One Day You Finally Knew: For Folx Breaking Away

Psst. In this episode, Jessica lets you in on a little secret:No one is f**king okay right now. Okay? So let's just make it okay to not be okay. For our own self-care and self-compassion, as well as how we model that for those in our lives who we love. Whether you believe it or not, we're all connected on this planet, and we're all suffering, more or less. Even if your problems are of the first-world kind, you're still experiencing the pain, grief, and general mind-f**kery t...

After taking a break from the pod for the last month of 2021, Jessica is back with the first episode of 2022, just in time to attempt to spare us all the external/internal expectations around making resolutions for the new year.What if we broke away from that practice entirely, or at least, what it's meant before now.Could we resolve to do less? Could we rest more? To be still and listen for what our bodies want to do next? Can we ask ourselves that question and then have the patience to wait...

This is the last episode of 2021 before some time away to clarify the next steps for the podcast and book writing. While all of these projects have been exciting, Jessica is coming clean about how when we push the river, we run the risk of that excitement starting to feel like too much, too fast, and too soon. When we want things to turn out a certain way (and who doesn't?!), we can find ourselves pushing for a particular outcome instead of letting ourselves float down the river's curre...

The fall and winter holidays are upon us, which can be a mixed bag for many of us. There might be much holly, jolly, and there might be a great deal of stress. Perhaps both. In this episode, Jessica reminds us that whether we're traveling to see family or popping over to a friend's house for holiday festivities, our true home is in our bodies, and we can rely on them to tell us whether something feels like welcome or warning, safety or danger, yum or yuck.We just have to take the time a...

We're all so fatigued by living in this world in the current state of affairs. Yet, we still have our to-do lists, waiting and constantly beckoning, despite having little energy to complete the tasks. A couple of episodes back, Jessica talked about getting that sh*t done. Today, we're looking at the possibility and the practice of not getting that sh*t done. We're human beings, not human doings. But, we live in a society that's all about productivity. Goddess forbid we sit down fo...

Remembering that courage means to take one's heart in their hands and fearlessness means you might be afraid but are doing it anyway, we can stay true to ourselves, despite the potential consequences. Sometimes those consequences involve being burned at the stake. Sometimes we need to take that risk, showing up as our full, complete, witchy selves. In this episode, Jessica offers an example of speaking her truth, even though she risked her reputation with a professional organizati...

The word compassion means to "suffer with" another, but that is often not what we're doing when we think we're offering compassion to someone who is behaving badly. In this culture of enabling and codependency, in our attempts to be loving, we instead indulge people in that suffering (and create our own), instead of offering them motivation for change that could ease it.Women and folx have been taught to "be nice", to not "rock the boat", to avoid conflict at all costs. We've come by th...

Earlier in the week, Jessica saw a post of Sheryl Sandberg's quote: "Done is better than perfect," and it got her thinking about how we risk getting stuck and even shutting down if we keep picking at a thing endlessly in search of the mystical PERFECT. Perfect doesn't exist, y'all. Just get the thing done. With the extra space that you have created by not tweaking and re-tweaking and tweaking some more., you can unpack and compost your internalization of how society and family have made you q...

Our families and our patriarchal society have taught us to have extremely high expectations of ourselves and others. And yet, both can lead to deep disappointment.What if the expectations we set for ourselves are so high that we must eventually fall from the pedestal we set ourselves upon?Could it be that we're actually moving along the current of life, doing just fine, and it's not that we're doing a poor job, but the lens we see ourselves through is the problem? Is it possible that when we ...

I love the Rumi quote, "Try something different. Surrender." I'm applying it here to this week's non-episode. Instead, you're just getting a little announcement.Mercury is retrograde.Everything electronic in my house is fucked.My laptop is not recognizing my USB microphone. I even bought another, thinking the mic might have been the problem. It wasn't. I can't spend more than 5 minutes hunched over my laptop screaming into the internal microphone. I did it last week, but my neck a...