Turn Anxiety Into a Powerful Ally | Jewel on Impact Theory

so i started using my anxiety as a clue and as a friend and every time i had anxiety i was willing to say it's because i was engaging in a thought that wasn't authentic with my real nature anxiety is our body's way of trying to communicate with us what you just ate what you just thought what you just did who you just talked to whatever it is doesn't agree with you [Music] everybody welcome to impact theory today's guest is jewell a four-time grammy-nominated singer-songwriter who has sold more than 30 million albums and had one of the best-selling debut records of all time in addition to that she's also a multiple time new york times best-selling author actor and philanthropist who's been on the cover of time magazine had a cirque du soleil show made about her life and written one of the best-selling poetry books of all time she's now also officially added being at the forefront of the mindfulness movement to her resume by working with large companies to help their employees find harmony in their lives as well as producing a new documentary with deepak chopra on the subject called mindfulness movement jewel welcome to the show thanks the intro i wrote was perfect you did it great i wish that would be amazing that would save me a lot of time but yours was very easy to write your life story is insane reading your book was was actually a lot of fun the the prose of the book is extraordinary as well as the content and the life you've lived is is pretty amazing um and i have to assume and you've talked about it that that's really informed a lot of what you're doing now and i'd love to go into that i want to talk about this concept that you have of the observer talk to me about that what is the observer when did it first start appearing in your life and has it been useful uh i was homeless for a year in san diego i was propositioned by a boss and wouldn't wouldn't have sex with him he wouldn't give me my paycheck could make my rent so i started living in my car i didn't think it would last that long i thought it would be a couple months until i got a new job and saved up a deposit for a new place but my car got stolen i was having panic attacks i was agoraphobic um and when you don't have an address it's hard to get a job it's hard to have a resume it's uh you start looking homeless and so i couldn't even get a job at 7 11 you know ultimately and just the amount of time it takes to survive and find shelter and safety in food and water is exhausting um i was starting to have panic attacks and agoraphobia and i realized i would end up in jail or dead if i didn't do something about it and i remember this quote by buddha that said happiness doesn't depend on who you are or what you have it depends on what you think and i was stripped of everything else except my thoughts and it was the only thing left and so i decided to see if i could change my life one thought at a time and i took it really seriously but i had so much anxiety that i couldn't figure out what i was thinking in real time if anybody suffered from that type of anxiety you're pretty much out of your body you can't even track your thoughts um and so i started watching my hands because i thought your hands are the servants of your thought it's your thoughts slowed down into action do you remember that i've heard you talk about that before and that that is very powerful it's super insightful um is that something you read is that just something that you literally noticed it's just something i noticed um as i was sitting there in a complete panic all right my job is to figure turn my life around with my thoughts holy f i can't figure out what my thoughts are you know it was just desperation i think um and really having the time and deciding to sit down and think about how does this work and what's another way and i think part of being a creative person is you start to get really comfortable with problem solving um and you have to i moved out when i was 15 so my whole life was problem solving having no option how am i going to figure it out um and so watching my hands just seemed like the it sounds so silly now like that was my huge plan i was going to watch my hands like it's a ridiculous plan but it ended up working not the way i thought i i mean there was a takeaway after two weeks of watching my hands i literally just had a notebook and watched and wrote down i washed my hands i didn't want to shake hands i opened a door you know i had no idea what i was doing at the end of two weeks i realized i quit believing in myself that was you know interesting that my thoughts were all geared toward i can't i can't i can't so that was interesting but there was a completely unexpected side effect that my anxiety disappeared when i was doing it when i was journaling it disappeared in other words mindfulness weren't around at that time there were no books about this but it was such a huge discovery for me that i realized so much that year i realized fear is the thief it takes the past and it projects it onto the future and robs you of the only opportunity you have to change and i wanted to change you know i knew moving out at 15 i should be a statistic i knew that i should end up in jail or dead if i didn't figure this out and so if i really wanted to change i actually had to show up in the current moment and that's what mindfulness does again that word wasn't around and so i just started to make all these discoveries that year and the biggest one i started to realize was that when i was observing myself my anxiety disappeared and i realized this trippy thing i had read you know descartes i think therefore i am and read a lot of his works that doubt somehow validates our existence which is a sucky way to go but what it is true i guess i realize it's not i think therefore i am if it if i could change that a little bit i'd say i observe what i think therefore i am i'm not my thoughts i'm the observer of them which gave me some room because it created this magical gap between my thoughts and who i was um if i was sad i wasn't sad i was the observer of sad and at that little bit of distance that gap the way i would describe mindfulness is you know if you have a thought creating a gap before you act on that thought and in this gap is like this magical chamber where you can change that's where you can step in and form new neurology neural networks rewire new patterns and starve old neural patterns yeah that's really interesting to me how much you can go from the poetic to the neuroscience behind the stuff and i find that really intriguing i know you've um i don't know if you've worked closely with him or if you just know him or know his work but judson dr judson brewer has actually been a guest on the show amazing guy really interesting when you start looking at the neuroscience