202. Full Sight to Blind and Back Again - Vanessa Potter

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Imagine living your life exactly as you are today, and suddenly over the course of three days your sight continually deteriorates until you are completely blind. As you and the doctors try to figure out what is happening, you realize you also cannot stand up; paralysis is now setting in.

This is what Vanessa Potter went through ten years ago. She went from a busy television producer to full-time healing from blindness and paralysis. She was able to overcome her health issues by immersing herself in the world of mindfulness and meditation. Working with a researcher at Cambridge University, she created a groundbreaking experiment that allowed participants to view their brain waves through art. We talk about her journey in this episode. We also hit on scoliosis, brain wave states, different forms of meditation, and forest bathing.

Books by Vanessa:

https://smile.amazon.com/Finding-My-Right-Mind/dp/B08QVWHR4X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18RFM2OWJEJAC&keywords=vanessa+potter&qid=1661357529&sprefix=vanessa+potter%2Caps%2C105&sr=8-1

https://smile.amazon.com/Patient-H69-Story-Second-Sight/dp/B06W2HC3B5/ref=sr_1_2?crid=18RFM2OWJEJAC&keywords=vanessa+potter&qid=1661357529&sprefix=vanessa+potter%2Caps%2C105&sr=8-2

www.vanessapotter.com

IG: @vanessapotterwrites

00:00.00
karagoodwin
Hello and welcome to the meditation conversation I'm your host Kara Goodwin and today I'm joined by Vanessa Potter Vanessa is an author social entrepreneur and wellness advocate who lives in London and she co-founded park bathe. A green health initiative in 2021 to provide free accessible forest bathing to the community and has just published a paper on the project and we'll get to that later. But first we're going to talk about her remarkable journey. So welcome Vanessa I'm so happy you're here so you had a remarkable journey to where you find yourself today where you spent 16 years as an award-winning Tv producer and then found yourself in completely unfamiliar and scary.

00:37.34
Vanessa Potter
Thanks for having me on.

00:54.30
karagoodwin
Waters with your health. So can you tell us about that.

00:59.31
Vanessa Potter
Yes, Gary waters indeed. Um I was a Tv producer the usual kind of stressed out busy. Um I had two very small children under four. Um, my youngest was only about um, 18 months and yeah fate did that thing it just through.

01:15.38
karagoodwin
Where.

01:16.90
Vanessa Potter
You know a catastrophic episode at me. That's what they call it a catastrophic episode and the long and short of it was I um, ah I basically went to bed not feeling particularly well um, bit of a headache and my that my eyes were sore. They just hurt a little bit and. Over the course of the next three days um that deteriorated and my sight went completely so within 72 hours I was completely blind and my site didn't kind of just switch off it slowly dimmed and that was one of the most frightening parts of this because. Obviously we were straight into hospital and there was a whole story around that and I could see my vision going hour by hour. So I'd look at a notice board and when I went into one mate. We went to many waiting rooms in one of the waiting rooms I'd be able to read the main text by the time I was being moved on.

01:55.54
karagoodwin
Oh my god.

02:08.69
Vanessa Potter
All the punctuation I couldn't see it or the smaller letters had disappeared so I literally watched it go and it went into a small halo and it got smaller and smaller and darker and darker and then literally extinguished and at the same time as that I'm being pushed around in a wheelchair and I've got a very strange kind of numbness going up my fingertips and because these. Things happen so fast. The brain can't process so it was only actually on about the second day when someone finally was you know examining trying to because because the doctors didn't know what an earth was going on so I was sent from departments department. Um, someone asked me to stand up and I couldn't.

02:38.67
karagoodwin
Um.

02:43.54
Vanessa Potter
And and we realized that I had paralysis that had gone all the way up my feet and all way at my arms. Um, So yeah I was blind and paralyzed in the hospital bed with nobody being able to tell me goodness Even what was wrong with me. Let alone if I would Survive. We didn't know how father paralysis would go so it was frightening. It was. Life Stopping. It was life changing it through me and my family into complete turmoil. Um I suppose extraordinary thing. Um Asidephon fact the rarity of this happening to anybody I had an exceedingly rare condition an autoimmune neurological condition so it was my body was fighting itself.

