August 21, 2025 • 45 mins
Welcome to Season 11 of The Hoffman Podcast. We begin our new season with Suleika Jaouad, an extraordinary writer, artist, and author - and deeply soulful human. Suleika is not a graduate of the Hoffman Process, but many in her circle have attended, and her work deeply reflects its spirit.
Suleika Jaouad :: Photo by Nadia Albano
Suleika speaks and writes about creative alchemy. Her recent bestselling memoir is The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life.
An alchemical life is one where we learn to take the more challenging lead weights (events and experiences) of our lives and work with them. We alchemize them into something new, as the alchemists of old called them, the gold.
Suleika has been doing exactly this since she was diagnosed with leukemia at 22. She spent the next year of her life shuttling between her childhood bedroom and chemo rooms instead of embarking on a traditional adult life. As she worked with what she was facing and brought it closer to her, her relationship with it and with herself transformed, alchemized.
As Suleika shares in this conversation with Drew, "that's maybe our collective, forever work, what we do when things fall apart. For me, reconceiving of survival as a creative act of taking those moments where things fall apart and re-fastening them into something has been my way of finding my way."
We hope you enjoy this soulful, inspiring conversation with Suleika and Drew. It's a beautiful beginning to our new season.
More about Suleika Jaouad:
Suleika Jaouad is a writer, artist, and author of the New York Times bestselling memoirs The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life and Between Two Kingdoms, which has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes the #1 Literature newsletter on Substack, the Isolation Journals, home to a creative community of over 230,000 readers from around the world.
A three-time cancer survivor, she launched her career from her hospital bed at age 22 with the New York Times column and Emmy Award-winning video series “Life, Interrupted.” Her essays and reporting have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Vogue, among others. A sought-after speaker, her TED Talk, “What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living,” has more than five million views.
Along with husband Jon Batiste, Jaouad is the subject of the Oscar-nominated and Grammy Award-winning documentary American Symphony, produced by the Obamas—a portrait of two artists during a year of extreme highs and lows. When her leukemia returned in 2022 and treatment complications temporarily compromised her vision, she turned to painting to transcribe her fever dreams and medication-induced hallucinations. This vibrant, visceral record of grief and desire has since expanded to include large-scale watercolors, exhibited in The Alchemy of Blood, a joint show with Jaouad’s mother, the artist Anne Francey, at ArtYard. Most recently, she was commissioned to paint a grand piano for the 2024 Super Bowl in New Orleans, now on display at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and trio of rescue dogs.
Find out more about Suleika at suleikajaouad.com. Follow Suleika on Instagram and the Isolation Journals Newsletter on Substack.
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As mentioned in this episode:
Matt Heineman, Director of American Symphony and Hoffman grad.
Jon Batiste
• Winner of 7 Grammy Awards
• Bandleader and musical director on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from 2015 to 2022.
Eudora Welty quote:
"I don’t think we often see life resolving itself, not in any sort of perfect way, but I like the fiction writer’s feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art, however imperfectly and briefly—to give it a form and try to embody it—to hold it and express it in a story’s terms." Eudora Welty
Terry Tempest Williams
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I think that's the work to hold the
paradoxes,
to hold
the brutal realities of life and
the beautiful
ones
and and the same
open palm.
Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought
to you by the Hoffman Institute. I'm Drew
Horning, host of this episode.
(00:23):
And today, we're speaking with a guest who
is not a graduate of the Hoffman process,
but
whose life's work is harmonious with the work,
the ethos of the process.
Please keep in mind that the views and
ideas expressed don't necessarily
represent the views of the Institute. However,
we do think you'll find this conversation interesting,
(00:56):
Hey, everybody. Welcome.
Suleikha Jawad is with us. Did I pronounce
the last name right? You pronounced it perfectly.
Hi, everyone.
I love that your parents had different accents.
So one sounded like Suleikha and the other
sounded like Suleikha.
That's right. And sometimes it sounds like Zuleija
and Sulaika.
(01:16):
That's the joy and confusion of growing up
in an interfaith,
interracial household.
Yeah. So right before we push record, you
acknowledge that
you haven't done the process
and, you don't know anything about it and
hope that's okay. And I said, wow, Suleikha.
I think the way in which you live
(01:36):
your life is deeply reflective
of what the process is.
And so we'll talk a little bit about
that, make that connection between so many things.
Really excited for this conversation. Thanks for taking
the time to join us.
I'm so excited to get to be here
with you. And despite
knowing nothing about the process,
(01:59):
Hoffman has very much been on my mind
these last couple of months, because several people
who are very close to me and in
my orbit
have gone to Hoffman.
And so I've been hearing little bits and
pieces, and and I'm very intrigued and and
really excited to learn more. And I'm grateful
(02:19):
to my sister who turned me on to
your column years ago.
You've written
best selling books,
Between Two Kingdoms,
New York Times best selling books. And we're
here in part because,
Matt Heinemann
is a grad and connected us together, and
he was the director
of American Symphony
(02:40):
and this incredible
documentary that cataloged
a powerful time
where you were going through
your treatment,
and John, your husband, was receiving accolades
and
Grammys
and conducting his American Symphony.
It's a beautiful documentary for those of you
(03:02):
that haven't seen it.
That project was such an interesting one.
John and I, we've known each other since
we were teenagers. We met at Bandcamp.
We're really at this,
what felt like a real peak in our
lives.
I was 33 at the time. John was
going to be 34, 35.
Things were really coming together for us. Our
(03:23):
careers
were going
better than we possibly could have dreamed of.
John
was the band leader on The Late Show.
I had just come out with this book,
and I was touring it all around and
writing
a weekly newsletter on Substack, long before Substack
was a sort of household name.
(03:44):
And we were as in love as we'd
ever been and really dreaming about the future.
All of that
came
crashing down in the moment that I learned
that the leukemia I'd first been diagnosed with
at 22
was back.
And so what happened next
was, yes, a kind of
(04:06):
cataloging
of those months and of John's attempt to,
in spite of everything we were going through,
to put together
a literal symphony,
a reimagination
of what the American Symphony might look like
in the twenty first century.
But, personally, we were really
living through the movements
of the symphony of life.
(04:28):
I think about words.
What does it mean to
use words and string words together
and use metaphor
and create sentences and paragraphs and
and share them
verbally
and on the page?
Sulayka, you have this beautiful ability to
(04:48):
string sentences together that illustrate
something
so powerful. Has that always been a part
of who you are? Whether it's writing or
speaking,
it seems like words are your friend.
I think I've always been obsessed with words
and language,
(05:09):
not because they were my friend,
but because they were a real source of
struggle for me early on. My dad is
from Tunisia.
My mom is from the French part of
Switzerland.
We moved maybe a dozen times on three
different continents by the time I was 10
years old.
And so I grew up
(05:29):
as what some people describe as a third
culture kid. I have three passports, but felt
like I belonged and fit in nowhere.
I spoke three languages
by the time I was six years old,
but couldn't spell
or string together a grammatical sentence in any.
And I often felt caught
(05:51):
between kingdoms and this sort of liminal space
where I really struggled to figure out who
I was and, and how
to conjure
a sense of identity
that I could translate.
I think like a lot of kids who
grew up this way, I was an expert
(06:12):
chameleon. I could shape shift and
scan a cafeteria
at a school and immediately figure out
who to avoid and who to align myself
with, and, you know, as a form of
survival.
But what was harder than adapting was finding
that through line of self
and finding
(06:32):
the language
to
express
who it is that I was to myself.
And so, you know, from
the time I could hold a pen, I
started keeping journals.
And I remember
keeping journals, right, right down lists of words
and colloquialisms
that I heard at school, and then I
(06:53):
try to incorporate them in conversation as much
as possible until they sounded somewhat organic and
effortless. And so I think I was a
student
of language and of words
from a very early age
because they were a real source of strife.
