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Episode 29:
The Radical Act of Warmth in an Avoidant-Attachment Culture

Guest: Sarah Peyton

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Marina Robb

Hosted by: Marina Robb

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Sarah Peyton

My guest today is neuroscience educator, Sarah Peyton, who is an author, an international constellations facilitator, Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication, and someone who has spent many years integrating constellations, brain science and the use of resonant language to heal trauma.

She works with audiences internationally to create a compassionate understanding of the effects of relational trauma on the brain and teaches people how words change and heal us. Sarah speaks about both the personal and the systemic forces that lead to traumatization, including racism, patriarchy, gender oppression, capitalism, and colonialism.

In this episode though, I found the content incredibly profound.  We all feel distress and are triggered to defend ourselves, but when we, our body and brain, feels safe and loved, we are not only capable of healing, but also able to experience and offer joy, creativity, playfulness and have the energy and motivation and enthusiasm to participate and cooperate in positive change for ourselves, others, and the world around us. 

In this episode, We dive into:

  • Flight and fight and a less known distress response ‘alarmed aloneness’ – or separation distress.
  • We linked loneliness as a killer and the stressor of aloneness – the modern culture of ‘grow up’, ‘don’t cry’, ‘you can do it on our own’ messages.
  • Re-affirming that our biology says we are not supposed to be alone, and healthy relationships are essential.  As practitioners or parents showing our delight in our children, signals that they matter and are cared for!
  • It is in fact a radical act to find warmth for us and others, not evaluating or measuring others, rather appreciating, and connecting with others.
  • What does attachment mean for our health?  The astounding statistics surrounding avoidant attachment and how stress increases our sense of aloneness and internal negative dialogue and self-worth. 
  • We need to be securely attached! Secure attachment is when we bring the people we love inside us – and are able to have warmth for ourselves.
  • As we talked about the grief of loss of the health of the planet, Sarah, reminds us that healing our trauma, will provide joy, play, and love, which we need to have to stay present to what is happening, and to have the creative energy to take action together.
  • The safer we feel the more parts are able contribute – activism arises from creative response – link to August response in the UK with Prime Minister that Sarah referred to: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2023/aug/03/greenpeace-activists-black-fabric-rishi-sunak-mansion-oil-protest-video
  • We create safety by genuinely liking our students, we are inviting each nervous system and brain.


Music by Geoff Robb: www.geoffrobb.com 

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Transcript

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(transcribed by AI so there maybe some small errors!)

Marina Robb: Hello, and welcome to the Wild Minds Podcast for people interested in health, nature based therapy and learning. We explore cutting edge approaches that help us improve our relationship with ourselves, others and the natural world. My name is Marina Robb, I'm an author, entrepreneur, Forest School outdoor learning and nature based trainer and consultant, and pioneer in developing green programs for the health service in the UK.

You're listening to Episode 29 The radical act of warmth in an avoidant attachment culture. My guest today is neuroscience educator Sarah Peyton, who is an author and international constellations facilitator, certified trainer of nonviolent communication. And someone who has spent many years integrating constellation work brain science, and the use of resonant language to heal trauma. She works with audiences internationally to create a compassionate understanding of the effects of relational trauma on the brain, and teaches people how words change and heal us.

Sarah speaks about both the personal and the systemic forces that lead to traumatization, including racism, patriarchy, gender oppression, capitalism, and colonialism. In this episode, though, I found the content, incredibly powerful, and very profound. We all feel distress and a triggered to defend ourselves. But when we, our body and brain feel safe and loved, were not only capable of healing, but also able to experience and offer joy, creativity, playfulness, have fun, and the energy and motivation to participate and cooperate in positive change for ourselves, others and the world around us. I really hope you enjoy this podcast.

Hi, Sarah, and welcome to the wild minds podcast. It's really exciting for me to have you here today. Thank you so much.

Sarah Peyton: Oh, it's a lovely thing to be here with you.

Marina Robb: I've told you before we went online that we always share a bit of gratitude. So I'd love to start and then if you have anything you'd like to share, then that would be a wonderful place. Is that okay?

Sarah Peyton: That's wonderful.

