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In this episode, I’m joined by Jennifer Eve.
Jennifer is an artist, poet, mother, and what she calls a deep soul diver. She has spent decades writing poetry that tracks her own life from her twenties through relationships, motherhood, awakening, shadow work, and eventually what she describes as rising. Her book, Rise, Queen, Rise, brings those years together through poetry, but this conversation quickly became about much more than her art.
We spoke about what happens when we stop treating our lives as a collection of things that happened to us and start becoming curious about why we participated in some of them. Jennifer spent nineteen years in an unhealthy relationship, and what interested me was the way she speaks about it now. There is no pretending the behaviour was okay, but there is also no desire to build the rest of her identity around being its victim. When she finally left, one of the questions she had to face was fucking uncomfortable. How did I stay there for nineteen years, and what was happening inside me that allowed me to accept it?
That sits right inside the work I care about. We can acknowledge what somebody did to us without spending the rest of our lives staring through the window at them. At some point, if we want anything to change, we have to look in the mirror as well. Not to blame ourselves for somebody else's behaviour, but to understand our own patterns well enough that we don't keep walking into the same relationship with a different face.
Jennifer talks about her poetry almost like a record of that process. Looking back at work she wrote decades ago, she can see things she understood intellectually long before she actually embodied them. She could see patterns without being able to change them. She could write about the shadow before she even had language for what the shadow was. I loved that because I think most of us know far more than we actually live.
The statement left by the previous guest was, “It's okay to not be okay. Just do something about it.” Jennifer's response took us somewhere interesting because sometimes doing something means not doing anything at all. Sometimes it means sitting inside an uncomfortable feeling without immediately trying to escape it, fix it, intellectualise it, or make somebody else responsible for taking it away.
Then Jennifer told me something that made the conversation real.
A few days before we recorded, she completely lost her shit with her teenage daughter. After feeling unappreciated and carrying resentment she hadn't fully dealt with, she yelled, smashed a water jug in the sink, and eventually threw a mug at the back door. This is someone who teaches vulnerability, embodiment, shadow work, and self awareness, telling me openly that she recently hit 120 on her own emotional thermometer.
I fucking loved that honesty because this is where so much of the personal development world loses me. Doing this work doesn't mean we stop having a shadow. It doesn't mean anger disappears. It doesn't mean we meditate ourselves into becoming some permanently calm human being who never loses their shit. Jennifer didn't pretend the moment didn't happen, and she didn't turn it into an identity about being a terrible mother either. She repaired it with her daughter.
That led us into anger and the parts of ourselves we would rather pretend don't exist. Jennifer usually experiences herself as softer and more melancholic, so feeling that level of anger gave her a different understanding of people who live much closer to it every day. Instead of deciding that anger made her bad, she became curious about what it was showing her.
We also spoke about parenting and another moment where Jennifer consciously used anger with her son. He had an opportunity to travel to Costa Rica but needed to see his father to get his passport. Her instinct was to remain understanding and gentle, until she realised that being the soft and compassionate mother might actually allow him to miss something important in his life. She deliberately brought out another part of herself and told him to get the fucking passport. He did, and he went on the trip.
That is the part of shadow work I think gets missed. The goal isn't to destroy the parts of ourselves we don't like. Sometimes we fucking need them. Anger can protect us. Aggression can move us. The part of us capable of saying no, raising our voice, or refusing to tolerate something has a place. The problem begins when those parts are running our lives without us knowing it.
This conversation is really about integration. Jennifer isn't pretending to have risen above being human. She is looking at the artist, the mother, the angry woman, the vulnerable woman, the person who stayed too long, and the person who eventually left, and recognising that they are all her.
Maybe liberation isn't becoming the version of ourselves we think is acceptable.
Maybe it is finally being able to look at all of ourselves without fucking running away.
Jennifer leaves the next guest with these words from her poem Reach Out Without Fear of Rejection:
“Reach out without fear of rejection. Reach out from the light of your soul. Although you are abandoned, a lost little vessel, you're now on the path, so stay in the flow.”
Jennifer Eve can be found at: https://www.eveofglobalgrace.com/
It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME. In Session with a Psychotherapist
Hosted by Chad Taylor. Author of It’s You. Oh Fuck. It’s ME
No tips.
No fixing.
Just real conversations.
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