I’m thrilled and honored to be one of the special guests tonight sharing a new spoken word poem. Join us tonight at 5:30pm PST on Clubhouse!
You Are the Medicine.
Sunrise from Pleasure Point, CA
Last weekend’s Airstream camping adventure.
Scoping out the whales.
Morning pages. My favorite way to start the day.
“Heal yourself with the warmth of the sun and the light of the moon. With a deep inhale of ocean breeze. Heal yourself by putting pen to paper and filling up blank pages with your own words and poetry and stories you want to remember. Heal yourself with the crackling and heat of a campfire and let your worries dissolve into the darkness of the sky. Heal yourself with turmeric, chamomile, ginger, cacao, maca, reishi, lion’s mane. Ground your bare feet into the packed cool sand and dig your toes into the earth while the ocean waves wash over you. Feel the grounding cord of energy connect you to the earth’s depth. Stand in your power. Heal yourself by honoring your energetic boundaries and listening to your intuition. Dance, sing, laugh, create. Make love. Allow yourself to feel deep pleasure in every part of your life. Heal yourself with nourishing food, nurturing friendships, and never forget- you are the medicine.”
Moving Through Grief: A Spoken Word Poem
On May 12, 2021, my mentor and meditation teacher passed away. It was unexpected, jarring, and shocking to hear the news and digest it. We met together every week for the past four years. When COVID hit, we gathered virtually every Monday evening at 8pm. He never once missed a meeting. He was the most consistent, reliable, knowledgeable, quirky, and generous human being I’d ever met. Throughout many of our sessions together, I remember thinking to myself, “This is the most seen I’ve ever felt by another person.” In February at the closing of one of our meetings he said, “You know, Julianne, there’s a lot of love here.” We both knew how special our friendship was.
The moment I found out he had passed away, I immediately messaged my friend who is a psychologist and specializes in grief and loss. “I just lost someone extremely close to me- perhaps this is the first time I’ve ever experienced losing someone that was such an important part of my life. Any resources would be greatly appreciated.”
She shared a TED Talk with me on the topic of grief- how it is not an event, it’s a process. Grief is not something we ‘get over,’ but rather it is something we move through and move with together.
This line became the seed of my poem.
Flooded with deep emotions and energy pulsing through my heart onto the page, this poem was born.
My mentor taught me that we can experience pain but we can also choose to transform it. Staying in the suffering does not serve us.
He shared his meditation practices and regularly wrote and sent his poems to me to read. He always inquired about the art I was working on and encouraged me to use my current challenges as conduits to create new forms of art. He effectively encouraged me to transmute and tranform pain into beauty. It felt fitting to use art and poetry to express my grief and love as a tribute to his life and his legacy. I am emerging from this time tender and transformed, hopeful and deeply grateful. May this poem encourage you to see the gifts in your grief, knowing that I am here too- moving with and moving through grief with you. There’s a lot of love here.
He taught me to see the world through a new lens- one that can use everything for good, for beauty. Here, snap pea leaves that I recognized could be the raw materials for a piece of art.
Rules To Live By.
Every day is a good day to follow Sister Corita’s rules. These have been particularly relevant to my recent creative projects where I’ve been experimenting, flirting on the edge of my comfort zone, and surprising myself in terrifying yet fulfilling new ways.
Dancing across disciplines of philosophy, coaching, art, nature, energy healing, nutrition, and poetry, I’ve learned it’s less about learning a particular subject matter. It’s more about learning about myself. Our interests and life preferences and passions change and fluctuate because we are fluid and changing human beings.
If we’re not changing, we’re dying.
Cheers to making art that is experimental and shatters old paradigms. Art that is courageous and generous. Cheers to following the rules. Cheers to breaking them all.
Bye Bye, Good Luck, Be Good.
“candy colored
happiness sunset
bye bye, good luck, be good”
One of the last poems my teacher ever shared with me. Prophetic and profound.
Accountabillabuddies.
I would consider myself to be highly internally motivated when it comes to fitness since I recognize the benefits it has for my mood, energy levels, creativity, and mental health. What I didn’t expect from this April challenge was the added motivation and drive I’ve have on the days when I was tired or emotionally drained because I knew someone else was counting on me to show up and close my rings.
