Pod Insights 10% Happier with Dan Harris Alchemize Your Anger and Anxiety | Suleika Jaouad About this episode How journaling can transform negative emotions into meaning and agency.
Suleika Jaouad http://suleikajaouad.com is the author of the instant New York Times bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms https://www.suleikajaouad.com/between-two-kingdoms, which has been translated into over twenty languages, and her highly anticipated new book, The Book of Alchemy, https://www.suleikajaouad.com/the-book-of-alchemy forthcoming in April 2025. She writes the popular weekly newsletter, the Isolation Journals http://theisolationjournals.substack.com/.
In this episode we talk about:
Suleika's new book, The Book of Alchemy On working with fear and vulnerability Journaling prompts from The Book of Alchemy Why Journaling is a team sport
Related Episodes:
The Science Of Journaling: How Writing Reduces Overthinking, Rumination, And Anxiety | Dr. James Pennebaker (Co-Interviewed By Dr. Bianca Harris) https://www.danharris.com/p/the-science-of-journaling-how-writing-ff0 Life, Interrupted | Suleika Jaouad https://www.danharris.com/p/life-interrupted-suleika-jaouad-dd7
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Transcript 11,198 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Dan Harris? This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
0:18 Dan Harris? Hey, gang. One of the questions we come back to time and again on this show is, what do you do when you're in the grip of anxiety, anger, uncertainty, or any other excruciating state of mind? Today, we're going to talk about how to alchemize difficult emotions through journaling. Just to say, and you may have heard me say this before, journaling is one of those practices that, for years, I reflexively rejected until I saw the science. And there is a lot of science here. According to the research, journaling can be an effective way to reduce stress and anxiety. And that's not all. Various forms of journaling practice have been shown to increase immune response, sleep, memory focus, time management, and decision making.
0:59 Dan Harris? My guest today has used journaling in some quite extreme circumstances. Suleika Jaouad is in the midst of her third round of treatment for leukemia. You may know Suleika's story, but just to fill you in quickly, she burst onto the national scene during her first round of leukemia treatment when she was 22 years old. From her hospital bed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York City, she started writing a New York Times column called "Life Interrupted." That got very popular. She followed that up with a bestselling memoir called "Between Two Kingdoms," and she came on this show to discuss that book. I'll put a link in the show notes. What I didn't know during that appearance was that she was experiencing the early stages of a recurrence of leukemia.
1:43 Dan Harris? And as she was treated for that second round of leukemia, it was captured on film in a documentary about Suleika and her husband, the very popular musician, John Batiste. That documentary is on Netflix. It's called "American Symphony." Unfortunately, Suleika's leukemia has now recurred for a third time, and she is in the midst of painful treatments yet again. Through this whole ordeal, she has really relied on journaling to help her process her various emotions, and she has really done, perhaps more than anybody, to popularize this practice. She has a thriving Substack community called The Isolation Journals, built, of course, around journaling, and now she has a new book called The Book of Alchemy,
2:25 Dan Harris? which is filled with incredibly interesting journaling prompts from big names like Elizabeth Gilbert, Sharon Salzberg, and the novelist George Saunders. Hat tip to my wife Bianca, who suggested I have Suleika back on the show. Bianca was actually an attending physician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering while Suleika was being treated, although they never met, until now, because Bianca joins me as a co-interviewer for this episode. Before we get started, I just want to let you know about something very cool that we're going to be doing in the second half of May. We are going to be doing a live meditation mini-series each weekday from Monday, May 19th to Friday, May 23rd at 4:00 PM Eastern. I will be leading a short guided meditation, and then I'll be taking your questions. The
3:10 Dan Harris? whole mini-series is going to center around a set of practices that I often refer to as the Buddhist antidote to anxiety, and I'm not making this up. One of the key practices that I'll be teaching is loving-kindness meditation, which, the story goes, was invented by the Buddha to help his monks who were dealing with a lot of fear. And loving-kindness is part of a family of four related practices known as the Brahma Viharas, or the Divine Abodes. I will admit, when I first encountered these practices, which are designed around cultivating loving-kindness, compassion, something called sympathetic joy, and also equanimity, when I first ran into these practices, I was, as you might imagine, a little reflexively
3:51 Dan Harris? judgmental and dismissive, but I have really come to embrace these practices in a huge way over time, and they've had a massive impact on my life. And, by the way, they've now been studied quite extensively in the labs, and have been shown, particularly loving-kindness practice, to have physiological, psychological, and even behavioral benefits. Anyway, this is all happening over at DanHarris.com. Like I said, Monday through Friday, the week of May 19th. Like any good drug dealer, the first dose will be free, so Monday's session will be open to everybody, and then, for the rest of the week, you have to be a paid subscriber. So head on over to danharris.com and check it out. We will get started with Suleika Jaouad right after this.
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5:37 Dan Harris? Suleika Jaouad, welcome back to the show.
5:39 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm so happy to be back. How's it going?
5:43 Dan Harris? I'm happy you're back. It's going great. Bianca Harris, welcome back to the show as well.
5:47 Speaker 05 Thank you so much. Very happy to be here, especially today with Suleika.
5:51 Dan Harris? Maybe that's a good place to start then, because Bianca, I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't think I ever asked you. I know I wanted to have Suleika back on the show, but I never asked you, because this was your idea first.
6:02 Speaker 05 Yeah.
6:02 Dan Harris? What was motivating you?
6:04 Speaker 05 Well, I've always truly admired your work and your story. I know you were on the show before. That really wasn't even a time when I was doing anything with Dan, really, work-wise. But we had been developing a journal over the summer.
6:20 Speaker 05 Dan is also obviously on Substack and I've been reading your Substack, which I love. And so together I thought, oh, well, this is very topical. And what is she doing that we could learn from? And so that's sort of where the idea was generated, but mostly just a great excuse to be able to meet you, talk to you.