03:19.84
karagoodwin
Wow.

03:22.45
Vanessa Potter
Um I suppose was also my producer instinct you know as a Tv producer I organize things I document I'm very organized and I organized person I know I think and and so I started documenting what was happening to me even though it was you know is this awful situation I kind of.

03:30.75
karagoodwin
That.

03:41.58
Vanessa Potter
Was a little bit of um, sort of sanity in there going I know I'll need to process this sometime. Not now I'm just going to survive now but I need the data I need this information so I can backtrack and go through this and make sense of it. so so I documented everything from about you know, the first.

03:54.82
karagoodwin
Wow.

04:01.48
Vanessa Potter
First afternoon everything was documented which was why I was able to write the book in the way my first book in the way I could with incredible detail and I continued that documentation for the next year um because it took a long time to recover.

04:06.53
karagoodwin
And.

04:12.67
karagoodwin
Wow! How long ago was this.

04:16.79
Vanessa Potter
So the I went blind in 2012 it's 10 years I can't believe it's ten years now I think goodness how much it's changed my life.

04:21.78
karagoodwin
Okay, wow. Yeah I mean the things that you I mean we'll and we'll get into it some of the the um, the exploration that you've done and the initiatives that you've been a part of have just been remarkable. Um, so the healing journey you said it took about a year to get your vision back? Um I know in the research that I did for you or on you, you already had some valuable tools at your disposal on how to deal with with the trauma and I think one of them was that. That instinct that you had to document everything I mean that's genius to have that insight at the time to be like I mean there's so much wisdom. There. Okay, this is a huge deal and I have to process it but I can only process like a fraction of it right now and so. I can there are things I can do now to help me to help my future self which is just a beautiful beautiful thing but can you tell us about some of the tools that you used um for your coping.

05:29.53
Vanessa Potter
Yeah, well there was kind of two sides to it. So there's the the physiological the the physical side of trying to see again, try and get my my visual system to start operating. But then there's also the mind side to manage my response. To this crazy experience that I'd had so on on the sort of mind side I'd been lucky because my children were born my second child particularly was born using hypna birthing. So I did have some very basic tools at my disposal and I teach a lot of meditation and I talked to a lot of people about this and I'm very quick to say. I was rubbish I was not an expert meditator I was not you know I'd done a bit of self hypnosis I dabbled I was a professional dabbler I was a Tv producer so I did it reasonably well and actually with my son I had an extraordinary experience and i'm. Very grateful for that that that exists in my past because that's a very strong memory stamp and that those feelings that sense of agency of being able to control myself and to know I could put myself into a hypnotic state and change the way I felt which is what I did because essentially my first birth experience was. Terrible very traumatic and I rewired that using hypnosis and so I kind of had a learning I had some knowledge and I had more than that I had evidence that I could change how I felt about something that felt catastrophic and so that was kind of 1 of my first places so I'd been taught to visualize.

07:03.26
Vanessa Potter
So I Basically when I was lying in my hospital bed I Visualized and I went back to the beach that I used to visualize when I had my son because it's you know it's an embedded memory. It's there. It's quite familiar and I spent about 80% of my time walking up and down. Shoving my feet under the coolness of the sand feeling the sun on my skin and it wasn't until again that whole post processing like in the future talking with psychologists and them going. Well this is this is so clever because you were actually actively using the visual centers in your brain to see.

07:35.49
karagoodwin
Oh yeah.

