Chapter 1: How did Suleika Jaouad's diagnosis shape her perspective on life?
And I kept saying to my doctor, like, I don't know how to deal with this level of uncertainty. I don't know how to keep living my life when I don't know what's going to happen. And he said to me the thing people often say, which is that you have to live every day as if it's your last.
And it was exhausting to try to make every family dinner meaningful, to try to squeeze the juice out of every single moment. It was just unsustainable. And so I had to shift to a gentler mindset of trying to live every day as if it's my first.
Zuleika, Zuleika, Zuleika. Welcome to Reclaiming. Thank you for having me on. Oh, my gosh. This is just – I've been feeling the magic of this conversation all morning, and I just feel really lucky.
Chapter 2: What role does creativity play in navigating uncertainty?
I feel the same way. I adore you. I've adored you long before I've known you. And I'm just so honored to get to sit with you and share this time.
Yeah. I was thinking about that. I think the first time we met was at TED when you did your TED Talk in 2019. I mean, I don't know that we had a... I feel like we might have because I was so blown away by your talk. I was so blown away by it. And the title, I wrote it down, What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living.
I remember exactly. We didn't actually meet face-to-face. But you sent me a message. Yeah. And I was so surprised and so moved. And, you know, it's one thing to think a nice thought about someone. It's another to take the time to actually write a message. And I think I'm...
just continuously inspired by people who translate thoughtfulness into action and who take the time to reach out without any expectation of anything. But just to say, I read your book, I listened to your talk, this moved me. And it's something that I think especially
In a world as busy as this one, it's hard enough to do with the people you know, and it takes a special person to reach out in the way that you did to me.
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Chapter 3: How did journaling help Suleika reconnect with herself?
Oh, my God. When you don't know someone, and it meant so much to me, and I suspect you do that a lot.
Is that true? Well, no. It's funny you're saying this, and I'm thinking about how – there'd be a ton of people who listened. It's like, oh, she hasn't gotten back to me on text in months. So sometimes I'm thoughtful. But I was, I mean... Not only was my experience so heart blown open, tears, you know, but all of my friends that I was sitting with, we were just all so moved.
Not just, it wasn't just your story of sort of love life and leukemia. It was your presence. Oh. Just your presence. There's just a magic about you. Thank you. A real magic about you. And so it's just really, really, really special.
Yeah.
I was absolutely terrified.
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Chapter 4: What lessons did Suleika learn from her experiences with leukemia?
Oh my gosh, right?
I don't think I've ever been more nervous in my entire life. Same. And I had to testify to Congress. So that says a lot. Yeah. I remember waiting in the wings and looking out at that red circle, and I just thought, okay, I'm either going to pass out, throw up, or I guess do this.
Something about the red circle just amps up the anxiety and the pressure.
Yeah, 100%. But your talk was one of the ones that everybody was buzzing about. And I think it was, again, not just the words, but you, your frequency, your heart, your energy. all of it. Thank you. And I had not seen American Symphony, the documentary that you are a subject of, and your husband who has how many Grammys?
Who knows?
I've lost track.
I won't say the number because inevitably I'll get it wrong and he'll correct me after this.
All right.
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Chapter 5: How does Suleika define the concept of alchemy in her life?
Well, we'll blame it on me that I didn't do my research. But Jean-Baptiste, which was so beautiful. But I wrote down there's this quote from your narration that just like, and so you said, long before our relationship, John and I shared a creative language. We both see survival as its own kind of creative act.
And I just, that hit me in such a deep way because I think survival, I think it gets talked, God, I'm like getting emotional. I think it gets talked about in these ways that don't have a beauty in And that was sort of what I felt in what you were saying. I mean, I don't know. What did you mean in that?
I mean, I believe we're all deeply creative as children. We play make-believe. We... use our imagination to teleport ourselves into all kinds of scenarios. We make finger paintings without worrying about if we're a good artist or a bad artist. And, um, at some point we, many of us lose that connection to our creativity and, um, The thing is, everything that we do requires creativity.
Fighting requires creativity. Interesting. Business requires creativity. Cooking requires creativity. But to me, where the creative process really comes into sharp relief is when you're thrown into a situation, whether it's an illness or something else, where you feel like you're having to reimagine who you are, where you're having to rebuild your life in the aftermath of a traumatic incident.
And for me in particular, dealing with leukemias I have for so much of my adult life has required a tremendous amount of creativity. Using my imagination to to travel beyond the confines of a hospital room, having to figure out how to communicate with loved ones when the fabric of language can't seem to hold the suffering. All of that requires creativity. How does it resonate for you?
Well, it's interesting what's sort of coming up for me, and I'm not sure I've Putting all the pieces together, I can articulate it in the right way. But the main kind of healing work I've done for the past almost 20 years has been, you know, now people understand when I say it's resonance and vibration work through sound. But for a long time, it was like, well, it sounds like a sound bath.
