Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We have to learn to cool down our minds, not control them, not get rid of thoughts, but ways to cool them down, to get the focus into the body rather than constant yibbering, saying, I'm not good, nobody else is like this. I'm alone. We have to cool down that thought stream. That's really our illness, not the fact that we're being attacked by a foreign army.
The army is the mind.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Annabel Heseltine and you're very welcome to Hope Springs.
Today we're bringing you a conversation that you might not be expecting with a broadcaster and writer who made a career out of interviewing the world's most famous people. Ruby Wax has done pelvic floor exercises with Pamela Anderson, chatted about shoes with Imelda Marcus and chatted up Tom Hanks.
But then in 2006, life got in the way.
Today, she's a mental health campaigner with a Masters in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University and an OBE for her work campaigning for mental health awareness.
To me, she's a beacon of light in a dark world. Incurably honest, Ruby has been there, got the sad T shirt and knows that by talking about her own experiences, she opens the door for others to do the same. Bringing the black dog out of the dark shadows. I began our conversation by asking her to take us back to a fateful moment nearly 20 years ago when she quit her job presenting a reality TV show called Cirque du Celebrity and signed up for a master's degree via a stay in a psychiatric hospital.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: Cirque du Celebrite was a car crash, one which I've blocked from my mind until you've so kindly opened up the litigation. No, it was a horror show. I've never done a reality show. That was the one where I had to dress as a circus. You know, the guy who cracks a whip and I had a whip and then introduce D List celebrities to do death defying things. And, you know, when you're D List, you'll do anything to crawl back up to C List. So they would be hanging by a nostril and twirling with no underwear on, you know, and I was so ashamed that they wanted me to be all Graham Norton Y and perky, but I just wept. So I would talk about, you know, in that kind of a voice which isn't mine at all, with, you know, in this kind of corset, which was humiliating, you know, because, yeah, what I looked like wasn't fabulous.
And I had to crack the whip and introduce you to this horror show. And then they finally said, oh, we're going on another season. I went gray. And then they said, no, we are. You're not.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: But you can't lie. You are one of the most honest, transparent, open people. And that is what I think I see in you. And I think everybody sees in you. And you've opened up for other people that opportunity to be honest, too, which is just what is so important.
But you had a breakdown.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: I didn't have a breakdown. Because of Cirque du Soleil. I wouldn't give them the credit, but I did. I have a depression. It's not a nervous breakdown. And I'd had it since I was a kid, but they didn't know the name for it. You know, where you sort of go to sleep, but you're awake. It's as if you're hibernating. And then you turn from a human into cement. And everybody says, oh, come on, perk up. Because I didn't think of that. And you can't move your arms. I mean, that's just too challenging. So nobody knew what it was.
It happened during my. When I had my third child, somebody, a doctor, said, you know, you have depression. And I was so relieved because I thought, this is a coma, or I have a brain tumor. But anyway, I had depression, but I didn't. They came every five years, so it was really a surprise. And then it becomes, you know, if they hand you a menu, you can't decide what to have. I mean, in a bigger sense than that. Like, should I have a manicure or jump off a cliff? Nothing matters. That's really hard to do a show in that state. And eventually I had to change my career. So I decided I'd become a psychotherapist. You know, it's always a wounded healer. And I was terrible. They made me do 200 hours, and I'd be sitting in front of the patient client, and I'd go, oh, come on, just cut to the punchline. Except I did love the smorgasbord. Of all the great therapists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, so that, you know, somehow you could find out what's wrong with you. And everything led to my madness. So I felt relieved that I wasn't the only one. You know, Freud's clients made me look like beige. So then I ended up while I was at school for psychotherapy in a mental ward. So my point is, mental illness doesn't have to do with the situation. That's why it's mental illness. If you have a trauma, you have a trauma. Something terrible happened. If you're in an accident, you'd have a reaction, you'd have ptsd. But depression comes even after you've won an award.
It has nothing to do with it. So I was already. I was in psychotherapy school and I ended up in the clinic. And then they said, you can't come back because you've missed too much. I thought, you guys should have empathy, compassion. And I don't think that was very compassionate. But they gave me an honorary degree later. Anyway.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: You did a brilliant one woman show. I think it was around two years.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Frazzled. Yeah.
