So what did YOU get up to last night?
We spent an evening exercising our mindfulness muscle in the company of campaigner and comedienne Ruby Wax.
Still on anti-depressants after 20-odd years, she freely admits which one is her favourite but still urges her sell-out audience to practise mindfulness... and switch off the news.
And the second half of the show, a frighteningly honest Q&A with audience members on mental illness as covered in her best-selling book Frazzled, reveals the many guises such illness can take.
Anyone who’s ever loved Ruby – and let’s face it, she’s everyone’s favourite funny-girl-turned-mental-health-campaigner – will also love this tour.
With a familiar comic undercurrent, she opens up on her own childhood, her early years with her immigrant parents in America, her husband, her family and how she feels herself channelling her own mother as she relates to her own offspring.
Is mental illness stress? Is stress down to the lives we lead? Turns out it’s probably down to how we deal with the lives we lead. Ruby reminds us how technology was supposed to give us free time, so we could go out chasing butterflies, dreaming or composing poetry. Yet we now seems to be slaves to the computers, which are themselves having the time of their lives.
She has a Master’s degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University.
It’s something she is probably more proud of than she would be prepared to admit. But it’s helped launch this second half of her career where she speaks with authority, knowledge and experience on this tricky and often hidden topic.
The telling stat is that one in four suffer. Among the 700-plus at this sell-out lecture it was probably more like three in four, such was the ferocity of interest and empathy with her words.
And perhaps there will be a legacy beyond the comedy (which incidentally was by no means in short supply last night - she’s still got it, has Ruby). She’s also opening Frazzled Cafes in partnership with M&S, where small groups meet every two weeks to just talk honestly and meet within their own community. There’s more at: frazzlecafes.org
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