EP35: Play with me / How ego holds us back from regenerative work / Your one wild and precious life.
Join me for an episode sat by a woodland stream, bathed in birdsong and providing a banquet for midges.
Today I explore my deepening relationship with nature in recent years, how it is led by a childlike wonder and has inspired me to re-center play in my work. I reflect on the ways in which ego - certainly my ego! - can hold us back from regenerative work that brings us joy and satisfaction. If internalised capitalism, deep-rooted fears and unhelpful beliefs are blocking your regenerative path, listen in for a simple journaling exercise to listen to and release these blockers. The episode finishes with one of my favourite poems, a poignant reminder to do what we love, however we can.
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Full Transcript
Alisa: I'm sitting on the bank of a small stream that runs through a very narrow strip of woodland that I discovered by accident one day when walking home from my son's school. And it connects between the school and the woods where I walk almost every day. It's very, very still today. There’s not a single leaf moving. Finally, perfect weather for recording a podcast in the wild. As I hope you can hear, there are birds singing all around me. There are also a lot of little flies, and I may be sacrificing my skin, but it's worth it. I've stepped off the path and picked my way through a kind of a bank of nettles to come to this spot. So it's a little hidden away and I suspect people hardly ever come here. There's a kind of motley collection of trees that are growing up on the edge of the riverbank around me, including some really magnificent oaks that were planted in a long line as a border. Spring has definitely tipped into summer. It's blue skies. The sun is still quite low and it's coming through the leaves and illuminating all the leaves of the nettles and the leaves in the trees and the white flies. buzzing busily around. It's magical.
I've been thinking about how my relationship with nature has changed so much in the last five or six years. Even this stretch of woods, I think for a long time what I noticed most was the path, and that might have been partly because I probably was navigating it with a buggy or a pushchair when I first discovered it. And it's definitely not terrain for pushing babies through. But even after that, I think a lot of the time when I was walking, I looked at my feet, maybe because I was so concerned about where I was going and walking at pace and therefore needing to keep an eye out for cracks and roots across the path.
These days I hardly ever look down. I walked very slowly through the maybe 100 meters or so of this path and I saw so much. I saw a mischievous squirrel running up a tree. I saw an amazing old gnarled oak. It was quite bare that I haven't noticed before. I can get lost in such a small patch of nature, even one that I've walked many, many times. When I really bring my curiosity to it, I could sit where I am right now by the river for hours and still not have noticed everything that there is to see and enjoy here. And that only comes when we can let ourselves be slow and when we can open up that childlike part of ourselves. that is just amazed by and interested in anything and everything. And that's why I believe so much in play and why in the past and now coming back to it again, I center play in my work because play unlocks something in us.
When we come into nature in a playful way we experience it differently. When we let ourselves look up, let ourselves close our eyes and absorb. The amazing sound of the birds and now the train. When we let ourselves touch things, touch them in different ways with our hands or with our feet, with our cheeks, it's such a different experience. At the moment I am about to create an audio course that will be full of... play invitations for connecting with nature and as we connect with nature unleashing the wild within us. And when I first set out to create this course I didn't know that it was going to be based in play. I thought it was going to be more instructional somehow, maybe a little bit more academic or intellectual. But really, what I want to share more than anything is an invitation to play.
I want it to feel light and easy. No one needs anything else adding to their list of things that they should do or habits that they need to acquire. I want this just to be fun and silly and magical. Later this week, I'm going to be closing up a period where I've been inviting early supporters for this audio course who are willing to buy the course before it exists and support me in creating it both through buying it and also through their feedback and by being some of the first to try out these play invitations. So if you are listening to this podcast in real time, which will be the 14th of May, then there's just a few more days if you would like to support me in creating this audio course. Please send me an email at alisa@regenerativeworklife.com. It costs £25. You'll get first access to the course and any subsequent iterations of the course that are created. You'll be part of a WhatsApp group where we play together and I answer questions and we support each other and you'll get a special thank you in the course.
I've been thinking a lot this week about how ego gets in the way of us finding work that we truly love. And that has certainly been the case for me. And I feel like I'm just starting to emerge from about a year, or actually a little more than a year of, let's say, the ego being more in the driving seat than I would like. I was tempted to use more of a battle metaphor there. But what I've learned is that it's not a simple case of battling the ego or battling our fears or battling our resistance or our... Whatever it is, whatever holds us back from really going for what we want and really allowing ourselves to find... work that is meaningful and joyful and satisfying. I think it all comes back to ego. Even when that ego is disguised as rational barriers, practical considerations, obligations. And even when that ego expresses itself as fear, lack of confidence, an inability to do something not believing that we're worth it.
Sometimes the ego shows up in quite an arrogant way. Certainly mine does. And for me, I've noticed that that arrogant ego is very much tied to an internalised capitalism, an internalised corporate drive for efficiency and no, even not efficiency, more... what is considered important in a capitalistic society. There's an individualism to it. There's a hierarchy to it. Essentially, there is a big part of me that believes that I should be doing something significant. I should be doing something that matters, not just to me, but that matters on a bigger scale. And the problem is that what that capitalist part of me considers to be important must, of course, be something that can make quite a lot of money, must be something that other people admire, must be something that you could tell someone about and then they would go, oh, that's impressive.