6:39 Speaker 04 That's how I move through the world in terms of my creative collaboration. The reality is it's an excuse to have conversations and talk about ideas. I'm dying to talk about ideas. So that feeling is so mutual.
6:54 Dan Harris? Let me ask if you're comfortable to like, just for an update on how you are. The last time you were on the show, you were in remission and then your leukemia came back after that conversation. And I think it went back into remission and then things have changed again. Would you mind just giving us an update?
7:13 Speaker 04 Yeah. So the last time I was on the show, I had just put out my memoir Between Two Kingdoms, which was about navigating the aftermath of a traumatic experience, which was leukemia, which I'd been diagnosed with at 22 and I was nearly a decade out. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my leukemia was back. And this is the strangeness, I think, of not just having a public platform where inevitably there's a gap between your self self and your public self, but the strangeness of putting out a book that is out of sync with
7:53 Speaker 04 the reality of what's unfolding. So I wasn't feeling well when we had our conversation, chopped it up to stress and fatigue. And of course, what I learned was that my leukemia was in fact back. It's less than a 1% chance of it returning that far out. And that unexpected
8:17 Speaker 04 Relapse was one of those moments that sort of rearranged everything. Since then, I've had another recurrence that was earlier this summer and I'm back in treatment. And it's been a interesting journey, to say the least. Our friend Elizabeth Bilbert says that to describe my life as a roller coaster is an insult to roller coasters. So that's, yeah, that's sort of the Cliff Notes version of what's been happening health-wise since we last spoke.
8:52 Dan Harris? And I'm interested to get the non-Cliff Notes version, to the extent that you're comfortable, on what's been going on in conjunction with all of that on the psychological level. In reading some of your recent Substack posts, it sounds like you've had some moments that have been, to put it mildly, difficult.
9:13 Speaker 04 Totally. When you learn for the third time that you have cancer, it's easily to feel utterly hopeless, to feel like you're doomed, like there's a sort of Damocles hanging over you. It's obviously a misfortune to have gone through this, not just once, but twice, and now three times. There's also a feeling of, I have experienced doing this. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do differently if I were ever to find myself in this situation again. So it's been all of it.
9:52 Speaker 04 It's been overwhelming, obviously frightening, and in a strange way, I think it's been easier this time around than it was at 22, because I have spent so much of my adult life cultivating the tools to navigate a moment of major uncertainty like this. And for me, what it always comes back to is my creative practice.
10:25 Speaker 04 Earlier this summer, when I got the news that leukemia was back, having a conversation with my dad, we were on the back porch of my house. And he was, you know, gutted as any parent might be in this situation, right? It's any parent's worst dream. It's a breach of contract with the natural order of things, to watch your child face their mortality in such a kind of direct way. And he said to me, you know, I have to believe that there's going to be a miracle. I have to believe that something is going to come along that is going to cure you of this illness once and for all, and it's going to be behind you. That's what I need to believe.
11:08 Speaker 04 I said to my dad, I love that miracle. Of course, I want that too on some level, but I can't anchor my sense of hope in a miracle. I need to be good with where my life is right now, regardless of what's happening in my body and in my biopsy results, because none of us know what the future holds. I maybe have a more heightened awareness of my mortality, but I can't anchor my sense of being well and the idea of something coming down the pipeline.
11:50 Speaker 04 I have to figure out how to be well right now, regardless of my health status. And he really heard that. And so that's been the main shift, I think, for me, is not defining health in terms of blood results or statistics, but figuring out what I want my life to feel like, asking myself hard questions about what isn't in sync with the life I need to live to feel good right now, and then making changes. And I think the specifics of my situation may be unrelatable. Most people do not get leukemia three times in their life, but
12:36 Speaker 04 All of us have the experience at one point or another of having this feeling cave in on us and having to figure out what to do about that and how we want to rebuild. So what I really try to live and to practice as I'm navigating this really scary chapter in my health is that it's that our lives are a series of choices and they require improvisation and creativity. And as much as the temptation may be to time travel to
13:16 Speaker 04 the future and to solve for any unknowns that may be lurking there. It's sort of a waste of energy and time. It's a recipe for anxiety. What is it that they say, you know, depression is an over fixation on the past. Anxiety is an over fixation on the future. And the antidote to that is solving for the now. That's where I'm at right now. I'm never going to be cured of this illness. I'm back in treatment. I've had to adjust my life to the grueling reality of doing five days of chemotherapy every month and recovering from that.
13:54 Speaker 04 But regardless of what the specifics of that treatment protocol might be or my prognosis, I'm committed to living the most grounded, inspired life that I can, regardless of how long or short it may be.
14:17 Dan Harris? Well, I have so much respect and admiration for how you're doing this. And also, you haven't even mentioned this, but the fact that you're turning all of this into beautiful material that helps other people. Before I say more and before I ask you the one million questions I want to ask you, let me just make some space for Bianca for any statements or questions you might have.
14:40 Speaker 05 I do feel speechless in terms of just your presence and grace and honesty and eloquence and being able to describe what probably feels like it barely touches the surface as far as the experience goes, maybe, maybe not. Obviously, when you hear somebody else's story, the entry into it is their story. And along the way, you put yourself in their shoes. And by doing that, you bring some of yourself in it. And then suddenly, you find yourself thinking about you and how that person's story influences you. So partly through these last few minutes, I found myself reflecting back in sort of
15:22 Speaker 05 a bit of a twilight zone from the time when you were publishing in The New York Times, which was around the time when I was just starting my first attending position. And I believe we were at the same hospital. I know some of the doctors, and I had been doing some research with two of them in particular. One of them you do name, so I know that that's true. Every time there was an article that came out, there was nothing I wanted to read more. And also, I had a really hard time bringing myself to read it. I'd been thinking about it for years, actually, and I only read your book this past summer for the same reason.