Whether it involves fitness, a creative project, writing a book, or completing a professional endeavor, it’s true- we are better together.
Discernment.
Find a quiet space.
Breathe.
Listen.
Underneath the scared voice is the sacred voice.
Illuminated.
When all eyes are on you, you move and speak and work in a certain way. You conduct yourself with intention, pay attention to details, and behave in a manner that supports the type of person you want to be perceived as. In reality, you are always being watched and noticed. The way you answer the phone or sign emails. How you walk across the room. Your smile. Your handwriting. The tone of your voice. The books you read and the insights you share. How you dress. The art you make or the projects you work on. Everything you do illuminates your heart. Everything is a glimpse inside of who you are. Everything is a diary. You just weren’t aware that everyone was openly reading it.
Rainbow.
Dried calendula petals inspired today’s art.
Usually when you win a goldfish at a carnival, it lasts four, maybe five days. Being jostled around in a plastic bag sealed with a tiny rubber band doesn’t set the stage for a long and healthy life. I won one of these goldfish when I was six. I named her Rainbow. She was the first pet who was all mine. I fed her fish flakes, regularly cleaned her bowl, bought her fresh aquarium plants with sea snails, and talked to her.
On the night of the huge October 1989 earthquake, I returned home from piano lessons, pushed past my dad and raced upstairs screaming, “How is Rainbow? Is she still alive?” My dad called after me, “What about your old man? Aren’t you concerned if I’m ok?” He still jokes about this today.
Rainbow lived for eight years. I loved her, knowing she beat the odds. Some friendships are similar. The ones formed randomly at a Meet Up, while cycling, or sitting next to at a coffee shop. The chances of making a lasting connection were as slim as a ping pong ball finding its way into a glass bowl. But those friendships miraculously beat the odds. They are tender and timeless. Which makes me love and cherish them even more.
The Invitation.
“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.
I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.
It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see beauty even when it’s not pretty, every day, and if you can source your own life from its presence. I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and
shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”
It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children. It doesn’t interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away. I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.”
The Beauty of a Blank Canvas.
A spectacular sunset at Mori Point.
“My perfect day is an empty schedule. I can’t paint what I want if my canvas already has marks on it.”
We used to give points to individuals who ‘did it all’- waking up at 5am to train, running from meeting to meeting, shuffling kids back and forth between baseball practice and piano lessons, logging back on to finish work at 10pm and collapsing into bed past midnight. Returning emails and scheduling meetings and creating google docs for the team and frantically moving from one task to the next without pausing to catch their breath or check in with themselves or their bodies or their breath.
The rules have changed. We now realize a bigger truth. Just because we’re busy doesn’t mean that we’re productive or doing meaningful work.
A common and safe hiding place: being busy.
But without the jam-packed schedule and distractions of pings and notifications, we’re forced to confront everything we’ve been accustomed to ignore. This requires an attentiveness and an awareness to what’s really going on underneath the surface. And most are terrified at the thought of peering underneath that rug and examining the dusty dreams and fears that have accumulated over the years. Most will do anything to avoid spending time with themselves. In solitude.
“In one telling experiment, each of 55 participants was seated alone in a quiet, empty room with nothing to do—except they had access to a button that would deliver an electric shock to their ankle which they had previously described as “unpleasant.” In their 15 minutes of solitude, 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of the women chose to shock themselves instead of simply sitting quietly. Lead author Timothy Wilson, a University of Virginia psychologist, says that with smartphones, tablets and TVs within reach anytime, many of us may not know what to do when we have time to ponder without distraction—but the electric shock results were still surprising. He suggests we could make our downtime—even traffic jams and waiting rooms—more relaxing and interesting by learning how to be alone with our thoughts.”
Points should instead be given to those who create carve out deliberate space for themselves. Who create sacred containers of solitude so they can be still enough to listen to the quiet yet truthful voice inside of them. Points should be given to those that create boundaries that protect their time and energy. Who choose to focus on work that matters, that makes a difference, and that serves other people.
This starts with having a blank canvas. A single idea. And lots of uninterrupted time to drop into flow and create something meaningful.