Jewel on Breaking Cycles of Abuse, Anxiety, and Saving Her Soul

26:39Yeah. I think that, you know, something I want people to know is like when you learn to meditate or you learn to be present, it's not like a magical land you stumble on where everything suddenly feels good. Yes. It just means you're present with whatever you're feeling. And so a lot of people quit meditating because when they bring themselves to the present moment, they just realize how uncomfortable they are in their body. they realize how excruciating their thoughts are and their thoughts are so excruciating that they want to disassociate again so you know for me learning to be present was also learning to accept that it didn't mean that i'd like what i was present with but again it puts you in a position of power to do something about it wow being present learning to meditate puts you in the actual driver's seat of your life so that when you have a thought, you perceive it, and then you pause before you act on it.

27:41That pause is where your power is. No matter how poor you are, no matter what your life situation is, your ability to have an intense stimulation, pause, and then say, how do I want to react? Because reaction isn't powerful. You know, reaction is just a neurological knee-jerk reaction of probably how you were trained to behave. But if you can stop and pause, you can have a thoughtful formed response. A thoughtful formed response will change the rest of your life. And that's by investing in that pause. And so for me and just for anybody listening, like just know, like if you decide today to start meditating, just because you get present doesn't mean you're going to like it.

28:25And that's okay. That's the first step. Good disclaimer. Yeah. And then the next step is saying you're committing to that pause. And then it was, you know, shortly after that, that I started to realize my anxiety was an ally. And I think that was what you were referring to in my book. When I realized, I just decided to suppose that what if a human's ability to have anxiety isn't a defect? You know, I mean, evolution's elegant. like there's not a lot of things wasted in the evolution of species yeah and so if a human has the ability to be anxious there must be a positive reason absolutely and so what if i could reframe how i thought about anxiety as being this terrible thing oh my god something's wrong with me because i'm so anxious what if it was wait there's something right with me yes and so over and over when i have things that are really difficult i always try to flip the script to say what if if it doesn't mean something's wrong, what if it means something's right?

29:28And what would that be? And so when I began to look at anxiety as something right, I tried to think of other things that made my body feel similar. I mean, anxiety is very overwhelming. It is a very strong. I mean, especially at four in the morning. Yes. Yeah. It's overwhelming. It's a sensation in your body that you can't ignore. And so I was like, what else is like that? Are there any other things that are like anxiety, that it's where my whole system is overtaken. And I thought of food poisoning. I was like, okay, when you get food poisoning, you can't ignore it. You can't ignore it. Like your whole body is having a reaction that you have to pay attention to.

30:06And so I tried to be really observing, curious about food poisoning. Like I thought through it, what is food poisoning? Okay. It's when you eat something bad. You don't know it's bad until later when And you're throwing up and throwing up isn't the problem. Throwing up is the side effect of eating something bad. And so then I was like, okay, what if my anxiety isn't the problem? What if it was something before I got anxious? And then I realized that my anxiety is always a side effect of consuming something that didn't agree with me. Just like food poisoning. Every time I was anxious, instead of being mad or trying to disassociate or suppress or medicate anxiety, I should get excited because it's my only my only way that my body can communicate with me to let me know.

30:53I mean. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Anxiety. Like it's the little neon sign of your body trying to say, hey, you just consumed something that didn't agree with you. And, you know, we have a brain and a dark box in our head that is trying to figure out how to relate to the world through our emotions and through our feelings and through our perceptions. and so I every time I was anxious I would again journal and I would say what was I just thinking feeling and doing yeah and I had three columns in my notebook and I'd have anxiety above it three columns thinking feeling doing every time I was anxious I would stop I would pause and I'd go what did I just think what did I just feel what did I just do and I'd write something in each column yeah and just guess if you don't know like get close as you can and then after about a month of doing that, you actually have a roadmap, a real blueprint to your own personal nervous system, your own personal psychology of what doesn't agree with you.

31:52Again, that's a really powerful thing. That is so powerful. And if you do this exercise, don't try to intervene when you're like, just give yourself a month to just write down what you're thinking, feeling, doing. Don't try to change what you're thinking, feeling, doing. Just be the observer. Just be the observer. I love it. This is a radical step because we internalize our abusers. You know, as mean as my dad was to me, I was twice as mean to me. I was cruel to me. And that's a really common thing. We become abusers of ourselves. And so to be able just to learn to be a neutral observer takes radical suspension of your own shame, of your own self-judgment.

32:33it's a trick it's not easy and so it sounds like a simple journaling exercise but in the process of this exercise you're going to have to practice neutrality emotional neutrality which is usually the very first time you've probably ever done it in your entire life yeah and so it's very important not to try to intervene or change your behaviors yet but to just allow your nervous system to have a slight break from your own self-judgment and so write down what you're thinking feeling doing and then the next part of the job actually takes a lot of discipline this is where discipline and grit and tenacity and i call it channeling your stubbornness for good you know i'm a stubborn person i can dig my heels in yeah what if i could dig my heels in for something that might radically change my life could i channel my stubbornness in a good way that might benefit me and that meant abstaining from those things on the list.