16:06 Speaker 05 Something was just stopping me from going there, even though I wanted to, because I knew that I knew that I just wanted to know more about you and your story and that there was so much to gain from it. I was stuck daydreaming about that. And I think there was a little bit of envy in how creative an outlet that you had. And also, pain being able to actually picture what you were going through, just on a logistical level at the hospital. And finally, putting those two together and reading your beautiful story and hearing about it again, it's just, it's like here in my chest, and I'm really grateful for that. I don't know what I'm trying to say, other than that's what happened when we were speaking.
16:51 Speaker 04 Thank you for sharing all of that. What do you think was at the root of that resistance?
16:57 Speaker 05 Well, now I fear making it about me, so I apologize, but
17:01 Speaker 04 No, you're not.
17:02 Speaker 05 I mean, if I'm honest, and I'm really, I've been thinking about this and writing about it a lot. I had a very severe illness when I was younger. I had a brain tumor. And then later, during my time as an attending, I became a patient at the hospital as well. And I've always struggled with which box I should put myself in. If you had to divide the world in two boxes, cancer, no cancer, you'd put me in the cancer box. But within the cancer box, I'm at the lucky, early-stage part of it. And I always found a way to sort of shame myself into
17:42 Speaker 05 being pulled towards other people to belong and share and thinking I have no business being there.
17:51 Speaker 05 And with that, you obviously don't validate your stories, but especially being, you know, a doctor in a cancer hospital.
18:00 Speaker 05 Everybody's story trumps yours. Everybody. And I think just feeling unworthy was part of it.
18:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's so interesting. Thank you for sharing all of that. I'm always interested in what attracts people to certain stories and what repels them. And often it's, they're the same thing. The very thing that's drawing you to it is the very thing that makes you maybe step back because it feels almost too hot to touch. That question of identity is something that I've thought a lot about in my work, right? How the fear, when we share vulnerably, or when we tell a first-person story, is that it's going to become the sum of who you are.
18:53 Speaker 05 There was actually a line in your memoir that helped start to free me from that thinking, that sort of binary thinking, which was around you figuring out that the border between sick and well is actually quite porous.
19:10 Speaker 05 And it just allowed for a lot more fluidity and comfort in letting my own experiences in and seeing others for theirs, instead of immediately just not being present for either, I think. So I really do thank you for that.
19:28 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I think, you know, we, we love to sort ourselves and in each other into binaries. We're either sick or well, or happy, or sad. And the truth is that most of our lives aren't unfolding in one camp or the other. Most of us are existing somewhere in that messy middle. And I know that for me, early on, at twenty-two, when I first got sick, I really resisted the idea of being labeled as a cancer patient. I had no interest in writing about the experience. I wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to do hard-hitting news. I wanted to help other people tell their stories. I had no interest in inhabiting the first
20:12 Speaker 04 person in that way, beyond the privacy of my journal. And more than that, I had no desire to identify as a cancer patient. And that felt really scary to me. I didn't want to lose my sense of self. The irony is, of course, I have, and largely in the first person for much of my career, although I only draw from the source material of my life when it feels like a useful way of answering some question that I'm grappling with, or something that I'm interested in investigating. But also, that's sometimes
20:57 Speaker 04 the beauty, whether it's writing our own stories, or reading the stories of others, is that the very thing we're avoiding because we don't want it to take up too much space.
21:11 Speaker 04 Ends up taking all the more space because of that. My friend Nadia Bolz Weber says, "The greatest antidote to shame is sunlight." I think that way about stories, too. It's like the second I write something down, it consumes me less. I've taken it out of my body and placed it onto the page. And the same as a reader, you know, sometimes I read something, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, and I think to myself, "I didn't know you were allowed to say that." Or, "It's the first time I've seen this thing I've been grappling with expressed in this way." And what maybe was eating me up suddenly ceases to do so as much.
21:54 Dan Harris? Coming up, Zaleka Jaouad talks about her new book, The Book of Alchemy, working with fear and vulnerability. And we go over some of the really fascinating journaling prompts from her book.
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23:34 Dan Harris? That kind of brings me to one of the things I really wanted to talk about with you. I think I can safely use the word "we" wanted to talk about with you, which is journaling and your new book, The Book of Alchemy. I wonder if you could just start by talking a little bit about the role, and you've touched on it a little bit, saying a little bit more about the role of journaling in your life, given all of the ups and downs, which have been more dramatic than a roller coaster.
24:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I have kept a journal from the time I was old enough to hold a pen. And I think it felt like this rare, private space where I could be my messiest, most unedited self and where I could really be in conversation with myself. But I think like a lot of people, growing up, I would buy a journal, sometimes write all the way through to the end, but more often than not, write a couple of pages and leave the rest of it blank. There are many benefits to journaling, but it was another thing on the list of many things that I felt like would be good for me to do, but that I wasn't really rigorous
24:47 Speaker 04 about. And it was only when I got sick at 22 and found myself in the hospital that first summer for about two months in isolation in a hospital room that I began to understand the real value of keeping a journal. And Bianca, it's funny that you say you felt some envy about how creative I am, but the reality is, all of this was born from a place of feeling profoundly uninspired, profoundly stuck, profoundly uncreative. And I was really lost that summer. My whole world had imploded. I was...
25:30 Speaker 04 Unsure of what to do with myself within the new limitations of being stuck in this hospital room, stuck in bed, I was watching my friends start their careers and get married and go to parties and all the other big and small milestones and feeling like my life had basically stopped before it had really begun and really sinking down into a low-down place, feeling a sense of desperation of what do I do with this thing that has happened to me? How do I process it? How do I hold on to some sense of self? And it was around
26:11 Speaker 04 that time, my friends and family and I decided to do a hundred day project and the premise was really simple. We were each gonna do one creative act a day for a hundred days. And my daily creative thing I was going to do was to keep a journal because it seemed like a pretty easy thing to do. There are no rules with journaling. There's no right or wrong way to do it. It's not, I'm penning a masterpiece writing. It doesn't have to be grammatical. It doesn't have to be anything. It can be lists. It can be bullet points. It can be a stream of consciousness. And with that sense of accountability and that container of the hundred days, something interesting started to happen. You know,
26:52 Speaker 04 at first, I really struggled to figure out what to say, especially given that I was stuck in this bed. There wasn't much happening in my life, not much fun stuff to report on. But in pushing through that resistance and committing to that daily practice, I started to use my journal as a kind of reporter's notebook. I started to write about all the things I couldn't say out loud to my loved ones for fear of worrying them. I wrote about shame. I wrote about anger. I wrote about fear. I wrote about death. I wrote little character sketches of...
