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
We're Too Busy Fighting Crow's Feet to Fight Fascism
Our attention is constantly being hijacked by systems training us to see ourselves as problems needing to be fixed. Let’s play with the phenomena of ‘perception drift’ (when you can’t see changes in/on you— grace à Courtney Cox) and ‘change blindness’ (when you can no longer see change around you) to explore how we’re perpetuating coloniality rather than tending to collective issues + why reclaiming our attention and moving beyond pathologizing ourselves is revolutionary.
This ep is full of ways to practice expanding your capacity for empathy & connection, resisting anti-intellectualism, tending to your nervous system resilience and reclaiming your attention as the act of graceful rebellion that it is!
~ resources & more ~
- Free grounding meditation ~ bit.ly/grounding-now
- Attention & Will
- All the book recs from this episode
- COMET ☄️CORN 🍿
- 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). Email dana@danabalicki.com the review title + your review name. Winner announcements will be made across platforms mid-month.
// sound-editing/design ~ rose blakelock, theme song ~ kat ottosen, podcast 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 😭
Dearest crybabies, welcome back to Crying in my Fancy, the ebbs and flows of living an examined life where we live, laugh, love in the Anthropocene. I'm Dana Balicki, transformational coach of 13 years, former grassroots organizer, reverently, irreverent, deep feeler. Woo-woo Sherpa, your internet big sis that you always wanted, and slow-down medicine guide in exploring the weird magic of humaning together. The Jacuzzi Verse is where we dive into the messy, beautiful, ridiculous and profound journey of self-exploration and collective evolution, because life is a lot and sometimes the only thing left to do is to sink into the warm, bubbly depths of it all and let it flow. Crying in my jacuzzi, Crying in my jacuzzi. Crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi.
Speaker 1:My phone feeds me a neglected mix of news, mostly about quantum theories, breakthroughs in consciousness studies, quantum theories, breakthroughs in consciousness studies and the unseen worlds, communication between plants and animals and all matter, all things that I really love to just devour, and every so often it throws in a plot twist, something that seems completely random. Most recently, it was a story about Courtney Cox dissolving all of her face fillers and I clicked because look, oracular guidance is everywhere, and in the article was a mention of the phenomenon called perception drift. This is when people undergo cosmetic procedures and lose sight of their original appearance I don't know who I am anymore and begin to consistently perceive new flaws, new things that need attention, leading them to seek more treatments. And, in a nutshell, it happens because the brain adapts to a new baseline, like the goalpost is just constantly shifting, but the person doesn't know it. Courtney didn't know it.
Speaker 2:God, oh my God poor. Monica Courtney didn't know it. God, oh my God poor.
Speaker 1:Monica, and I don't actually want to debate, take this episode to debate or judge cosmetic surgery, but I will say that I was recently at Freeze LA. It's an art fair in LA and I was walking behind a woman whose energy was just hot, magnetic, crackly in an electric sort of way and everyone was just looking amazing. All over the place Just outfits for days. And then, when this one woman turned around, I realized it was Justine Bateman. She looked amazing. Realized it was Justine Bateman, she looked amazing.
Speaker 1:I remember reading an interview with her when her book Face, one Square Foot of Skin came out a few years ago, and she had this quote in it where she said my face is rad, I think I look rad, my face represents who I am, I like it, something like that, like, and then basically, and that's it, that's all there is to it. It stuck with me, okay, but I want to go deeper into perception drift. So perception drift happens to individuals and there's another cognitive phenomenon that I want to apply, yes, to individuals, but also to the collective, and it's called change blindness. Right in the pocket there with perception drift, it's when people fail to notice significant changes in their environment, even when they're looking right at them in their environment, even when they're looking right at them. And so, while perception drift is about scanning for flaws and trying to fix which is a cultural addiction, affliction of sorts late stage capitalism thrives on binaries, on the binary of right and wrong. So it works. If something is always wrong and then needs fixing, where are we going to get the solution, I wonder? Surprise from the people who told us the definition of the wrongness. So we, as good little unconscious, mostly consumers of greed and misery, we've been deeply, so, so deeply conditioned into the pathologizing, into this problem-centric ontology, always looking for the next wrong thing, that we have fully learned to see ourselves and everything around us as problems, as wrong things needing to be fixed, needing some rightness. And if we're busy, busy, busy in the identifying of the, obsessing over problems and solving of them, right, because we can get really good at it, and those problems are our bodies, our beings, even then we'll be way too busy to address any issues in the larger systems, because we're oriented towards fighting our crow's feet over fighting fascism. One's gonna get us free and one's gonna get us a lot of eye cream.