Marina Robb: So, actually, I've just come in from being with a group of teenagers and just sitting around a fire. So I have some gratitude for that feeling that I get when I can just be actually around a fire and we don't have to talk. And we just sit and hang out. So I'm, well, for so many reasons, just grateful for fire.

Sarah Peyton: Thank you. I'm grateful. I just came from a cello lesson. And I decided to mostly take this week off except for this podcast. Mostly, I've taken this week off to play the cello. And so I'm just so good. I'm so grateful for the cello and for Bach.

Marina Robb: Oh, wow, I can actually see that the listeners won't be able to see but I can see your cello in the background. And it's amazing, isn't it? How? Well I mean, we're gonna talk about a bit about nature, but also music isn't music, just the most wonderful thing to soothe ourselves. Yeah. Well, as I said, I'm really grateful for you to come and share your time with me and I'm excited to talk about so many things actually. I've been sitting in bed reading your book and working through some of the exercises and actually, you know, I've actually found it quite moving. And really taken me to some deep and reflective places. So I think there's so much I could ask you, but I guess one of the things that's been really present for me is this whole idea of this alarmed aloneness. And this is something that you've is this something that you've kind of come up with?

Sarah Peyton: It's something that I've given the best name to that I can is because scientists talk about it all the time, but they use the word separation distress. Okay, that's so clinical. And it doesn't quite, it doesn't, it doesn't do the thing that alarmed aloneness does in people's bodies, when you say, Do you need a little acknowledgement of alarm? belongingness? How about some acknowledgement of decades of alarmed aloneness? And people are like, Oh, yeah. You say, do you need acknowledgement or decades of separation? distress? People are like, no.

Marina Robb: You know, because I've done quite a bit of, you know, reading and teaching even on what we often understand as those states of our nervous system, right, you know, the fly, fear, freeze, and so on. But I, but I've never heard of alarmed aloneness. And I wonder whether you would explain that and that maybe will take us into your whole field of who knows where we'll go?

Sarah Peyton: Yeah, of course. Well, so I was thinking a lot also about the nervous system and about fight flight. And I kept thinking how the terms fight flight kind of imply that either we're afraid, or we're angry. And I had this experience. I mean, especially when my kid was little, my son, when he was little, he would run away in stores regularly. I mean, I knew all of the code words that come over the loudspeaker when your child is lost, and they sit there sending employees to the doors to watch for kidnappers. It's an in the United States, it's often peter pan to the exits.

Marina Robb: I felt that too, actually, it was my daughter in my case.

Sarah Peyton: So there would be in my body so much alarm, but it really wasn't. I mean, I was irritated that he was running away from me. And I was scared for his safety. But there was something else that happened in my body that was not fear and not anger. It was this sense of something being torn away from me, and it was very alarming. And so I was thinking about fight, flight, fight, flight, fight flight. And then I was like, I think we need to acknowledge that there's a third element of distress that puts people in distress states that elevates heart rate that elevates blood pressure, that decreases heart rate variability, and that it's that it is a state of alarmed aloneness. And I was at the time looking very closely at Jakob punk SEPs work who is a American neuroscientist who studied emotions in the 20th century, and just started into the 21st century before he died. And he had what he called panic grief, and he was talking about how the word panic and panic attacks usually weren't about physical fear of safety. They were about being separated. And so I tried out panic grief for a while. But panic in English comes so close to like hysteria instead of to alarmed aloneness, even though you're meant for it to mean alarmed aloneness. So that's kind of this, I feel like I got to give people a sense. Now of what alarmed aloneness is, it's a state of being separated from someone or something that you love. And it's a distressing state and it you feel the distress in your body?

Marina Robb: Yeah, I mean, it doesn't make sense. But I guess because I'm new to it. I've been, you know, trying to sit with it and make sense of it in me and in my experience, and I know that you described it as it could be, you know, if you've had a divorce or you've lost somebody or someone's died, and you have this experience of distress, but then I've also heard you talk about it in a kind of, maybe more kind of a day to day way. And I was been I've been thinking about it for myself and thinking that, you know, this, and it's been a theme actually of this year, where what's come up is that we now know globally that loneliness is the biggest killer, you know, so I was trying to make a link in a way between your work of this alarm aloneness and this sense of global loneliness and then my own personal sense of, I'd never would have called it alarmed aloneness. But now I'm recognizing it in me that it's a feeling of. I'm on my own here. Yeah, that's really scary. Yes.