of this stuff when did you begin to discover that so that for me so one i want to talk about the gap that you're talking about so i read a book called man search for meaning by viktor frankl concentration camp survivor he talked about that gap that between stimulus and response is exactly what you're describing and that your life is essentially that choice and then going back to what you opened with talking about anxiety and you so i i suffered profoundly from anxiety for years i would still say it's it's a close to daily part of my life i've certainly learned how to manage it a lot more and to me it didn't feel so much like i was out of my body it felt like i was trapped or a slave to my body because i i couldn't get out of the neurology of what was happening and so when did you begin to discover that the the neuroscience of it all allowed me to visualize it which allowed me to begin unwinding some of the processes to become more present was that something that helped you or did you discover that sort of after you had fought your way through it you know it's really fascinating to me that if we do sit and contemplate a problem we will come to some truth that many other people come to in similar situations whether they're in a concentration camp or in a lab it fascinates me i call it going into the river of yourself to find the ocean of everything else um i realized about the habit loops i didn't have that word for it uh again when i was homeless i was addicted to stealing and i was addicted to negativity and i was addicted to anxiety i could tell that and i just stopped suddenly one day and i was struck by the thought that if our brains are addictive if we are capable of being addicted if it's such a natural thing to us there must be a biological evolutionary reason i mean it can't be that this was all a mistake and oops sorry about that addictive part of your brain you know it just didn't make sense and so i wondered if i could get addicted to negative things could i get addicted to anything to positive things and so i noticed this i called it a triad i noticed i had a problem and it was triggering me i knew that word and i didn't know that word then a stimulus i knew being homeless was really bad for me my my anxiety and my panic attacks and i had a response and it was stealing and then i had a reward and so i realized i couldn't change this first one but i could change my reaction to it and so i decided to insert writing and so every time i wanted to steal i forced myself to write and i did it enough and it was hard it wasn't fun it didn't feel good i'm stealing would have felt way better but i stuck with it enough um to where i started to get a reward um and then i realized once i could do that i could start to tackle really specific problems and get highly specific um i look at i look at meditation i was taught to meditate by an aunt when i was about 12 maybe it was transcendental meditation i didn't really stick with it but i knew of the concept um and then i think also writing being creative i sang my whole life and i wrote my whole life forces you to be present so it turns out if you're being observant or curious you're in a mindful state that easy so if you're anxious all you have to do is get really observant and really curious it can be about the light in the room it could be the smell of something but you're forced instantly into a mindful state you don't even actually have to meditate to do that per se and then i realized i have to start taking the skill of meditation out how do i describe it it's like going to the gym and building up a muscle and if you build up that muscle in the gym it's important and it's great and it changes you but unless you can put that muscle to work in your day your life may not be fully changed meditation is like doing a bicep curl but i needed to find a way how to take that bicep curl and that muscle i was building and change habits and that's where i started developing very specific exercises to attack or change very specific problems i was struggling with and i continued to do that my whole life my whole career and then i met dr brewer maybe two years ago and when he saw the exercises i developed he was like those actually work those actually rewire your brain and so on my website he he goes on and actually explains why they work which was a total trip and really amazing so i'd love to hear what some of those exercises are what are some of the specific things that that you did then they morphed and changed what are you doing now when i was homeless i realized i had two basic states i felt like this or i felt like this it was open and dilated or it was tight and contracted and i realized every thought feeling and action led to one of those two states and so a really simple hack was when i noticed a panic attack coming on or a huge anxiety attack i would just force myself to have a thought feeling or action that dilated me it sounds really simple but i just used gratitude so i remember my first time i tried it i was on the street corner i liked to live near this little flowering bush it was like my home and i was miserable and anxious and heading into a panic attack and i forced myself to notice the light coming through this palm tree and the way it filtered down and it looked like a lace dress on me and i just forced myself to feel the sun to smell the air to be profoundly grateful that i was feeling the sun on me i had a lot of memories of alaska sitting in the sun and it forced my entire system to dilate and i didn't know at the time what i know now you know now there's a lot of science your vascular system does dilate your blood pressure does you know drop your blood flow patterns change in your brain um and you get a different biochemical release which is amazing i felt it at that time i didn't know the the science but i knew that it worked so that was a that's one that i teach on the website and they're all just three-minute exercises that are very specifically designed to attack very specific and certain things as we try to change that whole notion of um being able to change is is literally the core of my being it it's certainly the journey that i've been on it's been the thing with having as many employees as i've had and that have grown up hard that have not been nurtured well when i was reading your book that whole notion really resonated with me of okay um nature versus nurture if you weren't nurtured well can you find your true nature walk walk people through that and i think a little bit uh you know some of the touch points of how you grew up hard why you moved out at 15 would be useful but really what i want to know is what's the punch line like how much have you been able to re-nurture yourself yeah so i grew up in an abusive household um moved out at 15 to get out of that situation knew i should end up becoming