Wholehearted: Living in Peace and Dying Wise with Jewel Veitch
Introductory Highlights
You know, sometimes opening up your heart doesn’t mean just letting everyone in. Sometimes it means I’ve gotta say no to this experience so I can continue to work with the rest of my heart.
If we say, I don’t want pain, I’m going to try and prevent my kids from suffering, I’m gonna try and prevent the discomfort of this conversation. I’m gonna try and avoid this over here. It’s a feeling that we’re trying to avoid in anticipation of pain. Then we’re also avoiding the flow.
You mentioned, um, a couple of months ago that you were working towards, incorporating that concept of dying wisely into your work. And that was one of the most beautiful offerings that cancer gave me was like facing that mortality and being quite crisply aware of what it was. You know, if this is it. What is it that matters most to me?
Returning to the Heart Through Breath
How do you reconnect with your heart during stressful moments?
Welcome to The Peri Moon Podcast. I am Nelle Tamar-Manuel. I’m a naturopath and a narrative therapist, and I help women in perimenopause find themselves all the way alive. And today I’m going to invite us to take a little, a little exhale, take a little breath, and an exhale before I introduce my guest, because something really special today.
Um, Jewel is a heart space healer, is what I feel deep in my bones, in my heart, and it’s such an honour to sit with somebody who’s so reverently orientated towards the heart and love and peace. Jewel, thank you so much for being here today. Ah, thank you for having me. I am so, so happy just to have this conversation wherever it takes us.
And I know that it will be heart led when two hearts shall meet. Um, yes. And I feel like we’ve known each other for many years now, and it’s like our chats are always so, they’re sporadic, you know, they’re far and few between, but it’s like oof. It’s like the ultimate anchoring and just landing in, in divinity and heart and love.
And I feel such a grounding from our conversations that is so unique to the dynamic between us. You know, what you bring to the table and what I’m here to soak up from you is just so gorgeous. So thank you so much for, for saying yes and joining us today. Oh, well thank you for asking and yeah, I receive equally through our conversations.
They’re so rich. So rich. Yeah. Yeah. So I need to preface this entire conversation with, I had a mad morning this morning. My daughter is, um, refusing school sometimes, and it was just a little bit chaotic. And, you know, I feel like in those times it’s just so natural to go into the head and think of all the reasons that, you know, how do I negotiate this?
And it’s very, very head heavy. How do you orient when you’re in those moments where it’s like something so demanding from the head? Is there something you do to like, pull us, you know, draw back into the heart? Mm-hmm. Yeah. I draw back into the body where the heart resides, um, and I use breath.
The breath of life is just such a, it’s such a powerful orient reorientation point for me and coming back into breathing all the way into, through the diaphragm and into my root and centre. I have a body centering practise that I’ve done for so many years now that I can access it in just a few split seconds.
And it just allows me to feel the swirling and then come back into this central neutral place, not because the challenge has disappeared and not because things have gotten easier, but because ease has come in to navigate what is swirling around and what feels hard. And because the heart and, and the heart and the, the, the thing that comes in accompaniment with that is when I put my hand on my heart and I press a little and I feel the heartbeat, like I literally feel the physical pulsation of the heartbeat.
I remember that there’s this heartbeat inside of my body that’s supporting me and that can carry me through whatever it is that I need to navigate and think about, plan about, orchestrate, about with my head. But it’s like there’s a flipping it around so that the heart can lead rather than the head leading with the worry.
Um, and I find that when I land in my body that I can’t hold both stress and connection with my heart at the same time. Hmm. So it dissolves in a way, even if it’s for a glimpse of a second or, you know, as I’m making a decision or whatever it is, but they can’t exist at the same time. Gosh. Yeah.
And it is, you know, even just that brief moment of clarity, it just shifts our perspective so much. Like just being able to, you know, stand in the eye of the storm and be able to look from a different viewpoint, I think is so powerful. And, and I love that you’re, you’re reminding me of the breath, breath is just, it is, it is so powerful and, yeah.
Yeah. It’s that, and, and recently I was sharing with you that I had moved through big stormy weather, like literally stormy weather with tornado level winds, and the breath is the wind of life, you know, and it’s like, as I was moving through the storms and the rain and the heat wave, it’s like there’s this, um, equilibrium available inside of this sweet little spot of knowing that this is happening for me.
That life is giving to me, that life is happening for me as opposed to what’s happening. This is happening to me. This is, this is really horrible. It’s like, wow, I wonder what’s here for me? This must be really big, really important. Yeah. Because it’s a gift, it disguised, and even though I can’t see it in the moment, there’s an underlying faith.