And
I was determined
(07:14):
to
figure out how to translate
myself
and
to find a sense of belonging in the
world around me.
I'm thinking
about Tunisiana.
Can you I mean, there's a a just
a fresh example
of using words and creating words that reflect
(07:34):
the important space you're in. Share a little
bit about that. So, you know, my husband,
John, is from New Orleans.
Tunisia is my fatherland.
When we moved into our first home together,
I
approached
this home as if it was
the most important creative project I'd ever undertaken.
(07:57):
And I was so excited, especially having felt
such a sense of upheaval as a kid
to have one physical
address to call my own. I never had
that before, and it felt like such a
novelty
and a real
kind of anchor that I'd yearned for for
so long.
And so as I was going about
(08:19):
dreaming
up this house, I really wanted it to
feel not just like a house, but a
home
and a manifestation
of
our relationship
and our
separate identities,
and hopefully,
the braid of those identities and that kind
of shared Francophone
(08:41):
African
lineage that we both have, and two, a
third relationship,
a kind of
manifestation
of us.
And so I came up with the word,
Tunisia, Tunisia,
Louisiana,
to describe that whole approach.
Beautiful. I mentioned my sister connected me to
your work, and she said, Sulayka is going
(09:02):
on a book tour. I got you tickets.
So
I'm sitting in LA
in the auditorium,
and you are reading, and John is playing,
and then you pull out your bass, your
stand up bass, and you start
playing that. How was that
tour for you and John
to have this shared experience of bringing your
(09:24):
creativity to the world?
I had no idea you were there. It
was
extraordinary,
and it was terrifying for me. You know,
there's a reason I picked a profession
where I get to spend
vast amounts of time alone with books and
my laptop. And so I've always been someone
who's far more comfortable
(09:44):
behind the scenes
than
in front of the camera or on stage.
And even, you know, in my early years
where I did play the bass, I, I
was a classical double bass player, but I
performed in the context of an orchestra,
which was an organism
where you're maybe a crucial part of it,
but you're also a tiny, tiny part of
(10:05):
the larger thing. And it's not you by
yourself being out there.
But when I wrote my most recent book,
The Book of Alchemy,
which is really
an exploration
of
this practice
of journaling that has
been
the
chrysalis
for all of my most important transformations,
(10:28):
and
has really saved my life more times than
once,
and more generally an exploration
of the value of cultivating a creative practice
in our life, whether you think of yourself
as creative
or not. I started
to think about
how, not just to talk about it, but
to enact it, and to walk the walk.
(10:50):
And so John,
who, you know, this book is dedicated to
him and and to me has always been
such an embodiment
of the notion of creative alchemy,
of transforming
something maybe considered
base or worthless, like lead, into something precious,
like gold.
(11:10):
And we started to dream about doing that
together and what that might look like. You
know, one of the things that's very important
to me in my own creative practice and
that I write about in the book is
the permission to be a bad artist,
to
cultivate a creative practice without a goal in
mind, but just to do it because it
(11:30):
pushes you
to experiment and to play and to expand
what you think of as possible. And so
as part
of that challenge, John said, well, why don't
you walk the walk? And why don't you
do something you're not very comfortable doing and
haven't done in years and dust off your
base and get on
stage? To which I was like, absolutely not.
(11:53):
There is no way I'm doing that. That
sounds way too scary. It's one thing to
be a bad artist in private. It's another
to do it on stage in front of
hundreds or or thousands of people.
So
in short, it was an alchemical
experience for me. Night after night in front
of thousands of people,
(12:13):
I
got up there
and really pushed myself to go beyond
myself
to do something I'm
incredibly
uncomfortable with and
to
do it anyway,
because it was interesting
(12:34):
and expansive
and playful.
And
what better way
to
talk about the mission of
a book than to actually embody it?
Yeah.
You know, in the process, we have what
we call a cycle of transformation,
which is sort of the overlay
(12:54):
of everything we do during the week. And
the first step is awareness,
and the second step is expression.
And there are moments where writing is a
huge part
of the week, so much so that people
are like, I've never written so much since
grade school, and their hands are cramping up.
You talk about low stakes, and I hear
(13:17):
it. If we step away from the performative
piece of it, the evaluative
piece of it, and go for the low
stakes expression,
it was one of those evenings where by
the end, everybody around you is, like, bonded,
all these strangers being a part of the
energy that you and John created on stage.
But one moment in particular was when you
(13:39):
quoted Eudora Welty by saying,
when you confront an experience, there's something beautiful
about confronting experience
and resolving it as art. Would that be
your tattoo?
Yes. Yeah. It's one of my very favorite
lines. If I had tattoos, that would be
one of them.
I have a whole constellation
(14:00):
of Post it notes above my desk, lines
from various writers and artists and thinkers
that will not tattooed on my body. I
want tattooed on my memory. And that's one
of them.
You know, we live in a culture that's
so obsessed,
not just with productivity,
but with
performance,
that I think
(14:21):
even when you attempt
to do something just for yourself, there's something
so insidious about those forces that it's hard
to quiet the chatter, the outside chatter, to
quiet the noise.
I am someone who cannot write at my
laptop because my laptop is where
I receive emails, and where I read the
(14:41):
news, and where I do my taxes, and
so many things happen
on my laptop. There's so much chatter. There's
so much outside noise
that in order to trick my brain
into a space of privacy,
of writing
without a goal in mind, or without the
fear
of an audience or some onlooker,
(15:03):
I have to do it by hand. I
have to do it in my journal.
And what that means is that everything I've
ever written, including
my first book, which was, I think the
first draft was 500 pages, I I wrote
those early drafts in my journal. Because in
order to give myself permission
to write the truth
(15:25):
without fearing
what it would mean or how it would
come off or how it might be perceived,
I had to do it in this sacred
container.
I think when you're able
to get rid of the stakes,
when you're able to quiet
the noise,
and to
(15:45):
sit down and take a breath and start
writing, for me, that's the purest line
to my intuition
that I've been able to arrive at. And
often, I start a sentence, or I start
an entry thinking
it's going one way, and I end up
being utterly
surprised by what emerges.
(16:05):
And I don't know what I'm thinking or
feeling
often until I write it down. You've mentioned,
and we talk about this at the beginning
of the week, the very first day, we
contrast
surrender
because part of what I hear you not
just use the word surrender, but that's an
actual act of surrender.
I don't know where this is gonna go.
I'm gonna surrender
(16:26):
to the experience,
surrender to whatever emerges.
And we contrast that with submission
and how you can take the process in
two different ways by submitting
to what's asked of you or surrendering
to whatever emerges inside of you,
around
you. And and will you share just a
little bit about that
(16:48):
act of surrender? I know it's not easy,
but there's something that you are deeply committed
to in surrendering to the experience
of it all.
I'm deeply committed to it because I've had
to
surrender or maybe submit
by force
more times than I can count.
(17:08):
And each time
within that
plot twist,
whether that's
my first diagnosis
with leukemia at 22, or, or the two
relapses I've had since, or, you know, other
moments
in my life where it feels like the
ceiling has caved in,
when I'm able
to
(17:29):
accept
that
without trying to fight it, without trying
to
numb
myself to it,
without trying to avoid it. When I'm able
to behold it
as a subject,
it's
ended up being
one of
(17:49):
the most creatively
generative experiences of my life.
I don't think
I would have started writing had I not
spent
an entire
year
at 22
shuttling between my childhood bedroom and the hospital
fighting for my life.
(18:09):
I would have gone to law school or
done whatever it was I thought I should
do
before
being forced to
have the burden of choice removed from me,
and and having the experience of being stripped
down to my most
laid bare self,
and then surrendering to that,
(18:30):
and
getting curious
about
what that process was like, and what was
possible within its limitations.
I've done that again and again in my
life. And each time
it's yielded something
utterly unexpected,
and personally,
(18:51):
my own small way, extraordinary.