a statistic was hell-bent as a 15-year-old to not do that and i looked at this concept of nature versus nurture i had read a lot of greek philosophy up to that point and so i think i felt i could think my way out of this problem possibly and i'd heard the concept of nature versus nurture um we had a bunny that that thought it was a chicken when i was being raised it was raised since a tiny baby with the chickens and it actually grew up to sit on nests and hatch eggs and it walked it hopped kind of funny like a chicken and it pecked at its food and it scared the crap out of me when i moved out because i thought what if i'm a bunny that thinks it's a chicken how will i ever know my real bunny nature what if my nurture was so bad i don't ever get to know my actual real nature and that thought and concept has been a real constant motivation i guess in my life um i did you know well i got myself through school i made it through this period of being homeless i ended up getting discovered my goal when i was discovered was to be a whole happy person first and to be a musician second and that was my deal with myself and why i signed the contract and i've stayed true to that i've continued my education and developing these skills so that i could change because if you take somebody with my background and you add fame on it you talk about a whole nother round of statistics you know it doesn't end well you've seen this movie over and over i didn't want it to be that way so i took years between records i did all kinds of things that are bad for your career but i felt were the only way to invest in my humanity and keeping good on my progress my promise to myself but i kept finding myself in similar situations again and again and again so in my book never broken i i talk about the amount of change i was able to facilitate which extraordinary really if i think about it i went from an outhouse and no running water in alaska to being on the cover of time magazine that's a lot of change but at the same time nothing changed and i'm writing a book right now it's actually all about change what don't we understand about that word because we grow we get different but we don't actually change like on a deep chemical level it's like water turning into ice or fog and rain it's still water and that was me i was having the same emotional spirit experience over and over in very different settings so it was like being on the same road and i got the scenery to change from icy you know views out my window to green and pastoral to gilded and gold but my experience was the same i was on the same road so how do we get on an entirely new road how do you actually change your entire paradigm so the way that i used mindfulness it did change me it helped me a ton but i realized it kept me in the same paradigm it's like the hammer and nail right if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail i learned you to use mindfulness in my hammer and nail paradigm to help me have a better experience of getting hit over the head by a hammer but i never got out of that paradigm and so with this book now that it isn't out yet but it should be soon hopefully is about how do you build an entirely new paradigm how do we build our reality through and our personality through a form of emotional connections and misunderstandings that form our entire paradigm and then how can you find that top domino and actually unplug it and plug it into something else to get yourself on an entirely new trajectory it is a fascinating topic and obviously to the point where i wanted to write a book about it and so what does some of that look like so you you have i would say a pretty extraordinary level of self-awareness being able to turn inward you've talked about the ability to look inward as a superpower if you were to turn that into a formula for somebody to follow like what does that look like as an adult you're looking back your life is not going where you want you maybe you are the statistic you you know you should be avoiding you're not able to do it you're out of your body you're not you know you're you're riding the waves of your emotions instead of taking advantage of that gap how do you begin walking people through a process of change the new book it's funny i haven't talked about the new book at all yet you're the first person i've talked to about it it seems to be coming up the book really starts to lay out an outline you watch me discover the process and it lays out something that you can actually practice to me the big part is practice you can have intellectual awakenings you can have therapeutic realizations but until you find skills that you can practice every day you're not going to build a new neural network and you're not going to actually create a new thought paradigm for yourself to operate within so it really is about practice i'm very into skills i'm very into giving people things that you can do every day because unless you do that it's not really going to change the thing i can't do for people is the willingness to do it the willingness to change it's for warriors like change isn't easy you don't just get to turn on the tv and wake up changed sadly um i always say being dysfunctional is a lot of work and it's exhausting and there's no light at the end of the tunnel so learning a new way is hard and it can be exhausting but there's a light at the end of that tunnel so to me that's the bet i'd rather take but you have to be willing to a lot of people say they want to change but they don't at the end of the day and that's really the truth of it if you are willing to do that it really helps to have a series of questions get asked you know this took me so long to discover i studied ancient wisdoms of indigenous cultures i got a billion books on neuroscience to kind of amalgam if that's a word everything together in a way that's a system that really caused a fundamental level of change and so going a little bit deeper on that system um when you so i think you and i are pretty aligned on you i mean it's the adult age old adage you are what you do every day right so excellence is is a habit it's the things that you do and i always tell people what you're trying to do like when you think about making a dramatic change in your life what you're trying to do is change your behavior so thinking about values which i know you think about a lot beliefs rules in your life things like that using my own vernacular but the whole punchline of all of that for me is are you doing different things are you changing the things you do because once the external manifestation changes then your life changes then the neuro chemistry changes so it's like you're doing this work inward for sure but if it doesn't manifest outwardly then you really have a problem so i talk a lot about routines so for me working out eating right those are huge