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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.
I woke up early this morning to check that the technology that I'm using to run the Gratitude Quest is all working well and I'm pleased to say that it is And then as I was lying in bed and thinking about this episode, the experience of reading the gratitudes that people have shared became the inspiration for what I'd love to share with you today. 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:Before I dive into that, I'll just let you know where I am. I'm back in my kitchen in the big comfy chair by the warm Arga and Ronnie is lying by my feet I mean that sounds like rural idol doesn't it? It's a little bit chilly and I'm kind of quite enjoying the feeling of that cool air on my skin and I can hear the birds, I can hear the birds outside so this feels very calm it feels like a really warm and comforting reflective place and that's always my preference for recording the podcast because it means that I can then sink into that warm reflective place within me. So before I really dive into the things that were coming up for me when I was reflecting on, you know, what to share today, I just want to apologise that, you know, if you really love to listen to these episodes very first thing on a Saturday morning, then I'm sorry that it feels at the moment that Saturday morning is the time when I record them and I think last week I sort of called it field to fork I didn't have another phrase for it but maybe it's more like thought to ear or heart to heart.
Henny Flynn:You know, so I'm recording them and then I'm sharing them straight away and so it feels very immediate to me, this conversation with you and maybe it feels immediate for you too, depending on when you listen. And, you know, you never know, normal service might resume once more and I might return to recording them and sharing them early on a Saturday morning or not, who knows? Just to sort of acknowledge this shift that's happened very organically and I'm going with it as I do with the podcast. I really allow myself a sense of freedom with this and that feels to me that it works and hopefully it works for you too so today's prompt from the gratitude quest and if you don't know what the gratitude quest is it's a twenty one day quest that began on Friday and the idea is that each day I share a prompt to spark thoughts of gratitude and every day they're very different. It's also really important that these prompts aren't about circumnavigating the hard stuff in life, but really about being able to hold pain and the magnificence of life simultaneously and that's a huge part of what a gratitude practice helps us do and actually I've written a field note which really explains some of the science of gratitude which you might be curious about so I'll put a link to that in my notes but it's not really that that I want to talk about today what I want to share is some reflections that came up out of today's prompt Ronnie has obviously got bored with listening to me recording the podcast and has now gone upstairs to see Anton anyway so today's prompt from the quest was name the things you're grateful for that you can feel maybe it includes texture, temperature, weight, noticing the nuance of sensation and you know I began, today's reflection, with you just sort of sharing how grateful I am that I can feel the coolness of the air on my skin and this experience of noticing the sensations of our body, the sensations of touch can be such a powerful way of reconnecting our head with our body.
Henny Flynn:So something that I've talked about here before and that I see often with the people who come to work one to one with me and also I recognise it from myself too is that so many of us have been conditioned to actually separate from the sensations of our body and to you know prefer to be up in our heads to be up in that analytical problem solving you know, sort of processing part of our brain and to perhaps even disregard the experiences that we're having in our body. Really kind of dulling feelings, sensations, emotions, and we do this for really valid reasons. We do it because emotion might feel scary or dangerous or unsafe in some way. I don't know if you can hear Ronnie's now running around again. Sorry about that.
Henny Flynn:Or we do it because it's complicated, you know, emotion is complicated or we're uncertain what to do with our feelings and sometimes we learn this strategy when we're very little. Sometimes it's something that of that grows and deepens within us as we mature. We gather evidence to us to assure ourselves that it's the right strategy for us. So, when I was reading the gratitudes that people have been sharing this morning in response to the prompt, I was noticing the sort of amazing quality of expression of sensation that was coming through in the gratitudes. And it actually enabled me to have a higher awareness of other sensations that I had in my body, I was in bed so I could feel the weight of the duvet on me, we have linen sheets or I could feel that sort of slightly kind of rough, deliciously rough sort of feel of the of the linen that's also simultaneously soft.
Henny Flynn:It's a really curious sensation. I was also really aware of how as I was reading the gratitudes it was bringing me really sort of very firmly into my body and out of my head thinking about oh is the technology working which was the reason why I you know went in to check it in the first place. Noticing these sensations can be a really beautiful way of reconnecting our head and body and often in trauma work it's used to support people to kind of come back into the body, to support us to, you know, maybe there's a sort of history or a patterning of dissociation and actually when we can connect with the body, with the feelings of the body, it can really help us with that and obviously of course what we don't want to do is overwhelm ourselves. We don't want to feel flooded with sensation and so we can do it very gently and you know just noticing one thing that you're grateful for that you can feel maybe it includes its texture, temperature, its weight and noticing the nuance of that sensation can be enough. That can be the practice, Because also for many of us, and this might resonate with you too, that hypersensitivity can be very present as well.