27:35 Speaker 04 Patients I was meeting, I wrote about gossip I'd overhear from the nurses, all of it. It was the kind of mundane aspects of what I was navigating, the more humorous ones and these deeper reflections. And in the course of keeping that journal, I started to feel for the first time like I had some sense of agency, some sense of narrative control, especially at a time in my life where I had to cede so much control to others. And more than that, it conjured to mind the idea of alchemy, this idea of transforming something that might feel
28:21 Speaker 04 base or even worthless into something precious like gold. And I realized actually that while this diagnosis was devastating, it was also raising some really valuable questions. It was helping me reroute my priorities. It was making me ask questions like, if I only have three usable hours in the day where I can do something, what do I want to do with those three hours? Who do I want to spend time with? And without the container of the journal, that place to pause and to reflect in a daily way,
29:04 Speaker 04 I'm not sure that I would have been able to begin to think about how I might alchemize or transform this period of illness and confinement into a period of time that might actually be worthwhile and meaningful and informative. This book, The Book of Alchemy, is about just that. It's about cultivating a daily creative practice through journaling as a way to ask ourselves the big questions, as a way to begin to take narrative control in your life.
29:50 Speaker 04 We live in a world where so much is happening. It's like drinking from a fire hose of... Of information and human suffering every time you open the news. For me, you know, it's easy for my life to feel over determined and under considered when I'm not taking that moment each day to pause, to free write, to follow the thread of my intuition, to paraphrase, to live my way into the answers.
30:26 Speaker 05 I'm wondering, in terms of your hundred day project, when you started doing this journal, were family members sharing their creative projects with each other real time? And how did that work in terms of you presenting your fears when they too were also fearful? And how did that go?
30:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, one of the biggest questions that we grapple with when someone gets sick is like, how do we show up for one another? Or really, in any moment of tragedy. And it's so hard to know what to say in those moments, regardless of if you're the person in the caregiver's chair or you're the person in the hospital bed. You know, there's so much pressure to find the right words, to
31:17 Speaker 04 put on a brave and strong sort of face for one another that more often than not, you know, at a time where all we want is connection, what's happening is a breakdown in communication. And so I think one of the hardest questions to answer truthfully, and yet it's the most common we ask each other is, how are you? And the reflexive knee jerk response is, I'm fine. And so that's what I would say to my mom. That's what she would say to me. And of course, neither of us were fine. Of course, both of us were likely grappling with the very same fears that we didn't want to burden each other with.
32:00 Speaker 04 And so what was interesting in the course of doing this hundred day project is there was never any expectation to share what we were making. But inevitably, that became a focal point in our conversations. I would write something in my journal and being able
32:20 Speaker 04 To give language to what I was feeling in the privacy of that journal. What I'd find is that I had the words to talk about what I was feeling with my family. My mom, for her hundred day project, was making a small ceramic tile each day that she assembled into a shield. She called it Suleika's Magic Shield, a shield of protection that she hung above my bed. You know, of course, the under netting of her project was this desire that I think many parents have to protect their child from harm, from hurt. And the terrible knowledge that you can't, you do the best that you can,
33:05 Speaker 04 but there's only so much you can do. And so she was grappling with that feeling of not being able to take away this illness. And so that became a point of conversation. And I think that's the beauty of doing that kind of creative practice and community of daring to be vulnerable. And whatever creative medium calls to you is that when we dare to be vulnerable, it creates a reverberation where vulnerability begets vulnerability begets vulnerability.
33:44 Speaker 04 And what may begin as like a first person, I quickly transforms into a you and then a we. And of course, we learn again and again that the things we may be struggling with individually are more often than not shared.
34:05 Dan Harris? In the book, which again is called The Book of Alchemy, you recruit these incredible people to provide journaling prompts. I would love to ask you about a series of them, to get you to describe them and also give your take on them. Are you open to that?
34:20 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
34:21 Dan Harris? So one of them is called a mind map. Can you describe that and why you included it?
34:25 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. So we have a hundred contributors in the book. It's really a curation of hundred of the most creative minds I know. And when I say creative minds, I I say that very broadly. Some of them are MacArthur Genius Grant winners and famous writers, but a lot of them are people who embody creativity in a way that maybe is less obvious. We have a seven year old contributor, two time cancer survivor. And here we have all kinds of different people. And so that particular essay and prompt called the mind map is an exercise in excavating memory.
35:08 Speaker 04 What I love about these prompts is that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to journaling consistently, to actually making it past those first couple of pages in your journal, is feeling like you're maybe rattling off what you did that day or circling back to the same old grievances and frustrations, but you're not actually getting somewhere. When you're stuck in your life, it's easy to get stuck in the same thought loops. So I'm someone who wouldn't necessarily have thought that I'd respond to the idea of a prompt. It felt maybe overly prescriptive.
35:50 Speaker 04 But in order to get somewhere unexpected and interesting, the way that I like to approach my journaling is by reading a short essay, a short piece of literature and then a prompt, which you can either follow or maybe you hate the prompt and you write into why you hate the prompt. Or maybe it just sparks something and you go in an entirely different direction. The prompt is really just there to spur you. It's there to twist the cylinder of the kaleidoscope and to let the light fall differently. And so that mind map prompt is one of my very favorites.
