Crying in My Jacuzzi with Dana Balicki
Join seasoned Transformational Coach & longtime activist, Dana Balicki, for a wildride into the jacuzzi-verse to explore the ebbs & flows of living an examined life. Each and every episode invites you to explore the strange magic of humaning together in these wild times.™ With 13 years of coaching expertise, Dana blends irreverent reverence, spiritual insight, decolonial teachings, collective movement-building, high-woo, personal narrative, and grounded growth-oriented practicality for deep, thought-provoking conversations.
Sound editing and design by Rose Blakelock, theme song by Kat Otteson, artwork by Natalee Miller! Extra support by robot cohost Alex & robot producer (and part-time cohost) Janet.
Crying in My Jacuzzi with Dana Balicki
The Only Kind of Heart Worth Having is a Broken One
what if brokenheartedness wasn’t something to get through, but an honored & trusted guide toward interconnectedness, courage, and grief as catalyst for heartfelt action?
in this episode we explore the wild paradox of love and sorrow, and the transformative power of embracing both…love in the time of broken hearts. dana shares her own personal heartbreak stories—including her biggest—plus, some reminder practices for how to slowdown and tune into the tender life experience of grief AKA the risk of living & loving!
~show notes~
- Living by the Word: a collection of essays, Alice Walker (“Nobody Was Supposed to Survive”—referenced MOVE Bombing essay)
- enter to win a free coaching session ~ when you leave a 5-star rating (only) and a written review, you'll be entered into a monthly drawing for a free 90-min coaching session with dana (value of $388). DM (@danablix instagram) or email a screenshot of your submission—take it right before you hit submit—along with the review name/title. winner announcements will be made across platforms!
/// sound-editing/design ~ rose blakelock, theme song ~ kat ottosen, cover art ~ natalee miller ///
@danablix on ig 😭 feeling the pull for coaching support? go to danabalicki.com for inner/outer transformation 🖐️⭐️ leave a 5-star rating & review to be entered in a monthly raffle for a free coaching session (details in show notes) 🎁 share this with your favorite boo-hooer 😭
Crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 2:Back in late 2004, maybe early 2005, I was living in Culver City and my boyfriend of many years had broken up with me and I was at this cafe. It was just a rainy, rainy day and I was reading Alice Walker's collection of essays Living by the Word, and there's this one essay called no One Was Supposed to Survive, about the bombing of the Move house in Philadelphia. The Move community was a black back to the land community and the Philadelphia police bombed their house, killing 11 people, several children, and at that time I was in the full swing of activism and organizing anti-imperialist and organizing anti-imperialist, anti-war. I was not unfamiliar with the cruelty and supremacist nature of the United States government and all of its sentinels, but I certainly wasn't immune to it. And at the end of the essay there's a poem and there's this line that says and I too, fucking yes, sing America. And I still remember reading those words on the page and feeling so angry and sick and heartbroken at all the ways people have dominated, dehumanized, oppressed each other over time, recognized, oppressed each other over time.
Speaker 2:And I got up, left the cafe and there was a man near my car, an older man, and he had this big bag he was digging through and he was soaking wet and I don't remember if it was like on his bag or a jacket or a piece of clothing, but I thought he was a vet, probably a Vietnam vet, and I asked him if I could get him anything or help him out and he just asked for a bagel and coffee or something like that. And when I brought it out and handed it to him, I was hit with this wave of stench of feces. And then our hands were touching His skin, just felt like it was so wet it was going to just fall off the bone. We talked for a bit and then I got in my car and drove around the block but I had to pull over because I was crying so hard and it was raining so hard that I couldn't really see anything and I felt torn open, like in my body, and I looked into this tear, I turned to it and this crack in reality and I could just see everything. I felt like I could see this man that he could have been my dad, or at the very least he was someone's son and he had definitely been uncared for by his country, but also that he had been a soldier in the racist Vietnam War bombing and the surely white police officers and then the black bodies of the MOVE family members, as Alice was describing them in her essay. Eleven eleven were killed on May 13th 1985, including five children.
Speaker 2:And in 1985, I was somewhere running around being a four-year-old my dad was a little younger than I am now and I felt everyone or everything that had been failed by the system, even the people that maybe thought they were winning or being cared for in some way, because states can't care for people or they don't. And then, thinking of the emails that we'd recently received at the anti-war organization I worked for, from our contacts in Fallujah, where the United States government was dropping white phosphorus, which is a war crime, and Iraqis being driven out of their homes, bombed out of their homes, into the desert in winter, and then the frantic hustle to raise funds for blankets and tents and stoves and food. And then the tiny reflection of my own heartbreak as the life I thought I was going to have with this man had evaporated. I could see all these worlds in the one world Through this web of heartbreak. I could touch all the things, the pluriverse, all the realities simultaneously, this web of interconnection, interbeing through heartbreak. It was a revelation and utter despair. Zero stars, do not recommend.
