Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm standing up on a very chilly Dartmoor leaning against a wooden gate overlooking a farmer's field where the sheep are grazing.
I've got my back to Dartmoor itself because there's a very cold wind coming off the moorland and if I turn around you'll probably hear it rush across the microphone.
It's wonderful,
It's a beautiful time of year,
Leaves are starting to come through.
I'm looking at the tree above my head which doesn't have any leaves on it as yet but I can see the little leaf buds starting to come through on the ends of the branches and if I look to the ground I can see the crisp brown leaves of oak leaves that fell in the autumn,
So I know that this must be an oak tree above my head.
And today I want to reflect on something that often happens when people come across the Inside Out Understanding or Three Principles,
Something that often happens and then has them question whether or not they're getting it.
I'm going to have to explain it in a bit more detail,
It sounds a bit cryptic at the moment but bear with me because I found this really helpful when I heard this as a metaphor.
Often what happens is when people start to understand how they operate and if you remember the Three Principles or the Inside Out Understanding is a description of how life works.
It's not telling you how to live life,
It's telling you how it works.
So in essence as I see it the Inside Out Understanding helps me understand that at my depth and essence of my being I am love and peace and wisdom.
That's the key message for me and it also lets me know that I have this capacity through thought to imagine myself in stories of upset and sadness and unsettledness.
So I'm deeply okay at the core of my being and I'm a human being and I get lost in thought and it's really helpful to know this because most of the other tools and techniques out there are telling you how to live your life,
Telling you how to feel happy,
Telling you how to get rid of negative beliefs and what's different about the Inside Out Understanding is that it's helping you see how life works and what happens is you tend to align yourself with how life works so you just feel lighter more of the time.
And let me take you back to this metaphor story that I found really helpful to describe it because you see often what happens is when people come across the Inside Out Understanding and they have an insight they feel this intense freedom and release.
Freedom and release often people are touched deeply to realize they are not broken,
That they are deeply okay at the level of their soul and they see that insightfully.
In other words they see something from within and they have an intense emotional response to it which is a sense of joy,
Of gratitude,
Of relief and that intense emotional feeling is one that might last for hours maybe days.
But then you see what happens is people often think that because the feeling of intense joy and gratitude is gone that they have somehow forgotten or don't understand the three principles or Inside Out Understanding and they come back and they want they're like what am I doing wrong?
I don't feel this intense happiness anymore what's gone wrong?
And the best way I've heard describing it is through this metaphor which I will tell you now and I want to imagine that you've been carrying a heavy heavy rucksack you're going on a hike and you're carrying a heavy rucksack with all your camping equipment on it and when you reach the campsite you undo your rucksack and it falls to the ground and you feel this intense relief and release that the weight is no longer on your back.
It's a freedom you're able to walk lightly and maybe for a few minutes maybe for half an hour you are feeling joyful and full of gratitude that you no longer have to carry that rucksack and then you forget about it and you end up just walking around normally you're in your natural state of finding your way around the campsite and those intense feelings of gratitude and joy have gone.
You're in a very healthy nourishing space of not carrying your rucksack and that is the best description I've come across for the three principles understanding is that it's often like letting go of a very heavy rucksack that you thought you needed to carry around with you in life and then you realize you don't and there is often an intense feeling of emotion and freedom when you let that rucksack go and then the bit that people get mistaken on or they get tripped up by is they think that intense feeling of freedom and joy and gratitude is supposed now to be their default feeling a hundred percent of the time and if they're not feeling that a hundred percent of the time then they're doing life wrong.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Yes of course you'll feel that intense freedom like when you put your rucksack down but then what happens is you get into a space of peaceful joy of a natural contentment and that imbues your whole life and that is how you find yourself living life with more ease.
I hope you've enjoyed this five minutes in nature and I look forward to connecting with you again tomorrow.
