The Joyful Practice Podcast

We were busy preparing for Olympia ArtsWalk this week and so we thought we’d try an experimental format.

In this episode, we discuss one of our shared principles:the Brain is an Organ in the Body

What do we mean by that? It’s one of the few principles we’ve never discussed.

(music by Andriig)

an equinox prompt

Darkness is good. light is good.

Darkness holds us.

Today we stand on the

in-between, a quarter point,

a balance.

Tomorrow each day is a step

towards dark.

towards the rainy season, the gray season, the cold

season

Slow down.

(how?)

Rest is creative.

(but how?)

What if it IS that easy?

What if you learn to rest by resting.

Today is a day of balance.

Autumn is the season of in-between,

Sarah can remind me (us)

about the thinning of the veil.

I see it as a morning mist

I see the leaves turning whil the flowers still bloom.

The prompt today is:

xx What images in your world are equinox?

What balance do you seek?

These are show notes for the podcast + a tour of the images that Sarah and I discuss, all of them drafts of our book cover for The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times.

A note about audio: Sorry for the background feedback on my audio this week. I’m learning. It was a mistake to record with a window open—one that I couldn’t fully correct with editing tools.

The above images were our first attempts at moving our analog elements into the digital world. We were designing these to represent our book on Kickstarter, but eventually realized that this was how we’d do our cover.

Here we are messing around with what goes where and how…

This week, as Sarah and I tackle layout for The Joyful Practice Handbook, we’ve discovered we have a problem: we have too many pages!

These the pages were once I made about a year ago, trying to envision what the book’s front matter might look like. But the book’s style has evolved since then. So I thought I’d share them is as a sort of UN-preview. Here’s a taste of what’s not in the book

What is Joy?

A Story About Joy & the Body

This is the audio for this week's Prompt Portal. To see the accompanying video and images, click here.

This Week’s Prompt:

(I said the words leggy mint while recording and now I can’t stop saying it.)

leggy mint: a slow housekeeping prompt

what is a space in your life that wants attending to?

move slowly through that space and center pleasure.

clear what you are called to

ask: what feels alive?

what wants attention?

see if there are things from surrounding areas that want to move into this space.

when you’re finished be sure to take some time to enjoy the space.

this week’s episode:

We start by talking about rabbits and aspen groves and seasonal cycles, and work our way to laughing about teenagers. Jenn tries to use the word copium, and if her 13-year old found out she’d never hear the end of it, but it’s okay—he doesn’t listen to the podcast.

We get into the nitty-gritty of trying to sort out a personal ethos on where digital tools do and don’t belong in our work. If Sarah takes a picture of a blue dress and matches it to a color in Canva, does that color now carry the the essence of the dress?

links & resources

* The Scrap Heap essay: Analog Is the Body’s Friend: aspen grove vs. digital toolbar

* The Prompt Portal: Wacko Revision

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

* Substack: The Scrap Heap

* Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

this week’s episode:

Ideas, art forms, cultures, bodies of water: when two or more things converge, they meet in the estuary — a place of ingenuity, adaptation, and abundance.

In this week’s podcast, we consider estuaries as a metaphor for collaborations and creative disruption, specifically, the analog+digital estuary where we hold experiments in turning our analog creations into digital images.

links & resources

* The Scrap Heap essay: swimming in the analog+digital estuary: a Joyful Practice experiment

* The Prompt Portal: the body is an estuary

* Sarah’s Scrap Heap post Estuaries, Borders, & Gap Edges: The Necessity of Creative Disruption

* Kate Hutchinson’s podcast/substack: The Last Bohemians. We didn’t discuss this, but it fits with many of this week’s themes. Kate Hutchinson interviews “maverick and radical women in arts and culture” who embody creative disruption.

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

* Substack: The Scrap Heap

* Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

this week’s episode

What is a threshold, and how is it different from a portal? How might we use the energy of the threshold to carry us into the portal of creative transformation? These are the questions that guide this week’s conversation.

Maybe a threshold is the thing we must cross before we enter a portal, and a portal is what channels us towards creative growth. Thresholds offer a choice: can we relinquish control of our creative process and step off the edge?

links & resources

* The Scrap Heap essay: we honor the power of the threshold

* The Prompt Portal: Leaving and landing: follow the swarm

* Jenn’s Scrap Heap post portals vs thresholds: the match of the century

* This episode from the podcast, Wonder Cabinet: David George Haskell: Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty (second week in a row recommending this because it keeps being relevant).

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

* Substack: The Scrap Heap

* Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

this week’s episode

This week, we’re talking about the Joyful Practice principle: We seek connection to the collective unconscious through collaboration with: friends, strangers, ancestors, dreams, chance, landscape, & the natural world.

Its a big topic, ya’ll. Collaboration is expansive. How do we collaborate with our creative intuitions, with our surroundings, or with the fears and ideologies that keep us tethered to grind culture? It might be the first step is learning to listen with discernment. Much of this conversation focuses on how collaborations are one way to give the middle finger to the patriarchal and capitalistic belief that ideas are proprietary. We argue for cross-pollination and for vulnerability and trust as our collaborative guides.

links & resources

* The Scrap Heap essay: Collaboration is a bee with its butt hanging out of a foxglove’s petal

* The Prompt Portal: the collaborations you desire, desire you

* This episode from the podcast, Wonder Cabinet: David George Haskell: Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty (we didn’t mention this podcast in our conversation, but it is a great companion to this week’s topic).

* Jenn’s original foxglove image:

The text in the image reads: We aim to work together in the realm of collective unconscious, which means that on some level, all work is collaboration. Cross-pollination, mind meld, microchimeras are signs of a healthy creative ecosystem. We can have open discussion about sharing credit and gray areas.

* Sarah’s reiterated foxglove image:

The text in the image reads: We seek connection to the collective unconscious through collaboration with: friends, strangers, ancestors, dreams, chance, & landscape.

* barn swallow nest with mixed feather decor (if your look close you can see some chick heads)

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

* Substack: The Scrap Heap

* Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

this week’s episode

We begin this week’s podcast with that mindf**k of a question: If the brain is an organ in the body, then why do we behave like the brain and the body are separate entities? (Although we don’t once mention Plato or Descartes, they sure are haunting the first half of our conversation.)

Other questions we get into this week: What does it feel like to listen to the body’s feedback, and how do we learn to trust that feedback? How are our bodies harmed by exploitative systems like patriarchy and capitalism?

links & resources

* The Scrap Heap essay: The Haunted Body (your body has the feedback)

* The Prompt Portal: Pain is a body-language (and comfort is a wave)

* The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté, M.D. & Daniel Maté (here’s a trailer for a talk Gabor Maté gives about the ideas presented in the book)

* Woo Woo with Rachel Dratch podcast

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

* Substack: The Scrap Heap

* Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

* Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.