JEWEL

with Jewel. She had so much to share. Oh my gosh, that girl has so much to share that I decided to split our conversation into two podcasts, two conversations, because I didn't want to edit it down and make it short. I didn't want you to miss a moment of what this brilliant, talent to fascinating woman has to say. So, Jewel, we talked about your background, your family, um living in Alaska in a crazy situation, and we talked about anxiety

and depressions, specifically with at risk youth. I want to pick up and continue this conversation with your book. Yeah. My favorite thing about this book was discovering practical steps. You know, the stuff like I mean, interesting to talk about, But unless you can create exercises you can practice every day that create new neural pathways, you're not going to change. So for me, that's my favorite part of the book is really helping create small, doable stuff. What's the name

of the book? We just keep calling it the book. I don't know yet. I'm just comit of it. I need help on the title. Jewel's new book yet to be titled. We'll just call it, like you know, prints the Yah, the book yet to be titled, which will help you to make healthy choices and take healthy steps to rewire your brain so that you're not thinking that you know, getting slapped across the face is love, or that eating your way into oblivion like I do when

I'm hurting is a healthy behavior. Do we know when it might be released? You're the first person I'm talking to about it. Oh my gosh, this is exciting. It's like you just announced your pregnant, your birthing. A book that's going to help change people's lives forever, and I'm the first person that gets to talk about it. This is awesome. It's like I'm looking at your ultrasound and we don't know yet if it's a boy or a girl, But that's okay. It's forming, it's in the formative steps.

How cool is this? Oh my god, I'm so excited. So um. I ment in a little while ago that I have a lot of kids, and I briefly glazed over the fact that that my my husband just lost his son. And in seven years we've lost three boys. Yeah, one cysycle selenemia. One we don't know what to yet because the autopsy reports after eight weeks still have not come back. UM, and one to mental illness m hm.

And I love the factual that you are courageous enough to talk about anxiety and mental health and making better choices. When I was growing up, I knew how it was raised. It was going to be the cycle that repeated itself, and I didn't want to be a statistic and it was very frustrating that we can go to school to learn Spanish and math and English, but there really isn't a human school. We really aren't taught the amazing creative power of what our emotions do and how we can

create our life and our reality. And mental health is important to everybody because we all have a brain and we all have emotions and when I look at me too, and bullying and suicide and opioid addiction, gun violence, etcetera. Etcetera. It's all a mental health issue. It's all an emotional health issue, and none of us are separate from it

because we all have emotions and minds. And so I've really dedicated my life to creating tools to help people have a sense of self agency, to solve for the anxiety, to solve for their depression, because to me, it's the most epidemic crisis that we have, and none of us are not touched by either friends that have taken their lives or are addicted, or we are self struggle with those things. I think it's the single most important issue. We are not taught what to do with anxiety, and

that's unacceptable. It's really unacceptable because it is solvable. So yeah, I'm very dedicated to it, and I'm really sorry sorry for your losses. The grief of that is I can't imagine how to offload all that. That is a lot. It is a lot, and thank god we can talk about it now. You know, I lost my brother when I was a young woman, and and losing my brother, I lost my my mom and my dad because they had no place to to process or take their grief. You know, you're just supposed to suck it up and

move on. I know we have no place to take a break and heal. You know, what is a parents supposed to do in those situations? What are you supposed to do? We need to create places where we can support someone like your mom or you, to give them a place to heal, to let their nervous system relax.

What's interesting about grief is our society really wants to rush us through it and accelerated greate hacks for solving for grief, and we really misunderstand the neighborhood and grief want wait, wait, wait, Jill, go back and say, I just I love what you just said. Is that again, create hacks a space? Oh yeah, our society is obsessed with all these hacks and it isn't making us healthier happier. Like I don't know if we can really call us

progressed if we're not any happier. Our society is so advanced, but we're no happier. In fact, for much less happier. Suicide is up six across every demographic since two thousand and six. That's unacceptable. So we don't need to be thinking of hacks. We need to be thinking of how do we honor the feelings that we have, and grief at its core causes our system to dilate, but we want to fight it. We want to contract around grief

and not experienced when we let our systems dilate. Grief is really asking us to connect to life in a much deeper way than we ever have. It's asking to understand the nature and the value and connect. And if we aren't given a place to do that, to dilate, to grieve, to let it out, to connect, to have deeply life affirming experiences while we grieve, we're going to tank. And it's sad because these are again simple misunderstandings about what an emotion is wanting from us, what it's asking.

