011 - Your Mother Nature

People often look to social media and the internet for health advice, but what works for others may not work for you. Each person has their own unique preferences and needs when it comes to health practices, which align with their "Mother Nature." Trusting your intuition and listening to what feels right for you is key to finding the best approach to your wellbeing. Ignoring your intuition can lead to burnout and resistance. Positive and negative intuitions guide us towards our true nature, while experimenting with different practices helps us explore and learn more about ourselves. How do you use your intuition to figure out what kind of healthy activities will work best for you? You see, social media and other areas of the internet have a great deal of influence over our health these days. It's a great place for people to share their success stories and offer proof that what they're doing to keep fit and healthy really works. So our mind, as an onlooker, says to itself, well, if it's working for them, it'll probably work for me. But when we try what they're doing, we may struggle to connect or have any success to. This can leave us feeling like a failure, or like there's something wrong with us for not getting the same results. The thing is, we're not wrong, and we're not a failure. What we are is different, different right down to our core. So in this week's conversation, Mother Nature and I talk about intuition and our core nature. Specifically, how we can understand, recognise and use our intuition to help us find our own unique path to vibrant wellbeing. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back to the show, Mother Nature. It's lovely to be here, Chris. So today I'd like to talk about one of the questions that was raised by one of our listeners. It's an incredibly valuable question for people struggling with their wellbeing. So I'm interested to see where our conversation leads us today. Here's the question. Dear Chris, I've been enjoying your podcast greatly and the insights nature brings to wellbeing. I wonder if you can help me with something I've been struggling with for a long time now. I feel like knowing how to exercise or eat or live more slowly should be intuitive. It certainly feels that way when I hear you speak about it. However, I've tried many approaches to diet and exercise now, but I never seem to find one I can connect with. It's exhausting. So how do I know what health practices work for me? As I say, it's a great question. So what are your thoughts on this one, Mother Nature? Firstly, can I just acknowledge the courage it takes to ask this question? I see people struggling to find their intuition for health more and more these days. And I get the sense that this person might be feeling a little burnt out by the process. It sounds to me like it's time for her to connect with her Mother Nature. Her Mother Nature? What do you mean by that? In the information age, humans are looking outside of themselves more and more to find the solutions to the needs they have inside. But all you find when you look outside of yourself are the solutions that meet other people's needs. When you follow what works for other people, it's not uncommon to have an experience like this listener where she's feeling a disconnect. Every person has a unique set of preferences and needs when it comes to diet, exercise and recovery. We could say these preferences and needs are a reflection of your true nature, your Mother Nature. So when you make health choices that reflect this unique internal nature, you'll find them effortless to connect with. Are you saying that healthy practices are most effective when they align with who you are inside? Aligned with your Mother Nature, as you're calling it. And a person's Mother Nature is a reflection of their unique preferences and needs. Exactly. For example, many people join gyms, yet stop turning up within a few weeks of starting. Whilst others join the gym and feel like they've found their home, dropping everything to get their daily fix. The ones who love the gym will shout about how good the place is. They'll preach the benefits to anyone that will listen. And they'll share evidence of the progress and successes they're having too. For these people, they've found what resonates with their core nature when it comes to physical activity. The problem is, if following what they say doesn't resonate with yours, then you'll come up against some powerful internal resistance. And the gym will feel anything but like a home. Fortunately, your intuition provides a set of very useful signposts to what your preferences might be. That's interesting. It reminds me of something I've always found strange. I love the sport of paragliding. I've done it for almost 20 years now. When I tell people that I fly thousands of feet in the air with 2mm thin ropes attaching me to a couple of sheets of fabric, and I greatly enjoy doing it, most people look at me sideways and say, you'll never catch me doing that. Yet, when someone says, I work out at the gym 5 days a week and I feel great doing it, people begrudgingly sign up for a membership and feel like the whole experience is a punishment they must endure. So people intuitively know they don't want to fly a bag of cloth. But they seem to lose their connection to their intuition when it comes to more socially normal activities. There you go. Sometimes humans trust their intuition, and other times they allow social pressure or expectations to override it. Fighting against your intuition and repeatedly doing something that just doesn't resonate with you will very quickly lead you to burnout in that area of your life. And that's why Yi thought that this listener's question had all the hallmarks of someone becoming burnt out. She's trying and failing to do what other people say is right for her, and it's exhausting. Now you mentioned a moment ago that doing things that don't resonate with you can create powerful internal resistance. Can you expand on that for me, please? Of course, Chris. We get powerful resistance when we go against our core Mother Nature. And as I said, your intuition is a set of signposts to this. You have three states of intuition. The first is positively charged intuition. The second is negatively charged intuition. And finally, there is a form of chargeless intuition that is completely neutral. I say positive and negative have a charge because they elicit a positive or negative emotion. Positive intuition creates emotions like joy, excitement, or enthusiasm. So positively charged intuition becomes that feeling that something is going to be good for you. Negative intuition draws you forward in a positive direction. Negative intuition creates emotions like fear, anxiety, and inadequacy. So negatively charged intuition is obviously the opposite of positive. You instinctively know that something doesn't resonate with you. An extreme example of this for you, Chris, is to think of going caving. Oh my God, yeah. I don't mind flying high above the ground, but send me down a deep, dark, narrow hole in the ground. No, thank you. So what about that chargeless, neutral intuition? This is an interesting one. Neutral intuition creates no emotion. It just feels right. Take love, for example. Positively charged feelings of love creates bonding and pleasure, whilst negatively charged feelings of love create fear or obsession. But neutral, chargeless love is pure and unconditional. There's no emotion, just love. Because neutral intuition has no charge, it's very, very subtle. So it's hard to spot when it's there. But it's that knowing deep inside of you