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hello there you beautiful and awakening wonder thanks for joining me on the awakening with russell side channel although perhaps if you're on this channel you consider the other one to be the side channel this video is a conversation between me and my wife laura she wrote this book the joy journal for grown-ups which is about how craft and doing stuff with your hands stops you going nuts and it's about how creativity is an essential part of your personal awakening we had this conversation in a book shop near where i live it's a really lovely conversation she talks about breath techniques the benefits for mental health and it's just a lovely intimate conversation about simple accessible techniques for being present and how it is impossible to be happy if you cannot occupy the present moment 100 i've heard this a thousand times but never before from my wife so have a look at this conversation between me and laura brandt stay to the very inks there's loads of great stuff in it and please let me know in the comments what you think of it this idea of present and the idea of slow living and connection through the moment talk to us a little bit about that laura and about like how what you're talking about here connects to mental health and how you approach that idea through your book well i decided when going into this book i wanted when i knew i was going to be writing a book for the adult rather than child um and we did play around with the title the joy crafting book for adults and it was didn't sound quite as good as grown-ups also though the google searches yeah anything that has adult in it yeah i don't think i think a couple of people oh what are you doing there right now first you need latex a riding whip oh god so the joy jenna for grownups i always knew what i felt was probably most well what something i had observed to be quite honest with you was doing crafts in a group of um adult women or mixed groups was this sort of um sort of self-punishment that people go through so when they start doing the thing and it's like i'm not good at this i don't think oh no i won't show you oh no please no it's terrible i'm not going to show you and then it's this whole process of sort of like just realize that we're all here we're all beginners some of us have never done this i fully admit that some of the things in this book i've been doing for the first time you know it's not like i'm not an advanced candle maker but you'll find a candle making uh recipe in this book or craft or project whatever you want to call it because i found a way of making it kind of easily and um well enough good enough to use and to give to people um but obviously and i also write about this but you can take that further and find further skills if you if you have any interest in it but what i realized was that people feel insecure about their own capabilities and also like even tonight i'm you know i'm not i'm not anxious about it the word is probably excited and nervous i'm nervous about doing this because we've never done it before so people feel that about workshops groups um a really good i last year i ran a series of sort of online um i called them joyful beginners classes and they were really friends friends of friends people i knew i i didn't know some people when we were all logging on at kind of 8 p.m on a saturday night and one of my friends messaged me just before and she was a girl i went to school with and i did art with and i talked about art and my art room experiences quite a lot because it was very defining for me in many ways um do you message me saying i'm so nervous about doing the online group and i was like gosh i hadn't even thought about that somebody would be nervous about but what we were doing we were making i think that was the candle making so she was nervous about not being able to keep up not really knowing if she would have to ask questions and it'd be on the group and zoom does create a barrier um but i realized i needed to include some calming techniques so i wrote the book um did a workshop last year and i applied uh so i trained as a hypnobirthing teacher after the birth of our little peggy um who's now three and a half so four in june um i trained as a hypno birthing teacher because i really really felt passionately about helping women with fear of birth and i did put hip rebirthing techniques to action in both of our births and they well they either worked or i just got lucky in some ways but i really did uh with the help of russell focus on my breathing and i am not someone who russell tries to get me to do wim hof breathing and i actually get so angry i'm like screaming like i don't want to do this i hate this i hate the feeling the feeling of those wim hof exercises they bring stuff up like you're like you know really i'll wrestle one your lips were going blue and you were so angry at the same time and i was like yeah it really brought stuff up for me and so i pl i wrote in the beginning of this book and i asked my friend so the the girl that really inspired me to do hypnobirth is called holly decrees so i called her up and i said i want to do an exercise for sort of a fear release but for creativity and i've got this idea that we do a breathing technique like a hypnobirthing breathing technique but what we do towards the sort of latter part when you're grounded in the breathing is you sort of tune into your senses and you get present with where you are and it's about um the senses so ultimately it's a tailored breathing technique that i learned through hypnobirthing but for your senses so that's at the beginning and it's um called