Transcript Disclaimer – Please note that the following transcript has been machine generated by an AI software and therefore may include errors or omissions.

Robin Daly
Hi and welcome to The Yes To Life Show on UK Health Radio. I’m Robin Daly, your regular host for the show as well as founder of the UK charity Yes To Life that helps people with cancer to help themselves through learning about and accessing integrated medicine and its wealth of resources to support them in body, mind and spirit. My guests today have been working on a parallel track to Yes To Life providing direct support and education to people working from our premises in Southampton Row in central London. Jane Hutchinson is creative director and Kevin Helton is story architect at Hello Love where I’m speaking to them now. Hi Jane and Kevin, great to have you Jane back on the show after some time now.

Jane Hutchison
Yes, quite a lot of years, maybe six, seven years.

Robin Daly
hi to you Kevin. Nice to meet you.

Kevin Helton
Thank you for having us.

Robin Daly
Okay, so back when I spoke to you last Jane, you told us about the fundamental aims of your organisations, Hello Beautiful Foundation and Hello Love, to create a world that’s free from degenerative diseases such as cancer through personal sustainability and non-toxic practice. I like the sound of it, I have to say it at the time. I did make the point though, at that time, they weren’t exactly in common currency, those kind of phrases, you know, personal sustainability. Do you think things have changed in the last four plus years?

Jane Hutchison
I think definitely since after Covid, I think people have started to know more about non-toxic practices. I think the word non-toxic is more mainstream now. Before Covid, no one talked about plant-based. Now it’s everywhere. I remember when we first opened, we were like, oh, let’s call it, we’ve got a plant-based restaurant. We said, we can’t say that. No, don’t know what it is.

Robin Daly
about yeah so it’s been a massive shift there has been a shift okay well we can go into that bit and you know those you were describing your range then do you think they’ve evolved over the last four plus years you still holding firm to those original aims of yours

Kevin Helton
Yeah, we’re pretty much holding firm. I think initially the charity started as a breast cancer charity in response to Jane’s diagnosis with breast cancer. then when we realized that a lot of the women that we are interacting with also had secondary cancers, realizing that a lot of this stuff is interconnected and interrelated and therefore it became more of a conversation around chronic disease and some of the things that we can all do in terms of lifestyle changes to help prevent the onset of those diseases and in other instances if they already have one of those diseases, some of the things that they can do to kind of make their journey a little bit easier and less painful so to speak.

Jane Hutchison
because we also have like an open door policy here, everyone walks in, we don’t know what illness they have. it evolved from a breast cancer charity to all cancers to now like just helping whoever comes through the door, really.

Robin Daly
that’s quite a rebate, but it’s fantastic. I mean, I can appreciate having to screen people at the door. It’s not quite it, is it? I remember one of the things I really liked about those aims when we spoke about them was the fact that they underline something that we feel very strongly about yes to life, which is the inseparability of our health from the health of our environment. It’s right at the root of our thinking. So you’re clearly very passionate about this. I’m sure your thinking’s only gone further on this since we last spoke. Do you want to say something more about it?

Jane Hutchison
Well, we just talk about everything in our lives that affect our health, you know, from obviously we’re on a main road here, so we know that the cars and the pollution are affecting us, so every little aspect of your health. So for me, getting cancer on a personal journey, it was like making lifestyle changes and they constantly evolve as well. So every year, something I learned something new and I think life is just a learning process and you never have all the answers and it’s just fascinating, really, the new things that come up and the new things that we can look at to help ourselves. I mean, mushrooms are a big thing now and psychedelics and all this, you know, it wasn’t really talked about that much a few years ago and now everyone’s talking about it and the importance of sleep and, yeah, there’s so many different things that we can explore. It’s like, yeah, millions of things.

Robin Daly
Yeah, you’re right, psychedelics was definitely not being spoken about openly back then, and yeah, all that circadian rhythm stuff has been pretty new. Funnily enough, driven by Nobel Prize-winning science, that was, you know, I think I was what put it in the headlines, and it’s now, yeah, common currency, it would have been totally nuts, that stuff, to be talked about in public, you know, five, ten years ago, but now it’s kind of like accepted, and this is a radical change, but yeah, it seems like over the years, we know a lot more for sure, but also the threats to our health get ever more as well, you know, we’re certainly not in a position where they’re getting better yet overall, and you know, if we’re not acting in a very savvy and defensive way, the chances are we’re going downhill, so it’s quite a bathroom to take on, isn’t it?