07:39.67
Vanessa Potter
You because we notice you with our eyes. Everyone thinks we see with our eyes and our pupils. That's just the lens that allows the light in we see with this bit at the back. The exhibitital part of our brain and so I was generating visual content for that part of my brain to keep it working to keep it. Juicy and active and alive and I was doing everything from color movement because these are all different brain centers I mean I didn't sit and go oh I'm going to be terribly clever and do this. It was so intuitive and instinctive and again I'm a big big fan of listening to those instincts. So so I did that for about. Um, my god I wish to say to people I'm just going away and nobody ever asked me where I was going. We said no I think it's ever so funny. Um, and that was incredibly successful because it did 2 things as well because again we often think about mindfulness about being close. You know, accepting our situation. No. Mindfulness would have been the worst thing for me in that situation I needed to escape it I need I need it a sanctuary and that's what ah a visualized mental sanctuary. Is it give you respite so I could take my mind somewhere else I could calm my body down into lots of Pranayama lots of very very basic I used um golden thread breath. 1 breath. That's all I used and I calmed my body because my body was on high alert as it would get to this sort of sooth state then I could come back to the room with whatever test, whatever piece of news was being given to me whatever situation I was in then and so that was.

09:13.70
Vanessa Potter
The most single powerful thing that had ever happened to me and and that and so that was one of the things that I you know wanted to document and write about and tell people about um the other thing I did because I'm a Tv producer and I'm used to detail is i. Did a load of experiments at home when I finally got sent home I was still legally blind and what that all that means is that I couldn't recognize I couldn't look after myself very easily without at that time support of course blind people live alone all the time but I wasn't used to it so I couldn't see the rooms I was in I could see walls odd patches of light. No color. No.

09:40.41
karagoodwin
Right.

09:48.46
Vanessa Potter
Very little 3 dimensions ah 2 dimensions I was everything was um mono um, so so that was a really difficult time and so I did these experiments because ah you get ill what people come to visit you? What do they say how you doing and I go ah with the paralysis.

10:01.97
karagoodwin
Yeah.

10:07.78
Vanessa Potter
I could say all right? You know I was bloodyminded today I did 5 steps yesterday I did 3 woohoo 2 more steps with a vision you you can't answer that question because the brain is constantly pruning away information and readapting to your environment.

10:11.58
karagoodwin
Yeah.

10:24.77
Vanessa Potter
So I didn't have a gauge I had no measure and that was incredibly frustrating particularly as the recovery was so slow and vision doesn't just switch back on. It comes back in layers and so yeah, so and and the scientists that I ended up working with were utterly.

10:34.12
karagoodwin
How interesting.

10:43.21
Vanessa Potter
Fascinated by me because um and they used to call me the human cat because a very ah, very famous experiments by Huber and weasel to nobel prize winning scientists who did experiments on cats to try and understand our visual system and here I was without the knowledge of that replicating a lot of the data in words. And experience and they're going. Oh my god you're a human and weasel cat. Those experiments were fantastic because they gave me a measure they gave me an answer to that question. But more than that I was stimulating my visual system and I was actively.

11:06.52
karagoodwin
Ah, yeah.

11:19.13
Vanessa Potter
Reconnecting visual centers and bringing my vision back online consciously. So again, um there were two ways I suppose that I I yeah I interact with my recovery.

11:27.35
karagoodwin
Coat and yes, there's just it it I'm floored at how much intuitive guidance you you had in order. So like 1 of the things was. Talking about? Um, how you would go away you know and that that like escape. But so in a way you know we don't want to live our whole life that way because we're we're you know we're escaping and we're not dealing with it but you had the other side to it where where you're like. I know that I need to face this at some point but I can't face all of it right now. So I'm in a document and with the intention that I'm coming back to it so that I can change how I feel about it and I can release some of the trauma because you are recognizing in the moment this is traumatic. And what can I do like you're already just sort of leaping into what might be helpful in the future and pulling it into the moment which is very advanced and then you're just doing it like you know what this sounds like a great idea I'm going to do that. You know. So really amazing.

12:43.28
Vanessa Potter
Um, it's interesting because you're right I mean you know after the experience I went and researched I and I and I didn't use any of that terminology or or words because I had no real spiritual experience I hadn't I Never really actively meditated as to say I Dabbled. Um. It was very intuitive but I think a lot of us are intuitive and and I think our bodies talk to us all the time and I found myself saying this a Lot. We talk loudly our body whispers and we've got to get used as human beings to listen to the whispers.

13:06.48
karagoodwin
And.