Speaker 3:But also 10 out of 10 would recommend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, both. And if we take Alice's word, the way forward is with a broken heart. In the Spanish proverb, the only heart worth having is a broken one. Then I think we're all right on track. Having a broken heart can mean that you took the risk of loving to begin with, and poets and sages through the centuries will absolutely tell us that we are courageous for daring to love. Maybe that's true.
Speaker 2:I do see a lot of folks out there in the world who are not necessarily willing to love. They're not willing to love the Palestinian people. Too risky. They weren't willing to love the Iraqi people or the Afghan people. Too far away, too different, too brown, too whatever, too foreign. It's risky to love or to care to open one's heart to another, to ones we'll never know. I mean, woo, that's something that people will never see, never meet, maybe never fully understand, though it's worth making the effort of understanding. But the risk is that heartbreak, and heartbreak is shaping.
Speaker 2:I was shaped by the heartbreak that I just told you about. That was actually over the course of many, many years and, honestly, has maybe never really stopped. I have never really stopped being heartbroken and I think there were definitely times when I pushed it down and away and then times it came back up right. Whatever we push down into our shadow will always come back up. It doesn't go away Just because we push it away. Resistance is still an energetic connection. What we resist persists. So I could push it away, but it was always going to come back up. At a certain point I had to become willing to be heartbroken, which meant that I had to be willing to grieve.
Speaker 2:I feel like we got a big collective lesson on grief during COVID. I mean, I think we got a lot of lessons over the past few years, but one of them on grief and collective grief and releasing ideas of what we thought would be what we thought we'd be, what we thought was going to happen, the pain of losing so many, the pain of our lives taking new shapes that we hadn't expected or wanted. And our culture is not very good at grieving. I think we all kind of know that one. I would say Western culture. That's what I, when I'm saying our culture, I'm saying, like our over-culture, dominant culture that shapes us and has roots in capitalism and white supremacy, deep colonial roots of separation and all of its little tendrils of influence that we all feel all the time, in the systems we live inside of, in the ways we communicate and interact, the ways we feel about ourselves in the world.
Speaker 3:Oh hi, it's me, the librarian. I don't often chime in here, but I heard Dana talking about overculture, which is actually a term coined by Dr Clarissa Pinkoli Estes, and in a lovely essay from 2017, she says I coined the word over-culture to mean the larger society, which often attempts to tell girls, women and elders what we ought, should and must be do act, but and as you know, often the deeper wild nature says otherwise, for the wild, instinctual nature is wise and wild, both with innate gifts and creative callings, all following the naturally insightful voice of the true self, rather than the often one-inch-deep over-cultures voice that values uniformity and only pre-authorized dancing.
Speaker 1:That's all for now.
Speaker 3:See you at the library.
Speaker 2:It's been a really important practice for me to grieve. Last month that meant asking my partner to vacate the premises while I just laid on the floor and howled and cried and made noises to just presence the intensity of emotions and sadness and pain that I was feeling, that I do feel about the genocide of the Palestinian people. I know there are many genocides going on in the world. I have a much longer, deeper personal connection to Palestine as an activist as, having visited there and visited there recently, as much as I'm turning towards the grief and then trying to take that grief and honor it and give it space and not make it right or wrong or or judge it in any way or coddle it really in any way, to be in relationship with it and then to allow that grief to compost and to allow some, some little seedlings of hope to exist and that to turn into action. Allow them to exist side by side, embracing the paradox.
Speaker 2:I mean that is what I work on with my clients all the time, and myself and my own little heart, we're holding grief and hope together, not a requirement but an invitation, because again in our over-c, over culture, there's an over focus on joy and happiness and emotions that are seen as positive and light and a resistance and rejection of more negative, bad emotions.
Speaker 2:I mean this in the spiritual inner work world, the healing industry, the wealth and hellness industry, the neoliberalized healing culture, only ride the high vibes, stay out the low vibes, man, I mean, the gems are in the dark. I think we do all that expansive, what some people call light work, to plunge into the depths, personally and collectively. If that expansion is to keep expanding, to just keep feeling good, good, good and to deny the depth of emotion that we all experience, that's joy, supremacy. No, fucking thank you. In traditional Chinese medicine, joy is only one of the five core emotions and it's the only one that we might put in the like high vibe category.