Sarah Peyton: And when we experience this separation from others that panic grief circuit, it actually what happens is there's a spike of cortisol, there's, and what is our greatest stress hormone is humans is cortisol, our greatest stressor is that we're expecting ourselves to do it all by ourselves. And we're expected by our society to do it by ourselves, you know, grow up, be a big girl, don't cry, you know, you can do this on your own, you don't need me to help you. All the messages that we give each other about, you know, we set children in their rooms to clean their rooms instead of doing it with them. You know, there's a way that I think the dominant culture says we're supposed to be alone, but our biology says we're not supposed to be alone. So it's a big chasm between what our bodies need and what our society says is the right thing to do.

Marina Robb: So would you make that link then with this idea that one of the biggest killers is this loneliness? Yeah, you would make that link?

Sarah Peyton: Absolutely. I mean, they, you know, when people are talking about this, they hold up a heart, that's been lonely, and they hold up a heart that's, you know, been a cigarette smoker for 30 years. And the damage is, you know, identical, I mean, that we get as much or more damage from loneliness as we do from cigarettes, or a bad diet or anything else. We're just, we're truly meant to have not just to be in company, but to be in good company.

Marina Robb: I love the way you say that good company. And I think, you know, and I guess I'm what I'm thinking, isn't that is hard, when you don't trust people?

Sarah Peyton: Yeah, I mean, I was just thinking about how you started out with your gratitude of being around the fire, with people with sweethearts. And we don't get to enjoy those fires if we're on, but we'll watch for somebody to hurt us. And if we've grown up in difficult family situations, where there's been a lot of stress and where the grown ups have been, or the older siblings have been scary, or mean, or have left us terribly alone, then we don't have any basis for expecting that the company will be good.

Marina Robb: Yeah, I mean, this is a big thing, then, because if we, I mean, I'm saying we like it's out there, if I and I just know, with so many people I work with that. One of the things I'll say a lot of the time is that we just don't feel good enough, right? We genuinely don't feel good enough. And in a way we are expecting people to behave, as you said, as we were shown in our in the past, right? So how can we as parents, as practitioners, as fellow humans, how can we support each other then because I really do feel that, as you said, that our society is kind of growing us up to look after number one, and we don't really know how to have all these great friendships that easily, you know. So, I mean, I know you've talked a lot about this resonant language and toolboxes and things like that, but it may be you'll draw on some of that to answer what I'm asking, but I'm wondering, when we're coming from a place of deficit, then how can we heal? And how can we support others? Because it's this is really important work, isn't it?

Sarah Peyton: It's so important. And what's really sweet is that there's a starting point that's really simple, that I can just describe, right now that's like, even before you do anything with language, the very first thing is to let yourself be delighted by the other by another person, just for a moment just to it's the most protective thing we can do for each other in terms of depression, in terms of anxiety, is to just let ourselves be delighted by the other person's existence brings tears to my eyes because it's so lovely and sweet and simple. but not something that we take a couple breaths to do. It's like when you first come into contact with the people in your household in the morning when you wake up. What's it like if you take a couple of breaths of delight? What's it like if you're like, Ah, here's my, here's my partner, oh, here's my child, oh, here's my companion animal. Just like that's place of warmth for each other, is a very simple starting point. And it's something that's like a radical act in the face of a dominant culture of avoidant attachment. Because when we're plently attached, we don't stop for even those couple of breaths of like, I really like you.

Marina Robb: I mean, that's already taken me to think about attachment, because I don't think many of us out here in the world really understand what attachment means. So it might be really helpful if you wouldn't mind. Talking a little bit about these attachments. You said that the dominant culture was avoidant attachment. I've never heard of it. I've never been heard someone say about the culture. I've heard it about, you know, parents or something? Could you speak to that?

