Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott and it's another grey June day,
Very cool and fresh.
There was a lot of rain yesterday and the lane that I'm walking up has got a thick layer of mud,
A sort of mush of old leaves and muck and there's a bit of a river of water or stream of water running down the edge of the lane because the stream is so full.
I'm just out for a little stroll,
Taking in the air,
Walking up onto Dartmoor,
My normal regular walk which I so love doing and it's so lovely to see the thickness of the growth as I walk up the lanes.
Overhead I can see the shiny leaves here of a holly tree actually and as the green,
Dark green of the moss on the trunks of the trees and thick ferns and nettles growing up on either side,
Everything feels very green and lush at the moment and today's reflection was prompted by a conversation I had which was about reflecting on the power of being yourself and I suppose as I look at these different leaves and plants around me,
I see the fern leaves and I can see the leaf of the beech tree above me and the holly,
The spiky holly tree and then there's the hawthorn leaf as well,
All very distinct different leaves.
It's good to see how each tree is itself,
It doesn't try to be something else and that's what I'd like to speak about today which is the power of being yourself,
The power of being true to yourself and it came about from a conversation.
I was having a conversation with a friend and we were talking about the way,
We're both in our 50s and we were talking about the way that we often found ourselves or at least in the past very much so,
Found ourselves trying so hard to please other people and this wasn't in a doormat kind of way,
It was in a way of when we're at work we were trying hard to please how we thought people wanted us to be at work,
With friendships or relationships we tried to be the kind of person that we thought other people wanted us to be and we were both reflecting on the power and the freedom of realising what it is to be ourselves and I love nature because I get such inspiration from nature and just seeing the way the different plants form,
They are themselves,
They don't try to be anything else.
The beech tree doesn't try to be a holly tree and the hawthorn doesn't try to be a nettle and the nettle doesn't try to be a fern,
Everything is itself and I wonder what it is to truly be myself.
I kind of know that to navigate through life and the culture that we live in in society,
I do have to make compromises and find my way and cajole other people and make concessions along the way,
I can't just forge ahead and have everything go exactly the way I think it should go but there's a difference between compromise and jogging along and finding a way to get through life,
There's a difference between that and sort of bending yourself into someone that you're not in order to try and get approval or to be approved of by others and when I've found myself bending myself into a different shape to try and please other people,
That for me feels really really unhealthy and so that's the question to reflect on today,
It's about me being myself and it's about you reflecting on what it is to be yourself and I'm not talking about making this a thing or beating myself up or you beating yourself up because you're not reaching the mark of actually truly being who you are,
It is though about looking within and getting a sense of what feels right,
What feels nourishing and what feels healthy about who and what you might be in the world and it's coming from that place of nourishment,
That healthy space.
My sense is that we shift and change as we grow and age,
We find that there are different aspects that blossom within us that want to be displayed in the world and part of this is about looking within to see where are you at the moment in your life,
What is it that wants to be shared in the world?
So have a little reflect on that for yourself today,
What is your true nature,
Who is it that you are at your heart and how do you want to show yourself in the world and to be in the world?
What's it like to come from yourself rather than to try and be what you think others want you to be?
