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A space to settle in and listen, and see where the episode takes you. This inspiring, reflective podcast is an invitation to travel deeper, with compassionate self-enquiry.
Henny shares insights from her own life, alongside practices that help us connect with our inner wisdom, explore our relationship with change and find a greater sense of flow. Henny believes we all hold our own answers, so there are no one-size-fits-all solutions here. This is a space to be with what’s true for you, and to grow from there.
If you’re drawn to slowing down, listening in, and exploring what it means to live with greater authenticity, this podcast is for you. Guided by psychology, mindfulness, therapeutic coaching, flow journaling, and everyday compassion, we explore ideas that help us step further into our inner worlds, in order to shape the changes we seek in our outer worlds.
Every now and again I come up with an idea for the podcast and I send myself a little note and sometimes it sits in my emails unopened but flagged, Sometimes it makes its way to a list of podcast episode ideas and sometimes it gets deleted because I look at it and I go oh no I don't have the energy for that anymore. Welcome to the Henny Flynn podcast, the space for deepening self awareness with profound self compassion. I'm Henny. I write, coach and speak about how exploring our inner world can transform how we experience our outer world, all founded on a bedrock of self love. Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you.
Henny Flynn:And every now and again I return to either the ones that have been flagged or the ones that have been listed and I feel into whether something is still calling my attention and that is what has happened today. So I am still recording this one from hospital like last week's. Things are looking more positive and that's wonderful. It does mean that you might be able to hear lift doors, people, know, gurneys going by. But I found another quiet little corner of a closed coffee shop at one end of a very very long hospital corridor and all is well.
Henny Flynn:So I want to sort of gear change really and talk about this idea that came to me when we were in New Zealand at the end of last year visiting our son and while I was there I had the most spectacular personal experience. I mean it was spectacular in every way beautiful country, mean the absolute joy of being with our boy, Just being able to take time out and the privilege of being able to be there and to do that, know, I felt every ounce of that. I also got what I can only guess was COVID while I was there. Lost my sense of smell and taste. So I'm guessing that was probably what it was.
Henny Flynn:So a few days were spent in bed. But even that was fine. It was all everything was was good. And and I'd love to share with you a particular thing that happened one day. So we are walking a very short stretch of the Kepler Trail and it's one of New Zealand's great walks.
Henny Flynn:And before we went to New Zealand, I'd heard about these these phenomenal walks that there are through this, you know, remote landscape that is most of New Zealand. And and I was really determined to do a stretch of one of these walks. To do a full walk is a is a big undertaking and we definitely weren't equipped for that but we set off one day and as we crossed over this enormous swing bridge you know a huge rope bridge and we were standing in the center of this bridge over this massive rushing river. And I need to find out the name of the river, and I'll I'll share it with you in the notes. But I was looking up river.
Henny Flynn:I was looking, you know, to where the water was coming from. The water was was heading towards us and I was standing in the middle of this rope swing bridge and it's all very elemental or very kind of organic and, you know and felt incredibly alive just standing there and watching the water rush towards us and you know pass you know tens of feet I don't know how how high we were, maybe sort of twenty, thirty feet above the water. And, oh, now a machine started up. I'm so sorry. This is gonna be a really noisy background, episode.
Henny Flynn:But, and and then Anton says to me, oh, look the other way. I turned around. I looked downriver. And so I was in the flow of the energy that was rushing along this riverbed and I felt the most incredible, it's a whoosh of energy come through me. My eyes filled up with tears.
Henny Flynn:My heart beat faster and my breath was leaving my body in these great gulping exhalations. It was like, it was like I couldn't live big enough to hold the energy that was rushing through me. I like that phrase. I couldn't live big enough to hold the energy that was rushing through me. And actually, of course it turned out I could live big enough.
Henny Flynn:I could expand out and into that energy. And it was one of those moments that felt like it went on forever and probably was just a few moments. And I turned toward Anton, who is obviously laughing at this point because he said, I only said, look at the few. And I'm like, oh my God, I feel the whole of life is here. And it was, oh, it was just magical.
Henny Flynn:It was absolutely magical. And it was, I think sort of elemental, you know, that kind of sudden tapping in to something that innately I think we all know is there. And that sometimes, you know, it can kind of land upon us or within us at moments that we just don't expect it to. Or, you know, personally, I'd say there have been times in my life where I've looked for it. You know, I've been in incredibly beautiful places and been filled with awe and almost, you know, maybe kind of yearned for something more.
Henny Flynn:I think if I'm if I'm, you know, if I sort of sit with that, I think that's true. And maybe because of that yearning, not being able to be so fully present with the awesomeness that was around me. And I just wonder whether any of this resonates with you, you know, either that feeling of yearning or the feeling of the sort of suddenness of the intense beauty of the world suddenly filling you. I think it's something that writers like Mary Oliver were very familiar with actually both both and, you know, both of those experiences I feel kind of resonate with her. Many of the, you know, the incredible sort of natural history writers of our time, you know, poets like Wordsworth, you know, they really, really understood the immensity of this connection that we can have with the oneness, the thing that connects all of us.
Henny Flynn:You know, we are natural beings. We're not something other than the natural world. We are the embodiment of the natural world, just as a flower is the embodiment of natural world or a river or a mountain, you know, or a fox. We all are. And so, yeah, so, oh gosh, that felt very lyrical as I shared that.
Henny Flynn:So then later on, we, you know, we hadn't even begun the walk at this point. We'd literally just left the car park and stepped onto the bridge, and I was already having an out of body experience or an in body experience. Maybe that's more appropriate. Anyway, so we do this beautiful walk. It's astonishing through ancient, ancient forest, moss dripping from the trees.
