sociocreative trust

 11 August, 2024 Arteles, Finland

MD: This is Melissa DeLaney and it's Sunday, the 11th of August and I'm at Arteles Creative Center, Finland. It's 1404 and we're just about to enter into a Conversation of Care. Would you please let me know your name and where you're from?

Chantel: Yeah, my name is Chantal Gagnon. I was born in Canada and I currently reside in the United Kingdom.

MD:  Great. Thank you and welcome. 

The first question is not related to your name and where you were born or where you live now, but it may be. Tell me who you are. 

Chantel: I've always struggled with this question. I think I am an artist, I am a creative being and I am an energy being. Um, what makes me unique? I'm not quite sure. I don't really think that uniqueness quite exists in all honesty. I think I'm just a person, and, I'm someone who experiences joy, sadness, daily struggles. And. Yeah, I think that's who I am.

MD:  To expand on that. I'd like to hear more about your thinking around that an individual doesn't really exist, or the uniqueness, not the individual, but the uniqueness.

Chantel  I think when we look at each other on a granular level, we start to see more and more similarities and it's very interesting. Like, if we zoom out too far, we all kind of look the same and are generically very similar. And if we go too far in, then again, we're back to being very similar. Very much the same. We have a unique fingerprint or unique DNA to a degree. But when you really talk to people, everyone's experienced trauma, everyone has experienced some degree of joy, some degree of sadness, and no one's joy, trauma, or sadness is any worse or more important. There's an equality to it, because those things have profoundly affected you. Whatever it is. I think right now there's a really big push in society for wanting to be seen as an individual. Although, even within that, there's so many similarities, right? I really see this interconnectedness between humans. I don't really see too many things as truly unique. I don't think that really exists because there's so many things that mirror each other. You know, Nature within, numerology. Everything can repeat. 

MD:  Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. 

The next question is, and this is probably multiple strands that we’ll delve into because it crosses a whole lot of private, personal and public kind of systems. 

What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of care?

Chantel:  It's weird. Okay. When you first said that, it was caring for another, whatever that is. Whether that's giving someone, a cuddle or giving someone a nice note, caring for someone who needs more help. Whether it's a small child or, someone who's disabled or elderly or someone who's injured. I think predominantly when I think about it a bit more, it is the small day-to-day actions. There's something about the act of caring for me that is more about others and helping someone else. I think because I've always struggled with self-care personally, that it is easier doing that nice thing for someone. It's making someone else's day just that little bit more easier, spreading that love. Just putting a smile on someone's face. Opening a door for a stranger, having a conversation with someone who maybe you sense that they're a bit lonely, and so you chat with them, and you miss your bus to chat with them a little bit longer. I think with care, there's also a need for being observant because a lot of people won't ask for care when they could probably use it. So if you're an observant person, it's a little bit easier to care for others because you can kind of see it a little bit more or sense into it or feel into it. 

MD: Tell me some more about that your experience with self-care? Historically. And then where you are now with that?

Chantel: Yeah. So, historically, self-care just kind of seemed like a form of punishment. And for me, that's come in two different forms. I'm dyslexic and have Irlen syndrome. I didn't really learn how to read probably until I was in grade six. I had a lot of after school tutoring, and getting pulled out of classes. So there was a lot of care. My mom put so much time into it and a lot of love and I went and got all these tests done. Oftentimes I was pulled out of my favorite classes or the classes I was doing, to go to learn to read. So even though that was important, it just wasn't fun. It didn't feel great. It sort of had this feeling of, oh, I'm being cared for because I'm less than. There was a bit of a negative connotation to it. Even though all of the teachers, and everyone was really loving, like, no one was horrible. Everyone was really loving. But it was because I was special. And, then on the other front, in my household, I'm from a very, very vain family.

So self care always seemed very vain and there's this negativity to it. It was almost like self-care to be better, more beautiful than the next person was kind of a competition almost around it. And I really detested that. It was almost like you did self-care because you didn't really like yourself, so you cared for yourself but not in a loving way. Within that as well, my sister was someone who just took a lot of emotional space within the household. So even on a self-soothing level, I never felt like I had space to cry or space to feel like my whole range of emotions. It wasn't until I moved to the UK that all of a sudden I had a year of just crying at everything. I'd see a commercial that wasn't even that sad and I'd be bawling. All of a sudden I had the space to have all these emotions. And so that was quite an interesting form of self-careI didn't realise that I was denying that sense of self-soothing throughout my youth.

MD: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for that. I'm glad that you got there.

Where you are now, what is your approach to self-care?

Chantel: My self-care started probably in my early 20s, where I was basically in a really horrible situation where I consistently experienced really high stress. Part of it was while I was studying and I really burnt myself out. I didn't have any concept of where the end of my rope was, and I was so used to pushing myself. I ended up with adrenal fatigue and basically, was forced to sleep and would be sleeping 14 - 16 hours a day. I would wake up and need a nap about half an hour later, after a full night of sleep. I really had to start paying attention to what was stress and what was stressing me out and really stop ignoring those signs and feelings and learn how to recognise stress within myself. I think that's where my self-care kind of started. And then it's further developed now. Where I got the second push for it was during the pandemic, where I was very lucky. I thrived in the pandemic. I needed the world to go on pause for a bit. And I really got back into a deep meditation practice.

