'Essence' is the Water in the Hot Tub
And we're all chillin at different depths
Welcome back to another edition of Hot Tub Talks!
Today’s tub talk is with Christina Ducruet 👩🎨
Christina and I met through the 6-week program she facilitates called Lab X: Creativity x Fear. She is one of the most skilled facilitators I have ever met and a kindred spirit when it comes to tub talks. Here’s a lil taste of our convo, and I hope you enjoy the whole thing as much as I did:
🚀 Meeting your hero in the hot tub
Brandon
Tell me about the last hot tub talk that you had in your life
Christina
There’s a woman named Dr. Lisa Miller, and she’s pretty much my idol. When I began my journey of creating something at the intersection of spirituality and science, I wanted to know - who's studying this? And she was the person.
So I was organizing an event on Spiritual Wellness and was able to get her to come speak, and I was so excited to meet her. And I found her at the event, and she just immediately disarmed me with just generosity of spirit, right off the jump. She was like,”Tell me about you, let's go chat."
We ended up in this video installation room at the museum having the most beautiful impromptu heart-to-heart, discussing my journey, which includes the experience of losing my mom, and she had recently lost her father, and so I found myself in like a deep tub moment with basically the woman I've idolized and looked up to and drawn inspiration from for the last two years. It really moved me. I'm getting emotional just thinking about it.
It was one of these peak moments that was so sweet. Imagine being this person who's a role model, and having enough energy to just pour that back into somebody else, and to be so generous. And to me that is like the essence of a hot tub talk. It's a great equalizer. You meet in shared humanity, you see into each other's essence— and it’s rocket fuel.
Brandon
I got goosebumps listening to that. I’m so interested in how to create the conditions for a hot tub talk - so in this case you guys got connected by both having work centered around spirituality and science, but also being the type of people that create and facilitate and speak and write. It seems to me like creativity and putting things out into the world is a way to invite hot tub talks into your life.
Christina
That is so true, and I feel like that's because to put something out there of ourselves is deeply vulnerable, and you don't get to be in the tub with somebody unless you're a bit naked— unless you've exposed yourself a little bit and you're sharing something real, which often speaks to the realness in the other person and gets them going, and it's a virtuous cycle that we can choose to feed in our lives.
🏛️Architecting ways to tap into ‘Essence’
Brandon
I want to dive a little bit more into what you're building with Labyrxnth. When do you feel like the seed of it was first planted?
Christina
I would describe it more like a density of threads coming together.
Labyrxnth is where we support people on their journeys inward through creative self-exploration. We're focused on serving the modern seeker, a person for whom, religion or other traditional means of nurturing their spiritual life don't necessarily exist, but they really they need that connection to their core essence, whether that's because they're going through a transition, or they want to tap that to be more creative and expressive in their life.
And I'm on that mission for two reasons:
I've always been spiritually curious. I've always been drawn to the deep chat, the big questions— my best memories and friendships of growing up were characterized by those types of amazing conversations.
When I turned 30, I went through a real rupture in the timeline of my life that made me recognize how badly I needed these things as a foundation. I was a new mom and had a five month old at home, and then my own mother was diagnosed with cancer that spring. I went from figuring out how to be a mom for the first time to becoming a caregiver for my mom as she went through a very brief, painful battle with pancreatic cancer, and in four months she ended up passing away.
I was all but completely obliterated in a short period of time– my sense of self, sense of what's up and what’s down, and went through a very dark night of the soul.
Following that chapter, I also almost immediately got pregnant with my daughter after losing my mom. It was the ultimate paradox of life and death, being so excited to have my daughter, but grieving so deeply alongside that and trying to heal and grow through it all.
While I had access to all kinds of resources, I recognized eventually that I was solving for the wrong problem. I was trying to do things like talk therapy and treat it like a mental health challenge, but I saw that I wasn't really broken, or there wasn't necessarily a problem to be fixed, but I was actually just having a very healthy existential or spiritual response to something universal.
I recognized— Wow… the way that we're solving for so many of our challenges is through the wrong lens, and that actually, if we just recognize that a lot of these, these painful moments of suffering in our life, are actually doorways to awakening and spiritual growth and development. If we could solve for that, we'd be so much better off. We'd feel less alone. We'd recognize that we're not the first person to deal with this, and it’s actually a universal thing. So those were the threads that led to Labyrxnth and me basically deciding to dedicate my life to this.
Brandon
It’s such a heartfelt story and what stands out to me is that idea that suffering or painful moments are doorways to transformation and growth. To me it feels pretty well accepted and hard to argue, but when you’re deep in that shit … good luck trying to just intellectually remind yourself of that.
In the hardest moments of my life, I’ve been the most spiritually open to new ideas or practices. I don’t think that’s just because I’m desperate, it’s also because that’s what actually holds up in those times.
When I participated in Lab X this spring, I was going through a really tough season of work, and it felt so grounding to have that weekly space to ground me in who I was beyond the work.