Jane Hutchison
I think more people are getting aware now that they have to look after their health. I mean, there’s so many obstacles throughout life with the food we’re buying in the shops, you know, everything’s processed now and it’s so hard to get freshly made food, for instance, and everything’s just becoming harder and harder. The soil that we’re growing our crops in is getting worse and obviously the more pollutants are in the environment and in the water and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. So then more and more diseases are cropping up and more and more illnesses.

Robin Daly
The onus is on people to become very well informed if they actually want to stay well. It’s becoming quite a science that everybody needs to embrace. Not least of all because industry of course is doing its best to tell us it’s producing really good stuff and it’s really safe and doing its best to cover up whatever’s going on.

Jane Hutchison
Yeah, definitely. More and more of that. Again, like social media and different things, more and people are being brought away of things that are out there that can benefit your health and there’s more education available now with social media. It’s true. It’s true.

Robin Daly
Yeah, both things are moved on, basically. The obstacles are greater, but also the access to information and knowledge is greater. I shudder to think what one’s health trajectory would be like if you just didn’t worry and just bought what was sold and did what everybody’s supposed to do. It seems to me like a serious downhill slippery slope now.

Jane Hutchison
Yeah, I think more so. It’s good that lots of scientists now are even looking at, you know, more of these psychedelic drugs or different studies where they weren’t a few years ago, I wouldn’t think. So even some of the scientific studies are becoming more integrated, which is good.

Robin Daly
So, the psychedelics you mentioned, obviously in connection with the mental, emotional, spiritual side of meeting a chronic disease or a life-threatening disease particularly. And yeah, they seem to be a huge resource for people there. But I mean, even beyond that, they’re just a huge resource for people meeting the challenges of life. But are you finding that many of the people you deal with are actually being helped by them?

Jane Hutchison
I think more of becoming aware that women, quite a lot of the women that come here that have stage four cancer are looking into psychedelics. Lots have taken among themselves and they’ve seen the benefits. I think there’s just a lot more awareness, especially within the cancer community.

Robin Daly
So people are learning about it from each other in the main, presumably.

Jane Hutchison
from each other, and they’re going to doctors educating them as well. Yeah, so there’s definitely a shift out there. Even years ago, people would be like, oh, psychedelics, that’s some crazy drugs.

Kevin Helton
Yeah, exactly. We do a lot of these sharing circles and try to remove some of the concern that people have around certain things. when people are able to talk about it together in a safe space, that would help them to dig deeper, as opposed to just automatically discount certain things simply because of what they’ve read elsewhere. a lot of this, again, is just being able to almost work together in teams to figure out the next steps. Because oftentimes, when people are going through chronic disease, such as cancer, they may be trying to do it on their own. that’s not necessarily because they want to do it that way, but because the people around them are not necessarily equipped to help them on their journey, or during that sort of diagnosis period, they end up getting a divorce, or they end up, the other people around them are not necessarily capable. It’s good when people are going through these journeys together, able to share notes, and educate each other. Every single day is a practice, a daily practice. And that’s why we really call it a non-toxic practice, because it is something that has to happen on a daily basis, the same way you would practice football, or darts, or anything else we like to play on Friday nights. Right. So I think the sharing circles are a good way forward for this kind of thing.