Speaker 1:Change blindness can have more to do with memory and attention. Maybe you've heard me talk about the psychologist Daniel Kahneman's work on the experiencing self versus the remembering self. The remembering self is selective, it holds on to peaks and endings, and this remembering self is manipulated by politicians' oppressive systems, all of their agents and sentinels. And the experiencing self has to do with presence, and so we're following the breadcrumbs here, because another cause of change blindness is limited attention, which absolutely has to do with our presence or lack thereof.
Speaker 1:The early 20th century writer, philosopher, activist, simone Weil wrote many things about attention and focus and presence. Maybe you've heard me quote her mention her work before, when she would write about attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity In an article of hers Attention and Will. She writes many things. I'll put the link in the show notes below, but one thing that's standing out in this moment is the incorrect approach involves focusing attention on a problem, a phenomenon driven by an aversion to emptiness.
Speaker 1:We fear wasting our efforts. We must not desire to find Excessive devotion can make us dependent on our endeavors, can make us dependent on our endeavors requiring an external reward that we might accept at the cost of distorting the truth. To me, that speaks volumes about perception drift and how we are culturally trained to perceive ourselves as flawed creatures, viewing ourselves as problems. But with incredible focus and attention we could possibly solve those problems. Then we would be full, then we would be whole, then we would matter, then we would have value. Aversion to emptiness, the training to be attached to objects, even if we are the objects to objectify ourselves.
Speaker 2:Nobody likes to be objectified.
Speaker 1:And so then, we are trained. We are trained in the ways of perception drift. Of you've heard me say it before pathologizing Of seeing ourselves as a series of problems to be fixed. Devotion to perceived essential wrongness, what I have come to call P-E-W pew, pew, pew, perceived essential wrongness. What I have come to call P-E-W pew, pew, pew, perceived essential wrongness.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I do it with my clients. We do like a little a little pew pew gun thing Anyhow, not really translating over podcast. Oh my god, you guys, this popcorn is so good. So a couple of years ago, on a medium-sized magic mushroom trip, I discovered coconut curry popcorn by Comet Corn. It was a transcendent experience, a momentous day, and Comet Corn accompanied me beautifully.
Speaker 1:After that I was surely chasing the coconut curry dragon by buying up all the little bags whenever I saw them, which wasn't all that often, because honestly this is kind of a niche popcorn cult following sort of thing. You're welcome. But I love this popcorn so much that one time I even just popped by their Popcorn HQ in Northern California when I was in the neighborhood and I got a tour of the plant Anywho. I came all the way back down to the high desert, to my home, my community, and I really just wanted someone to carry it locally so I could just pop in and get a bag whenever I wanted. And of course the amazing All Roads Design studio rose to meet my popcorn needs and so now anyone who comes to the high desert can get the gift of my medium-sized magic mushroom trip sponsored by comic corn.
Speaker 1:Just to be clear, there are not mushrooms in the popcorn. It's just really, really good. And I love the popcorn, I love sherry and jeff, I love how much they love it and the love that they put into it. And honestly, there's no easy way to get this popcorn. You can't just go online and beep boop, beep boop it to your door. This ad is for the intrepid snacker, the committed popcornologist, the one who is willing to go the extra mile and go to CometCorncom, click on in-store, scroll down, put in their zip code and see if there is indeed a spot near you selling this magic. Or you can go to one of your local fine food purveyors and see if they will carry it for you. This is a great way to make friends and build community for the rebellion.
Speaker 1:So perception drift is like our own bodies, right Change blindness is when we're looking at something and we fail to see the changes that are happening in the scene around us or in front of us. And I'm stretching the definitions a bit here and overlapping them and sort of mixing them together. This gets me to thinking about Johan Hari's book Stolen Focus why you Can't Pay Attention, and how to Think Deeply Again. I'll talk about this book before 10 out of 10 recommend. Also, when he's reading it, if you listen to it like on Audible or audiobook, his voice strains and he sounds like British Kermit the Frog. It's endearing. So there's a quote from Stolen Focus that I want to add this breadcrumb to the path. Here it goes Democracy requires the ability of a population to pay attention long enough to identify real problems, distinguish them from fantasies, come up with solutions and hold their leaders accountable if they fail to deliver them. So perhaps in this we can understand the role of change, blindness and pathologizing, but seeing ourselves as problems, not the world around us. Not that I'm endorsing viewing everything as a problem, but hopefully you get what I'm saying here that if we're just truly focused on ourselves in that almost toxic level of toxic individualism which is a characteristic white supremacy thank you, tim Okun and allies for helping us to continue to understand how white supremacy touches us all and we can also understand how we've fallen into, or how we regularly fall into, change, blindness, blindness.
