Be inspired To Shift!

Let today be the day you pick up a new brush and bring new colors into your life. Barbara Korein came out of retirement to start a new business that keeps art out of landfills. Dr. Agatha, a dentist, became an inspiration to more than just her clients. What can you do? What can you SHIFT? Take one small step to bring more of your heart's desire into your world. The whole world may be waiting for you!

Transcript

This is Shine On,

The health and happiness show with new episodes every week on how to live well.

Shine On is heard all over the world as a podcast,

But it's heard first on the radio in New York's Hudson Valley.

Hi,

It's Casey.

Thanks so much for tuning in to Shine On.

So I met this amazing woman via email.

We were introduced.

Her name is Barbara Corrine and she is running an art store thrift shop.

It just goes to show you like there are so many amazing things you can do with your life in the world at any stage of life.

By the way,

She came out of retirement,

Barbara did,

To create this wonderful warehouse where we are saving art supplies from landfills and also having a heck of a good time.

Barbara calls her business Retake Remake.

We are a nonprofit and I like to think of ourselves as an environmental arts organization.

The main goal of why we're in existence is to stop the waste of arts and crafts supplies.

And these are supplies that can be easily identified like gently used canvas or paper or partially used crayons,

Some fabric remnants that are still leftover from a sewing project,

But they're really super hard to donate any place.

So we're just trying to fill that gap between the waste and the art of it all.

So that's what we're aiming to do.

And the artists and the crafters are saying,

Wait,

You can take all this stuff that's in the back of my closet on the top of that shelf.

People can just donate?

Exactly,

Exactly.

And I would say that the donating people are just as thrilled as the people who are buying.

In fact,

I have people that are so grateful and also say,

Now I can purge with a purpose.

They know that their arts and crafts supplies are not going to get thrown out.

They love a happy art of fabric that they have no use for.

And they just know that somebody is going to get that for a great price and be able to use it.

So I'd say both sides of the equation,

Both the donating and the getting are just,

It's a great feeling that people are getting from doing this.

Right.

So this benefits the environment because this stuff isn't ending up in a landfill,

Right?

Exactly,

Exactly.

And we track those donations by zip codes just to see who's giving us what.

And since February 19th,

Peak skill alone,

We have taken in over a ton,

Over 2,

000 pounds of fabric,

Yarn,

Paper,

Markers,

Crayons,

Just everything you can imagine.

But we're over up above 2,

000 pounds peak skill alone.

And we have the people coming from all over Westchester and Putnam to donate and to shop.

So it's been really great.

So who comes in to shop?

All sorts of people.

I've actually been very surprised.

A lot of artists come in because they're looking for just one certain color of oil pastel or they need a new brush or something like that.

We actually have artists,

Teachers,

Parents,

Lots of crafters,

Lots of people who are doing a little DIY companies on Etsy or at craft marts.

They come in and get our fabric or the yarn and the thread.

We have probably right now I'm looking at it.

I probably have a thousand spools of thread in all different colors and they're 25 cents a spool.

So it's a bargain.

So anyone who's doing handwork,

Making work,

Have a lot of grandparents come in and get crafts for the weekend if they know their kids are going to be visiting.

So I don't think I've had anybody come in here and not walk out with at least one thing.

That's great.

Now,

What is your background in art?

Well,

I went to art school and I was a journalist for 10 years,

Then went back and got my master's in art education and taught at the high school level photography and studio art until 2010.

Then I retired and we moved into the city,

Did a lot of volunteer work.

So,

And also I do,

When I have a moment,

I do a little bit of my own work,

Which is basically collage.

So I'm interested in everything that comes in here.

So you were retired there for a moment,

Barbara?

Yes.

Yes.

For a moment.

So I was working,

I was volunteering and was on the board of a big municipal creative reuse center in New York city called Materials for the Arts.

And I was there for about 10 years.

We moved back,

Like it's a common story during COVID,

We moved back to Westchester and I just started thinking about why not try this out in a smaller scale as a nonprofit,

Did a little research.

