Every few weeks, I share provocative ideas about culture, consciousness, and creativity, alongside beautiful artwork, in my newsletter. I also host the Hurry Slowly podcast, teach online courses, and practice energy work. Learn more at: www.jkg.co
When the time is ripe ⚡️ 🍑 🌱
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Hi Friends- The first interview of the new season of Hurry Slowly came out last week, and I’m so excited about it! It’s a conversation with my friend Dina Schapiro, a therapist who works with folks on integrating plant medicine experiences. We cover a lot of ground in a deep conversation about how healing happens. We discuss the effects of doing traditional talk therapy versus working with plant medicine, why we need to focus more on coming into the heart rather than healing with the head, and how we can let go of old, limiting beliefs on a cellular level. Here’s an excerpt: “If you think about gestalt therapy or presence-centered approaches to therapy… one of the reasons it’s so powerful is because the healing happens right here, right now. It doesn’t happen back then. It doesn’t happen in the future. It can only happen now. Just like breathing, right? Breathing is very healing and very centering. It didn’t happen yesterday and it didn’t happen tomorrow. It’s happening now. When you’re sitting with a plant, there is no other moment than now. And when you are now in that moment dealing with ancestral stuff, you are healing it. When you are now in that moment working on your trauma, you are healing it. You are taking yourself to that place, and repairing the nerve damage that also has created a pattern in your life that perpetuates older patterns. It’s a healing on all levels.” Listen to Dina Schapiro: Manifesting from the Heart – In other news, you’ve got a wee bit more time to take advantage of the early-bird special for my 4-week course on Finding Your Voice. The $30 discount runs through December 15th. The course will be unfolding January 3 - Feb 6, 2024 and we are going to be doing some deep exploration and healing work around learning how to express ourselves in a more expansive, empowered way. If you’re on the cusp of stepping into your voice in a new way, this is a great practice space for you! Learn more and register here. Much love, When the time is ripe.I speak to a spiritual teacher from time to time, who uses very evocative metaphors. To share a dramatic example: They compared me allowing myself to go into negative thought patterns again and again to a dog returning to eat its own vomit. A disgusting but extremely useful metaphor if you want to stop getting lured into old thought loops. Anyway, after I went through a breakup with my partner this past spring, I was saying to this teacher how I wanted to understand the purpose of our relationship, what it was "for", so to speak. They responded by telling me that that insight was not yet ripe, and that when it was, it would fall into my hands like a beautiful peach ready to be eaten. But for now: The peach was not ready. Lately, I've been returning to this metaphor of ripening as I try to cultivate patience. Particularly with regard to thinking about finding new romance. An impatient (and perhaps lonely) part of me misses having a partner in crime and wants to rush ahead to find someone to fill that void. But a wiser part of me knows that I am hardly ready for any type of new romance as I stand here amidst the half-finished construction site that is me rebuilding the way that I relate to myself. Your most important relationship is your relationship with yourself, as they say. And I am deep in the throes of working on that relationship right now. Do I really need to add a new one to the mix? The answer is no. And, as this wise teacher said to me, Why would you want to bite into a piece of unripe fruit? When the timing is right, the flesh will be soft, plump, ready — and when I bite into it, sweet, juicy nectar will flow out. But right now, the flesh would be hard and unforgiving — to bite into it would yield only a dry, bitter taste. * Why must we be in such a rush? Why can't we allow situations, relationships, intimacy, the time and space they need to ripen? Why do we expend so much energy trying to force things? * I've mentioned before in this newsletter how, at the end of my morning meditation, I often ask my angels/teachers/guides/ancestors, What would you have me know today? Recently, when I was (once again) feeling this urgency, this desire to force, to try to control, to "make something happen" for myself romantically, I asked them to help me tune into a deeper understanding of what was unfolding, to help me be at peace with the space I am inhabiting right now, without trying to "escape" to somewhere else. (Or to someone else.) What they told me was quite beautiful: They said, Be patient. We are sending you someone but we want to make sure that you will see them when they arrive. Right now, you don't yet believe that you deserve this person and so if we sent them to you, you wouldn't see them. You wouldn't be able to receive our gift. And we don't want you to miss it! I found that comforting. The idea that I, too, needed to ripen. So I pass this metaphor onto you now. Where would it create more peace or patience for you to think about ripening? What situations or relationships might require more time and space to ripen into something gorgeous and beautiful that will — eventually — fall right into your hand?