[00:05:30] Speaker C: Yes. And you know, you said. Well, as you just said, perk up. Well, actually, didn't you think about that? That is something. You would do it if you could, but you can't.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: And I think that it's impossible to explain to somebody. They think it has to do with being sad. So all you have to do is go to a circus. It doesn't have to do. It's an unfortunate word. It has. It's like saying, can you please describe what it is to have diabetes?
I can use as many words as I can, but I write about it really well in my books.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: But you didn't intend to write about, did you, or to take a show?
[00:06:02] Speaker A: No, I mean, I. I went back to school to learn to be a psychotherapist. And Ed said, my husband said, someday you're going to put this together with show business. And I thought, no, I've left it. I've left it. I have my new friends, I carry my books, we go to the cafeteria. I had a whole new world. And then I thought, I'm not going to end up a therapist because I was crap at it. I did over 300 hours.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: That's a lot of hours.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: That's a lot. Well, you have to get 400. So I never made it, but I just. I was just trying to busy myself. And I was always interested in the mind. Ever since I was in high school, I was fascinated with mental illness. And then much later, I found out why. Because my family going all the way back were in institutions, but I only found that out after doing who do you think you are?
[00:06:49] Speaker C: I watched that and it was incredibly moving. What was it like for you going back to Austria and learning that about your family?
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Well, they never mentioned that they were even in the war. And I'd say, where are all my relatives? And they'd say, you haven't got any. I was suspicious, but I assumed they weren't lying.
And then they. You had to give the producers and the researchers all these papers. And my mom left a suitcase in the attic that was filled with postcards from my dad, who was in prison, writing in code so he could still run a business. And then love letters from, you know, my mom liked a guy in a uniform and pictures of her. She was an it girl. And it was from 1939, so they were one of the last to get out. I gave that to the researchers. They never told me anything. So when they took me to Austria, I didn't know what to expect. And I kept saying, whenever we went to an archive, I said. They said, guess what your great aunt did? And I said, was she an actress? Because I kept thinking I came from great acting, a great actress, they would say. So I had my face ready, and they said she was insane.
And I said, well, is she an actress part of the time? And they went, no, she was institutionalized for 30 years. And I said, well, maybe there was a drama group. And then they held up the next one. They said, what do you think she did? That was like a game show. And I said, is she an actress? They said, no, she was insane, too. Then we went to visit all the institutions in Austria. And they're quite beautiful, I saw. They look sunny.
[00:08:19] Speaker C: But can we talk a bit about your childhood? Because you talked about depression, and it was all this trauma that had been carried, which was never spoken about at home. In fact, one of the things that you said on that BBC program was how you didn't realize your parents loved each other.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: I don't think they did.
[00:08:36] Speaker C: But the love letters that you read when you were there suggested.
[00:08:40] Speaker A: Oh, I wouldn't say they were love letters to each other, but they were.
[00:08:44] Speaker C: Written to each other.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: No, not really. My mom did have soldiers writing and saying back to, let's run away together or I'll take you to a ski resort. I don't think there were love letters. Maybe I said it to be dramatic, but I don't remember that.
Maybe I said it. I can't really.
[00:09:02] Speaker C: You didn't say it?
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Maybe I've blocked it.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: There was a letter in particular that was written by your mother, and she said, I'm crying as I think I cry about it every day. And it was read out by. Translated by somebody in Austrian.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's right. That surprised me.
[00:09:17] Speaker C: I found that so moving because you've written about the way your parents treated you and how for you to say, I didn't realize they loved each other. Just Showed how little love you must have felt in your own home.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: Well, they certainly, by the time I came around, weren't in love. And it must have been so dramatic that they married just before they had to flee. So that must have been heightened. It. You know, let's grab this one.
Maybe if they stuck around, they wouldn't have been together. I really. I wasn't there. And I'm sure they were delightful people when they were young, but by the time I came, they were at each other's throats.
[00:09:53] Speaker C: And mine, I was going to say, and yours. I mean, that story you write about how your father raced across the street.
[00:09:59] Speaker A: Oh, I have a new book called I'm not as well As I Thought I Was, which is out now. Yes, let's get that in.
[00:10:05] Speaker C: And it's really good.
[00:10:06] Speaker A: That's about trauma. I mean, that's where I ended up in an institution just about a year ago or two years ago. And they said, you have to do EMDR for trauma. I said, trauma's an Oprah word. I don't have trauma. But they insisted on it. When you're in an institution, you can't argue and say, I'd rather take a face painting. So she did emdr, and gradually, gradually, she got to what really happened and made me not be funny about it because I made my career on imitating my parents.