because they cultivate and if nothing else and there is a lot more but they cultivate the the physical chemistry that you need to make sure that the new neurons that you're making actually can thrive right so just being in a place where at a physiological level you're creating the optimal environment for your brain to be healthy so that you're optimizing cognition you're at a point where your emotions are like anxiety i am convinced is largely a function of diet so it's the microbiome communicating to the brain so getting people to eat right getting people to exercise are part of the the system of change as i think about it i've been very curious to know like what are like the prescriptive behaviors that either you do or that you tell people to do absolutely diet's a huge one i've spent i always had kidney problems and health problems and so i had to seek out a lot of alternative care and practically gain a doctorate and everything from herbology to western medicine just to try and figure out how to advocate for myself diet understanding our own body's personal chemistry i do my blood work every three months because i have the money to do that now um because i like to see how everything i'm doing is affecting me i just find it fascinating um everybody's different the things that work for me are going to be different than what works for you and so you do have to find practitioners that are willing to help work with you to see how you're wired how you metabolize and those types of things i think that's a huge part of it for me it was always finding tools and resources i could somehow implement myself because i didn't have access to help or therapy or these types of things and that's what i'm really passionate about helping give people as well if you're do you do have the money for a therapist but your life isn't changing you need to re-look at it you need to have goals you know with change i actually had to develop a metric for the book of how do you describe change how do you quantify it how do you create a metric around it so that you can look back and go i have changed i just didn't get different or kind of grow or put on a different outfit emotionally if you will but you're the same person um i've got to know what what is the metric for change that is amazing well there's three pillars to change it's transformation transmutation and then transcendence can you find those i can i would love to get my book because i really worked hard on the definitions and see if i could even find it it'd be funny to see if i could it might be helpful to define the metrics and mechanics of what constitutes change to say something has really changed it has to go through three processes if only the first or second steps have taken place you may have become different or grown but you cannot really say you've achieved change there are three pillars to change one transformation we must look at what gives form to what we are looking at we must understand its nature we must feel motivated to transform it into something else this is where we identify where you are and where you want to go two transmutation this is the initiation of energy it requires sacrificing the energy of what you want to change so you can get to the next step sacrifice is an essential part we must sacrifice an old belief an old concept break down an old paradigm let go of the illusions we have to break it down or digest what we are changing so it can become something else this is where we put new concepts into action if we have a new understanding and don't act on it if we don't use it it creates inner conflict we must act on knowledge to transform it into wisdom what you don't give birth to will destroy you so this isn't just physical but an idea if we don't give birth to a new concept if we don't take action on it it'll destroy us keep us in a lot of conflict we can't sit on a new understanding and not act on it if we don't take the energy in absorb it and break it down it will create a conflict and make you unhappy once we break down old beliefs we can become pregnant with different ideas if we don't take time to give them space in our lives to have a good birth and transmute that energy it will create a deep conflict that we don't if we don't and we won't change the less judgment we hold the more we can transmute try to see through clear eyes letting go of dogma and paradigms and experiences as energy for what they are the more we can perceive and sacrifice programmed attachments to the ideas we are examining or letting go of the more we can transmute them to be open to a new way of seeing or thinking when we don't get rid of our perceptions and old ideas it creates a blind spot and keeps us from changing three transcending viewing a situation with new eyes becoming open to new paths when we alter our perceptions free of old dogma and paradigm it opens new pathways before us we can take new pathways that changes our trajectory this is where we use intention to set a new path that allows us to transcend our past experience it is entirely possible to change so foundational that our old stories and traumas no longer trigger us it becomes part of a story of your life that no longer influences where you go next when we transcend something we are no longer in relation to it we are no longer it no longer has power over us we're at liberty to choose where we want to go man that that is amazing um there's a few things in there that you've talked really powerfully about and i'm super excited to read the new book again i cannot tell you how sincerely i mean that you're never broken the the beautiful prose the incredible concepts the way that you're able to help people have their own inward look as they live through your life really really extraordinary that snippet is phenomenal i think those three things are really interesting the notion of death and rebirth is something that i've heard you talk about before um that to me is really interesting and i cannot help but notice behind you um you have these skulls with antlers i don't know if they're deer or elk or whatever yeah is that is it just that they're beautiful or is there some of this death and rebirth notion and making room for the new energy which i find really intriguing um i'd love to hear more about that and this whole notion of of death and rebirth and how it manifests in real life because it's not necessarily um literal death but there is still a letting go and making that new space yeah i was adopted by american natives when i was 15. and they brought me into a lot of their traditions and it got me fascinated with studying indigenous knowledge from all over the world one of the things i share in the book is this what i'm what i call a wheel of development um spot to go into but on the from nine o'clock to midnight uh are some stones on the wheel of introspection death