Jewel's Comeback Story

00:00:09 Speaker 1: Welcome back, everyone to another episode of Comeback Stories. The honor to have you here. We have a very special guest with us today. Somebody you may know as a recording ours that sold over thirty million albums worldwide, but somebody we know just as an amazing human being doing amazing things. We'd love to welcome Jewel to the show. Jewel, thanks for coming. Hey, guys, thank you for making the time for us. We'd like to dive right in to stories. Could you tell us what it was like for you growing up? Big broad question, Where do I start? What was it like for me growing up? I was raised in Alaska. It was raised on a homestead by a family that escaped Europe during the Second World War to have children in a free country. It was my grandmother and my grandfather and they had eight children in the middle of the wilderness in Alaska before it was a state, so they lived off the land. It was a really extraordinary childhood from my father. My grandmother had been an aspiring opera singer and a poetess, and so she taught all of her children to sing and to write and to do art. And then my dad was the one that sort of picked up where she left off, and he became a professional musician, making two albums locally, and we sang in a hotel for tourists and Anchorage, Alaska. And then my mom left when I was eight, and my dad and I became a duet at that age. So I started doing probably five hour gigs, probably two nights a week from the age of eight, a lot of bars, a lot of lumberjack joints, fisherman haunts. And then that's also when my dad. Yeah, my dad changed a lot during the divorce. I think it was a real trigger for him. We went back to moving on the homestead, so I grew up living on that same spot of land. We only ate what we could kill or can basically no television, no running water. It was an incredible way to be raised. But as I mentioned, it was really difficult on my dad. When my mom laughed, he had so much trauma and such a difficult childhood that when he went to Vietnam it was relaxing for him, which is pretty extraordinary. I've never heard anybody say that. And so yeah, when he came home from the war and my mom laughed, he started what we would now call trauma triggering of course we didn't know those words at the time. He started drinking to try and medicate those things and began being abusive at that age. So I ended up moving out by the time I was fifteen, and that's when I sort of embarked on my own and on my own what I call my happiness journey. I know that the journey has definitely led to happiness, but I'm sure going out on your own at the age of fifteen years old had it been scary. I had to have been like, what do I do now? I kind of like you had to grow up faster than having the normal kid teenager experience. What was that like for you? You know? Something I found really interesting in the bars was I knew I was in pain. The change, obviously, the pain of my mom leaving, my dad suddenly drinking, my dad suddenly hitting me was painful. And as I sang in the bars, I watched people and I could tell we were all dealing with pain, and I was just had a front row seat to watching people try different techniques. And some people use drugs, some people used sex, some people used these really strange relationships you'd see people get into. Some people just used alcohol, some used rage, and over the course of the years from eight to fifteen, I remember just making myself a promise that I would never drink and I would never do drugs, and instead I would try to understand, what do you do with pain? Why aren't we taught about pain? Why aren't we taught what we do with it? And I had a hero, which was an animal. As funny as that sounds, the buffalo is the only animal that heads directly into a storm, and I just found that fascinating because the quickest way is through, and with pain, it seems like we wanted to avoid it, and what if I could be the buffalo and moved toward it? And so I started journaling and writing and trying to use writings as a way of moving toward my pain. And it worked. It made me feel better. I didn't make everything better, It didn't make my life better, but I noticed it was a considerable difference in how I felt. And so when I was fifteen and sort of face with this prospect of do I spend another year in a cabin with a guy who's mean to me, or do I just move out into a cabin by myself, I was excited to just move out on my own, even though, of course it was scary and I had to learn how to pay rent to bills and all that. The thing, though, that was truly terrifying, wasn't the bills. It was it was the fact that I knew statistically, kids like me end up repeating the cycle. I could tell, you know, just watching my environment, that as much as I had a genetic inheritance, you know that might predispose me to diabetes, I had an emotional inheritance. And in my mind it looked like a river. It looked like there's a whole river behind me, and I was swept up in this river, and there was a course to it. You know. I knew I was destined to be with somebody who was an addict, or me become an addict or abusive or be abused. And I didn't want to be a statistic And then I didn't know how at fifteen to say I knew how to beat those odds. I didn't have a plan. I didn't have anything that indicated I would do any better. And so before I decided to move out, I really stopped and thought and wrote a lot about it. And what I came to was sort of this idea. I had been reading a lot of philosophy at the time, and the idea of nature versus nurture, and it really made me think, you know, what if my nurture was so poor, I could never get to know my own nature. You know, I didn't know the word trauma at the time, but basically what I was wondering and what if my trauma caused me to form my personality in a way that would never really allow me to know what my nature would be like had I not known that trauma. And so I was really curious if there was a way to renurture myself. You know, in today's terms, we would just call that, you know, thanks to neural plasticity, we would call it rewiring. But there was