[00:10:33] Speaker C: Were your parents funny?
[00:10:34] Speaker A: Oh, my God. In a vicious way. So my first book was how do youo Want Me? Which Carrie Fisher.
[00:10:39] Speaker C: That was your autobiography?
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Yeah, Carrie Fisher and said, you parents are almost as crazy as mine. But they were crazy in a hilarious, dark Philip Roth, Jonathan Franzen kind of way. I can't do, you know, now I've put myself in the corner. But she had that voice that was hysterical. Would you say I'm hysterical to people on the street? She'd drop people on the street and say, would you describe me as hysterical? So she would talk to people on the street to get evidence of how crazy I was. And I made a film about them. The first documentary I made was Miami Memoirs, where you saw my mother cleaning a Shagpile carpet behind me because I'd come in without taking a shower, outside of my house rather than inside. And she's on all fours, following me on a Shagpile, two sponges in her hand, and then says the great line, civilized people don't bring sand in a building. And my girlfriend worked for Martin Scorsese in New York, obviously much later on. And I had to interview him. And I was terrified. And he just Looked at me and said that line. He said, melanie, his secretary showed me your film. He said, that's one of the most frightening scenes I've ever seen.
Your mother chasing you. Not chasing, she's on all fours and screaming. Those lines.
[00:11:58] Speaker C: Reading through. There's been moments when I was very, very touched and moved. And I think from this book, from this book, but from the BBC show and also it was the little vignettes. It's the idea of aged 5 not allowed to lie on your bed once it had been made by your mother. And I just had this sense of this lonely ruby on her own, who didn't. At that stage, you didn't know what it was that you were living with and how you were living. But I don't want to dwell on what's obviously a very difficult childhood for you, but it has created for a monster. No, you're not a monster.
[00:12:36] Speaker A: No, no. But a good career, a career that's gone.
[00:12:40] Speaker C: I mean, when I look at your career and the books you've written and the different things that you've done, it is absolutely phenomenal. But what is also phenomenal is that you went from being this incredible TV personality interviewer, getting people to do these crazy things, you know, lying beside Pamela Anderson. It's a moment, let's face it, it wasn't such a great moment when Trump decided to down the plane to pitch. But I think when we talk about trauma, it's then that thing that you take from this, something so incredibly positive. And this has come out in your books and it's come out in the way you're living your life now. And I wanted to talk to you about generational trauma and also post traumatic growth, because I wonder, I think that this is where we are now in this world. But before we move on to that, can we just talk about some of the things that you've been very strongly campaigning for? For instance, we talk about the stigma, stigma of mental health. And I saw you on the Laura Kunsberg show.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Oh my God, was I terrified? Terrified. Because I'm not, I, I'm not a political voice and because I have dyslexia, so I speak in jazz rather than lateral sentences that make any sense. You might notice that from this you're going to have to edit Logic together because I jump around. That makes a good comedy writer, but a terrible political communicator. So my daughter in law's Katie Balz, and she sat with me the next day and told me about the news and how to say it. They didn't ask one of those questions. So I was now with the head of NATO and was trying to make sense, but luckily I had information.
[00:14:20] Speaker C: Yeah, you had Baroness Amos and you had Mark Sedwell as National Security Adviser. It was too quite sort of worthy heavy.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: But I said, what are they yipping about? Because, you know, we've got Trump in the. In the chariot coming over fast, so they better get it straightened out because we really don't care. Trump really doesn't care what the opinion is here, so they should really hunker down now and make plans for when that happens. I also said to the guy next to me, head of Civil Service, you know, that therapy would be a really good thing to do before they start negotiations, because otherwise it's just kids throwing sand at each other in a sand pit. That's what it sounds like when you see Question Time. Everybody's too angry to actually hear each other, and that's why we're in this mess. I don't have the answer of what to do, but how to do it. I mean, that's why I'm into understanding how to regulate the mind. And I can't do it to the masses, but individuals can learn how to steady their cortisol and then that trickles to the next and to their kids and to the community and to the world. And I always. My thing is, go fix yourself before you try to save the world, because you're throwing your neurosis all over everything.
[00:15:32] Speaker C: And the danger is that he's going to continue to do that.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And the woman, what's her name?