13:13.18
Vanessa Potter
Um, and sometimes because if they're not supported by someone else or someone else advocating it. We kind of don't believe ourselves and actually because I was in such an isolated place locked into your body literally as I was I didn't have but there was a moment in the hospital pretty early and I write this in my book I realize and it's a real clangor moment. Realized no one else was going to heal me. No one they will put me in the most safe place and they'll do that Absolute best. There was no question about that and the caring was amazing but they weren't going to sort me out. It was going to be me and it was going to be my body so I had to listen I realized very quickly I. To listen to what my body was telling me. So For example, for example on the physical side because I had Paralysis I had um, well actually I had what's called Sensory Loss and that just means that the brain isn't communicating with my foot. So My foot felt like it was wrapped in ice.

13:59.26
karagoodwin
Just okay.

14:08.41
Vanessa Potter
And then someone had bandaged it around with um gaffer tape. It was quite a specific feeling and it felt very heavy and I couldn't move it and over time we would um, stimulate my feet. So my family brought contraband into the hospital. It's quite funny so they're bringing in.

14:12.55
karagoodwin
Um.

14:19.60
karagoodwin
Bad.

14:23.58
Vanessa Potter
Gowerers and and soft wool and Cotton wool and a toothbrush and they were doing all these um textures on my feet and I had to guess what they were. We were painting my fingernails in Multicolors. So I could again try and retrain my brain like what is white What is blue What is Pink. And Likewise what are these textures and so I did bring a lot of senses back quite quickly and then I felt this urge that I had to move Now. My Mum's a physio so there's latent knowledge there of course. So The physio at the hospital came in and I was doing exercises and she went Oh who's giving you those I went.

14:58.38
karagoodwin
My long season.

14:59.16
Vanessa Potter
My body not never forget because of course I couldn't see her face but I felt her stop and then clear a throat and carry on and of course I Guess she's not used to that. But but this is what about I mean about listening she could have told me to do those exercises but my body knew it needed to move I was going to get atrophy.

15:05.51
karagoodwin
Ian honor.

15:15.14
karagoodwin
Um, yeah.

15:18.79
Vanessa Potter
So I just think a lot of us have these intuitions but we fear maybe lack of confidence lack of belief but we need to listen to them a little more I think.

15:28.74
karagoodwin
Yeah, yeah, thank you for sharing that I completely agree and I think that we do have a tendency to hand ourselves over to be like in the fact that you had that realization early on that like hey this healing is coming. It's going to come from me because. It's just limited at the external is limited in what they can offer. Um, it just brings to mind in my own world. My daughter has scoliosis and so I am like always you know. You know there's always I always have like 1 ear out for like does anybody have experience with that or you know what? What do we do with it? Um, but I had a vision and like a kind of an energetic experience one night where um I there I was seeing. Like I was kind of seeing her spine and there was a rotation that was part of the issue. It was like because I kept tuning into it as this curve and like I do some I do energetic work and it was like you know that's kind of how I'd been addressing everything but in this vision it was like oh there's a rotation and. And it was like you you have to also work on the on the rotation from an energetic perspective and so then I remember like in the vision I got a little bit too heady with it because I was like wait a minute like I kind of my conscious brain realized what I was seeing and I was like wait which way does it need to rotate.

16:59.95
karagoodwin
And then I was getting confused like am I seeing the way it's rotating on its owner am I seeing the correction like what am I supposed to 0 it on. But anyway yesterday that was maybe two weeks ago maybe 3 yesterday I um.

17:17.75
karagoodwin
Just ah, spent some dedicated time researching some more things about scoliosis and I hadn't really looked at it from like a research perspective in a while in months but it just there were a few different things that I was like we need to kind of get moving in a certain direction.

17:35.43
karagoodwin
And I'm watching this webinar and they start talking about how it's with this particular method Method. You know you know we think about the spine with the curves. But there's a rotation and so we also need to work to correct the rotation and I'm like my mind is like. You know like oh my gosh in the real world. There's a rotation aspect to scoliosis and um so it was just very fascinating and and you talking about how you were receiving all these intuitive hits I kind of wanted to just reinforce that Because. Ah, particularly with Healthcare I feel like we tend to hand ourselves over so much and we see the the hospitals. For example, you know as our saviors and as our guides and our you know the the masters of it like whatever they say. Is what I'll do because I don't know like I've never had to think about my vision before so you know what do they tell me and I think for all of us. You know there is that opportunity to also not you know to not discount what's coming from within us and be our own advocates and so it's a beautiful.. It's a beautiful lesson in that and illustration. So One of the things that you have since kind of dived Into. Um.

