Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott and I'm out on a really glorious summer's day.
It's in the morning so it's nice and cool and it's made doubly cool by walking down this really old track that leads off the Dartmoor moorlands.
I'm sure it must be hundreds possibly thousands of years old.
It just feels like it's steeped in history and on either side are tall mossy stone walls so they're green with the moss and I'm in a little wooded area and you can probably hear the birds and occasionally as I stand here I can hear the buzz of a fly or a bee go past and just glinting as the light dapples through the trees that are overhanging this beautiful cool path.
I can just see glinting the tiny little flies darting around but they're illuminated with the gold of the Sun and it is beautiful.
Today is actually a reflection on listening within.
I thought this would be a really good illustration of listening within.
Listening to your inner compass.
Now in the same way that you can probably hear the birds and maybe the occasional fly go by,
In the same way that you can hear that with me as I'm speaking to you here I'm asking you to listen in to those quieter voices within you,
Quieter feelings within you.
I call that your inner compass.
It's the quieter voice,
The quieter feeling,
The quieter intuition that is nudging you.
If I was standing in this same spot with the same birds and there was a busy road right beside me I wouldn't be able to hear the birds.
I wouldn't be able to hear the buzzing of the insects.
In the same way that the sound of the birds wouldn't have gone anywhere with the busyness of the cars if they were beside me,
So your inner intuitive deeper wisdom doesn't go anywhere.
It's always there.
It's just that when your mind is busy we find our attention leaves that deeper intuitive wisdom and rests in the stories and the thinking and the habitual thought patterns that vie for our attention.
What's it like to listen to your inner compass?
Well that's what this is all about.
This is the challenge today is listening.
Ask yourself what is my intuitive wisdom wanting me to hear?
Many people try and get rid of the busyness of their minds and their thinking and for me I spent many years doing that too.
Trying to get rid of my noisy thought patterns but when somebody told me about my deeper intuitive wisdom it made much more sense not to get rid of the noise of my mind in the same way it's no it makes no sense to try and get rid of the noise of the traffic.
Instead it's about reattuning and learning to listen to that wisdom in spite of the noise.
What tends to happen for me and for many people that I'm with is as I bring my attention away from the busyness of my mind or listen within listen to my inner compass as I listen within bring my attention there I'm able to hear clearly or more clearly what I wasn't able to hear when I was distracted in the noise of my thinking.
And what tends to happen is as I bring my attention to that settledness the noise of my thinking subsides.
So today your reflection and your challenge is to be curious about what your inner wisdom is saying and don't try and quell or quieten your busy mind.
That's not what this is about.
It's about bringing your attention within and feeling,
Hearing,
Listening to your inner compass and seeing what it is asking you to hear for yourself.