Day 69 at the Heart Lab 365: Book in Progress on how to become your heart's best friend

Day 69 (Fabulous Friday) – Make Your Own Movie of the Heart

Sometimes a conversation stays with you even when you've forgotten when it happened, where you were or even who said the words.

One such conversation returned to me today. The advice was to take a difficult moment from your life and imagine it playing on a cinema screen. You're sitting in the audience watching yourself. What would everyone around you be shouting at the screen? Don't go in there! There's a monster under the bed! Turn around!

They can see things the character can't. The impending danger is obvious from their seats, while the person on screen is simply living the scene. If you could hear them, would you listen? Or would you be too immersed in the story? I remember thinking it was a powerful idea.

Today it came back. And, as is the Heart Lab way, I adapted it.

What if I didn't just watch a scene from my life? What if I made the movie?

Now my heart was interested. What would the set look like? The lighting? The costume? The pyrotechnics? Would there be dialogue? What would the soundtrack be? And, most importantly: What would the character playing me be doing?

So, there I was on my #ProjectVitality hill walk when the movie started rolling in my head. The scene is enormous. Behind me is a god-almighty backdrop of fireballs and explosions. I'm walking away from it. Alone. Silent. There are scorch marks and battle scars. My hair is ruffled and wild. My clothes are leather and torn, a gun belt slung low around my hips.

I don't run. I walk. Slowly. Steadily. With a steely focus on the ground ahead. And I don't look back. The soundtrack kicks in. Sadie Barlow's I Choose Me. 

Note to self: there is definitely a Heart Lab 365 playlist forming.

As I walked the dogs and climbed that hill, I let the film play. My heart knows what those explosions represent. It knows the backstory. But watching this character, I wasn't feeling only what had happened to her. I was feeling what she had become capable of. My stride changed. My breathing changed. My heart thumped with the battle still behind me and the future somewhere ahead.

And then I imagined the cinema audience. They weren't warning me anymore. They were cheering. Keep walking. They didn't need to know what happened next. Neither did I. They just wanted Lil Miss Red to keep walking away from the flames. And somehow their imaginary cheers were enough.

So that's today's Heart Lab experiment. Take a scene from your life that feels safe enough to revisit and become its filmmaker.

Choose the setting. The light. The costume. The movement. The soundtrack. Decide where the camera sits. Then watch yourself on screen.

What does the audience see that the character couldn't see at the time? What are they shouting? What do they desperately want for you?

And perhaps the most interesting question: What happens in your heart when you watch yourself with the compassion of an audience already rooting for you?

Mine was sitting centre, front row. And apparently it had been cheering for me all along.

Roll the credits.

Heart Lab Rating: 9/10, Such an accessible yet powerful experiment. Moving from inside the scene to the audience gave me distance from it. Then becoming producer, director and star gave me something else entirely. Choice. I couldn't rewrite what had happened before the explosions. But I could decide which direction the character walked afterwards.

Movement Rating: 7/10, The hero story came straight into my walk. Suddenly there was purpose in the stride, drama in the hill climb and considerably more swagger than was strictly necessary. Even stepping off a kerb had a bit more pizzazz. Apparently Lil Miss Red does her own stunts.

Description of My Tears, Oh boy. When the soundtrack reached the part about choosing yourself despite everything you've carried and recognising that you've made it through, the tears came. Not elegant movie-star tears either. I sobbed. I blubbed. In public. Then rapidly attempted to gather myself in case another dog walker appeared around the corner. The boxers were spectacularly unmoved by the emotional climax. There were sniffs to investigate.

Love Rating: 9/10, A big score for self-love. Because something unexpected happens when you put yourself on the cinema screen. You stop seeing only the mistakes, wounds and things you wish had happened differently. You start rooting for the character. And perhaps there are days when our hearts need us to do exactly that.

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