And people could get that. I'm like, it's very different. It's like repatterning your field and all sorts of things. And I do often do these long protocols. And we did one around creativity. And so... I think there was a big unlocking for me.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of small joys in Suleika's journey?
I have a lot of sadness around not having had kids. And so this, I think like the connecting of, okay, this same creative force that you use to, you know, grow a child is the same creative force that you use to birth an article or a show or something. And so I think in that way, I hadn't thought about that as connected to survival. And until I heard you say that in the documentary.
And I will say the actual creative process of writing or painting or music has been so central, not just to surviving those moments, but figuring out how to heal and to live. I'll give you an example that's captured a little bit in American Symphony. But when I went through a second bone marrow transplant three years ago, I was in the hospital for about a month and it was during a COVID surge.
So the visitor policy was really strict. I was only allowed to have one visitor a day for a very limited number of hours. Wow. And I think far harder than the side effects of chemotherapy and the physical pain was that sense of isolation. And the creative process for me became a way of not just being in deeper conversation with myself at a time when
when I had no idea who I was anymore, but also of being in deeper conversation with the people around me. So I started painting during that period for the first time. I was having these really intense night terrors and medication-induced hallucinations that made me very afraid of my own subconscious. And I decided to create a visual journal of these weird apparitions
And during that period of time, John and I couldn't see each other for about two weeks because he'd been exposed to COVID. And the germ risk was too high as someone who had no immune system. And so every day I would text him one of my paintings. And in return, he started composing these little lullabies that he would send to me every day.
And I would play them on loop in my hospital room as a kind of... counterpoint to the hospital's many noises, the beeping IV poles, the alarms that go off whenever your condition drastically changes. And I felt so enveloped by his presence, by his love, but also by the healing melody of the lullaby, which is you know, perhaps the most soothing musical form. Kind of primal. Primal, absolutely.
And, you know, maybe it seems like a silly thing, but it changed my entire experience of that stay. I was no longer afraid of... My dreams and my nightmares, they became a subject, something interesting and even beautiful when I translated them into watercolor. And that to me is the power of the creative process. You can...
alchemize something that feels painful or difficult into something where you begin to also find moments of beauty or interest or unexpected revelations even.
Yeah. Well, you have your book, The Book of Alchemy. And so is that how you define alchemy or is there a way you define it?
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Chapter 7: How did Suleika's relationship with Jon Batiste evolve over time?
I had no artistic training. My mom is a visual artist. And growing up, she taught art classes in the attic of our house, which was her studio. And so I would go there after school and mess around with whatever tools were available to me. But beyond that, I had no visual art training.
But one thing I always really appreciated about my mom and that she reminded me of when I was in the hospital is, you know, especially with watercolor, you can't control the movements. You're in collaboration with the pigment and the water and you have to let it flow and bloom and bleed and you don't have control, much like in life. Yeah.
And sometimes I'd paint something and I'd say, this is a mess. I'm going to throw it out. And my mom would always say to me, no, the mess is actually where the energy is. Keep moving into that. There's no such thing as a mess. That's usually where something interesting is happening. And so she was a great art teacher, not just to me.
Well, teacher, I mean, that's an incredible metaphor for life.
It is. Right?
It is. I mean, that is a really...
What a beautiful thing. The mess is where the intrigue is. It's where the interesting stuff lives, and you push further into that, and it ends up becoming the most beautiful part of the canvas often. Right.
Well, and also I think that relationship, too, between— our expectations of ourselves, our expectations of excellence. And I know you have a journal that goes with your book and your, you know, I did that journaling class with you and John at the weekend thing, whatever. And
It's really interesting to me what your mom was saying because I think so many of us get held up by the voice in our head, right? I mean, it took me a long time to get to the place where it was, okay, I'm like drawing for 30 seconds. I have this little pad and I'm going to throw it away.
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Chapter 8: What is Suleika's vision for reclaiming her creative practice?
It's so in sync with, I think, the theme of what I'm exploring in my life right now, which is a reclamation of smallness. Interesting. Of prioritizing depth over reach, prioritizing smallness over skill, of... of really allowing myself to think about the small joys, to think about ways that I want to narrow my attention to something
that may be small and may not go anywhere in terms of what other people see, but that feels deeply nourishing to me.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting because in today's world, especially in this country, it also feels like a radical act. Totally.
Totally.
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And if you see a post-purchase survey, please be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth right here on Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky. Because home starts with mom. Do you think—because your parents were not born here, right? So your mom was born in Switzerland. And where was your dad born? Tunisia. Okay.
And so do you think—because my parents—my mom was born in the States but raised in Tokyo, and my dad was born in El Salvador to German parents— And so I think there's something about other cultures that sort of weave their way into your childhood. Do you feel like some of that is maybe what's coming out now in a way? Because we're so conditioned here. We are.
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