The intent of grief is asking us to dilate and connect to life, and it's going to teach us about life in a way that nothing else can. It's going to build an empathy in us the way nothing else can. It is a very survivable emotion, but it should help us connect in a much more profound way. We should come out of the other side of grief more empathetic, more connect and more life affirmed. How many of us

can say that happens? Very few I'm I'm just listening in awe because I cannot tell you how many people have treated the losses in our life like you know, it's it's it's been a year, get over it. Um. If somebody told you they were pregnant, would you say you should go in to the hospital and deliver today, you're eight weeks along. Let's get over this, Let's push

that baby out, Let's get on with this. No, if it takes nine months to form a life that is sustainable outside of the womb, forty weeks, how much longer does it take to to heal from losing that life? And it's it's a death. As you know, when we lose a loved one, it causes a part of us to die. And we have to be very actively engaged in our own gestation and our own process of how do we want to be reborn from this experience because it's transformative and we should be allowed the room in

space to say. Half of me is sad and grieving, and the other half of me is starting to dream who I want to be on the other side of this? How do I want to let this experience transform me? Life is full of all these wild and untamed energies, joy, loss, love, gain. All of these experiences like paints surrounding us, and we get to decide how we want to leave them together into our systems, to decide how we want to let

those experiences transform us. We can't control what experiences come down the pike for us, but we do get to really actively engage in how we want to let them transform us. And again, we just aren't given a human school of being able to look at it like that and go, oh, okay, grief is this opportunity. What do I want to do with it? What do I need to help transform? This simple exercise number one that that I could share with somebody, you can share with somebody

who suffers from immobilizing anxiety. For me, with anxiety, I always thought something was wrong with me. I have this much anxiety, something must be wrong with me. And I started to flip that script and say, what if it means something's right with me? What if my anxiety is a clue? But how I'm engaging with my life doesn't really work. And instead of spending all this time and shame, spend this energy and dedicated to getting curious what in my life is making me in conflict with my own life.

How I'm engaging in life that's creating me to be in conflict with my own life. And once I started doing that and sitting still in the morning and really contemplating it, it was like having a little neon signed to where I kind of got excited when I got anxious because it was like, oh, the neon sign. Something's out of sorts, and it's just asking me to look

at it. That's it. No need for shame, self approach meant all of these things, um, And so sometimes just the simplicity of flipping the script and saying it doesn't mean something's wrong with me. It means something's right with me. It's an opportunity to look at what is authentically me. How are my inside values not being represented in my outer life? What things am I doing? Maybe it's not getting that sleep. Maybe it's the fact that of a

job I hate. Uh. Maybe it's said I need to spend more time in quiet and give myself some time to meditate. When you said still, you'll start to figure those things out and then you need to stop doing them otherwise you will keep being anxious. And here's the thing in our society in our world today, setting still doesn't happen very often. Sitting still. We've got so many distractions.

We might be setting, we might not be getting exercise, but we're setting on our device, scrolling through TikTok, watching you know, twelve second videos that mean absolutely nothing to us and have no bearing on our life, but it's distracting us from our life. Yeah, our anxiety. Imagine if you left a child home alone and they're too young, they're going to be really anxious and scared. They know there's nobody in the house keeping them safe and watching

after them. Anxiety can be like that when we're not in the present moment. We're not home. When are rain is taking the past and projecting it into a future that hasn't even happened. We're not home. The only time we can keep ourselves safe is when we're present, right here, right now. When I was homeless, I had immense panic attacks, and what I really learned was that this fear was a thief. It robbed me as my only chance to

