Hello and welcome.
My name is Liz Scott and this is day 29 of a 30-day experiment where I'm living from a place of love rather than fear.
So this is the penultimate day and for 29 days,
I'm doing it for 30 days in total,
I'm bringing my awareness back from a place of insecurity or unsettledness,
Fearful thoughts,
To a space of love,
That inner space of wisdom and intuition and love that's within.
Each day I write a journal and I reflect on a particular area of learning for me and my request is that you join me,
You share your learning,
You join this experiment either for the whole 30 days or just now and again when you feel like you want to give it a go.
Today I have learnt something about love,
Holding love and sadness and experiencing them at the same time.
I took my mum out for lunch,
It was her birthday,
And I wanted to just take her somewhere simple,
Somewhere we could have a simple lunch,
She doesn't have a huge appetite and she's very elderly and she has dementia.
She's in the early stages of dementia so she recognises me but cognitively she finds things very hard to remember and repeats herself a lot.
And when I took her out for lunch,
We sat down and we ordered a simple lunch,
It was a lovely place we went to and we started a conversation,
Except the conversation we had was really sparse.
What I mean by that is that when I've taken her out for lunch before we're taking her out for her birthday,
There's been a real to and fro,
She's been really interested in asking questions about me and my life but the dementia is now moving to a different stage and she doesn't really ask questions,
She's not interested in my life anymore,
She can't grasp or hold information in the way that she once did.
And as I sat with my mum and I looked at her and I felt this extraordinary sense of love for this woman,
She's an extraordinary mum,
She's one of those mothers,
Those parents that gave us the building blocks,
The foundations of a rock-solid childhood and she did that by sacrificing so much herself.
She was always there for us and even though we didn't have much money or we didn't have an affluent lifestyle,
We never went hungry and we never went without.
She worked extra hours so that we were able to have a rock-solid childhood.
And here she was now at the end of her life or moving towards the end of her life,
The other end of her life and here she was in a very different place,
The roles were completely reversed and I was the one who was the leader supporting her,
I was the one ensuring that she was going to be okay,
I was the one that was doing the looking after.
And I felt a sense of sadness,
A real sense of sadness for the mum that I've lost,
A real sense of sadness for the mum that I'm never going to know again and with that sadness it didn't come with a sense of life being unfair,
It came from a place of love.
And that's what this experiment is teaching me,
It's giving me these wonderful moments to reflect and to realise very simple lessons that probably in day-to-day life,
If I wasn't doing this experiment and if I wasn't journaling and reflecting on what I was learning,
Really simple lessons are showing up for me which are special beyond words.
And for me today the real lesson I saw was that I can come from a place of love,
I can feel sadness,
A sense of grief and I can be deeply present with another human being.
In other words I can hold love and sadness at the same time,
It's almost like they come from the same place,
The sadness comes from a place of love.
And the other thing I had an experience of was really feeling connected,
Seeing her well-being and this might sound a bit strange if I'm talking about somebody with dementia but I saw something in her,
The spirit in her was still there,
The identity of my mum had changed,
Was changing and yet there was a spirit within her and it was a connected soul level experience that I still felt,
I still felt like we were connected.
So today love has shown up for me in a really beautiful way,
It's shown up by showing me that love and sadness can be both held at the same time and it's really showed me that connection,
Connection to my mum is present even when conversation isn't flowing.
I'd love to know what you're getting from this experiment,
Maybe you're joining me day by day,
Maybe you've just popped in now and again,
Maybe this is the first time you've listened.
You can always go back and find the Love Not Fear,
They're numerically ordered in the premium track so just go back and have a little look at them if you want to go right back to the beginning of the experiment.
But let me know what you're seeing for yourself,
Let me know what turns up for you,
What tiny bits of wisdom that you're learning as you live from a place of love rather than fear.
