Episode notes
What are the simple ways to build mental and emotional resilience every day? Gillian gets under the skin of this question in this brilliant interview with Will Van Der Hart.
Will is a coach, author, priest in London and Director of The Mind and Soul Foundation. His interest in emotional health is wide ranging, reflecting his broad experience in a variety of pastoral contexts. He is a Mental Health First Aider and is passionate about equipping church leaders to look after their own emotional health as well as empowering them to manage the emotional needs of their congregations. He is co-author of the new book Mind Fuel the book he co-wrote with adventurous author, Bear Grylls – a focus for this conversation.
Their broad and beautiful conversations covers much ground, including:
- Where the idea of the book and the co-write came about and the writing process.
- Bear’s experience of mending through nature and physical challenges
- Physical challenges as mending and the integration of mind, body and soul.
- Keeping the language of Mental Health accessible in the book to engage a new audience.
- Will’s decision making about what to share publicly when experiencing PTSD
- What does success look like for those dealing with really challenging circumstances.
- Integrating spirituality into all of life.
- Will’s tips for a flourishing daily life.
Links:
Transcription
Gillian Straine
I am Gillian Straine and welcome to the GoHealth podcast. So we are in season three of the GoHealth podcast where we are exploring the topic Together We Flourish. In this season we are looking at all the positive ways that people combine health and faith and we’ve got an amazing line up of super interesting people for you. We’ve chosen this topic -Together We Flourish as it’s at the heart of the GoHealth community and indeed all the work of the Guild, ’cause our vision is to see flourishing communities made up of flourishing individuals. And the GoHealth community is a place of faith, sharing, learning and practice where we actively tend to our journeys towards health and wellbeing, all for just £4 a month you can be part of this network and community.
Now in this episode we are exploring that theme ‘Together We Flourish’ with Will Van Der Hart. Will is an associate vicar in London and director of the Mind and Soul Foundation. He’s also a coach, a sought after speaker, mental health first aider, and he is passionate about empowering others to look after their emotional health. And he’s just published a book called Mind Fuel with someone you might have heard of, Bear Grylls. So in this episode we chat about the writing of that book with Bear, and it might surprise you how they did it, so it’s super interesting to listen to and why they’re both willing to share in this new book their own struggles, both of them, in order to help others, and where we can all find support and inspiration to be honest about our mental health and find ways to increase resilience.
I’ve read the book and it is dripping with positivity, but also integrity and honesty about real life. Oh man, I really enjoyed chatting to Will, I always do, I’ve known him for a few years, he’s fantastic. And we get into some really tough stuff that he’s gone through, like severely damaging his back and a serious mental health crisis following trauma he experienced and his ongoing work to keep healthy in a day to day way. But he does all the sharing with real grace and humour. Listen, I’m smiling just thinking about our podcast conversation because he is a super inspiring person. He’s really funny and he just, like, drops wisdom all over the place, just everywhere. So listen, I really hope you enjoy this episode. Let’s go.
So Will thank you so much for giving us your time on the Go Health podcast. How are you today?
Will Van Der Hart: Really well Gillian, thank you so much for having me on – exciting!
Gillian Straine: It really is exciting because this is our third season of the podcast and this season our theme is Together We Flourish and so you’re like the first person that came into my mind about somebody who’s really tackling Christianity and faith and living in a positive way. And you’ve got a huge background, of course, in helping people address mental health. You are associate vicar in London, you co-founded and direct the Mind and Soul Foundation. You’re also a coach and you’re an author. And you’ve just had a new book out, haven’t you?
Will Van Der Hart: Yeah, that’s right. So just brought the book out just last month, October called to Mind Fuel. It’s really a co-write with Bear Grylls, which is quite exciting. And so yeah, it’s been it’s been a fascinating journey this this last season just made – we’ve made up to I think 56 on my Amazon bestseller list. So that’s pretty good out of a couple of million books. It feels quite exciting to get up there inside the top 100, hopefully, yeah, just reach a new audience with the, with the emotional health material.
Gillian Straine: Yeah, that’s amazing. I’m so pleased to hear it’s going well. So where – can you tell us where did the idea for the book come from?
Will Van Der Hart: So yeah, I was writing a devotional on mental health and you know, I sort of regularly sort of spin through articles on Mind Soul Foundation website. And the ones that people pick up a lot from me are a sort of light theological entry into text exploring with kind of emotional, mental connotations. So I thought, oh, maybe I’ll do a 30 day lent book or something like that. On sort of journey through Mental Health in the New Testament, and I’m friends with Bear Grylls. I’ve known him for probably ten or 12 years now. We met through another mutual friend and another friend who’s a writer said, Oh, I heard that Bear was wanting to write a sort of devotional like Soul Fuel. His is 365 day kind of Bible study guide but around mental, emotional health. You should just chat to him. So anyway, I messaged Bear and said, ‘hey, I hear on the grapevine you’re thinking about this stuff and I’ve already started something, do you want to chat?’ Bear’s often away, so you know, you might not hear anything. But within 30 minutes I had a phone call from him saying, ‘Will, tell me what’s going on. You know, this sounds brilliant.’ And we had a really exciting conversation around the topic. And he said, look, I just all the work I’ve done with the sort of forces and contacts through the film industry, so many people I know just struggling with the basic stuff, but not everyone wants to talk mental health, you know, and so particularly chaps, it seems to turn a few guys off. So he said, ‘what could we do? could we could we collaborate?’ And so that’s how the idea was formed. And I think we were commissioned in mid February and we’ve done the write by the end of July. So it was quite a fast project, but it was, it was really fun to do. So it’s 365 days of emotional resilience.