It’s like an undercurrent of faith that exists here. And I remember my dad always accused me of having blind faith, and I always felt so disturbed by that, hurt by that. But now that I look back, I realise that that’s because, yeah, I have blind faith. Like I cannot see the faith that I hold. So I’m, I’m blind to the face that I cannot see with my own eyes because of the reality that’s happening in front of me.
Like your daughter is the reality that’s happening. But under, in the undercurrent, there’s this faith that we can either choose to be blind, you know, to or to trust that it’s there. So, yeah. Yeah. I love that. And I think it’s, it is it.
For me, when you’re saying blind faith it, it definitely brings up intuition, which I think is just such a feminine. It’s such a feminine technology to have access to, is that intuition? It’s like, I can’t, logic does not have a, you know, logic beware. There’s no place for logic here. Um, I feel like it is such a beautiful, you know, that, that faith is such a beautiful anchor.
Why Life’s Hardest Moments Become Our Greatest Teachers
Why do challenges help us grow spiritually and emotionally?
Um, and when we are thinking about it in a more, you know, holistic way, it really is, we are here to learn, we’re here to grow, and our souls have come here to learn and grow in, in a myriad of ways. And one of those ways is to provide us with externals that are not fun and are challenging. And that, you know, I wouldn’t sign up to a school or a course or anything if it was like, you’re just gonna stay in your comfort zone the whole time and you’re never gonna be challenged.
It’s like, if we’ve come here to learn and grow, then, then those, those moments that are the, the hardest and the most harrowing are the ones that give us the greatest opportunity to return to the heart, return to ourself, return to the moment, return to presence, return to breath. Mm. Yeah, I agree.
It’s such a beautiful school room that we’re in. Yeah. And I feel like, you know, we’ve discussed, you know, my cancer and how I chose to orient through that. And I feel like sometimes, you know, those big things when it’s something so in your face, like cancer diagnosis, I’m like, okay, I’m very aware of the mortality, you know, stress is the biggest predictor of mortality in cancer.
So I was very aware of that and I’m like, okay, I need to consciously orient myself towards not stressing, you know, towards peace and towards serenity. And I consciously oriented, this is going to be the best time of my life. And it was beautiful. It was such a beautiful time. But those day-to-day moments, they’re the ones, like for me, cancer was, you know… Awful, painful, all of those things. But the day-to-day ones, they’re the ones where it’s like that constant like return. Return to the breath, return to the self, return to the moment. Yeah.
The Illusion of Safety and Control
Why does our need for safety keep us from feeling peace?
Well, and I think that like during the day to day activity of life, life-ing, there’s this propensity for us as humans to want it to go well.
Hmm. To want it to go smooth, to be smooth, to be easy. And to me, the, the greatest irony is that it’s in the wanting it to that way, that is the very thing that counters the ease of it, if that makes sense. So it’s, it’s this want for things to be easy as opposed to, and I had a, a conversation with a client about this yesterday about.
The dropping the energy of trying to make sure that it’s easy, trying to make sure that our kids don’t suffer. Trying to make sure that we and our families are safe, trying to make sure that we stay healthy so that we don’t get sick. Like trying to make sure when the divine is all it wants to do is do its job.
And I often say like, who are, it’s, it’s kind of like trying, trying to play God. Mm and I feel like, you know, safety is such an interesting concept because I feel like if we strip away almost every conflict that we have, you know, within ourselves, within those moments where it’s like, oh, my daughter just swore at me.
You know, wow, that was, that wasn’t great. Or, you know, when, when things are, when we’re in conflict, it’s, it’s, it’s safety. And I, I feel the same with my clients. It’s like the more I strip away, the more it’s like you’re, you’re really afraid that you’re going to be, you know, ultimately that you’re going to be either rejected by the tribe or that you’re going to be physically unsafe.
Like, there’s such an element of safety that is, you know, people really start to clutch onto things. And it’s the antithesis of peace in a way. ’cause it’s like, it’s that grasping that really causes the conflict, I think. Yeah. And grasping in order to feel the peace. That’s the irony, isn’t it? It is. Yeah.
You know, where, when, and this is why I feel for… I mean, this has been a lifelong journey for me of accessing safety inside myself. Yeah. Accessing peace inside myself, not from the external world that doesn’t give me conflict or grief, but it’s inside myself. And really having been on this journey of be feeling home inside myself, it’s an ongoing thing.
And I don’t, I worked with a yogic swami for 14 years, very intensive private work with her, and I always believed that. She was all the way enlightened and that, that’s what I was reaching for. And one day I, I saw her humanity, and then I saw more of her humanity and more of her humanity.
And I realised when I, we parted ways, um, very gracefully, and I realised that I don’t believe, this is my own belief that we as humans will ever be entirely, always 100% of the time, feeling peace inside ourselves, home inside ourselves, safe inside ourselves. But I believe that we can move in the direction where the, the scales tip, and we feel mostly, almost all the time home inside ourselves.
