Hello and welcome to 5 minutes in nature with me Liz Scott sitting on a seawall in a wonderful warm dry heat in Spain.
We've come up the coast from Albir which is where we were staying on the tram to a place called Calpe and here the sand is a golden colour on the beach which contrasts with the little shingly pebbly beaches or the long shingly pebbly beach of Albir itself and I'm reflecting on the retreat that I've just been on.
We've actually been on a retreat for four days and the retreat has been exploring the inside out understanding and communities and just to say I'm on a busy beach here so you'll probably hear children playing and people on the phone and people walking by.
It's a really busy beach so the retreat has been a wonderful experience for me and I want to share what I've got from it and as you know I'm exploring what's next in my world and in my life and the retreat has been an exploration of the three principles in community and how we as a group of people who value and see the transformational nature of the three principles,
How we can support and share this more widely in the world.
For me the three principles boils down to two really important aspects and those aspects are that firstly that nobody is broken,
All of us,
You,
Me,
Everybody in the world is connected,
Is part of,
Is made of the essence and energy of life energy.
We are spiritual beings here in the world,
We are all fragments,
Fractures,
Fragmented elements,
Refracted elements of a spiritual being having an experience of being human.
So the first thing to always realise is that you are absolutely okay,
You are not broken,
Not at the level of spirit and then the second thing to realise is that thought and thinking,
The power of thought can cloud over and distract us and get in the way of us experiencing wholeheartedly that sense of wellness and well-being and so those are the only two things you actually really need to remember in life is that you're okay and you're human and sometimes you forget you're okay and that's okay to forget.
And the three principles understanding has been shared for several decades now in different community projects and the results have been startling.
In our group we had somebody who had had an addiction to alcohol and she'd been through the Alcoholics Anonymous programme,
She'd been to several places where she'd been spent thousands of pounds on treatment for alcoholism and the difference she said when she came across the inside out understanding or the three principles is that with everything that she tried before she saw herself and was treated as if she was broken,
There was something to fix or to be honest that there was she just had to manage not being fixed,
You had to manage being broken,
That's how she explained it to us in the group and that really touched me actually because the thing that changed her life was when she realised she wasn't broken,
She didn't need fixing,
She wasn't always an alcoholic,
All that had happened is that she had got lost in a thought loop that kept her from feeling her inbuilt well-being.
And if you translate that story across the world,
Across schools,
Education,
Children,
People with mental health issues,
Into prisons,
Into communities,
If you just translate that simple principle,
That principle that basically we're okay but we've forgotten it,
It's a completely different starting point.
So I've come away from this retreat feeling freshly invigorated,
Feeling like the flame within me has been blown on,
I really feel the desire to continue sharing in community and my community is likely to be older women and also potentially my geographical community as well,
I'm curious about whether there's still more for me to engage with there.
So I just wanted you to come up to date with where I'm at,
I feel that this is such an important message that the world absolutely needs to hear at the moment,
If you're listening to this just know you are not broken,
You don't need fixing,
That doesn't mean you haven't had traumas and upset and difficult things that you've gone through in your life but what you just need to know is that at your core in essence you are deeply deeply okay and that because you're human you'll probably forget that time and time again but when you bring your awareness back to that okayness within you you start to realize that life doesn't need to be as frightening as you once thought it was.