Sarah Peyton: I can, most of the world kind of scores above 50%. Unsecured attachment. So secure attachment means that you take a few moments for warmth, and you and you're able to function, you know, you're not just disappearing into warmth, or disappearing into motion, you're both touching emotion, and you're able to get done what needs to get done. And you get to have fun doing it. And it's relational and connected. And so secure attachment is when we bring the people who love us inside us, and we carry them with us in our brains. And they say nice things to us during the day. They're encouraging, they're appreciative, that you know, that inner voice is encouraging and appreciative and warm. And we kind of move into the world with an expectation, not that other people are going to take care of us, but rather that other people are interesting, and that we will have moments of delight, and that we can count on the folks that have our back. So that secure attachment. Now about 17% of the world shows up this varies from country to country, but UK US 17% Or so shows up as really solidly avoidantly attached. avoidant attachment means that you don't expect to meet good folks in the world, you kind of just expect that you're on your own. And that you need to be insulated and walk through the world with a layer of insulation not expecting anything from anybody else. Now, what's so interesting is that when we are under stress, we move from secure attachment into avoidant attachment. That's the most common movement. So if we've got 50% of the world, plus 17, which is mostly under stress, and we've got 17% of the world was severely avoidantly attached, we're up at 67% of the world that's mostly avoidantly attached most of the time, we're trying to get things done in order to deal with the stress, when the stress is about not being relationally connected, what we actually need to be doing is affiliating connecting, taking care of each other working together. Pairing but enjoying each other. You know, it's this is not an assignment of drudgery. This is an assignment of delight.

Marina Robb: So, if we're if we've got a dominant culture and where we're stressed, we're going to behave as if we can't reach out, right. That's the place where we can't reach out and we can't connect more stuff done. We just need to get more stuff done. And if we're believing that the other person isn't going to meet our needs, then we're kind of in trouble, aren't we? We're going to be defensive. We're going to it I feel like this is kind of like a spiral. Which is really hard to get out of and I know one of the reasons why I work outdoors and in the natural world is because I know both chemically that it supports a reduction in cortisol First start, which then facilitates that ability to be more connected with each other when we're in an outdoor space, I mean, that's one of the kind of basics. But it feels more than that, because I really wanted to kind of chat with you about the possibility of this nature chapter attachment. So we've got this human attachment, right. And we've got this whole as you've spoken so wonderfully in your books as well, you know, just we are relational beings and how important that is, but from my experience, the humans are the tricky ones, right? And you can go if you have the opportunity to go to the natural world or little places, you know, little local places, you start to feel better.

Sarah Peyton: And it's so interesting, isn't it, that nature causes our cortisol to drop and cortisol spikes when we have alarmed aloneness, and we're talking about nature attachment. Yes, we will. We need the earth and the microbiome and fungi and the trees and the flowers and the birds and the insects when the animals we definitely need them. That's a part of our being. And we're healed. I mean, you know, the forest bathing, you know, the increase in immune system response, howling good things that happen with lovely nature.

Marina Robb: Do you see though a link between the kind of parenting that we might get as a child, and the fact that so many people haven't had that relational, I'm gonna use the word in inverted commas, my fingers are flying here, you know, of nature, parenting, if you like, we haven't been in the company of nature. Do you see a link there?

Sarah Peyton: Well, I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1960s. So I grew up in the woods. And my family had really intense as many families did, in Alaska, people would move away from their families of origin when they had difficult families of origin and come up to the forest up to the tiger. And I mean, I believe that nature attachment does its own thing. And can certainly help to compensate for difficult attachment experiences that people have in their families, but doesn't make up for it. You got you know, it's really good. And it's really important. And you also need the secure attachment with humans, in order for the brain to get to that place where we can, you know, work together to save the climate safe. Save the planet. So it's own really important thing. And it's not everything.

Marina Robb: Yeah. What would you say more about that, then? Because you've talked about what we need. You just stepped into that thing about, well, what about our planet? You know, what about climate change and what we actually need to be healing, let's say within ourselves, in order to heal our relationship with others, and then, by extension, I think the natural world

Sarah Peyton: Yeah. Oh, my goodness. It's a big subject. So it's so big, and it's so important, and it's so beautiful. And we need each other so much, and we need these experiences of Yeah, we need these experiences of not just being in nature, not just feeling nature, but having the level of support for brain functioning, that we can see what's happening with the planet over time, that we're not moving into denial. It because without the solid, secure attachment. If we're an avoidant attachment, we move into denial, we don't see. One of the things that avoidant attachment does is it takes out it knocks out the sense of future. So for everybody under stress, their sense of future is compromised. We need sort of this funny trail that we're following along we need delight in one another, in order for our brains to function well enough to be able to perceive the long term time changes that we need to be able to perceive in order to go, oh, gosh, we need some really big social changes here. Well, there's, it's a funny place to start, but the place to start is with delight and one another.