36:32 Speaker 04 It's a kind of free association where you start with, say, a year of your life and write it in the middle of the page. And from that, you begin to free associate different big events. And then from each of those individual events, you begin to free associate more events. And that's, you know, the interesting thing about memory is so often we remember.
36:59 Speaker 04 The peaks and the valleys, right? You remember the day you got your diagnosis, but you don't remember the drive there and the really beautiful conversation that you had leading up to it. It's one of my favorite things about writing. The way that, you know, when we tap into our subconscious, when we tap into our memories and you open a door, it leads to another door and to another door and to another door. And you don't ever really know where you're going to end up.
37:35 Speaker 05 I found myself thinking about the way I write and sort of some of that validated what I do sometimes, which is I try to write about things that aren't bothering me or it's something descriptive. And that is, for me, the only way at this point in my life that I know how to let go a little bit. And it always takes me back to probably some unsolved problem, but it's a roundabout way. And suddenly I'm coming at it from a different angle. I intermittently had journaled growing up. And I remember when I was 22 or so, I was doing a master's program in the UK and I was doing my thesis work in Vietnam. And I hadn't really been journaling since high school.
38:19 Speaker 05 And that was the stuff of shame and locked boxes. And I never want to think about how awful I felt, you know, about myself again. And so I was trying more to write about the experience. And I was also grappling with the idea of should I or shouldn't go to medical school? That had been a real hang up for me. I was eating at a cafe and there was a trail of ants who were very, very busy collecting crumbs. And it was extremely organized and there was solidarity and I had a whole story around it. And I don't really remember exactly how I came back around to this unsolved question of whether or not I would go to medical school. It might have been around purpose, but that was not my intention to sit down and write about it. And if it had been, it would have been lofty
39:03 Speaker 05 and heavy and what have you. So that's a really cool way to learn more about yourself or not and just become creative and see what else you're capable of.
39:15 Speaker 04 Absolutely. I love that example so much. And I think that's why I love being prompted in this way is, you know, you might start out writing about a trail of ants and it circles back to a question that maybe you've been desperately trying to answer and banging your head against the wall, trying to figure out. And it's that kind of focused, unfocused sensation, right, that you know so well from meditation. And as someone who's always struggled to meditate, this is my form of meditation, is that when we tap into a creative
39:54 Speaker 04 practice, when we make space for the unexpected, when we allow for our imagination to be prodded, even if it feels completely unrelated to whatever quandary it is you might be trying to figure out. For me, it always ends up offering not just the most important insights into those big questions, but also the most unexpected ones. To go back to that 100 day project, that whole summer, aside from the big medical questions I had, my question for myself was, what do I do with my life? Which is a question that likely every recent
40:39 Speaker 04 college graduate is asking themselves, except that I felt this heightened sense of urgency, given my prognosis, given that my treatments weren't working, to figure that out. And this sense of impossibility, given that I was in a hospital room. There was no way that I was going to be interning at the New York Times or really doing anything. And the irony when I look back on those journal entries, where I'm like, I wish I were in Tunisia, which is where I'm from, reporting on the Arab Spring. What I didn't realize is that I was reporting On a very different kind of conflict zone, I was reporting from the front lines of my hospital bed.
41:23 Speaker 04 And it took about a year for me to realize that that journal, though I didn't write it in that way, and I wasn't thinking about it at the time, was source material. And it became the source material from my very first writing job, my very first time being published, which was this New York Times column, Life Interrupted, that was about the very things that I'd been writing about that felt particular to me, that felt honestly shameful in some ways,
41:56 Speaker 04 that I just hadn't fully looked at through the lens of, oh, well, this may not be what I had planned for myself. The plan is unfolding right now. You're just not really paying attention to it. And I've had that experience more times than I can count in the journal. Just a week and a half ago, I had this opportunity to paint my husband John's piano for the Super Bowl. He was preparing to sing the National Anthem. He asked me if I wanted to paint his piano, and I said yes, after thinking about it for quite some time, but I had thirty six hours to do it.
42:41 Speaker 04 And that's the kind of thing that makes you crumple under the pressure, that makes you want to get into bed and say, like, that's just not enough time to take something from ideation to creation to completion. And the very first thing I did was to go to my journal, was to just free write, not even about what it was that I was going to paint, but just to write about whatever came up. And I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote about John, about our love story, about how surreal it was for him to be back in his hometown of New Orleans as this, you know, kid who grew up near the airport, who started taking piano lessons at eleven about
43:28 Speaker 04 The American Dream and his embodiment of it about the American dream more broadly and how fractured our country feels, where half of the country feels like the American dream is in great danger and the other half of it feels like it's finally being, you know, saved from danger and what I arrived at was the image of a chrysalis of being in the cocoon where you feel like your most unformed self and the notion of a butterfly as this symbol of fragility and strength of transformation of
44:14 Speaker 04 I guess a kind of alchemy and I ended up sketching this abstract line drawing of a butterfly and that is what ended up being on the piano. Of course, a more finalized draft of that, but every time I don't know what I'm doing, I don't feel like I know what I'm thinking. I'm not sure about the path forward, any moment of great transition. That's where I go, the journal.
44:41 Dan Harris? We were watching, the piano looked great. So did your husband.
44:44 Speaker 04 Thank you.
44:46 Dan Harris? Well done, both of you.
44:50 Dan Harris? Coming up, Suleika talks about why journaling is a teen sport and she also issues a challenge to me.
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46:27 Dan Harris? Let's just have a few more of these prompts. There are two kind of elaborate prompts, both of which I want to ask you about. I'll start with George Saunders, who is a favorite of mine, and I suspect of yours too. And he's a novelist. He wrote Lincoln in the Bardo. He's been on this show a couple of times. And he has a very elaborate prompt. I'm sure you're not going to be able to recapitulate the whole thing here, but it's essentially it's to provoke you into empathy in a kind of challenging way. I was really struck by it, and I'd be curious to hear your, you know, brief description of what you can remember of it and also why you chose it.