Gillian Straine: Yeah, and normally when people come on the podcast and they’ve written a book, I usually read the book before I interview the person and I started reading this Will, I actually didn’t want to rush it. So I’m only up today 40 or something like that because there’s one sort of challenge a day and you can and it’s broken down into eight different areas: wisdom, battles, motivation, courage, relationship, self care, determination and spirituality as well. So tell us about the writing process. Did you like climb a mountain and hang out and write it or what?
[LAUGHTER]
Will Van Der Hart: It’s yeah. I think it was Russell Brand who said, you know, trust Bear Grylls to write a book – a good book about mental health, he probably wrote it hanging upside down from the tree by his private parts anyway, or language to that nature. So – no trees were climbed or mountains were scaled at my end. I mean, lots of people assume that Bear is quite disconnected from the writing process. Actually, he’s a really good editor, filled with ideas and every day we actually used WhatsApp. It’s the first time I’ve ever done this – sort of scoping ideas for two or three readings a day very early in the morning and then WhatsApping backwards and forwards to put readings together. Not a single word went through without Bear reading it, scrutinising it, challenging it, it was quite tough sometimes, you know, some ideas of mine, completely canned, but brilliant. And it was really fun. I think I’ve got I don’t know, I’ve probably got about 3000 WhatsApps from Bear over the over the period of writing together. And he’s, a he’s a great editor as well. I mean, just really sharp. And so we bounce stuff backwards and forwards and then popped into an online box for our editor to then review. And it was hard because we wrote quite long form because we were writing about 400 words and then our editor was out with the kind of knives carving it down to about 275 words. So, you know, there’s always a pain when you’re writing because you were just like, oh, I love it all. And actually they’re like, no, we want it to be sharp, digestible – a page a day, really hold people’s attention. So yeah, but I’m happy with the result as far as it can be.
Gillian Straine: Yeah, it is, so this is not a paid promotion, but I have so but I’ve been really, really moved. So some days actually I find it, and I consider myself such a fairly spiritual person, done a lot of this area stuff, but I’m finding it really challenging and in a good way and really positive. And I’ve been fascinated by Bear Grylls. I read his autobiography, ‘Mud, Sweat and Tears’, which is about his journey from breaking his back to climbing Everest with a whole load of other stuff, like his childhood in it. And I was struck, particularly at the end of the book, when he gets to the top of Everest, that for him, that challenge climbing a mountain, which is also physically hugely challenging, was also spiritually healing moment as well. And I just want to read a little bit. So he gets the top of Everest, you’ve read most of the book at this point and he’s there, and he said, ‘you see, ever since that hospital bed, I had wanted to be fixed physically and emotionally, heck, ever since boarding school, age eight, all those years I wanted to be fixed and right here at 29,000 feet, as I staggered those last few steps, I was mending. The spiritual working through the physical, mending.’ Which I think is a beautiful description of healing, that difference between being fixed and being healed as well, and what we can take through the faith we will often say. But this is him finding spiritual healing through physical challenge as well. Which is interesting, isn’t it? And part of what’s gone into your book?
Will Van Der Hart: Yes. So much part of his journey is is encountering the spiritual and the physical. I mean, one entry – it’s quite funny which I was like – can we even put this in- He kept saying, ‘I like to like hug trees Will’, I was like, okay. ‘You know, sometimes like I touch a tree and I just say thank you’. And I’m like, okay. He like ‘it’s been there for such a long time and it’s just doing such a good thing’. This sort of connection he has to nature, and just being grateful for being alive in it. And sort of grateful for all of its working. There’s a very strong sense of presence that he has, and I think a lot of people don’t realise he still has persistent back pain. He has to work really hard physically to kind of keep himself in good shape, to stave off the pain and that motif of kind of being present and mending is is very much a core part of who he is. I mean, it’s helpful also to know he’s just a really genuinely lovely guy. I know. I know people think with these celebrity types, you know, that they’re sort of all glossy and lovely on camera and then they kind of get off and they’re not like that in real life. Bear is actually lovely. I mean, I’ve been away with him and you know, we’ve met abroad and done some Christian kind of holiday things together. And what I’ve noticed about him is he just always has time for people and he genuinely is the warmest, most enthusiastic person in the room, which is which is great. And it’s great. You know, I couldn’t tell you how in the writing process. You know, I wrote, like I said, 160 emotional health entries with him. I mean, you’re thinking, oh, my goodness, I’ve got 200 more entries to write. Like, think about that for a minute. That is a lot of unique topics to like come up with. But he was constantly like enthusiastic and encouraging and like, this is great. And always deferring praise to others. Like, Oh, thank you, that was so brilliant. I love that idea. And that’s hard to do at 5:30 in the morning, you know.
