The Gentle Rebel Podcast Podcast Por Andy Mort arte de portada

The Gentle Rebel Podcast

The Gentle Rebel Podcast

De: Andy Mort
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The Gentle Rebel Podcast with Andy Mort explores the intersection of high sensitivity, creativity, and contemporary culture. Through conversations, creative prompts, and reflections, we examine how highly sensitive people (HSPs) navigate and reshape the world within, around, and between us in sustainable ways. I invite you to poke and prod the assumptions, pressures, and expectations we’ve accepted—to rewrite the stories of who we are, and to explore what’s possible when we embrace high sensitivity as both a personal trait and an essential thread in our collective survival (and potential).Andy Mort Arte Biografías y Memorias Ciencias Sociales Desarrollo Personal Éxito Personal
Episodios
  • Sustaining Your Creative Practice (with Steve Lawson)

    Sustaining Your Creative Practice (with Steve Lawson)
    Sep 26 2025
    Is the audience more than a gaggle of consumers? What role do they play in the creative process of an artist? Should they, as Rick Rubin says, "come last"? Are they always right? Or is there a more nuanced and sustaining way to approach this question? In this episode of The Gentle Rebel, I explore this question with Steve Lawson. I bumped into Steve towards the end of the summer at Greenbelt Festival. We rapidly got deep in conversation about his recently completed PhD, A Study Towards a New Model for Subscriber Audience Involvement in Improvised Music. Steve’s approach to music-making and creative practice has always resonated with me. Over the past twenty-five years, he has carved out a living as a solo improvisational bass player, developing a thoughtful and sustainable model for art that resists the common assumptions that drive an obsession with numbers and scale. His thesis turns that lived experience into a lens for questioning many of the assumptions baked into how we think about creativity today. https://youtu.be/BB362bVySiI Notes from our conversation... The Audience Comes With What happens if we treat the audience as part of the story that shapes and sustains our practice? A way of looking at the influential relationship between artist and audience is to create spaces where the rationale (the philosophical approach) can be presented, and work can emerge as part of a conversation with the audience. For Steve, listening to how people (who respect your work) engage with it, whether “that reminds me of…” or “my Dad just died and all I can listen to is you,” becomes so much more meaningful than having a reviewer who doesn’t know what you are doing or why, and place it in a pile of other CDs. What matters is how people relate it to their lives, and what it means to them. Creating spaces for this dialogue became central: a mailing list, website forum, Twitter, and eventually a subscription model through Bandcamp. Non-Algorithmically Defined Community Spaces This meant integrating community with the economic rationale for making music. The audience emotionally sustains the music and financially supports its creation, along with the maintenance of the space where both artist and audience belong as equals. When the audience has already paid for the music before it is made, there is no need to rationalise it with hype or spectacle. Instead, it connects with people who already share the philosophical approach. This is a form of patronage, supporting the artist because of how they create, not only what they make. Scenius (Brian Eno) Genius is not an individual trait but the manifestation of the collective intelligence of a scene. Famous names are simply the visible tip of a larger iceberg, as with Russian painters in the early twentieth century. Reception Theory (Stuart Hall) Audiences actively interpret media texts by encoding and decoding. They may align with the intended meaning (dominant reading), reject it (oppositional reading), or negotiate it. Instrumental music does not encode meaning in a concrete way. Its sense of meaning emerges cumulatively, with artist and audience encoding together. Decoding and recoding become a collective process, shaped by new work and ongoing observations. The Space of the Talkaboutable (David Darke) Great works expand the “space of the talkaboutable,” an invitation to discuss ideas and broaden horizons. While Darke sees this as arriving around the work, Steve sees the space as built first (through mailing lists, forums, Twitter, Bandcamp), with the work then released into it. Meaning is collectively encoded, decoded, and recoded in this shared space. “The Audience Comes Last” The PhD began with the desire to make better music. What became clear was how much the audience contributes to the process, and what happens when that is denied. Rubin’s statement that the audience should be ignored overlooks the wisdom, care,
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    1 h y 24 m
  • Hypervigilance and High Sensitivity (The HSP Owner’s Guide)