show up, which was right now. And so a lot of times anxiety for me was a sign of like, oh, I'm not home, I'm living in some future terrifying myself with from some future that hasn't happened, and so learning to meditate, learning to be mindful was a trumanous step. I was able to start not only getting out of my panic attacks, but noticing the triggers before they happened, and getting better and better at addressing my anxiety at

earlier and earlier stages. Um Meditation and the word mindfulness are pretty misunderstood. They sound so mysterious, but it's really simple. It's just consciously being present for whatever it is. I created a website called Jewel Never Broken dot com that shares a lot of these exercises that I developed actually when I was homeless. It's a sulfur anxiety to help me learn how to be present. A neuroscientist named Dr Judson Brewer actually shows how why the exercises work and

why they do rewire your brain. But they're very simple. There's three minute exercises that just help you to be consciously present. It's no more complicated than that. It's a free website, so it's it's a charitable website. Hold on Jewel Never Broken for anybody who wants to have more peace, more joy, deeper, meaningful relationships. UM healthier body, because when you're healthy emotionally, when you've got mental health than your

physical health, usually it falls in line. A lot of people think, well, I'll take time to take care of this once I once I get to the gym and exercise and and join a gym that you know makes me feel strong and and it's kind of backwards. You know, once you're emotionally strong, then you're gonna you're going to be much more physically strong. Yes, yes, we're going to take a pause here in this conversation with Jewel for

a brief message. Today's podcast features the amazing Jewel And when I say it, I mean that this lady, she is dynamic. She is one of the most compassionate, intelligent, strongest women I've ever had the pleasure to know. We continue our conversation with Jewel now. Um. In my book, I talk about in our body, we have three types of cell walls. There's permeable, a completely open cell wall where things and nutrients pass and come and go freely.

There's semi permeable, where it's a more elective cell that only lets certain things in. And then we have cell walls that are impermeable. Nothing gets in them, and we become physically ill when a pathogen, when a when a bacteria or a virus penetrates what should be an impermeable cell wall, Our emotional health mirrors this. We have three types of emotional cell walls. If you will, you know. The outer permeable cell wall is just it's an easy yes, like I don't care where we eat, I don't care

about movie we see. It's just easy. The middle cell wall, emotional boundary, is where you negotiate. It's like a maybe, it's like a I don't like eating with those people, but all right, or yeah it's not my favorite, but okay. It's where we're open for negotiation. And then are our innermost sync them. Our innermost emotional wall is a no. It's the things we can't compromise um our health or

our children and those types of things. And when we tolerate the intolerable, when that inner sanctum is weak, we become emotionally ill. This is where emotional illness starts. And so I have a practice in the book that helps us strengthen that internal emotional cell wall so that we stopped tolerating the intolerable. You know, when a children is a child is abused, what happens is that inner wall gets erased. There now doesn't count, and it leads to

tremendous emotional illness. Who knew? Who knew? When when I was playing your sweet songs all those years ago, listening to your voice that jewel is the voice of an angel, and and your physical appearance was so soft? Who knew that you had all this this wonderful wisdom just waiting to be birthed in this strength that is transformative? Who know? I didn't know either? How cool is that? Necessity is

the mother of invention, that's for sure. Yeah, but a lot of people, a lot of us, have gone through a lot of hard times. The fact that you have spent the last several years using your experience, as painful as they may have been, and and hardships and truth, your your truth to to help others and reach out to others and change the world for good. That's what's awesome.

We owe that to ourselves into others. It's funny in a world of so much false power, where we think our opinions are our power, we forget that a real active power is something that benefits you and your community. I was really lucky to be adopted by a Native family when I was young, but taught me things like that, you know what is an active power. It's something that benefits you and others, and it's important we all participate in that circle of life the same way you do.

It's why you're doing your show and why you're talking about your very personal experiences because you know, deep down you're part of that circle. It's beautiful. One of the one of the people that came and stood by my side just right after Zach left. It was a friend that I had had in grade school and in high school. We kind of drifted apart. She chose um, she chose drugs and alcohol, and and I made other choices, but um we've always stayed connected. But when I lost Sack.