There are these places all over the country doing really well,

Just small footprint and local.

And I actually started on this idea in 2019.

And so it took me almost two and a half years to get it going,

But yeah,

It's been really exciting so far.

And the money that comes in,

Is that just enough to cover your expenses?

Because I know you've got a pretty big space,

Right?

Yes,

We do.

We have 1700 square feet.

Well,

We haven't quite made our expenses,

But we're inching closer.

But yes,

All the money that comes in gets put back into the warehouse.

We are an all volunteer organization,

So nobody is taking a salary or any money to work here.

It's just a lot of us getting together pretty passionate about reuse as the alternative to throwing things away.

So everything goes back into the mission.

And we're also working on our education programs to help the public understand better about how to create and reuse things in expected ways and unexpected ways too.

Will you be offering any classes?

Yes,

We are.

We actually,

Because of people shopping here,

They often ask,

Well,

Do you need me to teach anything here?

And we're starting to build a very good volunteer teaching course.

We're starting out doing some classes for Girl Scout troops.

And then we're going to be doing various things with supplies that we have on hand with visiting artists,

Paper craft,

Yarn craft,

Some quilting.

And we're still kind of fleshing that out for the summer.

But yes,

We intend to do education as well.

Beautiful.

Is there anything at retake,

Remake in peak skill that you won't take?

Do you ever say,

Oh gosh,

We can't take that?

Yes,

Thanks for asking.

We really want to try to be an arts and crafts store.

So we say to people,

If that's something that you could take to Goodwill and they could sell,

Please do that.

So for example,

We don't take vases,

We don't take flowers,

Household goods like toothbrush holders or shower curtains.

We also don't take some off the supplies.

We have had to limit our intake of binders.

Some reason we got lots and lots of binders.

But generally we take everything that is considered an arts and crafts supply.

Right.

Like how about a piece of lace?

Oh yes,

Absolutely.

Give us your pieces of anything.

That's what we're most interested in rescuing.

We do get quite a lot of new things in here because you know,

Human nature,

You think you're going to start a craft and you don't.

And then it's in the back of your closet for a few years.

So those things move,

I think move very quickly.

But we also really appreciate like a half yard of fabric or just a,

You know,

Maybe two yards of bias tape that's,

That's left over because those are the things that probably will end up being thrown away.

We're really interested in those little orphans.

And you chose Peekskill because.

.

.

Peekskill is an amazing community.

It's diverse,

Supportive of environmental issues.

The mayor is so into building communities.

She has been terrifically supportive and there are tons of artists in this community and all in the surrounding community too.

It just seems like it's easy to get to.

You get a lot of people coming down from cold spring and garrison.

I think it's really on the verge of yet another renaissance.

All right.

Barbara Corinne of Retake Remake in Peekskill.

What else do our listeners need to know?

We are open for donations on Wednesday from 10 to 3.

We ask that you just limit your donations to arts and crafts supplies.

And we are open for shopping on Fridays and Saturdays from 10 to 3 as well.

Beautiful website.

Retake-Remake.

Org.

And you can find out all about our nonprofit by going there.

We also have a list of what you can donate and some definitions of creative reuse,

Which probably most people are doing in their lives.

So yeah,

Take a look.

All right.

Give me before you run off a definition of creative reuse.

What kind of projects have you seen?

Creative reuse is looking at something that was made for one purpose and maybe has come to the end of that purpose.

Looking at something a little differently.

For example,

We have wallpaper sample books that are bound to be thrown out from designers.

We have people come in,

Jewelers say,

Oh,

They make perfect backgrounds for our photos of our work.

We have people who do clay get the textured pages and roll out their clay to make their clay interesting.

We get people that make sit-upons,

The old Girl Scouts sit-upons by just whipping together the two vinyl sides and putting some newspaper in.

So creative reuse is about seeing something in a new way for its intrinsic value rather than what it was originally made to do.

Final question.

Have you ever worked this hard in your entire life?

No.

No,

No,

No.

No,

No,

No.