You know, and able to give ourselves grace when we lose it, because we know that that is part of being human. And it is, as long as we live in these, in this dense body, we’re always gonna experience things in a way that feels somewhat threatening. I think. And I think that’s just the nature of living, like an authentic life and living with, with vulnerability.
Opening Your Heart After Pain
How do you reopen your heart after grief and heartbreak?
And there’s a quote, and I can’t remember who it is, but it’s so beautiful. It’s lived to the brink of tears. And it, and I feel like that’s such a beautiful way to orient yourself is like, you know, can I open? It’s painful opening your heart, you know, like we, it’s so much easier so often to be like, I’ve had this heartache, I’ve had this pain, I’ve had this grief, and I just want to shelter myself forever more.
So I never feel this again. Opening your heart is such a, a painful reminder while also it’s so bittersweet. Like it’s such a painful reminder of all that’s available to us and all that we can lose in any one moment. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah. And I feel like for, so, you know, for so many people to be able to open back up again is such, that’s kind of the life’s work.
I agree 100%. Yeah. Dropping the armour and for good reason, we’ve built walls around our heart for self-protection in these crystallising moments in life where we’ve become hurt, scared, you know, um, felt, felt trapped and built these walls and then carried the walls
forward. And this is the work. I agree 100%. This is the work to dissolve those walls and. Let the armour drop and open to vulnerably express and vulnerably share from the heart. And I believe that it’s, it’s the willingness. It’s the willingness to open, it’s the willingness to try it on a little bit and then a little bit more, and then open up a little bit more. And really, it’s, it’s a practise to do that intentionally.
So often I think we don’t even recognise that the walls are up because we’re on autopilot and we’re talking from this place of, should I, this is what I should say, this is how I should handle this. And we don’t even recognise that we’re closed off or shut down. It’s interesting too, because I feel like when we, and I think this speaks to experience, or not necessarily just age, but just the, the, the journey of opening your heart and that trying, trying things on. I feel like quite often it’s, you know, will, will this, you know, interaction is taking me further from opening the rest of my heart. And maybe I could sit with this little sliver of an, an interaction and settle into that, but then it’s shutting off other pieces of my heart.
You know, it’s such an expense that you’re dealing with the heart. It’s not just like open or shut, you know, it’s like this facet, this facet today is really being triggered and I just need to pull back so I can nurture the rest of my heart. And maybe once that feels solid, I can open up the other part of my heart.
But, you know, sometimes opening up your heart doesn’t mean just letting everyone in. Sometimes it means I’ve gotta say no to this experience so I can continue to work with the rest of my heart. Yeah, I agree. Absolutely. And saying no and being really clear that this is what is most nourishing for me in this moment.
And it’s okay to, to, to, to protect myself and nourish my heart so that I can, it’s, it’s that, that it reminds me of that heartbeat. The pulse. Mm. You know, it’s like the, the movement of in and out and pulsing and side to side and front to back and really getting to know, I feel that opening the heart is an act of letting love in and, and knowing thyself.
Those famous, that famous scripture is really about the willingness to open to the degree that feels like we can, um, sustain that open and wholeheartedness for the duration of the day, the month, the year, the life. And it’s a practise. It, I think it is absolutely a practise and also it’s an intention.
Listening to the Wisdom of the Heart
How do you hear what your heart is trying to tell you?
Like I feel like a, a lot of people don’t really recognise. The beauty of the heart and how it can orient because it’s like, well, this is the way I live to be a good person. Or This is the way I live to get what I want. Or this is the way I live to progress in society. And they remove the heart from so much of the process.
And then they get to like, you know, mid age and, and I’ve done all of this and my life feels really dry and empty. And, and it’s the heart that gives us that. Like, it’s absolutely, the heart is the place that gives us the juice and the beauty and the joy and, you know, the glory that all comes from the heart.
And it comes from saying no to something that seems completely logical to one person and saying yes to something that seems like madness to another person. But it’s, it’s that window of tolerance and being able to open that window of tolerance in the heart that’s like, oh, I can take on this today, but I can’t take on that today and this is what’s going to feed me moving forward.
Yeah. And what’s required for that, I believe, is to be able to hear what the heart speaks. Mm-hmm. What the heart, how the heart guides and what the heart is saying and whether it’s a yes or a no, and whether, you know, it’s guiding us to open more, less, move in this direction, move in that direction.
And in order to really hear there has to be quiet. Quiet. Yeah. Still, still quiet space. And that’s why I feel that the work, this work that we, we each do I know is, is addressing the removal of the noise and coming back to heart over and over and over again so that we can hear how it’s speaking and how it’s leading us forward.