33:31And you can't do all of them at once. You pick one thing, one thing at a time, and you start to say, all right, every time I think X thought, it hurts me. It makes me anxious. So it's a step-by-step process. A, you have to develop enough presence to notice you're doing it. That's a whole skill that takes months and months of practice, like learning to write a bike. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. That's one thing I'm so glad that you're sharing and your journey is, is that you learned this over 20, 30 years. But you can start with these practices today. And over a month, you are going to have a lot more awareness around this stuff.

34:08Yeah. The first thing is like committing to learn how to be present, whether you are super thrilled with what you're present with or not. And then being able to notice, oh, I am thinking like a thought that would undo me was I don't know what I'm doing. it sounds like kind of an innocent thought and by the way it was an honest thought like i literally didn't know what i was doing you're still living in your car yeah and you're trying to you know figure out how to get food and and you're beginning now to use your journal to write lyrics in your songs right like this is that time period yeah and and so the journal goes from you know um kind of being your way to have awareness and to work through some of these mental challenges to then you start you know writing lots of lyrics and we know where that leads and that leads to you know your first you know record deal and uh having a song and an album that i think sold like 13 million copies um and you had this incredible success and and then you had a whole new host of problems yeah um yeah you know the powerful thing about being homeless was i learned how to get relief from my anxiety and my panic attacks and my shoplifting.

35:19In my opinion, I became a very powerful person while I was homeless. Yes. Because I figured out how to have relief. And anybody that suffers from these things know that that relief is like, that's all you want. That's all you want. And money can't buy it. Nope, no. And so because of these types of exercises where I stopped, I learned to abstain from these thoughts. I learned to replace them with other thoughts. I learned to, instead of shoplifting, start writing. I turned around on my own body. My body started feeling better. Being alive and awake in my own body became somewhat tolerable. Yeah.

35:57And by the time I got discovered, it was scary because, I mean, you look at any famous person, look at any biopic. Do they all become drug addicts? Check. You know, do they all almost die? Check. It's like. It's not exactly the ticket to happiness that people think it is. No. And so I was like, oh, crap. Like, I'm being offered basically a heroin. Like, I'm being offered something that is so dangerous to someone like me. Yeah. But I also really love singing, what do I do? And that was, like, a huge dilemma. Okay. So during this break, I'm going to tell you about two more things that I'm super excited about.

36:35And the first one is something that I talked to Michael Pollan about on my episode with him. and it's this AI therapy app called Sonium. Now, I met the founders at this mental health conference and they encouraged me to try it. And at first I was super skeptical. And then after about two weeks, I was blown away at how deep these conversations were going and how helpful it was. And now I'll be using it for six months. And like, there's not a week that I don't use it. I mean, I still have my therapist, but you know, I don't know about you, but like, if I wake up at 4am on on a Thursday with a bunch of anxiety, my therapist isn't available.

37:11And that's when I go to Sonya. And so I just wanna share it today because it has had such a huge impact on my mental health and on my healing journey. And I kinda want everyone in the world to know about it. The company just launched, it's in the Apple App Store. And I think it's free for the first couple of weeks. So you can just try it. And I just think it's incredible. And I think it really is gonna help a lot of people, whether they have a therapist or not. And the other thing that's really interesting is it's also become like a coach to me. Like it will text me on Wednesdays when I'm supposed to work out to check if I'm doing my workout.

37:46So it's like I have a life coach and a therapist in my pocket. And I'm gonna play a clip right now because you gotta kind of see it to believe. Hi Blake, I'm here. What's on your mind right now? Oh, I'm just feeling a little stressed about things right now because I feel like I've got so much going on and I really don't know how to prioritize it. When everything stacks up at once, it can blur what actually matters and make that old not enough story get louder. Let's slow this down by picking one thread to start with, what feels most pressing in this moment. The important reframe is this. The projects did not cure the depression.

38:22They arrived because you healed. And when you overworked to prevent relapse, you actually undermined the things that keep you well, like sleep, presence, movement, and connection. When that edge shows up, It is a signal to reduce load and restore choice, not to push harder. Okay, one more thing, and this might sound crazy at first, but this year I met some engineers from Nike who invented a new type of office chair that has not only changed my life, but actually saved my back, especially because I am on about five hours of Zoom calls every day. The MoveLab chair has two different pivot points under the seat, which keeps your body in continuous micro-movements all day.

