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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.
How resilient are you and has it changed over time? I've noticed my own emotional and psychological resilience has increased as I've aged. Things I struggled with in the past seem to affect me less and this has played out in the research. This is something that I'd love to explore with you today and just see what else might affect the way that we perceive and move through the things that are challenging in our lives. Welcome to the Henny Flynn podcast, the space for deepening self awareness with profound self compassion.
Henny Flynn: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. You know, while we all, completely understand that our physical resilience naturally declines as we mature, the research shows us that emotional resilience, psychological resilience actually increases or improves in some way. And, there are studies like the English longitudinal study of ageing, also known as ELSA, which followed nearly 7,000 people over seventeen years.
Henny Flynn:So, it's a really robust study and it found that older adults in England exhibit resilience in the face of significant life changes things like bereavement, retirement, unplanned hospital stays and overall the study found that people's mental health did not worsen after any of the events and in fact really surprisingly for the researchers depression actually improved after some of these experiences. So all of this makes sense in some way and perhaps we can see it in ourselves or we can see it in older loved ones around us, you know, see how people bounce back from experiences that might have floored them in the past. However, today I am really curious about the length of time that I've personally needed and need to fully return to my buoyant, energized self when hard things happen and it's something that I notice in people around me as well. And I think for me at least it's summed up in noticing that I'm no longer willing to cover up or to mask the truth of how I'm feeling and I wonder, does that resonate with you too? So, if you're also a peri or post menopausal woman like me, then there may be some familiarity to this idea of being no longer willing to cover up or to mask what we're experiencing or actually no longer able to do that.
Henny Flynn:You know menopause is often accompanied by a kind of loss of desire to compromise or like I just said, know, almost like an inability to compromise in the same way that we used to in the past. But I think it might be more than this. I think it might go beyond the fluctuations in our hormones and I certainly don't think it's exclusive to anyone who identifies as female. I think it's something that we might all recognise or experience or potentially we all might recognise or experience it obviously depending on who we are, depending on our life experiences and the nature and nurture that's made us us. So my experience this spring of sitting with a loved one uncertain whether they would live or die, is not unique to me.
Henny Flynn:You know, I know that so many of us listening here and the people in our lives that we are deeply connected with, you know, we know that this is not a unique experience and the worry and the fears and the anticipated grief, the frustration of not knowing what was happening, that desire to control outcomes beyond my control all of that is not unique to me. It is deeply, irrevocably human and it's part of our shared humanity, shared experience of our humanness and so I've been profoundly curious, you know, watching this process that I've gone through both during and after those worrying few weeks that I had to spend in hospital sitting beside my loved one And you know the girlfriends who know me really well and Anton who excels in these kinds of situations they've been beautifully, kindly checking in with me, acknowledging the tiredness and the exhaustion that accompanied the days and the weeks that followed that period of time in our hospital and in some ways they've been my guide, you know, my reminder that it's okay to feel how I've been feeling and I've been feeling depleted. My reserve bank looking a little empty, you know, it's been a bit of a flag that I'd been over borrowing from my future self.
Henny Flynn:And this concept of borrowing from our future self in times of difficulty, It's one that I first heard from a podcast guest many years ago, as he spoke about the death of his father and it resonated so deeply with me and I know it's really deeply with many of you and in fact one of my girlfriends actually played that line back to me in one of her messages when she was checking in on me. Know, so it resonates this idea of borrowing from our future self and when I first heard it, it spoke to the times where I had done the same times of burnout from work, times of grief from the loss of dear, dear loved ones, times of, you know, wild anxiety from stress or worry about things that I couldn't control in my own life or believed I had no control over or things that were unfolding in the lives of those I loved. And so, the phrase resonated. And this idea of borrowing from our future self, it speaks to something that I've often thought about. This idea that we all have a self care bank and like the best bank in the world, it's one that we can pay into and take from each day.
Henny Flynn:We can invest in it over time and then reap these longer term dividends and we can borrow against future investments. The challenge is that even with this bank of our own making, one that is only here for us, we can empty its reserves. You know, like those desperate stories from the 1930s and scenes from films like It's a Wonderful Life, we can make a run on our own self care bank and the risk is that we leave it empty and that's when we burn out. We do it by not honouring our need to replenish and restore our reserves. We do it by covering up what we're really feeling and just ploughing back into the world without a care for ourself as we are today or the impact it will have on our future self.