’cause you just can’t hear it when. It’s too noisy in there. So it’s intention. It’s intention, an intentional recognition of what’s going on between the two ears and realising, oh, I need to drop into the body where the heart resides now because it’s too noisy up here because, and I can’t hear anything that the heart is, is saying right now because I’m too busy hearing the noise in my.
Emotional Courage, Grief and Grace
Why is feeling your emotions the pathway back to peace?
Overthinking mind. How do you like, I’m, I’ve always been very highly sensitive. Um, and I’m okay with my emotions and I love my emotions and I have space for all of them. And, you know, most of my art comes from this beautiful, like, willingness to share my emotions and express how they’re showing up. Um, but I do know some, quite often when I am in that really noisy head space and I drop back into the heart, it can be so painful and I can understand why people avoid that.
Mm-hmm. How do you have that experience at times where it’s like, oh, I’m dropping, oh, and I feel so remorseful about this thing, you know? And like now that I’m, oh, I shouldn’t have spoken to my daughter that way. Or, you know, what, whatever it was that’s coming up, and you get out of the head and back into the heart and it’s like, ow, I I’m, my heart’s a little heavy and it hurts a bit after that experience.
Mm-hmm. And I can see why people, you know, would rather go back to the head. Yeah. Well, because then you don’t have to feel, you know, and feeling takes a lot of courage. Emotional courage. It’s, and I too, I, I’m the same way. I love my emotions. And I actually, uh, started on this journey by teaching myself to have them.
Mm. In deep, during deep, deep grief. After my sister had passed away, after 10 years of anticipatory grief, it was, it’s like I taught myself to grieve, taught myself to deeply feel. And as the more I did that, the more I learned that on the other side of feeling my emotions all the way to the end of themselves, there was this quiet, there was this peace, there was this place of calm on the other side of it.
So I taught myself that there was a reward for feeling, I believe. Yeah. And a reward for emoting. And letting myself do that, I would actually evoke them through music and sound, because I could feel there was grief and it, the, the, the tension was building and building and building through the week.
And then on Friday nights, I could feel the tension and I would play music that would evoke emotion and I would do it on purpose so that I could go in and feel, and I, I believe that it’s so. It’s such a gift, and it’s such a value, a value to be willing to first of all, you know, feel, feel the sadness and the pain on the heels of having acted a certain way that we, we may be judging ourselves for and bringing grace into it and through grace, allowing ourselves to, to feel whatever it is.
Because there is the, the movement of energy that occurs, as, you know, frees up space to restore the flow of life. I love that you brought grace into it, because I feel like, you know, we can go through the more I just, the, the, the heart is such an organ of grace for me. And the more we sit with it, the more, you know, we can go through these big experiences.
Like, so often I’m told that I went, you know, I was, I did cancer with grace, you know, that’s a, a big reflection that I often receive. And, and it is, it was like, well, I just let my heart rule the whole, you know, it was steering the ship through that moment and it steers the ship for most of my life. But it does give us access to, you know, when those, those trickier moments come up to be able to offer love to something that would in our brain be ugly.
You know, and it’s like in our, I’m angry here, and it’s like, well, you are passionate and you felt the thing, you know, there’s an element of grace that comes with just using the heart and, and being able to have the emotions give all of the emotions a spot at the table. It’s like you, you, you are beautiful too.
You are beautiful anger and you have a voice and you have a reason for being here. And you know, as you, as you move through and as you move past, then that creates more space for joy and ecstasy and bliss and, you know, like, it, it is flow. It has to be flow or elsewhere. You know, that’s when people lock up and I can see it in their bodies and I can see it in the way they express themselves.
The Power of Duality and Flow
Why do joy and pain need each other?
Um, mm-hmm. Yeah. That restoration of flow I think is absolutely important as well. Yeah. And I feel that flow emerges as a direct result of the inherent duality that exists in life, so that when we’re willing to feel it all, we’re willing to feel pain. We’re willing, which opens up feeling joy. We’re willing to feel angry, which opens up feeling, um, you know, calm.
And we’re willing to, to have faith. And we’re also willing to feel the doubt. We’re willing to experience night and day and cold and warm and, um, black and, and light. And I feel that being willing to experience the duality is what brings us back into flow, because that’s the neutral place between being able to dance with it all.
If we say, I don’t want pain, I’m going to try and prevent my kids from suffering, I’m gonna try and prevent the discomfort of this conversation. I’m gonna try and avoid this over here. And it’s a feeling that we’re trying to avoid in anticipation of pain. Then we’re also avoiding the flow.
We’re also avoiding when we avoid the pain, we’re of, we cannot feel the joy. And when we cannot feel and we’re numb, then we’re disconnected. And disconnection is at the root of so much suffering and addiction, I feel.. Yeah. I think addiction is absolutely a dissociation. It, that’s the core of what it is.
