The Good Life Unravelled Podcast: Ep. 50

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This is part 2 of the interview with Holland Otik. Go to episode 48 to listen to part 1 first. 

Holland Otik is a maker, chef, teacher, researcher, and animistic object enthusiast who incorporates magic and ritual into everything they do.

In this episode we cover a range of topics in quite some depth. It’s a super interesting discussion with some pretty profound and insightful ideas.

We cover:

• How most of the spiritual and wellness industry in the west uses eastern philosophy, beliefs, and culture and repackage to make it accessible to white westerners.
• History of folk religion in the UK was linked to the natural world and a lot of that has been lost with disconnection through urban life.
• The importance of autonomy in our current way of life.
• Links with personal spirituality between autonomy.
• How capitalist society needs us to be disconnected to keep the system going.
• Personal art is essential and not a luxury.
• Everyone is has a creative practice if you reframe what they do.
• Everyone is a curator and noticing that is liberating.
• The imperfections in relationships make them more meaningful.
• The good life comes from being yourself and giving space for others to be themselves.
• Living with chronic illness taught her to accept that it’s not possible to always be happy or without pain, but finding a peace and accepting moves you forward.
• The pandemic has opened her eyes to how able-bodied people see illness. This is triggering for the chronically ill and disabled whose lives are always like that.
• How the wellness industry can make the chronically ill feel disempowered.
• The tragedy narrative attached to disabled people and the chronically ill.
• How seeing disabled people thriving might change perception of illness.
• Even the perception of a wellness treatment can change depending on who it is serving.
• Wellness industry not accessible to the people who need it the most.
• What to say to somebody who is chronically ill.
• Holland’s MA art work on tragedy narrative, child abuse, and self-harm.
• The problem with centring trauma response on authority figures and not the victim.
• The need the allow people to self-soothe in the way they know best.
• The power in truly seeing one another and appreciating their autonomy.

LEARNING POINTS

• If it’s the mystery that you’re interested in with spirituality you can pick anything and give it meaning.
• Belief is the most accessible self-built resource we have.
• We have lost the ability to connect with ourselves, to have that autonomy. 
• Everyone has a creative practice if they reframe and think about what they do. 
• Curation is creativity.
• Curation is simply choosing things to go together.
• In relationships, it’s actually more meaningful to recognise the bad times and appreciate you’re together despite them.
• It’s ok for not everything to be perfect.
• We need to stop hiding people that are chronically or disabled. We need to see them living their normal lives, or even thriving.
• Processing trauma needs to be person-centred.
• Preferred response to somebody chronically ill saying they feel bad is ‘yeah, that is really awful’. – Say you hear them.
• There is a power in seeing one another, hearing one another, centring that person, appreciating that autonomy. 

LINKS

Find Holland here:

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

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Previously on The Good Life Unravelled … Episode #049 – Creating a transitional activity to cope with working from home