The Embodied Vessel Podcast

Loren Lewis Cole

Podcast hosted by artist Loren Lewis Cole exploring themes around the vital necessity of artistic practice throughout the stages of our lives. From the conversation on depression and the 'meaning crisis', to our desire to dance a dance that only we can dance, the importance of creativity, curiosity and play are more important than they've been for some time. As we approach an age of increasing technological enmeshment and disembodied information hoarding, craft and the dexterous skillsets allow us to glimpse an ancient kinaesthetic intelligence that can completely revitalise our lives.  How can we go from a performative mode of engagement with the world to a participatory one? Living from the inside out, sharing what we've come here to share. Art is medicine. We create art to heal, we heal to create Art.  @lorenlewiscolejewellery www.lorenlewiscole.com Gorgeous cover image by @raynjermain , Ben Rayner 

  1. 33 - How Art Heals Deep Exhaustion.

    Jun 5

    33 - How Art Heals Deep Exhaustion.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts in this podcast Join the LLC Jewellery Family  https://lorenlewiscole.lpages.co/jointhetribe/ Come say hi on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lorenlewiscolejewellery/?hl=en If you are exhausted, you are safe to feel exhausted, and you do not need a retreat or a holiday to recover, you need to remember your Art. We heal when we let ourselves completely feel.  It’s only when I let my whole body genuinely feel the fragility and exhaustion, that the freeze can move, and all that armour energy can be liberated again into generosity, creativity and inspiration. Yesterday I was so exhausted. My entire spirit was fatigued. Despite walking, eating well, exercising and getting lots done, my vitality was on the floor. I’d been running on action and interaction for over a month, getting so much done, with quiet time but no time for poetry, open ended creative space that’s quiet enough for me to hear my heart again. I don’t know what ‘most people’ need. But I know what I need, and what so many sensitive, intuitive artistic people need. We need our art, we need the medicine of diving into the ocean of imagination, sensuality and the undefined.  Possibility that’s unknown, exciting, beautiful. What’s always fascinated me is how energy moves when I recover from overextended interaction. What took a month to get out of balance and overexerted can be genuinely reinvigorated in a few hours. Sometimes we need to feel really unwell to remember the medicine we need. Vitality slowly creeps away until we feel unrecognisable to ourselves, energetically impotent. Art heals this, and if your an artist you’ll know this medicine. Restoring sumptuous energy throughout the entire system. The tangible body and the intangible vibe we emit. We’re in a poetically illiterate over culture, modernity is beige and predictable, the poet is starving, and so we must know how to feed ourselves. Sometimes we eat a bit each day, other times we forget to eat for so long. Art is medicine. Maybe it’s a song you listen to with your entire body on the drive home, feeling it fully for the first time. Maybe it’s truly dancing with closed eyes so you can feel your body from the inside out. A cry, some connection, the generosity of beauty. Our ancient bodies are primed for this medicine which is why reconnection can happen so easily  if we know how to treat ourselves. When we trust our deepest ability to reinvigorate dehydrated psychic soil, we don’t fear feeling disconnected. If you know you can eat, you don’t fear hunger. As Artists, knowing how to reinvigorate our creative river means we always have the tools to heal. Art is the free movement of healing energy in the body.

    24 min
  2. 30 - Remaining fully alive and responsive in the presence of doubt and fear.

    Apr 3

    30 - Remaining fully alive and responsive in the presence of doubt and fear.

    I'd love to hear your thoughts in this podcast Fear and doubt tend to make our experience and world smaller. We take less risks and play things safe and reasonable.  There's no way we can live a life fully expressed without falling on our faces, feeling consumed with doubt and fear, and wondering if we should just quit.  If we're playing it safe artistically or in any other area of life, we won't feel doubt. Doubt is going to come, and what matters is who we are and how we work with it WHEN it comes. Because it will baby, and instead of running from it, we can learn to dive into the ego death of a portal that is doubt, and instead of crumbling, we can find presence there, find aliveness there, find the spirit to continue there.  What we run from has power over us. What we face courageously we internalise the power of.  Greatness is forged in the fire of emotional intensity, what I often see is the desire to make what could be acute emotional experiences more diluted and chronic. chronic fear can actually ruin our lives, but acute fear fully embodied just makes us deeper, stronger and more alive. We all feel good when we feel confident, but what really makes us, where we earn our stripes is how we deal with the times we're tired and doubt ridden, fearful and uninspired. We don't rise to the level of our confidence, we grow our confidence by our ability to inhabit and metabolise doubt, fully alive, through the portal of uncertainty, into a new awareness and more powerful ground. Doubt and fear are inescapable on a true path of heart, it means you're not playing it safe, welcome to the human race my love. Keep going. There is no security in life, in our work, in our futures, only the courage we have to keep going no matter the circumstances, to choose to celebrate being here in an imperfect circumstance,  only full aliveness is here, no security. So keep going, keep working, keep bringing your gifts forward. With love,  Loren Go to the Limits of Your Longing- Rilke . God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me. Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness. Give me your hand. Book of Hours, I 59 Join the LLC Jewellery Family  https://lorenlewiscole.lpages.co/jointhetribe/ Come say hi on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lorenlewiscolejewellery/?hl=en