And that's not to
say
that those
experiences
weren't profoundly traumatic. They were. Both are true.
They were the worst experiences
of my life.
And the experience of being sick itself is
not creatively generative.
(19:12):
But the response
to the experience
of being sick is where I found
my
sense of agency
and power
and
a kind of wonder
that surprised me again and again.
Oh, wow.
I'm thinking about
(19:33):
the chemotherapy
that caused you at times not to be
able to see
and to not be able to write. And
instead,
you take up painting
in the hospital room
not having any experience painting,
and yet you pivot from that place and
(19:53):
paint some beautiful
work eventually.
What a beautiful
experience to,
confront something
and resolve it as art. It really does
feel like a kind of alchemy. It feels
like a kind of magic to me.
I'm going to
paraphrase
Terry Tempest Williams' line, but
(20:15):
it's about arranging
the broken pieces
as a sort of mosaic. In my work,
that's maybe
our collective
forever work,
what we do
when things fall apart.
For me,
reconceiving of, of survival as a creative act
of taking
(20:37):
those moments
where things fall apart and
refastening
them
into
something
has been my way of
finding my way through.
Yeah. You brought up Terry Tempest Williams, and,
you know, one of the things about the
book of alchemy is
(20:57):
your
deep commitment to elevating the voices of others,
your
collaboration,
your desire to be a part of a
team.
I'm just inspired by the way in which
sharing who you are is
something that you create in community.
You're so good at that. I imagine it's
(21:18):
important to you. The truth is I don't
think I had much of a community until
I got sick.
In my younger years,
I was a little bit of a hell
raiser until I got sick. And, you know,
that year leading up to my diagnosis at
22,
I was doing things I wasn't proud of.
(21:38):
I was
spending time
with people
who emboldened
parts of myself
that weren't
the most
elevated
aspects of who I knew
I could be. And so when I got
sick at 22,
to my great surprise,
(22:01):
and I have to kind of laugh now,
you know, the people
that
I
was going to keg parties with or doing
lines with were not the people sitting by
my bedside as my hair fell out in
clumps.
And I felt really
hurt and angry and betrayed
by that,
Even though I look back now and think
to myself,
(22:22):
those relationships
never had the depth to sustain
much of anything, let alone
something as devastating
as the illness
that I was confronted with.
And once I got over that and started
to
bring the lens back onto myself, and and
to think about
(22:43):
the kind of friendships I had cultivated,
and the depth of community I wanted to
cultivate,
and to focus on the people who had
shown up,
often
completely unexpectedly.
Friends from childhood, old classmates,
fellow patients in the cancer unit.
I began to make a study
(23:05):
out of community
and
to
believe
that
it is
essential
to
our well-being.
The depth and strength of our relationships
correlates
directly
to
the depth and
(23:27):
strength of our quality of life.
And so
I really
made a conscious
shift in
wanting not just to have better friends, but
to figure out how to be a better
friend. Because as much of a cliche as
it might be to say that something like
cancer takes a village, it really does. And
(23:48):
I think, you know, there are so many
things in our life that require
a village, but you have to build the
village long before you need it. You have
to invest in that
village
with generosity
and
kindness
and consistency
without expectation
of anything in return.
(24:09):
Your animals
are important to you. I you had a
great post with one of your dogs just
sort of wanting to connect with your face.
It's such a cute video.
And you've just written about the dogs you've
had over the years
on We Can Do Hard Things. You've talked
about your capacity to be a dog broker,
helping people get their own dogs. And I'm
(24:32):
thinking about Richard Rohr's work around soul
and how
dogs have a soul. And
there's nothing like the affirmative,
unconditional
love
that a pet, a dog can provide.
Can you share a little bit about these
small creatures that inhabit your life that are
(24:54):
so so wonderful?
I think I'm drawn to animals for exactly
the reason you just said. It's such an
astute observation, and I really believe
animals and and dogs in particular
are amongst some of our, our greatest living
teachers,
not just in a kind of purity of
(25:14):
love
that as
humans, we so often
complicate,
but also
about our finitude.
Most of us
outlive our dogs. We have longer lifespans
than our dogs, and that can feel like
reason enough to never have a dog.
My husband, John, said when he was six
(25:34):
years old, they had a family German Shepherd,
and he noted to himself that he was
going to outlive the dog and decided not
to get too close to it because it
was gonna be too painful, which is such
a profound observation
for a six year old.
Three years ago, when I relapsed
and I was going through a second bone
marrow transplant while I was in the hospital,
(25:55):
my
beloved dog, who I'd had from the time
I was 22 years old, who I'd grown
up with, who was in the care of
our dear friend Elizabeth Gilbert. And she called
me one day while I was in the
hospital. I was at my very sickest.
I had
two blood infections
and was
in sepsis,
and I had zero white blood cells because
(26:18):
I just had this
bone marrow transplant, and it was not in
grafting. So I was as close to death
as I've ever been.
And she called me, and I did not
pick up the phone because I was as
close to death as I've ever been. And
she texted me a few minutes later and
said, I really need you to call me.
And what she had to tell me was
that my dog Oscar
(26:40):
was dying, that he had cancer
and that he needed to be put down
in the next hour,
which, you know,
I think the only thing
worse
than someone else's dog dying
on your watch as someone else's dog dying
while they're in the hospital,
possibly dying.
(27:00):
And it was
devastating.
Liz was devastated.
We had a sort of
virtual
vigil
over Zoom.
Everybody was weeping.
And
Oscar,
who had been
a fellow Hellraiser
(27:21):
his entire life. He never met a person
he didn't bite. He was like this tiny
little rapscallion
terrier, and those last moments of his life
surrendered.
He was
like a puppy again. He was tender. He
was sweet.
He allowed himself to be held and cuddled
in ways he never would have.
(27:43):
After that happened,
I was so
inconsolable
that I felt as,
you know, near to a breaking point as
I've ever been. And I had this sudden
vision
of
these four
birds lifting
a wooden marionette.
And I got out my watercolor, and I
(28:05):
started to paint. And as I painted,
almost like a, a chant in my head,
were the words,
I surrender
to the flow.
And I rendered this painting
in like one fast furious breath. And as
I painted
the strings connected
(28:26):
the wooden marionette to the birds, I felt
my
spine begin to lift.
I felt that sense of surrender.
And the next morning I woke up
and the infections
began clearing,
and
my bone marrow
began engrafting.
(28:46):
And in my sort
of magical
thinking about this whole episode,
I felt like
perhaps
Oscar, my beloved little terrier,
had died as a kind of sacrifice
so that I wouldn't have to.
But more than that,
what he taught me
(29:06):
was
about,
sure, our,
our finitude,
the fact
that the only certainties in our life is
that we are born and we will die.
But more than that, our capacity
for ever expanding love. Because after all that,
I was like, I'm never gonna get a
dog again.
(29:27):
That was so painful. I never wanna go
through something like that again.
And I sat with that for a while
and and remembered Oscar in in those final
moments of surrender and total trust and love.
And
decided
to try to embody
those qualities
(29:48):
in my own way. And now I have
three dogs in the span of three years.
I just turned 37, and afterwards, my husband
and my friend said, what did you wish
for? And I said,
a fourth dog. And they were like, no.
That's too many dogs. But here I am,
essentially
running
an unofficial
animal sanctuary out of my home.
(30:11):
And that animal broke her to other people
having this beautiful connection to these dogs.
I promised Liz after this whole
experience
that I was gonna find her a dog.
And she said, I want it to look
exactly like Oscar,
but without the biting. And so it took
me a year, but I found her that
perfect dog and she was my first.
(30:31):
And my
side hustle is canine matchmaker.
So in The Book of Alchemy, you talk
about your writing
space
or maybe it was in your isolation journal,
something you posted. But are you there now?
Is that where you are up in your
your valley upstate
somewhere?