19:05.24
karagoodwin
Because with your whole journey. It seems that you then became very interested in like what what's happening within the brain and our brain wave states and so Forth. Can you tell us about the brainwave states and the experiment that you did that shows these changes. That happen within meditation and it it illustrates them in a way. That's both artistic and scientific.

19:31.50
Vanessa Potter
Yeah, so you're absolutely right I got super geeky not to begin with I'm curious and and I'd say Curiosity is the other Um, you know weapon that we have that again people. Um I think often kind of overlook curiosity is is going to find you the answer.

19:47.20
Vanessa Potter
Um, or if not, it's going to send you on a ah journey that will feel much more positive than sitting still and waiting and so that's what I did I I after I'd recovered and and I when I started to kind of post rationalize and think about everything go through my diaries I thought my goodness well for the start I've got one hell of a story here. Ah you know.

20:02.66
karagoodwin
Yeah.

20:05.56
Vanessa Potter
Ah Tv producer in me was a storyteller was very much a you know awakened to that. But that was I wanted to know the science and I and I also wanted to communicate the science but in a really intuitive way that wasn't just telling and it wasn't just going here. Look here's a picture of a beach now you can imagine I just so I'm not going to show pictures of beaches.

20:22.44
karagoodwin
And.

20:25.21
Vanessa Potter
So when I'd been in the hospital I had um tests where they put electrodes on my brain to actually measure my visual capacity and I was really intrigued by this because I thought well what else can it measure and so I I did what I thought anybody would have done which was to design a massive neuroscience exhibition from my notes. Ah.

20:41.68
karagoodwin
Ah, obviously.

20:44.20
Vanessa Potter
I just genuinely and I've said this lots of time I genuinely thought that was normal. It kept me very occupied and it it was 27 pages of loads of different installations and all these different ways of communicating different facets of my journey. Um, ah to the public to let them understand about. This incredible thing at the top of their head their brain and their visual system. So eventually I was put in contact with a neuroscientist at Cambridge University and and and that kicked off a really amazing collaboration. Um, which is called the beach and that was launched at the science festival and we basically we invited members of the public. To wear an eeg cap now these are little electrodes that measure your brain activity and we could measure them in live time and we could transmit that data into a very sophisticated computer system and what we worked with a local London art school and again I am so fast. Tracking through a really complex geeky process here. But but we converted different brain frequencies into music and animated graphics. So we invited the public to come in and they put these headsets on um, most of them and I mean this was what two thousand and fourteen fifteen ah

21:43.29
karagoodwin
Um, I'm yeah.

21:59.00
Vanessa Potter
Loads of people didn't know about mindfulness or meditation and so I think the vast majority had never tried it and we gave them 5 minutes to meditate and we did a guided track and we did a baseline and this was the really important part. So the baseline was like look close your eyes think think of the shopping list what you're having for dinner. And then the 5 minutes was actively consciously trying with your eyes closed to follow this track and then we showed them the 2 sets of data. Um, afterwards, it's these visual images and these visual images moved now just to explain about the brain states. Um, our brain is like this constant orchestra. It's playing all sorts of different notes all the time. So I think in the meditation world people get a little bit obsessed with you know alpha frequencies or theta frequencies and um, we basically have in terms of what we did our experiment. We had 4 main brain states that we measure delta is at the bottom. That's our slow brain waves that are active the most active when we're sleeping. And then we've got um theater which is I always described theateratre as that in-between stage. You know when you're falling asleep. You suddenly have a great idea that's kind of I mean again, shortcutting all of this alpha is is called um, ah, kind of an awake state and then we've got beta which is the very fast.

22:59.40
karagoodwin
And.

