Ep 177: Being Nature & Freedom of Spirit

What if nature isn't just a sanctuary we retreat to but an essential part of who we are? Challenge the traditional perspective of nature and explore how embracing our innate connection with it can unlock our freedom of spirit. We are not simply visitors in nature; we are nature itself, and acknowledging this can profoundly affect our sense of wellness, creativity, and playfulness. Together, we'll unpack the societal norms that often bind us, whether we identify as conformists or rebels, and explore how these roles can distance us from our true essence.

Rediscovering our intrinsic free spirit that society often compels us to suppress. The distress we feel when constrained by expectations is a call to realign with our inner truth. I share insights into how congruence and self-alignment can lead to genuine happiness and fulfillment. This conversation invites you to reflect on your life choices and consider new ways of reclaiming your inherent freedom, allowing you to live more authentically and harmoniously within your natural self. 

Try out the simple meditation offered at the end.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Truth and Transcendence brought to you by being Space with Catherine Llewellyn. Truth and Transcendence, episode 177. This episode is about being part of nature. We talk about spending time in nature or being in nature as if nature is a place that we can visit and then come away from, and I think this is a slightly unhelpful perspective. I think it's much more helpful for us to consider ourselves as being part of nature. So we're not in nature or out of nature. We are nature, and sometimes we're indoors and sometimes we're outside, and when we're outside, sometimes we're in the city and sometimes we're in the countryside, but all of the time time we are in fact, nature.

Speaker 1: 1:06

And this is particularly important in relation to a theme I'm interested in at the moment, which is freedom of spirit, and I'm going to read you something about freedom of spirit and the connection with nature, so I won't be looking at the camera while I do that. So if we consider that we already have freedom of spirit inherently, that it's already ours inside us, it's not something we have to go and get, and if we consider that freedom of spirit manifests in wellness, energy, imagination, imagination, sense of humor, versatility, plasticity, elasticity in the mind, creativity and things like that and, above all, playfulness, which doesn't have to look a certain way. So if we do have inherent freedom of spirit and if it manifests in all of those wonderful things, how is it that we don't always experience life in that way exactly? So I'm now going to say that we are born as pure free spirit, in my opinion, with no consideration for others or anything else. So we're born, you know, when we're first born, we don't even know who we are, we don't even know that we exist, or barely, and we certainly don't have consideration for other people or for anything else. And that's natural, as it should be. But as we grow, we learn that this isn't a sufficient strategy on its own for being acceptable to our tribe, efficient strategy on its own for being acceptable to our tribe.

Speaker 1: 2:49

We start to notice there are expectations upon us to adapt and modify our behavior and by and large, we do that. By and large, we learn to fit in and we learn to conform. And, by the way, if someone's sitting listening and saying, well, I didn't, I'm a rebel. Actually, being a rebel is another way of conforming, because every culture has two sides of the coin, and one side of the coin in any culture or in any tribe, is the rebel, and that is actually one of the roles in the tribe. There's usually more than one of those people. Even if we think we are the rebel and I have authority in saying this because this was me even in being the rebel, we are probably in some way conforming to that cultural model of being the rebel.

Speaker 1: 3:45

And before anyone takes offense to that, all of this happens on the subconscious level and all of it is entirely natural and it's inevitable. As we learn to fit in and to conform, we begin to lose some of our connection to our original freedom of spirit and again, this is inevitable and it's part of our development as a human being. And we also, at the same time, start to form habits of self-denial and habits of suppression of freedom of spirit. And we do all of this to survive and to fit in and to conform, and some of it we're doing out of love and some of it we're doing out of survival, and some of it we're doing out of love and some of it we're doing out of survival and some of it we're doing because we just can't think of anything else. But, like I said, it's mostly on the unconscious level. But the thing is, the freedom of spirit is still there within us, and that is why we feel pain when we don't honor it pain when we don't honor it. So a lot of the distress that people experience these days is as a result of suppressing their freedom of spirit, because we are happiest when we are in alignment with ourselves or, as a friend used to say, when all our planets are in alignment, when all the aspects of us are all congruent and in tune with each other.

Speaker 1: 5:09

If within us, we have a freedom of spirit, and if we are not honoring it, we're suppressing it. This is going to hurt, it's going to be painful, and so how this has actually happened is that, by overly adapting and conforming, we've given away some of our power, and when we give away our power, we naturally begin to feel powerless. We forget that we gave away our power. We start to believe that our power was taken from us by somebody else. Now, of course, some of us in our lives have experienced situations where people will actually disempower us, and that can happen, or situations can happen but I'm talking about a different dynamic. I'm talking about the dynamic of the power that we've actually given away, thereby feeling powerless and thereby finding it necessary to blame external people or situations or circumstances for our situation, for our experience, for our lives. And that, in a way, is a way of trying to find an antidote for feeling powerless is to try and find a reason outside of us for feeling powerless.