rebirth and wisdom is at 12 o'clock and this wheel of development is something each of us travel you know once in a lifetime as well as with any business startup with any new relationship you can look at this wheel as sort of a map or a blueprint and right now if i was to say where we are as a country we're in death and rebirth so there's introspection and when we introspect we now have to let go of things which is a death and then we get to be reborn into a new thought process or way of being a way of relating to the world and then when we act on that we have wisdom but you can travel the wheel in an encumbered state um so there's an unencumbered state where if you travel the wheel and everything's kind of perfect you experience it at its highest you know that it can be it's rarely true for any of us and so there's an encumbered pattern of each thing so the encumbered pattern of introspection is repression if we refuse to introspect we suppress or we rep repress and so instead of letting go of something and letting thoughts or ideas have a death we have fear so we repress the result of that as fear instead of being reborn into a new outlook or a new way of seeing the world we become disempowered and then instead of moving into wisdom we start suffering from doubt so the encumbered pattern is really not comfortable it's repression fear disempowerment and doubt so right now what's fascinating to me is we look at where we are as a world as a culture for the first time every world power is afraid of the same thing and it's invisible that's never happened that i'm aware of in the history um and so we're either going to introspect let go of old ways and systems be reborn into new way and act in wisdom or we're gonna repress suppress act in fear become disempowered and doubt every action and step we make and to me that's where i hope i can step in i hope many many people can step in and start helping us move in an unencumbered pattern around that section of the wheel man we got to talk about identity then because that that's an amazing breakdown and i think the the reality is and my gut instinct is everyone will resonate with the sort of apparent truth of this some people will take the um the expansive path and many people are going to take the contracting path literally the words you were using as you were describing i was like you're back to those two central things you were saying things either make you expand or they make you contract i think identity is a big part of why people will end up really going in either direction so my identity is that of the learner so i'm you know i'm seeking things that make me feel expansive i want to learn i assume i'm doing things wrong my identity is not tied up in being right or worthy or any of that my identity is like yo there's got to be a way for me to get better to improve i want to get rid of old ideas because i'm like i've already arrived at where my old ideas have taken me and i don't want to be here in five years right i want to be somewhere better more productive more joyful more whatever and i think though a lot of people going back to the the flip side of that point of identity is you've got people who even if it's trauma even if it's something bad that happened that is their identity and you um riff on this in never broken which is as long as the words of your abuser are ringing in your head like you're never going to be free of that abuse and that was an interesting example and i think you do refer to it as a death where i don't think most people would think like you actively have to let that go you actively have to break your own identity as somehow being tied to that like the things that you've had to overcome our immense and the fact that you have had and i'm i'm so curious to know if this is part of that true north um that you alluded to a minute ago that you've known who you were trying to become and have have let the things die away that were we're holding on walk people through exciting a lot of people are going to be stuck in a negative mindset in a trauma they don't believe in themselves they uh have some sort of trauma from the past that defines who they are in the present but they don't realize it like how do they begin to make that space in my book never broken i talk about this experience with my mom and i realized i was broke and i was three million in debt nothing i'd ever been told about my life was true and this is all after selling the albums and this is like the height of the height yeah um and it was devastating i mean it was just and it was a total brain mess for me it felt like just having my brain shattered and it was in a million pieces i didn't know reality from fiction um having to go back through your life and figure out what was true what was false it was a hard thing to get through and i didn't press therapists i didn't trust anybody to mess with my mind i was just in a really bad state and i wouldn't have even honestly known who to turn to at that point because what i was dealing with was so strange and unusual i quit a tour because i thought like i was gonna have a nervous breakdown if i went and uh i was at my house and i walked out and looked at myself in the mirror and i don't know what these epiphanies always happened in the mirror and i remember this joseph campbell allegory the allegory of the golden statue it's a story about a small village that had a prized golden statue they heard a neighboring village was going to come and attack them so they covered the statue in mud and then the war came and went the statue stayed covered in mud the entire village forgot its value generations passed one day a child was sitting at the feet of the statue it was raining saw a glinter of gold and they realized the statue had inherent value for some reason that story came back to me and i thought what if i'm not broken what if i'm attacking this entire problem of trying to fix myself from the entirely wrong perspective when something's broken when you feel broken inside you feel like something outside of you has to fix you very daunting to be fundamentally so flawed that something outside of you outside of your own nature has to help fix you i thought what if i haven't realized like i can't be broken a soul is not a teacup it's not a chair it exists permanently for all time whatever the nature of that energy is it is forever and so what if i'm not broken what if i'm just covered in layers of mud and silt and abuse and hurt and neural programming that isn't me it's like a hard casing that i've become entombed in within my own life but it isn't who i am authentically and so i started using my anxiety as a clue and as a friend i started realizing that i didn't have to fix myself as much as i had to do a very loving archaeological dig back to who i really was get rid of the programming and every time i had