(30:51):
I'm in the Delaware River Valley. We just
moved
nearby to a farm, but it's a similar
setup. It's slightly nicer than my last setup,
which was a literal potting shed
that had been converted
into a kind of writing shed that had
no heat other than a wood stove, which
sounds far more romantic than it is, I
(31:13):
can assure you,
when you're freezing your ass off on a
January
day and and waiting for the the wood
stove to heat up.
But, yeah, I have a little I'm in
it right now as I'm talking to you.
It's a tiny
one room
cottage
on our farm, and
it's such a privilege. I never had
(31:33):
a room of my own to work in
for most of my 20s
and early 30s, and I was always offering
to pet sit or house sit so that
I could
go away and be away with my thoughts.
And so I'm I feel really lucky and
and grateful
to have this little room filled with books
(31:54):
and the things that inspire me. So like,
how how's your health? How are you feeling?
So I learned almost exactly a year ago
that the leukemia was back a third time.
I
was
obviously
devastated by this news. I had
known it was a likelihood, but had hoped
(32:18):
for longer and,
you know, my prognosis is not good.
When I first got this news,
I just couldn't get out of bed for
a month. I just felt like I don't
have it in me
to do what I've always done and to
pull myself together and
try to embrace the uncertainty and, and figure
(32:40):
out
how to keep making plans and to keep
moving forward. I'm tired. I don't want to
do this. I don't want to go to
chemo anymore. I don't
want to do the bone marrow biopsies. I
don't wanna answer
the concerned texts and phone calls from well
meaning friends. I'm just over it.
And I spent about a month like that.
(33:02):
And it have it in me to write
my weekly newsletter. I just went totally dark,
no explanation. I just stopped participating, and I
needed that.
And I'm grateful
I allowed myself
that.
And I think, you know,
there's so much
self imposed pressure, but also cultural pressure.
(33:23):
We put ourselves
to be someone who suffers well.
And I think it's especially true for whatever
reason with cancer. You know, there's this pressure
to find the silver lining, or to, you
know, people say things like God doesn't give
you more than you can handle, which always
particularly
(33:43):
enraged me, because sometimes it sure feels like
you've been given more than you can handle.
And then
this notion of of living every day as
if it's your last, and
something that my oncologist
said to me over and over again, because
I kept telling him, I don't know how
to do this. I don't know
how to make plans for three months from
(34:06):
now or let alone three years from now
when I don't know that I'm going to
exist in the future.
And wouldn't it be easier to just stay
in bed
and not have
my heart broken
when those plans
or commitments can't come to pass, then
then
to
dream
and
(34:27):
to
open my heart
to new experiences and a new love, which
is to say
new loss.
And he said, you have to live every
day as if it's your last. And every
time he said it, like, I, I knew
what he meant, and I was just filled
with anxiety.
And this, again, this sense of pressure to
(34:47):
make every family dinner as meaningful as possible,
and then
to be deeply
disappointed in myself when I picked a stupid
fight with my mom or whatever. Because it
wasn't just a stupid fight with my mom.
It was a
important dinner that was ruined by that stupid
fight, and it was just not working for
me. And so
(35:08):
at some point,
I shifted to a different mindset
that felt gentler to me and,
and, and more doable, which was this idea
of living
every day as if it were my first.
And
that really clicked for me. It's really worked
for me.
This notion
(35:28):
of waking up
with a sense of curiosity
and wonder and play
that a little kid might. And when I
do that, I'm not scrambling
to cross off big bucket list items. I'm
admiring
a flower blooming in my garden. I'm watching
(35:49):
a caterpillar
scuttling across a rock. I'm allowing myself
to slow down
and to be present
with whatever it is that's happening.
And since doing that,
it's shifted me
out of
an all consuming
fear of the uncertainty
(36:10):
ahead
into a place
where
I'm able
to
make room for and, and marvel at
the mystery
of the unknown.
When I'm doing that,
I feel alive.
When I'm doing that,
(36:31):
I'm making
decisions
with
alive me
in mind and not
some future
dead version of me.
In the process, at the beginning of the
week in particular, it's a deep meditation
on death,
death from a couple different ways of looking
(36:52):
at it. And
some students are a little bewildered, like, why
this?
And then through the experiences
of it, the different experiences associated with looking
directly at death, directly
at death,
they intuitively,
cellularly get it that it has nothing to
do with death and everything to do with
(37:12):
being alive.
That's so powerful.
You know, when I said you live a
life that is what the process is all
about, this is part of what
I'm talking about, your capacity,
your honesty.
You're honest,
Brutally,
(37:32):
lovingly
honest
about what's happening inside you, what's happening around
you, what you see in the world.
And, there's a courage to that
that,
is
electrifying
and your ability to do what you're just
talking about now, to look at death
(37:54):
and to know that the prognosis
is not good. And the irony
is the prognosis is not good for all
of us.
I'm not special in my relationship to mortality.
I just think about it maybe more than
the average person does,
and I have to remember that too. And
when I remember that, it feels like a
kind of gift
(38:15):
to be in such close conversation
with my mortality.
When I'm thinking about my month and what's
important to me,
and I'm holding
mortality
and the balance,
all the things that might
consume me suddenly
quickly sort themselves
in a priority list.
(38:37):
That feels pretty clear.
And so that's a privilege. It's a privilege,
in a way,
to not think of
my time or our time here as infinite,
to be mindful about it, about who you
spend it with and and what you wanna
do with it.
And I'm grateful that I don't get to
(38:58):
forget.
I just sent you a quote from
Liz
about you and Between Two Kingdoms.
There's something about
receiving,
allowing,
letting love in
that
feels
even more
challenging at times. And when I've read this
(39:19):
quote from Liz about you,
it's like, wow.
She sees you. She
loves you.
Would you be willing to read it?
Oh my goodness. You're asking me to do
something that makes me want to hide under
a pillow fort, but I will do it.
Okay.
I want to describe Souleikha Jawad with words
(39:42):
like courageous,
resilient,
vulnerable, and inspiring.
But I understand that for cancer survivors, these
words can feel like empty cliches.
The problem is, these words are true.
Soleika Djawad is courageous, resilient,
vulnerable, and inspiring.
And her memoir about her cancer journey is
(40:04):
a work of breathtaking creativity
and heart stopping humanity.
Jawad's story goes where you never expect it
to go,
not only into the depths of her own
pain and lost years,
but into the spirits of countless strangers,
sick and well, she meets along the highway
of her own life and illuminates with rare
(40:25):
generosity
and grace.
This is a deeply moving and passionate work
of art,
quite unlike anything I've ever read.
I will remember these stories for years to
come because Soleika Joad has imprinted them on
my heart.
What's that like to read her description of
you?
To your point,
(40:46):
when we talk about
gifts, I think we think about them in
in the context of of being the giver
of the gifts.
And what occurs to me
as I read them is how hard it
is
to accept a gift.
It's a gift to be someone who can
accept gifts and really, yeah, receive them
(41:08):
with their full
breadth of, of intention.
And so as uncomfortable
as that made me,
I did feel her love and
it made me feel loved. And
I think had I not read them aloud,
I would have quickly
read those words with one eye closed, you
know, out of the corner of my eye,
(41:29):
and not
receive them in in the way that she
wrote them and and would have wanted me
to receive them.
Yeah.
The receiving of the gift is the gift
back to the giver,
and so receiving them as she would have
wanted you to receive them. I love that.
What's the rest of the day that we
(41:49):
have in store for you?
Oh, I have a great week in store
for myself.
I was supposed to be
traveling
on vacation, and I decided not to do
that and to stay home with my dogs.
And instead, I've put
long blocks on my calendar all day
(42:09):
where it says
SJ
and meetings,
but they're fictitious meetings.
They don't really exist.
They're meetings with myself,
and
I am starting to dream about my next
book.