Speaker 1: 6:22

But unfortunately, when we do that, when we blame the externals, we actually give away more of our power and feel more powerless, and then we blame more, and this is an inexorable and inevitable process. And again, I would suggest most of us have done it and many of us are still doing it some of the time. So this feels even worse. So we then get into a habit of devaluing ourselves and we become overly serious about everything. And we also, in order to kind of make it bearable, we try to fill our lives with things to make us feel better. We probably spend more money than we can really afford on comfort, clothing ourselves in ways that help us to feel better about ourselves, finding activities to distract us, a lot of the things that we do to actually cover up this feeling of devaluing ourselves and just suddenly getting really overly serious about everything. So we compromise ourselves by either shutting down the inner voice of truth and wisdom or by ignoring it.

Speaker 1: 7:37

Now, one of the ways we seek to regain some sense of control of our lives is actually by separating ourselves from nature and from the whole. Because if we're feeling powerless and then we are connected in with nature and connected with the whole, nature and the whole are incredibly powerful, unpredictable. When we're connected to those, our own powerlessness becomes more evident and that can be really upsetting and distressing for us. So we've got this desperate need to regain some sense of control and we fall into the illusion that we are actually here to control ourselves, to control our lives, to control others and to defend ourselves from a dangerous world. This is an illusion that many of us carry within us to some extent.

Speaker 1: 8:38

Please hear what I'm saying as something. This is a shades of grey thing. This is not a black and white thing. I'm not saying this is all of any one of us. This is an aspect of how we've learned to survive. So we actually, unfortunately, enslave ourselves by pursuing the illusion of control and human in quotes mastery, by cutting ourselves off from the flow of life and the freedom and the power that rides with that flow. Oh my God, do I kill myself now? No, so how do we reconnect with being part of the whole and being part of nature, and actually by doing this we will help to reclaim our freedom of spirit and we will help to reclaim our power and realign ourselves within. Just doing this will help us, and this is a meditation that can be done every day. It can be done wherever you are. Doing it outside, surrounded by the beauty of the natural world, is ideal, but if that's not practical for you, you can actually do this anywhere because of our fantastic human faculty for imagination.

Speaker 1: 9:56

So you go into a relaxed position, which any position, doesn't have to be sitting. You might be lying down, you might be propped up, it doesn't matter. Get comfortable, maybe wriggle into that comfortable position, allow the breath to fall softly, warmly, deeply through the body, into and out of the body, and the meditation. I'll give you the beginning of the meditation and you can then expand it from there it begins. I am the grass, I am the field, I am the insects, I am the birds, and then you make it up from there and just let the imagination run. I am the animals, I am the clouds, I am the sky, I am the leaves, I am the wind, I am the water, I am the stream, I am the brook, I am the river, I am the lake, I am the trees, I am the flowers, I'm the trees, I'm the flowers, I'm the ivy, I'm the rocks, I'm the soil.

Speaker 1: 11:10

And just keep going naming every single part of what you consider to be nature, and as you keep going, you might discover that you begin to understand there are things that are actually part of nature that you've previously thought were not, which could be the buildings, the rooms, the furniture, the cars. These are all part of the whole and all part of nature as well, because we are nature and we brought those things into being. They exist. So everything that exists and everything that comes from everything that exists is nature and is the whole. So I invite you to do this little meditation for yourself.

Speaker 1: 11:48

It's very, very simple. Just start with I am the grass, I am the field, I am the insects, I am the birds, and allow your imagination to run, and you only need to do this for about five minutes every day, and you will notice an extraordinary shift starting to take place in your life, as your connection with the whole and with nature is reclaimed and as you start to feel the power and the beauty of nature flooding into you. It's doing it all the time already, but you will start noticing it more than ever. And if you're somebody who's already utterly familiar with all of this and just does it like breathing, then you probably have people following you and learning from you. Feel free to give this little meditation to them if you feel it's suitable.

Speaker 1: 12:41

So thank you for listening, have a beautiful week as part of nature and as part of the whole, and I will see you next time. Thank you for listening to Truth and Transcendence and thank you for supporting the show by rating, reviewing, subscribing, buying me a coffee and telling a friend. If you'd like to know more about my work, you can find out about Transformational Coaching, pellewa and the Freedom of Spirit workshop on beingspaceworld. Have a wonderful week and I'll see you next time.