Gillian Straine: I think also what I’m struck by in his writing, not only in this new book you’ve put out with him, but his other stuff as well. The challenges are seen as opportunities for growth and that there’s something really healing about engaging, engaging in challenges. I’ve said I went to really difficult time after my second child. I was really I suffered really badly with depression and I was on to Samaritans and I was really, really quite ill – if that happened to me now, I would have gone to the doctor, I would go to the doctor, I didn’t back then and I thought, I’ll just try to think my way out of it. I thought come on, Gillian, I’m a priest. I’m a spiritual leader. I should not be feeling like this. And I gave myself a really hard time, so a heap of shame on top of it, which is another topic you talk about in the book. But it was actually one of his other books, the one you mentioned before, ‘Soul Fuel’. that helped me as well and challenged me to get back in my body and start running and be more physically active, actually, because I think in Christianity so often we you know, you have to find healing through having a good cry about it or silent prayer. And we miss the healing that can come out from just getting back into our bodies and challenging ourselves a bit can’t we.
Will Van Der Hart: So much, and I found this – we had quite a lot of interesting conversations, of course, because I broke my back in 2016 and suffered from this thing called Cauda Equina Syndrome. I didn’t do it parachuting in the desert. I blew up on a trampoline with my kids, having done years and years of rowing. But this sort of feeling of, I think what that did for me, we both work our pain through physically, through some endurance activity. When I lost my back mobility, I sort of struggled then because I couldn’t do what I could do before. And, you know, it’s easy to discount your physicality, particularly as you getting older and you sort of almost put physicality in the sort of enthusiasm of youth. And oh, you’ll learn, you know, when you get old, creaky and cranky. Actually Bears really, he really sort of inspired me to get back in my body again, you know, just just through his enthusiasm. You know it’s so Platonist – this whole idea, you know, you know how Plato denigrated the sarxs and that the psyche was sort of tolerated but what he really loved with pneuma. We still have that in society at large. You know, we’re still so platonic, and particularly in the church, the body is largely ignored and, you know, diminished. But, you know, we’re elevating the spirituality and the intelligence. I just think the incarnation means something. You know, the fact that the word became flesh and moved into a neighborhood means that actually being fleshly and physical matters.
I think, in writing the book, you know, I try to cycle every day, but I’m just really sort of engaged with my body more. And so, okay, this is a gift. And whatever level we’re able to be mobile and celebrate our bodies and move our bodies, it’s good for our minds and for our spirits. And I think the danger of professional exercise and of maybe the Bear icon idea is that those of us who haven’t got a body and a six pack that looks quite like that, or those of us who maybe are carrying a little bit more weight than others, those of us who maybe have a physical disability or some physical challenge can discount ourselves from being physical people. But actually, you know, we’ve all got a body, whatever its shape or size or ability and moving that body and celebrating that body is an important part of our emotional health and wellbeing.
Gillian Straine: Absolutely. And and there’s lots of new science coming out which sort of almost proves what the Bible tells us are, you know, we are created mind, body and soul and science in a couple of thousand years is just sort of catching up in terms of how we keep stress in our body. So if things go wrong and if there’s a problem or we suffer a trauma that can somehow get trapped in the body as well. So there’s a lot of healing that can happen through a physical therapy when that kind of things happen. But our bodies are really wise as well, aren’t they? Our guts are lined with brain cells. We might say, I felt it in my guts. We had this…we can actually discover a lot about the world and about ourselves and about God even through our body.
Will Van Der Hart: Yeah, Bear’s got a few mantras, which are quite funny, again, when they come through on a WhatsApp at six in the morning. You know, saying ‘never give up’, you know, but also ‘trust your gut’ is one of his key phrases, you know, trust your gut. I mean, I think we’ve obviously seen books like Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. You know, the body keeps a score, and there’s a lot of reference and interest in the idea that our bodies can really talk to us and tell us more about our environment and ourselves than we maybe would give them credit for. I was coaching someone yesterday who’s, you know, very, very anxious at the moment, but helping them think about the fact that their body responds and reacts to their environment well before their mind appraises it. You know, if you’re stepping into the street and a bus is whizzing up, you know, the hard shoulder, you go into reverse well, before you’d ever realised there was even a bus, that it’s only when the bus has gone past that you go, oh, my goodness, I nearly died. And so, so all of that stuff that our body is a tuned into our limbic system, how it responds and it’s aware of itself well beyond how we’re consciously aware of it, is so powerful, but it makes so much sense. Then of course, when you experience traumas and you know your body keeps the score – listening to your body and the tension within your body and the reactions of your body is a really great insight to what’s going on. I think we’ve become far too cerebral and far too inattentive to our bodies. But that to say, I mean, Mind Fuel isn’t all about having a cold shower and romping around in the woods. So, you know, it’s a it’s a physicalism is a part of it, but it’s it’s not all about getting out there in the physical.
