Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm sitting in the early morning breeze outside Exeter Cathedral.
The Cathedral Green has got a few trees in it,
There's a bit of grassland and around it are some very old buildings enclosing the Cathedral.
Often people come here to Exeter to visit the Cathedral and they can't see it because it's so well hidden behind different houses and buildings.
And I say I'm sitting on the Cathedral Green but actually it should be called the Cathedral Yellow.
The grass is so yellow at the moment,
We've not had much rain and it's looking a bit sorry for itself.
And today I'm reflecting on an interaction I had with someone recently and the interaction was around their thinking.
They began to realise that their thinking was unhelpful and the comment they made is,
Well,
I think I've got a lot now to unlearn.
It's going to take me a long time to unlearn this.
And I love it when those comments sort of land on me and I kind of think well that's not quite right and I go away and reflect as I have done on this morning's walk and just want to express what I'm seeing about that comment.
I've worked with young people and one of the things I noticed when I work with young people,
Some of these were around the age of 10 and some were teenagers,
Is that young people learn things really quickly,
Particularly around well-being.
When I talk to young people about thought and how thought covers up the,
We called it the diamond within us,
Young people got it really quickly.
They got it so quickly I didn't quite understand because predominantly I work with adults and with adults beliefs and limiting beliefs are often quite prevalent.
It takes a little bit longer for adults sometimes to see through to their diamond.
But without exception,
Whether you're a child or whether you're an adult,
There's no unlearning in the sense that,
In the same way that you might learn something,
You do something by repetition and experiment.
When it comes to seeing through unhelpful thinking and thought and negative thought patterns,
The unlearning is not something that happens or needs to happen over a period of time.
Usually the unlearning happens in an instant.
You see something differently about a situation that one day looked one way and then just completely changed.
I'll give you an example with a youngster I was working with.
We use the metaphor of the diamond just to explain the resilience and well-being that's inherent and innate in everybody.
And we were sharing this with a group of youngsters and this young lad,
He was probably about 16,
He was someone who was always a bit on the outskirts of the group.
He found it hard to,
He needed time before he could say something,
He needed to formulate what he wanted to say and sometimes the group was chipping in so quickly he couldn't quite keep up.
But we did this little exercise with him and he saw something very deeply.
It was a meditation exercise where he just started to feel his diamond and in that moment after the exercise had finished I looked at him,
I could see something was different.
And I went and had a conversation with him and he said to me I feel Zen,
I feel Zen.
And I said you know that feeling of Zen,
That is who you truly are,
That's your diamond,
That's you experiencing your diamond without all the other thought that goes on.
And he got up from that exercise and he went in front of the whiteboard,
Took out a pen and started explaining the whole group something he he hadn't been able to do because he'd been always at the one on the periphery.
That he saw something so different,
He had been believing thoughts about the right people he should go with,
The right hairstyle he should have.
He had been,
His whole life had been formulated and he had formulated his whole life about how he thought other people thought about him and how he thought he needed to act to be accepted.
And in this moment he absolutely saw through all that thinking to something deeper and more profound.
So this conversation that I'm sharing with you,
When you see something about who you truly are,
That diamond within,
It's not that you have to unlearn thoughts,
It's that they fall away because they no longer seem relevant.
And that's what this is all about.
That's why I say keep looking within,
Keep looking within to your diamond and see what is ultimately true and who you truly are.