nowhere to go to learn a new emotional language. You know, I could go to a community college for Spanish, but there was nowhere. Nobody was talking about an emotional language. And the millions of set points that it would take for me to learn a new emotional way of relating to myself, of relating to pain, related to conflict, all these things. But at least it was a challenge, and it felt like a clearly laid out challenge, and so that was my job. My job was to try and learn a new emotional language. My job was to try and learn if happiness was a learnable skill, you know, if it wasn't taught in my home, was it ever learnable? Was it teachable? And so, in an odd way, you know, the beauty of youth, the ignorance of youth. I sort of set off on this ambitious mission, saying, all right, this is the war I'm up against. But I was into the fight, as it were. I love to talk of learning how to renurture yourself. We love to acknowledge mentors and teachers in our lives that have helped us grow in our perspective and early ways of coping with things. Is there somebody that you could credit as being a mentor along your journey of learning how to renurture yourself and to learn how to talk to yourself differently. I I was a real isolated kid, you know. From me, I learned to stay safe by isolating, so I didn't really make friends. I didn't have any mentors around me at the time I went off to school. I started having panic attacks, I started becoming agoraphobic. But I kept relying on nature. So it might sound odd, but my relationship to nature. I learned how to be human from nature, you know, by studying nature taught me pretty much everything I know about everything I've learned about psychology and emotional everything. Trying to think of like a concrete example to give you, there's two that really come to mind. One is, you know, I was maybe thirteen on the edge of a cliff in Alaska, on the ranch I was raised on. And the tides in Alaska are really large. They go out for a mile and come back in. It takes a long time, and I was incredibly, incredibly oppressed, despairing, and I sat there and just watched the tide go out, and after a while it started to finally come back in. And for some reason, that one thing struck me. How if you look everywhere in nature, the culmination of the entire universe is change. That's the common denominators change. You know, that tide took a long time, but it did start to come back in. And how could I sit there and be so arrogant as to believe I was the only thing in all of the universe that wouldn't change that My bad mood was permanent, and suddenly I laughed at the absurdity of what I was indulging in and that I was part of something larger and I was connected to something larger, and even though it didn't happen to be my mom or my dad, it was powerful and it was beautiful and it was there to teach me. And so that became like a you know, something that I integrated, and it's something I work with kids with subtle ideation now and something I tell them is this tide story and basically the idea of emotional impermanence. And I learned that concept from the ocean. I learned that concept by realizing I'm part of something larger than me and that that's a beautiful thing. So that's one example, I guess. But now my mentors for whatever reason, you know. And then when I became homeless and just isolation was always my safety thing, it actually took me a long time to learn to connect and to find any kind of safety through connection. I can relate a lot to the nature thing. I just moved to San Diego about almost a year ago now, and I feel like for a lot of my life I really didn't get out into nature and now I live right on the ocean, and it has taught me so much over the last year as I just watch it and the magnitude of it, but the flow, the consistency, and just how big it is. So I'm getting a late start on it, but I definitely can relate to what you're saying. You had mentioned the relationship with your mom and dad. Can you just touch on that a little bit about what it looked like growing up for both your mom and dad. I know I've heard your story, and I think it's an important part to kind of connect the dots. Yeah, my mom left when I was a my dad took over raising us. Looking back at his childhood now, I can't believe he did as good as he did. He had a shockingly abusive childhood, every type of abuse you can It was really a difficult thing. He has a beautiful book, by the way, called Son of a Midnight Land, and it's it's a beautiful account of what it's like to be raised in that type of psychological, physical, emotional, everything abuse and to try and heal. When I left home at fifteen, I didn't think i'd have a reallyationship with him again. I just left and was like, I got to figure out how to heal. Just sort of cut your losses and move forward. My dad started getting sober in his sixties and he's seventy four now, and we have an amazing relationship. And people often ask me, like, how did you heal your relationship with your dad? You know, I didn't really. I healed myself and my dad independently because he wanted to healed himself, and we were able to meet as two different people. I'm sorry is nice. There's a lot of people that go through their life, you know, and they don't ever hear the word sorry, And it is nice, but it doesn't earn you back a relationship. Change behavior earns you back a relationship. And so it's through my dad's changed behavior that I was able to relate to him in a whole new way and trust him in a whole new way. And because of my own healing, I was able to meet him where he was now, you know, without speaking to him through a bunch of old passed her or passed wounds or pasted grudges. So my dad's a pretty easy little thing to wrap up. That's it. It's pretty nice where it is now. I feel really lucky my son knows him. My mom's a whole other animal. I wrote a book called Never Broken, and it took all three hundred and fifty pages to describe my mom because she's a much different scenario. But as a child, you know, I really missed her. I would hitchhike two hundred miles to go see her as a nine year old. As