So with the adrenal fatigue, I started meditating, doing yoga a lot, which helped. I got really into the meditation, and the wanting to be the healthiest version of myself. Because I wasn't seeing anyone and it was the first couple years of my life where I didn't go back to Canada and so I didn't have to go see family, and I didn't have to worry about looking a certain way for my family, my care was really about my own health. It had nothing to do with vanity. It was just very much, how can I be the healthiest version of myself? I cooked everything from scratch for all of my meals. It was absolutely everything. I would go outside every day and just look at the trees and touch trees and walk in grass barefooted and sit outside and have a picnic. Go for a run. Um, lots of visualisations, a lot of forgiveness. I didn't realise how much I needed to forgive. I had a huge few months of just doing forgiveness Non stop. I guess like the current day, it is maintaining some of that magic I was able to get during the lockdowns.

MD: Woo! Yeah yeah. Amazing. Thank you.

Chantel: Um oh and journaling is a big part of that as well. Journaling, meditating and movement and food and just really acknowledging your feelings and honoring them.

MD: Knowing when to back off from things and when to enter into things as well, your own energy levels as well, to be able to manage that. Yeah, they're the basics. It's such a good practice.

Chantel: As well with that,  during the pandemic, I was really lucky and got a lot of intuitive training. Within that, I really listened to my intuition. Now with a lot of things, a lot of my decisions are very much based intuitively, rather than being so logical.

MD: And with your meditation practice, you've been training to be a teacher as well, or you're a meditation teacher?

Chantel: Yeah. I think I would call myself an intuition coach. I'm an artist, which really helps fill my cup. And then that helps feed in to me being an intuitive coach and the intuitive coaching helps my creativity.They both really play off of each other. As an intuitive coach, you really have to have a full cup because you're giving and have to be fully present for people to be able to hold that space. I now have something that I call daily success habits. It's certain habits that I do almost daily. There's about five and they change here or there. But, I have about five daily success habits. Daily, I try to get a minimum of three of them done, if not all five and it's things that really fill up my cup. The big perspective shift that I had with the pandemic was really noticing how full my cup is. I think before, it was about recharging and then it it turned into, okay, what am I willing to distribute and when do I need to recharge and refill? How much am I willing to give? What's over giving? What's under giving? The mindset around it has shifted a bit.

MD:  And those the daily things that you're doing, do they stay the same, or do they change?

Chantel: They stay the same for the most part, but they do change a little bit. Oftentimes winter will play an effect in it. So, it's really interesting. Like going outside tends to be a really big one for winter because it's a little harder to go outside. Meanwhile, in the summer, it just doesn't it doesn't feel like an effort to go outside. So it's almost like that just naturally gets replaced with something else. Then it  tends to be  meditation, journaling, some kind of movement. It can be going outside, but it can also be like doing a puzzle at the end of the day. If I don't have energy to do a puzzle at the end of the day,  I know that I've over given. Sometimes the first two hours of my day are my best hours.

MD:  And so what happens in those first two hours?

Chantel:  Usually I'm so wildly creative. I have so much energy. Things are just lovely. I used to always give that time to work or everything else. Right. My focus is great. And every once in a while those two hours are just for yourself, that time isn’t for anyone else. Even if someone asks me to do something, no, those two hours were for me. We can talk after those two hours. So that's really lovely. 

MD:  The  work that you've been talking about and the practice you've been talking about is really beautiful. Self-care, and I see them as such great examples and such great practice. 

The next question is,  where does relationship fit into those aspects of self-care?

Chantel:  Yeah, I mean, it's tough. I feel like with relationships, especially as women, we can over give really easily. I think, we're still in this weird cycle or period where women are expected to work full time and still do the majority of the household. I would like to say that my household is different and it really isn't. I'm a little bit lucky in the sense where my partner has a very weird schedule, and so his day starts really late and he tends to go to bed quite late. So oftentimes those two hours in the morning, he's sleeping, I can really enjoy it. I have that beautiful quiet. There's nothing like focus. There's a certain kind of focus when the whole household is sleeping that you just can't get any other time. We are very, very lucky that way. There is a lot of caring in the sense of, because my partner, works these crazy hours, I'll always make us both lunch the night before with leftovers from dinner, and little things like that. Or if he notices that I've been a bit stressed out, he will do things around the house to lighten my load. Or there is a bit of back and forth or sometimes we'll just be like, let's just go out for dinner tonight. That feels like self-care for both of us. 

I do  feel like especially within the world of spirituality, and my partner doesn't meditate, he's not into spiritual stuff whatsoever,  it can be a bit tough because you almost do it around the other person and I haven't quite figured out a way to not necessarily do that. He's very supportive of it. But it's also because I know we have such weird hours together when he's home, I really want to enjoy those hours together. So even though I was like, oh, I would have loved to have, like a three hour meditation tonight, you know? Um, you sometimes just wait until he goes on tour or whatever, you know? 