Henny Flynn:We can feel sort of hyper alert to all sensations and we often see this discussed when we talk about neurodivergence and, you know, just the different ways that our brains work, the different ways that we each experience the world, we'll all have different responses to sensation. And, you know, we can have this sort of hyper alert to all sensations, including touch. You know, the feel of things against our skin becomes very important. We might notice with children that they don't like the feel of certain clothes, which is entirely reasonable and often as adults we might dismiss it and just go oh come on just put them on or put it on, but actually for that individual they're expressing a sensitivity to the feeling of something and just sort of bypassing it can be a way of teaching and conditioning our children to bypass the sensations of their body. So I think it's a really interesting thing to pay attention to, and then not to kind of go into some terrible guilt trip, because maybe that's what we did with our own children, but simply to recognise that there can be a conditioning in our society to override our awareness of these things and just to acknowledge that's there, not with judgement, not with guilt, not with shame but simply like oh okay I get it that's something that I have experienced or I have been partied to perhaps or I have observed sort of along this theme I think I've shared here before that at times when you know, when I've been sort of struggling a little bit with my, what I call the veil coming down, when I feel a sort of sense of disconnection, My experience is that the veil comes down because my skin feels porous, and the veil is actually a form of protection, because it's almost like my skin is no longer a sufficient protective barrier against the experience of being in the world, and for me that sense of porousness feels as though other people's emotions get through, like I feel things so much more deeply inside me, and actually, you know, the very natural response and my learnt response was to separate, you know, for the veil to come down or the sense of the veil to come down and to separate and to distance myself from people or from the things that I felt were intruding.
Henny Flynn:And I also recognise now that what that does is it can create isolation. And so, learning how can we manage these experiences of our sensitivity to the world or our loss of sensitivity to the world can be really beautiful work and I'm not going to sort of try and kind of answer that here because that's very deep deep work but really, I feel sometimes it's just useful to kind of air this in case any of this resonates with you, and maybe it sparks some more thoughts or maybe, we can simply hold it with compassion we can simply say oh okay other people experience this too It's not just me. This is part of our human condition. And, you know, and that in itself can be something that can help us hold something that might be feeling challenging or difficult in some way and help us explore something maybe in a new way and maybe even open a door to doing some deeper work perhaps with someone like me or with a therapist in order to sort of understand okay well I think I am dissociating or I think I am feeling things in a very intense way or I don't really understand what I am feeling and perhaps exploring that with the support of a guide who could help you understand what you're noticing more.
Henny Flynn:A sort of slightly tangential, but I think related point here is something that I really, really love, which is something that I once read and I've tried to find like the root source where I read it, but I just can't find it anywhere pretty sure I haven't made it up, which is something about, ancient Celts in so around The UK and into sort of parts of Europe as well the Celts had this concept of the thin places and for them a thin place was somewhere like the top of a hill or the top of a mountain where the veil between sort of man and the gods was thinner And for me, I sense that we all potentially might have an understanding of what it feels like to be in a thin place, where the barriers that we might have erected around us they get thinner and we can sense things more vividly and that could be sort of the barriers around us externally or it could be the barriers within us and I'm deliberately saying barriers rather than boundaries and so when these barriers when they feel thinner we become more alert, more aware of the stuff that's outside of us.
Henny Flynn:So maybe this deeper connection with the energies of the universe, maybe a deeper connection with nature, maybe a sort of sense of kind of wisdom that someone else is sharing with us, or we become, you know, more alert, more aware of the landscape within us. Maybe our intuition, our inner wisdom, our instinct, you know, they become more present, more vividly available to us. And it can be a time of great wisdom and learning and deep connection. And, you know, as I sit here now it sounds really beautiful and I've definitely had those experiences myself. And I recognise it can also be really painful when we're in that kind of place, because it can be a time of change, you know, something's shifting and that can sometimes be uncomfortable.
Henny Flynn:Often it's uncomfortable or it might be that we're in an uncomfortable phase or part of our life and that is what enables that thin place to arise. So, kind of, I think this is all sort of a part of really paying attention to what it is that we're feeling, and I feel that our body is one of our kind of greatest guides here. So, even simply paying attention to the sensation of touch and how does it feel to put my hand down even like upon my own arm or upon the arm of the chair which is what I'm doing right now the arm of the chair that I'm sitting in and touch this very old French I don't even know how you describe it. It's like a really beautiful piece of fabric which has got needlework all over it. And it's one of those kind of classic pieces of sort of what I would call kind of French like household linen or fabric.
Henny Flynn:And I remember buying it so it's imbued with memory. I can feel how soft it is on my skin. I can feel the ridges of the stitching underneath my hands and it's wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful to connect with this and ordinarily I just sit in this chair like I don't do this. I don't sit and really pay attention and of course, as I'm really paying attention, my interception, my awareness of what else is happening within my body, it starts to sort of get activated it starts tell me other things, and so, you know, this can be a really incredible part of mindfulness, basically.