39:04The founders told me it is the equivalent of taking 3 ,000 steps and all the lubrication of your joints and the blood flow is why my back no longer hurts and I can focus on my work so much better. I loved it so much that I actually joined the team as a co-founder and I will be sending one to every person I know when we launch this fall. If you're interested in learning more or pre-ordering one. We only have 500 in the first run. You can check us out at movelab.com. And that's spelled M-O-O-V-L-A-B.com. Well, I mean, I think it really prepared you. And when I read in your biography that, you know, with your record deal, you got offered a million dollar signing bonus and you're homeless and you did not accept it.

39:52I was like, what? Like I did not see that coming. Like, I mean, it's like, I did not see that decision, but that decision served you incredibly well because you got more backend and that was incredibly, you know, successful for you. I mean, how do you turn down that, um, when you're homeless? First of all, nobody gives you money for free. So there's definitely, there was something, there was a hook somewhere that nobody was telling me about. And so I went to the library and got a book called everything you need to know about the music business i love this and i just read about the contracts and how they worked and i learned it was a loan yeah it's not free like you're being loaned money yeah then it would also cost money to like promote me the label would spend at least another million dollars like promoting me so now i'm two million dollars of a loan yeah for something i hadn't even made yet yeah it was a lot of pressure future project product that i hadn't even like developed that just seemed like a bad idea like it gave me anxiety and how can you be an artist yeah above of being famous if you have that pressure.

40:54So now your decisions are going to be, okay, what's going to make, you know, you're now looking at the market versus what you yourself want to do. And that's never good for an entrepreneur or for, I think, a musician. Yeah. It meant that I was leveraged before I even had anything. And so if my goal is to be an artist and protect my art, then I had to put myself in a position to protect my art. And that didn't mean leveraging it and having to pimp it out to make millions of dollars. That meant I'd make bad decisions. And I knew I could live on nothing. And so again, it's very hard to leverage somebody that A, just feels powerful because it's like, wait a minute, I just got a grip on my happiness.

41:32Everybody else can F off. And B, it didn't take money. So what do I actually want in my life? I wanted a career. I didn't want to be short-term fame, one hit wonder anyway. And so I turned the money down. I took a really big backend and started to make decisions that would build hopefully a career, 60 year career, not just like I have to be famous now to make this money back. And during that time, your mom moved back from Alaska to San Diego. And during that time, you guys sound like you were inseparable from reading your book and she started managing your career. What was that like after not having her in your life at all?

42:13And now she's really in your life yeah you know i was a surfer at the time and i was surfing out at the the way at this really great little surf spot and there was a pay phone and uh i had had mail like a little p.o box at this time and opened this thing and i got a i got this record deal and um i remember calling my mom and if i could go back in history and go back in time and i did have a time machine that would maybe be a moment that would be really great not to call my mom. But I did call her and I was like, you're not going to believe it. I got this record deal. And she was like, oh, my gosh, I'm so proud of you.

42:52I'll be right there. And it felt so good. You know, it felt like, you know, I was a little girl that just wanted my mom's love. Yeah. You know, and here she was coming to help. And it felt amazing. It felt amazing having her in my life and being part of my life. and getting to have family that I could share this with. And the whole journey is in the ups and downs. And you can imagine all the ups and downs of a career. And then I think it was around 2003, I realized that my money had been mismanaged and my mom wasn't who I thought she was. And it was a deep, deep betrayal. The reason I wrote about it in the book was because it really took 300 pages for me to try to describe the nature of that relationship.

43:40and how complicated it was. And to be able to be, how old was I then? I was like, you know, my thirties when I realized like, oh my gosh, I'm actually broke. I tried to make such good decisions. I mean, that's, that's horrifying. I mean, as an entrepreneur myself and I've built businesses and spent all this time to have done all that and had all the success. And then to find out that you're broke or even in debt. I mean, that must've been, I don't see how I would have recovered from that. I have so much respect for you. I mean, it was awful. Yeah. It was such a horrifying. You've been through all this already.

44:14You kind of scaled the top of the mountain and you realize you just got pushed off. Yeah. I mean. Yeah. And by the person that you love most in the world, the person whose love you wanted the most in the world. And it was such a difficult thing to recover from. I was, I think I was 3 million in debt on top of it. Wow. and i had just taken the biggest like musical risk i had ever taken i switched into pop which is a huge no-no like in you know the 90s singer songwriter culture it was so hard to get respect as a female yeah doesn't happen easily yeah to then like switch into pop it was considered you would have thought i murdered children oh my gosh people were so mad yeah that i dared to go from the credible singer songwriter to the vapid pop star.

45:06Like there was so much violent hatred around it. It was shocking, which is funny today to think about because it's so common today. Absolutely. But then it was like the biggest taboo that you could break. And so I knew I was making this big radical decision, but I've always saved my money. I've always tried to be smart about it because that gives me artistic freedom. Sure, it works back to not being leveraged. I love it. I put out the album. It did do good. The song did really well. And I had a huge public backlash. And I didn't go on tour. And I needed the tour. I needed the money. Okay. But I mentally couldn't do it.

