Hi Friends-
A quick housekeeping note to start: I have just moved to a new email provider, which involved some much-needed consolidation and re-organization of my various email lists. I won't bore you with the logistics!
Suffice to say: If you are new to this newsletter, welcome. I send messages every 2-3 weeks, and I always try to offer something of value.
Okay, onwards to the real talk...
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It has been a wonderful and strange summer in the land of Jocelyn — filled with much reflecting, releasing, and ripening.
Speaking of releasing, I wanted to talk to you today about a concept I've been chewing on for the past few years, which is the idea of "relationship hygiene." (I know, it's not a sexy term, but it has a certain utility!)
Much like brushing your teeth so that plaque doesn't build up, the idea behind relationship hygiene is to name, express, and release small hurts or slights as they occur so that they don't build up and fester.
I don't know about you, but in the past I have had a strong tendency to suppress a lot of my anger and pain — and I became so good at it that sometimes I didn't even consciously notice that something had hurt me at all.
But "consciously" is the key word there, because those slights were still subconsciously getting stored away somewhere deep inside me... each hurt a tiny molecule of lava that was building toward a future eruption.
Because, as I'm sure you well know, the things we ignore or push down always resurface — given enough time. And often that emergence comes in the form of an unexpected explosion.
I remember an acquaintance once told me about an expression in her mother tongue that loosely translated as "a woman has a thousand pockets." Which meant: A thousand pockets for tucking away every little slight to eventually be retrieved for examination at some future date.
While I am a woman who very much likes for her clothes to include pockets, I wanted to stop stockpiling little hurts and pains for later. Because I knew I was nurturing a toxic residue that would build up and thicken over time and eventually get blasted everywhere when I couldn't tolerate my own suppression any longer.
So I've been engaging consciously with what I call relationship hygiene, which means doing my best to acknowledge and apologize for hurts I inflict and to recognize and name hurts I experience in as close to "real time" as I can muster.
For the moment, real time often looks like a lag time of a few hours to a few days as there is a steep learning curve in transforming from being a pro at suppression to acknowledging your feelings in real time.
In practice, this means talking about the small, niggling irritations and slights that don't really seem like a big deal, but that nevertheless stick with you and slowly start to alter the energy of how you relate to someone.
I'll give you a mundane example: A close friend of mine said something recently about some other friends of mine that felt dismissive and a little disrespectful. I winced internally in the moment but didn't say anything. (I must admit here that I have a particular intolerance for anyone saying anything the least bit negative about my friends — it really gets my dander up.)
After that interaction, I noticed I was looping on it in my internal dialogue. I was starting to build this negative narrative about what my friend had meant in saying those words, and I could feel myself generating this energy of separation between us, of otherness and not belonging.
And let me be clear: What I am talking about here is very subtle. I wasn't angry, my friend hadn't said anything nasty or mean. This was a very, very small slight. I had to really tune into myself to recognize that I was trying to tuck that little interaction away into my pocket for safekeeping. That even though it was very small, it was also going to create a very small amount of residue.
So, a few hours later, I called them back and I told them that I was feeling a little bothered by that thing that they had said. They were then able to explain more about what they had meant in saying those words, and I was able to realize that I had not fully understood what they were trying to express. In the process, they got to clarify, soften, and expand on their perspective in a way that comforted me. Any residue was immediately cleared and released.
What also often happens during these "relationship hygiene" conversations is that it opens space for the other person to rummage around in their pockets and share anything that they have been holding onto as well. I would say most of the "hygiene moments" that I have had with this particular friend end up being exchanges. We create space for each other to say "this made me feel a little sensitive" or "it felt a little off when you did this..." So the feedback and the clearing and the softening into deeper intimacy gets to happen on both sides.
It's probably obvious, but I should note that this isn't something you can do with just anyone! I only engage in this practice with close friends with whom I have already built a solid foundation of trust. Not everyone is ready for this level of accountability and intimacy in relationship.
My friend who I mentioned above has, in fact, explicitly opted into this practice with me. I consider it a great gift to be so committed to a friendship that we're both willing to do the unglamorous, often uncomfortable, maintenance work to ensure we're in relationship for a long time to come.
I hope this reflection invites you to tune into what you might be tucking away in your pockets. What small stones, or old residue, you might wish to release. I find the less I hold onto, the more I can soften. The more I release, the more space there is to expand.
—
As the seasons change, I'm looking forward to sharing more about my new projects coming to fruition, including a new season of Hurry Slowly.
One exciting tidbit I can share right now is that I will finally be re-opening my popular RESET course to new students on an ongoing basis in just a few weeks.
So if you are in need of a "cosmic tune-up for your workday," put a pin in your calendar for late September. More details will be forthcoming soon. 🙌
Much love,
Jocelyn
LINK ABOUT IT
What are dreams for? A fascinating essay about how the muscle twitches that we have during dreaming help us learn more about our bodies. "In a series of papers, Blumberg articulated his theory that the brain uses rem sleep to 'learn' the body. You wouldn't think that the body is something a brain needs to learn, but we aren't born with maps of our bodies; we can't be, because our bodies change by the day, and because the body a fetus ends up becoming might differ from the one encoded in its genome. 'Infants must learn about the body they have,' Blumberg told me. 'Not the body they were supposed to have.'"
Poet Andrea Gibson on life, death, joy, and not "double suffering." This interview with spoken word poet Andrea Gibson on We Can Do Hard Things is absolutely incredible and very intense. Having just recently received news that her cancer has returned and may be terminal, she talks to hosts Glennon and Abby about how she entered a bliss state and many of her anxieties and fears fell away as she confronted her own mortality. It's a beautiful conversation about being present and embodying love in every moment. If the topic feels too heavy, skip to 1hr 23mins in, where she reads her poem "Tincture" at the end. It's a marvel (also intense!).
What have we learned from a summer of climate reckoning? I thoroughly enjoyed this incredibly lucid interview with climate scientist Kate Marvel. It is neither doomy nor pollyanna-ish, it is just real. She breaks down how ocean currents, air currents, forest fires, aerosoles, greenhouse gases and more impact climate in a very simple and clear way, and talks about what's ahead and the way forward in a manner that's comfortingly matter of fact. Highly recommended if you're open to understanding the uncertainty of our future more clearly.
Ancestors to Elements: Reconnect to nature, mystery & joy. My dear friend Sebene Selassie has a new 6-week course launching in early October that she has been ripening for many moons now. For those of you who don't already know Sebene, she is a wise, thoughtful, kind, and super-talented writer and teacher — and the only guest to have been on Hurry Slowly three times! The course is designed to help you embody the sacred paradox of belonging and to navigate what Sebene calls our "accelerated curriculum of personal and planetary troubles." Amen.
Some novels & music I've been enjoying lately:
This 3+ hour mix from sound artist & healer Sara Auster.
This mostly instrumental jungle dance vibes mix.
Demon Copperhead. Barbara Kingsolver's great Appalachian novel, which takes on the roots of the opiod crisis. Her use of language is stunning.
Circe. Madeline Miller's excellent followup to The Song of Achilles, about a goddess discovering her magical powers.
Learned by Heart. Emma Donaghue's latest about Anne Lister and Eliza Raine's bittersweet girlhood romance.
SHOUT-OUTS:
The illustrations are from: Alberto Miranda, who is based in Madrid, Spain.
Link ideas from: Sterling Cruz-Herr, Sebene Selassie, and Andrew Glei.
You can support this newsletter by: Leaving a review for Hurry Slowly on iTunes.
Website: jkg.co
Twitter (X): @jkglei
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