Shadowing Practice: life opens up when you take your pleasure seriously 🌷 - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Love, devotion, pleasure, they all very boldly ask, what is life for?
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What is your life for?
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Being chronically depressed has taught me so much about discipline and about love.
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Many years ago, I was going through one of my bad bouts of depression and I came across this question, which is very simple.
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And this by no means was a cure, is a cure.
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It was simply a reorientation.
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And sometimes, sometimes that's exactly what you need.
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And the question is, what is the loving thing to do here?
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It worked for me, I think, because it very quickly turns love into an action.
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And so the loving thing in that circumstance might've been like making my bed
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or taking a shower or making myself something to eat.
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All of these, which I could have definitely written down on a to-do list and, you know, ticked the thing off,
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but then the orientation would have been totally different and the feeling would have been totally different.
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Not to mention that, you know, those were things that I knew I had to do and yet didn't do them.
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These days I've been kind of gravitating towards that question.
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Again, I find myself in the midst of, I don't know, of some big transitions, I think, that are happening and some big changes that I long for,
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but I can't make those changes now.
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So I feel kind of like a lot of uncertainty and frustration, and I also feel quite overwhelmed.
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And so when I remember, I asked myself, what is the loving thing to do here?
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And it is always such a fantastic question, because nine times out of 10,
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I know, I know exactly what the loving thing to do is.
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And I think more than that is that there is almost always certainly a small loving action available to practice.
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I already know all that I need to know in order to act from a place of love.
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And this has been a big shift in how I approach my creativity currently.
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It's how I approach my writing, the thing that is constantly evolving, a relationship that is constantly evolving.
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I have a desire to write and yet writing feels frustrating and it feels difficult very often and still it provides delight.
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It provides a way of knowing and understanding myself and I feel pulled towards it consistently.
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It's also how I now approach making these videos.
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You very likely noticed if you've been following me for a while that my
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videos took a shift and they completely changed
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and it has a lot to do with asking myself
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that question what is the loving thing to do here my creativity is no longer goal oriented
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and I think that that is still kind of a shock to me
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because I never consciously thought that my creativity was goal oriented
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but I was definitely trying to use discipline discipline without love in order to
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become better at writing or in order to be able to write more and create more.
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But now my orientation is very much towards love, towards devotion, and towards pleasure.
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And I find that when I turn towards a feeling rather than like towards a goal or some sort of metric that,
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you know, the process very naturally becomes non-linear.
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Therefore, there's kind of an ease that comes with it.
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So let's talk about it.
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That was a big old intro.
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When I get a little stuck with my writing and a little too in my head, which happens more often than I would like to admit, I know it's time to switch things up.
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I used to be so focused on writing.
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Everything was about writing, sitting down to write, write, write, that I forgot that my creativity is expansive, that it all relates and communicates to each other and
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if I can have multiple different projects I can feel better
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because I can leave one frustrating project and go to the next
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which is why I'm so happy to be partnering with Skillshare, a place where real people teach all kinds of skills from writing
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which I've done so many of their courses to painting to knitting to coloring all of which I've done before.
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Last month I was really into coloring which was immensely therapeutic and now I am knitting, which listen, it doesn't look very impressive,
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but it is 270 stitches cast on.
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And the only reason I can knit is because I once took Vincent Williams' class, Knitting 101, on Skillshare.
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He is so vibrant, so encouraging, and such a warm teacher.
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And yeah, I learned how to knit.
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And so now I can knit different things.
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Fabulous.
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So if you'd like to give Skillshare a try, the first 500 people to click the link in the description box below or to scan the QR code here,
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we'll get a one month free trial with Skillshare.
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Thank you so much to Skillshare for sponsoring today's video and for supporting the channel.
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Sudden change of background.
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I'm taking care of my partner's dog.
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But anyway, let's get into it.
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Discipline can, of course, produce output.
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It can build habits, it can force action, but I think that discipline without love removes the humanity
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and I think kind of like the mysticism of wanting to create anything, or I would even go as far as to say from wanting to make big,
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big change in your life.
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Discipline without love is punishment, and in its punitive form, it instills the premise that we are here to produce and
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that we're here to conform and that anything that doesn't deliver results is inefficient.