Marina Robb: Yeah, I mean, I often think about as the rise in what people are calling eco anxiety, you know, being anxious of the fear of the destruction. Yeah, our lives and our planet. That feels like a, it can feel to many people and to young people as well, that there's like this whole that there is no exit from. And yet I absolutely love and agree with you this feeling of? Well, we also need those moments of delight those seeing what we're together and the hope that's in that, you know, otherwise, it can feel incredibly desperate. And I again, I'm sort of picking up here that this is the same in a family if you were in a family that was very dysfunctional and very distressed, it would be very, it would be an is very hard to imagine something else if you haven't experienced it, I guess as well as it because denial is a safe as the protector, I assume, right?

Sarah Peyton: Oh, Yes. You know, it's part of the insulation that we put around ourselves, when we believe we have to do it alone. It's so, boy, what a task for us. What a goal, to have so much delight in each other that everybody's brains start working well enough to save this gorgeous, incredible, beautiful, that's stunning, interconnected, complex. Being that we live on.

Marina Robb: Is that real? driver for you in this healing work?

Sarah Peyton: Oh, yeah. it is. I love both. But more than anything, I love what happens to brains when they are loved.

Marina Robb: Will you say more about that? Because again, I think that it's a lot of people listening won't understand what's happening in our bodies and our brains. And why you should say that focusing on delight is actually so valuable. Would you speak to that?

Sarah Peyton: Yeah. As we, as humans feel, I mean, it's true for other animals as well, any social animal, as we feel safe, then we move out of fight flight, alarmed aloneness, I want to just also, you know, when we named you know, eco anxiety, I want to name the love that people have for the planet. I just tears to my eyes, I just want to name how much people are, like, grieving how much they love, this incredible place we live on so much love. And if that doesn't get named, and if that's not, if we just say it's just fear, we're knocking out an entire complex of capacity that we have as humans, to love to mourn, to read to play, to discover. And all those things are needed for, you know, for remedying ego anxiety and for saving the planet. We need these, we need this cut our complex capacity to figure out something to do together, set a goal work together, look at what you know, what are doable steps towards our goal. And the thing is, that is so big, we can't do it alone. We can't make a little private blueprint or, you know, a roadmap. We need to be making roadmaps with each other. And to be you know, goofy along the way, you know, and just loving the heck out of the planet and each other and, yeah, am I getting anywhere close to describing what you were hoping I would?

Marina Robb: You are I mean, I'm stuck in the love at the moment, just to be honest. I mean, I you are and I guess I think it's really powerful because we're here holding we the love that we feel for this earth and this planet and for, for people. And at the same time, because I know your work is, you know, you've worked in prisons, you've, you know, the terror and the pain that exists as well. But here you are repeatedly saying, So, we still have to find our way to love. Right. And so I would love you to speak to that, you know, in terms of your, the way you said, I mean, how do our brains How do our brains who we are? How do we find our ways to love ourselves and others? Because this is about healing, right?

Sarah Peyton: Yeah, this is about healing. And it's about how two brains do their best work. So our brains are complex, and the safer that we feel, the more parts of the brain are contributing. As we move into urgency, we lose relationality. So, um, so we were, but the urgency is real. So we need to be holding the urgency together. And I think, you know, some of the most complex and creative responses that have come from the folks who are working on the very edges of, you know, trying to save the planet, are come out of deep complexity. So, you know, people forming chains of humans and blocking roads, you know, there's, it's a creative response. It's a creative and relational response, people taking, you know, soup and throwing it on famous paintings, you know, this is interesting. This is like, awakens people. It's like, what's going on? You know, it's like it. It's a creative and relational response. The Fox, who went and put all that they covered. The prime minister of Britain, they covered his house. And in fabric, do you remember that, when that was done, was in response to him signing a whole bunch of lease agreements for at work for oil exploration?