moving into calm because that's what i feel hopefully it does it moves us from the place of go go go ready for anything fight or flight or whatever it is into a grounded sort of ready for okay i've never done this before i feel okay about that this is okay i'm gonna be okay i'm gonna enjoy it and you could notice like i'm doing this now but i'm also just talking to you notice that the sky is so beautiful in the little bit behind there that it's like pink and blue and purple and it looks amazing against the turquoise roof and i was just then thinking i've got to just tune in for a minute because when the nerves come up i really need to recognize where i am that's really important point i like that thing that you said with the marbling exercises in the book that you did in one of your online classes or groups or whatever you call them where you said addressing that idea of embarrassment which i think is shame in three syllables look people people don't want to show stuff and you said i'll just show your like we'll say what you did so what what i did was um marbling's actually if anyone's done it quite hard so it's fine marbling well it's if you're doing kids marbling and um you're using probably kid-friendly marbling inks you put them into the water and you swirl it around and you put the paper on and you lift it off and wow voila but if you buy marbling inks that dry quickly it's like pouring a very liquidy nail varnish on top of water so you pour this stuff on and if you haven't bought i think it's alum or whatever the name of this the thing is you put in the water if you haven't prepared yourself with all the different chemicals and the gloves and the glasses and the mask and everything else and you want to just do it quickly and like i was with this group it kind of becomes quite stressful because you put it on and you're like so i did it with this group of people i'm really close to and it was funny because some of them are not they wouldn't call themselves crafty in fact one of them was covered in bin liners because i had said that this stuff stains the work services sophie so she was covered in sort of bin laden for like right how long's this gonna take what's it looks like but just go with it try and enjoy it so everybody hated their marbling uh pictures they were all like this isn't working one friend was googling better paper to do it on one friend was looking up different inks the other one was worried about you know whether it could go it wasn't going on the thing she wasn't what she wanted the marbling swills didn't look quite right so at the end i said right do you know what i would like you all to just show the thing that you're least happy with so show the thing you're least happy with and everybody held their piece up and it was so alarming that these pieces were so beautiful and and different and unique and yes some of them had bigger holes of the paper because the thing you're trying to achieve with marvel marbling is that you cover the paper that you don't have bubbles of where the water's not taken you know the colors not taking the paper but that didn't seem to matter because they were so lovely and beautiful and you can cut out little gift tags from them and all sorts so i made them all show that their least favorite and it sort of broke the ice right at the end of the session but it worked they all felt much better about their best pieces i suppose that what that shows is that our perception about our own creativity can often be warped and having a practice around it makes it like less of an esoteric and abstract practice rather something that's just at the end of your own arm and that's something that's within you and something that's available for us to explore i just thinking then about a conversation i had once and i'm going to say it is because it makes me look good it was with their producer rick rubin and and with their meditation teacher jack cornfield where they contested that creativity is the what a human is that is who you are is your own creativity so by what i like about what you're doing is you're bringing these you're making these things democratic and accessible rather than something that's at the end of some long laborious punishing selective process you know that clearly impacts people because that's why your mates are embarrassed to show something you know there's we're all trying to appeal to some standard that we imagine is there so that that democratizing of craft and our i love well i hope you enjoyed that let me know about how you stay present in nature what crafts you participate in and how i should better convey the necessary connection between like craft activity folk activity mental health spirituality and some of the more high-minded or at least uh radical political ideas that we discuss elsewhere on our channels if you're not remember our mailing list community yet sign up right now with all sorts of fantastic stuff live zoom calls conversations that are live gabor matty i've just done a conversation with it's absolutely fantastic they're only like 70 seats people came saw gabor mate i do a zoom call every friday with people and there's a one day event with wim hof and vandana shiva and a whole bunch of other breath work teachers yoga teachers and like people that are interested in craft and making and exploring and scoring is a fantastic event you can come to that as a link in the description to that as well stay free

Channel: Awakening With Russell

Views: 40,980

Keywords: Russell, brand, russellbrand, awakening, spiritual, spirituality, wellbeing, wellness, USA, UK

Id: -j-_4p1YyTo

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022