that you just trust. Neutral intuition is more like the destination you have in mind when you're traveling along the motorway. It's just there held as a concept inside of you, the destination that the right and left turns of positive and negative intuition lead you to along the way. This neutral, intuitive place inside of you is your Mother Nature. It's the core of who you are. And everyone's Mother Nature is unique to them. So is this the root of that internal resistance we come up against? Yes, it is. People often override their positive and negative intuitions, taking an exit off the motorway, even though the signs are pointing the other way. Going against your intuition means you're embarking on a course of action that may go against your deepest core nature. So very quickly you encounter resistance. It's nature's way of getting you to be you. Would you say this is a modern issue? With information everywhere, we look outside of ourselves rather than paying attention to what's going on inside. It is a more widespread issue today, yes, but it's not new. It's a product of free will, and what's more, it's what makes humans so amazing. What do you mean? Surely going against intuition is a design fault? I don't do design faults, Chris. Sorry, you're right. Of course you don't. So what does free will make humans so amazing? Free will is the ability to explore your intuitions. It allows you to go much deeper than the reflexive nature of other animals. Therefore, intuition is supposed to be explored. Have you ever noticed how your reflex to fear the unknown looks very similar to negatively charged intuition? It's easy to mistake the two, but often if you push through your initial fears, incredible things open up for you. For example, maybe you feel resistant to joining a gym, but you do it anyway. Then you realize that there is a community there that you really like, or you discover yoga when you get bored of the treadmill. It's these experiences that teach you about your core nature, and that is something no other animal will ever get to experience. Playing with your intuition allows you to explore possibilities, and that's an amazing gift. Wow, so you're saying that intuition is there to guide us, but ignoring it can be a good thing too. So positively and negatively charged intuition, the stuff we really feel, are there to guide us towards our true nature. And experimenting with following or not following our intuition can teach us even more about our true nature by allowing us to explore many possibilities until we hit something that just feels completely right. So that person who reluctantly joined a gym, but discovered a community or a yoga class learnt even more about their true nature. They learnt that they were right, they don't enjoy the gym, but they do love community or yoga. And that opened up a deeper understanding of their true mother nature, that core nature that's deep inside all of us. You've got it, Chris. The human experience is one of discovery and growth. True health is to eat, move, rest and socialize in a way that resonates deeply inside of you. So if we bring this back to your original listener's question, how do I know what is right for me? The resistance is telling her that she has yet to find her core nature in the activities she's engaged with. It seems like this is bringing us back to the governing rule of playful curiosity. That is exactly what it is doing. If you're trying something over and over again, hoping it will click, then you're not learning anything. But if you open up your playful curiosity, you can ask yourself questions like, what was it I didn't like? Or what elements did I like, no matter how small they were? I'd encourage you to dig into your experiences and explore the outcomes. Allow your intuition to pull you forward and explore the results with an open and curious mind. Doing so will lead you to your answers. So simple, really. Thank you, Mother Nature. This has been another truly enlightening conversation. I think it's time that I did a round-up of what we've learned today. Please, be my guest. Many of us find that when we're seeking health, the process has us feeling more burnt out than inspired. The nature of people is somewhat different to that of other animals. We all have broadly the same needs on the surface, but deep down, each of us has a very unique nature. You could consider this your Mother Nature, or Core Nature if you prefer. A fingerprint of your own, so to speak. When social media or other information sources promote what is working well for others, it doesn't always mean that what they're doing is going to work well for you. So try what they're suggesting and see how you get on. And if it doesn't click for you, then it doesn't mean there is anything wrong with you. It's just a matter of resonance. If you don't resonate, it's because your Core Nature is looking for something else. So it will put up resistance to help you change path. This resistance is your negatively charged intuition, talking loudly. Mother Nature suggests that we learn to understand our intuition if we want to figure out what will resonate with us. Positively and negatively charged intuitions are the clear signposts, like resistance or excitement, that tell us to stay on or get off the path. That neutral intuition is the knowing inside of us that we only recognise when we finally resonate with an activity. This knowing is neither positive nor negative. There's no emotion attached to it. Instead, it's just a sense of comfort. So it's a rather subtle part of intuition we have to practice listening to. Mother Nature designed us to play with curiosity at following and not following our intuition. Exploring what happens when we do so teaches us what our preferences are. The key is to try lots of things but without any expectation of a desired outcome. Instead, just notice what you like and you dislike about an activity without attachment. The likes are your positive intuitions and the dislikes are your negative intuitions. Both help you fine-tune yourself to that deep Mother Nature inside of you. Beautifully summarised, Chris. Thank you for this conversation today, Mother Nature. I hope it answers the question that our listener had. I feel it's really helped me to reframe the positive and negative experience I have in my own life. I can see now that health is an individual pursuit. We just need a playful and curious mind to explore our intuition about wellness and find that Mother Nature inside of us. Thank you. You're welcome, Chris. I look forward to the next one. I hope this conversation has been useful for you today. Many of us find ourselves at the mercy of other people's core values in this information age. We all tend to get a bit on the preachy side when we find something that works for us. Heck, you could easily accuse me of preaching on the find-your-own-unique-preferences-for-health soapbox. And you'd be right. Some people would prefer just to do what others tell them to do, which is cool too. Nature has encouraged humans to use their free will to explore the world. When it comes to activities that lead to health, playing with your intuition, following it sometimes, ignoring it others, allows you to learn more about who you are and what activities bring about health in you. So whilst I can't directly advise a listener on what health activities will work best for them, I can encourage them to playfully explore and learn from the positive and negative experiences so they can fine-tune their own path. Now, go have fun exploring. And remember, health emerges quite naturally when you allow Mother Nature to guide you. www.mooji.org