Robin Daly
Well, you’ve embraced the idea of that kind of group work very early on, I think. And it’s turning out to be a real gem in terms of scenarios for helping people. You know, I interviewed James Maskell on the show a couple of months back whose his trajectory took him. He was thinking, well, you know, he’s a health activist and thinking, what on earth are we going to do to get some decent healthcare? he initially started off down the route of thinking of functional medicine, which seemed to him the answer, until he got to the point where he realized, well, it’s great functional medicine, but there’s never going to be a scenario where everybody gets functional medicine, it takes too much time, it’s too expensive. then he realized that group work was actually more effective than one-to-one functional medicine in helping people. And it’s cheap and helps lots of people at once. You know, an amazing conclusion. I can see, really, a lot of the underpinning ills of society are the ones that can get addressed in group work, the things that are very fundamental to people about isolation and belonging and their social network and feeling they’ve got other people gunning for them, that they’re not on their own with their problems. All this stuff, which is actually deeply, psychologically weakening to be in that position like that, which puts you at risk of illness and attacks your immunity, basically. All that kind of stuff can get addressed in group work. And so immediately, you’re building a great platform, quite apart from sharing great information that you just described. That’s as I see on the cake as well. You get all those things happening at once. And without the necessity for a massive amount of skilled forensic expertise, it just happens quite naturally. So it’s a wonderful thing. And obviously, you know that. I’m lecturing on here, but of course, this is what you know, because you’ve been doing it for a long time.

Jane Hutchison
having this community space is so special. We noticed through COVID when we weren’t allowed to have group sessions, how it suffered and even online, you know, it’s such a distance between someone online, just having that one-on-one and the group sessions are so important for people.

Robin Daly
I’m just going to talk about that a bit. Anyway, yes, we have joined in in recent years and got group work going, and it’s really going extremely well. People are absolutely loving it. I’m very happy about that indeed. It’s sort of fast becoming a central feature of what we do. I think it’s brilliant. For everybody listening, you’ve just described that you’ve got these two organisations. Well, what are each of them? How do they relate to each other? What do they do?

Jane Hutchison
So the space itself is called Hello Love, and the charity within the space is Hello Beautiful Foundation, the cancer charity. So Hello Love is basically an artist-led community space, so we support different artists and charities. So we have a gift shop, we have a vegan restaurant, and downstairs we have a holistic studio. So because we didn’t know anything about setting up a charity, I’m from a design background, Kevin’s finance background. We were like, how are we going to raise money? So because we couldn’t create art, we opened a gift shop to help their support from the charity. So half of the sale goes to the artists and half goes to the charity pool. And so yes, we support both sides. we support lots of homeless people as well, and lots of refugees that come over that can’t get work, and they might want to sell some of their artwork or crafts in the shop. So yeah, we’re supporting a wide range of people.

Kevin Helton
just maybe to give you a little bit about the timeline, Hello Loved was started prior to Jane’s diagnosis with cancer. So we were already servicing clients as a design studio, websites, iPad apps, retail design. And then when Jane was diagnosed with cancer, we naturally were able to call on some of the people that were in our immediate network, those artists. so the first conversation really became around mental health and positive emotional awareness. So a lot of the colors that you’ll see when you visit the space are bright and exciting colors to instill happiness. We do a lot of spoken words. We write poems and haikus that we then transition into screen prints and greetings cards. So a lot of the content we’re able to recycle in different mediums to provide people with just that tiny bit of encouragement that they need. So some of those items we give away free is in our kind of non-toxic gift pack that we give to patients. But other times, people are buying it on behalf of people that they know with the illness. Again, at the point of every sale, there’s that kind of social nuance to giving back and to supporting people in the community, really shopping with the cause, and really creating a community environment. So it’s a community center with a kind of modern contemporary twist to it.

Jane Hutchison
When we first started, all we really knew was art awareness. So we created lots of art campaigns, talked about beauty and change, talking about different types of breast cancer. Because I only thought there was like one type of breast cancer before I was diagnosed. It’s just educating people, educating people about reconstructions of flat, you know, flat is beautiful. all these different subject matters, just bringing it more talked about and in the open. then I was when I was going through my own journey and finding out all the holistic things that were helping me. And we met more and more holistic practitioners and different doctors. We onboarded them and thought, you know, it’s a great place to open an awareness space all about, you know, education and having this holistic side to it as well.

