[JAZZ MUSIC]
CHRISTOPHER BAILEY: Loneliness is not the absence of people.
Loneliness is the inability to express
what matters to you most.
Hi.
My name is Christopher Bailey.
I'm the Arts and Health Lead of the World Health Organization.
And that quote from Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist,
is the seed for this video.
It's called "Doing the Cultural 5."
What is the Cultural 5?
It's a set of activities that we've
developed to reconnect to yourself, to others,
to your environment.
And the set of activities are in five areas--
music, movement, visualizing, storytelling, and connecting
with your environment.
Now, this video is not about becoming an artist.
This video is about your life becoming an art.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
So the first of the Cultural 5 is music.
Now, if you play an instrument, feel free to play it.
[CLAPPING]
Play your body.
Sing a song.
If you need to have music on in the background,
sing with it, or a cappella-- whatever you want.
The idea is to find a sound and music that matches your mood.
Now, it's important to meet you where you are emotionally,
or your friend where they are emotionally,
and go from there to let out whatever emotion that you're
feeling.
Now, I happen to be feeling pretty good right now, so I'll
sing a nice, expectant song.
(SINGING) I have often walked down this street before,
but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.
Now, as I sing, feel the vibration within your body.
Feel the way the sound mixes with the different textures
in the room and creates an oral picture.
For those of us who are visually impaired,
that's called echolocation.
It's something that we actually develop in our brains.
But it's a way of palpably connecting
to the world with sound.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
The second of the Cultural 5 is movement.
[WALTZ PIANO MUSIC]
The idea here is to express your mood, your emotions
through the physical space around you.
Sort of lift up your chest and your body.
Own the space.
Explore your body moving through it.
And it doesn't matter what you do or how you do it.
You can mix genres.
Find your space and own it.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
So the third in our Cultural 5 is visualization.
Now, if you know how to draw or paint or whatever,
that's great-- you can visualize that way.
But you actually don't need to.
All you need to do is close your eyes
and start formulating a picture.
It can be a painting, an image, a place.
And this time, instead of matching the mood
that you're in, maybe picture something that
gives you pleasure and comfort.
Maybe it's a place from your childhood.
Maybe it's a painting you saw in a museum.
Maybe it's a place that you visited.
Other things that you can do are,
if you don't know how to draw, you
can just make random squiggles and drawings
and see what patterns exist and see what patterns
you can find and bring out.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
This is the fourth of the Cultural 5.
This is storytelling.
What I want you to do now is to think
of three things that happened to you today, and write them down.
Don't use a computer.
Use an actual pen, use an actual paper,
and cradle your ideas as you create them.
And try to use all of your senses
as you capture these moments.
What did it look like?
What did it smell like?
What did it sound like?
How did it feel?
Try to choose something that made
you feel a sense of gratitude.
And, if you can, maybe pick a poem or a song lyric
or a passage from a book that you really enjoy and read it
out loud.
Hear your voice in the room--
something that is how you feel today.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
So this is the fifth of the Cultural 5.
This is connecting with your landscape, wherever
you happen to be.
I happen to live in rural Switzerland
and next to an apple orchard.
What I want you to do is, no matter where you live,
or whether it's a city or a suburb,
a small town, a village in the countryside,
go out into the countryside, into your neighborhood,
and treat it like a museum.
Bring your camera and start taking images of things
that you never really noticed before.
Find the stories there.
[JAZZ MUSIC]
So that was the Cultural 5.
Now, you try it and see where it leads you
in the story of your life.
And the idea here is that rather than waiting for things
to happen to us, waiting for us to be entertained
or for things to change, just to start reconnecting again,
and we become the authors of our own story.
[JAZZ MUSIC]