My biggest learning method appears to be experimentation.

I remember last summer when I found myself making cheese; I became obsessed with making cultured cream cheese. I have quite a few cheesemaking books and watched hours of videos making various cream cheeses, from Fromage Blanc to Boursin. I settled on making Fromage Blanc.

The Summer Cheese Experiment

Picture the middle of summer, Christmas is fast approaching, and I’ve decided to make Fromage Blanc so I can make a cheesecake for Christmas Day. It started well:

● Fresh milk – check.

● Flora Danica culture – check.

● All equipment needed – check.

I started to warm my milk up to the correct temperature and got distracted for what felt like one second, overshooting the target. No problem, I thought as I whipped it off the stove to cool down.

I waited and waited some more, checking every 10 minutes, then every 20 to 30 minutes, and finally a couple of hours later I was present enough to wonder why it was taking so long.

It was a typical summer's day, and it was a lot of milk: 8 litres. I finally looked at the room temperature, and it was 26°C. No wonder I was having trouble getting the milk down to 22°C, and worse, I had to hold it there for 12 hours.

Adjusting on the Fly

I moved the whole operation under a ceiling fan and turned on the ancient air conditioning unit, hoping that as night closed in the temperature would drop. In my impatience, I started dropping ice cubes sealed in plastic bags into the milk. The ice would melt, and I would renew the ice cubes several times until the temperature started dropping.

At 10:30 pm, I had managed to get the milk temperature down to 22°C, but the room temperature was still 24°C. I added my culture, said a prayer, and went to bed.

Unbelievably, it worked. My 8 litres of milk yielded so much cream cheese I also made the most wonderful French onion dip from scratch. Have you ever caramelised onions over a hot stove in the middle of summer for 60 minutes?

My family are used to me. They ask, "What’s for dinner?" I quite often respond, "It’s an experiment." I try new things all the time, especially trying to make anything and everything from scratch. I’ve made Worcestershire sauce, Spicy Texan BBQ Sauce, focaccia, and even kombucha, and those are just the things that worked. Plenty of others didn’t work out, thank goodness I have chickens. Some have been surprising successes, like the French onion dip, which was divine.

Bringing the Experiment to Life

I hadn’t thought about it until recently, perhaps I approach the less tangible parts of my life the exact same way. I try something, notice what happens, adjust, and eventually discover what works for me.

I once went to the Starlight Festival in Bangalow and listened to a guy talk about breathwork and how, in his practice, he was working toward a two-minute breath, setting a pace that he would then endeavour to hold for one hour. That is a total of 30 breaths (in and out) during that hour. I was in awe that someone could slow their breath down so much. I had already been working on slowing my breath and using my breath to improve my heart rate variability, but nothing this extreme.

I had to give it a go.

My starting breath rate was 6 breaths a minute: 10 seconds in and 10 seconds out. I had a long way to go and got down to practising. I don’t remember how long it took, weeks or months, but with daily practice, I eventually could take a one-minute breath (30 seconds in and 30 seconds out) and hold that pace for ten breaths. I never progressed past that as it felt like my limit, and I don’t often practise that now, years later, but I know with a little practice I can get back there.

Around the same time, I discovered Florian Dagoury, Mr 10-Minutes, on Instagram. He holds the static apnoea world record (breath hold) at 10 minutes and 42 seconds. I found watching him inspirational. He would be sitting so peacefully, usually at the bottom of a pool, and that somehow helped me slow my breath down.

Spirituality as an Experiment

I think experimentation best describes what I am doing with my spiritual practices too. I don’t conform to any system of spirituality.

● Spirituality: I’m not a witch, nor do I have a coven, yet my practice includes intention, ritual, sigils, and making amulets. I have a place of focused intention that I don’t call an altar, where I use the elements, cardinal directions, and my growing understanding of the world in which I operate to practise my craft.

● Mediumship: I am not a medium, nor do I practise mediumship in the way I was taught, but I can see people from the other side when I am reading Tarot. They often appear to me through a reversed King or Queen. I can usually recognise enough to describe how their personality came across while they were alive so that the person I am reading for recognises who I am talking about. I have learned to recognise these appearances more through a bandicoot experience rather than through any particular method I was taught, but that is a story for another time.

● Scripture: I am not a practising Christian though my Christian roots run deep. I have nine Bibles and at least another 25 religious texts and commentaries. I even have my grandmother’s copy of Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, a huge leather-bound book bigger than a lever-arch folder that allows me to trace words back to their original Hebrew and Greek. I do try to live as Jesus lived, with love, compassion, and acceptance, while remaining connected to the Holy Spirit within. I also draw wisdom from the Torah, Bhagavad Gita, and Tao Te Ching. There is so much truth in the pages of many religious texts, Christian or not.

Perhaps that is the part of experimentation that I have come to value the most. It isn’t just about discovering what works; it is also about discovering what doesn’t work and adjusting my practices accordingly.

Sometimes it’s realising that I am trying too hard to control the outcome and instead learning to leave the whole thing overnight and see what it looks like in the morning.

I am experimenting on myself, an experiment of one, to understand what brings me into alignment and into the fullness of all that I am, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Finding Clarity Through Uncertainty

Most extraordinarily, my penchant for experimentation has been my biggest ally in dealing with uncertainty. It’s a way of telling myself that I am just experimenting, and therefore I am no longer so fiercely attached to the outcome. Some of my experiments have been very small and very low risk, and these have helped to build my tolerance for letting go of the outcome.

I do love the successes, but I am also learning to be gracious when I miss the mark. Rather than see it as a failure, I can reframe it as learning.

I think that is why experimentation has become such a useful way for me to navigate uncertainty. I don’t have to be certain before I begin. I only have:

● To be curious enough to try.

● To pay attention to what happens.

● To be willing to adjust along the way.

For me, it always comes back to clarity. We often want clarity before we take action, as though knowing is what gives us permission to begin. I’m not sure clarity works that way. I think clarity is often what the experience gives us. We try something, we notice what happens, and we learn something that we couldn’t have known from where we were standing before.

Perhaps we don’t always need to know where something will lead before we begin. Sometimes we just need to be willing to conduct the experiment.

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• What could you try, simply to see what happens?

• Is there something you've dismissed because it didn't work the first time?

• What have you learned through experience that you could never have learned by reading about it?

May this day bring you peace. May you feel the warmth of the sun on your face.

Until next time,

Leeanne

P.S. I’d love to hear from you. Where in your life do you experiment? Simply hit reply and tell me.

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