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I think a lot about these oppressive structures
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that are kind of hidden inside of self-improvement culture that presents itself as being neutral.
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You know, like I want to be a better person and I want to become the best version of myself.
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Like the language is definitely full of potential and possibility and it seems like a good thing.
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And I think wanting to become a better person is inherently a good thing.
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But underneath all that, self-improvement culture is highly individualistic.
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It is capitalistic.
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It is result-oriented.
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It is ableist.
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It poses productivity as moral virtue.
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And I think it also has a very insidious way of making everyone strive for like the same set of goals,
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deeming external metrics the most important.
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I think for me, the thing that has really instigated this shift, the shift in how I view discipline
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and how I want to view discipline going forward is an awareness of my relationship to time,
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which very strangely, I don't think that I had really thought about in in depth, but if you've watched any of my latest videos,
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you've most likely heard me talk about this idea of making time feel habitable, of making time feel like home,
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like a place that you can settle in and linger in.
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And the thing about discipline, for me, is that it often overrides everything else.
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It usually overrides all the uncertainty that comes, you know, from the future.
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It overrides all the context that comes from the past that might change the way that you feel, that you understand,
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that you relate in order to do something in a designated
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amount of time for a designated number of times in order to achieve a certain result.
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Discipline without love exists only in future time.
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You are never there yet.
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It produces people that can sustain enormous amounts of present discomfort in pursuit of future reward.
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And as a society, we applaud that.
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But what gets lost is the ability to simply be able to, you know, be inside their own lives,
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to reside in the present time, to be as they are.
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And I think that there is a lot of grief
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that comes alongside this temporal structure in which we manage
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and micromanage time and we live a life that is always in preparation for the future.
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And that time just never seems to arrive.
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I really don't want that.
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It's that whole thing with that doctor who spent a lot of time with people dying and across the board,
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everyone on their deathbed just wanted to be with the people
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that they loved and tell the people that they loved that they loved them.
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Nobody was speaking about their achievements or their successes.
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It's all always about love.
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Anyway, I find Hannah Arendt's distinguishing between labor, work and action very helpful here.
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Labor is cyclical and you do it for survival.
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Cyclical meaning that, you know, you're hungry, you feed yourself, eventually you'll get hungry again and hopefully eventually you'll eat again.
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So she associated labor with what she calls the laboring animal, the person who is reduced to the metabolism of their needs.
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It produces nothing durable.
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You consume, deplete, replenish, repeat.
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There's nothing wrong with labor.
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She made this very clear.
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But a life lived entirely in this way is a life without permanence, is a life without the possibility of meaning,
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is like a life without a world.
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Work is different.
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It is the creation of a world, the fabrication of a world, making things that endure beyond the act of making them.
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Arendt associates this with the maker, the person who builds something durable out of materials and leaves something behind.
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So work, unlike labor, has this quality of permanence and it cannot be consumed.
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So for example, if I write a poem and if someone else reads that poem,
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that poem still exists even if the person finishes reading the poem.
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And then there's action, the capacity to begin something entirely new, to initiate, to speak, to appear in the public world as a free person,
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meaning a person that has the ability to change, to be spontaneous, to act in ways that cannot be predicted.
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Action is where human freedom most fully lives.
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It is like the disclosure of who you are and what you stand for and what you bring into the world.
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And I've been thinking a lot about this idea of aliveness and what it means to feel alive and alive.
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And everything I read always points to the capacity to be able to surprise yourself, the capacity to act spontaneously,
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and the capacity to remain mysterious in the way
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that like other people cannot predict what you will do next
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and i think that that is where creativity resides it resides in
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that not knowing and discipline extinguishes that it very it can very easily erode that
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because discipline is based on certainty at least the discipline how
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we understand it today devotion i think can then restore the relationship between all three it allows labor its place
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because labor is important it's important to show up it's important to be consistent it's important to commit to
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that practice but that does not become the whole
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that does not become the whole thing at the center is love
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which i think allows for creativity and allows for creation for making the person
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that is oriented by love can care about the thing
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and care about the thing being built rather than just the proof of, you know, the building.
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And then it allows space for action, for starting new things, for taking yourself by surprise,
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because you are open to the possibility and you can follow curiosity.