a ten year old, I was really missing her at show up on her doorstep unannounced. I don't know how much of the story you want to go into, but it's a crazy psychological drama. The long story short. She became my manager years later when I was in San Diego. I got discovered as a homeless kid, and she came down to start to sort of help and then began to co manage and then ultimately manage. And she's a very spiritual woman. Yeah, a lot of people really like her still do. When in about two thousand and three, I realized that all my money was gone and nothing was actually what it seemed, and she wasn't actually who she appeared to be, And recovering from that was an incredible feat, an incredible journey all over again to be able to do that. And again, like I didn't have access to therapists as a kid, by the time I was thirty four, I definitely could have had access to therapists, but I had been so mentally abused and spiritually abused, psychologically abused that I didn't want anybody to touch my mind. And so I started to develop a whole new series of exercises to help myself heal. And that curriculum alone is I've based a ton of other stuff on for other people that are healing. I've heard you say that you didn't understand the relationship with your mom until your thirties. Is is this what you're talking about? Is that the the understanding that you finally knew who she was based on what she was doing with the money situation. Yeah, it's so complex, but yeah, my mom portrayed herself in one way and basically behaved another, and I didn't know it until I was about thirty four, And then I did have to go through my life and not only fare at out the difference between who I thought she was versus who she actually was, the amount of betrayal that was involved in that, but also having to really go back through every single thing I'd been told about my life by her and realized they weren't actually true. And so a lot of things I considered facts in my life I'll try and think of, like a really specific example. Oh, she had said my dad left. She had said my dad blackmailed her so that she couldn't have us kids after the divorce, and that he took us and that's why she couldn't have us, And for some reason I just always accepted that as a kid, I guess that i'd really thought about it. My dad didn't really act like he wanted us, so why would he blackmailer to have us? I guess it didn't make a ton of sense, But you know, the truth was, she just didn't want to be a mom, and she left, and my dad took over raising us because he didn't have a choice, and he actually did the right thing, you know, he took us. And instead I spent my whole childhood hating him, thinking he had blackmailed my mom, when the truth was that isn't how it happened at all. So from eight to eighteen years old, you lived in twenty two different places. Your dad has PTSD. He takes you but doesn't want you, your mom leaves, what would you say of all of that? I know you were homeless at some point, living in a car, Like what was your bottom? What would you say was your rock bottom? I'm trying to remember when I've always been kind of practical. I asked myself, you know, did I want to kill myself? And I didn't. I wanted to figure out how to be happy, and so I just made that promise to myself. And it was that day on the cliff. So I don't know that that's a bottom. It's just that I would say, do you want to die? And I'd say, no, what do you want? I'd say, I just want to learn how to be happy? And I go, well, what am I going to do about it? So every day was just what am I going to do about it? And every time I got hit with a new setback, It's like do I want to die? No? What am I going to do about it? And so that just meant every single day I had to come up with something new. I had to come up with a different tool, do something different today than I did yesterday, and maybe it would have a different outcome. And so I approached it kind of I mean a scientist is a dumb way of explaining it. But I really tried to be that logical about it. I was stubborn. I the only true rebellious thing I could do in my life was live. Everybody would expect you to kill yourself, so that's not very surprising, it's not very rebellious. I really wanted to figure out how to be happy. I wanted to figure out I refused to leave this planet without having what I felt entitled to, which was happiness. It's just that nobody was coming for me. I had to see what was I going to do for myself? What did I owe myself? And for me? That's what like shoplifting was about. I shoplifted for a really long time. It was during that time I was homeless. So I ended up homeless because I wouldn't have sex with a boss when he propositioned me, and he wouldn't give me my rent my paycheck, and I couldn't pay rent, so I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen, which was just horrible. But I never regretted, like my decision to not sleep with my boss, like I didn't want to be leveraged like that was part of my rebellion. It was like, I'm not going to kill myself and I'm not calamity leverage me no matter where that takes me. And so that was a really difficult time. You know, being homeless was very frightening. You definitely are reduced to being an animal. People look at you like you're an animal. They treat you like your filth. They won't even walk down the same stride at the side of the street as you. They want to cross the street so they can avoid looking at you. It was wildly dehumanizing and scary. You know, my panic attack skyrocketed, my agoraphobious skyrocketed, and so did my shoplifting. And I was in a dressing room one day. I was trying to steal these this dress and I was shoving it down my baggy pants and I looked in the mirror and I saw my reflection. I couldn't avoid what I looked like. I looked like a homeless kid that was stealing. And what struck me is I was a statistic I didn't beat the odds. You know, I that this high and mighty mission I had at fifteen three years earlier. You know, I failed because here I was looking in the mirror as a homeless kid stealing, Like it doesn't get to be a bigger statistic. I