45:45Like, I just, I couldn't do it. I was going to have a psychological breakdown. And so I had to choose my mental health over the money I really, really needed. but then again you said you're choosing your first job is to be happy yeah and so you stuck to that true north i love this yeah and it turns down millions of dollars that tour would have made me millions and you were in debt once again this is like yeah i love it but i couldn't do it i couldn't have gotten through it yeah like i just couldn't have and i knew it and so i didn't do it and i chose to heal but because of the type of psychological abuse that went on in that relationship.

46:24By this time I had money for therapists, right? When I was homeless, I didn't have money for therapists. This time I didn't trust anyone. Oh, interesting. I wouldn't have gone to a therapist. You couldn't force me into letting a human influence my brain ever again. Wow. And so it was another very fertile time, just like when I was homeless, of incredible skills that I developed. I mean, I could write books on what I learned during this time. And And one of the most important realizations for me during this time was, again, it was looking in a mirror. I don't know what it is about looking in mirrors.

46:59Mirrors and journals. Yes. We have some themes here. I like it. Washing my hands, looking in the mirror. And I remember this allegory I heard called the golden statue. Okay. And it's where there was a golden statue in a village, priceless, solid gold, and a warring village came. And so they covered the statue in mud to hide its value. The war came, it ravaged the town, generations, you know, of trauma. And one day, generations later, there's a little boy at the foot of this ugly statue and it had been raining and there was a little teeny gold fleck on the toe. And the boy thought, what is that?

47:37And he started to pick off and realized this is mud covering a solid gold statue. For some reason, I remembered this, this allure because I felt so shattered and so broken. So many things I'd been told in my life were absolutely not true. Yeah. Oh, that's so horrifying. And it's very damaging to like figure out like what in my life is true. Yeah. And so when I thought of this golden stature, I was like, wait a minute. I'm not broken. I don't have to fix myself. I have to uncover myself. That is a very different proposition in life. So powerful. Because you're trying to break something that's inherently broken or you're trying to fix something that's inherently broken.

48:15Like it's almost impossible. Yeah. If you're just trying to uncover something that's inherently there, that's a wholeness. And so I realized my job wasn't to actually fix myself. It was to do the most loving, tender archaeological dig to find my inherent self. That's a whole different thing. Like, again, you can just tell my body relaxes when I talk about that. Yeah. Isn't that wild? And so I spent that time when I didn't go on tour to basically do this archaeological dig. And I just want to tell anybody that's listening, anybody that's going through a hard time, this is absolutely possible. It's patient work.

48:55It's devoted work, but it's a thousand percent possible. And the story with my mom, it almost feels like a long, long time ago. I mean, it was a long, long time ago, but it isn't, I wish my mom wellness. I wish her beauty. It isn't something that I carry in my heart that, you know, I always say like abuse happens in one second, right? Hitting you takes one second. All the decisions you make based on that are the rest of your life. That's you abusing yourself. Absolutely. And so true healing is being able to say, you know, I'm 51 years old and I'm not making decisions based on that hurt. I love that.

49:40That's powerful. That is so powerful. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing all this. And, you know, I just love how much practical advice has been in this conversation. I'm glad because healing is gritty work. It is. It's hard work. It's devotion. you know and healing is it's such hard work but being dysfunctional is much harder work yeah being dysfunctional is exhausting yeah and there's no possible better outcome and so at least if you're willing to work hard to heal it's gritty work but there's a whole other future available to you it just makes me so happy to see someone who has a story like yours which is just one of the coolest stories i've ever heard um using it to just help other people and so what today are you most focused on in terms of sharing this knowledge with others gosh we started the inspiring children foundation probably 25 years ago and the goal was could i help other kids that don't have resources access to therapy or maybe even supportive family networks or functional family networks um have positive results yeah like is therapy the only way like does that mean everybody without therapy is just screwed like that is i mean unacceptable and i realized like for me like it was these little tools that i developed it was these little habits it was these ways of thinking it was these systems yeah and these systems changed my life and they didn't cost a thing yeah and so i wanted to see like could we help people with anxiety suicidal ideation have real outcomes without traditional therapy and the answer is yes like we have tremendous results.

51:20And now, I mean, CBT, DBT is basically the same thing. It's skill-based, behavioral-based things that if you're loyal to them, you will get results. They work. Yeah. Well, I'm so grateful for you being on the show, for everything you're doing with your organization and just the person that you are. Well, thank you. And likewise, the fact that you're doing this and being able to talk about what you're going through is just, it's so powerful. Sharing our stories is powerful. If this episode spoke to you, please share it with a friend, family member, or someone you love. Because No Magic Pill is not just a podcast.

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