And I have no expectation
for what will happen in these quid and
(42:30):
quid meetings. They may just be me lying
on the couch with my dogs,
reading my favorite books and and doodling and
in a notebook. It doesn't matter. But I'm
trying
to schedule on schedule time
for
new things to emerge. And so I'm very
excited for this week.
The beauty of embracing the unknown,
(42:52):
so much of your gift is saying yes
to the unknown
even though it's unknown.
And I guess actively trying to cultivate it,
to make space for it.
And there's, I guess, a kind of irony
to scheduling unscheduled time, that sometimes
that's what you gotta do.
Yeah. There's something about your capacity to
(43:13):
schedule, unscheduled time,
embrace death in service of life,
step away from binary. But, you know, the
familiar
binary world that we so wanna lean on
is a fallacy. It doesn't exist. We've gotta
lean into the liminal space
(43:33):
of the unknown, the emergence of what we
do not yet know.
I think that's the work to hold the
paradoxes,
to hold
the brutal
realities of life and
the beautiful
ones
and and the same
open palm.
(43:53):
Suleikha, thank you for this time. I'm I'm
so grateful that our grads get a chance
to
hear you and
connect with you. And
we'll put so much of what we talked
about in our show notes so that
even some of the artwork and the isolation
journals and and the books and maybe some
(44:14):
doggy photos as well too on the page.
Please.
Thank you so much, Drew. What a joy
and, and thank you to everyone who's listening.
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
(44:36):
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Razi Ingrassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves,
in each other and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hanppaninstitute.org.
I think that's the work to hold the
paradoxes,
to hold
the brutal realities of life and
the beautiful
ones
and and the same
open palm.
Welcome to Love's Everyday Radius, a podcast brought
to you by the Hoffman Institute. I'm Drew
Horning, host of this episode.
(00:23):
And today, we're speaking with a guest who
is not a graduate of the Hoffman process,
but
whose life's work is harmonious with the work,
the ethos of the process.
Please keep in mind that the views and
ideas expressed don't necessarily
represent the views of the Institute. However,
we do think you'll find this conversation interesting,
(00:56):
Hey, everybody. Welcome.
Suleikha Jawad is with us. Did I pronounce
the last name right? You pronounced it perfectly.
Hi, everyone.
I love that your parents had different accents.
So one sounded like Suleikha and the other
sounded like Suleikha.
That's right. And sometimes it sounds like Zuleija
and Sulaika.
(01:16):
That's the joy and confusion of growing up
in an interfaith,
interracial household.
Yeah. So right before we push record, you
acknowledge that
you haven't done the process
and, you don't know anything about it and
hope that's okay. And I said, wow, Suleikha.
I think the way in which you live
(01:36):
your life is deeply reflective
of what the process is.
And so we'll talk a little bit about
that, make that connection between so many things.
Really excited for this conversation. Thanks for taking
the time to join us.
I'm so excited to get to be here
with you. And despite
knowing nothing about the process,
(01:59):
Hoffman has very much been on my mind
these last couple of months, because several people
who are very close to me and in
my orbit
have gone to Hoffman.
And so I've been hearing little bits and
pieces, and and I'm very intrigued and and
really excited to learn more. And I'm grateful
(02:19):
to my sister who turned me on to
your column years ago.
You've written
best selling books,
Between Two Kingdoms,
New York Times best selling books. And we're
here in part because,
Matt Heinemann
is a grad and connected us together, and
he was the director
of American Symphony
(02:40):
and this incredible
documentary that cataloged
a powerful time
where you were going through
your treatment,
and John, your husband, was receiving accolades
and
Grammys
and conducting his American Symphony.
It's a beautiful documentary for those of you
(03:02):
that haven't seen it.
That project was such an interesting one.
John and I, we've known each other since
we were teenagers. We met at Bandcamp.
We're really at this,
what felt like a real peak in our
lives.
I was 33 at the time. John was
going to be 34, 35.
Things were really coming together for us. Our
(03:23):
careers
were going
better than we possibly could have dreamed of.
John
was the band leader on The Late Show.
I had just come out with this book,
and I was touring it all around and
writing
a weekly newsletter on Substack, long before Substack
was a sort of household name.
(03:44):
And we were as in love as we'd
ever been and really dreaming about the future.
All of that
came
crashing down in the moment that I learned
that the leukemia I'd first been diagnosed with
at 22
was back.
And so what happened next
was, yes, a kind of
(04:06):
cataloging
of those months and of John's attempt to,
in spite of everything we were going through,
to put together
a literal symphony,
a reimagination
of what the American Symphony might look like
in the twenty first century.
But, personally, we were really
living through the movements
of the symphony of life.
(04:28):
I think about words.
What does it mean to
use words and string words together
and use metaphor
and create sentences and paragraphs and
and share them
verbally
and on the page?
Sulayka, you have this beautiful ability to
(04:48):
string sentences together that illustrate
something
so powerful. Has that always been a part
of who you are? Whether it's writing or
speaking,
it seems like words are your friend.
I think I've always been obsessed with words
and language,
(05:09):
not because they were my friend,
but because they were a real source of
struggle for me early on. My dad is
from Tunisia.
My mom is from the French part of
Switzerland.
We moved maybe a dozen times on three
different continents by the time I was 10
years old.
And so I grew up
(05:29):
as what some people describe as a third
culture kid. I have three passports, but felt
like I belonged and fit in nowhere.
I spoke three languages
by the time I was six years old,
but couldn't spell
or string together a grammatical sentence in any.
And I often felt caught
(05:51):
between kingdoms and this sort of liminal space
where I really struggled to figure out who
I was and, and how
to conjure
a sense of identity
that I could translate.
I think like a lot of kids who
grew up this way, I was an expert
(06:12):
chameleon. I could shape shift and
scan a cafeteria
at a school and immediately figure out
who to avoid and who to align myself
with, and, you know, as a form of
survival.
But what was harder than adapting was finding
that through line of self
and finding
(06:32):
the language
to
express
who it is that I was to myself.
And so, you know, from
the time I could hold a pen, I
started keeping journals.
And I remember
keeping journals, right, right down lists of words
and colloquialisms
that I heard at school, and then I
(06:53):
try to incorporate them in conversation as much
as possible until they sounded somewhat organic and
effortless. And so I think I was a
student
of language and of words
from a very early age
because they were a real source of strife.
And
I was determined
(07:14):
to
figure out how to translate
myself
and
to find a sense of belonging in the
world around me.
I'm thinking
about Tunisiana.
Can you I mean, there's a a just
a fresh example
of using words and creating words that reflect
(07:34):
the important space you're in. Share a little
bit about that. So, you know, my husband,
John, is from New Orleans.
Tunisia is my fatherland.
When we moved into our first home together,
I
approached
this home as if it was
the most important creative project I'd ever undertaken.
(07:57):
And I was so excited, especially having felt
such a sense of upheaval as a kid
to have one physical
address to call my own. I never had
that before, and it felt like such a
novelty
and a real
kind of anchor that I'd yearned for for
so long.
And so as I was going about
(08:19):
dreaming
up this house, I really wanted it to
feel not just like a house, but a
home
and a manifestation
of
our relationship
and our
separate identities,
and hopefully,
the braid of those identities and that kind
of shared Francophone
(08:41):
African
lineage that we both have, and two, a
third relationship,
a kind of
manifestation
of us.
And so I came up with the word,
Tunisia, Tunisia,
Louisiana,
to describe that whole approach.
Beautiful. I mentioned my sister connected me to
your work, and she said, Sulayka is going
(09:02):
on a book tour. I got you tickets.
So
I'm sitting in LA
in the auditorium,
and you are reading, and John is playing,
and then you pull out your bass, your
stand up bass, and you start
playing that. How was that
tour for you and John
to have this shared experience of bringing your
(09:24):
creativity to the world?
