Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
It's completely dark.
I'm walking through the village and you might hear the occasional car go by.
It's not very late but darkness falls so quickly at the moment.
It's quite a cloudy night,
I can't see the moon and I can't see any stars.
I can hear the distant rumble of our busy road which is probably taking all the people back home after a day's work and I'm just feeling the breeze on my face and looking at the hedges and walls and trees kind of come out in the gloom all around me.
Everything is a shade of grey it seems to me at the moment and I've just come back from a really useful meeting.
We go to a group which is a supervision group and I've got a listening when I was in this group.
My husband and I recently were running a meeting which was quite a tricky meeting,
A lot of emotions involved and we had spoken to our supervisor before the meeting and then we were in a supervision group today and we used that group as a means to debrief the meeting that we'd had which we'd found quite challenging and tiring but had been a successful meeting.
And one of the things as we were sharing and we were explaining the process,
What we'd learned,
What we'd seen,
What had worked,
What we had experienced with the dynamics of the particular group we were working with,
Once we'd shared all that we felt really heard.
There were other people in our supervision group,
Participants who were listening and what is so powerful when you're in a group like that,
When you're sharing like that,
What is powerful is not that people come up with clever suggestions or ideas or say how about you did this in a different way,
The power is that you are listened to and you are heard as you speak what you see and what makes sense to you.
And I was in the experience of that today,
The group sat and listened and they didn't try and rush and rescue me or give me advice or try and solve things that weren't problems,
I wasn't looking for answers to problems and I realized how powerful it was just to be heard.
And then another member of the group spoke up and talked about someone who they were supporting who sometimes would find themselves confused in a lot of thinking and I reflected on that and realized something so true for myself in this listening space,
I realized that there are times I get really confused in my thinking,
There are times when my mind revs up and I wonder what is the right thing to do and I know for sure that the people I seek out when I'm in that confused state,
I don't want people to offer solutions and I don't want people to give me advice,
I want someone to stand alongside me to recognize that I'm in confused thinking and to deeply know and hold the space that I am okay despite the confused thinking,
There is nothing to fix,
There is nothing to rescue or to save,
It's just the recognition that I am feeling confused and that someone is witnessing me.
And that was really important today,
It was this sense of being witnessed,
Of being heard,
Of people being present as I spoke,
They weren't churning over what they were going to say next,
They weren't trying to interrupt the conversation,
They were just listening and as they listened I felt myself deeply settle.
And that's what happens when people listen to you,
When I'm in a place of confusion and someone stands alongside me and just listens,
It's like a catalyst that helps me to settle.
And when I settle and when anybody settles,
What happens is they are much more able to feel and touch base with their intuition and wisdom and ultimately it is their intuition and wisdom,
It is my intuition and wisdom that helps me navigate my life and it's their intuition and wisdom that helps them navigate their life.
Always it's about creating a space to listen so someone can deeply hear themselves and that's what I deeply experienced when I was heard and listened to today.