Christina
The term spirituality is almost taboo in our culture, and I don’t want to just toss it around, but at Labyrxnth, we use a term called essence— which I really love, because it speaks to something I think we can all relate to, which is at your deepest level, what is that personal essence that makes you you? Beyond the career or labels, and underneath all the shit of our day to day. Whether we call it essence or soul or something else, all of it is just language that’s trying to point to the quality of self that’s indelible in some ways.
What do you call it?
Brandon
Creativity has been an interesting way into it for me. When I participated in the Creativity x Fear program, all the different practices, whether writing or drawing or speaking, they always ended up in some inner exploration of finding ways to make sense of this essence. And getting familiar with essence doesn’t just make me better creatively, it helps me get through all of life’s ups and downs and step through these doorways of transformation.
What have people told you they take away from their experience with Lab X?
Christina
I think there are two things:
First is around the idea of shared humanity and co-creation. All the experiences we design at Labyrxnth are highly relational. We've chosen modalities that are explicitly co-created by the participant and the guide because a big part of it is you discovering your own agency, your own sense of I did that myself. Not like ”Oh, I saw some guru, and they worked their magic on me, and I have no idea how it happened.” You actively created that experience of awe, wonder, insight you got out of the experience.
And then the second thing is that people are consistently moved and surprised by the extent to which they gained insight or had a big AHA moments as a result of another person's process. Just being witness to another person at the essence level, people are often blown away by how much movement that creates for them. We call this the “medicine of shared humanity.”
A metaphor I've used to describe the spiritual development process – that fits very well with Hot Tub Talks – is that we bring seekers together who are at very different parts of their journey. I've often described it like a community swimming pool, and the water is essence. We’re all swimming in it, but people are at different depths. Some folks are in the hot tub marinating, and they can stay there forever. They're pruned out. Others are at the edge in the splash pad, getting wet for the first time, just dabbling a little bit in vulnerability. But the point is, it's all water. We're all kind of meeting for that same nourishment.
Was that your experience?
Brandon
Yes, and my experience was a kind of opening up to myself, as in I felt more receptive to my ideas and intuition and what excites me. It felt like I was empowering myself to go out and do the learning and the growing. It wasn’t like I was showing up for an hour and a half, and learning a tactical skill, it was showing up to practice a way of being that I am slowly seeing the value of more and more.
Christina
It's never been easier in this world to get shit done on the tactical level. There are these accelerants with AI that let you choose any idea and run really far and wide with it.
Therefore, to me, the premium becomes like, how do I make myself receptive to have the idea in the first place, and more often than not, let myself pursue it and play with it?
You and I met through Sublime, which I love because to me that’s a spiritual technology. The way that it respects the creative process and the way that it really speaks to being in that flow state and being inspired and going down the rabbit hole is another way of becoming receptive and embracing generative as our nature. It feels like a birth rite that we're supposed to be creating and acting as a conduit for something bigger than ourselves.
🤼 🤝 Creativity vs Practicality
Brandon
What are your creative practices or creative callings that you have been answering to recently?
Christina
I'm looking over here at my vision board and one shift that I’ve started this new year with is a renewed sense of myself as an artist. It helps me remember that the periods where I’m just brewing are a really crucial part of being creative. So sometimes that’s freewriting very diligently in my journal, or recently I’ve been listening to a podcast called Line Time, where the host is this amazing artist who gives these cryptic prompts to follow along and draw or paint whatever comes up, and at the end of 20 minutes you’ve created some wild piece of art. I’ve been loving using different practices to get into creative flow.
Brandon
How do you balance the identity of being an artist with the identity of being a founder who is trying to build a business?
Christina
I think there’s a false dichotomy with the view that creativity is frivolous and ungrounded or inherently at odds with sustainability and value creation.
Earlier in my career, I worked in innovation strategy & design, where essentially we were marrying what we called “the money” and “the magic”. I have this deep feeling in my bones that those things go hand in hand. I love to create things (and Labryxnth reflects this) that have integrity and are elegant from the inside out, and that includes that they actually f*ing work from all the perspectives that they need to work— the guides are getting paid, our clients are having consistent outcomes, it’s spreading via word of mouth to people who want and need it, etc.
We consistently hear from people who have participated in Labryxnth that they are surprised how deep they can go in one session. And that is a creative challenge I’ve been obsessed with. How do we make transformation, not accidental, but on purpose? How do we create the conditions so we can reliably provide these finite, complete innerworldly experiences that people crave and deserve? So that, to me, is all a creative question, but also a really practical way of thinking.
If this convo hit for you and you want to dip your toes in the essence, check out all the events and programs that Labryxnth hosts here.
If you vibe with Hot Tub Talks, these will be your kind of gatherings.
I’ll leave y’all with some tub questions for the comments:
🛁 What helps you reconnect with your essence?
💭 Got a not-yet idea that’s been brewing?
🎨 What’s one creative ritual you’ve loved lately?