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Devotion at its core is a relationship and relationships change and relationships benefit from care,
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from tending, from being listened to, from consistency, from showing up,
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relationships are less responsive to being managed.
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Because to manage someone or to manage something means that there is a distance there, there is a hierarchy, there's a power over something,
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but the devoted self is inside the relationship, is part of that relationship.
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And the most wonderful thing about relationships,
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which I think is also the most terrifying thing about relationships is that you don't know exactly where it's going.
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You might think that you know but love like people can't be possessed
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and can't be controlled and therefore again can always take you by surprise.
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So it requires getting quite comfortable with uncertainty which again I think productivity and self-improvement culture really despises.
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But the thing that keeps relationships alive and growing and the thing that keeps creativity alive and growing is very much this,
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is not fully knowing and therefore always wanting to reach towards it,
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hoping that one day you will know and hoping that one day you will understand.
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And it's it's the desire of it all
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which i keep coming back to i think every single video it's desire
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that leads to curiosity and curiosity that leads to new ways of thinking
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and new ways of understanding and new ways of creating it is curiosity
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that leads to creativity i've been reading the art of love by eric from
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and i've been been thinking a lot about my relationship to myself
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and my relationship to my creativity as I read a book on heterosexual intimate relationships.
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When you love well and when you love right,
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you provide enough space for the other person to feel safe enough and comfortable enough and supported enough that they can change,
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that they can transform, which can be wonderful.
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It is also scary.
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It's terrifying because it means that the person might change so much that they might want to go in a different direction.
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They might want to leave you.
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They might change so much that the relationship changes and change is uncomfortable.
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But when you allow yourself to take a step back and to witness the change happen and recognize the power of love,
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the power of your love, the power of loving is quite special
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and that's eric from's whole thing a shift from seeking being loved to loving we are
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so concerned with making ourselves lovable with changing who we are in order to be more lovable
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that we fail to learn the art of loving
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and it is through loving that ultimately you become more lovable
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because it is through loving that you learn and understand yourself so much better.
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So I asked myself, how can I love what I make well enough?
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How can I love my creative self well enough?
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How can I create space for my creativity, for my creative self to change,
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to transform, to feel supported?
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And Fromm would say that it takes care, it takes respect, knowledge, and responsibility.
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And I think that's all very sensible.
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Every couple of years, I read letters to a young poet by Rilke
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because I think we all should be doing that
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and of course Rilke is absolutely devoted to his writing
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and in his very first letter he expressed to him the need to go inward to really find out
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if writing was the thing that he must do.
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Every time I read this letter I think about vulnerability of going after the thing
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that you desire whatever that might be it's one of the reasons
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that I think this letter always makes me I don't know
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it makes me like a little bit uncomfortable I can feel I can feel the fear inside of me
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because to go into yourself and to find that reason to find
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that thing then requires a moving towards the thing
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because the thing is now alive and real and it exists
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and you can no longer hide from it
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and the pursuit of these desires usually means making yourself visible in some way even
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if it's only to yourself trying something new or trying something out
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or going after the thing that really matters to you requires a whole lot of courage
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because you know it might not work out you might be misunderstood it might take a lot of your time, which might make people continue to misunderstand you.
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It might mean that other people don't take it as seriously as you do.
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Or maybe you recognize that you have built a life around not doing the thing.
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It's all very confronting.
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And it's the first letter.
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It's the first letter in the book.
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Devotion that is steeped in love, that is not delusional, requires an honest look at your circumstances.
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There is no need to abandon the desire,
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but there is a need to hold that desire and look at it without romanticizing it.
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Find small ways to getting closer to it.
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Discipline, how I experience it, makes very little room for context because
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it's rigid and as I said it relies on certainty the certainty
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that no matter what you will do this thing and
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if you don't do this thing then you will you should feel ashamed
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and I've been there and I know
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that most everybody has been there it's not sustainable it's not sustainable
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and it's not enjoyable what I get out of this letter is not necessarily
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that now you have to give up on everything and like completely overhaul your life and take a million risks
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that is one way of doing it
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but I think what I get out of this letter is
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just the question of do I need to be in relationship
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with this thing whatever it is regardless of whether anyone pays
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me for it regardless of what people might think of it
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do I have to be in relationship with this again very
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similar to how I view like important relationships in my life or intimate relationships in my life.
