
So that's a really good example of life turning up in a neutral way and we then impose our stories about what is right and wrong in the situation.
And then also I shared how I'd been on the receiving end of another form of communication where I had gone down the rabbit hole and I had felt unsettled and insecure and frustrated and unheard and unlistened to and I had gone into those stories myself.
So two very different situations or two very different responses.
One where I just saw life as it was and I was fairly neutral and one where I interpreted a lot of stories about what was going on.
On.
And this is really useful to know because it shows us something about life.
It shows us how we are all creating our experience of life.
We see things completely different and we see life through the filter of our past,
Our beliefs,
Our culture,
Our society,
And our expectations about how people should behave.
And we all individually create a sense of how the world should work and how we should respond if the world doesn't work in the way we think it should.
But I want to offer something a bit different here or a bit deeper around this sense of us all seeing difference in the world.
Because the temptation can be to try and get people to see our view of the world.
And for me,
That can be a hiding to nothing.
When I try and engage with somebody else's intellect and convince them that my way is the right way,
All I do is I tend to come up against their ego and intellect,
Which entrenches in its opinion,
And we end up having like a tug of war,
A lot of energy being spent,
And neither of us going very far.
And what I found with the inside out understanding,
And this is The foundation of what I share and teach in the world is that there is another layer beneath this,
A foundational layer,
Which is the best place to look when I feel unsettled or I feel as though I'm not being heard.
This foundational place is the energy of life,
Of love,
The universal energy that surrounds us all,
That we are made of.
That means that we are all the same.
When I find myself looking at the differences between how people are and how I am,
I found myself feeling frustrated that people don't see the world as I see it.
If,
On the other hand,
I notice I'm getting lost in a thought storm,
And instead of trying to convince somebody,
I bring my awareness back to this settled sense of who I truly am,
Then that sense of who I truly am,
That foundational piece of that love of energy,
That universal energy,
That seems to be the best starting point.
Because when I listen to somebody from that place,
I'm listening from a place of compassion and understanding.
That doesn't mean I agree with someone or I'm going to change my views,
But it does mean that I get to see how somebody else is seeing the world.
And when two people look in the same direction,
When two people are having a different of opinion,
But they fall back into that space.
Often what happens is they laugh at the conflict that they nearly got lost in,
Because they realise that there is so much more that connects them than separates them.
So today's reflection is all about that.
It's about realizing that deep essence of connection between us all,
Rather than getting lost in the thoughts that separate us.
Let me know your reflections,
And don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