Henny Flynn:It is an act of carelessness that is profoundly human. It's normal and it's one that's often celebrated we call it resilience or work ethic or commitment any number of phrases that we might use to celebrate it and often it feels like we have absolutely no choice at all. Now, when my mother was dying, I accepted an incredible new role where I was working. It was a promotion to head up a team responsible for a multi million pound budget. The work we were charged to deliver was exciting and it was scary and it was so far out of my comfort zone and it was utterly absorbing.
Henny Flynn:I thought it might be just what I needed to get through the grief and the pain I was feeling and that I rightly anticipated was just going to get worse and in some ways perhaps it was what I needed. I worked with wonderful people who showed me enormous kindness at times when I struggled. The company itself actually treated me well when I finally broke apart and I learned so much through the experience that I truly wouldn't be as good at what I do now without those learnings and it made me so ill I nearly died. It exhausted every single cell in my body, so I thought I had nothing left. I thought joy had deserted me and would never return.
Henny Flynn:This isn't the job's fault, of course. The job was just the job doing what it needed to do to ensure the system it supported was well fed. The responsibility for my actions lay with me and it came from well, it came from many things but my reflection as I sit here with you now is that it came from a lack of willingness to acknowledge what I was really feeling or a lack of understanding in my own ability to acknowledge what I was really feeling and a belief that I just had to go on and on and on. There were many, many things that contributed to that time, just as there is more than one layer to what I've been noticing over the past few weeks. You know, is nuanced and delicate and multifaceted and so are we, if we allow ourselves to be.
Henny Flynn:So yesterday I sent a text to a friend and it reads, or it read, I just felt myself return. And it's not that I haven't been here I have. What I meant was that the part of me that I'd felt I needed to hold back in safety and comfort now felt ready to step back into the world again. I call her Joy and she is the very heart of me. She is part of my tiny tattoo that I have on my foot and she has accompanied me throughout the whole of my life.
Henny Flynn:My protector and the part I sometimes still feel I most need to protect. Now, I recognise that there is more work for me to do here. It is ever ongoing, this art of learning about ourselves and it's what makes this work so intriguing and so rewarding and I believe in asking for support where it's needed. At least I understand the value and the critical importance of that now, the woman that I am now and I'm working with someone I trust to help me disentangle the hidden knot that's been revealed through this observation of my own process over the past few weeks months not because I need fixing or that there's something wrong with the process that I've been honouring simply that in the process I have observed something that is asking for my kindest attention and it feels the greatest gift that I can give myself to attend to that request. So all of these thoughts, these reflections and these threads that reach back into the past and out into the future and across sideways into my lived experience.
Henny Flynn:Do they coalesce around this idea of resilience and ageing? My reflection is this that it is with the deep inner work, the profound knowing of ourselves, that we are able to truly understand our needs, so we no longer diminish ourselves and deplete our reserves of energy in the name of outdated beliefs about how we should show up. So, as we age, our emotional and psychological resilience may not appear as brushing things off lightly and just getting on. It may instead appear as the courage and bravery to truly acknowledge what we have been through and allow it to process in its own time, in order that we can step forward with the new wisdom gained, fully integrated, so we can add it to our own wonderful life's work, knowing it will continue to support us until that time it's no longer needed. Now, curiously, since my loved one left hospital and, I've been, you know, back home, back here at the farm, I've uncovered a series of poems, in fact some I've uncovered through looking for something random on my phone or Anton's dug some out of some of the boxes that we've got in one of the goat sheds.
Henny Flynn:We don't have goats, but we still call it the goat shed. Things that we had boxed up when we moved house and had put into my dad's garage, not knowing quite what to do with them, because we didn't know where to put them and now they're sitting in the shed and anyway we're starting the work of going through what's there. Anton's uncovered some of these poems too. So, some of these were written to and by my mother while she was ill and some of them have been written by me over the past many years and they all seem to speak to this wisdom of self knowledge in some way and I really love it when that happens, you know, when we've been reflecting deeply about something and then something appears in our line of sight that shows us this insight that we've always held and how, you know, in the past it just leaked out into the world, and yet it's only many years later that we can truly see it was ours to own. Anyway, I would like to share one of these from my mother, Bibby, a wonderful, complex, beautiful, fiercely intelligent woman, who loved us all so much.
Henny Flynn:Yeah, I'm just going to read it to you. I warn you, it ends with a mild swear word at the end. She was very irreverent, my mother. So, the poem reads, For Henny. My daughter, age two, had never enough of my reading to her Billy Goat's gruff.