It’s like I cannot tolerate this feeling that I’m experiencing, right. Experiencing right now, and I need to have something to buffer that. Mm-hmm.
Grief as a Portal to Love
How can grief deepen our connection rather than diminish it?
I’m always fascinated because I feel like you, you know, we’ve chatted before about how your sister’s death really was a catalyst for you and. I just naturally gravitate to what, you know, I just have such an, a huge attraction to people that are like, this terrible thing happened, you know, and I made lemonade, you know, I just… Yeah, absolutely adore that because I know there’s a portal, there’s a threshold that has to be crossed between that this grief is absolutely excruciating and unbearable, and the release that comes from surrendering to it and the light that floods through as a result.
And yeah, I just, I adore that, that you are very cognisant of that experience that you had, because I feel like a lot of people would like to keep those two things very separate and very contained. It’s like, this is my grief and I’m gonna hold it over here in the grief pile. And then occasionally I might let some sort of light in.
But it’s when you, we just surrender to the grief and surrender to the pain. It can, it’s just like that beautiful marriage of light and dark and Yeah. Yeah. It’s the brink of tears, you know? It’s really just so sublime. And, in this case, or in the case of, in my experience, having lost someone I loved so much because of the, the dance that it, it has become, my connection with her is so palpable, more so than when she was in her human body.
Yeah. There’s just such a, it, it’s, it’s an inexplicable connection that is, is available for all of us. And it comes through the portal of the heart, that universal heartbeat that just is pulsing in my body and your body. And in those who have left this earth who are part of the wind and the leaves that are rusting on the trees and the rivers that are flowing and the air that we breathe, we are breathing the breath of life and the breath of heart all the time.
And so it is so much more massive than we can even conceptualise and hard to put into words. And I think a lot of indigenous cultures have this view of, of death and grief as well, it is a portal to ecstasy. And I think, in western societies, I’ve really just almost like fetishised the material experience so much that it’s like, if I can’t see you or touch you, then I’m missing something, then something is wrong.
There’s something lacking. And, and there is so much more. And I think that that’s the thing that grief can really show us is in that letting go of this is how our relationship looks, or this is how our dynamic looks. You know, physical and physical when we surrender. Okay, that may be gone, but what else is available?
It’s so glorious that it’s like, oh, I think you are, you know, like who you are today showing up for me when I most needed somebody to be here for me.
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the tiny little moments and the tiny miracles that show up every day and that we don’t notice often enough, in my opinion.
I don’t, I don’t notice them often enough. And then I remember to notice them and then they become cumulative and generative. And then I remember, and I remember them more than often enough. And then I forget, and then I remember. And that’s being human.
It’s absolutely being human. And I think I, I love that.
Being Fully Human in the Age of AI
Why is the human experience more valuable than perfection?
In a time of AI and the industry and everything’s mechanised. And we really, really, it’s such an honour to be able to be human. Like it really, all of the ai, you know, I’m a writer, you know, a big part of my life is writing and so many people are like, what are you gonna do with AI? You know, you’re gonna be, and I’m like, they cannot replace a, well… I doubt that they could write like me, but even if they could, they don’t get the experience that I get.
The feeling that I get from being human and being able to, you know, I’m here for the experience, not the piece that I just published. I’m here for the experience of it. And to be able to open myself up to that experience is such an honour and it’s such an honour to sign up, you know, like I feel like there’s a, there’s a little sign up sheet on the, on the, on the cork board and it’s like, yep, sadness, grief.
Yeah, I’ll sign up for all of those things because it is such an honour to have access to those emotions where, you know, I look back at my grandmother and I don’t think she was allowed to have many, you know, it wasn’t safe for her. I don’t think she was allowed to have emotions, I don’t think, you know, there were places and spaces for her to sit with emotions and people that were really comfortable listening to those types of things.
And it’s just such an honour for me to be in a time and space where it’s like I can be human and, and have all these things and be safe at the end of it. I can ugly cry about something and feel loved and it’s so glorious.
Yeah, and it’s so incredible to me how it’s like this momentary decision to open the heart to receive love this way, and it’s a moment to moment decision to that we have a available to us, like everybody.
And our grandmothers were brought up in an era where it was a lot less, um, acceptable.
And it’s a lot more acceptable now yet. Why do so many resist it? Still, we are not our grandmothers. I mean, we are an extension, but do you know what I mean? Like, it’s so, it is so acceptable now. And yet I think because of such deep ancestral conditioning, we’ve carried forward that in acceptability.
And I feel like it’s an unravelling and an unlearning how to protect ourselves and begin to come back to the heart as an intention, like you said earlier. It’s just such a, the intention itself catalyses the energy of opening and, and allows us to open the heart, even if it’s a little bit at a time at first.