She's been sober, clean and sober now for over thirty years, and during searching for her path, she discovered that her grandfather was was a full blooded Native American that had been taken off the reservation and forced into a reformation school.

His air was good, his name was changed, and he lived with shame the rest of his life, hiding his true identity, and so she and her sons have done a ton of research and history and just reclaimed their birthright of who they are and who he was and who they are through him, and her deep, deep, deep

faith just has been such a gift to me. Not that, um, not that my faith hasn't been everything, but she just daily would call or write or send me a note that just as I'm holding space, I'm saying prayers, I'm I'm here, I'm here to talk, I'm here to listen, I'm here to just set with you. And she went with me to where he left and we just sat there. I don't know how long we just sat there in

that very sacred place. And while we were sitting there, two birds came and lit in the tree above us and started singing, and I knew it was both my sons, and so did she. And just being able to sit with somebody and hold that space with them, it's everything. It is. It brings the sacred back into what would be scarring, so sacred, so holy, so beautiful in mm hmm, in the midst of the most abject pain you could ever imagine, there's so much beauty. How weird is the

true Delilah. It's very true. I'm getting chills, but it's very true. And when we are given the space we get to reclaim that, we get to allow that experience to transform into something holy, something that's beyond our understanding, that still hurts, that's something that's so much bigger with us that you can't help but be filled with in awe and to be able let the sacred come back

into it is so healing. Rory Fie called me a couple of weeks after Zach left, and Rory Fike said, your son is your son's He only knew about Zach, but he said, your son is much more a part of your future than he is a part of your past. Ah, it's beautiful. And at the time I was like, how can I said, how can you say that? I'll never get to see him graduate I'll never get to see him, you know, find his true love. I won't get to

hold my grand babies. How can you say that? He said, because this, this life is but a breath, and now you are going to look forward to the eternal so much more than you ever have before. And I went, well, m beautiful. So I'm glad I let my my son have a band in the garage. I gave him the whole upper part of the car poard. I'm glad that God gifted me with a kid that was filled with life and love and passion and and and silliness, and that I was able to to fully engage in that.

M hmm. Yeah, that's another gift of presence. You know, we really regret when we can't show up in the moments that we do have, And it's a real beautiful thing to be present because you don't know what the future holds. Nope, none of us are promised the future. We just know what today is and today, Jewel, I'm so so proud of you. I can't wait to hear what the name of the book is. The name of the song that i've heard, No More Tears. Yeah? Is that going to be the name of the album too?

Because I know it's a work in progress. I don't know. I'm so bad with titles. It's the last thing that comes to me usually under you know much to rest or like we need it today. Um, No More Tears was the first song I wrote for this project. It just came out of me, and it's about a lot of what we're talking about. This idea of I've been through a lot and I'm standing and I know I'll cry in the future, but it's different. Um, I've changed, I've embraced and it's it's a real life affirming song. Um.

I wrote it. I've been working on a documentary about homeless youth, and when I was working with these kids and hearing their stories, you know, most of them are on the street because the street was safer than their home life. You know, is somebody that takes and foster children. The truth of that, and many of them, you know, parent is okay that they're gay and so we're beaten or a young girl was raped since she was four. Uh. We have all these assumptions about who is on the

street and why, and we think that they're lazy. I know that wasn't the case for me. I ended up on the street because as I wouldn't have sex with the boss, he wouldn't give me my paycheck and I couldn't afford rent, and I got kicked out of where I was living. I started living in a car, and then my car got stolen and it was just a vicious cycle. And it's incredibly difficult, and so being able to share the stories and humanize who these people are,

look at our our issues, how we're similar. I was very moved to write this song about my experience and about everybody's experience. M yeah, and it just started off the project. It was like it came out with a bang, and then it took me a while to write other songs that I thought were up to this level. Well,

