On being trolled, and reclaiming wholesome

Good afternoon, Carousellers.

I hope you’re having a good start to the month.

I woke up this morning to a bit of a surprise - a short reel I’d posted of me performing some comedy songs in a sauna at The Brighton Sauna Festival had gone viral, and it had brought in the trolls.

A short clip of laughter, connection and sweaty joy had been inundated with comments on my weight, on whether it was funny (apparently not), and even gifs of people vomiting. I calmly deleted the comments and changed the settings of who could comment. But I did not take down the post. I stand by my example of liberated self-expression and joy, and unless this is feedback from people I care about, it does not touch me.

This felt huge. A few years ago I got trolled on TikTok and it really impacted me. But today I felt robust. And mostly I just felt sad for these men, who felt they had to take me down. Take anyone down.

I’m celebrating that I get to live a life where I am surrounded by epic people who lift each other up. This is the norm in my life now, and the values I live by.

As I’ve shared before, one of my tag lines is ‘following the aliveness is my business plan’ - which means, I keep going where the energy is, even if it doesn’t always make sense! The Sauna festival was another example of this. I was invited to perform my Sauna Song and Dry Robe song in the 22-seater sauna. A gig in a sauna? Let’s do it!

I chose to make this interactive, and teach everyone the parts beforehand, so I had a whole sauna of people singing ‘I am getting so hot I wanna take a cold plunge!’ I also had the owner of Beach Box Sauna, Liz, acting out the Aufguss. It was a full collaborative performance.

Afterwards I had lots of people share how much they’d enjoyed it, how joyful it had felt. How WHOLESOME.

I think I used to struggle with that word - maybe I felt it was synonymous with boring. But if I look at that word now - WHOLE-SOME - it’s about feeling WHOLE. And actually that is a wonderful thing to offer the world.

So, I’m reclaiming the word whole-some. And I do realise that when we move into wholesome activities that we are going to trigger the f**k out of people who do not feel permission to be that yet. And we must continue to show the way…

Here are some ways you get down with wholesome Weiler over the next couple of months…

👽Psy Fit

We kicked of Psy-cle 5 last night with a full moon bang! There are 3 more opportunities to join before our summer break: Monday 8th, 15th and 22nd June. All at SEA GYM Brighton. Tickets here.

🎤Noughtie 90s Piano Singalong

I’ll be performing nostalgic singalongs with my band at the following events:

The Hall, Exeter - Saturday 27th June

Love Trails Festival - Friday 3rd June - SOLD OUT but let me know if you’re there!

Wilderness Festival - Friday 31st August

Happy Start Up Summercamp - Friday 12th September

🫂 1:1 Coaching

If you’re in need of an injection of wholesome joy into your Carousel life, I offer 60 minute coaching sessions, or 3 months packages. You can check out my coaching page here. For the 3 months, I offer a 30 minute taster to see if we’re a good fit. A heads up that my prices will be increasing from the Autumn.

Also in my Carousel life…

🎙️It’s been a while since I’ve released a podcast episode, but look out for one this week! Back in 2022, Kim Willis and I made an episode called Knowing When To Quit the idea of having children and now, 3.5 years later we’ve recorded an update about what happened next. I can’t wait to share it with you!

📆 I’ve been doing some big thinking about how to structure my year as a Carouseller… I’ve found a way to make everything feel calmer and… well, more whole, even across many different interests. The aim is to feel like I can go deep with many projects, as well as continually to express all parts of myself. One for a future Carousel as it gets clearer.

🥳I went to the UK Burning Man (very different to US one, I believe!) and had a week of creative joy, a LOT of DJing and running Psy Fit - all in the beautiful Devon countryside. One of the values of the burns is that there is no money on site, so everything is gifted. Being in a space where people are constantly thinking of things to offer each other is incredible (my absolute favourite being people showing up dressed in Roman togas offering us cheese + grapes platters!)

One of my DJ sets👆

Wishing everyone a great start to the month, and do say hi if you are coming to any of the festivals!

Big hug

Sarah