Kevin Helton
The other thing that we also realized is that for people that don’t necessarily have cancer, they may assume that the Hello Beautiful Foundation doesn’t apply to them. They think, oh, it’s a cancer charity. It doesn’t apply to us. But in reality, we want to bring everybody into the narrative much sooner. Let’s start the educational process from day one. So when you pass the space, it says Hello Love because Hello Love is a design studio and people can engage with art that way. And then as they dig deeper into the narrative, then they start to find out about the Hello Beautiful Foundation. And it actually turns out that the space supports not only the Hello Beautiful Foundation, but about 50 other charities do the space. So we encourage those charities to kind of utilize it as their home as well. So their home away from home. So if and when, yes to life, for example, needs a space that’s slightly different than the space they already have access to, we say, hey, let’s do a collaboration. Let’s figure out a way that we absolutely encourage something else to happen. that’s where the magic stuff happens.

Robin Daly
Okay, so I was going to ask you, Jane, when we spoke before, we talked about your own experience, your own diagnosis and everything. That’s obviously provided the impetus for all this work you’re doing to raise awareness. you’ve described how you started out knowing nothing. Basically, like most people, you’re just into the system and you start doing what you’re told to do. But along the way, obviously, you’ve formed some very strong ideas for your own, which have led to exactly what you’re doing now. Was there things in particular that happened to you that made you see, or maybe they kind of opened your eyes, if you like, in a way that made you think outside the box?

Jane Hutchison
I think I was always quite holistic before I was diagnosed. So I already had that few things I was doing quite holistically. So I already knew the benefit. I thought I was really healthy before I got diagnosed. So many do. But then it’s that wake up call to what wasn’t I healthy with. then I just started to read so many books and was fascinated with what I was finding. I had lots of spiritual experiences when I was diagnosed. I think that just opened up the floodgates really of everything available. then I started to practice different things. Qigong really helped me through my journey. I had a really bad lymphedema. So that really helped. I think just things that were helping me, I realized how important they were to share with other people through their journeys and how it could also help them.

Robin Daly
Okay, and looking back now, as some of you just come along and say to you, you know, say you picked three things, you know, which were super important to you in finding your way throughout the other end and creating a very healthy you at the other end, I believe living much longer than predicting, but, you know, many times, what, you know, what would you say those were?

Jane Hutchison
I’d say now, looking back, that definitely the mental health side of things, working through stresses and traumas, and maybe traumas you didn’t even realise were there, like really working on through those things, because often we, you know, we blank them out for a reason, and they’re eating away inside of us, so really doing a lot of emotional awareness, mindful practices, but I think that is like, I think everyone that I meet that has cancers had some stress or anxiety in their life, so I’d say that was like the first thing to really embrace, and then also just, you know, think about what we’re eating, what we’re consuming on a daily basis, and then what we’re putting on to our bodies, so everything what we’re putting on and what we’re putting into our bodies are so important, I mean, it’s almost like a car, right, you wouldn’t put diesel in a petrol car, so you really have to be, you know, mindful of what we’re eating and consuming, because our bodies are, our bodies are amazing, really, that we can eat so much rubbish and last for so long.

Robin Daly
No, it’s boggling, we can treat them so badly and they still keep going.

Jane Hutchison
say you know I’ve smoked and drank and I’ve lived till I’m 70 and that’s fine and that can happen but you don’t for me it’s like I don’t want to take the risk you know especially now having a pencil once it’s like

Robin Daly
Yeah, it’s a warning shot, isn’t it, to say, well, you know, you know, wake up.

Jane Hutchison
Yeah, I feel so much healthy as well doing like I feel more healthy now than I did before I got cancer and more healthy than when I was in my 20s. It’s like the more you do holistically and you feed your body with the good stuff then the more it affects you, your energy levels and your overall well-being. So just a personal level, I just feel so much better.

Robin Daly
Yeah, and it all ties in very nicely with the kind of psychological aspects of actually knowing you’re doing good things, you’re looking out to yourself well. Actually, it’s also a very big part of the picture, I think, as opposed to suspecting that you’re not. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Okay, maybe you say a little bit about what’s on offer there for people with cancer, because there’s plenty going on at your place, I know.

