The Joyful Practice Podcast

this week’s episodeWhat 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 showAt 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: @joyfulpracticeanalogThank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments. Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

this week’s episodeThis 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 showAt 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: @joyfulpracticeanalogThank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments. Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

this week’s episodeWe 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 podcastabout the showAt 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: @joyfulpracticeanalogThank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments. Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

this week’s episodeThis week we get curious about the ways grind culture separates us from the needs and desires of our bodies, especially the pleasures and challenges of rest. What does it mean to resist rest, and how might imagining rest as a creative act change our relationships with creative process? How does rest get complicated by chronic disease and neurodivergence, and how do busyness and resentment distract us from that original source of creativity: paying attention & listening deeply to ourselves, each other, and the world around us?links & resources* The Scrap Heap essay: Rest is Creative: a toad, a lady on a couch, and Baubo walk into a bar* The Prompt Portal: Rest is Creative: practicing buoyancy* Tricia Hersey’s book, Rest is Resistance, and her website, The Nap Ministry* Gilligan’s Island clip: Make-Shift Radioabout the showAt 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. Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

this week’s episodeThis week, we get transgressive about academic and cultural institutions that have built an industry around workshops that are often discipline-and-rigor-focused zones of punishment. We also (tenderly) examine those internalized forms of creative punishment many of us encounter when we start working on a creative project, where imagined audiences watch over us, judging our creativity on its ability to produce a product rather than allowing it to be a process that has value in itself. What does it look like to inhabit a punishment-free creative process? Maybe there’s a clue in the symbiotic relationship between sea anemones and clownfish. Whether its listening to the feedback of our own bodies, or participating in collaborations that act as creative safe havens, we’re curious about how following our creative impulses might blaze the trail for a gentler, more playful and intuitive, kind of creative practice.linksThe Scrap Heap:* essay: creative process is a punishment-free zone: and you are a clownfish in a sea anemone* The Prompt Portal, our first video prompt for creative exploration!about the showAt 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.Every week, we’ll discuss one Joyful Practice principle. We’ll start the discussion with a short essay on our newsletter The Scrap Heap, and on Fridays we’ll release an episode of the podcast, as well as a short video with an immersive prompt—we call it the Prompt Portal.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. Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments. Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

Scrappy has two meanings, and we embrace both of them. This, our first go at a podcast, is scrappy in the sense of untidy. We want to play with things before we refine them. It’s also scrappy in the sense of determined. We recorded directly to Substack assuming we could learn how to edit afterwards. But then it seemed we couldn’t! Which maybe would have been fine—to just hit publish and release it as-is. But why do that when you can spend an afternoon learning how to edit a podcast in Garage Band? Over the last few months, podcasts have been one of my most important tools for staving off anxiety. I have a small collection of weekly safe podcasts and, as I move through my day, I rely on their chatter to keep my own rumination at bay. As Sarah and I experiment with formats, my greatest hope with that we might come in handy this way for a few listeners. If we can keep you company in your garden or while you do the dishes, that would be a joy. This first podcast episode is a companion to the post that Sarah shared earlier this week: Iterations at PlayBelow are the images we discuss. The first three are iterations of the same page:Below is a page about composition notebooks, followed by a very rough and early iteration that adds onto that page. Two more notes to add:* I refer to a podcast where Deborah Iyall talked about Lena Horne performing the song My Funny Valentine. That podcast was Episode 23 of Menopunks. * As promised, here’s Sarah’s post on Saturation Jobs. Also, we’d love to hear from you!We’re experimenting a lot this month and would love to hear from you if you have any topics to suggest, questions to ask, features you’d like to see. Oh, and do you have thoughts about comp books and the patriarchy? Thoughts on iterations? Chat is open; DMs are open. Don’t be a stranger! Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe

Get full access to The Scrap Heap at scrapheap.substack.com/subscribe