mean, I avoided the stripper pole like good for me, super proud, like that was definitely an option. But still here I was in a really bad situation. And it was at that moment that I remembered a quote that Buddhas said that happiness does not depend on who you are or what you have, It depends on what you think. And so I had this strange privilege of being stripped of everything except my thoughts, and I wanted to see if I could turn my life around one thought at a time. But I couldn't witness my thoughts in real time. You know, I didn't know the word disassociation, but it was disassociation. I was so disassociative that I couldn't tell what I was thinking in real time. And so I tried to come up with like a solution. And you know, your hands are the servants of your thoughts. So if you want to know what you're thinking, watch what your hands are doing, because it's your thoughts slowed down into action. And so my huge plan was watch what your hands do for three weeks and then write everything down and see if you can figure out what you're thinking. It was like a really silly life plan, but it's what I did for three weeks. Every time I opened a door, I wrote it down. Every time I washed my hands, I wrote it down. Every time I stole, because I did not quit stealing right away, just whatever they did, I wrote it down. At the end of three weeks, I sit there and I look at all my notes, and I mean, I guess there's kind of a takeaway. I quit believing in myself and some stuff. The much more interesting thing was that my panic attacks disappeared for three weeks. That was like a crazy side effect. I didn't even notice until I sat down and looked at my notes. I was like, wait a minute, I haven't had a panic attack. It was mind blowing. I was like, what the heck made this happen. What I'd stumbled onto was mindfulness, right. That word wasn't a word at the time, But what I basically stumbled onto was being so present. I forgot to think about and worry about anything else because I was so hyper focused on exactly what I was doing each minute of the day. And so that was really interesting. To me and really exciting. And so then from there I just started building on it. I started to get a grip on my panic attacks. But it was all through behavioral practices that I would just sort of invent for myself. Like the next thing I would do was every time I walked upstairs, I would make myself be really present. The word present, I mean, I'm sure it was a word then, it just wasn't in our zeitgeist, you know, like it is now. I just would call it like I'd show up. And I realized that fear was this thief that would take the past and projected into the future. And it was in an effort to keep myself safe. But it was kind of like leaving my house to go look for robbers, like I should probably stay in the house, That's a better thing to do. Just that sometimes being in your body is a really scary, difficult place to be, And so I had to teach myself how to be in my body, how to sit through waves of anxiety without leaving, without disassociating, and then just through more observation and more curiosity, just seeing more patterns. And this is like was the first year. I call it the best, worst time of my life. It might have been my bottom, but it ended up being the most transformative time in my life. Because of these little exercises, I started to get a grip on Like I realized I had to take a concept that I could perceive, and then I had to figure out how to enact it, because if I can't act differently, my life won't be different. And so it's really those skills still to this day that I'm teaching like our kids in our foundation. Mindfulness has had a tremendous impact on my story as well, and being present has transformed my life in so many ways that I honestly sometimes don't think I think too much into the future as far as like visualizing a future, want my future to be. I struggle with a balance as far as Okay, what is too present to where I'm not having a vision for my future? But what is too much future tripping to where it's taking me out of the moment? Like how do you think that you began to find that balance in mindfulness for yourself? It's a really great distinction. I love that, Yeah, being able to future dream, to be able to anchor into what is my motivation in life? Where am I going Where do I want my life to move? Is such an important skill? You know. That isn't worry, That isn't future thinking in a negative way. It's feeling into the present moment and learning you know what is causing me to want to move through life? And where is that? And again I guess because of you know nature, I think and thought about it in terms of migration. You know, migration is an interesting concept. All animals migrate, but humans quit or did we? You know? That was a really interesting thought to me of Okay, what is migration? Let's say migration is going from somewhere I don't thrive to somewhere I will thrive. And so then you have to identify why aren't I thriving here? Like if I'm an elephant, it's that the grass is dry and we don't have enough water, and I want to migrate and move over here so that there's more water and more grass. Well, for humans, we have pretty much usually a lot of the food we need, a lot of the shelter we need. So what does cause us to move throughout our life? What's motivating us? And so spending time on your motivation is an incredibly important thing and I really encourage anybody to really do it. It It took me a good six months to a year to really pin down, like why am I here on this planet? What am I built for? Service is just a big part of my life. I knew it was definitely going to be service oriented, but really defining it. You know, my motivation is it sounds very poetic, but my motivation is to be a spark that ignites a flame that consumes the darkness. I want to be a force for good. Basically. The reason I worded my motivation so specifically is because I used to try to do everything. I tried to be the spark and the fire and the wood and everything, and I burnt myself out, exhausted myself. I'm really just good at a specific thing. It's