47:04 Speaker 04 It's one of my very favorite prompts, too. So it's essentially a multi-step prompt that guides you into writing a short story from one of the greatest, you know, fiction writers, if not, I believe, the greatest of our time. But really, it's an exercise in empathy and inhabiting a point of view, not just other than your own, but inhabiting a point of view from the perspective of different characters. What I love about the wide range of different contributors, and I've mentioned some of them, whether, you know, it's writers of the likes of George Saunders
47:48 Speaker 04 or, you know, we have a prompt from a man on death row. We have a prompt from a young mother on the verge of widowhood, tapping into the portal of each of these individuals' imaginations and seeing what happens for us when we step into it. Were you, Dan, daunted by how complex of a prompt it was? Or was that intriguing and exciting to you?
48:18 Dan Harris? I have a funny relationship to journaling because I write memoirs. I mean, I've only actually published one, but I'm six and a half years down the road, almost seven years down the road on the second one. So I really don't want more writing assignments. And yet I've seen all the evidence around journaling and Bianca and I co-created a little journal too. So I am all for it, but I'm not all for it necessarily for me. And I kind of feel like much of what I'm doing with my time in writing is a form of journaling. So I'm probably not going to do George's very extensive recipe. That being said, on my own, trying to, and empathy is the great theme of George's writing, to the extent that I understand it, or him.
49:03 Dan Harris? The idea of putting myself in the shoes of people I disagree with. You referenced this earlier, where it's such a polarized time. I guess probably everybody can guess where I fall politically. And so putting myself in the mindset of people with whom I disagree is really important to me. And I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts and reading from the other side of the aisle, so to speak. I think what George is pointing toward is a practice I try to do in a less elaborate way in my own life every day.
49:37 Speaker 05 I actually read it a little differently. In his description of the prompt, he describes it in five stages. First, you write about person one and you try to get into their voice. And then there's a person two, you get into their voice. Then you have an intersection where they're, each have their voice and they're talking to each other. And then I think in the fourth stage, one does something to the other, or it's after one has done something to the other, and you re-enter their voices in the aftermath of their interaction, if I understand correctly.
50:12 Dan Harris? Yes, except for the first person, person one, is specifically supposed to be somebody to whom you sincerely feel an aversion.
50:19 Speaker 05 Right. And so I actually had a personal trigger with that. And so, yes, I'm not disagreeing with anything you said, except that the thing that really made me want to try this was about getting into their voice.
50:33 Dan Harris? Yeah.
50:33 Speaker 05 And then creating a story around it. And so having my particular aversion and my particular issue.
50:40 Speaker 05 And not yet wanting to make up a story about anyone else. I don't know if that's really my wheelhouse. I'm going to write something in her voice and the voice is supposed to be the best version of that person. And so I wanted to make her person one. And see if I could access what I'm averse to differently. Yeah. And challenge what I think the narrative is. Yeah. And then actually write out the interaction. So maybe we're not seeing anything different, except that I thought his prompt was actually one of these, you know, and I'm not trying to make you get too heavy, but let's try to get into voices and characters and stories.
51:23 Speaker 05 That ultimately, obviously, will will speak to relating to each other and empathy.
51:30 Speaker 04 Well, and I think that's the beautiful thing about these prompts. There are so many different ways to interpret them. And you don't have to actually follow them to a T. The point is just to do exactly what you said. It's to maybe get an idea of how you might find a new entry point into something. When I did Georgia's prompt, I actually ended up basing my character off of a real person who I was struggling to not just access empathy for, but even struggling to just like understand what was happening. And it was
52:09 Speaker 04 an exercise in fiction, but I guess an autobiographical fiction. And I didn't necessarily follow it to a T. But it was helpful for me. It was, yeah, to really fully inhabit a perspective that felt especially challenging because it was a trigger for something that was happening. But I'm interested in what you said, Dan, about feeling like, you know, you write for a living. And journaling is more writing and, you know, who has energy or time for that? I totally get that. I feel that way sometimes about reading books. It's like I spend so much time reading that by the time I get to leisure reading, I just don't have the energy for it. But I think for me, with journaling.
52:55 Speaker 04 Couple of things came to mind. It's like, I don't know that I could have written my memoir had I not kept a journal, because I don't know that I would have remembered as much Hmm. had I not committed it to ink. Yeah. And there's something about the act of writing something down, even if it seems insignificant in a moment, that kind of saves it to the memory cloud, at least for me. And the other thing I'll say too, so many of us are deeply creative as children. We write, we dance, we play, we tap into our imaginations and come up with like make believe stories and we lose
53:39 Speaker 04 that access to the creativity that I believe is in each of us as we get older. And you think, you know, when you're professionally creative, that doesn't apply to you. But for me, I think in a way it applies all the more so. Yeah. The more I write for a living, the harder it is for me to tap into that place of freedom and experimentation and ease that I had as a child, because I'm thinking about audience, I'm thinking about critics, I'm thinking about form and it sucks all the joy and all the spontaneity out of it. And so actually,
54:22 Speaker 04 whenever I'm doing like my writing, writing, I try to do my first drafts in the journal to trick my brain out of that place of this is serious writing and I must deliver and I must do a good job and I must meet this deadline and it has to be unimpeachable, otherwise I'm going to put my foot in my mouth and someone's going to get really mad at me on the internet and blah blah blah. And I actually will do, I wrote all the first drafts of my book, of both these books and my journal, so that I could
54:56 Speaker 04 try to cultivate that feeling of, if this is writing just for me, I don't have to know what I'm going to say. I don't have to know where it's leading. And I'm just going to write through to the end without caring if it's any good, because nobody's ever going to see it. I find that that actually has become the most important and sort of monnegotiable part of how I warm up to do my writing, writing.