MD: Yeah. Yeah.

Chantel: Relationship is tough with self-care. It's very easy to care for the person you love, though. And sometimes over care. 

MD:  I love that. It's also a really beautiful way that you've navigated those times for yourself. And knowing that those peak times for you in the morning, but then having the the other entry points throughout the day, and then your ritual of your puzzle or something playful at the end of the day. So that's a really beautiful practice. 

This last question is multi-strand. I'd like to hear your responses. Big picture responses as well as your personal responses. And I'm sure that you've had lots of thinking around this. 

How would you like to see more care enacted in your future and also the future?

Chantel:  I'm discovering more and more these little, meters or these little metrics that help me see where I am on well-being and what kind of care I need. Or what kind of kindness I need to give to myself. So one is the puzzle. One has to do with movement. If I don't feel like moving, I've burnt myself out somewhere. 

MD: Are you journaling that, or is it just something that you're doing intuitively along the way just kind of in your head, what you're doing/tracking?

Chantel:  It is both… So for example, at the end of the day, I always have a puzzle beside the TV. My partner loves to watch a movie or play video games at the end of the day. I love to have a puzzle. We will sit together but do different things. Right? And if I'm sitting there and if that puzzle feels like a chore, I know I've over given. So maybe tomorrow I should adjust that a little bit. Or what can I do right now to to to to care for myself. I think it's really good for people to have those barometers for themselves or metrics.

I would love to see in schools teaching kids how to do that. The post-secondary education system really drastically needs to change. There are a lot of schools that are very proud that their students have sleeping bags so that they can sleep at school if they need to, because that's how hard they work. I just don't think it's good to glorify burnout for a degree that no one's going to look at. It's ridiculous. And I was definitely victim to to to that. I would love to see, again from a young age, more meditation and more mindfulness practices be brought into school.

And have that in the workplace as well. I would love for every office building to have a meditation room or a place of quiet. I think that would be really lovely. I think right now we live in a world with so many distractions and so much noise. Not just like audible noise, but noise and static with everything going on. All the emails, everything. We sometimes need more spaces that invite stillness and quiet. It'd be really nice to see that for the future. I think it would be really good to also teach starting from a young age. But I mean, at any point in tuition, I think that's really important for people. It's such a valuable tool. For people to be taught at a young age to, explore and discover, what is your care, right? How can you care for yourself? How can you care for others and really, really explore it. I spent so much of my youth not caring for myself, and now I'm still learning to do it. I still feel like I'm a beginner at it. I still really struggle with it. I really struggle with self-love. 

You know, like a department of, love and peace or something, whether it's within a school or within an office or something, or the government. I would love to see more.. Department of Love and Peace. I would love that. To, you know,  solve problems from a loving place. 

A book I just finished before I came here, I can't can't remember the name, the writer suggested to someone within the Indian government that whenever politicians start arguing too much, to take a minute of silence or have a moment of meditation. And they do that now apparently. That's a really beautiful thing. Um, and especially, I'm sure politics is a very stressful job, those people should have a lot of care. I would want my prime minister to be very well taken care of and to come to work every day with a full cup. Because they have to give a lot of themselves.

Overall I would just love to see people really, really see what fills them up. 

Another thing too is my frustration with the spiritual community as a whole. We've done a really good job at teaching people how to care for themselves and how to listen to them to themselves. But we don't necessarily show people how to take action going forward and how to bring that out into the community. And this is where I think, give yourself those two hours in the morning or have that really beautiful morning practice of going inwards and listening to yourself and really tuning into the core of yourself, to get to that spot where you feel that love and then lead it and bring it outwards and go help someone that day go, whether that's a food bank or literally just being kind if the cashier looks like they've had the most miserable day, be kind to them. I think it's not about about self. And I feel like spirituality has somehow gotten twisted where it's become very selfish and not active enough.

MD: I just made a note there from what you're saying is care as an action as well. That's our work and that's the responsibility. 

I'm definitely going to take on some of your suggestions as my daily practice. I think the morning thing is really important because it gets it's really easy, in my experience, for things to get diffused pretty quickly once you start your day, to get drawn into all of that noise. I think that two hours is a really strong and beautiful practice and grounding. So thank you so much for sharing that. 

Before we close off, is there anything else that you would like to contribute or add?

Chantel:  I guess the words I would like to leave on is, we rarely regret helping someone else out. Or the planet or whatever it is.  I think, even going out and picking up some litter, you're never going to regret that. As long as it's not completely depleting you. So I think, get to that point where your cup is full, you feel like you have the energy to do those things. And it is it is important for you to get yourself to a point where you're having the energy to go and do those things and then go out and help the world, and just spread. Spread that kindness. Spread that care. Spread that love. Iit's not all about self-love.

MD: Great. Thank you so much, Chantel. Our first minister of the Department of Love and Peace. It's been great talking with you today. Thank you.

Chantel: Great.