Jane Hutchison
Yes, it’s different all the time. And yeah, we’ve got so many different events. So the regular things we do is like qigong, meditation, breathwork, yoga, sound massages, we do non toxic gift packs of your diagonals, you get books about meditation, you get skincare that’s organic and free from different parabens and different chemicals. And then we do lots of different workshops. So we might do a self healing group or a dance session or poetry evening or just everything and everything really

Kevin Helton
We’re constantly learning new things, people come in with these practices that have been done for thousands of years in China for example and then you learn about it and then you go down a rabbit hole of exactly the different parts like Jane mentioned the qigong and what it means to do lower Dantian breeding and the difference between yin style and yang style and when they’re used and why you want to use you know each of these particular things and so light entrainment we we got some time with the Pandora star we got some time with some lucid dreaming and astral projection so you know you start to realize that the healing process is not just in the waking state but it’s also in the dream state in the in the in the restful state it becomes more of a lifestyle and so I think one of the things that we were you know maybe Gordon mentioned in the last one was around incremental change you know because there’s small incremental things that we can start to include in our daily activity that can have a profound impact over time it’s cumulative this the longer you do it the more you do it the more impact that that you see as a result

Robin Daly
Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, it’s always seemed to me a sort of minor explosion of activity going on over your place. I just like, how do I do so many things? How is that small place?

Kevin Helton
Well, part of our job is just to curate the professionals like yourself and just make sure that people can just even know that some of this stuff exists and allow them to use their own time to go and explore more.

Robin Daly
Anyway, great. So I just wanted to explore the pandemic scenario because they were doing all these masses of things and suddenly the whole lot is switched off. And it was quite a learning moment for everybody, that was. And yours was such a face-to-face event, you know, you were really working hands-on with people there in so many ways and the whole lot stopped. I’m just interested to know a bit about the experience, first of all, what you found out about helping people and how you could help them without that face-to-face and what effect you had on them, all that kind of thing, just what, you know, how was your pandemic?

Jane Hutchison
I mean, personally, it was nice because we got some downtime that we weren’t doing so many things. It was almost the time to have a breather and reassess and, you know, do some things that we couldn’t do before because they’re constantly going. So we worked seven days a week before that.

Robin Daly
You must do. You must do. Just do all that stuff.

Jane Hutchison
But then, you know, when everything stopped, we were basically focused on, well, we had the juice bar and salad bar here, so we had lots of our community that were in the local hospitals. So we ended up spending a lot of the time making food and taking them to the local hospitals. We also had some patients that were on their own that live near here, so we were allowed to have them in and speak to them and give them food and things. So we came like a shelter in a way, and we were helping homeless because everyone moved out of the city. It just doesn’t, the homeless were left, so they were coming to us for food, so we ended up helping so many homeless with free food items. So we basically just shifted into making food, didn’t we? The local hospitals asked us to make it for the whole ward, but of course we didn’t have the funding to do it.

Robin Daly
say where there’s the funding coming from anyway, there’s no money coming in with it.

Kevin Helton
very, very difficult and very difficult time with the, you know, our requirement to close this to the space itself. But then, of course, the landlords are still, you know, requiring money for the first half of the lockdown. We were paying the full, you know, you know, rental contract. And so the halfway through said, look, look, we could only maybe pay you half of, you know, the period. But even still, you know, this is, you know, far more than what we are generating through any income activity. So, you know, we were able able to hang on by a thread and we’re still here doing so. You know, but amazing. Yeah. One of the things that we realize, you know, coming out of the back end of covid is that a lot of people have transitioned to online only. But there is still a deep desire for people to still interact and have the human element. So we’re hoping that people, you know, really come back together and not just allow themselves to be lost in the virtual space.

Robin Daly
Yeah, that’s a worry, isn’t it? I think there is an appetite for a bit of real-world stuff, but it’s not universal. I think there’s still a lot of fear around, basically. Yeah. I didn’t think cancer patients weren’t fearful in that way, unless they were kind of bone marrow transplant patients or something, where they got no immunity. Everybody else was kind of like, yeah, let’s go and do stuff. Great. But now, everybody’s in two minds as to whether they should or not. And it’s produced this kind of anxiety about it, which is a tragic shame, because of course, the stuff we were talking about earlier that is fostered in group work, you know, trust and companionship and all the rest of it, that comes from face to face, you know, doesn’t it? Comes from sitting down together and just talking things out.