I had no idea you were there. It
was
extraordinary,
and it was terrifying for me. You know,
there's a reason I picked a profession
where I get to spend
vast amounts of time alone with books and
my laptop. And so I've always been someone
who's far more comfortable
(09:44):
behind the scenes
than
in front of the camera or on stage.
And even, you know, in my early years
where I did play the bass, I, I
was a classical double bass player, but I
performed in the context of an orchestra,
which was an organism
where you're maybe a crucial part of it,
but you're also a tiny, tiny part of
(10:05):
the larger thing. And it's not you by
yourself being out there.
But when I wrote my most recent book,
The Book of Alchemy,
which is really
an exploration
of
this practice
of journaling that has
been
the
chrysalis
for all of my most important transformations,
(10:28):
and
has really saved my life more times than
once,
and more generally an exploration
of the value of cultivating a creative practice
in our life, whether you think of yourself
as creative
or not. I started
to think about
how, not just to talk about it, but
to enact it, and to walk the walk.
(10:50):
And so John,
who, you know, this book is dedicated to
him and and to me has always been
such an embodiment
of the notion of creative alchemy,
of transforming
something maybe considered
base or worthless, like lead, into something precious,
like gold.
(11:10):
And we started to dream about doing that
together and what that might look like. You
know, one of the things that's very important
to me in my own creative practice and
that I write about in the book is
the permission to be a bad artist,
to
cultivate a creative practice without a goal in
mind, but just to do it because it
(11:30):
pushes you
to experiment and to play and to expand
what you think of as possible. And so
as part
of that challenge, John said, well, why don't
you walk the walk? And why don't you
do something you're not very comfortable doing and
haven't done in years and dust off your
base and get on
stage? To which I was like, absolutely not.
(11:53):
There is no way I'm doing that. That
sounds way too scary. It's one thing to
be a bad artist in private. It's another
to do it on stage in front of
hundreds or or thousands of people.
So
in short, it was an alchemical
experience for me. Night after night in front
of thousands of people,
(12:13):
I
got up there
and really pushed myself to go beyond
myself
to do something I'm
incredibly
uncomfortable with and
to
do it anyway,
because it was interesting
(12:34):
and expansive
and playful.
And
what better way
to
talk about the mission of
a book than to actually embody it?
Yeah.
You know, in the process, we have what
we call a cycle of transformation,
which is sort of the overlay
(12:54):
of everything we do during the week. And
the first step is awareness,
and the second step is expression.
And there are moments where writing is a
huge part
of the week, so much so that people
are like, I've never written so much since
grade school, and their hands are cramping up.
You talk about low stakes, and I hear
(13:17):
it. If we step away from the performative
piece of it, the evaluative
piece of it, and go for the low
stakes expression,
it was one of those evenings where by
the end, everybody around you is, like, bonded,
all these strangers being a part of the
energy that you and John created on stage.
But one moment in particular was when you
(13:39):
quoted Eudora Welty by saying,
when you confront an experience, there's something beautiful
about confronting experience
and resolving it as art. Would that be
your tattoo?
Yes. Yeah. It's one of my very favorite
lines. If I had tattoos, that would be
one of them.
I have a whole constellation
(14:00):
of Post it notes above my desk, lines
from various writers and artists and thinkers
that will not tattooed on my body. I
want tattooed on my memory. And that's one
of them.
You know, we live in a culture that's
so obsessed,
not just with productivity,
but with
performance,
that I think
(14:21):
even when you attempt
to do something just for yourself, there's something
so insidious about those forces that it's hard
to quiet the chatter, the outside chatter, to
quiet the noise.
I am someone who cannot write at my
laptop because my laptop is where
I receive emails, and where I read the
(14:41):
news, and where I do my taxes, and
so many things happen
on my laptop. There's so much chatter. There's
so much outside noise
that in order to trick my brain
into a space of privacy,
of writing
without a goal in mind, or without the
fear
of an audience or some onlooker,
(15:03):
I have to do it by hand. I
have to do it in my journal.
And what that means is that everything I've
ever written, including
my first book, which was, I think the
first draft was 500 pages, I I wrote
those early drafts in my journal. Because in
order to give myself permission
to write the truth
(15:25):
without fearing
what it would mean or how it would
come off or how it might be perceived,
I had to do it in this sacred
container.
I think when you're able
to get rid of the stakes,
when you're able to quiet
the noise,
and to
(15:45):
sit down and take a breath and start
writing, for me, that's the purest line
to my intuition
that I've been able to arrive at. And
often, I start a sentence, or I start
an entry thinking
it's going one way, and I end up
being utterly
surprised by what emerges.
(16:05):
And I don't know what I'm thinking or
feeling
often until I write it down. You've mentioned,
and we talk about this at the beginning
of the week, the very first day, we
contrast
surrender
because part of what I hear you not
just use the word surrender, but that's an
actual act of surrender.
I don't know where this is gonna go.
I'm gonna surrender
(16:26):
to the experience,
surrender to whatever emerges.
And we contrast that with submission
and how you can take the process in
two different ways by submitting
to what's asked of you or surrendering
to whatever emerges inside of you,
around
you. And and will you share just a
little bit about that
(16:48):
act of surrender? I know it's not easy,
but there's something that you are deeply committed
to in surrendering to the experience
of it all.
I'm deeply committed to it because I've had
to
surrender or maybe submit
by force
more times than I can count.
(17:08):
And each time
within that
plot twist,
whether that's
my first diagnosis
with leukemia at 22, or, or the two
relapses I've had since, or, you know, other
moments
in my life where it feels like the
ceiling has caved in,
when I'm able
to
(17:29):
accept
that
without trying to fight it, without trying
to
numb
myself to it,
without trying to avoid it. When I'm able
to behold it
as a subject,
it's
ended up being
one of
(17:49):
the most creatively
generative experiences of my life.
I don't think
I would have started writing had I not
spent
an entire
year
at 22
shuttling between my childhood bedroom and the hospital
fighting for my life.
(18:09):
I would have gone to law school or
done whatever it was I thought I should
do
before
being forced to
have the burden of choice removed from me,
and and having the experience of being stripped
down to my most
laid bare self,
and then surrendering to that,
(18:30):
and
getting curious
about
what that process was like, and what was
possible within its limitations.
I've done that again and again in my
life. And each time
it's yielded something
utterly unexpected,
and personally,
(18:51):
my own small way, extraordinary.
And that's not to
say
that those
experiences
weren't profoundly traumatic. They were. Both are true.
They were the worst experiences
of my life.
And the experience of being sick itself is
not creatively generative.
(19:12):
But the response
to the experience
of being sick is where I found
my
sense of agency
and power
and
a kind of wonder
that surprised me again and again.
Oh, wow.
I'm thinking about
(19:33):
the chemotherapy
that caused you at times not to be
able to see
and to not be able to write. And
instead,
you take up painting
in the hospital room
not having any experience painting,
and yet you pivot from that place and
(19:53):
paint some beautiful
work eventually.
What a beautiful
experience to,
confront something
and resolve it as art. It really does
feel like a kind of alchemy. It feels
like a kind of magic to me.
I'm going to
paraphrase
Terry Tempest Williams' line, but
(20:15):
it's about arranging
the broken pieces
as a sort of mosaic. In my work,
that's maybe
our collective
forever work,
what we do
when things fall apart.
For me,
reconceiving of, of survival as a creative act
of taking
(20:37):
those moments
where things fall apart and
refastening
them
into
something
has been my way of
finding my way through.
Yeah. You brought up Terry Tempest Williams, and,
you know, one of the things about the
book of alchemy is
(20:57):
your
deep commitment to elevating the voices of others,
your
collaboration,
your desire to be a part of a
team.
I'm just inspired by the way in which
sharing who you are is
something that you create in community.
You're so good at that. I imagine it's
(21:18):
important to you. The truth is I don't
think I had much of a community until
I got sick.
In my younger years,
I was a little bit of a hell
raiser until I got sick. And, you know,
that year leading up to my diagnosis at
22,
I was doing things I wasn't proud of.