I've listened to it and it is beautiful. And Janie my producer who adores you um and Dianna my sister who adores you, who is my producer for the podcast, and saw you at the vineyard and said, oh my god, I had no idea that this woman has the depth that she had, is uh. And they're the ones that reached out and said you gotta you and Joel you'd you'd like you, you like You're passionate about so many of the same things. So that's where I heard the song,

and it just resonated. You know, some songs are like wow, that's really pretty um, and then some songs just resonate like, uh, I'm trying to think where I was the first time I heard hands, But it was one of those songs that I have these big, huge, clunky man hands. If you look at the appendages at the ends of my arms there, um, they've never been something of beauty in the traditional sense of beautiful hands. I love my hands

because they're my mom's hands. And I love my hands because I was laying in bed with my daughter one day, who has these lithe beautiful, um, musical hands. If if your songs were hands, they would be my daughter's hands. Um. Yeah. And I said, I don't understand genetics, you know, how did I get these hands? And you got these beautiful hands? And she was like fifteen at the time, and she took my hands in hers and she goes, Mama bear,

your hands are working hands. And then she tossed hers in the air like like Ballerina's and she says, mine are not. How that has changed now that she's the Mama bear and has her own daughter, and her hands are never still um. But that was the sweetest compliment that anybody has ever paid me about my hands. And I don't know, something just opened up inside of me that day, and I fell in love with these appendages that I had not particularly been fond of before, just

because they are not graceful in in their shape and form. Um. But we all, uh, we all have things that we might not like. But when we look when we reframe it and look at it from a different perspective like my daughter did that day. Man, the beauty is just revealed in such a beautiful way. It's so true. That's amazing how much women we will torture ourselves over our bodies, when if we take care of what we have and value it. I don't know a body that isn't beautiful.

You know, whatever type it is, they're beautiful. And it's just it's not all uniform. And it's very sad that we feel so subject to trends. You know, if Latino beautiful, big curves is finally you know, curves are allowed, Um, the really skinny girls really feel like, oh no, I'm not in fashion. Our bodies shouldn't be subject to fashion type. When Heroin Chic was in our poor Latina beautiful curvy

sisters felt like that wasn't fashionable. If we're taking care of ourselves and healthy and honoring what we are, it is beautiful. Well, you are beautiful, Jewel, and I'm so proud to know you. Likewise, I'm so glad to get to reconnect. I'm so proud to see the path that you're on and the way that you are changing the

world for good. I try to talk all the time about I was uninvited to a church one time I had, I had been invited there to to speak, and and I went and I talked about foster care, and I said, you know, I don't understand how if the only thing that the Almighty judges are religion on according to His Holy Word is how we care for orphans and widows and their affliction, why we've got half a million kids

in foster care. I don't get it. I don't get how we we we can worry about some you know, the plank and or the spec in someone else's eye, and judge people based on the fact that they are not living according to to our standards. And yet we're not living according to God's standards. Because we got four seven thousand kids in foster care. That wasn't the message they were expecting. Good for you, though, you know, I'm sure there are people in the congregation that hurt you.

Love is love. We just need to love more. God is loving and we do need to love more, but we need to love in a real way. Yeah, it's a verb. It's action oriented love. It's an action word. It is south peace. You know, peace. We think peace might be getting rid of things, you know, controlling our environment, more, getting rid of things that upset us, pieces of very active state. It's a verb, and it's just the willingness to come into harmony with what is. It's a process,

it's work. Well, I'm excited to see the process and I can't wait to see. I can't wait to meet this child you are birthing in your new book and and in your new music. Well, thank you and thanks for your your help in getting it out there. Um, it was really scary for me to engage in my music again. You know, I really associated my music career with a lot of pain. I loved what I was doing, but I always thought my purpose and serving my purpose was much more important than taking care of myself. I

really hurt myself. I exhausted myself, I depleted myself. I surrounded myself and people that didn't care for me and ignored all of it because I thought I was serving my purpose. And when this song came to me, No More Tears, I was kind of terrified because I knew deep down I needed to go back to music, but the way I engaged with it, I couldn't do that again.