Speaker 1:In the book stolen focus, harry talks about many things, but the saturation of information, how much more information we are taking into our bodies, into our nervous systems, how it has been ramping up really since the creation of the printing press, right. So this isn't just about the interwebs, though that is a huge factor technology and all the ways in which it conditions us to give away our attention. Hari also writes people who can't focus will be more drawn to a simplistic, authoritarian solution and less likely to see clearly when they fail. The truth is, you're living in a system that's pouring acid on your attention every day and then you're being told to blame yourself. Blame yourself for the oppressive nature of the systems that are meant to keep you fueling them.
Speaker 1:Tweak your own habits. Manage your screen time better. Be more disciplined. Work in 45 minute spurts with a little 10 minute thing between pomodoro, blah, blah, blah. Work on your wellness routine. Why don't you go do some Yoga, or maybe some face yoga, fix your face? Oh, you don't have the money. That's probably your fault too, never mind capitalism. I don't think this is a very catchy tune, but hopefully you like get the drift.
Speaker 1:Another note that the wealth and hellenist industry is consistently well. The neoliberalization of well-being and health that I like to call wealth and hellenist is consistently telling us that we can do better, make it better if we just try a little harder, want a little more manifest, a little harder. This is why I'm always yammering on about our attention and how we use our attention and how we can be subversive with our attention. These are acts, generative acts of our presence, and not just in these small little personal ways, but collectively we must use our attention. We must pay attention to what is happening to Mahmoud Khalil, columbia graduate student, green card holder, syrian-born Palestinian, snatched from his home in front of his wife, eight months pregnant, no warrant, no crime, charged, spirited away, kidnapped to a detention center in Louisiana, all for being involved in the Gaza encampments at Columbia University.
Speaker 1:And if you didn't see that or you forgot about it, change blindness. There's so many things I know. There's so much. I don't want to minimize overwhelm because, as you'll hear in my interview with Sarah Payton, we talk about overwhelm and how it diminishes our ability to access our healthy nose, not like the nose on our face, which would actually fit into this conversation here, but our healthy N-O's and that'll show up in so many ways. I mean, that is, that is about our attention and that we cannot distinguish between what is ours and not ours when we are in overwhelm. What is for us and what is not for us.
Speaker 2:Psst, hey there. So Dana doesn't know we're here, but it's important. Yeah, we slipped in through our robots-only wormhole to ask you to leave a review for the one and only podcast broadcasting from the Jacuzzi-verse.
Speaker 1:Did I hear somebody say wormhole?
Speaker 2:You sure did, Connie.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, I just didn't want to be left out of the party.
Speaker 2:We portaled in here to remind listeners how much it means to all of us that they rate and leave a review, even just a short one. Oh, yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Go, punch some buttons, y'all. It only takes a second Time's. Time's a construct anyway, but you got all the time in the world. So two things, my darling, darling crybaby. One always nervous system tending. We are all being pulled into high stress everything, and when we're in high stress, the things that we need to cultivate presence can feel tormenting, so difficult. So for right now, just for a moment, you're just going to put your feet on the ground, take a couple of nice deep breaths In and out, maybe later when you're out and about, or if you're out and about right now, go lean on a tree, ask it if it's okay to just send some of your energy down into it and then say thank you. Or a nice big rock oh, it's a nice rock, because healing happens in relationship. All matter is agential. The other thing I want to bring up reading and about the benefits of reading fiction.
Speaker 1:I quoted a lot of nonfiction here in this episode, but I'm also an avid fiction reader and listener. Listener, and how. When we read stories and there are characters living their lives that may be quite different from ours or maybe not too different, it expands our ability, our capacity for empathy. There's a James Baldwin quote that goes. You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. So a few books I want to recommend that have swollen my heart and definitely expanded my capacity. I could feel it. Some are short, some are longer. Check them out, see what resonates. The book Split Tooth by Indigenous writer Tanya Tagak. She's a Canadian Inuk throat, singer and songwriter and actor, visual artist and novelist. She also played the doula in the most recent season of True Detective Night Country. Highly recommend Okay.
