Show of hands for all of you who love singer/songwriter Jewel... Mine's up in the air! Since her break-out hit, "Hands" in the fall of 1998, this sweet and sparkly Jewel is much beloved, but I'm willing to guess that many of you are just as clueless as I was as to the absolute powerhouse of intellect this woman is!
Raised in circumstances of dire need, without the security most of us have always taken for granted, Jewel has always been a crafty survivor, but she has grown into so much more. Her philanthropy stretches across continents and is also strongly felt on our shores. She started by offering to others, who were looking for ways to bolster their mental health, the coping practices she developed for herself during a brief time of homelessness. From there, she's developed several more projects, each targeted at helping vulnerable populations. Her latest work is a film, "Lost In America" about our homeless youth, and of course, her own music provides the soundtrack. The single, "No More Tears" is out now, and we're going to talk about that and so much more on this episode of Love Someone with Delilah. It's Part 1 of 2 and I know you're going to want to join me next time to hear the rest! ~ Delilah
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Today's podcast is a guest that is a perfect example of how a single person can continue to delight and inspire and inspire awe after decades of being in the business. Not only that, she has become an expert on how we can all adapt to change in emotionally healthy ways. From her days as a struggling musician who was forced to live on the streets for a time, to a pop sensation, to a respected developer of self help strategies for folks coping with anxiety and depression, and an advocate for the most vulnerable in our society. This woman never stops growing in surprising directions, reaching for the unattainable, and embracing change like no other. Her hands may be small, but her knowledge base her intellect is galactic and size, as is her talent, her heart, her compassion, and her authentic desire for peace, love and understanding. I want to talk to you more about that, but we need to pause here for a quick message from our sponsor. It's the Home Depot. You can take on any number of home improvement projects successfully with their help, their resources, and the friendly advice that they have to offer. There's something like a million different products for sale in each store, giving you an idea of how resourceful they can be and how resourceful you can be. So when it's time to get started, start at the home depot. How doers get more done? So please welcome my friend, incredible musician and amazing woman, Jewel. Well, Hi, Hi, sweetheart, how are you? I haven't talked to you on ages? How are you more than ages? I know? But the girl's gotta talk, you know. But a girl's gotta talk, and you and I have got to talk. So let me tell everybody today our podcast guest is somebody who has been writing and recording beautiful music for almost as long well no, not really. I was going to say almost as long as I've been playing music, but that's not true. You still got a few decades to go to catch up with me, girlfriend. Uh, and you're working on a new project. I got to hear the single off of it. Uh, no more tears. Welcome to our podcast today, the Sparkly Jim who is known as Jewel. So since I last talked to you, um, you've written more music, you're working on a new CD project, and you're writing a new book. I am and momming it up and momming it up. How many kids? Yeah? I have one boy, he's eight years old. Oh come on, can I give you one or two more? Would you like to borrow them for the weekend? Oh my gosh, I don't know if I could handle it. Bring them on over, let's try it. My husband and I just adopted number twenty last month, so you can handle it. Oh my gosh, trying to keep track of of birthdays is not not an easy task. Yeah, it must just be like a constant between that. I really can't imagine it is a constant. But your son is eight and is he the kind of kid that when you're a mom to him, you're a mom to twelve because all of his friends are there? Or is he more quiet and introspective and not really the flophouse for the gang to get together every week. I definitely would love of my house to be the giant flop house. Um, he's definitely more of a kind of one on one person. Although he just formed a band. He's the drummer in a band, so I'm anticipating his bandmates come over. I created a rehearsal space in my garage because I want all the kids at my house he's the drummer. Does he take does he take after mom? Does he have any of your amazing vocal skills? Yet he has a really beautiful voice. The ton of it just murders me. And it's probably because I'm his mom, but it just slays me. Um. And he's going to sing a song. I think he's singing a Tom Petty song in the band. So I don't know if it'll be a thing, but it's nice just to see him exploring and bonding the kids this way. He's eight. We don't care if it's a thing today. It's a thing. That's all that matters, because when they're six or eight, or ten or fifteen or eighteen, my job, your job is to help them to explore all those areas they think they might be interested in. Yeah, it's so fun. It's like watching him play dress up and seeing what they like and what fits them and trying something else. It's wonderful discovering seeing them a human, discover who they are is an incredible process exactly and why I would never, ever, ever if you paid me a bazillion dollars and said you can be a time traveler and go back to be a teenager. I would never want to go through that again because it's so exhausting trying on those different aspects of you. Yeah, but what's so sweet is your kids luckily have a really safe environment where it's fun, you know, where it's allowed. It's so important I think that the world we live in today, Although there are a lot of things that terrify me, one of the things that I love the most about it is the fact that I think I know with my kids, they have much more permission to be who they are and much less societal pressure to fit into someone else's norm or to feel wrong about about being true to who they are. Yeah, I think they have a lot more role models of people willing to be loud and proud of who they are as it changes, and that we get to keep rewriting who we are. It's so important because we have to life asks us to change constantly. I'm not who I am at forty five. You know who I am at forty five isn't who I was out even ten years ago. It's a constantly evolving artwork, and it's great that people are feeling more and more permission to actively engage in the process of that self creation. I think one of the saddest things in the world is when I watch people that I love resist change or refuse to acknowledge change, or shut their eyes and plug their ears and go la la la la la, I'm not changing. I'm not doing this. I don't you move something in my life? Agreed. When we get rigid, we are really in conflict with the very nature of what being a life is. And that's hard and stressful. I went to an eye doctor several years ago. I had had perfect vision. Oh, my life beyond perfect vision. Like I could see the spot in the eye of the owl that was in the tree, you know, hundreds of yards away. And then I