23:11.17
Vanessa Potter
Um, elevated brain ah frequencies which is like when you're running for the bus. So just to really in a slapdash way to separate out those brain states but those brain states all are communicating all the time they're all active. It's not like one shuts off and another shuts on but we can see a dominance and the dominance is the key thing.

23:13.72
karagoodwin
So.

23:30.24
Vanessa Potter
So we showed these to um, our 120 people who came through our exhibition they queued down the road I have to tell you to do this. We had to extend it. People were so desperate because you could see your mind I mean it's so tangible I mean it's this part of yourself and even the most hardened skeptic or.

23:34.10
karagoodwin
Wow, That's amazing. Yeah.

23:48.33
Vanessa Potter
You know was just so curious and people saw differences and it's not what had Changed. It's the fact it had changed so were all wire individually. So Some people might have and the delta are these beautiful big Blue haos. Someone might have like wo on their meditation side. But then on their um, you know, just the Baseline the thinking state the thinking visual they might have a lot more of the Green. Um alphare and a bit more and the and the red Beta was like this spike so it's really visual and really easy to see and they could see different brain states activated when they meditated.

24:16.75
karagoodwin
And many.

24:27.40
Vanessa Potter
So what does that mean it changes your brain it switches on different parts now that did vary and and we used to say to them. Well how did you feel I mean the brain and these pictures are great but how did you feel and most of them were like astonished. Calm I've never sat for 5 minutes in the middle of a day. Okay in a dark room slightly weird with headphones on and weird people with wires everywhere but really calm and I and I just suddenly became aware of my body or they all had different things but 5 minutes had a.

25:04.86
karagoodwin
And.

25:05.00
Vanessa Potter
Found effect upon these people and so it was a really extraordinary experiment and for me I was you know one side of me might have gone. Oh that's great. Satisfied. My curiosity did the absolute opposite. It fired it with a thousand more questions. And that's how I ended up with my book where I went back to Tristan Beckenstein who is the the main scientist I worked with and I said oh look Tristan and he's great. He's south american he's quirky and a musician and he's really open to arts collaborations and I said I've got another idea. Ah.

25:38.31
karagoodwin
Why a minute.

25:42.15
Vanessa Potter
And he was like come On. Let's hear it and that was to take what we'd learned during this exhibition which was in essence that we can change our brain state by our how we think and use our mind but I was I'd started to learn about Transcendental Meditation. And somebody had asked me about loving kindness and I was like I fobed the question I went I don't know what that is I didn't know anything and so I was being asked these questions and I said to him I Want to go find out and I found out all about these different ways to use your mind is it being in the present is it visualizing.

26:08.29
karagoodwin
Um.

26:20.80
Vanessa Potter
Um, are we using something that's repetitious. You know what happens in the brain if we do that and so that's that's what sparked then another 3 hree-year experiment where I wore an eeg headset every day pretty much every day and I work my way through 12 different techniques.

26:23.55
karagoodwin
And.

26:36.98
Vanessa Potter
And recorded everything and and wrote a book about it and there's a paper hopefully coming out on that as well.

26:39.40
karagoodwin
Wow. Well what are the names of your books.

26:45.55
Vanessa Potter
So the first book's called patient h sixty nine that was my hospital number and the story of my second site and this is my second book. Um, finding my right mind 1 woman's experiment put meditation to the test which is it's kind of says on the front cover. What I did.

26:59.70
karagoodwin
Um, yeah, right? That's beautiful. That's amazing and you're you're currently focusing on force bathing like I mentioned in the introduction. So can you tell us about this this initiative.

27:02.79
Vanessa Potter
It's a road map. It's a road map to meditation.

27:16.88
Vanessa Potter
Yeah, this is so exciting. This has been my my my my last year and a half actually um so forest bathing is this extraordinary, very simple technique that I came across and. Was fascinated to embark upon something a bit more research-based so I I collaborated with Kirsten Mccun who's a researcher at Derby University excuse me and she and I set up a project called park bath because forest bathing traditionally is normally 3 hours in an ancient woodlands. And that's not accessible if you live in cities if you work it's it's a lovely idea and it's and and we know from the research it has wonderful physical and mental health benefits. Um, but who can do that.