LINK ABOUT IT What we remember. A beautiful longread by Sally Tilsdale about the untrustworthiness of memory, and, by extension, of memoir. “Saying This happened to me is a fallacy, and therefore I am who I am because this happened to me is a gross fallacy… If everything we remember changes each time we remember it, if our efforts to remember are influenced by every comment and story and photo we encounter, if all that effort of sorting and talking and writing about our pasts moves us ever more toward watching an imagined self, how can we know ourselves?” I wish I had nothing to sell you. I appreciated this post from leadership coach Chela Davison about the internal discomfort that arises around selling yourself and your products: “Do I love the way we’re living? Where everything and everyone is a commodity? Where even our children regard themselves as a brand? Where consciously or not, we seem to collectively believe that wealth acquisition will save us from existential terror? Where buying and selling happen faster and more frequently than my complaints about this relentless laundry situation? No, I do not.” “Ideas seem to gestate best in a void — when that void is filled, it is more difficult to access them. In our consumption-driven society, almost all voids are filled, blocking moments of greater clarity and creativity. Things that block voids are called ‘avoids.’” I enjoyed this profile of the artist Andrea Zittel by my friend Bailey. That quote is from Zittel’s manifesto “These Things I Know for Sure,” which is absolutely also worth a look. Identifying and fixing the root causes of burnout. "Burnout is a syndrome that may cause a person to become depressed; depression might predispose a person to burnout. But ultimately, burnout is distinct in that work is always at its root. People often feel better as soon as they’re able to get away from the cause of their stress, Parker said. That’s not usually the case with depression." On feeling a responsibility to speak out. A conversation with writer and activist Fariha Róisín about rage, liberation, and integrating the personal and the political into your writing practice. A fascinating and strange profile of Joyce Carole Oates, who has written 63 novels and 47 collections of short stories. Let’s normalize asking questions for clarity rather than moving based on the story you’ve created in your mind. I like Claudia Dawson’s idea of creating a working manifesto of free will. What does it mean to be two-spirit? Why 2023 was a great year for women in film. Ezra Klein talks to Rabbi Sharon Brous. 5 stages of climate feelings.
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Jocelyn K. Glei
Every few weeks, I share provocative ideas about culture, consciousness, and creativity, alongside beautiful artwork, in my newsletter. I also host the Hurry Slowly podcast, teach online courses, and practice energy work. Learn more at: www.jkg.co
Deep dog thoughts at Acadia National Park. Hi Friends- I’ve been talking about gestation, frustration, and unnaturally long cycles of trying to understand the path forward for many months now. The cycle looks something like this: Phase I: I don’t know what I’m doing (gestation, faith, patience) Phase II: Okay, I think I know what I’m doing (mild clarity, beginning to plan & take action) Phase III: Wait a minute, do I know what I’m doing?? (pause, reflect & gestate still more) Phase IV: I know...
Artwork by Pavel Mishkin, see the animated gifs here. Hi Friends- This opening will be short and sweet because I’m on retreat. 😌 But I’ll share one small seed — a concept from Gary Nabhan that I discovered in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass. Restoration = Re-story-ation What a beautiful idea, that the restoration of anything — your peace of mind, for example, or the vitality of our Earth — depends upon learning how to tell ourselves new stories. This idea feels very resonant as...
Artwork by Poulina Bogatskaya. Hi Friends- I’ve been thinking about teachers lately, and that’s the subject of this week’s essay: “Expanding the Aperture of Your Curiosity.” One of my great teachers has been the writer E.F. Schumacher and his book Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered. Schumacher talks about the power of ideas, and how they serve as instruments for our thinking — how we think with and through them, so much so that we cannot think outside of them. How culture...