But every day I get up,

I'm so excited to come in.

But Sunday,

I think I probably sleep almost the whole day,

But I love it.

It has been such a wonderful experience.

I feel so energized,

But you're right.

It is the hardest thing I have ever done.

That's Barbara Corrine and her retake remake business is in Peekskill in a building called the Hat Factory on North Division Street.

Does it give you some ideas about things you could be doing?

Or maybe you just want to take all that stuff from your Stamp It Up days and send that over there.

I know she's having a great time.

And I understand her laugh when she says she's never worked this hard in her life before because I too run a thrift store to support the Let It Shine Foundation.

It is so much fun.

It is my joyful place.

It is so difficult to be anything less than elated in a thrift store.

Everything is just so beautiful and everything is absolutely affordable.

You could buy whole shelves of things.

Anyway,

Such a good time and such a great idea.

I don't know.

I hope today that that just gives you some ideas.

Because what we want to do is get those happy endorphins going.

The good hormones that support our wellbeing,

They're absolutely free.

And we can use our mind,

Body,

And spirit to access those free,

Happy hormones.

It's true.

Your big,

Beautiful brain doesn't know the difference if you're faking a smile.

If you smile and you sustain that smile for a while,

Your body says,

Oh,

She's happy.

Let me make the hormones that support health and happiness.

It's absolutely true.

And we've got Dr.

Agatha here today.

Dr.

Agatha is actually a dentist by trade,

But she's also an inspirer.

Can you imagine having an inspiring dentist?

And she wrote a book called The Shift about her journey in changing her mind,

Body,

And spirit and getting her hormones working for her.

So tell us what's in the book,

Dr.

Agatha.

So The Shift came about.

It was a personal story initially.

And it was something that I worked out for myself in order to improve and change and really get myself to shift my own life and transform.

And I wrote it to sort of share with others basically a simple system that does exactly that.

It shifts your thoughts so that you can boost your body's natural production of specific key hormones that are responsible for helping you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve in a way that's easy and it feels good.

Talk to me about these hormones.

We produce essentially five hormones that you can call them motivational hormones.

And these hormones are the first one is dopamine.

You know,

When you do your to do list and you cross things off,

That makes you feel good.

Oh,

Yes.

It feels so good.

So that's dopamine.

The other one,

The next one is serotonin,

Which is a leadership type of hormone.

It basically makes us feel like we have self worth,

Makes us feel good,

Regulates our mood,

Increases confidence.

The next one is oxytocin,

Which is what we feel when we connect with another human being,

When we feel love or trust,

When it actually helps us sleep.

The other one is endorphins.

This is kind of like what we refer to as a natural painkiller that's like a runner's high.

You know,

When you go running and you feel really good,

That's endorphins being pumped out.

And the last one is actually a negative one.

It's cortisol.

That's sort of what we're talking about,

I guess today,

Which is the stress hormone and a fight or flight hormone.

You know,

We talk about hormones all the time,

But I never really broke them down to understand them in this clear way.

So dopamine is like a feeling of achievement.

Yeah.

It basically makes you feel like you're getting stuff done.

Serotonin makes you feel like you're in charge.

Self worth and charge,

Confidence.

Oxytocin is connecting to other people,

Feeling good,

Friendship.

Yes.

And then the runner's high natural painkiller,

That's when you are in the zone.

And then when we're feeling stressed,

The cortisol kicks in.

And what does the cortisol do?

So the purpose of cortisol is actually to make a sharp focus.

You know,

If there's something threatening in front of you,

You're supposed to be able to react quickly,

Respond quickly.

So cortisol allows you to react very quickly,

Essentially by shutting down other systems like your immune system,

Your digestive system,

Because you have to run,

You have to act.

And it also helps with memory.

So short term,

Short stress is good for you.

It's the long term that we're always talking about and people are always kind of focusing on the fact that everyone's always stressed out.

So cortisol,

You know,

So if you're walking down the street and you see a bear,

Your brain is going to signal to your glands to make cortisol.

I'm guessing that's the way it works,

Right?