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I won't sacrifice everything for them.
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I won't sacrifice everything for my partner, but they will most certainly not be the last thing on my list.
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They will certainly not be the person that I only see if I have time or if everything else gets done.
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It is to be taken seriously.
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They are to be taken seriously.
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My creativity will not be the last thing on my list.
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That to me is a form of devotion that is realistic given the circumstances that I find myself in.
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There are a few books and a few essays that I can confidently say really changed the way that I view things, the way that I view my life,
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ultimately kind of changed my life.
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One of them is Pleasure Activism, which is a compilation of essays and poems on pleasure that I read, I think, back in 2019.
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I mean, I know I read it in 2019.
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It's, I have a bad memory, but for certain books, I'm like, that was the time.
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That's when things started changing.
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And the essay, The Uses of Erotic by Audre Lorde, of course, funnily enough, that's the intro essay to pleasure activism.
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I had an eating disorder for over a decade and
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that required absurd amounts of discipline for me
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and I lost a whole lot in that decade of my life
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and reading pleasure activism and reading Audre Lorde of course didn't heal me overnight
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but it most certainly opened a door that led to a different path.
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And today, through consistently choosing that path and consistently opening different doors,
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I have a much more normal relationship with food.
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Thank God.
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I realized that pleasure was not something that I ever expected out of life.
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Even saying that makes me, it makes me really sad.
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But yes, it was not something that I considered important.
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Every day I would deny myself all kinds of pleasures and more than that I would deny myself sustenance, like the very thing that I needed to survive
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and to enjoy life which then just like cut me off from any sort of real enjoyment.
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In 2019 pleasure became the theme of my life.
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What happened when I started taking my pleasure seriously, like truly seriously, and when I talk about pleasure,
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I talk about the like sustainable, good, durable pleasure.
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Worlds started opening up for me.
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I started connecting with my body very differently.
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I had been very much disconnected from my body.
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Through connecting with my body, I then started connecting to everything else around me very differently.
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I started connecting with art.
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I started following feelings.
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I became more attuned to my feelings so therefore I could follow them.
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It's everything Lorde writes in the uses of erotic as power
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and my relationship to writing to my creativity as a whole is pleasurable and can be pleasurable.
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The sustainable kind of pleasure requires effort of some sort it
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requires you to move towards it it requires you to act in some way you can't be static
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and in order to move towards pleasure i also have to
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move towards curiosity to ask myself the important questions being able
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to know what is pleasurable to me it requires deepening my relationship to myself.
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And discipline can be pleasurable when seen as devotion,
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when centered around love, because you're showing up to the thing that you have decided really matters to you.
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And that feels good.
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Even when it's hard and frustrating, it ultimately feels good.
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And it feels good because it's durable.
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It feels good because it instills some sort of permanence.
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It is loaded with meaning.
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More importantly, when it stops feeling good, you can notice it because you know what feeling good feels like.
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So you can recognize that and start anew.
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It's very important to be able to know what feels good, what feels good to you, what is pleasurable to you,
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so that you can confidently identify what doesn't feel pleasurable to you.
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You can choose a different path.
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You can maybe put some things on pause.
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Maybe you need to wait a little bit.
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Maybe you just need to relax for a second.
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There is no rush because it's a lifelong process.
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It's a lifelong relationship.
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And so naturally, things are going to shift and you're going to have to be patient.
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And you know that even if you wait for a couple of days
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that you'll come back to it because it's the thing that you are certain that really matters.
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And those things, those things you feel in your body, when you're connected, you can feel those things in your body.
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Love, devotion, pleasure, they all very boldly ask, what is life for?
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What is your life for?
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And I think discipline, the discipline without love, without devotion, without pleasure, it avoids this question.
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It like hides the question away.
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It wants you focused on a list, on metrics, on production, on self-knowledge through accomplishments and performance.
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It has no time to ask the question.
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I think love can really shake that out of you.
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And I think love has really shaken that out of me.
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When I orient back towards real self-knowledge,
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towards feeling, towards connection, towards the things that cannot be turned into information,
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that cannot be consumed, that's where the good stuff is.