Henny Flynn:I took so many photographs of moss and trees. What's so wonderful about these great walks in New Zealand is that they are tended for. So, you know, there isn't the undercurrent of fear that you might get lost. It's clearly marked, but it still feels wild. It's very, very carefully done.
Henny Flynn:And so we walk, I don't know, a few miles, and then we come to bay on one of the Great Lakes. And it feels like we're, you know, one of the great explorers landing in a place that's, you know, been inhabited except for the fact that there were a few other walkers around, but you know, it still had that quality to it. And so we sat very briefly on the sandy beach at the water's edge, but the little biting sandflies that are famous in New Zealand, they soon sent us back into the woods. But it was, yes, it was beautiful and then we were walking back. And then I was thinking about what had happened on the swing bridge.
Henny Flynn:And I just thought, I wonder if that feeling is here. I wonder if it's like intrinsically here. And so I held my hands on a tree and felt the same energy flowing inside me. The same sort of rush of connection. And and so then I was like, oh, this is really interesting.
Henny Flynn:My curiosity has peaked and I I walk a little further and I I lay my hands on another tree and it's the same. It's this like this thrumming energy running through. Anton's quite used to this, so he's just he's just wandering it on ahead. But my my feeling was that this wasn't something that was special or unique or certainly not unique to me in any way. It was something that felt so incredibly ordinary.
Henny Flynn:It felt like the most ordinary truth that there could possibly be. And it's the same thing that makes everything in life so special. And the words that came out of my mouth when I was trying to explain this to Anton was my sense that we are all part of the universal I'm gonna say that again because there's some big background noises. But what how it felt to me is that we are all part of the universal And I think that's what I was feeling, you know, somehow, for some reason, I was gifted that moment of being able to tap into it and feel it. And and I suspect that everybody who walks those trails feels it in their own way.
Henny Flynn:You know, and everyone who climbs a mountain, everyone who sits and looks at a blade of grass in a municipal, you know, park and really, really sees it. I think it's so hilarious because there's a massive going on in the background. That's the universe, sharing a little joke with us. This this universal it is everywhere. And I think because of maybe one of the reasons why this whole topic resonated with me again today, having written the note for it back on the December 3, is because I am in a hospital.
Henny Flynn:I have been facing into some of those really big questions over the last few weeks. And you know while the reason for being in the hospital isn't mine to share. The very fact of being here means that I've also, you know, consciously and unconsciously been facing into threads of my own mortality and the mortality of those that I love and you know and all of that is all part of this universal this this ability that we have as sentient beings to be with our experiences on multiple levels And and, you know, Anton, who who studied philosophy at university, he said, when I told him this idea that we're all part of the universal home. You said it before. I'm just gonna that was some, extra voices, con contributions to the podcast then.
Henny Flynn:But when I said to Anton about we're all part of the universal his response was yes, of course, it's just that some things amplify it. And I really love that concept that there are some things that amplify it. Some things that enable us to feel things more keenly. And sometimes that's that's in relationship with each other, you know, profound love, deep grief, loss, pain, immense joy, you know these things that we can really sort of tap into through the experience of our shared humanity, shared humanness. And then we've got, you know, this experience of our our connection with the natural world and our our shared beingness, you know, with the natural world, with all of the all of the beings, know, and and all all life that is around us.
Henny Flynn:And I think, you know, when we deny that, when we don't deny that connection that we all have, you know, we are all born of this earth and returned to this earth. When we deny that connection in some way or try to separate ourselves from our natural state, I think that's when we also become separate from, you know, from our compassion in some way or from our empathy or from our, you know, ability to be in community. So, and that really leads me to the thing that I think is, you know, most important for all of us right now, which is to connect. It's certainly the thing that in polyvagal theory that we can see in and in so much of psychology that we can see that what we most desire as human beings is connection. And sometimes we get that connection from others of the same group and you know, who think the same as us.
Henny Flynn:And, you know, that can be very valuable and very useful, but it can also be very separating because it means that we become separate from others. And so really, when we think about connection, what we're looking for is the ability to connect with all beings with compassion, with kindness, and to be able to listen to and hear, our shared needs and the shared needs of this planet. So I didn't expect that to go that way. I've clearly been feeling a bit philosophical about it all. Gosh, I mean, that resonate with you?
Henny Flynn:Does any of what I've just said resonate with you? The universal our shared need for connection, the places that we can find connection, whether that's with other humans or in the natural world. You know what, what stands out for you? And I'd love to hear from you. Please, you know, do email me.
Henny Flynn:I love it when I get emails from people about the podcast episodes. It it sort of, you know, it helps to spark my own thoughts and, you know, maybe there's something here that that we build on in some way. I'd love to to see, you know, maybe this takes us into another episode, and and sort of, reflecting back on on the reflections that I received from you. So, please do. And, you know, I think ultimately, this whole episode is a way of answering the question of, you know, what makes you think you're so special?
Henny Flynn:There's, you know, that that sort of dreadful kind of criticism that can get thrown at us. Think, know, particularly like when we're at school, I I definitely remember teachers saying that to other pupils. I mean, it's awful. What makes you think you're so special? Well, everything, of course.
Henny Flynn:Life just the fact that we are alive on this tiny rock spinning around in this ever expanding universe. I mean I'd say that's pretty special. So there we go that's it and oh gosh yes hopefully next weekend's episode will not be from a hospital corner. You never know I might be back back home and recording it from there which would be for all the right reasons. Let's hope so.
Henny Flynn:Alright darlings send you so much love and a hug and a wave.