Marina Robb: So these are like, so like, an activist response, a big, communal, big response? And I think, absolutely, there's a place for that, but I'm also really asking about that place of the teacher, the professional, what can we do? You know, in terms of some of the tools that you've written about and work with, in terms of like, resonant language and things like that? Could you speak to some of that? Because I think that it's like, there's many ways isn't there? Like, we have to be on the streets, we have to be in policy, we have to be doing what we can in our day to day? And would you speak to some of that, because I still feel like there's this, I'd love to understand more how, how when we attend to our nervous systems, if we can find our way back to love as we were kind of saying love about ourselves and each other and in then, perhaps, then have the ability to make those relationships so that we can go and do those bigger things, you know?

Sarah Peyton: Yes, absolutely. Okay. So, if we start with the nervous system and the brain, when we are in urgency, we're in flight, alarmed, aloneness, or freeze, and our actions are coming from a place of panic and desperation, which robs us of our creativity. When we have a sense of being warmly received, of mattering of loving the people that we're with of having delight in them. Then the nervous system shifts states to social engagement, where our immune systems start to function more fully, where our thoughts become more creative, where play becomes possible, where we find it easier to affiliate with others and create community where we naturally reach out to folks and connect with folks who have shared values and work together in whatever way you know, perhaps teaching, perhaps policy creation, perhaps getting out the vote. perhaps doing these big creative political actions that are on the world media scene. All different ways of responding become more possible. Once we have a sense that it's safe to reach out to each other, and we create as teachers with young people, we create that safety by really actually genuinely liking our students, and enjoying them and taking moments for delight for each nervous system. Because when we do that, we're inviting each nervous system in each brain into social engagement, where creativity becomes possible.

Marina Robb: And it's delight is delight different to praise because I know a lot of people say, you know, praise, oh, well done, you've done that really? Well. They say no that's, I'm getting a really different sense from you, that it isn't the same, you know, as this genuine, heartfelt response. I feel like that's what you're saying, Yeah, compared to this, you know, kind of, really, you just want to move on, you know, how people respond to people, and they just want them to move on by saying something nice to them. Yeah, the difference isn't that?

Sarah Peyton: such a difference. Because that's, you know, evaluative and based on what somebody does, we're delight is based on who somebody is there being. And the question that we can ask ourselves and talk about, which is so radical, is, how does your body warm or lift or soften? When you come into contact with this person? What kind of metaphors come to mind you know, when you come into contact with person? Is it like, a little firework going off behind your heart? Is it like frogs jumping into a pool is it like a leaf unfurling in the spring, you know, all of these things will happen will have a different than light reaction to every single person. Every single person, snowflake nature will bring out a different delight in us. And, and if we begin to talk about it, and notice the body sensations, just to take that moment of like, you know, somebody says, how are you and say, Oh, my heart lifts, when I see you, you know, it's a different response than what we're used to getting, we are telling people, you make a difference to me, you matter to me, you change me. And when we know that we can change one person, we start to have much more of a sense of agency in our world that we can change more than one person.

Marina Robb: And if I'm right, the metaphor, is that one of your yeah, there's an in language. Yeah. So there's is there? I don't know if I've got this right. Is there kind of I mean, is there like a toolbox of these resonant languages?

Sarah Peyton: There is, because I was collecting all the different kinds of ways that we can. So what's interesting about the left and the right hemisphere is that the right hemisphere is where relationality happens. It's where body sensations are noticed. It's where, but it's not a hemisphere that has a ton of language capacity. So we have to talk to the right hemisphere to awake in the right hemisphere. And to do lists don't awake in the right hemisphere. And praise doesn't do awake in the right hemisphere. But letting somebody know that they've changed us that awakens the right hemisphere likes that a lot. And that's the place where the neurons of secure attachment actually are developed. That's a place it's between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, where there's the most neural resilience and strength and growth that happens when we have real relationships with people and that those tracts of neural tissue are what keep us calm and creative, even in the face of really big stuff. And also, let us see the really big stuff, because a lot of folks are walking around just trying to figure out how to get dinner on the table tonight and pay the rent or the mortgage. And that then keeps us from accessing our ability to see this beautiful planet and respond to this planet.

Marina Robb: It sounds like we need to slow down. We you know like we need to slow down.

Sarah Peyton: Yeah, slow down to speed up.