And I always say to people, you know, you don’t have to open, open wide and lay it all out when you’ve spent a lifetime with your heart closed. What’s one area? What’s one small thing that you can open to receive more of today?
Love, Vulnerability and the Heart Unfurling
What does it feel like to experience safe, unconditional love?
Mm. It, I, I haven’t told you this, but I have a beautiful new love in my life and it’s really so happy for you. Well, new… childhood sweetheart. So it’s fascinating to me watching the process of my heart unfurling and feeling completely safe and, and completely love. Yeah. His capacity for love is what turned me off. Him and Charlie and like teenager’s. Like, oh, he’s, he loves me too much. You know? And it’s interesting just looking back on the timeline, being like, he loved me too much as a teenager.
So that was something that I was like, I wasn’t ready for that vulnerability of being loved to such a degree when I was obviously still working through my own insecurities where it’s like, oh, he. You know, he wants to see behind this curtain. I’m not ready to show.
So to get to a point in my life where, you know, just beautiful maturity is like I love, I love me so much and you know, being loving myself so much and being like, there’s nothing really he could sit, you know what?
There’s nothing that I don’t want him to love about me. And just watching that open now is such an interesting. Yeah, it’s just an interesting observation as far as how love works and the mechanics of love and watching it because it’s not, you know, it’s just, it’s a deepening, it’s a, a continual deepening, which is not what I affected, but also it feels so, you know, obvious now.
Well, and you’re ready now. You’ve been readying yourself for this level of love, for your whole life, probably, and opening your heart for this level of receptivity, likely for a lifetime. That’s so incredible. I love that. For you and you, you know, I, I can, I can say you deserve it, and we all do. We all, it’s our birthright to.
Shined so brightly that may, they love all of us, and you know, that which they do not is simply what they don’t love in themselves. Like it has nothing to do with, with us. And so I just love for you that you’re opening, and I love that you used the word unfurling.
Well, it is, it really is. And you know that that symbolism of the rose and the heart… I was just looking at the rose, reminds you it’s so gorgeous. Rose is just such a beautiful talisman for me as far as my journey on being, you know, living a heart led life.
The rose is, you know, obviously it’s that, that commercial Valentine’s Day Roses equal. I love you. Oh, but so much more than that. It’s so much more, isn’t it? It’s the seasons and it’s the purity and the richness and the vulnerability.
So yes, it’s very glorious.
The Rose, Imperfection and Unconditional Love
What do the thorns of the rose teach us about love?
One thing I love about the rose is, you know, the, when we talk about perfection and how things are so perfect and the rose represents, you know, it’s just such a perfect thing. And I even, you know, I have to remind myself that it has thorns as well, you know, and it, and it’s, it is perfect.
And it has thorns too. None of us. It is the duality and it’s like none of us are without our little prickles, you know? That’s right. We all have that, and we can all still be this perfect manifestation of love if we, if we decide that that’s what it is. Perfectly. The beauty of imperfection.
And it is all in the eye, you know, it is all in the eye of the beholder. It’s… what am I choosing? What lens am I choosing to look at this with? And is it from a lens of beauty, or am I looking at, and that safety, ouch, that might hurt me? Is it the safety piece again, that’s keeping us distance from something when it’s like, oh, I just wrap my fingers around this bit. Don’t touch that bit. Um, I can hold it close to me. Yeah. Just have to handle it with care and consciousness and deliberate attention.
You know, and embrace all of it. And with grace, like, I feel like giving ourselves grace for the things that we have been conditioned to believe are wrong, and, you know, spent a lifetime making the most right parts of ourselves wrong and really bringing grace into the thorns and the prickly bits.
And because those are also the right parts of us that, that they’re what make us whole. What would a rose be without the stem or the thorns?
What would give it nutrients, what would feed it? What would protect it?
It’s interesting and, and it’s, it echoes back to that conversation we were having about being life being the greatest classroom that we could ever sign up for.
And if my soul’s like, when I come here, I’m going to live a heart led life. That marriage was so perfect to me to learn all of the nuance and all of the, the edges to what that would look like because him being. Him being in his utter vulnerability and, and seeking safety so much, um, would lie or hide things from me or deceive me in many ways.
And the greatest thing for me, as, you know, I became really aware of what the dynamic of our relationship was, was I had a longing, my heart longed to be able to love the bits that he was hiding.
It was like, but I want to love all of you, and you are only giving me this little bit. And it’s like, I want the prickles, I want the thorns.
I want to be able to wrap my whole heart around all of that. And I think quite often it, it, yeah. It’s interesting that we, the things we want to hide them, you know, it’s easy to love pretty things. It’s easy to think love, easy-going things. But the greatest joy I think comes from loving my cancer experience, or loving the process of grieving, like loving those things.
