Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm up on Dartmoor,
The sun has set,
It's a grey cool day,
There's a wind blowing on my back.
Above me are two ponies,
They're both sort of white,
One of them is white and grey,
The other is white.
They're grazing quite happily in the evening as I sit and talk to you.
Slightly higher up the hillside I can see three cows and one very tiny calf which I think must have just been born.
Small little calf and I'm always a little bit wary of cows when they've got calves so I'm going to keep my distance from the mum and the calf as I speak with you now.
And today's reflection came about from something I heard today.
It was an interview with a man called Rupert Spira,
Who I follow as a non-dual teacher.
And he was talking about happiness and we've talked about happiness before and the terminology of the word happiness because I often don't use happiness when I describe this state of contentment,
Of gratitude,
Of love.
Happiness for me sometimes is a bit of a connotation of being a bit shallow,
Of like you feel happy when you get a present.
But when he uses this term happiness,
And I'm going to share a quote that he shared with the interviewer,
He's talking about this space of love,
This space of settledness,
Neutrality,
Contentment,
Gratitude,
And the interviewer asked him a question and his response was this.
He said,
We don't use the world in service of our happiness.
We use our happiness in service of the world.
We don't use the world in service of our happiness.
We use our happiness in service of the world.
And I really loved this quote.
It landed with me,
So much so I had to write it down because I wanted to share it with you.
There is,
In our culture,
A kind of a sense that we get happiness by what we can get from the world.
Now,
It might be through a relationship.
I'll feel happy when I have a loving relationship with a partner.
I'll feel happy when I have children.
I'll feel happy when I get a certain income bracket.
It looks like we're waiting for the world to provide us with happiness.
But of course it doesn't work like that.
I remember once speaking with a group of youngsters,
These were teenagers that are about to take their exams.
And they were talking about all the stresses and worries that they had and they talked about things like the amount of time they needed to study,
Their fear of not passing exams,
Their worries about not going to the right college or university,
Their concerns about not getting a job.
And it looked to them as though they needed all of these things to be fixed,
To be correct,
To be okay in their world,
For them to pass exams,
For them to get the right college,
To get the right job.
It looked to them like that needed to happen in order for them to be happy.
But of course as I listen to them.
Being a little bit older than them,
I realised that all that happens is people replace those things,
Jobs,
Exams,
Study,
University,
All those concerns,
Those challenges that seem to be needing to be resolved before we feel happy,
They're just replaced with other things.
Maybe it's about getting a loved one,
It's about having a family,
It's about children going to the right schools,
Being looked after.
Our happiness looks like it's dependent on things happening in the world.
So we don't use the world in service of our happiness because it doesn't work like that.
That's how I see it.
A much healthier way of seeing how life works and in my experience this is how life works for me is that rather than trusting that the outside world will make me happy It's about me being of service in the outside world or using my happiness in service of the world.
So when I feel this sense of fulfillment and gratitude and nourishment,
It's not come because of something in the outside world.
It's come because I am touching base with my true nature.
And as I touch base with my true nature,
Well,
It just makes sense for me to be of service in the world.
So I'm curious how that lands for you today.
I'll repeat the quote again,
Then we'd love to have your reflections and comments.
We don't use the world in service of our happiness.
We use our happiness in service of the world.
Let me know what you think.
And of course,
Don't forget to join me again tomorrow for another five minutes in nature.
