Hi Friends-
It's fourteen days into 2024 and twenty-four days into winter, and I've been reflecting on seasonal rhythms. And how my own rhythms do or don't align with the rhythms of the collective.
While many are embracing that fresh "new year, new you" energy, I find myself resting in a period of uncomfortable liminality, waiting for my next wave of projects/incarnations/reinventions to fully crystalize.
So I decided to make that the subject of my latest podcast episode. "Where are my wings?" is basically a live broadcast from the awkward soup of transformation that contemplates inflection points, the rhythms of creativity, letting go of heaviness, and the frustration of finding yourself still hanging out in the waiting room.
Listen to "Where are my wings?" →
One thing I am crystal clear on — even in this liminal season — is the joy of my energy practice. Both the 1-1 sessions and group work I've been doing have really been lighting me up, and I'm looking forward to sharing more in that realm in 2024.
Along those lines, two new glimmers of possible interest:
I'm thrilled to be offering a new 2.5 hour workshop on Sun, Feb 11th called Radiant Attention for Self & Collective Care that's about learning how to connect with your own inner healer.
I'll be sharing tools and techniques for clearing, comforting, nourishing, and rebalancing your energy system so that you can consistently show up for yourself and others in your full radiance.
Learn more about Radiant Attention for Self & Collective Care →
I'm also offering a limited-time discount on all 90-minute, 1-1 energy sessions with yours truly through March — as long as they are booked by January 20th. (The discounted cost is $199 instead of $225.) You can learn more about what a 1-1 session looks like & see my calendar here.
My favorite feedback after a recent session: "There is a new energetic sheriff in town! I feel released from old limits — both self-imposed and vestigial, ancient." 🤠 ✨
Btw: I'm now opening these energy sessions to folks beyond those who have already taken a course with me. If you haven't worked with me before but are curious about a 1-1 session, you can hit reply on this email to schedule a 10-min call to see if it's a good fit. : )
Scroll on for an essay on the superpowers of being sensitive (and why it also requires more "energetic grooming"), plus links, links, links!
Sending warmth 🙌,
Jocelyn
Sensitivity is a superpower.
In my early 40s, I had one of those aha moments that is so obvious it feels dumb. It led to me finally acknowledging that I am a sensitive person.
In other life, in another culture, I might have understood — and even appreciated — my sensitivity a long time ago. But, as I'm sure you know, being sensitive is most certainly not regarded as a desirable trait in this particular culture.
The world we live in perceives sensitivity as a liability—
a fact I caught onto young, and then quickly set about enveloping myself in layer upon layer of armor — e.g. aloofness, fierce self-reliance, a quick wit, self-deprecation, sarcasm — to protect the soft underbelly of my true nature.
It's only now, from my perch on the 4th floor (aka my 40s), that I can appreciate both the vulnerability and the power of that sensitivity.
That my sensitivity is what empowers me to: tune into the zeitgeist, feel and facilitate group dynamics, connect to my own and others' energy systems, trust and follow my intuition, feel into what's not being said, and so on.
And that my sensitivity is also what opens me to absorbing moods (positive and negative) from the collective, taking responsibility for things that aren't mine, and over-attuning to the energies of those around me.
The other day I was trying to think about a useful metaphor for this kind of energetic sensitivity. What came to me was the image of a lint roller. 🙃
The idea being that if you are sensitive, it can feel like you move through the world with this extra coating of stickiness, which allows you to attune to, and absorb, things both positive and negative.
Some days, I feel like I'm just collecting psychic lint as I move through the world. By the end of the day, I'm just this fuzzy cloud 😶🌫️ — a confusing agglomeration of moods and energies that are not entirely mine.
The point of this metaphor is to emphasize the importance — for anyone who feels particularly sensitive — of regularly engaging in some form of psychic or energetic grooming, if you will.
To regularly take time out to notice what has come into your field, to acknowledge what's yours and what is not, and to then "give back" the things you don't need to carry so that you can rest clear and easy in your own energetic sovereignty.
Just like we brush our teeth, or shave, or comb our hair every morning to groom our physical self, having regular mindfulness or energetic or somatic routines can be a way of "grooming" our energy.
Mind you, I recognize that grooming is a bit of an odd word. Given our cultural obsession with beauty, it can feel like it's connected to control and perfectionism. That we groom ourselves in order to achieve some broadly acceptable version of attractiveness.
And grooming ourselves into energetic "perfection" or acceptability is certainly not what I'm going for here.
In other animal cultures, grooming plays a very specific role: It is a daily form of care and social connection. It is a way to show affection. This is the sense in which I am using the word.
That we regularly show our energetic systems some love by scanning the mind and the body, noticing the psychic schmutz that we have collected, and then gently sweeping it away so that we can re-settle, re-center, and re-ground — which then allows us to be with ourselves, and show up for our work and others, with more generosity and clarity.
