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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'm back in my kitchen this really feels like the place to speak to you and I've been thinking this week a lot about the juxtaposition between joy and pain and between the bitter and the sweet. It was something that came up a lot in a conversation that I had recently and it's something that's been arising as we do the gratitude quest and I just thought maybe we'd reflect on that a little 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.
Henny Flynn:Settle in and listen and see where the episode takes you. So how do we hold the bitter and the sweet? How do we hold the joy and the pain? How do we learn that both are welcome within us, that there is space, maybe that's a better way of saying it, that there is space for both within us and also I think you know just reflecting on the use of that word welcome like actually for so many of us when we have come through really challenging painful times, it is very common for us to look back and to say gosh, I wouldn't be without that time because of everything that it has given me, of everything it has shown me. And at the same time, it's really important that we don't sort of use that almost like a like a kind of meme you know of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger you know I've talked about this before and the discomfort that I have when we can find ourselves maybe doing it to ourselves or having or being the recipient of it or noticing that we've sort of said something similar to others that, you know, that pain is the place of growth essentially.
Henny Flynn:And while at times that might be true, at other times pain is simply pain. It is incredibly difficult to handle and there are times when it feels impossible to hold. The weight of our grief, the weight of our shame, the weight of our pain. And so in a sort of conversation I've been having recently, this concept, the juxtaposition between these two things and you know this wonderful person that I was speaking with they talked about, you know, for them it kind of came down to this sense of the bitter sweet, the bitter and the sweet, and how even something like cacao is a beautiful representation of the importance of both of those things in our lives because if you've ever drunk cacao without the sweetness of a little bit of honey in it, my word, my word you understand what bitterness is and at the same time if we put so much honey into the cacao that we drown out the bitterness, then we change the drink to such a degree that it's almost no longer cacao. So we're always looking to create this fine balance within the medicine of that drink and I think it's a really beautiful, powerful metaphor for finding the way in which we can accommodate the bitter and the sweet within ourselves and in the way we make room for both within ourselves.
Henny Flynn:I was also, as I was reflecting on this idea, I was thinking about, you know, how has it been for me and what's been my experience of holding these two things? And as part of my sort of learning, I worked with a really wonderful teacher who would speak about at the end of every practice she would say something along the lines of I see you, I see you in your pain and your magnificence. And it felt like such a blessing to receive that, to be seen in my wholeness, know, and everyone I know who's been the recipient of that blessing has, you know, felt something similar, you know, it's a really wonderful thing to be seen in our pain and our magnificence. And at first I received it simply as that of like, oh gosh, you know, how lovely to be seen, how lovely to be seen in that way, you know, it's a fairly kind of like surface level, how lovely to be seen in that way, but still, you know, meaningful. And then through a extraordinarily painful part of my learning process, I had an awakening, you know, these awakenings, they don't just happen once and done.
Henny Flynn:They're a continuous process of the waves kind of coming across the horizon and meeting us on the beach. You know, there's awakening, awakened moment of recognising that for the majority of my life, I had held a very unconscious belief that you can either be holding pain or you can be holding joy. And at some point when I was very young, I made the decision to hold joy. And for joy to be my anchor, my raison d'etre, the feeling I wanted people to associate with how it was to be with me, but of course that's unsustainable. You know, we can't always be in joy, and so therefore the energy that that took for me to be like projecting that, whether or not it was received that way by others is kind of irrelevant, but you know, like internally, like the effort it took to project that took its toll, and so therefore at the same time as having these high highs, I would have these low lows where I would feel as though my joy had abandoned me, that all there was within me was pain And I remember, you know, during a devastating period of very personal grief, I remember saying to Anton at one point, I feel as though I'm never going to smile again, because the pain was so great.
Henny Flynn:I thought it had washed away my joy. And then, of course, slowly over time, joy began to return and pain began to abate and I kind of forgot again, and began like pushing pain away and pushing the joy out and, you know, back into that cycle, that pattern. It took getting really ill, ten years ago now, to begin to understand a little more about what was actually going to really serve me in the next decades of my life, next many decades of my life. And it was only sort of a few years ago, so sort of like, you know, in this journey that I had this moment of awakening where, again, in a very painful learning experience, I was able to understand deeply, viscerally, like down, down, down in the bottom of the bowels of my belly, you know, like deep, deep, deep down. I was able to understand that within me, I have the capacity to hold my joy and my pain simultaneously.
Henny Flynn:And I share it because I feel it had never occurred to me that it could even be possible to do that before. And of course, we have to come to these understandings ourselves. Know, it doesn't matter how many times someone might tell us, that it's possible for us, and we have to come to the deep understanding ourselves. But I also think it is useful to know that it is possible. It's useful to know that we have this capacity simply because of our humanity.
Henny Flynn:There's lots of science around this as well. Things like Oh gosh, that's so interesting. I clearly am so unwilling to sort of to go up into the headspace of the science that the particular bit of research that I want to share with you is completely gone from my head. So let's trust that. Let's not go up into our heads.
Henny Flynn:Let's stay in the body, stay in the deep, deep knowledge of the body. And the invitation today is really to feel into, where do you have a sense of that capacity for holding the joy and the pain? Maybe it's something that you've learnt yourself many, many years ago. Maybe it's something that you sense you are awakening to now. Maybe it's something that you have a feeling of, oh gosh, yes, that would be, that would be a useful one.