anxiety i was willing to say it's because i was engaging in a thought that wasn't authentic with my real nature it was a clue my anxiety became my best friend because it started being a neon sign that said you're engaging in a behavior a thought or an action that does not agree with you our anxiety is our body's way of trying to communicate with us what you just ate what you just thought what you just did who you just talked to whatever it is doesn't agree with you and so i became very diligent i started taking a notebook around every time i'd have anxiety go what was i just thinking what was i just doing and i'd start to write it down and i started playing a game it's up on my website jewel never broken as one of the mindfulness games which helps rewire you but it was called self another every time i had one of these thoughts i would write it down and i'd ask myself what's the truth and this is different than you know doing affirmations in the mirror i'm not a huge fan of affirmations um hope and fear travel the same neural network in your body if you say i hope i do good on my test you might as well be saying i'm afraid i won't so we don't hope we do we take action um and so telling yourself the truth isn't affirmative thinking it's finding the truth that makes your whole body relax it unlocks you and it starts to really unwind your anxiety it's fascinating one thing i've heard you talk about that i thought was really powerful is this notion of okay when i first started doing this i would get anxious because i didn't know what i was doing and i identified basically a flip side of that and the antithesis statement was no i know what i'm doing but that you knew wasn't true um what was the statement that you ended up coming up with i feel like if people really let this one sink in it's the kind of thing that could unlock something for them yeah this is how we take affirmative thought and tweak it so it isn't a hope but it's the truth so i think an example i gave in my book was my best friend was dying i was under a lot of stress i was doing a movie i'd never done a movie before and i was starting to go back into panic attacks i hadn't had those in a long time and so i tried everything i would record myself saying the truth to myself at night and fall asleep to it i was just i'd try anything that would work um so the fear was i don't know what i'm doing that came to me over and over and over that was the lie so i went to the antithesis of it i know what i'm doing it wasn't the truth i had no idea what i was doing okay but it gave me a starting place to refine from and i would just start playing around with different phrases until i felt my whole system relax and the truth was i will figure it out and i will i've never quit i know that about myself i have never once quit until i figured something out and that made my whole system relax and it let me trust my nature and i let me trust my process i'll figure it out and so every time i have this paralyzing fear i don't know what i'm doing i would say to myself the truth with a breath and i will figure it out and i knew that was true my bones knew it and it calmed me down enough and again i didn't know this at the time but that re-welts reroutes the blood in your brain it allows you to access a different part of your brain so you can start to problem solve how did you go through losing someone that close to you like that that's something i've seen people really really have a hard time with in my new book i describe god as five primal powers life death birth decay and creation and those five primal powers are at work at all times in the world we're not supposed to practice our spirituality or our self-betterment whether you're an atheist or not we're not supposed to practice and learn to try and control our environments and a lot of times we we do it because we kind of have that secret hope that we can never hurt again and we may never get blindsided again that was a big one for me i was always getting blindsided what i realized is that these powers are working at all the time right we're always interfacing with life death birth creation and decay something's always being born and breaking down and it's just life and so if you look at those colors because i'm very visual these colors are coming at us all the time we don't get to control what life throws our way we do get to control how it changes us and so that's really the most productive way to focus your time and your energy and to sort of look at it like being an artist i'm gonna take these experiences these dark and wild energies and colors i'm to weave them into something that makes me a more resilient person a more giving person a more wise person and so it gives you comfort when you deal with loss when you deal with grief something else i talk about in the new book is all feelings come from seven core emotions and i talk about them like the seven primary colors all emotions stem off of these seven and grief does something interesting you wouldn't expect it it dilates you if you watch a system if you will let yourself grieve and you won't resist it your whole system will dilate so hard it is asking you to connect to life in a transformative way you do need to go through your own death you're going to be altered forever you're going to change your perceptions and how you relate to life and how you connect to life and how you value life forever it is asking you to do that when we resist it and we tighten up we're going to drag that experience out we're going to repress it we're going to experience the encumbered patterns of the wheel that i mentioned before versus allowing it to make you dilate and connect it isn't comfortable but you do get through it that's really interesting i never like if somebody had just caught me off guard and said is grief contracting or expanding i for sure would have said contract but you're absolutely right in terms of when you try to resist it like even i'm not a big crier in fairness but in in the moments where i have cried it is a sense of letting go it is a sense of unclenching right and to try to stop that is this like really sort of hard intense gripping that's interesting i had never taken the time to think about that yeah i spent so much time studying emotions for myself and for this this book because we've inherited you know our genetics but we've inherited a lot of beliefs and a lot of misunderstandings and so the way we perceive something is honestly a misunderstanding of grief i inherited the same one whether from my family of origin or from me just interacting with life you can't cry without dilating you can't get mad without dilating if you stay mad that's a grudge and that's something entirely different you've tightened down around two emotions that bonded and turned into a grudge this is fascinating topic that's really interesting