The more I grow into myself and make peace with my own sensitivities, the more essential these routines and practices of self-affection feel to me.
They help me find more equanimity and be less reactive, they help me recover more quickly when I do get off kilter, and they help me attune more keenly to myself and what's available in the world around me.
✨
p.s. Part of what we will be doing in my new Radiant Attention workshop is learning practices for soothing, re-centering, and resetting our energy systems. If you want to expand your toolkit in this arena, I would love to have you join.
LINK ABOUT IT
How to discover your own taste. A fascinating conversation between Ezra Klein and journalist Kyle Chayka about how the Internet and algorithms have flattened our taste & the ramifications for self-expression, art, and the voice. "I think these ecosystems and platforms prevent us from experiencing difficult content in a healthy way. We don't have to fight through something. We don't have to be patient. We don't have to... consider our own opinion as it develops because we always have that possibility of clicking away... It's almost like boredom doesn't exist, like difficulty doesn't exist, scarcity doesn't exist. A feeling I've been having a lot lately is that scarcity is often what creates meaning."
Creativity as a way of alchemizing pain. I really enjoyed this conversation between Suleika Jaouad of the Isolation Journals and Diego Perez, aka Yung Pueblo. "I've arrived at a point where I don't want to have tough skin. I want to have porous skin. I want to feel the things that are happening to me, the terrible things, the beautiful things. I want to be open to it all. And I think for me, creativity was the vehicle to getting to that place. Instead of numbing something painful, creativity was a way of engaging with that pain and, in engaging with it and examining it, perhaps even having the opportunity to alchemize it into something interesting or useful or maybe even beautiful."
Cherishment: a psychology of the heart. This piece is slow to get started, but I love the idea of "cherishment consciousness" that it advocates for. "In Japanese a very simple, everyday word, amaeru, an intransitive verb, denoting 'to wish or to expect to be loved' in the sense of primary love. Amae is the noun derived from it, while the adjective amai means 'sweet.' These words are so common that 'indeed the Japanese find it hard to believe that there is no word for amaeru in the European languages.' Moreover, in Japanese there is a rich vocabulary describing the various attitudes and moods that develop if the wish to amaeru is frustrated or must be repressed."
Digging as deep as possible for no reason. I've really been enjoying The Whippet, "a newsletter for the terminally curious." The current edition has a wild array of fun facts, including this one: "The Kola Superdeep Borehole is 12 kilometres deep (7.5 miles). For context, the deepest mine is 4 kilometres deep. Cruising altitude for a passenger jet is 11 kilometres up. The bottom of the Mariana Trench is 11 kilometres down. I really want you to understand that if you jimmied open that tiny rusty cover, there would be nothing between you and a hole that is deeper than the Mariana Trench. They began drilling in 1970 and stopped in 1995 when they ran out of funds. The aim was just to try and drill as deep into the earth's crust as they could."
Roxane Gay's book recommendations. I will be adding a bunch of these to my reading stack.
Deep fakes are real. Check out this fake version of writer Ethan Mollick, speaking in multiple languages, based on a 30-second video clip. Yikes.
What I wish someone had told me about starting a meditation practice.
Ancient indigenous songlines match long-sunken landscape off Australia.
Enshittification, an amusing term.
Offerings: How you can work with me ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ Last chance, y'all! Save $60 off registration for RESET, a cosmic tune-up for your workday, through Jan 15th. If you're dealing with burnout or just coming into awareness that the way you are working is not sustainable, RESET is the reboot you need. It will show you how to let go of the soul-sucking productivity mindset of grind culture and move into what I call a "heart-centered approach to productivity." Click here to opt into an educational newsletter and podcast series about the course and get the discount code. New year's special: Book a 1-1 energy session for any time now through March for $199 instead of the usual $225. If you book by January 20th, that is! My energy practice focuses on coming back into the body, opening the heart, leaning into self-expression, and cultivating deeper awareness and self-trust. It's particularly well-suited to those looking to get into deeper touch with their purpose, creativity, or intuition. Deep, playful, transformation are my watchwords for 2024. Learn more about what a session entails and book here. Learn how to soothe yourself and your energy system in my new workshop, Radiant Attention for Self & Collective Care on Sunday, February 11th. This juicy 2.5 hour workshop will teach you how to connect with your own inner healer as I share practical tools & techniques for relating to — and soothing yourself — with tenderness and compassion so that you can show up more fully for your work, your friends, your family, and a world that needs your gifts. This is going to be a really warm, cozy, regenerative class, and I can't wait to teach it! Learn more and book your spot here. ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ ✨ |
SHOUT-OUTS:
The haunting paintings are from: Rita Quattrocchi, who is based in Italy.
Link ideas from: Exponential View, Austin Kleon, and Sebene Selassie.
You can support me & my work by: Participating in one of the many offerings listed above! : )
Website: jkg.co
Twitter/X: @jkglei
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