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Baroness Amos.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: Baroness Amos said, well, he always changes his mind about everything. And I said, smell the roses. Come on, that's four years ago now. He's really nuts.
But if she wants to think that he's going to change his mind, let her. You thought you were scared of flying. Get ready for Trump.
[00:15:54] Speaker C: I think we're all braced, but terrified because it's impossible to see where he's going to go. But let's go back to talking about this stigma and about mental health, because you are now a campaigner for mental health. And this was one of the things you were talking about. There's one in four people in this country who are affected by mental health every year, and it's terrifying numbers. And it's even more terrifying when you look. Break it down and you look at some of the trauma and mental health issues around young people.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: One in three.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: One in three, exactly.
Would you like to tell me a bit more about this and where did it start that you started to feel that you needed to campaign?
[00:16:32] Speaker A: I didn't campaign. I suddenly found myself having to write a show about mental illness, but I only did it in mental institutions. And then suddenly, I don't remember how it happened, they said, why don't you do this show outside of the institutions? And suddenly I found myself on stage, touring everywhere, going to Australia, New Zealand with a show about mental health. My theory was make people laugh and then you can. Their mouths are open. You could put anything in there. So I spoke in the first half doing, you know, doing a mental strip tease, using comedy, otherwise you're turning people off. And in the second half, I invite them to speak. And even in a in a thousand room thing, people bravely stood up and told their story and that became. The reward, is that people started opening their mouths. So I wasn't a campaigner, I just said, speak. And then it turned into.
In London, I invited the big boys of therapy, you know, Peter Fonagy and Mark Williams. I invited them into my theater in London and then said the public could come in. I had a whole host of therapists. And it became open day so that people who were. One woman said she was on the verge of suicide and suddenly five people ran to her and she came every week and she said that saved her. One woman said, I haven't been out of my house in 20 years. This is my first time out. Then you go, oh, now I see what I'm doing. I didn't do it to be a heroin. I did it because I wish somebody did that when I was ill. And then it turned into my charity, Frazzle Cafe, which is on. I run it every other Tuesday.
[00:18:08] Speaker C: Where is it?
[00:18:09] Speaker A: It's online.
[00:18:09] Speaker C: It's online.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: You go on frazzlecafe.org and you come on free all day. There's facilitators who. It's like aa, but it's for people who are frazzled, which is everybody. And people speak from the heart. There's no cocktail chatter. And then there's breakout groups. But whatever country they're in, whatever color, whatever age, when somebody speaks, they feel heard. And you just feel this compassion sweep over the screen because we're looking in each other's eyes, nobody's distracted. And that's love.
[00:18:42] Speaker C: So you went on tour with a Buddhist monk?
[00:18:45] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's from my book, how to Be Human. A Buddhist monk and a neuroscientist.
[00:18:50] Speaker C: Exactly. Geylong, Tubton and Ashrampura.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:54] Speaker C: I first met you at a retreat at the sort of a turbocharged ashram where there was 31 of us and we were there for five days.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Five days.
[00:19:03] Speaker C: And I remember the first night there was 31 of us. That was 31 stories and there were two or three people who had had suicidal ideation was one person who tried to commit suicide. And actually by the end of it, I thought, how does Ruby do this? You know, it's exhausting. I came away feeling quite overwhelmed, actually. And yet I know that some of those people, you really were struggling. And Tubdin said to me later, these are Ruby's people. But you take that so seriously, which you should. But I know you didn't just finish at the end of the day and it was a long day, but you were actually going to people's rooms to support them and help them if they'd had an emotionally difficult time. How do you cope with that?
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Well, that was. That's my calling in a way. I was trained at Oxford, so I know how to teach mindfulness and I know about cognitive therapy. It's not for trauma, but it's an. It's a combination of the two. Tuktin is the best mindfulness trainer there is without using the B word. You know, we're not Buddhists, but it's a way to lower the cortisol and focus your attention in a world that's filled with weapons of mass distraction. That's you want to be happy, be able to focus on what you want and not get dragged away. Good luck. So we're training that attentional focus which is mindfulness. I do the neuroscience and I make it amusing. He does the real thing and I just taught a two day mindfulness course for the Mind Body Spirit Festival. So I like the teaching. I haven't done it before, but on stage I do. I used to in frazzle do some teaching, but they couldn't tell. They still thought it was comedy and that's really a bonus. Keep it funny. And then when you need to go dark, they're really listening. People are, you know, if their hearts are open, they can really hear you. Then you pull it up and you're funny again. So you made your point. If you just whine, people don't hear you. That's what campaigners do, they just whine. A lot of them.