Jane Hutchison
I think it took over a year for people after the pandemic to really start to want to even dip their toes into doing group sessions again. Well. It has taken quite a while, but yeah, people are really seeing the benefits now of doing group sessions and meeting other people.

Robin Daly
So the momentum’s getting going again, you think? Yeah, it’s nothing. But would you say it’s not back yet to the level it was?

Jane Hutchison
quite back. I’d say the main, our main cancer patients that we’ve had for a lot of years are really keen to do things. Yeah. Yeah, but they’ve been years now doing different practices. So yeah, but just newbies, then they’re a bit skeptical, still a bit, you know, whether how much do, how many people are going to be in a group session.

Robin Daly
the oldest will know the benefits when they will have experienced them firsthand. Yeah. Yeah. So this is this sort of new, slightly sort of anxious mentality that’s around. It’s tragic. the fact that COVID has done that to everybody, I mean, it’s not just people with cancer, of course, there’s people everywhere or, you know, there’s, there’s slight anxiety about things. I think it’s a tragedy for human relations, personally.

Jane Hutchison
Yeah, it’s brought a lot of fear, which isn’t great, especially the fear is the one thing you need to try and get rid of to help combat some of these diseases.

Robin Daly
Absolutely. Yeah, that’s definitely the case. I think we probably agree that in many ways we’re making progress now. I mean, in awareness, there are some things that are definitely moving in the right direction. So the concept of well-being for a start was kind of wacky a few years ago. But now, even governments talk about well-being now and the NHS is like, oh, yes, very sensible stuff. So good food and exercise and all that stuff is much more common currency. But there’s all these other areas, which I kind of wonder about things still getting worse. And they have been accelerated by the pandemic. Well, I think you’ve already alluded to this sort of substitute of the virtual for the real. Speaking over Zoom, as we are now, was one of the more real virtual experiences. Many are far less real, but people engaged in them for a lot of their lives, things which are fundamentally made up or don’t have any genuine social interaction and care in them. And yeah, I find they are things that are going in completely opposite direction to the things that we need for our basic health. And so what’s your feeling about overall? We have this balance of something seeming to be moving the way that we’ve been pushing for, and you’ve been pushing for, in terms of awareness about the health of the planet, the environment, all that sort of thing. There is movement there, but then there’s these other things going on as well. So what’s your feeling overall?

Jane Hutchison
Yeah, it’s a tricky one. There’s lots of positives, but yeah, what would you say?

Kevin Helton
I think maybe at this particular stage, it’s similar to some of the greenwashing effects that we see in other parts of the sustainability conversation that some people have jumped on the bandwagon, people that weren’t necessarily talking about these things are now saying it and you see the side of this bus or that bus and it seems like they’re talking about the same stuff but in actuality, they’re not and so the audience, the people out there are now in a position where they want to talk about health and wellness but then they’re confused as to what is actually healthy or not.

Jane Hutchison
It’s even so it’s even like the vegan foods and everyone’s now going vegan But then the vegan food available is processed vegan food and it’s not healthy. I think people are getting confused It’s just yeah like this like Kevin said this green washing of you know It’s not really healthy even though the media the mainstream might want to say it’s healthy for profitable, you know means It’s even like all these milks that you get in half full of emulsifiers and sugars that people think they’re healthy because they’re meant to be vegan or plant-based

Robin Daly
with a plant-based restaurant, you must be very aware of these kind of things. You’re dealing quite intimately with choices that you make for your own restaurant and seeing what’s going on in the world around you. Yeah, it is tricky. But thinking about the human elements we’ve been talking about particularly, I agree. There is this dichotomy with the practical way you have the interaction between business, which is trying to lead everything in one direction, and health is over there actually. And that is one issue. But this thing about the human spirit and what we need as human beings in order to feel we belong here, and that we’re cared for, and that we can trust ourselves, we can trust other people, we can trust life, we can trust nature, all those things to me are having quite a hammering at the moment through this drive for unreality as a kind of alternative, a nicer alternative to reality in some way there. it’s being manufactured at quite a rate and it’s quite attractive to people just because it’s not reality, which they’re struggling with.