um how have you not like you have this really interesting thought around forgiveness and what it is and um specifically i will i will plant the answer i've heard you give before which is around it being like scissors um i'd love you to explain forgiveness as you see it um and what you mean by it working as scissors i do like shortcuts the only genuine shortcut life offers is facing the obstacle um i realized a grudge carries everything out and drags it out forever to me winning is i want to like i want to completely get past it so for things like my dad who was abusive when i was young or my mom that ended up being incredibly deeply betraying forgiveness was the best way to win as odd as that sounds um people confuse forgiveness and condoning those are two different things you can forgive without condoning a behavior i call forgiveness the needle that knows how to mend if you want to heal forgive them because it is like cutting that last thread that connects you to them which is sometimes why we don't want to forgive it's what connects us to our pain and our pain connects us to that wish that we still had them um maybe hating a person that hurt your child connects you to your child the last way that you have i mean it almost can make me cry it's so tender i understand why we don't want to forgive but if you really want to be free if you really want to have liberty you have to cut that thread and the only way to do it is is by forgiving and moving on you never have to see the person again um again when i forgave my dad when i moved out i never thought i'd see him again i didn't forgive him so i could get back a relationship i forgave him so i could figure out how to heal and move on with my life now is it still true so you forgave your dad and and because he has changed so much he's apologized and actually changed behaviors you guys have reconnected is it still true that you have not reconnected with your mom true yeah my dad's incredible he's like i mean you've heard of personality settling and all these different theories about how old you can be when you change and my dad is living proof that you can profoundly change and he was in his 60s when he got sober and he's in the 70s now happier today than he was yesterday and he'll be happier tomorrow than he was today it's incredible um with my mom we don't have a relationship i haven't seen her as i described in the book since 2003 i think and i don't know that we ever will i want to talk about so the where you grew up outside of homer alaska homer alaska itself is not exactly a bustling metropolis so to be growing up outside that what you call a homestead i'd love to hear a little bit about that and i'm asking specifically because i think your work ethic is insane i find that as inspiring as i find your your singing ability which is unimaginable i've seen you perform live it is breathtaking to say the least um but your work ethic to me is is awe-inspiring thank you um yeah i grew up on a homestead my family were pioneers born in switzerland but living dur in germany just at the beginning of the second world war they were able to escape and make it to alaska that was giving away free land to anybody that would go up there and promise not to die for a whole winter my grandmother was an aspiring poetist and opera singer my grandfather was a linguist studied languages and etymology and they raised these children you know before it was a state my grandfather actually ended up helping draft the constitution for alaska which is amazing only in america story um my grandmother taught them all to sing and to write to paint you know sort of very idyllic uh creative upbringing in the woods there's a show about my dad's uh and my family called alaska the last frontier um most people don't realize it's my family but that's my dad and my brother my uncle and my cousin it's a beautiful way to be raised while there certainly were a lot of difficult things as i mentioned my dad had to live through the creativity he calls it the cure was in the disease nature and creativity were this cure which ended up helping heal him and i feel the same way my family are hard workers they're going to be a pioneer and literally forge something out of nothing that's the original entrepreneur like that's the original gangster of of finding a new way forward um and so being raised in the mentality was you had to rely on yourself there was nobody else to kind of come fix it you had to figure out how to fix it there were six ants that i was raised with so my dad has there's eight of them total six were girls and so the girls are highly capable in pioneer states women are not treated differently and the roles are interchangeable so i wasn't raised with a gender biased system in alaska there there's no like the women cook and the men do this like i was not raised with that concept i knew i wasn't as strong as a man but i knew i was as capable and that if you put your mind to it you could figure it out and i think when i left alaska i didn't realize that one single thing was an absolute game changer for me going forward i never thought i was a weaker sex i thought i could think as hard as somebody else and figure it out and find my own solution i was taught that i had to find my own solution that's how i was raised and that was a tremendous advantage um when i got discovered you know i was on a record label with probably 600 artists there's no competitive advantage we're all artists you know there's not like a finish line and there's one winner it's art you can't say red's better than blue it's just the preference and a lot of systems to help you get your your art forward to see if people like it so for me the only competitive advantage i could find was my work ethic i looked at these other musicians and i believed i could outwork them and that's what i said about doing and about killed me i don't know how wise it was but it did work out one of the one of my favorite stories um in that is so your debut album ends up going on to smash it 12 million records sold one of the highest selling debut records of all time but it took you over a year to break it if i'm not mistaken like you were touring you said you were doing two and three shows a day i think you said you did 600 shows in a single year which is it literally just thinking about how many shows that really is even if you didn't waste more than that yeah that's insane and i did it for multiple years how did you do a voice luckily i've always had a strong voice i grew up bar singing and i think i just built up this muscle and endurance um and i was just very tenacious uh i was a folk singer at the height of grunge so the odds against me were so high i was singing songs called i'm sensitive while you know nirvana was out the odds of me making it were not were not huge and i i made a folk record in intentionally