And I really believed that I could never be successful unless I was doing what I did before, which was five shows a day, any cities a day, killing myself. And so it's been interesting really sitting with my fear just around music, something that's so natural to me that I had issues around of saying, all right, I'm willing to do this, I'll have to do in a new way where I don't hurt my health. And so it means a lot to me to be able to do this with you and have this experience that's so beautiful

and I'm not exhausted, So thank you. Here's the thing that you have learned and that I wish others would learn now. You own your music in that it's a part of you and it's an expression of you. But the music industry, which is completely separate from the music, doesn't own you. And I love that, you know though, it was never the industry that did it to me. It was always me. Really yeah, I was willing, I

in fact believed, and part of it's true. Nobody should enter any new job if they're not willing to grind hard, but there's a line where it becomes insane. I didn't know that line. Um. Yeah, label never asked me to dress a certain way and make a certain kind of music. I always, you know, had a ton of autonomy in what my art did and how I did it. But

it was me that just ran myself incredibly hard. Again, when you're raised in an abusive system where you were never nurtured or treated a value, I certainly didn't know how to do that for myself. And I through work at it um and I thought the work is what it took, the amount of insanity that I took on, and it wasn't. It turns out somebody told me years ago, Delia, You've got to stop being a human doing and be

a human being. Mm hmm yeah, because there were you know, when I started, there were no women in this industry. There still are so few women in my industry. Yeah. And and I had to work twice as hard, twice as many hours, go to twice as many appearances, and I still, you know, wasn't wasn't getting the respect or the opportunities that that I felt I should have been. But yeah, someone just said, you've got to be a human being, not a human doing. It's so beautiful being

a woman. We do things differently, and it's sometimes hard when we come into an industry dominated by men because we think we have to do it like they do and they're much more linear than we are. Um. It's been really neat growing, you know, as a woman, becoming older, which I love, and realizing I just have a much more have a different way of engaging. I use my intuition a lot more. I don't do business plans. I feel my way through things. How I attract opportunities is

very different. Um, and it's been neat to learn. Well, I'm glad you're learning. Wonderful to have pioneers like you, you know, that are willing to go into these formats and show women that we can do it. Well. I don't know that that I was a pioneer. Well I guess I was. I was and I am. But mostly I'm just really stubborned, Like, don't tell me I can't do something me too, People like, how have you kept going? I'm like, I'm stubborn. It's really not a talent. It's

not a talent. I'm just willing. I didn't have a business plan. I didn't have a game plan. I just have a whole lot of stubbornness. M hmm, and so far it's working out pretty good. I want to be uh if you have a home delivery or a hospital delivery with this book that you are delivering, I want to be in the waiting room uh as as soon as it's like rolling off the press, because I really want to read it and I really want to share it.

Because that's what my podcast, that's what my radio show, that's what my life is all about, is helping people to use the gifts and the talents and the skills that God has given them to make their world and the world at large a better place. And all the all the tools that we can gather that help us do that. The stronger and better will be eight men. Our whole lives shouldn't be spent getting over our past. I'm happy to arm people so we can have a

great future where we're not relative to our past. Somebody, uh boss that I used to have, was talking about a coworker who said they're a belly button examiner. I said, what she goes? He spends all of his time and energy talking about his past instead of living in the present. And every time I would think of that person, then I would imagine them standing, you know, naked, staring at their belly button. But there's a fine line between being

introspective and honoring yourself and staring at your belly button. Yeah, and that's where change is hard. We do have to look backwards to understand the nature of what we're working with, to understand how we have to transmute it and transform it to change. But a lot of us get stuck at looking at the past, and so we never change. We just stay relative to all of our past trauma and we can't quite move on. That can happen in

therapy too, you know. I mean, how many therapy sessions have we been in or our friends have been in where it's like nothing's changing. I just keep talking about it. It's that change thing is pretty hard misunderstood. Thank you, Jewel, God bless you. I'm so proud of you. And give your boy hugs and tell him to bang those drums as loud as he possibly can. Have you ever has he ever gone to drum circle? No, that'd be so fun. I'll have to find one. Find a drum circle. Take

your boy and be blown away. That's a great idea, all right, thank you for spending time with me. Yes, thank you. I'll talk to you so alrighty, have a great pap.