Oh gosh. The heart just, it opens and it fortifies and it amplifies. And I feel like being able to love those things is so delicious. Unconditionally, right. Unconditionally in the truest sense of the word and the truest sense of that experience of zero conditions. And that to me is like the greatest kind of spaciousness
That we can give our hearts, because our hearts that they, they, they, they, they feel constrained. I feel my heart feels constrained when I, you know, when I create those walls and when I drop the walls, there’s this spaciousness of accepting, embracing it all unconditionally in love. Hmm. And I think it does speak to the containers we create, you know, like marriage is obviously a container where unconditionally unconditional can flourish.
You know, your boss at work. That may not be the, the container to practise unconditionality, you know, let, there might be, as I was mentioning before, it’s like some days it might be like, oh, this is triggering me and it’s making me shut my whole heart down. But when we’re in those containers where it’s like, let me, let me open a little. And I think it does speak to, to the environment we’re in and to the, the nature and dynamic of things as well.
The Sail Metaphor: Living in the Flow of Life
How does opening your heart create effortless forward movement?
When the, the, the unfurling reminds me of the, like a, uh, I’m a sailor and the unfurling of a sail. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sail unfurl, but as it unfurls, the wind catches it more and more fills it, and the forward propulsion accelerates and there’s this like effortless forward flow with the unfurling.
So it’s such a great metaphor for what can happen when we allow that unfurling to take place, we can move ourselves more into that state of flow without trying… And just letting the unfurling do the work, you know? It does. And for me, it’s really been an experience of. Like, I don’t really think about that.
I know. I don’t really have to think about that that much. No. You know, I don’t think about things as much as I used to, and it, which kind of feels counterintuitive ’cause it’s like, oh, I’ve really gotta plan out my life and I’ve gotta map things out and as an author, I can have plot points in my life, but what are those micro experiences in between and how is the heart guiding us there?
It’s like, I can, I can seek for all of these amazing things to happen, but if I can’t find peace just when I’m unpacking the dishwasher. Then what is it all for? You know? And, and being able to sit with the heart and be like, it will show me where I need to go and what, you know, I had to, the other night I had to cut a phone conversation short with somebody.
It just wasn’t really, you know, and as gracefully as possible, but it had become a really uncomfortable and unhealthy kind of conversation and things like that where I usually, I’d be like, I’m a bad per, you know, my brain would happily tell me how bad I am or how uncaring or how unloving it was, but my heart was like, I have a whole world that I need to love, and by having this experience, it’s going to going to shut down a lot of other parts of my heart.
It does become that wind in the sail. Absolutely. It becomes like, you know, and then, then I could dive straight back into beautiful love connections, you know, it’s so, so gorgeous being able to say, this isn’t serving love right now. This experience is not serving love right now.
Yeah. I love that. Is this serving love? You know, What would love say right now? What would my heart say right now? It has so much to say, so much to say.
Dying Wisely and Living Wholeheartedly
What does it mean to live well and die wisely?
You mentioned, um, a couple of months ago that you were working towards, um, incorporating that concept of dying wisely into your work. And That was one of the most beautiful offerings that cancer gave me was like facing that mortality and being quite crisply aware of what it was. You know, if this is it.
What is it that matters most to me? Um, and being in hospital, it wasn’t, I didn’t care about the house or the car or, you know, all those things that we think we need to, it was like, oh, this person just caught, you know, sent me a message and connection for me and, and orienting from a place of love and, yeah, rich, rich connection, deep connection, soul connection.
That, for me became the only option almost. It’s like, yeah, I still have to pay rent and I still have to do all these things. And that comes first. Like the, that’s the thing that I need to cultivate more than anything because. In those lonely moments in hospital, they were the, that was what was like, oh, that kept me warm.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And what matters the most? What matters the most and what is the top, top priority and the greatest desire of any human is that connection. And I truly, truly have been focusing on what matters most and living so richly as much as possible, remembering that this is a rich life to be lived in a rich way, wholehearted way.
And that when the end of it all, at the end of it all, I want to know that nothing was left unfelt felt and unfinished and unsaid and incomplete. And who knows? I, I am not there yet, but my desire to die very wisely with a smile on my face and knowing, wow, that was such a good ride. And actually we’ve just, um, moved and my husband’s just retired.
And we’ve made a massive transition in our lives. And we’ve been, we’ve been looking at pictures and we’ve been sitting in so much gratitude for all the experiences that we’ve had to this point, because this transition has called us forward to look and revisit all, all that, all that we’ve become and all the adventures and places we’ve, we’ve gone to, and experiences we’ve had with people we love and people we’ve met.