27:58.34
karagoodwin
And it's a big practice in Japan is that right? yeah.

28:04.34
Vanessa Potter
Exactly right? Yeah, it's called Shinri Yoku and the translation is forest bathing which basically means walking in and and bathing in the the natural forest. Um, and it's very simple. It's using the 5 senses in a very kind of conscious way and it's slow and it's in silence.

28:10.16
karagoodwin
Are.

28:21.90
Vanessa Potter
and and I say it to lots of people and they kind of go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a walk in the park. It's not It's so different so we wanted to explore this and put it into ah a green space setting. Ah a park a city park and ask the question. Wood Forest Bathing that's normally done this very quiet. You know you know this ancient woodland with no one around for 3 hours could we take the juicy parts of that and put it into ah a public park in an hour and have it as a mental health intervention as an accessible resource that was our question. We've since taken nearly 300 people on part bath walks in crystal palace park and I I always have to be careful with scientific results. You know you can't get too excitable about them because you know, but even Kirsten who is a proper proper scientist goes. No, we absolutely can say it works because he does our results.

29:08.50
karagoodwin
How.

29:12.78
Vanessa Potter
Were were incredible. We had ah nearly a 40% reduction in Anxiety. We had a 51% reduction in you know rumination overthinking people pretty much across the board walk away feeling calm centered grounded. I Mean most people don't want to talk Well some people want to chat a lot at the end some people just want to go sit under a tree for some people. It's a very emotional Experience. We get a lot of tears. Um, so it's been an absolute privilege to be part of this project and in fact, we're now applying for new funding to extend it.

29:47.79
karagoodwin
Um, Wow, That's beautiful. What an amazing service to to a society. Especially right now when it's like what can we do. To kind of get some peace and some calmness and some grounding and some some you know take the take the edge off in a healthy way. Yeah,, that's beautiful.

30:12.35
Vanessa Potter
Yeah, because it is accessible and and one of the things that we teach is is not having. There's a little bit of um, hierarchy and snobbery around spirituality sometimes I find and we are very very keen to say to people look. It's your life. You can do this, you can share this with your family. You don't need to be an expert to walk in nature. We've taught you some basic tools come back a few times come and do a few sessions so you know you really get it. We've got a guided track if you need reminding but go and do this have your own agency and and adapt this for your life. And so we get wonderful stories of runners who do a 40 minute run and the last warm cooldown is forest bathing unplugged. They walk through the forested part of the park and it transforms their exercise routine with 1 lady told me the day she came back on a walk and she's got a tiny little.

30:52.31
karagoodwin
And.

31:06.11
Vanessa Potter
Like a green quad next to her office and she was going down and doing little forest bathing sessions in this session when she was very stressed at work to the point where and this was a year later after she went on her first walk she was telling me she says now her colleagues go go on off, you go go and do that thing you do because it didn't.

31:21.77
karagoodwin
Um, ah, that's beautiful.

31:24.12
Vanessa Potter
Had such an you know a noticeable difference because it's absolutely my go-to it's changed my life and when I hear things like that I'm so pleased. Not just that she that we did part bathe but that she found something and she owns that that's hers and she doesn't need anybody else in the world to do that for her. It's hers.

31:33.80
karagoodwin
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's glorious, wonderful. Well thank you so much Vanessa how can people find out more about you.

31:42.58
Vanessa Potter
I Love that.

31:52.74
Vanessa Potter
Okay, you can find me on my website which is Vanessa Potter Dot Com and that's potters in Harry Potter just Vanessa Potter um I'm also ah on Instagram and Facebook as Vanessa Potter writes and I'm still on Twitter under my old first book which is at patient H69.

32:11.30
karagoodwin
Okay, wonderful. Well this has been such a joy. Thank you for all of the the work that you're doing to use this experience that you've had to unlock. Higher levels of consciousness for other people and and greater greater experiences of their own whole self. It's really beautiful.

32:39.24
Vanessa Potter
Thank you.

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