kind of like what you call my medicine or my nature, and so anything I do, I have to make sure it's aligned to that motivation, to what I believe I'm built here to do, and that inspires me to actually move throughout my life and through time. But that kind of future dreaming in a healthy way, you know, it's not like fantasizing or getting lost in fantasy. It's not getting lost an ego of like I want to be whatever, rich and famous, and no judgment on that either. Just it's good to know what's really what is your intention? What are you really trying to find so that you can anchor into it what things are important to you, so that then you can start to because I personally really believe once you begin to identify those things, your brain that's a pattern matcher, begins to see things and opportunities in doorways that match them. You know, just like when you're on a bicycle and you see the rock in the road and if you stare at the rock, you hit the rock. Having that vision of the future which can change, you get to update it. You know. I don't think we should stay fixated on it, but when you start to see that, it's allowing your brain, as a pattern matcher to start identifying different opportunities that lead toward that, and it is really important. I don't know if that was too vague or if that helped. No, that was great. That was great. I was going to ask you next, like what what did the future dreaming look like as far as music for you? Because I know like in that time you were trying to like like you said before, re nurture yourself, learn new ways of thinking, new ways of being, Like how did you what did future dreaming for your music look like? At that time, I didn't have any musical aspirations. Particularly I was trying to get off the street. It was hard for me to hold down a job. I had bad kidneys, and I kept getting sick and kept getting fired from work for being had tuning me sick days. And then after a while you start looking homeless, and you you know, you go in for seven to eleven to get a job application, and you just don't look right, and you don't have address to give on your job application. It's just hard. So being raised singing, I was like, well, maybe I can just go get a gig in a bar or somewhere. But in San Diego it was a hotbed of like rec labels. A lot of them were down there looking for grunge acts, and so every single venue charged musicians to play there. It was like the opposite of what I needed. I was like, won't anybody pay me to sing there? So I found a coffee shop that was going out of business, and I talked I went in there. Her name was Nancy, and I was like, will you please keep your doors open for a month and maybe I can bring people in. And if I bring people in, maybe you know, I can keep the door money and you can keep the coffee and food. So that's what we did. And I think the first, you know, i'd hand out flyers on the beach and I started writing. I had been writing a little bit early. I've been writing for two years, I think at that point, just because I loved it, you know, the same way my dad wrote songs, or all my aunts write, all my uncle's write, everybody's just everybody writes. That's what we do. And the first show, I think two people came, and then the next Thursday, four people came, and then the next Thursday six people came. And you know, being homeless is I call it the random factor. Just random stuff happens. You know, the car I was living in got stolen. Then I was trying to save up money to get a new car. Or my best friend's car got impounded, and so I gave him the money i'd saved for that, like just it's so hard to work out of the poverty cycle. But meanwhile, this little crowd was growing, and after about a year it really grew to the point where it was standing room only, and it was such a healing thing because I was so lonely, you know, going back to that isolation I was talking about earlier. My safety was being alone and never letting anybody know the truth, never letting me know when I was actually hurt or what I was actually dealing with. I hid everything, and I in a way, I kind of deserved to be lonely because nobody knew me. I only told the truth in this little book that nobody read, my journal, and so I decided to just write the most honest things I could and to try and let myself be seen. And that was the most frightening, frightening thing. I remember my first, you know, Thursday, I stood up on my first little show in the coffee shop and I sang these gut wrenchingly honest songs about just feeling depraved and the thief and all that stuff. And the guys came up to me afterwards with tears and they were like, I didn't know anybody else felt that way, And it was connection. I felt connection for the first time, you know, I felt vulnerability for the first time, and setting down the weight of that armor, the beautiful that Brine Brown described, you know, recently in a book. And so by the end of this year, I started getting a grip on my stealing, my panic attacks, my agoraphobia. I was getting happy from the inside out. It was because of no external thing. I was getting happy. I could feel my internal landscape changing. And then all of a sudden, record labels start showing up at this coffee shop, and it was shocking, and so I almost didn't sign the record deal because again, like, you take somebody with my emotional background and my baggage, and then god forbid, someone like me gets famous. It's the world. I just didn't think I could handle the pressure, and so I wasn't willing to trade in my happiness for a record deal. I was like, maybe I could just make a living as a musician, you know, singing in a coffee shop. But I really thought about it, because obviously it's really a compelling thing to be able to get to make a career of music with a record label. So I made myself a promise that my number one job was to learn how to be a happy, whole human, and my number two job was to learn how to be a musician, and I made myself a vow that I would never betray that promise to myself, And so I navigated my career according to what I call my north star decision. That's my north star. And