Kevin Helton
I admit that I watched a lot of science fiction and, you know, a lot of these kind of Star Wars and Star Trek style shows. yes, you’re you’re correct. People are kind of getting lost because especially when it relates to stuff like social media, you know, they’re able to present themselves in a way that seems, you know, healthy or it seems this way or that way. But in reality, in their real life, that that is, you know, very far from from the from truth. And if they are living in that kind of false reality long enough, then they themselves start to believe that they actually are healthy. Then they actually are. Absolutely. So and then that takes a toll on the mental disposition, as well as the physical side of things as well. So again, it’s an educational conversation to have to remind people of some of these issues that they can encounter are in that way.

Robin Daly
I really like what you’re doing really for all those kind of reasons, particularly in the real world place, the real world things going on, and real world interactions between people. And, you know, you get two people who are both faced with terminal cancer. There’s going to be some straight talking going on, you know what I mean? You’re going to be making some… They don’t waste time, those people, they haven’t got any time to waste. And so some real sharing goes on and some excellent, you know, the best of human interactions. So that’s fantastic. And the more people who are present in on that kind of situation, the better, really. Because it’s the very antithesis of the lack of reality that social media represents.

Jane Hutchison
We find through lots of our, especially our breathwork sessions that after the session, everyone just opens up and shares and there’s lots of either crying or laughing or, you know, there’s so much interaction in it. It’s just that healing being together and sharing stories and that human element of it, which is scary to think, you know, if we’re heading down to any more lockdowns or anything in the future of different pandemics and we lose that again, like what’s going to happen to the world, you know, that healing is key.

Robin Daly
But it’s just so sobering to think that actually those kind of interactions that you’re talking about, some people don’t have any. No, no. No. Yeah. No interactions like that at all. Yeah. And that’s why it’s such a valuable thing you’re offering. Yeah. We’ve got a little while left. I was wondering whether we could just talk about your thoughts about the future. Have you got any plans you’re hatching? You just all the time try to do as much as you possibly can right now.

Jane Hutchison
we’re just we’re carrying on with more different workshops so yeah just new things all the time but then we’re developing this um you can talk a bit more about it

Kevin Helton
Yeah, we’re developing a wellness app at the moment. It’s a natural extension to what we’re already doing through the physical space. Even though it’s an app. Even though it’s an app. We position it as a virtual health assistant, so helping us to help ourselves. a lot of the educational stuff that we talk about giving you a kind of Wikipedia style, you know, a set of resources just to find out about certain things on the journey and find out about certain doctors and specialists that might be specific to your type of cancer or your type of chronic disease. But also helping with early diagnosis. So especially when it relates to people of color, a lot of times the machines and some of the testing that’s been done has not been really properly calibrated or even tested for that matter on different ethnicities. This not only impacts those groups, but also it impacts the wider group because the data sets are now biased. we see a lot of conversations happening in the alternative, should I say AI space, sorry. And again, you know, those machines can only learn based on the information that you, you know, put in there. Absolutely. Yeah. So if you put junk in there, you can only expect junk out. And so a lot of our conversation is how do we improve the bias? How do we work directly with doctors? How do we work directly with researchers to resolve some of these things? And how do we improve health outcomes? And so by equipping people, you know, with an app like this, we hope to increase longevity and help people on their path a little bit easier.

Jane Hutchison
We also want the app, so many of the women in our community are diagnosed stage four straight away because the doctors are turning them away so many times saying there’s nothing wrong, there’s nothing wrong and then when they’re finally diagnosed it’s stage four so how can we improve on diagnosing people earlier so they’re not being diagnosed later so many doctors are not taking account of women that are going that are in their 20s and they say you know well you’re too young so just go right you know this needs to change

Robin Daly
Well, it certainly does. I mean, that has been true as long as I’ve known anything about cancer. It’s always been the same. People get turned away all the time. Obviously, I had a child who had cancer, and I’m surrounded by parents who all had this story about being told to go away over and over again, and then described as neurotic, and then being referred for mental health problems, and eventually finding out, oh yeah, the kids got late stage cancer. Just not listened to over and over again. That story has been going on ever since. It got to the stage about, I don’t know, maybe it was five years, a bit more ago. It was actually recognised as an issue that people weren’t getting diagnosed because they were turned away, but I haven’t noticed it’s getting any better yet. I have not reported that there’s a massive upturn in earlier diagnosis. It’s such a key thing, of course, when you get diagnosed.