Gillian Straine: And yes, because in the in the preface for the book, there is a real focus on those internal battles in the mind that can stop us going forward and stop us going… So there’s a big focus on mental health in the work in the book as well isn’t there.
Will Van Der Hart
Yeah, I mean, there is, that said, I think, you know, the mandate that we had, the excitement we had was, I think, having run the Mind Soul Foundation for the last 16 years, that to a level the mental health literature space is relatively saturated. I mean, most people know about mental health. Those people who are interested in mental health, buy books on mental health. I mean, I’ve got shelves of my health books. I’m like a mental health junkie and I think people like me probably have got no reservations about engaging with thinking about, listening to, reading things about mental health. But in the world out there, I think there’s still a significant number of people for whom this stuff is disinteresting, wooly, disengaging, not something they want to engage with at all. And as a result, those people are then potentially more vulnerable when they do face the battles of life because they have got any any of the sort of structures or understandings or frameworks to be able to manage those emotions. So Bear and I actively engage, are trying to engage in disengaged marketplace, where mental health is concerned. And so we actually sort of coined the phrase, I mean, it’s not too cheesy of sort of mental fitness, which is this idea of actually you can be physically fit, you still get physically ill. I mean, everyone who’s physically fit still suffers from physical illness. You can also be mentally fit. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to struggle with mental illness at some point or other. The mental fitness is this healthy self-awareness of how we work, how we process, how we have maybe particular biases within us that that can limit us. We have family of origin stories which might lead to hard beliefs that stop us from making progress in life. So understanding ourselves and keeping short accounts with ourselves, keeping processing, keeping our emotions alive, you know, sharing, talking, collaborating. So we hope and it sounds like a stereotype again, I hope it isn’t, that maybe young men who are down the gym all the time in saying that mental health would never touch me, might pick up this book. We hope that a lot of the middle aged men that I coach who’ve got huge amounts of success but a very small amount of happiness, might think, Oh, that’s an interesting book I could read on the Tube without too much embarrassment. So there’s, we’ve definitely diluted mental health as a sort of primacy and gone for something that’s hopefully accessible to people who might react to that label. Obviously, as you know, I’ve got a mental health condition. So for me, as someone who suffers from GAD like I have no reservations about talking about mental health but, but thinking about people who would find it hard to. That’s they’re the people we’ve really written this book for.
Gillian Straine: And GAD is Generalised Anxiety Disorder, just in case people haven’t heard about it. So thinking about those people, that bloke on the tube going home after a long day to a life he’s not happy with or that bloke in the gym as well. What do you think the obstacles are that have stopped them up to this point, until they get your book, right? So what are the obstacles?
Will Van Der Hart: You’re very kind. You’re very kind. I mean, again, Bear would kill me if I said the book was only for men, it’s definitely not. It’s for women, too. But if we take the stereotypes, actually, what’s interesting, I think The Daily Mail, we’re like, oh, you know, various Twitterati, were saying that all the odds they’re bringing out will be old trope surround sort of mental health thing about men who don’t understand themselves. Look, it’s not true, but the statistics of male suicide remain the same. 4270 people die by suicide. I think of that last year over three quarters were men and the greatest risk age is 50 to 57. So you tell me what correlates. The reality is that I’ve got to be honest with you, as someone who went to public school, the greatest dysfunction I see is in often private school, educated men in their forties to sixties who’ve had very little socialised experience in childhoods, who have had very little opportunities to develop their emotion in any way, and who’ve got no sort of modelled emotional framework. They go after success and actually they get it but don’t have the opportunity to work through those emotional experiences, you know, within themselves. And they’re often told, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and crack on – look good. And when you feel bad, you know, you don’t know what to do with it. So this is light touch, you know, it’s definitely light touch, but the hope is through encouraging people to recognise basically emotional turbulence as normal and actually universal, we can begin to provoke conversation between men. The greatest challenge facing men today is isolation. It’s the feeling that I’ve got to keep up appearances. I was coaching a guy, I remember a couple of years ago, sixty year old guy, unbelievably successful. And you know, the classic coaching question is, what do you want? So I was like, what do you really want? He said, look, I just want to hold on to retirement and then I can be myself. I was like, what, what do you mean? He’s like, I just want to hold on to retirement and then I can start being myself.
Gillian Straine: Wow.