then in my career I had to figure out how to navigate that. So I made a sub category of my number one job was to be an artist, not be famous. So I would always choose things that nourished me as an artist over things that would nourish me for fame. And that's how I said about my career, and I'm really grateful. I don't know what the heck made me think of doing that, but it saved my life multiple times throughout a really difficult and crazy, tumultuous career. Fame is an incredibly difficult thing to interact with. I know, you know, just the pressures of being a professional and handling that stratosphere is very different. What is it like going from having zero money, being homeless to all of a sudden being thrust into this other world. It sounds like your why and the promise that you made to yourself is what kept you anchored. But I have to think there had to be some challenges in that I mean, gosh, yeah, my career was any careers super challenging. You know, you're trying to do something really difficult with all the odds against you. Having a really clear north Star decision like that made things a lot simpler. I remember the real world. My label came to me. They're like, there's this new thing called reality television and it's where peopled with cameras just follow you around in your life. And there's gonna be this house in San Francisco and they'll be cameras in it and we can literally watch you go from being homeless to moving in this house, to making your album to releasing it and it'll all be in television. And he goes and they were like, it is a sure thing that you'll get famous. And I turned it down. And I remember my label being like, what in the holy hill is making turn this down? And I turned it down because you know, again, it wasn't natural. Hardwood grows slowly. Shortcuts only lead to pain, you know. I just learned that from nature. Softwood grows quickly, falls over. Hardwood grows slowly, lasts a long time. I wanted to be an artist that lasted a long time. I didn't want to be famous, and so those were tough choices, but they were made clearer by you know what I was solving for my north start filter decision maker, and I made a really honest record, a folk record at the height of grunge. I didn't use a fancy producer. I just sang live in the coffee shop and that was the record. I turned down a million dollars signing bonus. Believe it or not, there was a huge bidding more over me and I turned down this million dollars signing bonus because I read a book about how the business works, and it basically described this million dollars was in advance and you owed it back through record sales, and then if I didn't sell enough albums, that was an unrecouped debt and labels were often wont to drop you to cut their losses. So then, yeah, that didn't work for my long term plan of being an artist forever. It just worked for right now. And so that was an easy decision for me to make because of how I was making my decisions. Now. Is it a risk, yes, but so is taking a million dollars and thinking you're going to sell that many records. That seems like an even dumber risk in my opinion. And I knew I could live on nothing, and I knew I could be happy with nothing, and I knew nothing was sacrificing my happiness and my mental well being. And so the record failed for a very very very long time, and I ended up getting to tour with Bob Dylan and then Neil Young, and then things started picking up. And after it looking like it was going to be a complete total loss, I suddenly started selling a million albums every week and it went on to be the highest selling debut album of all time. Crazy. When I turned down that million dollars signing bonus, I took the biggest back end so that if my album sold, I would make money, And so I ended up just making a crap ton of money. You bet on yourself, Yeah, I hear. I hear contentment in that. I know a lot of people coming from where you may have come from, would have maybe jumped at the bit for that million dollars, maybe jumped at the bit for the opportunity to have been seen, especially with the moments of loneliness that you describe. What would you say to somebody that I was having a hard time trusting that process of like you describe with the hardwood, like that's getting impatient, Like they feel like they've been hurt for so long, that they've been down for so long that they're they're owed something like what would you say to them or or encourage them to do, or to think along their journey for them to just stay the course and to see something happened when it happens. I think really just stopping and not having to make a decision right away through your homework. You know, for me reading that book on how the music business worked, it was pretty easy to see that I was kind of just being used. The bidding war wasn't about me. It was kind of about me, But bidding wars are always about the competition. So that's not to take that personal. And it's better to think about what do I actually want from life. I want security, and I wanted long term success, and I wanted to make honest art. And if you're going to make honest art, you have to It's like having a baby. Dishonest art is too, but if you have a baby, you have to try and give it a situation it will thrive in you. Shouldn't leverage a baby before it's even grown up. You know, you shouldn't leverage a baby on what you think it's future earnings will be when it's twenty. Like, that's a terrible idea. So it was really just stopping and thinking and taking a breath and making sure I wasn't making decisions from my wounds or from my insecurity that instead making decisions based on what do I really want. The other thing I'd say is it's like, you know, the stock market. You don't want to put money on a bad bet. You want to invest your money wisely where you really believe it can grow and give you a good return. It takes a lot of homework and it takes a lot of research. Well, our character is like that. Life is like that. Our energy Just imagine your energy is your currency, and where are you going to spend your energy? Are you going to spend your energy somewhere