British weather and being your own Guru

Gretel Hallet, came on our Chocolate Fairy Training last year and is running workshops in East Anglia.  If you live in the area and would like to attend a Beyond Chocolate course, Gretel would love to hear from you!  Meet Gretel.

I am cross with the British weather. Not for the first time, either. Why can’t it ever do anything properly?! By that I mean, be really hot, blow really hard, snow really heavily. Because it just doesn’t. We get half-hearted summers where there are a few warm days that lure us into the promise of heat and then it cools down again and we shiver in our flimsy clothing. We get winds that seem too laid back to blow down any more than a few twigs. We get snow that falls just enough to throw us into a panic of confusion, but not enough to shut things down properly.

By now you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, I don’t want things to shut down completely, thank you very much’. But think of the alternative… services disrupted, trains running hours late, car and bus journeys delayed and dangerous, people struggling to get to work and the shops, roads treacherous, rails slippery, pavements icy …. Wouldn’t it be better if we just couldn’t go out at all? What if we just accepted that there was too much snow and ice to go anywhere, and stayed at home?

Emergency services apart (I’m not going there with this bit of the argument), it would be much safer and take all the uncertainty out of the situation if the weather would just be severe enough for us to have to stay home.

I get very annoyed with the inevitable martyr who struggles in to work, arrives several hours late, exhausted, wet through, and then more or less spends the day in a state of collapse in a chair, gasping, ‘It was just so awful out there!’

While I have rung in to say I won’t be going to work because the weather is too bad.

‘Martyr made it in today,’ my boss will say, in an accusing tone, having also struggled in to work, endangering herself and other people by insisting on driving on icy, ungritted roads …

And to return, briefly, to the emergency services: how many motorists, pedestrians etc do they have to rescue because people insist on going out in dangerous conditions? How many people die because the weather isn’t quite bad enough to make them stay at home?

And what’s this got to do with Beyond Chocolate?

Aha! Well, it’s all about Being Your Own Guru. Saying, ‘actually, this isn’t right for me’, and doing what is right for you and no-one else.

Which is also about Tuning In to find out what is right for you.

And then doing what is right for you.

Maybe eating that huge slice of chocolate cake is right for you just now. Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe trawling 6 miles through snow and ice is right for you just now.

Maybe it isn’t.

Maybe a dance class is right for you just now.

Maybe a run through the park is right for you now instead.

Maybe you just need to snuggle up under a duvet and watch a weepy film.

Beyond Chocolate doesn’t tell you what to do; it gives you the tools to do what’s right for you and what feels good for you and that may change day to day. Be Your Own Guru, Tune In, how is it for you today?

Excuse me, but the Snowplough has just arrived to take me to work ….