Will Van Der Hart: I’m like, wow, what have you been doing for the last 40 years? Like, and the reality is anything but being myself, you know, we have a crisis of emotional health and wellbeing in all generations. But I think when I when I talk anecdotally to men in that generation, I’m thinking we have big problems. And, you know, they’re are problems, as we all know, around domestic violence, which, you know, is is a real epidemic, which is unseen. And so much of that seems to be linked to, you know, obviously, there’s all sorts of elements to what domestic abuse means. But the men who are emotionally aware and don’t go to the football, get super angry and then come home and beat up a family member are what we’re looking for? What do you do with your emotion? What do you do with anger? What do you do with your discontentment at work? I know you know the statistics around football, you know the loss of a football team and domestic violence are horrific. Like what is wrong with men that we have not, we know that men would turn their emotions into violence against the people that they love. I mean, these are all questions we’re asking. I’m not saying we’ve got the answers to them, but I just, I just think anything we can do to open up emotional conversations for people who are having those conversations is going to be a good thing. You know, this book isn’t a…look if you’ve got a mental health problem, don’t read Mind Fuel as the answer to that problem, please. Go and see a psychologist. Get the medication you need. Read a great book by a psychiatrist or psychologist. This is the book I’m hoping people will give to their teenage sons for Christmas, plug, plug, plug.
[Laughter]
Do you know what I mean – this is the book I hope a guy would read 365 days of readings around – actually, it’s okay to feel like that and actually it won’t stay – like there’s a way of working around this, there’s a way of getting through this, there’s a way of opening up.
Gillian Straine: Because these are huge chronic problems. I mean, that story you just told about the man who wants to be himself the last few years before he dies is heartbreaking. And they are real questions of identity as well. I mean, are we can we be ourselves or are we our work? These are huge problems I think we’re dealing with. I’m always struck when I do healing services, Will, and you sort of start with sea of faces and everyone looks very, very Church of England, mostly, you know, white and neat and all together, you know, and thinking about dinner or drinks party or whatever it might be. And then they come up for healing and then in the confidentiality of that space tell you the most heartbreaking things – not necessarily great tragedies, but sometimes, but often I’m just so lonely or you know, I can’t forgive myself for something and many, many years ago and these and these are huge things as well that we’re talking about and I was really struck in the book as well that you helpfully provide icons.. Like interviewing you on podcasts, you can just look up all the spirituality ones to find out what you say about the faith, but dealing with, you know, big hitting topics like shame as well that we carry around, which is huge, isn’t it? And almost seems still quite taboo even to talk about and in safe church spaces, isn’t it?
Will Van Der Hart Massively. I mean, Rob and I wrote The Power of Belonging as our real offering around shame. I’m so glad I wrote it. It was, in a way, a bit of an exhaustive book, so it’s not done so well because you can’t help but go deep with shame. But I think writing it really made me feel convinced that the root of so many of our ills, mental and emotionally and relationally, shame is sitting pretty. You know, it’s that, one of the earliest human emotions. I think Darwin suggested that shame was at the heart of the human condition, seen as shyness in babies because they would turn their face away from the non-parent, whereas other animals would come out and, you know, hang out with the other rhinoceroses or the other giraffes or whatever, but human babies would turn their face away from unknown adults straight away. And that sort of shame or shyness was like an intrinsic part of who we are. I mean, I think maybe that’s what original sin really looks like. There’s this sort of otherness that we feel from a very early stage. It’s certainly at the heart of so many of the issues we face, and we all have that sense, I mean, imposter syndrome is another thing that we deal with in the book, and it’s so prevalent today, this feeling of, I’m not good enough, and I’m sure that social media has exacerbated the problem significantly. I’ve got, I’ve got a 13 year old daughter who is heavily…she’s a sweetie and she really is sort of grounded…but, you know, Tic Tok and, you know, Instagram and all this stuff, it’s hard…it’s hard not to feel like you’re just not good enough and then needing to sort of project an image that you’re better than you really are. Whereas at least in history, when there was only sort of a town crier, you wouldn’t necessarily know what vegetables the next door village were growing. So yeah, it’s, it’s a hard world of comparisons and we’ve got to address it.
Gillian Straine: It’s absolutely huge, I think, you know, when we used to come home from school, you know, you shut the door and you were safe. And now the mobile phones mean you’re still interconnected to a world that can be ever so cruel. And of course, Bear is a superstar and he is sharing his story, but you do the same as well, around, you mentioned earlier you have a general, a generalised anxiety disorder. And you you talk about it quite publicly. And I remember Will, the first time I met you, we were in some mental health meeting or something in London and you made a quip about it. I can’t remember, we were talking about some project and you said you’re anxious about it, but you would be anyway. And I remember being struck by your sharing that in the room, how it changed the dynamics of the room when one person was willing to share. We’re all professionals talking about mental health, but you shared your own condition and it changed the dynamic of the room in a really important way. I’ve seen that through my ministry where I talk about either having cancer or suffering from depression. Suddenly everyone wants to tell their story as well, and something happens in a room about which can be deeply healing as well. So this is the same way we can all do do that bit of sharing, can’t we?