I have a strong desire to do something that people would find impressive. And as I inch closer and closer to the heart of the work that I want to do, connection with nature, personal rewilding, unleashing the wild within us and around us, I get locked in daily with a voice that says, does that really matter? Is that a good use of your time? Is that what you spent 15 years as an entrepreneur, learning all of those skills, having all of that experience, making all those connections to do this, to be some kind of wild woman in the woods? Who's going to listen? Who's going to pay attention? How are you ever going to make any money doing that? You really think it's going to make a difference? Do something better with your time. What if you waste your only opportunity? What if you get old and realise you squandered an opportunity to do something of significance? What if no one else ever notices? Do you see? And maybe some kind of dialogue like this sounds familiar to you.
A good way to spot it is that it's often tied in with words like should. I should be doing something significant or can't. Can't make any money doing that. And those words feel so strong and so powerful and so immovable to us. And to get really specific with you, for me, this looked like taking my love of nature, my love of coaching, my love of play, of creating lived experiences, shared experiences, and then pocketing that up into quite a constrained version of that around career coaching which by the way, I still love. I still believe is really important. I do incredible work with clients who are either specifically living a corporate setting or certainly a corporate mindset and are finding their way to the freedom of a relationship with work that feels joyful to them, that brings them life, that brings life to others around them. But I don't need to be confined by that and I don't need to attach it to a career label for this work to matter.
And the part that still feels vulnerable to me, that feels kind of scary, is just the part of sitting here by the stream telling you about what I can hear and smell and feel under my hands and inviting people to share those simple experiences with me. Inviting people to come and coach with me in the wild, come on a walk with me, even people who live hundreds of miles away. Invite them out into nature where they are, be in nature where I am and just see what happens. To create play invitations, to take people forest bathing. These are things I love, these are things that light me up. But I always find myself discounting them, feeling like they're not important enough. Wanting to take more of an expert position on things wanting something that feels weightier and yet what could be more not weighty but grounded what could be more grounded than sharing the experience of deep connection with nature and everything that that does for us for our inner work when we can do that.
I am daily unravelling from the control that my ego wants to have over my work, which is really the same thing as my art, my creativity, my expression. And I'm learning that you can't white-knuckle this. You can't look at your fear. It might be quite a different thing for you. You might have really deep rooted fears around security and that you need to be within an organisation to feel secure. And it's really irresponsible to step out of a kind of very conventional work setup where you have, you know, a regular pay check and bonuses and health care. And that might feel just fundamentally unsafe to you. There's no good just shouting at that part of yourself going, no, I am safe. Come on, come on, we can do this. We can do this. I'm not listening to you. It doesn't work. We have to make space for that voice. We have to really listen to it. I know you feel unsafe. Tell me why. Tell me what's unsafe. How can I make you feel safer? And for me, part of it has been assuring that part of myself that If we need to make money, when I need to make more money, then we'll go and do that. We'll find a way to do that. Even if it's really not an ideal way, we'll do it when it's necessary. But right now it's not necessary. So we can just let that fear go a little bit. You know, and in my example about feeling unsafe, maybe you'll find certain things that you can put in place for yourself.
I had a client who genuinely got unstuck, had been wanting to leave big, big, big corporate America job for a long time. Every quarter promised themselves they would do it. Every quarter didn't do it. And one of the things that unlocked for them was when we realised how scared she was around having health insurance. And then she did the research to find plans that she felt good about, that felt affordable to her. And things shifted from that point. It sounds so simple, but I think it's because she really listened to that part of herself that was scared and gave it something that it needed.
So I invite you to listen to those parts this week. Really listen. And one of the best ways I find that to do is to write in the voice of that part. So write yourself a letter. Mine might say: “Dear Alisa, I am your ego and this is what I want you to know.” Let all the thoughts out. I did this last night. I wrote out all the reasons that this work I'm doing is frivolous and silly and whimsical and fluffy and lightweight and ... not worthy of my expertise and experience. And I kept going and I kept going until that part of me had said everything that it needed to say. And all I was left with was, this is the work that I want to do. And don't get me wrong, we'll have to have that conversation again and again. But my connection to the work felt that much deeper because I let... all of the fears and excuses and reasons have their space and I still wanted to do it. So maybe give that a try.
I'm going to finish by sharing a poem with you. It's one you may well have heard before. But I really don't think you can listen to this poem too many times. And I want to share it because yesterday I joined a workshop with Manda Scott about finding your soul's purpose. If you don't know Manda Scott, please take a look at the Accidental Gods website or podcast. Her work is incredible and essential.
Manda read this poem to us at the beginning of the workshop and I realised in that first minute or two that I had received everything I needed to receive from that workshop because they were just exactly the words that I needed to hear and perhaps you might need to hear them too. And of course they come from the wonderful... Wonderful Mary Oliver.
“Who made the world? Who made the swan and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean. The one who has flung herself out of the grass. The one who is eating sugar out of my hand. Who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down. Who is gazing around her with enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed. How to stroll through the fields, which is what I've been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
