Thread, awareness, and creativity as a mirror

In this episode I share with you the beginnings of my own creative practice with thread, and the richness I discovered in it as time went by. I then talk about the way our creative practice can be a gentle mirror, a window into our subconscious to allow even more awareness of who we are, and agency in our life. 

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This podcast is hosted by Laure Porché: http://laureporche.com. You can follow me on Instagram @laureporche
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Transcript

[00:00:00] Laure: So first I want to remind you that if you are interested in co-creating the Silken Mirror, which will be my new membership starting in 2023, you can fill out the form that is in the episode notes, and by filling out this form, telling me what you would like to find or to see in such a membership, you will get first dibs when I open it up.

[00:00:31] Because when I open it up, it will be for a limited number of people, at least for a certain time, and then I'll open it up for more and then for more, I probably do that gradually over the first year. So if you're interested in telling me, cuz I'm definitely interested in hearing what you have to say.

[00:00:51] And now for today's episode in preparation for this month's interview, which is with Nadine Marchal, who is an amazing, amazing French textile artist, I want to talk to you about how working with arts and crafts and creativity can help you strengthen new stories for yourself and can help you unearth the truth of who you are. And to talk to you about that I need to talk to you about thread about my own relationship with thread. Because it goes much further than just a craft, and it's not something that you might know at once. You don't get into a creative practice or a crafting practice necessarily with a consciousness of the dimensions of that specific material. It's very rare to have a conscious process around what kind of artistic practice of creative practice you choose for yourself.

[00:02:04] People don't say, oh, I really need grounding and to work with my relationship to matter so I'm gonna do pottery or ceramic or work with clay, they don't go in it that way. They're like, oh, I feel really drawn to that and I wanna do it. And so for me it was the same with thread, right? I didn't say to myself, oh, I really need to work on connection and bonding with other people and with myself. I need to work on gathering all parts of myself into something coherent, and so I'm gonna work with thread. That's not how it happened.

[00:02:48] How it happened was that I fell in love with the material, with thread, even before I could do anything with it. I would buy yarn even before I knew how to knit or do anything. And I would use it in costumes that I were making and stuff like that. But I just loved the material for what it was. And then I went to this crafting fair and I saw this yarn, gorgeous yarn, and I just bought so much of it that I just had to start knowing how to make things with it, right? And as I got deeper and deeper into it, right at first I started just knitting, knitting lace cause that's what I got really inspired by at the time. So I started knitting lace and I was knitting all the time, 24 7, had so much yarn, a huge stash of yarn, and I was thinking, okay, I'm never gonna go into spinning. It's enough, I have enough stash. And then I really fell in love with fiber. And so I started spinning my own thread and I thought, I'm never gonna go into weaving, like that's enough. You know, like knitting and spinning and I can't do everything. And then of course I went into weaving, which is another way of interlocking thread. And then I thought, I'm not gonna do embroidery, right? Cause I just, I can't do everything. And then of course I went and started doing free embroidery and stuff like that.

[00:04:24] But what I mean to say is that for years, while I was doing all these things, I was not aware of the metaphorical aspect of them, and I was not aware of what they were providing for my life in terms of dimension and help and support. And it took a lot of time with the material and with the practice and also starting to question myself and question my practice and seeing also the mirror that the material itself was giving me, what would happen to me when I would wind up a ball or a skein or when I would spin. And when I started working with intention, which was basically you know, when you spin, you take loose fibers and you introduce a spiral. You introduce twists into those fibers and they grab onto each other and they create a thread, and that's how a thread is created. And so I started having the idea, which is not a new idea, many, many people and cultures have been doing this for years and years and years and centuries. But I started having the idea of, as I was spinning thread, especially to make garments for myself, for other people, to start having an intention or prayer that would flow from me and into the thread and be grabbed as the fiber was being grabbed or was grabbing onto each other, the prayer would be grabbed into the spiral as well and just like be sucked into the thread if you will. . And so when I started doing that and seeing the results of that, which were pretty fantastic in terms of what people experienced with the garments that I would infuse with that kind of thing or even for myself, I could feel like the kind of state that it would put me in. I started asking deeper questions about the metaphorical aspect of what I was doing, of like why, you know, why thread? Why am I creating thread all the time? This is basically what I was doing at the time. I was spinning pretty much 24 7 and as I was spinning or knitting I was also in a time in my life where I was very, very actively with more or less success trying to resolve my difficulties to connect to other people. And to myself, obviously, but the way that I was perceiving it was mostly with the outside. And the way that I see it, that creative practice that I was having was basically constantly supporting that movement that I was trying to learn or to nurture of connecting with others and bonding with others or being available for it, right?