Will Van Der Hart: Yes, I mean, again, the healing power of story is so underestimated. I think like that idea of mending versus then healing that you pointed out earlier is really important. And we sort of…we’re mended in community, we’re mended in tapestry in a way everyone a thread and together we create a better story. I suffered from quite a traumatic anxiety, PTSD style breakdown in 2005 after I was involved in assisting in the London bombings, at Edgeware road assist station. And, you know, I had a real choice in my life at that point. It was, you know, getting calls as I started to talk about mental health from other more evangelical leaders who one of whom said, look, if you keep talking about mental health, you’re going to you’re going to ruin your ministry. You know, people are going to call you the mental priest. You just you just need to be quiet about it. And I was in this quandary, I thought, I can either go back in my box and just pretend this was just like a bit of tiredness and mild burnout or I can start talking about mental health. I just thought, I’m just going to get out there and start talking about it. And weirdly now people call me the mental priest. I quite like it. You know, it was it was a funny season and I just thought it’s got to be better to be vulnerable and to be real than it has to be to carry pretence and hide. And I’m so glad I did because, you know, if you’d said to me at that age and stage, I’d spend most of my ministry talking about mental health, I would have run a 1000 miles.
But now I just think, you know, isn’t it God’s providence that God used that experience, that I had to begin having conversations about mental health, which has actually been useful for some people and offered some help in the church. And so that was yeah, it’s been an interesting journey.
Gillian Straine: Amazing journey. Thank God for your ministry as well. Because tackling real taboos actually within a church hierarchy and within our communities, because they can be so…we’ve got a big project, Will, as you know, called Healthy Healing Hub project to make every church a place of healing for the whole community, helping them to discern what God’s calling them to do, helping them work with a multi. multi-agency and then getting in experts as well. So we’re not a mental health charity. We know some great ones like Mind and Soul, that we can promote and point people in the direction of that kind of thing. But I quite often, if I know, if I’m feeling brave or I know the church well, I’ll say, great, you want to be a Healthy Healing Hub, but is this a healthy place? And you can see everyone will begin to shift in their seats and then there’ll be a bit of a titter at the back because they know the real story, kind of thing. And I think there’s some challenge that needs to go on there. And if we’re going to be either, if we’re thinking as communities or even individual Christians, if we want to offer health and healing to other people, we have to look at our own…sort of get our own house in order, as it were. And that’s not about being perfect in any sense. I think it’s more about being open as well, about the problems and just being realistic, speaking the truth, which sounds like what you’ve been doing over the last few years and certainly through this book.
Will Van Der Hart: Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s right. I’m just getting the conversations going and breaking down barriers between people. I think, I hope the church is more inclusive these days and actually that people who previously wouldn’t have felt welcomed, feel welcome across, across every denomination and every every kind of style of Anglicanism. And for me, that’s been mental health. It’s been, you know, actually, if you suffer from serious enduring disorders like schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder or bipolar disorder, if you suffer from neurotic disorders like depression or anxiety or OCD that you feel, that there’s a place for you at the table. And actually God welcomes you. And, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s amazing how I think how divided or how excluded people felt from, from the from the church in many ways. And yet Jesus, you know, in my experience, always came first to the sick and oftered the first welcome, you know, almost in every room, offers a first welcome to those who are unwell, what a gift. Just yeah, just lovely to see people who felt excluded from from the family of faith being welcomed back in again. I’m grateful to all of the Anglican leaders I meet as well and the bishops for the change of culture that I think we’ve probably both seen over the last ten years around this topic. Just, you know, I’m so grateful to see such an interest in areas of mental health among clergy and a willingness to kind of engage and also come from organisations who are participating well in this space who are trying to resource people to support those and enfranchise those in their communities who might be struggling in that way.
Gillian Straine: Absolutely. It’s good to see positive things, going positive as we move forward. But can I just take you back, you mentioned, you know, some quite serious mental health conditions like schizophrenia, chronic health conditions and things like that. People who live with, you know, really big piles of rubbish in their lives that they have to go through. I mean, the book aims to help people develop a positive mindset and break through obstacles that limit success in everyday life. It’s a really bombastic statement, right and great. But what about the really serious stuff? Well, what does success look like if you are notwithstanding a miracle, we all believe that it might happen. But notwithstanding that right. If you’re dealing with something really awful and you cannot see a way through and there’s no medical hope of change, what does success look like there?
Will Van Der Hart: Well, I think there’s, there’s obviously two ways to answer this question. The first one is that we’re only ever looking at success in terms of our own capacity. Like the purpose of Mind Fuel was not that we benchmarked success and become more impressive than others but actually that we live with the fullest capacity, with our fullest capacity as far as we are able. So I really hope that people who maybe have physical disabilities would not feel turned off by what we write in Mind Fuel, but we would recognise that whilst I can’t climb the mountains that Bear Grylls can climb, they can live with, you know, they can find success within their capacity. We talk about creating green spaces, very like try to describe people’s windowsills – if you live in a tenement block and you’ve got a windowsill, start green gardening so you look out the window through plants rather than straight through concrete, you know. So we have in mind what would success look like if you don’t live up a beautiful mountain in Switzerland somewhere, like everyone has their stuff. And I’m not wishing to diminishing anyone who’s dealing with a really kind of rubbishy rubbish of life, but within every limitation is also an opportunity to find success.