you know, to satisfy a short term need, or will you spend your energy where it might pay dividends? For me, Like, not sleeping with that boss was terrifying because I knew what was going to happen. I knew I'd end up living in my car. But I chose to invest in my character, right, So instead of invest my money in insecurity and being leveraged and trying to appease this horrible person, I spent my energy on my character and just try to have faith that if I invest in my character, the outcome has to be better. Now, I've done this many many times in my life. I'm forty eight now, and I've done it enough to see this pattern as I look back of It's not that risky. It seems so risky at the time, and I know it seems so risky each times it comes up. But when you invest truly on what you know is right in your heart, you know not what it has to be a really deep knowing anchored in this profound sense of yourself. But when you invest in that magic happens. I never would have dreamed I could have gotten signed by a record label. I never would have dreamed. Each time these terrible things have happened to me, and you just tune it out and you go, but what is the right thing now? What will make me a better human? It's always worked out in ways that I just couldn't have imagined. Then if I tried to hustle it or use my will, if that makes any sense. And now on working with kids for the last twenty years, I've never seen it fail for them either, when they let go of the anger and they let go of the hatred and they really anchor into it is the right thing, and will I do that? Have the courage to do it? And it looks so risky, and then lo and behold, it's magic happens. It's extraordinary. The mind is messy, but the heart is pure. And I think, you know, I teach meditation, and even in my own meditation practice. For people that don't teach or don't practice meditation and find out I teach, they'll say things like, I can't meditate. My mind never stops thinking. For me, it's like when things if I can go single point of focus, whether it's my breath or a mantra, my mind gets quiet enough to actually I'm still thinking in my meditation, but I get these downloads of inspiration. So I always keep a journal right next to my little meditation station, and that's really just coming back to the heart. I love that our podcast is called Comeback Stories because it kind of has a double meaning with the sense of meditation, where meditation is just coming back, coming back over and over again. The body knows where home is. The mind will take us down these roads that makes us feel so disconnected and homeless. So we have to have practices that return us back to the center of the heart. And that's what I hear you saying in that, and I just I've heard you talk about meditation and the bicep curl, and I give that same analogy. So what are some of your practices today, your mindfulness practices? Do you have mantras, affirmations? What does your movement practices look like? Yeah, some of the practices that I really love are ones called making an ally out of my anxiety. This is something I teach a lot of I coach a lot of CEOs and as well as our kids and your anxiety. It dawned on me one day, I was like, what if I'm coming at this whole thing wrong. I keep thinking something's wrong with me, that I'm inherently so effed up that I have to fix myself. But what if something's actually right with me? What if I feel this shitty because something's actually right with me? What if my anxiety is actually trying to tell me something and it's not the enemy. And so I developed this practice called making an ally out of your anxiety. And it's kind of based on the idea that if your body was a car, you know there's a car alarm, and you don't want to get mad at the car alarm, you should see who's breaking in. That's probably the better thing to do. And so looking at your anxiety as this warning sign, this way of your body communicating. He's your body's non verbal, right, that's your brain, it has verbal that your body's nonverbal, and it's trying to tell you that I just consumed something a thought of feeling or an action that does not actually agree with me. So like when I was trying to heal from the brainwashing that happened with my mom, I literally had to start figuring out what thoughts were mind and what on which ones are which ones aren't. It was really a difficult process. I used my anxiety to do it. My anxiety led me to my nature because I was willing to believe that if a thought gave me anxiety, it must not actually be my nature, that must be some other thought that doesn't belong to me, It doesn't agree with me. It's like when you eat food and you get sick, you shouldn't eat that food again. So sitting down and I call it getting in my hoop, meditating, getting still, getting quiet when I'm anxious and moving toward it. Moved toward the pain, right, moved toward the anxiety, and ask it, what are you trying to tell me? And then write down what was I thinking, feeling, or doing? And then just do that for two weeks. Don't change anything. Just start writing down every time you're anxious and write real, thinking, feeling, doing. Then I want you to start noticing every time you're relaxed, what were you thinking, feeling, and doing. I first stumbled onto this back when I was eighteen with me panic attacks. At the end of just whatever two weeks of studying, you'll have a list now of things that dilate you or contract you. Those are the only two basic states of being right, So anxiety is contracted, connection is dilated. And that's also our nervous systems. So it's your parasympathetic nervous systems. You're dilated relaxed nervous system. Your sympathetic nervous system is your fight or flight. So basically, you map out thinking, feeling, doing. When you're dilated, thinking, feeling, doing contracted, and you can't be in two states at once. And that's the really cool thing is you really can. And that's the only time I'll say there's a hack in mental health. You really can force your system, hack your system out of a contracted state by participating on something on your dilated list. So