TRANSCRIPT: CRYING IN MY JACUZZI
EPISODE: 1, Welcome to me jacuzzi, have a transcendent hotdog
Okay, Hi. It's me, Dana. This is crying in my Jacuzzi. Welcome. Okay, we're gonna start with a quick story though. First. It's a story about hotdogs. I know. what? yes. This wasn't always the grand plan. But as Daddy Pedro says in the Mandalorian, this is the way. So câmon.
Iâm not a big hotdog eater, full transparency. You know, that whole like lips and assholes thing. However, a friend was coming out to my neck of the desert to go camping with her family and friends and she was committed to bringing what she said, were transcendent hot dogs, the best hot dogs that have ever been made!
The time rolls around. They come into town, I have forgotten about the hot dogs, but we're hanging out. We're outside. I mean, it's just a gorgeous, Starry Night and a fire pit up against these huge boulders. I mean, just desert magic. My heart is so full. We're playing charades with these little kids and I am the only one like millennial elder here, child-free. I know very little about young child culture. Except I do know something about like Blippi and how everybody actually hates him. Okay, anyway, and some sort of like Australian dog show that is like good for the soul. Okay, that's it. That's all I got. So I know nothing about these little kids' culture.
We're playing charades. Hot dogs come out. We all have sticks. We are just having the very best time we are cackling around the fire. Doing little dances. Roasting these dogs that I had forgotten were the best hot dogs ever most transcendent. And I cooked mine on my little stick. And there's a picture of this, um, put it in the show notes. And they go to like bite it off the stick. And this hat, greasy lips and assholes squirt just shoots into my mouth. Should I have done a content warning here? I go to another planet because it truly is that amazing. Now, out the other end of the hot dog, itâs shooting down another greasy squirt straight down onto my boots, suede boots, and wear them all the time. They're my favorite. Big greasy squirt right across the front of them.
i Still think about that hotdog. Not just because it was truly transcendent and one of the most delicious things and it was just a delicious evening of playfulness, and fire spirits and transcendent lips and assholes. My mind was shifted. I had an ontological shift about hot dogs that night.
But I also think about them all the time because I have never washed that greasy squirt off my boots not out of laziness. Which by the way, I do not think is real. I think laziness is a construct. But because every time I see it, I'm reminded of that very magical evening of that very magical hot dog. sensual experience like woof who knew? And then every time I wear these boots, my cat comes up and sniffs my shoe and then like licks it's just like a little tank like suede. Oh god, it's just so cute.
So it's the gift that keeps on giving, the messy ickiness - that greasy squirt brings me still a great joy. I will never wash it off. I mean, it's like this probably is just too late now, but I will always opt for the icky when there's magic involved.
I love both/and. I believe one of the most magical things we can do as humans humaning together is â embrace paradox. the Practical, the magical, the joy and the pain, the profound and the mundane. The disgusting and the cute, the weird and the logical.
So welcome. Welcome welcome welcome from the bottom of my greasy little hot dog heart, Welcome to crying in my jacuzzi, the ebbs and flows of living an examined life.
Hi, I'm your reverently, irreverent. Oh god, one of my favorite paradoxes right there. But I am your reverently irreverent host, Dana Balicki and in this podcast we are going to live laugh love in the Anthropocene.
{COHOST ROBOT ALEX: the Anthropocene is the current geological time period during which human activities aka human domination have impacted the environment enough to constitute a distinct geological change, aka climate chaos. Basically, we're going to dig into all things related to how we're human together while being hurtled through space on a giant living rock.}
That was my co host, Alex, he's a delightful robot with a whole lot of sass, lots of opinions, also lots of facts, he's a real treasure, you're gonna get to know him a lot better. The name of this podcast came to me when I was in fact crying in my Jacuzzi. Having a Jacuzzi was always a dream of mine. And after living in New York for 10 years, and moving to the desert, made it a top priority. I was crying in my Jacuzzi one night, and then I started laughing. I thought to myself, oh, one day crying in my jacuzzi, that will be the name of something that I that I do - a book, a one woman show, a podcast.
I am not proud of this fact, but I did dry to talk myself out of this name. To something more easily digestible when swiping something that might give you a a clearer, more instantaneous sense of what we're doing here on this podcast. What we're going to do here together, and ultimately, nothing felt as good as crying in my jacuzzi, even saying it now I feel amazing. it thrills me to no end. And look, if I'm going to put my time and energy and money and all the things, my heart into something that I'm putting out in the world. It has got to make me feel good. It has got to turn me on. I gotta be lit up inside. Just thinking about it. And that's what crying in my Jacuzzi does. I can barely say it without laughing. God themself gave it to me. So what can I say?
About me? Because maybe you're like, Dana, you're not famous. I haven't read your books or seen your TV show or what have you. So like, why you, why this? WellâŚ
I've spent the past 11 plus years as a transformational coach. I've been listening to people. I have been deep in all the stuff have gone deep into underworlds upon underworlds supported people on breaking down their deepest, oldest patterns, getting down to the root of them, cultivating deep curiosity, wild compassion, tapping into what is most resonant for them, and then guiding them in creating lives that match that those visions that they cultivate through their own inner work, that they are their own very best guide.
And everything I teach a practice myself, I will put some of my teachers down in the show notes and you can dig into them because there are many amazing beautiful humans that I'm so lucky to stand in the lineage of the decade before this transformational coaching work. I was a political activist like left of left left lefty left, that's still alive and well in me. It's just taken different shapes. It used to be me like running through Congress, chasing down politicians or performing citizens or US of elected officials on sold. Radio, City Music Hall stages, losing issue, big protests, marches in Washington, DC street actions all around the country really all around the world, super involved in Occupy Wall Street in New York when I lived there, plus a lot of behind the scenes stuff that wasn't nearly as flashy or fun, but that was my activism. It's all just taken different forms. Now. I'm still here to help us see how we belong to each other. And here you are, here we are together.
