Effortless Interlude

Welcome! Wow — 2022. This week I am sharing a short 20 minute episode riffing on what I have learned about effortlessness over the past few days. Specifically, incorporating Julia Gillmor’s Facebook Livestream on Resistance and Russell Brand’s YouTube video on Laziness.

Here is the script I read from for the podcast:

Hi - Wendy here - welcome to another episode of wild and precious conversations.

This week, a short interlude.

I have lined up a pretty cool list of conversations for the coming year, and I thought it might be a good idea to pause and give a little context to what on earth we are doing here.

I am also dipping my toe into the idea of uploading video content as well, for a few reasons. 

So, for this week, a short discussion about the idea of effortless and how to incorporate that into your life.

Which, let’s be honest, feels pretty impossible sometimes.

Last week, Marla Estes used the metaphor of compost to describe that place of uncomfortableness we need to stay in sometimes. As she described it, it’s a place where growth can happen.

True enough — and jumping off of that, my friend Julia Gillmor did a Facebook Live (I will link in the show notes) about resistance and how to move through it. Important. Finally, I was influenced by a 2 or 3 year old video I noticed by Russel Brand on the idea of laziness.

So, dear listener, as we move into 2022, I can say that I am definitely mired in - or nestled in? Compost. I can almost feel the growth happening and I can say that I can feel the roots growing down, digging down through the rich soil for nutrients. I can also, maybe? Feel the growth beginning upwards, searching for the sun.

Having said that, Staying with the metaphor of a young plant growing in compost…having watched Julia and Russel and having been taken by their thoughts which converge with the idea that yes, it is important to take daily action to do those things you don’t want to do. And yes, rest is important, but no, (and this is riffing on what Russel Brand said) passing out on your couch in your week-old jammies with an empty bag of potato chips balancing on your belly is maybe not the best way to “do self care”? And, I will add - maybe it is, for you, in that moment - that one is hard to say. Suffice it to say, though, that for each of us, there comes a point where we know…we just know…it’s time to get off the couch, dip ourselves in some freezing water, sit quietly in contemplation, take a walk in the woods, or otherwise more forward moving stuff.

As Russell Brand says, though, so eloquently, “we’re always applying moral attributes to our actions and objects — as my counselor would say, “evaluative judgement” — that food is “good” or “bad”, lying on the couch is “bad”, sleeping in “bad”, etc…

Here are a few thoughts. Russell Brand talks about laziness as being a “sort of personal nihlisim a sort of well, what’s the point of doing anything?”And that is I believe, what Julia is thinking about when she talks about resistance - that moment when you being to try to convince yourself that there is no point, “Why you?” As Julia says, “What is your thing? When you look in the mirror, and you say, “I’m not ___________ enough”” What is your thing? What is your resistance? As she says, this force is universal - everyone has their own, personal resistance, gravity maybe, :) trying to gently coerce, pull them down into the much of the compost they find themselves in…I think this metaphor works really well, actually..

Russell talks about his daily habits that he now does no matter what - run with his dog, jui jitsu, meditation, cold plunges.

What Julia calls resistance, and Russel doesn’t name exactly, I call “our inner critic” I actually made a course in 2017, when I first started playing around with making content around my passion for mental health, called “making friends with your inner critic” or embracing your inne