couldn't see the spot in the eye of the owl. And then I couldn't see the eye of the owl, and then I couldn't see the owl. And I went to the eye doctor and he asked me my age, and I told him, and he says, yep, he said, this is what happens when your body changes. Your lens becomes rigid. M that's a metaphor. And he said, as you get older, it becomes less pliable, like the lid of a mayonnaise jar or margarine container, and he said, the older you get, the more rigid that gets, until it's like a china plate. Mhmm. I thought, you know, that kind of applies to the way we look at life sometimes. Very true. It's a great metaphor. I want to talk to you more about that, but we need to pause here for a quick assage. Jewel. Hold on, Okay, let's start where we just left off. Tell me, Jewel, what has changed in your life since we last talked, and how you're embracing it and what the journey is showing you today. Like if I were on a horseback ride with you right now, what would I be seeing from Jewel's life. It's interesting the book I'm writing is actually about change and the nature of change. A lot of this grow and we become different, but we can't say we've actually changed. And for me, in my life, I noticed it seemed like there was a ton of change. So I went from, you know, living in a saddle barn on an Alaskan homestead with an outhouse to being on the cover of Time magazine. That's a lot of change. Uh. I got the scenery to change, but I realized the road I was on was the same. So when you look out the window of my life as it were, I would go from green pastoral meadows to arctic darkness to gilded, fancy places. But the experience I was having was repetitive. UM. I was dealing with a lot of intensity and betrayal and herd and grief and trauma. And I couldn't get out of that cycle. So I had changed, but I hadn't changed at all. And I wanted to understand what is the nature of change? What don't we understand about change? Uh? And so I started investigating and studying all kinds of different cultures, um, all kinds of different philosophies, from youngion to ancient aboriginal cultures, and really starting to find and create metrics around change, and then creating series of exercises that help us fundamentally change those patterns. UM. The books about how we form reality through a series of misunderstandings that we inherit as we grow up. You know, as much as we inherit our genetic material, we also inherit belief systems and emotional systems, and that wires our brain, and that informs and prompts us to make decisions based on those assumptions and so it's about how can we examine those, pull them apart, and reattach them to create meaningful change in our life. So a good topic because it's what I'm really interested in. Wow, Okay, break that down in English for for for for those of us that don't have the vocabulary that you do. You're, You're, You've got quite a vocabulary, and and simplify it. The books just about change and how we create ourselves and if we don't like certain aspects of how we behave, how can we become something else? And really simple, doable steps of how to do that. It's through neural wiring and neural plasticity. So our brain is always listening to us, our body is always listening to us. Every time we have an emotion, biochemicals flutter system and it prompts us to take an action. So it's just basically looking at how we bomb those things together and how we might reattach them. So if I feel shane easily, let's say shame was a feeling in my household, and every time I felt shame, it was a horrible feeling that felt intolerable, and so I would attach shame to let's say anger, anger, feels stronger and less vulnerable, and so now I feeling really isolated. I haven't really changed my experience of shame. I just sort of have a different, more tolerable version of it in this isolation. And now isolation feels uncomfortable, and I might attach it to I don't know, something really intense, an intense experience to distract me from it. And so we keep making all these emotional connections that don't really let us change. They're just different forms of the same kind of yucky feeling. And so in the book, it's learning how to take a feeling like shame, for instance, and saying, all right, instead of attaching it to anger and feeling isolated, I'm going to sit with this feeling and connect it to something entirely different, like compassion or connection, and that actually allows your feeling of shame to really transform. And when that happens, you're gonna make a very different decision in your life, and that will create a very different reality in your life and allow you to really change. I had a counselor one time that said, for the next six months, I don't want you to do X, Y and Z, and I looked at him I'm like, you gotta be kidding me, like, like, you might as well tell me to stop breathing. I have to do X, Y and Z. Actually it was only X, not even Y and Z. Forget why and Z. I can't even live without X. And he's like, no, if you want me to continue to work with you, Delena, you've got to make a commitment that, to the best of your ability, you will not participate in in these decisions for six months, because I would like you to heal and be able to move forward with your life. And I said no, no, no no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, just terrified. And he's like, okay, tell tell me what what is terrifying? And I'm like, that will hurt And he said exactly. You got us sit with the pain and process it instead of keep running from it behind these behaviors that you're getting accolades for. Wow. Mm hmmm. Yeah. We experience emotional pain in the same part of our brain that we experience physical pain, so our brain really can't tell the difference between a broken leg and a broken heart, and that's why it's really psychologically terrifying for us. But the more we learn that we can sit in an intense feeling without distracting ourselves from it with other behaviors, we can start to experience what the actual intent of that is, and usually it's one in connection. Most of our coping mechanisms or unhealthy emotional patterns, we think they're keeping us safe, but ultimately they become painful because they keep us from connecting. When somebody says to you, you need to abstain from that behavior, it's hard to exist in a vacuum, and so need a new behavior to replace the old one. And that's how you actually build new neural wiring. And so it's saying, if I'm going to abstain from this behavior, I'm going to replace it with this behavior, and I'm going to build a new neural pathway. This has been such a fascinating conversation Jewel, that I'm going to break it up into two parts so that our listeners don't miss out on a single thought. I've known for a very long time that you are a whole lot more than just a pretty face that could play guitar, but whoa girlfriend. You're changing the world and I love that all of you listening, Please please please check out Jewels important new film project Lost in America about homeless youth at www dot Lost in America film dot com. Her new single, No More Tears is the title track to the film. Join us on the next episode as we continue this brilliant conversation about her yet to be released not even titled yet new book and more Unlove Someone with the Lila