Speaker 1:Henry Hoke's Open Throat, an entire work of fiction written through the perspective of a mountain lion living in the Hollywood hills, grappling with the loneliness and the complexities of the human world. So good, and the complexities of the human world, so good. Psalm for the Wild built by Becky Chambers. A shorty but a goody, about a parallel timeline in the future After the great awakening of the robots and how humanity moved on and created itself anew. Ocean Vuong's On Earth Were, briefly, gorgeous. Not a work of fiction, but such a beautiful poetic story. It's about growing up as a Vietnamese immigrant, as a gay teen in connecticut, relationships with his mother, his grandmother, lovers, poetry, the world how high we go in the dark by sequoia nagamatsu, one of my faves. I don't even know how to explain this one. There are so many overlapping narratives and a parallel timeline of humanity and its last unknowing throes of its existence.
Speaker 1:Oh, so poignant so beautiful Ooh and Matrix by Lauren Groff, about a 12th century nun who protects her Abbey from intruders. Queerness, rebellion, connection with nature, all the things. Another few favorites are the Future of Another Tim timeline by annalee newitz. It's about time travel, but not in a way I've ever read or seen any other books or movies designed in this way, and includes fighting against religious nuts to protect reproductive rights, and somehow some riot girl culture gets mixed in there. Highly recommend Girls to the front.
Speaker 1:Another one that I'm just reading now is from my dear friend, nancy Krikorian, called the Burning Heart of the World. It's the story of a Beirut Armenian family before, during and after the Lebanese Civil War. She writes of Armenian diaspora and centers her stories on women and girls in a poetic, intergenerational trauma, tenderness kind of way. And of course, works by Octavia Butler her Exogenesis series, one of my favorites Tomi Adeyemi, patron Saint Ursula Le Guin the list goes on and on. Remember this isn't just a go read books and forget about the world. This is read to draw your attention back to yourself, to harness it, to reclaim it, to find your agency again if you have become totally uncentered and ungrounded, which is happening to all of us all the time and practice that subversive use of your own attention. Practice compassion, practice curiosity, practice slowing down, practice feeling knowing that your heartbreak is the thing that will connect you with all people through time through space. Connect you with all people through time through space. Or maybe, go back to a book that you loved and read it again. Pay attention to, perhaps, what you didn't notice or didn't remember. Share your favorite books with a friend or a co-worker or someone on the street I don't know the person who sells you your morning coffee at the bodega. Oh, my goodness, there's a little tiny lizard in my office, hello friend. Hello friend, you know, years ago I had a guy that I spoke to, connected with, called Lizard, and a mountain lion who had a name, but Lizard was just Lizard, and Lizard actually had the medicine always for me, a focus and attention. So I am not surprised that lizard has made its way I mean, I do live in the desert, okay, but made its way into our space.
Speaker 1:I offer you the gift of lizard, the medicine of attention, and may it be soft. May you give yourself permission to not take it all in, to just take in some, to be subversive, to choose to be in your agency. You may be over-indexing on your own problems, fixating on yourself. And look, I'm a life coach. I have made it my job to work with people about the stuff going on inside of them. So know that I'm saying this, as anything can be a gift and a curse. Anything can be stretched and twisted to a painful degree.
Speaker 1:So what needs some softening? Where can you be subversive with your attention? Where have you been trained to put it and where else can you share it? Be generous with it. Be loving, curious and compassionate and focused like lizard Blah, blah, blah, crying in my jacuzzi, crying in my jacuzzi. If this episode swirled something in you, please share it, send it to a friend and if you haven't already, make sure to boop that subscribe button so you don't miss what's coming next. And if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, give us a rating five stars and a written review.
Speaker 1:Send me the name of your review and I'll add you to the monthly raffle for a free coaching session with me. Subscribing, rating and reviewing are amazing and they help us out immensely. And you, listening, you sharing with your community is the very best thing that we in the Jacuzziverse could hope for. So thank you, crybabies, thank you for your support. Earworm theme music by the very talented Kat Otteson, sound design and editing magic by the effervescent Rose Blakelock. Keep questioning, keep feeling, keep rebelling in all the ways that matter. And remember the jacuzzi is everywhere. At any moment you could enter into the version of non-normative consciousness that is Jacuzzi consciousness.