if you're feeling anxious and you're pacing the floor from me, I rock I get really anxious, I stop breathing. I have to sometimes still mechanically look at my list of the things that I do that dilate me. It can be breathing, exercises, meditation, a walk in nature, sleep, connection, writing thoughts like I'm going to figure this out. You have to be careful with the affirmations a little bit because they can't be lie, you know, a lie. It can't be it can't just be what you wish, because hope and fear are the same, They're the different side of the same coin, right, I hope I do good on this test is like saying I'm actually afraid I won't do good on this test. So hope for me doesn't carry a ton of weight I know that might be a controversial thing to say. It's more that you have to really find the truth, you know. So if a thought that used to upend me was I don't know what I'm doing, that thought alone used to send me into a panic attack, and it wasn't an untrue thought. I usually didn't know what I was doing. But the truth was I never quit until I figured it out. That was the truth. That was the thought that could get my whole system to relax. If I had tried to be, you know, an affirmational thought, it would have been, um, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I might have looked in the mirror and said, I know what I'm doing. That's a lie. It didn't make my body relax when I said it. So if people are using affirmations, just make sure you're finding thoughts that are the truth, because you know, when your whole body relaxes when you think them, if you still feel tight when you're saying it, it's actually a fear but worded in a much more clever way. Take us through. When you just started working with Inspiring Children's Foundation, I've come to a formal relationship with Ryan Trent James, some of those guys over there in the Vegas community. They've been there for me and helped me through a lot of issues with my relationships, you know, taking me out into nature. How you get involved with those guys and why does it mean so much to you to do the work that you're doing. Yeah, those are my boys. They're great, great humans and can't thank you enough for coming in. And he came in and talk to the kids. Yeah, let's see. The foundation was formed about twenty years ago. It's founded on this same idea, same principle that I was working on two of what is happiness? You know, how do I teach myself what my intuition is? How do I learn to relax? And so Ryan I started working together about i'd say at least ten years ago something like that, and kind of further developing the curriculum. My goal has always been like it's you know, misery is an equal opportunist. It doesn't care if you're black or white, or rich or poor, it doesn't care. It's an equal opportunist. Then if you're going to learn not to be miserable, that means learn. The keyword is learn. If to learn a new way that's an education, and in America, education means money, so suddenly happiness as elitist. That's unacceptable. It's unacceptable that any humans should be able to walk through this planet contemplating taking their own life and not be given mental health tools that help them. And it upset me that kids like me that moved out at fifteen suddenly we're just like, you know, what what am I supposed to do? Or kids like me just left out? And so with the Inspiring Children Foundation, what we're really passionate about doing is really making sure that we supply tools that work without psychotherapy. I love psychotherapy, not against it. Not everybody has access to it, and frankly, not everybody's getting the result they're looking for. I think we have to be much more behaviorally oriented. We have to fine ways of taking these philosophies and making practices and then your life should be showing improvement or else it's not the right practice. And so that's what we do in Inspiring Children Foundation. We work on those types of mental health tools. We work on entrepreneurial skills and then athletic skills. It's just incredible. Thank you for the time that you've given to us. Today, your wisdom, all the things that you've tools, practices that you've created, garnered over your life. To see it impacting children, impacting the world in the way that it has is truly amazing. We appreciate you for creating the time to be here today. It's a blessing to have heard your story and I can't thank you enough. Well, I'm such a fan of both of yours and the work that you're doing, and Darren, just the way that you share and what you're advocating for. It's so important that people are sharing these things and helping to create a community where it's okay to speak and to speak up and to say I'm not happy. I need to learn another way of doing this. Yeah, Jill, thank you, And I just want to acknowledge you also. I mean the way you show up in the world. You are armed with a lot of tools and you're putting these tools into practice, You're living it and it's just an honor to have you here to and we love these types of conversations. We could talk about this all day, but we want to honor your time, So thank you again for showing up. Thanks guys, I hope to see him Vegas soon. All right, we're out, all right, what's up? Comeback stories, family, It's Donnie dropping in here. So did you know that Darren and E's relationships started by me being his personal development, mindfulness and mindset coach. I want to let you know about both my one on one coaching program, The Shift, and my group Mastermind Elevate your Purpose. These coaching programs are specifically designed for people who are ready to take the next step in their purpose and level up their career, personal finances, and have more connected, deep and meaningful relationships. My gift, then, part of my purpose, is to help others take that next step in leveling up their lives so that they can have a greater impact on the lives of others, create success that sustainable yet evolves and grows, and help build a legacy that will outlive your life. If this is calling you, just go to Donnie Starkins dot com and apply for either one of my programs.