because it's who i was i wanted to be honest what i just learned while i was homeless was just my authenticity was my only currency and i clung to it it was my happiness i didn't want to let go of it just to be famous um and then i had a hard road to hoe and i had to be willing to pay for that basically i had to buy that authenticity with work ethic because i didn't get to take the other shortcut so i did shows in the morning for high schools and then i would go do one record in store you know go to a record com store and play in the parking lot then maybe two or three radio shows um this would be a multiple using two cities a day i would open for bauhaus at night which is a goth band which was really difficult and then i did a midnight show in a coffee shop and i did all this in a rental car it was grueling um but every time i played i figure out the puzzle how can i make this audience pay attention to me how can i make them listen to me i could see that i converted people and it just was a grass movement you know just was a slow a slow thing but it worked one thing that i i'm curious to know if you think this is a strength of yours given my the way that i think i think it's amazing is you have uh i'm gonna prove people wrong uh streak in your personality from yodeling at the age of five because your dad said or your grandfather said somebody told you you were too young for it and then learning to move every muscle on your face because you didn't want to have involuntary muscles tell me about that that sounds really funny hearing some people say that it's ridiculous um yeah i think you know there's something in each of us some little voice in us that knows i can do that i don't know how to do it yet but i can figure it out and i definitely had that when you have that inclination you have to follow it you can't let that die that's some truth in you speaking and it built up a grit i think you know a tenacity that type of thing and again with the way i was raised yeah the involuntary muscle things bizarre but i did it is that something that you value in yourself it is we have different phases in life you know when we're young we're looking for fuel right all of us we're looking for something combustible that can get us to the next level um perfection we have we have healthy ones and unhealthy ones perfectionism is an unhealthy one you know if you have any talent and you become perfectionist that perfectionism will be like a rocket booster but it how i describe it it uh it limits your ability to be genius it limits your ability to be great because perfectionism is careful it's calculated it doesn't want to look foolish and so it's this deceiving rocket fuel that gets you this far but that last inch that's so hard to be great at something you have to be willing to take huge risks you have to be willing to fail terrifically on grand scales perfectionism won't let you do that and so a very difficult transition i think a lot of people that are successful don't often talk about is how did they dismantle that perfectionism and did they because if they haven't yet and they've done these amazing things i want to see what they can do without it because if they can let go of that and take that risk it's stratospheric what you're capable of accomplishing the same thing's true about having a point to prove you know i had a point to prove um for sure it was a rocket fuel it was a it was a combustible energy that i knew how to tap into it was visceral and i could channel it and i could just make people listen to me you know i was intense and now that i'm older i don't feel that way and it scared me once i started learning to let go of having a point to prove because it was like having a knockout punch in your back pocket and when you start letting go of that because it it all it limits you it limits your ability to go that extra inch what do you use to connect with people if you're not going to wow them with these other skill sets what's so authentic and undeniable about you that you're going to connect in such a deep way that you'll get the same result but in a much healthier and much more sustainable way um so i think i've really worked on letting go of having a point to prove it's definitely made me go it made me search really hard for what's interesting and what's visceral and how do i connect i had to really redefine it and search for a new and much more sustainable way man that's super interesting the the people that you have um interacted with from just ideologically somebody like descartes which i'm still shocked by because this is all happening uh you know pre-internet uh either in alaska or you know sort of at the edge of living on our own and homeless um to bob dylan taking you out with him on tour um the the wisdom that you've been able to to coalesce runs is really fascinating and like i'm saying the way that you've coalesced all of it into shareable wisdom i think is really extraordinary and i think using your own clock definition i mean it with the full weight of that that that midnight straight up is wisdom and i certainly got that from your first book i'm super curious to read your upcoming book you have a new single grateful out now album forthcoming uh and if you would tell people where they can connect with you where they can find the song uh be amazing and the mindfulness movement where can they get that yeah um the song is called grateful it's up on any streaming platform for any mindfulness tools i call it making a habit out of happiness that's it jewel neverbroken.com jewel neverbroken.com um i don't know i guess you can find me from those those two places the mindfulness movement film you can find it on instagram i'm on instagram and it's just cool amazing last question what's the impact that you want to have on the world hmm i think it's it's a small goal i want my life to be my best work of art i don't want my music to be my best work of art or my poetry i want to be my best work of art and if that affects other people that's gravy but it's really just starting in here it's amazing thank you so much for being on the show everybody i'm telling you right now if you only know her from her music you have a treat coming your way it's extraordinary the poetry is amazing all of the mindfulness tools the book the just what she talked about her life how she's lived it how she's gone introspective what she's made of that how she's made change it is really extraordinary there's so much to learn um i think you will love everything about what she's doing so seek her out find the stuff it will change you if you let it um if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care what was that like um being an immigrant and then trying to make a name for yourself well i mean i was born in haiti in a small village um and they imagine a place so no electricity no running water