[00:21:04] Speaker C: So it's a.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: But like writing not all of them.
[00:21:08] Speaker C: A good Shakespeare, where you basically have a really intense drama, but you lighten it up with the comedy, which makes.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: I'm exactly like Shakespeare. We work.
[00:21:16] Speaker C: Which is where you wanted to start, wasn't it.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: I did start at the Royal Shakespeare Company, so I must have learned a lot. Make them laugh and then you can be more serious than a serious person.
[00:21:25] Speaker C: The first evening I found it listening to the stories, I found it quite overwhelming. Over the next four or five days, you and Tubton and Rala brilliantly brought us together to talk about what it was that each of us was feeling. But also the education you gave us on. In a very easy way, you talked about where we are now in this 21st century. You use that brilliant line, you know, we just don't have the bandwidth. You go back to the.
[00:22:00] Speaker A: Our brains don't have the bandwidth to cope with the 21st century. Yeah.
[00:22:04] Speaker C: And you went back to something which really, absolutely resonated with me about how we live in this fight, flight and freeze. And I'd love to hear a bit more about what you think about where we are now and why we've got that.
[00:22:17] Speaker A: Well, that's why mindfulness has got a bad rap, I'd call it. It's like training for the mind, like doing sit ups at a gym. It's exactly the same thing. If you look in an MRI scanner, you would see certain areas of the brain toughen up, get more resilient. And those are the ones that help you with attentional focus, with self regulation. Boy, your mother can't do that for you. So a lot of the things at first I say you are not your fault. The culture is kind of ill. Okay, we always had problems, we had wars. But and I'm not saying that life was easy. You died at about 25. But now we're getting stressed about stress, which is the word. Frazzled. That's what frazzled means. So it's your thoughts that are sabotaging you. So you're not just saying I'm stressed. You're going, oh God, nobody else is stressed. I'm not supposed to be stressed. I'm not good enough. Everybody thinks I'm a fake. All this self talk is very new and it's because you just needed to know what the neighbors were doing. You might be keeping up with the neighbor. That's not so much pressure. But when you're competing with the rest of the world for who's the best looking, who's the most successful and who's the happiest, you're thrown into this typhoon of envy. And so that's fight and flight. Envy, competition in the wrong way. Lack, loneliness, that's the killer. People would rather have violence inflicted on them in prisons rather than be Isolated. And that's what it's created, this world where everything I'm talking about over here in the west seems to be, oh, everything's available except humans can't make up their mind when there's too much choice. And that becomes overwhelming. Then the guilt thinking, oh, we've got everything. I got this state of the art shoes, my teeth are my own. Then you feel the guilt and the shame. So we're really packing it in and I think we need some. We used to have community and that would help people self regulate because we pass our oxytocin, we pass that love chemical when we're in community.
Now, on your own, what are you going to do? And you're isolated. So now disease starts to kick in. So with mindfulness, you don't use a therapist. You're doing what a therapist would do, which is you're listening to your mind. All the horror, the shame, the whatever, but you're doing it with compassion. And when you do that, when you learn how to do that, the thoughts are just thoughts, they aren't real. If you get carried away in the stories and believe they're real, the neurons connect and they become real. So if you learn to kind of sit back and watch them like you'd watch a TV show, the ones that really you need. If you need to problem solve at work, go ahead, do it. But the garbage, like, why didn't he call me back? He didn't call me back because he doesn't like me. Maybe nobody likes me. You're able to sit like a conductor in an orchestra and go, I don't need those.
[00:25:03] Speaker C: So I remember you saying that you did a month long retreat.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Yeah, silent retreat.
[00:25:08] Speaker C: All these ideas that were coming into you about the other people and all their preconceptions.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: But then because I don't have the phone to distract myself thinking everybody else is having a better life. And then I get on the phone and call people I don't even like everything was taken. You're in silence and you start to see these thoughts. They come and go. If you don't hook on, you know, it's like believing a rumor. If you don't hook on, they're horrifying, then they're sort of sweet, then they're slightly pornographic, then they're murderous. And they're like Mark Williams always says, like clouds passing. Or if you were sitting next to a stream and there were, you know, debris going by, those are just thoughts. Some are horrible, some are nice, some are sweet to know that they keep moving Means you don't get stuck.