Or your muscles,

Whatever the reaction from your muscles sends a signal,

Cortisol gets created and that's great.

You're going to have more,

It's going to shut down other systems so all the energy goes to survival.

You running away from the bear,

Right?

Exactly.

But the problem,

As I understand it,

Is when that cortisol level stays too high for too long,

That's when inflammation sets in and inflammation is the cause of all the itises.

Am I on the right track?

Absolutely.

You're bang on.

Bang on.

Oh,

I've never said bang on before.

Is that a Canadian thing?

I think so.

I've heard it a lot.

I like it.

It must be.

All right.

So what's the message you want to share with us today about stress?

Well,

Essentially,

I mean,

If we think about stress and if we think about it short term,

It is supposed to be there for us to react and respond and focus.

The reality is that when we live in stress,

When we do stress on a daily basis,

Then we're constantly reacting.

So we're constantly suppressing the immune system.

Well,

That's never good for us.

We're constantly shutting down our digestion.

No wonder people are having issues with stomach and colitis and all these different things that are happening.

It also constricts your blood vessels.

So that increases the risk of heart disease and that's one of the things that everybody talks about that stress puts you at a higher risk.

Well,

It's because it's constricting your blood vessels.

It also causes headaches and fatigue and difficulty sleeping and irritability and depression and all these other things that go along with it.

And so living in stress and being in stress all the time kind of makes you really,

Really susceptible to so many different diseases,

But it also makes you very kind of irritable and not fun to be around,

Which people tend to feel when they come near you and then you sort of send that out and you tend to attract the negative towards yourself as well.

Right.

Right.

I am a living example of this.

Someone told me the other day,

You're always so angry.

And I'm like,

No,

I'm never angry.

Like I really,

It takes a lot to get me mad,

To get me really mad.

But the signal I was sending off was anger when actually it was just like so much stress,

So much stress.

Right.

So in your book,

The Shift,

Can you give us some ideas about how to shift from stress to peace?

Well,

One of the things in my book,

The Shifts,

I talk about a lot of different aspects of changing things in your life that you would like to change.

So habits and the way we think and the way we do things on a daily basis.

But essentially when it comes to stress especially,

The first thing to really do,

You could kind of look at it like in three steps.

The first thing to do is just to see it for what it is.

And what I mean by that is a lot of us will look at something and go,

My God,

Our life is over,

The world is over,

This is done.

But we're seeing it for really worse than it is because we all know that something a year from now will not be as big of a deal as it is now.

So just seeing it for what it is means that you're not going to deny what's going on,

But you're also not going to dwell on it or make it bigger or make it more.

This actually allows you to acknowledge what's going on and the stress that's around you,

But it stops you from your reactive habitual response.

And you're now putting yourself in a position where you can look for a more acceptable one.

The second step would be to own it.

And what I mean by that is you recognize that we tend to stress more and more intensely about things that matter to us.

And recognizing that and owning that makes you more open and more willing to listen to feedback or advice from others.

And that's what friends are for,

That's what family's for.

And the last thing is to really,

Once you've done the two,

Is to really make it better than it is or see it for better than it is.

So you know when something happened last year and you were all upset about it or stressed out about it,

But you look back on it now and you're thinking,

Oh,

It wasn't so bad.

Well,

If you could sort of put yourself in that position and go,

You know,

How will I think about this a year from now?

How am I going to feel about it a year from now?

Because a year can make a big difference.

And by looking at it like that,

You can really focus on what's good about this in the future and what you could do today to make it maybe easier on yourself or others and see how you can contribute outside of yourself and not focus on just yourself.

So reframe,

Put it into perspective,

Take a breath,

Step back,

And not blow it up into something bigger.

Perfect.

You know what,

Dr.

Agatha,

Too,

I think we need duct tape to,

We need duct tape because we have got to cover the mouths of all the people around us because sometimes the stress is,

Oh my God,

This is horrible.

You know,

Other people blowing it up,

You know,

It's really sometimes in my stronger moments,

I can get myself under control,

But then like I wish I had a mallet to take care of everybody else in the room.

