Sarah Wilson on sucking at meditation (and doing it anyway) - Summer Series

Hello, and welcome to the Slow Home Summer series! For 5 weeks over December and January we’ll be revisiting some of our favourite episodes from 2017, so we can walk the walk and slow down during the Christmas break. Also it turns out podcasts, just like fine wine, really do get better with age. Whether you missed them the first time around, or are having another listen, we hope you enjoy these poggies as much as we did!

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Today Brooke chats with the wonderful, challenging, inspiring author Sarah Wilson. Sarah is someone Brooke has admired for years - not only for the work she’s done to promote the notion of drastically cutting sugar in our diets, preventing food waste, and her more recent work in mental health awareness - but also the way she goes about that work. She is honest and open, prepared to stand for something regardless of whether people agree with her, and she’s also funny and smart and good at not taking herself too seriously.

In this conversation Brooke and Sarah talk about her new book, ‘first we make the beast beautiful: a new story about anxiety’ and dive deep into how Sarah slows down in order to both strengthen herself against anxiety’s harmful side, and simultaneously go deeper into it.

They talk about the discomfort of true reflection and Sarah’s growing boredom with shallow conversations and external grasping (and why cocktail parties are the worst example of this!) as well as the idea that it’s not necessary or even helpful to slow down simply for the sake of slowing down, but rather aiming to slow down in order to be or do something meaningful.

As an avid bush walker, Sarah talks about why she chooses to head off into the bush every second weekend (more if possible) and what the rhythm and solitude of solo hiking provides her that other exercises can’t. Sarah shares her cure for insomnia and why one of her two major tenets of slow-ness is to simply walk. She also introduces Brooke to the French idea of ‘flâner’, an urban wandering, and why sometimes it’s enough to simply walk through our own neighbourhood, noticing, paying attention, watching people and observing the comings and goings that surround us.

They also talk about meditation and why it’s the second key tenet of slow-ness for Sarah, and why it’s not only OK to suck at meditation, but why it’s actually incredibly useful to be bad at it.

This is a cracker of an episode, packed with loads of inspiration. Head over to http://www.slowyourhome.com/ss185 for the full blog post, including links to Sarah's books, website and other resources mentioned in today's show, and in the meantime, enjoy!

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