Flow

It’s been quite a long journey for me to get to where I am today. Six years ago, I was working in the City of London as a Business Crime lawyer. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how important “connection” is to me. Reflecting on what life was like back in my lawyer days, I think that I was both feeling quite empty inside and living a rather detached life, always striving for more or something better - or more to the point, always feeling like I had to be something more or do better. I was on this endless exhausting search upwards (which I believe is a cultural tendency in our late capitalist industrial growth world). Working with clay in my evening pottery classes allowed me to stop striving and stay in the moment with what I was doing. I now understand that what was happening to me was that I stopped looking for something outside of me to fill the emptiness that I was feeling inside. I slowly stopped striving and somehow started to believe that I was enough. Working with clay facilitated a reconnection for me, with myself, nature, and the world around me - a sort of reconnection with my hands, heart and mind if you like. The psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi argues that crafts, like pottery, allow us to enter a “flow” state, a perfect immersive state of balance between skill and challenge. If you’re feeling disconnected, try picking up a paintbrush, learning a new skill, or joining one of our pottery classes. Reach out, connect, and do something just for you. There’s a lot of kindness in the world, you just have to look for it and open your heart to it. Lots of love and light, Stine x