Marina Robb: People are saying that they're slow revolution. Big because actually, when I run around, I can't even notice the flower. I can't notice the cloud that's moving or the smell Oh, you know, and I think, you know, when I think of children and my childhood, but children, you know, generally I think it's the time isn't it at the time, they were say, I love playing outside because I have time and space. And I think part of the time is that they're seeing adults for the first time. Being a bit silly, yeah, a bit having fun, and they're slowing down as well. And so, because you talk about, you know, regulation and CO regulation, and there's something in that isn't there, if the adult is stressed out, then they're certainly not giving these cues that you're you speak of, you know, to the child and, and they're not being met, in any sense of delight or anything else, right.

Sarah Peyton: Yeah.

Marina Robb: I feel, I think it's so important. All these things I really do. And I wish that there was a kit when you become a parent, or even a teacher, you know, where you could actually pick up this stuff and, and do it for others. But do it for yourself, right? Because you've got to, we've got to do it for ourselves to each other. Yeah, we got to do it for each other.

Sarah Peyton: Love it love all the parents that we know that they get, so that they get this stuff and have some delight in their kids.

Marina Robb: Yeah, it's true. But it's hard. I say this in different times. It's hard to kind of be generous with the love that you might have when you're empty. Yeah. Running on Empty, isn't it? And there's something

Sarah Peyton: And all beloved parents are out there running on empty. Yeah, so how are they going to find the juice to stop until their kids are? Oh, and I see you it's every day when I see you. My heart swirls.

Marina Robb: Yeah, and to do genuine, genuinely, though, because there's something you know, I could take the script, I could read it and repeat what you said. But to do it genuinely, I have to slow down and I have to kind of stop and feel it. To express it. The message is definitely slow down. It's always about slowing down, I guess. And I guess. Yeah. To kind of, to finish the conversation. Is there? Are there any things that you would suggest that people could do for themselves? I suppose like, you know, we have talked about very, you know, about the other the planet, but what are some things that some kind of things that you would suggest that we could do to look after ourselves, whether that's about our body as well, you know, is there anything there that you feel would be, you would want to share

Sarah Peyton: one of the things we can do, I wrote the book you're reading so that people would be able to know your resume itself book. So that people would be able to do something that would be a little bit of a bridge between believing we have to do it ourselves and kind of starting to reach out for connection with others. Tender, beautiful hearts, I was just hit by a wave of acknowledgment of how vulnerable we are even in our adult friendships, how much we just need to be, you know, laughed and cared for. So there's, on my website, there's a button, if you go to sarahpeyton.com, there's a button that says start healing now, that lets people receive a whole series of guided meditations that we can sell those. That's the sort of thing we can do on our own guided meditations. Journaling, where you write letters to yourself, of appreciation and sweetness and delight, and one of the practices I enjoy is, but you can't I can't do it if I'm empty. But if I'm somebody else has done a little bit of filling of my tanks, I can wake up in the morning and greet Sara and say, Oh, I'm so happy, you're awake. Welcome to the world. You know, kind of a practice of self worth is quite something.

Marina Robb: Thank you so much there. Thank you for your warmth and your kindness and all the work that you're doing for us all. So I really appreciate you.

Sarah Peyton: I'm grateful for you and your voice in the world and for working with this wonderful kids sitting in circle

Marina Robb: thanks again for speaking to me, Sarah. I feel I've been invited to be kind to myself and gentle and warm with my own vulnerable parts, especially the ones that have not really been cared for. Do remember to go to our show notes to link to Sarah's work and download her free resources by clicking the button start healing now, as well as getting all the other behind the scenes content. If you're enjoying the Wildmind podcast, please help share it with others. Join me next week for episode 30 When I explore our basic emotional systems, and share a few more ideas to support healing ourselves. This is for our own personal development as well as for the work we do as parents, facilitators and practitioners. 

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Wild Minds Podcast. If you enjoyed it and want to help support this podcast, please subscribe, share and leave a rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Your review will help others find the show. To stay updated with the wild mines podcast and get all the behind the scenes content. You can visit theoutdoorteacher.com or follow me on Facebook at the outdoor teacher UK and LinkedIn. Marina Robb,

The music was written and performed by Geoff Robb.

See you next week. Same time, same place


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