And I, you know, we’re really inspired by people like Nick Vujicic who’s got no arms or legs. And I was with ab undertaker recently and we were talking about gratitude and he said to me, he was from Trinidad and he said, we were talking about the issues, issues of gratitude today. He said, ‘I used to feel poor because I had no shoes. And then I met a man who had no feet’. I was like, Oh, okay. I was like, he was just sort of, you know, was just a moment. I was just like, wow, I was really arrested by that phrase that he used. And I was thinking, you know, whatever our limitations, whatever hardships, there’s always success to be found in living our fullest life within the constraints that surround us.
Now, some of those constraints can be overcome in this life, and some of them can’t, but none of them can diminish our capacity to live within them well. And, you know, I think in such a comparative world where success has almost become an externalised measure and applauded or approved off by a kind of big crowd, we can lose the reality that there is a way of living every day with gratitude, serenity and application, which is still fulfilling.
And I, I’ve met a number I mean, I’m friends with Sharon Hastings, who has a psychotic life long psychotic disorder. And she continues to battle psychosis, is an incredibly inspirational writer, an amazing mum and just a force. And I think, you know, comparatively, I definitely think man, I’m so glad I don’t have psychosis. That’s what I think. She’s probably thinking I wish I didn’t have psychosis, but she does. But with the constraints of her life, is she successful? Oh, boy, yeah, she is so successful. But, you know, she has really distinct limitations that she has to enact in order to stay living well within her lane. But she’s living that life. And I think, you know, hopelessness comes from believing that someone else’s success should be ours. But hopefulness comes from identifying the success that we’re living or the decisions that we can live in to find that success. And yeah, I mean, I’m just working I’m just working through a dear friend’s journal who I’m sort of toying with, she agreed to sign it over to me before she died so that I could…she was like, ‘let’s do something with this Will’, you know?
So I’ve just been reading it this week, you know, she’s 43 when she was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer, I buried her last year. I was just inspired by her successful living throughout a heinous season of treatment and operation and just illness, sickness, nausea, you name it. We blew some champagne at her funeral because she was like, I said, she couldn’t do like a recording where told everyone since that would be too freaky…but she basically, she just lived it full. You know, she was on the sun lounger floating in the middle of a pool in Nairobi about three weeks before she actually died. Like, you know, life is filled with limitations and hardships, but that doesn’t mean we can’t live.
Gillian Straine: I meant to pop into Waterstones before we chatted to see where your book was. Was it in the self-help section or the faith section? I haven’t looked, because what really struck me was what I read and particularly, Will, looking at the Christian sections of, spirituality sections as well. And I’m sure you’ve noticed because you wrote the book, right, but in all the sort of challenges you bring up under the spirituality sections where there is a challenge around shame or a challenge around burdens that we carry or a challenge around being bold in this life in the name of Christ, almost all of them came with good advice that had something to do with connecting to others. And I wonder if that’s why this book should be more on the Christian stuff bit rather than self-help. Because it’s not an individualistic book, certainly not in the Christian spiritual things. And I’m curious, given that our podcast season title is together we flourish – there’s something about the togetherness of, you know, muddling along as Christians with all the rubbish life throws at us. The togetherness is some of the healing bits that to be focused on in a positive way.
Will Van Der Hart: Yeah, and I think that really, I mean, one of the things about Bear, again that’s super inspirational as Bear, he just celebrates team like because he celebrates team. I mean, even if you follow him on Instagram, you see as many…any post…he actually posts himself will be a post of his team, will be pictures of cameramen – I think was one today a cameraman or camera woman up off a cliff somewhere. Just my great team and our world is fractured and individualistic in so many ways. But together we’re stronger. Obviously, writing a book, we wanted to write a book that, you know, Bear could read in a cancer ward, in a children’s cancer ward without a conflict or we hope that maybe that the people of other faiths and religions would enjoy reading, too. We hope that we would engage with men and women in the mosque as well as maybe in the church. And so we’ve tried to write the spirituality section, they are written from a distinctly Christian perspective, but we tried to write them in a way where the wisdom could, could be accessed and interesting to people of other faiths, but also reflecting our belief in the power and presence of Jesus and acknowledging that the community of faith or discussions around spirituality are great starting point for us all to find better health of mind. And I think the piece of spirituality and religion is sort of… should be cut off from the main – it’s a kind of niche interest topic is like cutting off your leg and saying your leg is a niche interest topic compared to the rest of your body. We are, I think, intrinsically physical, mental and spiritual and it would be completely remiss of us not to include a spirituality element to a book around emotional health and wellbeing. And, you know, I, I would love it if people felt more free to be able to ask questions about faith and spirituality and ask each other, you know, across faiths and across denominations and across backgrounds and assumptions, like what’s this mean to you? I guess anything we can do to express welcome, invitation and celebrate questions and togetherness around faith and spirituality is going to be a good thing.