And it’s quite amazing how rich of a life it has been already. And the, you know, there’s more to come. And that is my wish is to, when the end of it all comes, I do want to feel that deep gratitude and peace, rest in peace, you know, like truly rest in peace. And I feel like I’m, I’m, I’m resting in peace in my lived experience more and more and more.
And that is what leads us to be able to die wise, live well and die wise. I just have, um, really connected with that in my work. Yeah. Living in peace. I think that’s so important. And I feel like a lot of people are, you know, it’s like… I do the job or I leave. This big chunk of my life is dedicated to getting all this stuff together or whatever it may be, and then I can have some peace on the weekend.
And I think switching for me, switching that perspective to being like, I think staff has to be secondary. It has to be secondary or. Like, that’s my, I don’t know. Yes, it is my life that I’m living, but it’s also my life force is being able to live in peace every moment or as close to it as much as I can.
Being able to live in peace, you know, after that it’s like, oh, this, this stuff is just as good as that other stuff that I thought I really needed or I’m, I’m happy with no stuff. Um, I know. Yeah,
We’re moving to towards minimalist living and it’s so much fun. I mean, minimalist not to the extreme. We’re not there and I don’t think that that’s the, the goal, but just, it’s just stuff. We don’t need stuff.
No experiences and connection, soul connections, like this one. Very much like this conversation.
Jewel Veitch’s Heart Keys Oracle Deck
Where can I find Jewel Veitch to connect with her?
Oh, Jewel, this has been like, just, I knew, I knew when we, when we booked this date to make this conversation happen, I knew it was going to be profound, and I knew that there’d be things in my life that would be so relevant, you know?
And then with Birdie this morning, I was like, oh, the heart, you know, it just reminds me, it was like that little, little slap on the face, like, Hey, get back to the heart again. And it is so as much as you orient, it’s always just such a beautiful invitation to remind us back, back, back into the heart. I know.
I love chatting with you and thank you. Likewise.
Thank you. Thank you so much.
Where can our beautiful listeners find you in the world? And would you like to share what, what it is that you are offering at the moment? You’re in a state of change, aren’t you?
I am, and while moving and moving across provinces. This week the heart key Oracle deck cards that I have co-created with the Divine are landing in the US. I live in Canada, but they’re landing in a warehouse and will become available. And I am hosting a Heart Keys Launch celebration event mid-September. I’m really excited to bring these cards to the world. They are beautiful in the physical, they feel gorgeous. I pulled the Grace Heart Key card just the other day in a client session.
And so these cards are a portal to the heart. They’re a tool for coming back to heart. And they are the vehicle for the inner somatics methodology that I’ve created around my work. And this celebration event that’s gonna take place is going to include a deck. So it’s a way to receive the deck.
It’s going to include a personalised heart key reading from my heart to yours. And it also is gonna include the original first six heart keys that were born before they ever came into form, before the idea was even seeded, that they would become an Oracle deck. But these heart keys have been alive in before my whole life, unbeknownst to me.
So I have the original six and transmissions that I channelled through for these original six a little while ago. So that is my next offering, my current offering. And the Heart Gate clearing session is a one-on-one session that people can upgrade to from if they want, wish to receive the deck, attend the event, and receive a heart gate clearing session.
It’s, it’s designed to dissolve the walls that are built around the heart and to open the heart and receive love, the love that we are so people can see me on social media, on my Facebook page, Jewel Veitch and Instagram, jewel.veitch, and my brand new inner somatics.com website is about to be launched.
In about two weeks. Otherwise my current website of jewelveitch.com is where people can go to, to find me right away. So there’s so many moving pieces. Everything is flowing, everything is streaming just so beautifully in concert with this move. It’s so incredible. Yeah. So thanks for asking. Yeah, beautiful.
The macro and the micro. Hey, it’s like we can’t, you know, we make one shift and then everything ripples from that. I love it. And, and I love this big move for you and I love this big change for you and I love that it’s evoking even greater change. Like I do believe change begets change.
You know, we can’t change just one aspect and, and hold it. A beautiful intention for that one change. Like your intention from moving was so immense and immensely beautiful for other things to then follow suit. I love that. Thank you so much.
Just one last thing, is that when the seed was planted for a move, we agreed, my husband and I, that we would be shown two years later we’re here, but we have done this, we have moved through this whole process by being shown what’s next. And it has been… it’s just been so transformational. So thank you. Thank you for having me. I’ve loved our conversation and I love you.
Oh, I love you. And I always adore our catchups. It’s always, as you said, it’s always so rich and I’m just so grateful for your being, Jewel. Thank you so much.
Thank you too. I adore you. Have a beautiful day.
Thank you for sitting with us today. It has been an absolute joy. If you’d like to work with me or connect with any one of our beautiful guests, you can find everything at perimoon.com.au. And until next time, may you find yourself all the way alive.