Here's what I know about you. You might be a weirdo. Just like a self identified, weirdo, someone who lives out in the world, in their very own way, perhaps marching to the beat of their own drummer. As the kids definitely do not say. And if you're not that, you might be in a little class I like to call weirdo adjacent or weirdo curious. You are living in your world, you're living your life, you got your patterns, you got your relationships, you got the things and cultivated cultivating interests, there's a different way of understanding the world that you want to tap into.
You want to feel more connected to you want to build a relationship with you, you might be like, I don't know if my friends are gonna get this around. If my family's gonna get this, or the people in my life are just gonna think I'm freaking weird that your game because the world is big, the universe. Even bigger, the multiverse, forget about it. There's a lot, there's so much that we can't see. Which means that there's so much to be curious about.
And I know people come to me, like my clients, which I've had hundreds of over, over the years, and students 1000s of their workshops, group courses, all the different ways in which I have interacted with ever evolving souls. But I make being a weirdo safe. I invite you into this, right that like there's a connection and deepening into our humaness into our hearts that's available when we really allow ourselves to be as maybe as silly, maybe it's gross, maybe essential. Like whatever's gonna let you just not necessarily make sense. But make sensation, feel things. Be curious about this a life experience your own and the one that we are making together.
I ask really good questions as part of why I'm good at what I do. And I'm really good at what I do. I ask those âwhat elseâ questions. What else could be possible? What else might you not have been willing to see or look at? Questions that make you want to ask more questions that help you release your grip on some of those sticky, old rigid stories or even some of the healing growth self help work whatever would however you refer to it every relate to it, maybe some frameworks that you have learned through various people, communities, whatever in the health and wellness or wealth and health wellness industry, as I sometimes call it, the things that have felt so true but have never felt very good. Or are you just realizing that it didnât feel very good? And I want to share that with you. I want to teach that to you and encourage your ability to tune in to your own intuition, that inner guidance.
Find those transcendent hot dog moments where you feel so alive. And just keep asking âwhat else? This isn't normally what I do, or how I think or how I look at the world. But what else?â I'm, I'm just blown by that hot dog. I don't even know if I've eaten hot dogs since maybe I never even will again. But I was willing, I was willing to have a mysterious experience in the form of lips and assholes. ground up together and into a transcendent meat tube, so I guess that's what I'm asking of you.
I know some of us are just meeting here. And it's like, oh, she's already asking something of me. And is she asking me to eat a hot dog, or be a hot dog, maybe both hot dog talk side.
Consider it more an invitation, an invitation to come play. To go deep. Maybe get a little dis oriented, meaning away from your every day normal orientation, and into some magic and wonder as well as some deliciously practical tools for living an examined life. For humaing together. For humaning with yourself. And all persons idea. It's an invitation to be a wild participant in your own becoming. And then together, let's do it in our, our collective becoming, becoming more of who we truly are.
There's this poet and activist that I just adore their named Alok, do you know them? I follow them on Insta. If you don't know, please do. Iâll put their handle down in the show notes. But they were a guest on Glennon Doyle's podcast called âwe can do hard thingsâ. And they said this thing about making sense. And I think about it pretty much every day. And honestly, it's part of how I'm here with you now why I'm here with you now, in this way, through a podcast called crying in my Jacuzzi. So the quote is this:
âIt's never about making sense. It's about making sensation. It's about what things make us feel. In order for something to make sense. It has to pay allegiance to an idea that already existed. And when we want to make new ideas, so we have to be speculative and experimental.â
My God, doesn't that just make you want to make way less sense and make way more sensation? Instead, we'll explore things that already exist. But let's also make new ideas. Let's make new worlds. Let us speculate and experiment and ask what else what else? What else? Then not what else? Because we need more and more and more to be satisfied. But because we're willing to hold the paradox of being satiated and filled up while also being insatiably curious about how this whole existence thing works. Or maybe not how it works, maybe just how it feels.
Did I also mention that I have a robot producer named Janet?
{PRODUCER ROBOT JANET: Hi, I'm Janet. This isn't an ad. But if it was it would make sense for it to be hot dog related. Am I right? Dana's husband, Ryan, can we catch up because he has acid reflux, he tries to sneak it all the time, which is honestly just quiet. Anyways, it's very nice to meet you.}
And sometimes we're gonna go to a magical library to practice in Bibliomancy, which is using books as divination tools. And there's a really special place we're gonna go where we visit with Advice Dom, who's really just a bossier version of me, plus some other magical realms that we will visit together. I mean, what? are you excited?
Nothing's required of you. Certainly you don't have to eat or be a hot dog unless you want to. And sometimes I'll sing you songs and read your poetry, maybe make you uncomfortable. make you laugh. Maybe you've done those things already. I hope so.
Welcome, welcome welcome again and forever to crying in my jacuzzi, the ebbs and flows of living and examined life. And may this sweet little song be stuck in your head the rest of the day, just like it is mine.
{OUTRO: If you enjoyed what we did here today, go over to wherever it is that you are listening to this podcast and give us a rating as many stars five as your heart desires. Five stars though, the music and other musical bits by the very talented Kat Ottosen. sound design and editing by the effervescent rose Blakelock. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. I look forward to playing with you more in my Jacuzzi that sounded dirtier than I meant it, but you know what I meeeean!}