Ruby Wax at Bath’s Assembly Rooms
She’s known for her wild, brash attitude and wilder, brasher hairstyles. Ruby Wax. The standup who seemingly overnight became a mental health and wellbeing guru. Having gained a master’s degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford University in 2013, the comic is also now a Visiting Professor in Mental Health Nursing at the University of Surrey. So she’s well qualified to talk to a room full of curious exhibition-goers about the subject, and this week that room was the grand Georgian space of Bath’s Assembly Rooms.
Wax was introduced to the stage by the Achieve exhibition’s organiser Martin Roberts (Homes Under The Hammer), and was immediately into her characteristic comedy routine of skittish anecdotes and self-deprecating ‘mum humour’. There were belly laughs. As we all know, she is a very funny woman. But she also spoke more seriously about her own personal experiences of mental illness, her insights guided by her research and academia.
The talk was a goldmine of poster-quotes. Many of them were jotted down by the girl next to me with her fruit-infuser water bottle and little notepad, nodding “Mmm” and “It’s true” to the speaker’s every point. This was a ‘health & wealth’ conference after all, and the whole event had a certain stench of pyramidism. Anyway. Among the cliches, Wax shared real insight, and (as somebody with mental health challenges) I found her perspective and her way of framing cognitive behaviour genuinely useful. There were solid takeaways, and all interjected with her trademark wit.
“So I heard about this new thing called Mindfulness. Thought it sounded a bit… y’know, vegetarian.”
What Ruby Wax is spectacularly good at is demystifying those theories and practices that have found their way into the mainstream in recent years, and have come to develop an image of hipsterism and pretentiousness. Mindfulness. Meditation. Breathing exercises. These words make some people recoil at the thought of doing something ‘vegetarian’, and there were indeed some very uncomfortable-looking middle-aged dads in the audience when Ruby declared that she would lead us all in a quick demonstration. The usual introduction to mindfulness was given, with each of us sitting quietly and transferring our attention to different body parts, and then to breathing. This is what mindfulness should be about. It is for everyone. There is nothing odd or pretentious about it. It is simply a way of dealing with the hectic modern world, and that’s good. She got that across excellently.
“You don’t need to be sitting on a gluten free pillow for this shit.”
She talked of the art of ‘pulling’ attention to a sense, using our five senses as a toolkit for achieving mindfulness. The mind will always be distracted again, but we can pull it back to the sense, “like a mental sit-up”. She talked of emotions as being like a virus, which carries from you across to those around you. She talked about stress and how it has become a sort of badge of honour in the modern world (“I am just so busy!”), and how it needn’t be; how stress exists to help us survive, and our problems come from stressing about that stress. She suggested that human beings have evolved almost as far as we can physically, but to survive in the world we have built, we need to “upgrade our brains”. Mental health — she suggests — is the next stage in our evolution.
“Take care of yourself first. Then save the world.”
Despite a badly-organised exhibition, it was great to see the talk well-attended, and Ruby Wax walked off-stage to rapturous applause. Bath has always been on the forefront when it comes to mental wellbeing. To see this leading light visit the city was great, and I hope she will come again soon.
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