(21:38):
I was
spending time
with people
who emboldened
parts of myself
that weren't
the most
elevated
aspects of who I knew
I could be. And so when I got
sick at 22,
to my great surprise,
(22:01):
and I have to kind of laugh now,
you know, the people
that
I
was going to keg parties with or doing
lines with were not the people sitting by
my bedside as my hair fell out in
clumps.
And I felt really
hurt and angry and betrayed
by that,
Even though I look back now and think
to myself,
(22:22):
those relationships
never had the depth to sustain
much of anything, let alone
something as devastating
as the illness
that I was confronted with.
And once I got over that and started
to
bring the lens back onto myself, and and
to think about
(22:43):
the kind of friendships I had cultivated,
and the depth of community I wanted to
cultivate,
and to focus on the people who had
shown up,
often
completely unexpectedly.
Friends from childhood, old classmates,
fellow patients in the cancer unit.
I began to make a study
(23:05):
out of community
and
to
believe
that
it is
essential
to
our well-being.
The depth and strength of our relationships
correlates
directly
to
the depth and
(23:27):
strength of our quality of life.
And so
I really
made a conscious
shift in
wanting not just to have better friends, but
to figure out how to be a better
friend. Because as much of a cliche as
it might be to say that something like
cancer takes a village, it really does. And
(23:48):
I think, you know, there are so many
things in our life that require
a village, but you have to build the
village long before you need it. You have
to invest in that
village
with generosity
and
kindness
and consistency
without expectation
of anything in return.
(24:09):
Your animals
are important to you. I you had a
great post with one of your dogs just
sort of wanting to connect with your face.
It's such a cute video.
And you've just written about the dogs you've
had over the years
on We Can Do Hard Things. You've talked
about your capacity to be a dog broker,
helping people get their own dogs. And I'm
(24:32):
thinking about Richard Rohr's work around soul
and how
dogs have a soul. And
there's nothing like the affirmative,
unconditional
love
that a pet, a dog can provide.
Can you share a little bit about these
small creatures that inhabit your life that are
(24:54):
so so wonderful?
I think I'm drawn to animals for exactly
the reason you just said. It's such an
astute observation, and I really believe
animals and and dogs in particular
are amongst some of our, our greatest living
teachers,
not just in a kind of purity of
(25:14):
love
that as
humans, we so often
complicate,
but also
about our finitude.
Most of us
outlive our dogs. We have longer lifespans
than our dogs, and that can feel like
reason enough to never have a dog.
My husband, John, said when he was six
(25:34):
years old, they had a family German Shepherd,
and he noted to himself that he was
going to outlive the dog and decided not
to get too close to it because it
was gonna be too painful, which is such
a profound observation
for a six year old.
Three years ago, when I relapsed
and I was going through a second bone
marrow transplant while I was in the hospital,
(25:55):
my
beloved dog, who I'd had from the time
I was 22 years old, who I'd grown
up with, who was in the care of
our dear friend Elizabeth Gilbert. And she called
me one day while I was in the
hospital. I was at my very sickest.
I had
two blood infections
and was
in sepsis,
and I had zero white blood cells because
(26:18):
I just had this
bone marrow transplant, and it was not in
grafting. So I was as close to death
as I've ever been.
And she called me, and I did not
pick up the phone because I was as
close to death as I've ever been. And
she texted me a few minutes later and
said, I really need you to call me.
And what she had to tell me was
that my dog Oscar
(26:40):
was dying, that he had cancer
and that he needed to be put down
in the next hour,
which, you know,
I think the only thing
worse
than someone else's dog dying
on your watch as someone else's dog dying
while they're in the hospital,
possibly dying.
(27:00):
And it was
devastating.
Liz was devastated.
We had a sort of
virtual
vigil
over Zoom.
Everybody was weeping.
And
Oscar,
who had been
a fellow Hellraiser
(27:21):
his entire life. He never met a person
he didn't bite. He was like this tiny
little rapscallion
terrier, and those last moments of his life
surrendered.
He was
like a puppy again. He was tender. He
was sweet.
He allowed himself to be held and cuddled
in ways he never would have.
(27:43):
After that happened,
I was so
inconsolable
that I felt as,
you know, near to a breaking point as
I've ever been. And I had this sudden
vision
of
these four
birds lifting
a wooden marionette.
And I got out my watercolor, and I
(28:05):
started to paint. And as I painted,
almost like a, a chant in my head,
were the words,
I surrender
to the flow.
And I rendered this painting
in like one fast furious breath. And as
I painted
the strings connected
(28:26):
the wooden marionette to the birds, I felt
my
spine begin to lift.
I felt that sense of surrender.
And the next morning I woke up
and the infections
began clearing,
and
my bone marrow
began engrafting.
(28:46):
And in my sort
of magical
thinking about this whole episode,
I felt like
perhaps
Oscar, my beloved little terrier,
had died as a kind of sacrifice
so that I wouldn't have to.
But more than that,
what he taught me
(29:06):
was
about,
sure, our,
our finitude,
the fact
that the only certainties in our life is
that we are born and we will die.
But more than that, our capacity
for ever expanding love. Because after all that,
I was like, I'm never gonna get a
dog again.
(29:27):
That was so painful. I never wanna go
through something like that again.
And I sat with that for a while
and and remembered Oscar in in those final
moments of surrender and total trust and love.
And
decided
to try to embody
those qualities
(29:48):
in my own way. And now I have
three dogs in the span of three years.
I just turned 37, and afterwards, my husband
and my friend said, what did you wish
for? And I said,
a fourth dog. And they were like, no.
That's too many dogs. But here I am,
essentially
running
an unofficial
animal sanctuary out of my home.
(30:11):
And that animal broke her to other people
having this beautiful connection to these dogs.
I promised Liz after this whole
experience
that I was gonna find her a dog.
And she said, I want it to look
exactly like Oscar,
but without the biting. And so it took
me a year, but I found her that
perfect dog and she was my first.
(30:31):
And my
side hustle is canine matchmaker.
So in The Book of Alchemy, you talk
about your writing
space
or maybe it was in your isolation journal,
something you posted. But are you there now?
Is that where you are up in your
your valley upstate
somewhere?
(30:51):
I'm in the Delaware River Valley. We just
moved
nearby to a farm, but it's a similar
setup. It's slightly nicer than my last setup,
which was a literal potting shed
that had been converted
into a kind of writing shed that had
no heat other than a wood stove, which
sounds far more romantic than it is, I
(31:13):
can assure you,
when you're freezing your ass off on a
January
day and and waiting for the the wood
stove to heat up.
But, yeah, I have a little I'm in
it right now as I'm talking to you.
It's a tiny
one room
cottage
on our farm, and
it's such a privilege. I never had
(31:33):
a room of my own to work in
for most of my 20s
and early 30s, and I was always offering
to pet sit or house sit so that
I could
go away and be away with my thoughts.
And so I'm I feel really lucky and
and grateful
to have this little room filled with books
(31:54):
and the things that inspire me. So like,
how how's your health? How are you feeling?
So I learned almost exactly a year ago
that the leukemia was back a third time.
I
was
obviously
devastated by this news. I had
known it was a likelihood, but had hoped
(32:18):
for longer and,
you know, my prognosis is not good.
When I first got this news,
I just couldn't get out of bed for
a month. I just felt like I don't
have it in me
to do what I've always done and to
pull myself together and
try to embrace the uncertainty and, and figure
(32:40):
out
how to keep making plans and to keep
moving forward. I'm tired. I don't want to
do this. I don't want to go to
chemo anymore. I don't
want to do the bone marrow biopsies. I
don't wanna answer
the concerned texts and phone calls from well
meaning friends. I'm just over it.
And I spent about a month like that.
(33:02):
And it have it in me to write
my weekly newsletter. I just went totally dark,
no explanation. I just stopped participating, and I
needed that.