[00:07:20] And while I was not necessarily aware of it at the time because I was much younger, obviously, I became aware of it as I grew older and as I became aware of it, I started using it more consciously, using thread way more consciously when I wanted to anchor a feeling or anchor an epiphany that I had about something, then I would embroider something about it or would make an, an object about it or would spin a skein of yarn with that specific thought, specific intention going into it.

[00:07:57] And that added layers to my practice, obviously. And then, I started getting interested in the symbological and mythological aspect of thread, because thread is something that you find actually in many fairy tales and myth. And in almost every culture there is a god or a goddess of thread or weaving or spinning because thread has been a constant in human history. And with my work, obviously, I do family constellation, so I work in family systems and ancestors and connecting to your ancestors. So it makes complete sense to me that I would be working with thread because it's basically the thing that everybody on earth has in common, no matter the culture that you are in, no matter your color of your skin, where you were born, wherever that was, at some point your ancestors spun thread. And it doesn't matter if it was thread that was made of plants or made of wool, or made of sinew, like there's many, many materials, right? That it could have been spun from. But it is a constant that no matter how far back you go, and no matter where you go, everybody on this earth has ancestors who knew those gestures and who knew how to make them.

[00:09:27] When you become aware of that and you start connecting into that or when I started connecting into that, into my practice, into my creative practice, it opened a whole world of richness and strength and support where I could feel really, because I was going at it consciously, and it had been happening unconsciously until then, right? It's not because I became conscious of it, but becoming conscious of things usually make them stronger. And so I started becoming conscious of the fact that every time that I would start spinning, then I started trying to connect consciously to the strength of my ancestors and what was coming to me through those gestures, that becomes almost like a ceremony, because why are rituals done the way that they're done? The exact same way throughout generations, whether it's mass or whatever else ritual you can think of. The specifics of the rituals, like the gestures and the clothing and the day, and all of that has to be really specific. And part of that is because when you do something as close as possible to the way that hundreds or thousands of people have done it before you, then it's like you tap in or you plug in to that morphogenetic field that exists that is kind of connected to that specific imprint or you would say like a hologram of that specific ritual, right? And when, and you plug into it and suddenly you have access to all the strength and richness of hundreds of years of that ritual being performed. And so with spinning is the same, like with thread for me is the same.

[00:11:16] It's like when I start spinning, then I connect into the strength of hundreds and thousands of years of ancestors and people who survived and who spun thread and made garments out of it. That's tremendous support for my life. And not only that, but it's also a tremendous mirror in general.

[00:11:39] You know, whatever is happening with my project, with my current project is usually a great mirror for whatever is happening in my life. And that kind of takes me to what I want to talk about and because we'll talk more about thread and textile with my guest in the next episode for sure. But I wanna widen that reflection to creativity in general.

[00:12:01] Because obviously, why do I do what I do? What I, why do I do the work that I do? And especially with things like the Moonlit Path course or what is coming up next year, which is the Silken Mirror. And why do I call it the Silken Mirror? Because that is exactly for me what it is, what that kind of creative practice is, which is like a mirror that reflects you in a way that is both soft and true.