Speaker 2:So this is why, in heartbreak there is richness for us, there is perhaps courage, and I mean courage to risk yes, courage to risk being heartbroken, but courage to become more of who you are by embracing the multitudes, the multitudeness oh, that's a good word All the parts of your existence, of being, yes, a human. We're not even being anthropocentric here, but I know you know, because I don't know who else is listening to this podcast Could be a whole crew of rocks and flowers out there that tune in regularly. Hi guys, I really appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Keep listening. I know the library just dropped in, so I thought I would too. It's me Connie, your friendly neighborhood quantum worm. It's me Tani, your friendly neighborhood quantum worm, and I have plenty of rock friends that just love grinding my jacuzzi. So if you have any rock friends or liking friends, those crazy bastards, just feel free to share this podcast with them or go ahead and rate and review wherever you are listening. Anywho, gotta toot with them. Or go ahead and rate and review wherever you are listening. And who got a two?
Speaker 2:To honor our complexity, not just as humans, which is plenty, but as beings on the planet, in a web of experience, in the pluriverse, in the many worlds that are in this one world, and not one of them is the correct world. Again, our overculture would not agree with that and look the overculture. A gentle being man. Everything has agency. A gentle being man, everything has agency if we honor that we are in a web of experience of beings and we honor the range of our experience, the range of our emotions, in the same way that we can honor the seasons, that we can honor A tree goes through different forms and processes in every season, and that it all has its place and its function, Like nothing in it is extra or random or superfluous, random or superfluous. And that our brokenheartedness, our grief, our sadness, our relief, our shutdowns, right Like our trauma responses, like none of it is wrong, is an accident, is a problem that our brokenheartedness has a reason for existing. Maybe it even has agency. What if it has something profound to teach us, as opposed to just something to get through and get over? I mean, my biggest heartbreak has been the world. No man has broken my heart.
Speaker 2:The way the world has bell hooks rates in her book all about love. Everywhere we learn that love is important and yet we are bombarded by its failure in the realm of the political, among the religious, in our families and in our romantic lives. We see little indication that love informs decisions, strengthens our understanding of community or keeps us together. This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love's promise. So your brokenheartedness is proof of love, is proof of life. And if we want to splash around in some Zen Buddhism, the heart full of love is also the heart absent of love. Empty, oh emptiness. All things inter-are, inter-being. The heart that is full of love is also the heart that is empty of love. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Our broken hearts are only broken because they existed in the first place, because there was something to break. Put your hand over your heart. How is your heart? Just breathe into it. How is your heart?
Speaker 3:Broken full empty.
Speaker 2:Let your heartbreak guide you. So what if our brokenheartedness has a purpose, or even just has agency, like it's a thing that we're interacting with, that we can have relationship with? It's not an accident, it's not a throwaway, it's not just something to get through as fast as possible, that to be shaped by it is maybe the point. It is maybe the point. How are you being shaped by your broken heart? Who are you becoming? I mean hint hint more of yourself, but who are you becoming because of your broken heart? And then, if we're all out here with broken hearts, having risked that, that's beautiful. Being willing to be shaped by hurt, by pain, by sadness, by discomfort, that's living, get away from it and you don't ever really get to know it. What if that right there, your willingness to be brokenhearted, that right there, your willingness to be brokenhearted, to be in that pain, to be shaped by that, is the only way you will ever understand and have any understanding with the people that you will never meet, that you are concerned about or raising funds for or standing in solidarity with or talking and having fucking uncomfortable conversations with your friends and family and community about what if that broken heart is the only actual understanding that you will ever have with them. Why would you ever turn away from that?
Speaker 2:I don't have a monopoly on this, on how to do it with all the grace, all the time, and I don't expect you to either. I don't expect anyone to. I think grace is something that we can cultivate and maybe that understanding will never be easy and maybe, just maybe, that is part of our continued magnificent evolution, because look at how many things will never be easy. Addressing systemic racism, that's never going to be super easy. Chill, no big deal. It's not designed to be. If it were easy, then it wouldn big deal it's not designed to be. If it were easy, then it wouldn't exist. It's complex and maybe heartbreak is just always stepping forward as a guide, as a teacher, to not just show us how to get through it, but to be in relationship with it, with ourselves, with each other, in great discomfort, woo.
Speaker 3:You feel me. Let your soul be crushed. Let your heart be broken. Let yourself be changed. Let your relationship be broken. Let yourself be changed. Let your relationship to your ego.
Speaker 1:That's been trying so hard to protect you let that grow and evolve.
Speaker 2:Find compassion for the parts of you that are scared. There are so many parts. It's okay. Guard the pain of others with compassion. Turn your heartbreak into action. Crying in my jacuzzi, 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.
Speaker 3:Five stars, though Theme music and other musical bits by the very talented Kat Otteson, 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 mean.
Speaker 1:Thank you.