[00:25:50] Speaker C: You did that amazing cloud meditation where we all lay on the ground and looked up and it was wonderful. It was a lovely analogy that the idea of the thoughts of the clouds just passing by, but that the blue sky, which it was under it.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:03] Speaker C: Is still there. It's always there, even if you can't see it.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: The reason I like mindfulness, really, is because of the neuroscience. I mean, if, you know, they weren't teaching witchcraft at Oxford, and it's not witchful thinking. You actually are. The more you exercise scales at a piano, it affects an area in the brain. It's not because your fingers are getting smarter. So when you do this specific exercise, there is a part in the brain that's responsible for attention. You're exercising things and you actually change your brain. You're changing your brain.
[00:26:34] Speaker C: You had your brain scanned before and after this month, didn't you?
[00:26:38] Speaker A: Yeah. In frazzled, I went in and they gave me the startle test, where they show you images of horrifying things and they watch the amygdala light up. Then I did a retreat. This isn't how they really do research. This was just a quick fix for me. And sure enough, they'd show me the same pictures. And maybe the prefrontal was more active, which is the more rational part of your brain. But I didn't get startled. I was very, Well, I guess you'd say, cool, homostatic is the calm where we want to live, which means that things come in, but they don't kill you. It's just a thought.
[00:27:15] Speaker C: A lot of people say, oh, I can't do meditation. And I loved what Tubdin said, that we have 84,000 thoughts a day.
[00:27:24] Speaker A: Oh, did he say that?
[00:27:25] Speaker C: He said that. And he said each thought is an opportunity to exercise that meditation muscle. And the idea that you're going to have thoughts, of course you're going to have thoughts. They're going to come in. There's nothing wrong with that. You shouldn't beat yourself up. It's not that you're not doing it. It's just that you sit there and make that commitment. And every time, you gently take yourself back, every time you realize you've gone off and you're ruminating or whatever, well.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: You go back to a bodily sense because that's real, you really are breathing. So it's an anchor. When you notice the thoughts getting too vicious too quick, that's exactly the type of mind we want. Everybody goes, well, my mind's going 2,000 miles an hour. Let it. You're not. If you stop the thoughts, it's like a cigarette, you'll smoke more, just let them go. But you keep coming back to this. Feet on the ground or feeling yourself in the seat. But you have to practice it. Otherwise you go, you do what but a sit up looks ridiculous to somebody 100 years ago. You lie down, you get up. So it's always coming back. You're tasting coffee, you watch where your mind goes. I want to murder somebody, I hate doing this. Come back to the taste, sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. If you keep coming back, you allow the thoughts to go a million miles an hour. But coming back means eventually there's a part of you that is observing. Otherwise how would you know what you're thinking? So you go to that deeper part of you that just watches. And that's the very, the minute you're in that you're in the presence because you can't hear something yesterday or tomorrow. But it's a practice, you can't do it just sitting here. And I'm going to breathe now. People say, oh, I'm doing meditation, I'm breathing. It's one minute a day of doing a specific exercise. And they say after eight weeks the mind is changing. Just the way you're getting a six pack.
[00:29:08] Speaker C: So do you do it every day?
[00:29:09] Speaker A: I have to. I didn't do it today, so I have to get out of here and do it.
[00:29:12] Speaker C: Will you do it later on then? You'll do it later on?
[00:29:14] Speaker A: Yeah, but I do it on a bus or I do it standing in a queue. You can do moments and just think. It's like if you're lifting some weights on your arm, you can do it 40 minutes and you'll get a bicep. If you do it for about a minute, you'll still get something, it's not going to be bulging.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: And it's that habit. You want to keep the habit. So even I was advised, I did. I used to do it late at night and I didn't mind if I was exhausted and I was falling asleep and it was obsessive and then I let it go. And now I do it every morning when I get out of bed for 20 minutes and if I really can't, because maybe I've got a train to catch, I've overslept, I will just, even if I do 30 seconds, I've kept the habit going. And I think that's part of it, isn't it?
[00:29:55] Speaker A: It's, don't punish yourself if you don't do you know you don't go to the gym, don't whip yourself, you know, just say, okay, I've got a minute now. If you're on hold on the phone and you're getting that ridiculous music, go to the breath and then go listen to what your mind's doing. Come back to the breath. It's that back and forth. It's not just about, oh, I've blocked out the thoughts. The thoughts will never go until you're dead.