55:26 Dan Harris? I love that. It's really smart. Actually, it kind of leads me to the next question. The last prompt I wanted to ask you about, which is Elizabeth Gilbert's Letters From Love. Elizabeth Gilbert has also been on the show and she's, as people may know, she wrote Eat, Pray, Love and has written novels and is just a pretty creative and extraordinary person. Side note, she's coming back on the show soon because she has a new novel coming out. Anyway, she has a very popular sub stack called Letters From Love and she asks people to write themselves a letter from the most loving voice they have. I think I'm stating that correctly. Anyway, she asked me to do it and I've been just putting
56:07 Dan Harris? it off and putting it off for lots of reasons, I'm sure. But yeah, I'm going to shut up and get you talking about why you find this idea compelling enough to include it in your book.
56:20 Speaker 04 Absolutely. So Liz is a dear friend and mentor and a fellow journaling fanatic. You know, she has this really unique approach to journaling. She calls it a two-way prayer where every day in her journal, she says, "Dear love, what would you have me know today?" And that sort of prompt and the response is the voice of love answering that. She has another variation on it around fear where it's, "Dear fear, what would you have me know today?" And fear responds. I love the love prompt so much because the way we
57:04 Speaker 04 speak to ourselves is rarely the way that we would speak to a child or to someone we care about. And that exercise of inhabiting the voice of love is actually really scary and really challenging. Self-loathing is this sort of Western concept that we think of as utterly normal and commonplace and yet is so insidious. And so I'm with you, Dan. The first time Liz invited me to do a letter from love, I was like, "I don't want to do this. I don't even know what..." What happens if I have nothing to say?
57:45 Speaker 04 What happens if love has nothing to say in response to that question? And it's another one of the journaling prompts that I return to again and again and again. And I'm always surprised by what comes out. And it's often the thing I need to hear that I didn't know I needed to hear.
58:09 Speaker 05 Dan, this is what I want for Valentine's Day. I would like to see your love letter to yourself. Watch you squirm while writing it, but then also read it, please.
58:20 Speaker 04 Wow, maybe you both need to do letters from love toward yourself and then towards each other. John, my husband, also keeps a daily journal and did morning pages for years and years. And there's a period of time where we were both spending a lot of time apart. We were both on the road for work. And obviously, it's easy to feel disconnected in moments like that, especially when the sum of your interaction is a phone call where you say, "How are you? How was your day?" So he decided that instead of doing our respective journaling that we each do,
59:03 Speaker 04 we would write three pages addressed to each other, snap a photo of it, and text it to each other. And so that's what we started to do. And it was so interesting because there were things that would come up in those letters that I don't even know I knew I was thinking or feeling about. And I know the same was true for him. And there were certainly things that wouldn't have made their way into like the quick 15-minute phone call in between, you know, meetings or the quick FaceTime from the airport terminal. And so it's something that we've continued doing now, even when we're under the same roof,
59:44 Speaker 04 when we're feeling like, for whatever reason, we're not able to talk to each other in the way that we like. We write journal entries and address them to each other and share them with each other.
59:58 Dan Harris? Mine would be so much better than yours, Bianca, I'm just saying.
1:00:00 Speaker 05 That's very cool.
1:00:05 Speaker 05 No, I actually find a lot of safety in that idea. I mean, Dan would have to read the letter, so that's a different thing, but I think I express myself better in writing. I could see myself doing that and feel like I'm getting my point across better than the sort of fear response that I often have.
1:00:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:00:24 Speaker 05 Good or bad?
1:00:25 Speaker 04 Absolutely.
1:00:27 Dan Harris? That kind of brings me to the last question on my list, although I'm aware Bianca, you may have others that you want to get in. But this is kind of, I think, the animating idea of your subsect, isolation journals. Would you argue that journaling actually is a team sport and it is supercharged by doing it in community?
1:00:46 Speaker 04 Absolutely. We reach for the journal maybe in really heightened emotional states or moments in our lives, but it's really tough to do it consistently. It's tough to do honestly, anything consistently that's not an absolute must or doesn't feel like it's an absolute must. And so in community, generating that sort of accountability and energy for me has always been crucial to cultivating any sort of consistent creative practice. And it feels especially instrumental when inevitably you hit a point where you're like, I don't feel like doing this, or I don't feel like I'm getting somewhere interesting,
1:01:31 Speaker 04 or I'm getting caught in the same repetitive loops. But more than that, I think I also am so inspired by other people's entries. And, you know, journaling's private, there's no expectation to share anything that you write, but occasionally people do. And so, you know, some of the essays and prompts that appear in this book were actually responses to other people's prompts. The book is divided into 10 chapters and they're organized thematically on beginning, on love, on loss, et cetera. And, you know, I think of
1:02:12 Speaker 04 One of the prompts and essays in there, which is a response to a prompt in the very, very early days of the newsletter, and it's a young mother writing a letter to a stranger. And the stranger is this other young mother in a waiting room at Slum Cettering. It's such a beautifully written piece, something that moved me so much when I read it that I felt compelled to ask her to include it in the book. But it's also the kind of prompt that maybe I don't journal too regularly in my journal, but it's become a kind of thought prompt for me when I find myself in a waiting room
1:02:54 Speaker 04 and a stranger catches my eye and I wonder what it is that they might be going through. And I kind of compose my own little note to them in my mind. Community for me is, and I love how you put it, I do think it supercharges creativity in all of its manifestations and forms. And I think that's true of journaling. And it seems kind of counterintuitive because we think of it as this sort of solitary practice, which it is. But I think there's great benefit to doing it with people you know or with perfect strangers on the internet.
1:03:36 Dan Harris? Harris, any other questions before we let Suleika go?