    1h 21m
  3. 29 - Life itself is the sharing circle

    Mar 7

    29 - Life itself is the sharing circle

    I'd love to hear your thoughts in this podcast 'To love anything, at any cost, is a bargain.' Wendell Berry Some recent reflections on my own confusion around spirituality and the artistic path. Because Art is not seen as a path in many circles, I didn't trust my own gifts when I was young, and in an unconscious attempt to overcomplicate my life and do something more meaningful, I tried to do all manner of things, all of which left me depleted and uninspired. Being on an artistic path, which includes of course anything we're bringing from our heart into the world- in craft of not, requires a level of rawness and vulnerability that leaves us feeling defeated on a daily basis.  This sense of being defeated I have come to realise, is in itself a spiritual experience, because what we're trying to do feels so immense, we grapple with vast currents of energy, and always fall short, and that is how it should be.  We transcend the limited individualist trauma culture of our times by stretching out into a vaster cosmology that includes wild beings not human not animal- whispers we feel but cannot truly see because when we focus on them they vanish. The slippery nature of the creative inspiration is in itself a frustrating and soulful experience. In this way, the creative path brings us to our knees as well as to exalted states of wonder and connection, and a sense of feeling raw pervades. A full human being, not a perfectly healed or optimised human being. The last two stanzas of 'The Man Watching', R.M.Rilke When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us. I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament: when the wrestlers’ sinews grew long like metal strings, he felt them under his fingers like chords of deep music. Whoever was beaten by this Angel (who often simply declined the fight) went away proud and strengthened and great from that harsh hand, that kneaded him as if to change his shape. Winning does not tempt that man. This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings. –Translated by Robert Bly Join the LLC Jewellery Family  https://lorenlewiscole.lpages.co/jointhetribe/ Come say hi on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lorenlewiscolejewellery/?hl=en

    1h 24m
  4. 27 - Where are you afraid of within yourself?

    Feb 7

    27 - Where are you afraid of within yourself?

    I'd love to hear your thoughts in this podcast For an Artist, our primary material is our inner world. From the material we engage with there, we blend our internal energy with the force of upward moving inspiration, connecting with material of expression...clay, dance, the voice, the body, rocks, gold, food, sound....the list is endless. If we are full of ideas about how we have to be, we're unavailable for the energy of our voice to move through us, and everybody's voice is unique, stemming from an internal impulse.  Yet sometimes we might find we can't quite grab onto the feeling of Authentic Voice moving through us, because the current of authenticity is asking us to feel anger, ugliness, annoyance, desire, frustration, aggression, or anything else our sense of self has disassociated from.  There is medicine in the courage required to be fully alive.  Here are some ideas for how to create a short but potent deliberate experience of the very emotion we're hiding from, which brings relaxation and flow because it's energetically very expensive to hold ourselves in any shape other than what's natural.  To create work that's vibrant to us and others, we want to be in the authenticity of the body. May you be unafraid of the entirety of your inner experience, and alchemise it all in the cauldron of your practice. An introduction to Butoh, you can look into other videos and here might be a jumping off point... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQcn55T-jNE The Aesthetics of Bhuto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcUuNF_o2gM Beauty in the Grotesque... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f6R8Ry9qVo Join the LLC Jewellery Family  https://lorenlewiscole.lpages.co/jointhetribe/ Come say hi on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lorenlewiscolejewellery/?hl=en

    45 min

About

Podcast hosted by artist Loren Lewis Cole exploring themes around the vital necessity of artistic practice throughout the stages of our lives. From the conversation on depression and the 'meaning crisis', to our desire to dance a dance that only we can dance, the importance of creativity, curiosity and play are more important than they've been for some time. As we approach an age of increasing technological enmeshment and disembodied information hoarding, craft and the dexterous skillsets allow us to glimpse an ancient kinaesthetic intelligence that can completely revitalise our lives.  How can we go from a performative mode of engagement with the world to a participatory one? Living from the inside out, sharing what we've come here to share. Art is medicine. We create art to heal, we heal to create Art.  @lorenlewiscolejewellery www.lorenlewiscole.com Gorgeous cover image by @raynjermain , Ben Rayner 

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