Gillian Straine: I think so many people see our our church buildings as places that are not for them. I noticed that during the Queen’s death, I live at the Lichfield cathedral and we had thousands of people coming into the building who’d never been before. But there some kind of twinkle somewhere that said this is a type of place that does death. We should probably just go there. And that was a huge moment. But I think so much more of it is, is doing stuff outside of church buildings just, you know, you just never know where these conversations are going to happen, you know, in the cereal aisle of a supermarket or maybe particularly in nature. Remembering I was saying being in…I think there’s something particularly interesting and about being in the wilderness and the spaces in nature that you sort of forget about yourself and discover God, types of things going and doing that kind of thing is really important.
Will Van Der Hart: Yeah, that’s right. We did a bit on The Desert Fathers, you know, we kind of like to strip it all back, get out and just encounter God and, you know, under the stars. Yeah. I mean, I had a really great conversation with my mum and dad the other day. They’re really strong Christians and, and, and my mum was clearly a bit worried. She was like, you know, it’s quite secular, Will, you know, like it’s not very much in there about Jesus and bless them, I think they were very worried. I think they maybe were like, it’s going to bring some sort of intervention and like pray for me that I was, you know, I still said, look, I still love the Lord. But there are so there’s so many barriers to people both talking about mental health and also encountering Christian faith. And we want to write a book which is like comfortable for people to say, actually, that’s interesting. And we haven’t there isn’t a huge spirituality section to the book, but I hope there’s enough to at least initiate some conversations and that yeah, believing in God isn’t, isn’t weird, you know. Well I don’t think it’s weird. And so we just want to provoke that natural conversation and say look, you know, if every book that we write as Christians is flooded with Christian-see and we’re writing for the approval of a Christian audience, then we’re never going to really express to the world what what we what we believe and maybe they could they could sort of core of what Christian faith is really about.
Gillian Straine: I love that you said there a couple of times – that word conversation and that conversation comes with that openness, curiosity about the other person holding a space for stories of rubbishness and goodness. You know, it’s so much about conversation. And also, I think we need to be really bold. I mean, God can look after God’s self, right? The message of the resurrection is good it doesn’t really need us. What we need right now in the world is good communication and marketing, actually, so the messages can get out there as well, it’s really important and what this book certainly does, I’m looking forward to the other 200 and whatever many days…
Will Van Der Hart: You’re very patient Gillian, thank you.
Gillian Straine: But finally, Will, thank you for being on the podcast. I wonder if you could just tell us as we begin to end – what helps you to flourish in day to day life? What helps you get by, if any of us listen today, having a bit of a tough day, maybe some things triggered for them by what you said around mental health. What helps you to flourish? What bit of advice can you leave us with today?
Will Van Der Hart: Always try and have a little laugh every day. Just I always love a little levity, just a little bright side, you know. And there’s always a moment there’s always something you can…there’s just a little humour to be eeked out of every day. And so often I find it’s the people in the darkest places who bring the best humour. So a little levity, you know, any connection with someone you love. And if you’re a single person, if you’re living alone, just having that call, making that call at the end of the day or a chat with someone you know, someone at work. If you’re in a family or community, it’s a it’s a hug. It’s a friendly hi, it’s it’s time, it’s just being you with others. We were never, you know, we’re never built to be alone and to carry our own burdens. We were built to be together and to carry them together. So a little levity and a little love every day it sort of, I think, ministers away a lot of pain, a lot of struggle.
Gillian Straine: Will thank you for giving us your conversation today. Connecting with us and certainly giving us lots of joy. I wish you huge luck with this book and thank God for your ministry and your witness
Will Van Der Hart: Thank you so much, Gillian.
Gillian Straine: So that was my conversation with Will, thank you so much for listening. What did you think? We’d love to know your thoughts, ideas and how you’ve been inspired by my conversation with Will. The podcast is freely available to all, but we pick up the conversation in the house community. If you’re not already a member, join us. It’s only £4 a month, we’d love to welcome you.
And we’ve just opened bookings for a popular Advent course. It’s called the Go Health Waiting Well Advent Journey. This year, the Go Health Waiting Well Advent Journey invites you to wait, hopefully and with others as we deepen our faith and wisdom this holiday season, each day there will be an email full of inspiration and practices written especially for you in 2022, augmented with wisdom from spiritual leaders from today and of the past, interweaving Scripture and prayer and the wisdom of the Christian faith into each day of Advent, we will together learn how to Wait Well for the birth of Christ. Daily practices will help us grow in patience and joy, becoming healthy and hopeful at a time that is often chaotic in a world that’s full of uncertainty. So it was brilliant last year and I’m so looking forward to this year’s Advent journey, it is free for everyone to sign up. There’ll be a link associated with this podcast. Pop over to our web page where you can find more details.
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