1:03:40 Speaker 05 I'm sort of hanging on more to the conversation, the topic you were just speaking of, community, because I'm sort of embarrassed that I hadn't even put the two together until this conversation. And, you know, being stuck in my own lane of what journaling is, as somebody who's withdrawn quite a bit to think about things, and journaling has been a way for me as an individual not to feel alone, sort of with myself. And of course, as you grow and experience and learn, you know, you let more people into that orbit and then suddenly it becomes exponential in what you get from their experiences and then you give your experiences.
1:04:23 Speaker 05 And so I guess it was happening naturally, but I hadn't really put it together as what it really is, which is community, which is connection, which is the whole point of figuring all of this out.
1:04:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, to be in dialogue with the self is to be in dialogue with the world.
1:04:46 Dan Harris? Yes, because the self is a creation of the universe, just like everything else in the universe. So when you talk to yourself, you're talking to the universe. Anyway, I'm getting a little meta meta physical here. Although I don't even know if that's metaphysical, I think that's just commonsensical. Just one little thing here, we don't have to talk about this, and I wasn't planning on talking about it per se, but you did reference that you were struggling with meditation, or that you have historically struggled with meditation. And I do just want to point out that often the confusion is that people think that the struggle that they're having is proof that they're doing it wrong. But actually, it's usually the stuff that you're struggling with, often it's distraction, is just part of meditation, and the fact that it's happening is proof that you're doing it right.
1:05:29 Speaker 04 Hmm, thank you for that. It's funny, I think of journaling as my version of meditation. And yeah, sometimes the thing that you're struggling, the thing that you're resisting, is exactly when you know you've touched on something worthwhile. I had this post-it note, and I was writing my first book on my desk. But I think also perhaps applies to both journaling and meditation.
1:06:01 Speaker 04 A good book, write what you don't want others to know about you. If you want to write a great book, write what you don't want to know about yourself. So for me, whether it's in the pages of my journal, or when I do try to meditate and feel like I'm failing at it or not doing it right, it's all that noise, all that clamor that's coming up. To your point, that's sometimes the most interesting valuable stuff right there.
1:06:31 Dan Harris? Yeah, it's the point, actually. We think it's an obstacle, or a problem, or a hindrance, but it's that is the point, to get to know what's happening in your mind, so you're not so owned by it.
1:06:43 Dan Harris? Just before we go, anything you were hoping to cover that we didn't get to?
1:06:47 Speaker 04 Hmm, I guess I, you know, last thing I'll say, and I mean, this is my first interview I've done about the book. What I was thinking is, like, I'm not quite sure how to talk about it yet. But more than that, I think it's, it's actually hard to talk about journaling. It feels like this childish pastime that we do in a pretty little diary with a locker. Somehow doesn't feel rigorous in this way. And there are lots of reasons not to try something new. Our lives are busy. We feel a resistance to them.
1:07:32 Speaker 04 But maybe I'll challenge you, Dan, to actually writing through one of those prompts like Georgia's. And in return, maybe I will give meditation a go as well. How about that?
1:07:50 Dan Harris? That's a good deal. I like that.
1:07:52 Speaker 05 Well, they have similar PR problems, right?
1:07:55 Speaker 04 Both similar PR problems, exactly. Yeah.
1:07:58 Dan Harris? Yes.
1:07:59 Speaker 04 It's like a thing that we know is good for us, but you know, someone else can do it. Or maybe someday I'll get around to it.
1:08:06 Dan Harris? Exactly, exactly. And just to say, anybody who thinks that journaling is something done only by distraught teenagers. Actually, there's a ton of evidence. And Bianca and I interviewed one of the leading scientists who has really pioneered the, the research into journaling. I'll post a link to that in the show notes. There's hard data to show that it has real benefits. Just before I really actually let you go, so like, can you just remind everybody of the name of your new book? And anything else you want us to know about?
1:08:39 Speaker 04 Okay, the new book is called The Book of Alchemy, A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life. It's really everything I know about cultivating a creative practice to try to transform.
1:08:58 Speaker 04 Life's interruptions and peaks into something interesting and meaningful. And it has 100 essays and prompts from the most creative minds I know. And I'll be coming out on April 22nd. I'm so excited. We're planning a very exciting tour. I'll be with my husband, John, and we'll be announcing that soon. And yeah, it's the practice that has changed my life. And I'd go so far as to say, saved my life. And if you're like Dan and you're like, that sounds cool, but maybe not for me. Commit to five days and five prompts and see what happens.
1:09:43 Speaker 04 Where should I start for my five days of meditation, Dan?
1:09:47 Dan Harris? You can take the intro course on Sam Harris's Waking Up app.
1:09:51 Speaker 04 Okay.
1:09:51 Dan Harris? That's a really good intro course.
1:09:53 Speaker 04 Deal, I'll do it and I'll report back.
1:09:55 Dan Harris? Okay, we're likewise, all right, we have a deal. And just to plug you just a little bit more. So Lika's previous book is called Between Two Kingdoms. I'll put a link in the show notes to her appearance on this show in September of 2021. She also has a Substack called The Isolation Journals, which is really popular for good reason. So Lika, thank you for your time and both of us wish you nothing but good health.
1:10:20 Speaker 04 Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Bianca. What a joy. So grateful. Thank you so much.
1:10:32 Dan Harris? Thanks again to Suleika Juad. Don't forget to check out her new book, The Book of Alchemy, and her Substack, where she turns journaling into a team sport. Also, speaking of journaling, and you heard me reference this during the episode. Bianca and I created a journal called Dump It Here, which is available at danharris.com. And a reminder to go check out our live meditation mini series. That will be happening every afternoon from Monday, May 19th through Friday, May 23rd at 4:00 PM Eastern. You can get all the details over at danharris.com. As mentioned earlier, this will be centered around the four related Buddhist practices known as the Brahma Viharas.
1:11:16 Dan Harris? I will guide some meditations and then take your questions. Come check it out, danharris.com. And if you can't afford a subscription, just let us know, we'll hook you up. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who works so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Podpeople. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer and head of content. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.
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