And I'm grateful
I allowed myself
that.
And I think, you know,
there's so much
self imposed pressure, but also cultural pressure.
(33:23):
We put ourselves
to be someone who suffers well.
And I think it's especially true for whatever
reason with cancer. You know, there's this pressure
to find the silver lining, or to, you
know, people say things like God doesn't give
you more than you can handle, which always
particularly
(33:43):
enraged me, because sometimes it sure feels like
you've been given more than you can handle.
And then
this notion of of living every day as
if it's your last, and
something that my oncologist
said to me over and over again, because
I kept telling him, I don't know how
to do this. I don't know
how to make plans for three months from
(34:06):
now or let alone three years from now
when I don't know that I'm going to
exist in the future.
And wouldn't it be easier to just stay
in bed
and not have
my heart broken
when those plans
or commitments can't come to pass, then
then
to
dream
and
(34:27):
to
open my heart
to new experiences and a new love, which
is to say
new loss.
And he said, you have to live every
day as if it's your last. And every
time he said it, like, I, I knew
what he meant, and I was just filled
with anxiety.
And this, again, this sense of pressure to
(34:47):
make every family dinner as meaningful as possible,
and then
to be deeply
disappointed in myself when I picked a stupid
fight with my mom or whatever. Because it
wasn't just a stupid fight with my mom.
It was a
important dinner that was ruined by that stupid
fight, and it was just not working for
me. And so
(35:08):
at some point,
I shifted to a different mindset
that felt gentler to me and,
and, and more doable, which was this idea
of living
every day as if it were my first.
And
that really clicked for me. It's really worked
for me.
This notion
(35:28):
of waking up
with a sense of curiosity
and wonder and play
that a little kid might. And when I
do that, I'm not scrambling
to cross off big bucket list items. I'm
admiring
a flower blooming in my garden. I'm watching
(35:49):
a caterpillar
scuttling across a rock. I'm allowing myself
to slow down
and to be present
with whatever it is that's happening.
And since doing that,
it's shifted me
out of
an all consuming
fear of the uncertainty
(36:10):
ahead
into a place
where
I'm able
to
make room for and, and marvel at
the mystery
of the unknown.
When I'm doing that,
I feel alive.
When I'm doing that,
(36:31):
I'm making
decisions
with
alive me
in mind and not
some future
dead version of me.
In the process, at the beginning of the
week in particular, it's a deep meditation
on death,
death from a couple different ways of looking
(36:52):
at it. And
some students are a little bewildered, like, why
this?
And then through the experiences
of it, the different experiences associated with looking
directly at death, directly
at death,
they intuitively,
cellularly get it that it has nothing to
do with death and everything to do with
(37:12):
being alive.
That's so powerful.
You know, when I said you live a
life that is what the process is all
about, this is part of what
I'm talking about, your capacity,
your honesty.
You're honest,
Brutally,
(37:32):
lovingly
honest
about what's happening inside you, what's happening around
you, what you see in the world.
And, there's a courage to that
that,
is
electrifying
and your ability to do what you're just
talking about now, to look at death
(37:54):
and to know that the prognosis
is not good. And the irony
is the prognosis is not good for all
of us.
I'm not special in my relationship to mortality.
I just think about it maybe more than
the average person does,
and I have to remember that too. And
when I remember that, it feels like a
kind of gift
(38:15):
to be in such close conversation
with my mortality.
When I'm thinking about my month and what's
important to me,
and I'm holding
mortality
and the balance,
all the things that might
consume me suddenly
quickly sort themselves
in a priority list.
(38:37):
That feels pretty clear.
And so that's a privilege. It's a privilege,
in a way,
to not think of
my time or our time here as infinite,
to be mindful about it, about who you
spend it with and and what you wanna
do with it.
And I'm grateful that I don't get to
(38:58):
forget.
I just sent you a quote from
Liz
about you and Between Two Kingdoms.
There's something about
receiving,
allowing,
letting love in
that
feels
even more
challenging at times. And when I've read this
(39:19):
quote from Liz about you,
it's like, wow.
She sees you. She
loves you.
Would you be willing to read it?
Oh my goodness. You're asking me to do
something that makes me want to hide under
a pillow fort, but I will do it.
Okay.
I want to describe Souleikha Jawad with words
(39:42):
like courageous,
resilient,
vulnerable, and inspiring.
But I understand that for cancer survivors, these
words can feel like empty cliches.
The problem is, these words are true.
Soleika Djawad is courageous, resilient,
vulnerable, and inspiring.
And her memoir about her cancer journey is
(40:04):
a work of breathtaking creativity
and heart stopping humanity.
Jawad's story goes where you never expect it
to go,
not only into the depths of her own
pain and lost years,
but into the spirits of countless strangers,
sick and well, she meets along the highway
of her own life and illuminates with rare
(40:25):
generosity
and grace.
This is a deeply moving and passionate work
of art,
quite unlike anything I've ever read.
I will remember these stories for years to
come because Soleika Joad has imprinted them on
my heart.
What's that like to read her description of
you?
To your point,
(40:46):
when we talk about
gifts, I think we think about them in
in the context of of being the giver
of the gifts.
And what occurs to me
as I read them is how hard it
is
to accept a gift.
It's a gift to be someone who can
accept gifts and really, yeah, receive them
(41:08):
with their full
breadth of, of intention.
And so as uncomfortable
as that made me,
I did feel her love and
it made me feel loved. And
I think had I not read them aloud,
I would have quickly
read those words with one eye closed, you
know, out of the corner of my eye,
(41:29):
and not
receive them in in the way that she
wrote them and and would have wanted me
to receive them.
Yeah.
The receiving of the gift is the gift
back to the giver,
and so receiving them as she would have
wanted you to receive them. I love that.
What's the rest of the day that we
(41:49):
have in store for you?
Oh, I have a great week in store
for myself.
I was supposed to be
traveling
on vacation, and I decided not to do
that and to stay home with my dogs.
And instead, I've put
long blocks on my calendar all day
(42:09):
where it says
SJ
and meetings,
but they're fictitious meetings.
They don't really exist.
They're meetings with myself,
and
I am starting to dream about my next
book.
And I have no expectation
for what will happen in these quid and
(42:30):
quid meetings. They may just be me lying
on the couch with my dogs,
reading my favorite books and and doodling and
in a notebook. It doesn't matter. But I'm
trying
to schedule on schedule time
for
new things to emerge. And so I'm very
excited for this week.
The beauty of embracing the unknown,
(42:52):
so much of your gift is saying yes
to the unknown
even though it's unknown.
And I guess actively trying to cultivate it,
to make space for it.
And there's, I guess, a kind of irony
to scheduling unscheduled time, that sometimes
that's what you gotta do.
Yeah. There's something about your capacity to
(43:13):
schedule, unscheduled time,
embrace death in service of life,
step away from binary. But, you know, the
familiar
binary world that we so wanna lean on
is a fallacy. It doesn't exist. We've gotta
lean into the liminal space
(43:33):
of the unknown, the emergence of what we
do not yet know.
I think that's the work to hold the
paradoxes,
to hold
the brutal
realities of life and
the beautiful
ones
and and the same
open palm.
(43:53):
Suleikha, thank you for this time. I'm I'm
so grateful that our grads get a chance
to
hear you and
connect with you. And
we'll put so much of what we talked
about in our show notes so that
even some of the artwork and the isolation
journals and and the books and maybe some
(44:14):
doggy photos as well too on the page.
Please.
Thank you so much, Drew. What a joy
and, and thank you to everyone who's listening.
Thank you for listening to our podcast. My
name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and
(44:36):
president of Hoffman Institute Foundation.
And I'm Razi Ingrassi,
Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute
Foundation.
Our mission is to provide people greater access
to the wisdom and power of love. In
themselves,
in each other and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hanppaninstitute.org.
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