Jane Hutchison
more educational awareness more people speaking up as well and sharing their stories publicly that they are getting diagnosed later that’s the only way really to change things the more people that yeah about this so we’re trying to collect data from that to actually present it like this is what’s happening and let’s try and change the system

Robin Daly
That’s interesting. I was going to ask you, how do you think you’re going to influence that situation? So your app is going to collect information from people about that kind of thing.

Jane Hutchison
then we’ll go to different research groups that actually put this information together and then we can go to different doctors and different people and say look this is what’s happening and it really needs to change.

Robin Daly
Interesting, so do you want to give me an idea of the kind of information you’re looking for that you’re hoping to make some changes with?

Kevin Helton
It just may be connecting the dots that may not necessarily be obvious on first glance about some of the potential causes for cancer. Again, people are not always immediately aware. They might not associate stress and anxiety with a longer term health impact. Right. You know, see you.

Jane Hutchison
We can collect this data that says if you have like a hundred cancer patients that say that they had massive stress before they got cancer and we’re presenting this data like, look, this is the evidence of all these people, then maybe, you know, we get funded by some scientists and we actually can show this data, then that can start to have a shift.

Robin Daly
do you have a particular ploy for sharing this app and giving it out to the world how you can to encourage people to use it.

Jane Hutchison
we’re getting people to sign up already to the early stage. It’s not released yet, but they can sign up at the moment for early release. But we’re building the app. It should be ready early next year.

Kevin Helton
if they’re interested in kind of seeing how that you know, the the evolutionary period if you go to Libra health Org, okay, and you’ll kind of see the beginnings of that and so Libra is intended to encourage Balance, that’s where that name came from. It just so turns out that both Jane and I are both Libra. Easy name to agree on in some ways You know and from there we hope to you know again encourage people to Participate in how that app starts to unfold and you know encourage doctors also to to use this as an opportunity To to help create something that will have a wide-scale You know benefit for society as a whole

Robin Daly
it’s got a kind of two-way function, it’s informing the people who use the app for their benefit but also they’re supplying their information for everybody’s benefit.

Jane Hutchison
that’s the aim. Also working with like alternative doctors. So maybe doctors of psychedelics, for instance, and doing research groups with them and providing them with cancer patients, so we can get a better understanding of some of these techniques, even sleep. So some doctors might be doing a research about the benefits of sleep. just getting all this information in one place really to help society in moving forward to all these amazing practices out there that can really benefit.

Kevin Helton
Many of the doctors also just kind of mentioned the fact that they struggled to find people to participate in various different studies, and so that’s a very unique part of our conversation as well as how do we make this a social experience and encourage people to feel like, again, that they can find trust in the doctors and in the NHS in various different places that they might have lost trust in before. Obviously, the system is not perfect, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make the best of it, provided that we come together as a group, and that communal intelligence is what then will ultimately create something that’s very beneficial for us all.

Robin Daly
Great. All right. Sounds very good. Thank you very much. Guess what? We’ve run out of time. It’s been really great to talk to you both. I was really inspired to hear about what you’re getting up to over the extraordinary energy and creativity. And of course, it’s lovely to have another organization that we feel so in tune with. So thanks for everything you do and for coming on the show.

Jane Hutchison
Thank you. Yes, brilliant. Yes, we love you guys.

Robin Daly
Thanks so much!

Robin Daly
those guys are inspirational on the way they bring consistent energy and creativity to their work. If you’re in central London make a point of checking in. Their website is hellolove.org and you can find out all the details there. We’re careering towards the end of the year but plans are shaping up for some exciting events in 2024 at YestoLife which I’ll be sharing more about in the new year. Meanwhile I hope you have some plans of your own shaping up for some time over Christmas spent relaxing, sharing time with those you love, savouring the wonders of nature or whatever makes your heart sing. We have one more Yes to Life show before Christmas so I hope you’ll make a point of joining me then.