[00:30:19] Speaker C: So it's just being aware of yourself at that moment.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: You're training like a child having a hissy fit. You're not slapping it so the kid cries harder. You're gently, gently taking it back to something physical. They teach this in sports for athletes. Now come back to the body because your mind will go crazy when it comes to competition. So they teach them how to lower their cortisol and then do the activity. This isn't about chilling out. This is about knowing, okay, I have to pull back. It's like driving a car. Now I have to go into first. Now I go into turbo. Now I rest.
So that's what it gives you. But if you just say, oh, there's an emergency, I'm going to breathe, well, you might as well jump out of an airplane with no parachute.
[00:31:01] Speaker C: We're coming towards the end now. So I want to move on to talk about your book. And now for the good news. To the Future with Love, which you wrote about a couple of years ago. You talk about people doing positive things and amazing things. And sometimes this is coming out of a place of despair or.
[00:31:19] Speaker A: It was during COVID that I wrote it.
[00:31:21] Speaker C: Yes. And I want to talk a bit about post traumatic growth and how it seems to me that so many of the people who've had a really difficult time have had a trauma, lost a relative, something that has been really traumatic, are the people that go forward and do amazing things in their lives. And I wonder, therefore, if we are going through collectively in this world now, the most traumatic time. I mean, there are wars all over the place. We're living with such fear. We have the Internet, We've talked about this. What is your view of where we can go in the future and how we can manage this now?
[00:31:54] Speaker A: I don't really have an overview like that. I think it's each man for himself. A lot of people are still. We've never had it so good. There's never been so few.
You know, people are educated more than they've ever been. They live longer. There's wars. But not the way they were. There's diseases held in check, so you can't say that. But what does humanity do when they get fearful? They declare war.
And we're at war with ourselves here. That's why it's 1 in 4 and that's why it's 1 in 3, is that we're burning out from thoughts. It really is. I mean, if you want to do something, go over to Gaza or the Ukraine and do something. But to sit here and watch news that constantly flashes in your face over and over again, your little part of your brain doesn't know that the threat isn't right behind you. It's 20,000 miles away. So we are in a state of fear. If we can learn how to deal with that, then we'll live longer, we'll live better. We live long anyway. But, you know, the mind and the body are onesie. If you have too much stress in, you know, up here, whatever you've created, you're not at war, you're sitting at the office. We have to learn to cool down our minds, not control them, not get rid of thoughts, but ways to cool them down, to get the focus into the body rather than constant gibbering, saying, I'm not good. Nobody else is like this. I'm alone.
We have to cool down that thought stream. That's really our illness, not the fact that we're being attacked by a foreign army.
The army is the mind.
[00:33:33] Speaker C: And one more question, my last question is, do you have a particular hope for the future?
[00:33:38] Speaker A: Yeah, I hope we don't get bombed tomorrow.
[00:33:40] Speaker C: Yeah, we're in difficult times, but meditation, I think.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: Meditation just.
If I was in charge, I'd have a clearer mind if I meditated. But I'm not a politician, so I hope that they're in their right minds when they make these agreements.
[00:33:55] Speaker C: Well, we vote for them. So it's up to us, isn't it?
[00:33:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:58] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:33:59] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please leave us a review wherever you're listening and recommend this series to anyone who you.
[00:34:15] Speaker C: Think might enjoy it too.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: I'll be back in a fortnight for the last episode of Hope Springs Before Christmas, when I will be speaking to Robin and Merlin Hanbury Tennyson, a father and son who have dedicated themselves to protecting rainforests both temperate and tropical, and the indigenous people living in them.
As Robin, who founded Survival International in 1969, tells us, this is work with a long back story.
[00:34:52] Speaker A: It's a story that goes right back.
[00:34:54] Speaker C: Through history, that people have known what the answers are and then have not done it. We now know that, like knowing that.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: For climate change to work, we have.
[00:35:02] Speaker C: To change our attitude towards nature and towards our relationship with this incredibly rich and diverse planet.
[00:35:12] Speaker B: This episode was produced by Pete Norton and brought to you by the Resurgence Trust, a movement, a magazine and a manifesto for Hope.
To find out more about their work, click the link in the show notes of this episode.
I'm Annabel Heseltine and thank you for listening to Hope Springs.