Henny Flynn:I mean, that's really what I'm talking about. And acknowledging the truth that, you know, sometimes things feel really overwhelming. Sometimes when we have this kind of high sensitivity, this high awareness to, you know what is on our skin or what our hands are making contact with it can feel really challenging and so naming things becomes our ally here this is sort of one thing that I'd really love to share now so similar to the RAIN mnemonic you know which you might be familiar with from people like Tara Brack so RAIN is recognise allow investigate nourish or nurture some people use slightly different words but essentially it's that so the practice being you know name what's coming up inside you name the emotions that are coming up allow them to be there investigate where their source might be and nourish nurture the feelings, be kind to them. So surgeons and soldiers are also taught, a similar practice, I mean it feels interesting to sort of bring soldiers into this, but you know, it's true, they are. Which is to name the actions that they take in order to allay their fears.
Henny Flynn:And this is something which, you know, is often used in a kind of therapeutic sense to support us if we're experiencing anxiety or high stress or panic attacks. To actually simply name the action that we are taking and it could be I am getting up from the chair, I am crossing the room, I am going up the stairs, I am washing my hands, I am feeling, I am picking up the bar of soap, you know, specifically naming the experience or the actions that we're taking and what we're noticing in the space around us can be very helpful in re grounding ourselves and in sort of psychology it's called verbal grounding and I think that there's a connecting thread to this with the gratitude practice but before I name that I just want to there's another sort of memory has come up for me which is again I've shared before that I had a panic attack this is a few years ago now at a really beautiful place near here in Wales and it's a waterfall called Water Breaks Its Neck, and it's incredibly dramatic. It's got ancient forest, it's got a mountain, it's like, it's really, really beautiful.
Henny Flynn:It's, you know, my idea of, like, somewhere I just love to be, and attempting to climb up an extremely muddy, I mean, it was like nothing I'd ever seen before, an extremely muddy hillside which had very few like focal points that had like a tree and then maybe a blade of grass you know that was it I had a panic attack I'm not going to sort of go sort of deep into it now, I'm very happy to, but just, it feels like it's too much of a segue, and in the experience of that what I noticed was that some part of me innately understood that what I needed to do was talk myself through what I was noticing and so I heard myself say my hands are deep in the thick mud, I can feel the earth beneath the mud, I can feel my knees on the ground, I can feel my head bent down, I can feel the tears on my cheeks and I was, there was a, this part was like was helping me and naming what I was noticing and it was that that enabled me to come back online, to come back into my body, to stop feeling as though I was going to fall off the earth, which was how it was feeling, it was terrifying, and then from there I was able eventually to get myself off this hillside with the very kind and gentle support of Anton, who didn't try and intrude, but just enabled me to make my way and you know, all was well and it was a fantastic learning experience that is for sure and really helped me relate to the clients who've said that they've experienced panic attacks And the memory of that ability to name what I was noticing has stayed with me.
Henny Flynn:And I think that this is one of the reasons that a gratitude practice can be so powerful and like I said, there's so much research, there's so much science, but so this is just the pole of one, you know, my observation might resonate with you too, is that when we are writing a gratitude practice, we are naming things out loud in a way when, you know, in writing is a way of naming things out loud and we're being really observant about what we are noticing around us and I was saying to Anton yesterday is that I recognize that when I'm deep in my daily gratitude practice of writing 21 things a day which does ebb and flow but you know which is okay but when I'm deep in it, I'm constantly scanning for things that I might include, you know, lovely little tidbits that I might notice through my day, and that obviously means that I am more alert to things that I am grateful for. And of course, when that starts to build a positive feedback loop within our system, so rather than scanning for things that make me feel afraid or make me feel alone or make me feel sad or make me feel hurt or make me feel frustrated or whatever it is that might be going on I'm also scanning for the things that make me feel joyful, hopeful, give me a sense of presence, purpose, connection and so you know with the gratitude quest and the amazing people that have signed up for that, it's nearly 300 people are following this quest right now, and I'm really sorry if you weren't able or didn't have time to join, because the doors are closed, but I will be sharing something once the quest completes that, you know, might be interesting for you, but in the quest we're, you know, we're sharing in our private quest space, we're sharing a gratitude in response to that day's prompt so not the full 21 or the full three or the full seven however many everybody is writing but we're sharing one thing and that is a way of being heard.
Henny Flynn:My feeling is that this practice has far reaching benefits and even if all that we take from it is to be able to connect with the joyful things, the hopeful things in the world around us in more meaningful way, well golly, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? And even if what it does is enables us to reconnect with our bodies in a more attentive kind compassionate aware way well gosh wouldn't that be a wonderful thing So I'm now going to make coffee and I send you a hug and a wave and my gratitude for being here today.