Henny Flynn:In the mornings, she'd climb into my bed and always, always the same words she said. She'd open the page of the frightening book, then shut it again, a very quick look, at the monster who lived under the plank, over the river where the slimy weeds stank. 'Velly fuffy mom mon!' she said so bravely, knowing that I would answer her gravely. It's only a picture, he doesn't really exist.' My reward was being ecstatically kissed. We agreed he was nasty, a menace in fact, but actually that was her first put on act.
Henny Flynn:She was scared, she was brave, she didn't run. Instead, we made it a huge bit of fun. Now she has grown, herself a mother, but still she faces the vultures that hover, demons that lurk in the bottomless pit, but I tell you now, she can deal with that shit. So, a poem from twelve years ago. She was right, of course, but the way that I deal with difficulty now is so very, very different to how I learnt to deal with things before, as a child and as a young and maturing adult.
Henny Flynn:It feels very different for me today. Significantly different from the days when my mother wrote those words. So, if you find that you are masking your true self or feeling you're needing to perform, remember this may be an old pattern you learnt when you were very small. Something some very clever part of you realised could keep you safe at a time when your resources were limited simply by the fact of being a child in an adult world. And so you gathered evidence to support that strategy and prove its efficacy and understandably kept playing it out and playing it out until maybe it's begun to feel outdated, as though it's no longer the wisest path for you as you are today.
Henny Flynn:Or if you notice your reserves are depleted, that you're close to emptying your own self care bank because you have no energy left for the things that restore you and keep your account topped up. Remember, even noticing this can be part of how you begin to shift the outlay. Self awareness with self compassion is our most powerful asset because it helps us see the truth of our experience, not so it exhausts us further and we collapse under it, but so we can also see the tiny steps we can take to change things in some small way for the better whatever better might mean for you right now. Or if you're worried that you need to be more resilient or that you shouldn't be feeling so tired despite the energy grief or worry is taking from you or if there's a voice telling you you need to 'back up', remember listen to it all kindly and let it know you understand this drive to get on and that you won't always feel this way. Hold the tiredness, the sadness, the worry with compassion and remember this too shall pass.
Henny Flynn:There's a reason those words have clung in our collective consciousness they hold undeniable truth. So these behaviours and patterns and beliefs can change if that is what you would like them to do. And like everything in life, it is a process. It's not something that needs to be rushed at or ignored. Simply faced with kindness and curiosity and calm.
Henny Flynn:And if you'd like someone to walk beside you while you navigate whatever you're facing or whatever you would love to change, you know that I am here. So that's today's reflection. These words, they felt like they poured from me, unusually. I actually wrote much of it before I came to record. Often my thoughts are tumbling out, sort of verbally, and this time they seem to fly out of the ends of my fingers, and so this episode is also a field note in the blog and I will include a link to that if you love to read as much as listen or if there's any element of it that you just think oh I'd really like to return to that concept and maybe sit with what it means for you and also of course if there's anything here that you want to challenge or question or share your experience of, then I would absolutely love to hear from you.
Henny Flynn:It means such a lot when I get your messages and I always reply and and I'm always curious to see how do these words land, how do these concepts land, what do they spark for you, you know those words I say at the beginning of the episode 'Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you', like that really is the essence of why I share these reflections and obviously they're full of my own personal lived experience, because for me that really helps me, you know, when I hear someone else sharing something, not just in the kind of esoteric or the intellectual or the researched evidence that they've gathered, but in their own lived experience, then it brings things to life for me and hopefully it brings things to life for you too. And yeah, I'm always very, very curious to hear about other people's experiences too this wonderful journey, this wonderful experience of life, you know, it's endlessly fascinating and yeah so you can message me hennyhennyflinn dot co dot uk or come and send a message on the website hennyflinn dot co dot uk just yeah whatever works for you. Then lastly this feels quite exciting, but it's a sort of deliberately mysterious teaser.
Henny Flynn:If you heard the episodes that I recorded from hospital, so they were this season, I think they were episodes four and five, then I'm soon going to be sharing something that accompanied me through those days and at the time it felt like a form of medicine for an aching heart. If you've been receiving the everyday compassion emails, then you're going to be the first to hear what emerged, and if that piques your curiosity and you'd like to know a bit more about what these everyday compassion emails might be, you're still able to sign up to receive them. They now go out weekly and they are exactly what it says on the tin a tiny note filled with love, ordinary kindness, everyday compassion for whatever our day might be holding. So, if you'd like to sign up to those and get to hear the new news then that's always available for you. I'll put a link into the show notes for you.
Henny Flynn:Okay my darlings that's it I want to send you love and a hug and a wave