This is Verla Fortier of your Outside Mindset show. I created this podcast because I believe that a vital piece of the health and wellbeing puzzle missing because of our huge focus on diet and exercise. That piece of the puzzle is reclaiming Your Outside Mindset. By your outside mindset, I mean the time you spend outside close to trees, lakes, plants, gardens, and  appreciating and protecting this gift that nature gives to you whether we are in the city or country. For more on how to reap the health and happiness benefits of your time in green space and how you can in turn give back to nature in simple ways please check out my books on Amazon: 1) Take Back Your Outside Mindset: Live Longer, Stress Less, and Control Your Chronic  Illness and 2) Optimize Your Heart Rate: Balance Your Mind and Body With Green Space. As I have said you this podcast is about highlight the link between your personal health to your time spent outdoors in nature. And I recognize that that relationship will not exist if we are not taking care of nature too, it’s a two street. I want this podcast to help us identify the little things to help out ourselves and our planet, to say them out loud so that we  feel better, and so we can feel like we are making a difference however small. This solo podcast episode is about managing difficult emotions when loved ones move away. I am working on managing my emotions as both my kids who are Canadian settle in London England.

The first things kind people might say to me is : oh that must be hard having them both so far away or you must miss them.. and both are true in moments. And because I have the tools that I use to manage my chronic illness which is systemic lupus or SLE, I find this is a time in my life when again I can view the situation with fear as a loss or with curiousity as an opportunity to learn something new. And I know from my hero Ellen Langer Stanford social psychologist that “every thought affects every part of the body” so what I say to others matters if I want to feel good about my siutaion with my kids living away.

For my recent trip to England I packed my 5 point plan.

1. Noticing difficult emotions as they arise. So here they are: anger, fear, stress. So before I left I had negative and fearful thoughts like “why do I have to get on this plane, contribute to climate change to see my kids?” I am still naming these various emotions watch them come and go. I do my best not to judge them and try to watch them come and go like the weather.
2. I pack my outside mindset with me everywhere. it is my guiding star. The kids, who also have outside mindsets – thank goodness already know that all I wanted to do was walk outside with family in green space while I was there. We all know this is where we are our best selves – smiling more, more relaxed, and noticing new things to keep us in the present. As Ellen Langer says simply noticing is mindfulness. So I ended up having so much fun outdoors with mu kids in England. We took a train to Lulworth Cove, near Bournemouth  and hiked together for 4 hours, we spent an entire rainy day strolling around Hampstead Heath Park in London, and we spent two days roaming the grounds of Leeds Castle in Kent County. And I have the social media pictures to prove it on IG, facebook and linkedin.
3. Dr Ellen Langer says that when we are having fun, we are being mindful. And when we are mindful we are attracted to others and they are attracted to us. The poet Keats must have known this too. When we  toured his house in Hampstead, we learned that when he became very sick before his death in his early twenties, he became more and more jealous of his lover and asked her “who have you smiled with today?” When I moved back to my hometown of Pine Falls I noticed that everyone liked to find humor – to laugh. You meet someone on the street, chat, and have a laugh about something. I believe this has something to do with the native community close by Sagkeeng and more so in Pine Falls where laughter is used so often and so beautifully to articulate and recognize loss.
4. Hand on my heart and say good for you, you are doing the best you can, and everything is ok. Langer goes even further and tells us to “assume everthing is going to be ok.” What can I thank right now? The fresh air, a tree, a bird….and notice how that feels.
5. Climate action. I initially thought I might tag on a trip to Thailand since I was already over in Europe visiting the kids. And as ±I become more climate aware, I cancelled that trip and decided to keep more side trips into green space local. Since I took a long 6 hour trip overseas I decided to keep my side trips – if any – local. This became my conscious climate action. And next time I visit London I plan to get a rail pass as an incentive to keep my travel to the UK countryside local. So I am making adjustments with the climate in mind and I will keep talking about these with you, my kids, my friends to keep climate action close to and in our lives.

 I am still in the process of reframing my emotional response to my kids both buying houses and settling in the UK. I want to use this an opportunity for growth, curiousity and love rather than focus on fear, loss or scarcity. Yes I have moments when I really miss them. And this  is my 5 point plan to maintain a positive mindset to manage my emotional response:

1. Noticing difficult emotions as they arise. Allow and see as weather patterns that come and go. Practice saying to myself and assuming that everything is ok now and going to be ok in the future.
2. Pack my outside mindset – spend as much time as possible outside in nature with my family no matter where I am.
3. As Dr Ellen Langer says that when we are having fun, we are being mindful. And when we are mindful we are attracted to others and they are more attracted to us. Now there’s incentive for a 71 year old!
4. Hand on my heart and say good for you, you are doing the best you can, and everything is ok, and find something, anything to thank. Notice how I feel when I do this, Stay curious.
5. Take positive climate action and talk about with family and friends it even if it is just some small adjustment.

So please join me in optimizing this 5 point plan in your life wherever you are and wherever you go.

Another Ellen Langer phrase I used when I was visting my kids is  don’t worry about making the right decision – make the decision right.

So applied to my kids both buying houses and settling in the UK. I can say and believe that I am going to make that decision right. And here are some of the reasons why it is right already;

1. They are together over there and see each once a week or every two weeks. They are close. They have each other.
2. They love their jobs where they are valued and expected to take holidays.
3. This is an opportunity for me to get to grow, be curious, and learn about another culture and country. All this while I am happy with the life I have designed for myself in my home town of Pine Falls, Manitoba. I have a peaceful home in the country where I can manage my SLE easily with support of friends and nature nearby.
4. I will have my own bedroom to stay in each house – and the kids and their partners have made it clear that this is why they bought homes with extra bedrooms.
5. Both my boys are happy in their marriage/relationships and all of us get along well and want the best for one another. Put this way, the moves are the right decision and I will keep track of and be curious about the many more reasons for why these moves of my kids to UK are working well  for all of us.

So I have applied my outside mindset to my emotional response to my kids moving away – with the same set of tools I use to help me to manage my SLE and my previous diagnosis of breast cancer. With my outside mindset and Langer’s mindfulness techniques I can see the opportunity for growth and abundance rather than scarcity. I know I will continue to have moments when I really  misses them. And that is when I go to my 5 point plan: 1) notice emotions 2) be outside as much as possible. Notice  3) smile and laugh, find humor. Notice  4) Put my hand on my heart and thank anything. Notice 5) take small climate action. Notice

Taken together I find that all this noticing (mostly outside in nature) leads to an endpoint of  kind of mindful optimism —and assuming that everything is ok.  BTW Ellen Langer’s new book The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health is amazing. My kids have copies and we talk about her ideas as we integrate them into our outside mindset practices.  Ellen Langer and I are planning another podcast interview again soon. If you would like to hear a previous episode with Professor Ellen Langer go to Episode 22 and have fun optimizing my 5 point plan for dealing with any new challenge in your life – because we all need a little more of your outside mindset.