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Like, is the life that I'm living accountable to the person that I really am.
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Not the productive, useful self, but the person that, you know,
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can be moved by a piece of music or by art or by the birds in my neighborhood.
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And when I put love at the center, I think that I could confidently say that yes,
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that I am living a life that is accountable to the person that I am today.
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It means that I'm trying to live a life that feels sincere to me.
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It's so interesting because for the longest time I have been such a skeptic and I have even been
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just like enormously scared of the word love and telling people
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that I loved them and it just felt really exposing to me
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but I think it was because I had cut myself off from pleasure
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and from the things that feel good and therefore it just felt
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so vulnerable to be able to share or to bask in love
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because I had so little of it for myself and
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so I was very protective of it
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and it felt like such a big ask to put love at the center of it all
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when I had just so little to spare.
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And look at me now making a whole damn video about putting love at the center of your life
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and discipline as devotion.
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It's amazing what time can do
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and it's also amazing what taking your pleasure seriously can do
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because taking your pleasure seriously means connecting to yourself seriously
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and once you connect to yourself seriously you must take your
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desires seriously i think they just kind of go hand in hand okay i don't know
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that i think that's all i've talked a lot i think that's enough um thank you
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so much for watching i'll see you very soon next week perhaps who knows ciao ciao
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 324 sentences and 4162 words to shadow. The speech runs for 27:51. The speaker talks at a steady 149 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 less common words from the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
- discipline /ˈdɪsəplɪn/ (noun) — A controlled behaviour; self-control.
- creativity /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/ (noun) — The ability to use imagination to produce a novel idea or product.
- devotion /dɪˈvoʊʃən/ (noun) — The act or state of devoting or being devoted; a feeling of being devoted (to something).
- connect /kəˈnɛkt/ (verb) — To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object.
- knit /nɪt/ (verb) — To turn thread or yarn into a piece of fabric by forming loops that are pulled through each other. This can be done by hand with needles or by machine.
- poem /ˈpoʊ.əm/ (noun) — A literary piece written in verse.
- curiosity /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/ (noun) — Inquisitiveness; the tendency to ask and learn about things by asking questions, investigating, or exploring.
- essay /ˈɛs.eɪ/ (noun) — A written composition of moderate length, exploring a particular issue or subject.
- sustainable /səˈsteɪnəbəl/ (adjective) — Able to be sustained.
- durable /ˈdʊɹəbəl/ (adjective) — Able to resist wear or decay; lasting; enduring.
- consistently /kənˈsɪstəntli/ (adverb) — In a consistent manner.
- uncertainty /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/ (noun) — Doubt; the condition of being uncertain or without conviction.
- consume /kənˈsum/ (verb) — To use up.
- metric /ˈmɛt.ɹɪk/ (adjective) — Of or relating to the metric system of measurement.
- certainty /ˈsɝtn̩ti/ (noun) — The state of being certain.
Phrasal verbs you will hear
- talk about (verb) — Used to draw attention to the speaker's characterization of someone or something.
- look at (verb) — To observe or watch.
- get out of (verb) — To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of.
- go after (verb) — To pursue in attempt to catch another.
- show up (verb) — To appear, arrive, or attend, especially suddenly or erratically.
- book on (verb) — To register (for duty).
- come across (verb) — To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
- come from (verb) — To have as one's origin, birthplace or nationality.
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 47 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I've, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, therapeutic /ˌθɛɹ.əˈpjuː.tɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: devotion /dɪˈvoʊʃən/, shake /ˈʃeɪk/, orientation /ˌɔː.ɹi.ənˈteɪ.ʃən/, rush /ɹʌʃ/, shock /ʃɔk/
- Long words — get the stress right: creativity /kri.eɪˈtɪv.ᵻ.ti/, curiosity /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/, sustainable /səˈsteɪnəbəl/, consistently /kənˈsɪstəntli/, uncertainty /ʌnˈsɜːtənti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like discipline, creativity, devotion.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | you've been following · I've been thinking · i've been reading |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | has taught · might've been · I've been |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is reduced · cannot be consumed · cannot be predicted |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | question, which is · coloring which was · person who is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.