[00:12:32] If you start having a creative practice that is geared towards self-exploration. I mean, if you start having creative practice regardless, right? But just a creative practice, if you don't have the intention to kind of reflect on what you're creating and having a conversation with it, then you probably will miss out on some of the richness of it. It's kind of when I was knitting and spinning and working with threads for years without having all the awareness that I have around it now. It was great. It was supportive, but I was missing out on how I could use it consciously, and I was missing out on the information that it was giving me about myself at the time. And so that's why I find it so important to connect your creative practice to a real intention of seeing what is being revealed to you about yourself through what you create . And no matter the medium, it doesn't have to be textile. I think textile is very powerful for all the reasons that I talked about, but I completely understand that it's not everybody's thing. First you have to appreciate slowness which is not everybody's fun thing to do. Even for me, it can be frustrating sometimes how slow it is. But whatever medium you use, any creative practice is great, but when you start going into your creative practice with a real intention of exploring the truth of who you are, and so basically entering into a conversation with whatever you create and being willing to see what it's showing you, what it's revealing to you about who you are, and also be willing to use what you create as a way to strengthen yourself or to support yourself or to move through something or to have a way to anchor something that you wanna start embodying better, then that brings so much richness and awareness into your life. 

[00:14:41] I actually don't often talk about what I do on this podcast, so I thought that was a good occasion, especially since I'm in the middle of really thinking deeply about how I want to create this membership and what I want to be in it. But the way that my work works is that basically we use questions and processes around archetypal themes or like really large questions or large themes that we explore through our own body, very often in space, bodies in space, but also through discussion and reflection and self-inquiry and stuff, and we use that material to create something whether it's writing or drawing or textile, it can be movement, it can be whatever, if you're doing clay, like it can be clay or collage , and then from that thing we get more information about our original material, what we were creating from, which was like our impressions, our epiphanies, things that come to us, our felt sense of things or, you know, the embodied perception or of that specific theme or subject.

[00:16:00] And then we put it out of ourselves into an art piece or something. And that art piece feeds us more information about that specific subject that we weren't aware of. Because whatever you create, your subconscious is always at play and it's always moving into what you create, whether you want it or not. You can try to not have it move into what you create, but it's almost impossible. And then from that new information, you can create more and that feeds you more information about who you are. And then you can create more. It's virtuous circle of awareness where your awareness of yourself feeds your creation that feeds your awareness of yourself, and it goes like this. And it's, it's endless, obviously, right? Because we never really know ourselves completely, absolutely, fully. But it's also really strengthening work to learn to be with yourself and to use your resources in the best possible ways, and to have more compassion for yourself and to just have a kinder, more intimate relationship with who you are.

[00:17:15] And it's a way to be in conversation with yourself that doesn't rely on the cognitive and on the rational and on the ideas that you have about who you are or who you should be. And it relies on the reality of your subconscious structure, of your cosmology of your inner world, your felt inner world rather than your thought inner world. And I feel like you know, our thought inner world and our thought world gets so much real estate in the way that we perceive ourselves, way too much real estate. And my desire or my idea is to start giving more real estate to the felt sense of who you are and the metaphors, right, that describe you, that don't have to be explained or understandable and that can just be, it can just be right? Because the felt sense of who we are there's no judgment to it. It's just who we are. Whereas the thought sense of who we are, very often, there's a lot of judgment that's attached to that . It's like very, very strong judgment. So that's the intention behind my work and I thought I'd talked to you about it because I'm in the middle of really creating something new. And also I wanted to talk to you about all my understanding and richness around thread, cuz that's something that is important to me, that I feel is not understood or is not perceived by most people, who perceive especially thread crafts are made with thread as old lady kind of crafts, you know, they're a little quaint. But actually there's so much power in that material and in that practice. And that's something that I love to talk about and that I will talk about more with my guest in a couple of weeks. And so, in the meantime, I invite you to go and fill out the form to let me know what you would like in this new offering.

[00:19:22] And I am very much looking forward to continuing to talk to you about those subjects. I have a number of wonderful guests coming up this year that I'm really excited about and I hope you will keep listening to the podcast. And if you like it please don't hesitate to share it with a friend or to leave a review or ratings on Apple Podcast or Spotify. That is very helpful. Thank you so much for being a listener. I really appreciate all the feedback that I get from you about how much you enjoy this podcast, and I wish you a good day and a good night. And to be well and safe until our next episode.