After going through an eight-week mindfulness program with April Hadley a few years ago, I knew I wanted to ask her to be on this podcast one day. Every week, I was inspired by the human behind the teacher. April shared with us the real struggle in her life, what brought her to mindfulness and how the struggle is still real. It's these raw accounts that bring the greatest inspiration to me. It's a sigh of relief. An "I'm-not-the-only-one-who-doesn't-have-it-all-together" reminder that we all so desperately need in this crazy world of "Let me show you what's perfect and wonderful."
From parenting, performance and art to post-partum depression, anger, fear and laughter, we move through many real and vulnerable spaces in this episode. In it, there's a great depth of comfort.
April Hadley is co-founder of Grand Rapids Center for Mindfulness, has a psychotherapy practice and is a storyteller, writer and artist.
*Special thanks to Jim Bonney for helping me clean up the audio with this one
In this podcast, you'll hear April talk about her experience winning a lip sync contest for HQ, a homeless youth drop-in center, along with her artwork. Here's a peak!
#EmbraceStrangeness Sometimes I fiddle with a piece and then I discover the perfect quote. Sometimes I fall in love with a quote and then I make a piece to hold the words. This one was the former. And I love this image because I let myself experiment. I let myself veer off into strangeness and it felt like a sliver of healing. I considered being an art major in college but I didn’t feel like I was weird enough. I still don’t feel all that weird, but I am much more open and open is a practice in and of itself. “Beauty always has an element of strangeness…simple, unintended, unconscious strangeness.” //Charles Baudelaire//
-April
Prince (aka April in costume for the HQ Lip Sync)