But you know what you can do if you can just shut it off for a bit and allow yourself to be in that moment too.

Yeah.

Be in the moment.

All right.

Very good advice from Dr.

Agatha who wrote the book,

The Shift.

You know,

You're a dentist by trade.

I have read that dentists,

I don't want to freak you out,

But you probably read this too.

You're a dentist.

I have read that dentists have like a really high rate of suicide because of the stress of their job.

Can you speak to that?

Yeah.

I think you agree with that.

I see a lot of stress in my profession and I do hear stories and issues and of course,

I mean we can all look at everybody's job and say,

Yeah,

Mine is the worst,

Your mind is the most stressful.

I'm not really sure why we are at the top of that nasty list,

But I do hear a lot about it and I think a lot of dentists just by nature,

We're very introverted,

We're very OCD,

Very particular and that's a challenging piece of personality to deal with when you're dealing with so many unknowns,

Especially nowadays.

I think that kind of pushes you sometimes and some people just don't know how to deal with it,

So I think that's where it comes from.

How do you help your patients?

I really like to get to the core of the issue a lot of the time,

So I think part of maybe my gift is to really listen in the beginning and really sort of try and figure out what people want and what they're after and just really communicate upfront.

So I guess you could call it managing expectations,

Finding out what the person is really looking for and not just sort of like when they're in pain,

They're reacting to and then being open to different options and presenting them with everything that's available.

I think that's sort of a gift that maybe more people or just the gift of listening would be a benefit to a lot of people.

Dr.

Agatha,

Her book is called The Shift and it got me thinking because I really think that I probably say thanks too much,

But what I was thinking was there really was a really big shift in my life.

Probably I'm going to say like six or seven years ago,

I had a birthday party,

Which is unusual because I'm usually not a public kind of celebrator,

But I had a birthday party and invited my friends,

Just you know the folks in my circle,

Not a big deal,

Not a lot of people to my house on a Sunday and my husband made risotto and Caesar salad.

I don't know why that's important,

But his risotto and Caesar salad is amazing.

And we had Prosecco and my girlfriend said to me,

Why are you doing this,

Marbedo?

What is it about this birthday?

And I said,

It's nothing in particular other than I had this thought in my life at this time.

I said,

What if my life never gets any better than it is right now?

How would I appreciate it?

How would I celebrate it?

And how good would it look to me if this was as good as it's going to get?

Wouldn't you just dive in a little deeper and love it a little more,

Right?

Or just work to be your best self so you could appreciate it at the highest level.

And when I started thinking of that,

Just looking around my simple house with my few friends with the wonderful Prosecco and risotto,

I thought,

You know,

Thank you,

Lord,

If this is it,

I'm good.

Of course,

I still have plenty of hopes and dreams.

And at that time,

I never thought I would start a foundation or be having so many women's retreats or have a thrift store and a market and a food pantry.

And I think perhaps all of those things came to me because my arms were just wide open saying,

Thank you for what I have right now.

Thank you.

It's all good.

And I appreciate it.

All right.

So that's my little sermon for today.

I'm Casey.

This is Shine On,

The Health and Happiness show.

You can find out more about me at casysplace.

Com.

We've got a summer retreat for women coming up in August in Ossining,

New York.

And it's Mother's Day weekend.

Happy Mother's Day,

Mama.

The market on the river opens in Verplanck,

And that's a Cortland waterfront park.

And I will see you there every Sunday for the next six months.

I will be at the market on the river with all of the vendors.

We are looking for a few food trucks and food vendors.

So if you know anybody,

Send them my way.

Let it shine online.

Com.

The market supports the pantry and what a gift it is in this crazy world that we get to spend this time together.

I am so grateful for that.

All right.

The thought for the day is from Oprah,

Who said,

The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.

Shine On.

You've been listening to Shine On,

The Health and Happiness show,

With new episodes every week.

It's your time to shine on.

Reviews

That was nice. Thank you so much 😊