Henny Flynn:That would be, that would be useful for me to, to explore more. And maybe it sounds so alien, that the potential of it is something that feels impossible to even consider. So, you know, wherever we are on that particular sort of part of our own personal experience, our own personal experiential journey through this life. I hope that something about what I've just shared might feel useful in some way for you. And to that point, I'd really love to close today with a poem from my darling girl and it's one that I don't often share.
Henny Flynn:I've realised there are certain poems from those books which feel very much like my kind of go to places, you know, when I have a sense, an urgency to share something from the wisdom of those bits of poetic prose. And I tend to have, you know, some go to's that I choose. This one is not one of those. And yet today, when I opened the book at random, it's the one that it opened to and it felt so resonant for this exploration of the bittersweet and the joy and the pain. And even as I say the bittersweet, I also just to let you know, I've had Whitney Houston singing bittersweet memories over and over again in my head this morning.
Henny Flynn:And then it transitioned to Dolly Parton, who obviously wrote the song. I'm talking about the song for the film Bodyguard, if you're not familiar with it. It's so beautiful. And Dolly's original version, oh my goodness me. That woman, she's very interesting, I think, Dolly Parton.
Henny Flynn:That's that's a bit of a segue, isn't it? But anyway, yes, what arises for you when you reflect on your experience of that and your capacity for that and, for holding the joy and the pain. And yes, and I'll close. I'll close by sharing this poem. And before I do that actually, let me just talk to you about something which is coming up, in October, which feels like a very long way away from, early March, which is where we are, but it's a really wonderful thing, and it's called the weekend of no requirements and in a way it speaks to this, this capacity, this ability we have to sit with the joy and the pain, to hold the joy and the pain, because sometimes also what we need is a place where we can lay it all down in the deep green grass and simply be and simply have a sense of no requirements upon us for a time and in this instance for a few days in a beautiful, luxurious, I mean I use that word advisedly, a beautiful, luxurious house in, The Marches in Herefordshire, very near to where I live, and there's a swimming lake, there are woods to walk in, there's big open fires, the bedrooms are glorious, with expansive views either out into the hills or up into the woods, and the whole weekend is deliberately crafted so that everything is intentional, of course, and that everything is a choice.
Henny Flynn:So if you want to come and join the morning meditation and some reflective practice and maybe some yoga in the sunshine on the lawn. You never know, October can be such a beautiful month in The UK. Delicious food, nourishing, delicious food, beautiful company. And if what you really need to do is to spend the weekend sitting by the fire with a good book, then you're very welcome to do that. And if you'd like to join in some of the creative practices, some of the reflective practices, drinking cacao together, even a hula hoop workshop on the lawn is something that we would love to be able to share.
Henny Flynn:You know, so some fun and lightness and some depth and breadth, all of it with no requirement upon you to be anything other than how you feel in that moment. If that is calling to you, it's the sixteenth to the October 19 in The UK. I'll put a link into the show notes for this episode and you can always email me if you want to find out a little bit more about it. It really is going to be so, so wonderful. And then there's another thing coming up as well, which is another one of my small group courses, and this one is about awakening our hopes and dreams.
Henny Flynn:I've talked a little bit about awakening already today, so this is about awakening or reawakening our hopes and dreams and springtime can be such a beautiful time to turn our attention toward this. You know, up until the eighteenth century, March was when our new year began. It was actually when, you know, in the Julian calendar, it was actually when we were sort of standing on the tipping point from one year into the next. And so really like embracing that and feeling into, well, what are your hopes and dreams for this coming year, this coming twelve month? And, how would it be to be able to sit with those, to explore them, maybe to see how it is, to reawaken them, to understand them a little bit more, in the company of a small and very kind and very compassionate group, again, there's no requirement on you to show up in any particular way.
Henny Flynn:I hold the space so carefully, and really just as an environment to open up our self awareness with that profound self compassion that is so important in this work. So if that appeals to you, I can't remember the dates which is really helpful isn't it? But it begins in March anyway and all of these small group courses they run on a Thursday lunchtime, these short courses for small groups. They run on a Thursday lunchtime. So, it's designed so that if you are in a working environment, can take a lunch break, come along to the session and then step back into work And, you know, really to sort of try and make these as accessible as possible to as many people as possible and hopefully at a time of day where our energy is a little bit higher rather than always doing this kind of work in the evenings or at weekends.
Henny Flynn:So, have a feel into if that works for you. There's a handful of places still remaining, and it would be wonderful to see you there too. So, two lovely offerings, one the weekend coming up in October and one the small group short course beginning this month and I'm going to say goodbye now and then I'm going to read the poem and I send you so much love and a hug and a wave and here's that poem from my darling girl. Show me what makes your tears fall. Show me what makes you tremble before dawn breaks.
Henny Flynn:Show me what makes your heart sing. Show me everything that brought you to this place. Show me your tiny joys, your woes, your ancient fears. Show me all of who you are, and I will show you love. I will show you how broad is the sweep of my arms as I hold you tight.
Henny Flynn:I will show you the expansiveness of my ever opening heart that has space for every part of you. I will show you there are no scales upon which to be weighed. There are no measures that can find you wanting. I will show you there are no conditions for my love of you. I will show you there is just my love and you, which added up makes one, not two.