    Hypervigilance and High Sensitivity (The HSP Owner’s Guide)
    Sep 20 2025
    In this week’s episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, we look at the relationship between sensory processing sensitivity and hypervigilance. As we finish our journey through the first HSP Owner’s Guide, we turn our attention to hypervigilance. that feeling of being permanently “switched on,” unable to stop scanning for danger, even when we’re safe. For highly sensitive people, vigilance is a natural part of sensory processing sensitivity. It helps us read the room, pick up subtle cues, and stay attuned to what is happening beneath the surface. But when vigilance tips into hypervigilance, it can leave us in a state of chronic over-arousal, disconnection, and exhaustion. In the episode, we explore why hypervigilance is such a common experience for HSPs, how it shows up in everyday life, and ways we might support our nervous systems in returning to a sense of safety and connection. I examine hypervigilance within a social and cultural context for HSPs, rather than from a clinical or individual psychological perspective. https://youtu.be/RCvrgSJH73I Vigilance vs. Hypervigilance Vigilance is an intrinsic feature of sensory intelligence. It anchors us in the awareness to notice and predict useful information to help us survive and thrive together. Hypervigilance is what happens when vigilance overspills, and we get stuck in a state of alertness with limited capability to move our nervous system into a state of connection. This can have roots in early life (especially for HSPs who are more impacted by their formative environments). But it can also develop over time because of the pressures and rhythms of the modern world, with constant notifications, cultural glorification of busyness, and a never-ending expectation to perform and prove our worth. Possible Signs of Hypervigilance Hypervigilance is not always dramatic. Often it shows up quietly and gradually, for example you might notice: Feeling flat or detached, as if life is happening behind glass Difficulty taking action, even on small plans Unusual tearfulness Brain fog and trouble focusing Ruminating thoughts on repeat Disrupted sleep cycles Anxiety or panic attacks seemingly “out of nowhere” Harsh self-criticism or low self-esteem If these feel familiar, they may be signs that your nervous system has been in “stay safe” mode for a long time. Why Hypervigilance Happens Hypervigilance is the nervous system’s over-lean into the message, “stay safe by staying alert.” This is obviously appropriate in certain contexts, but when we carry this story everywhere, it takes its toll and can be a difficult pattern to get out of. Some common contributing factors include: Early Environments: Growing up in conflict or unpredictability can train the nervous system to always be on guard, especially in volatile environments where safety could be torn away at a moment's notice. Past Experiences: The nervous system may overlearn from painful experiences, remaining alert to avoid “ever letting that happen again.” Cultural Pressures: Hustle culture, social media outrage cycles, and global crises all create a background hum of threat. Worldview and Meaning-Making: Certain belief systems (political, religious, ideological) can divide the world into “us vs. them,” keeping us in a state of perpetual alertness to nefarious outside actors. Physiological Factors: Poor sleep, hormone shifts, or nutritional deficiencies can lower our threshold for perceiving danger. These are rarely isolated and often overlap in ways that reinforce one another. Meeting Hypervigilance with Creative Gentleness A helpful (though, not easy) way to meet everyday hypervigilance is to slow things down. Not necessarily by stopping altogether, but by letting engagement become gentler and more deliberate. Rather than rushing to solve, fix, or control, we can allow space to notice small sensory glimmers,
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    32 m
  • As a Man Thinketh (A History of Self-Help)

    As a Man Thinketh (A History of Self-Help)
    Sep 6 2025
    I had not heard of James Allen before I started exploring this history of self-help. I saw references to his book, “As a Man Thinketh”, which was frequently cited as an influential text around the power of thought on manifesting circumstances. With our “It’s the thought that counts” theme in The Haven this month, my curiosity took me into a James Allen rabbit hole. I read three of his books: From Poverty to Power (his first), The Divine Companion (his last), and As a Man Thinketh (his most famous). I wanted to try getting a sense of where he was coming from in his philosophical worldview. He published around twenty books, all written within an eleven-year period, before he died in 1912 at just 47 years old. I do wonder how his ideas would have evolved if he had lived longer. In this episode of The Gentle Rebel Podcast, I share my response to As a Man Thinketh. I reflect on Allen’s ideas and their implications for the way we think about ourselves, one another, and the nature of reality. https://youtu.be/tVtG-Ahrkgw Why Am I Doing This Project? You may be wondering why I'm exploring self-help...Good question. I'm not completely sure. But I think it's because I’ve felt an intuitive nudge to explore this world and its function in culture. I don't know where it will take me (I have no overriding purpose or vision with it - sorry James!), or what I will find, but I have a sense that there are interesting things to discover by examining, not just the content that is common in the self-help genre, but the role the field plays in how we understand and judge ourselves, others, and the horizons of possibility for the world. As I find in this book, there are some interesting insights and invitations to explore. But it also carries the potential to be understood, embodied, and applied in dangerous and harmful ways, especially when Allen’s metaphors are mistaken for literal truths. This is where his philosophy, which initially sounds positive and empowering, becomes reductive and destructive when we examine its logical implications. It demonstrates rhetorical tricks that are echoed in modern-day personal development literature, such as metaphorical literalism. This is where poetic imagery and aphorisms are employed to support and prove otherwise baseless philosophies. How James Allen Described As a Man Thinketh As a Man Thinketh is intentionally short. Allen described it as a pocket book with teaching that all can easily grasp and follow. He said it shows how, in their own thought-world, each human holds the key to every condition, good or bad, that enters into our life. By working patiently and intelligently upon our thoughts, we may remake our life and transform our circumstances. The question I keep coming back to throughout this exploration is, does he mean this as a description or a prescription? And what difference does this make to our reading, interpretation, and application of these ideas? As a Man Thinketh - Notes Thought and Character “A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts." A person is the product of thought alone. The mantra “change your thoughts, change your life” is still repeated as if it were a scientific law rather than a metaphor. The Effect of Thought on Circumstances “Every man is where he is by the law of his being. The thoughts which he has built into his character have brought him there, and in the arrangement of his life there is no element of chance.” Prosperity and poverty, joy and suffering, always mirror the state of an individual’s mind. The Effect of Thought on Health and Body "The body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed." Thought is the source of health and sickness. Thought and Purpose “He who has conquered doubt and fear has conquered failure.” To avoid suffering,
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    1 h y 4 m
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