Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast: Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docu-series, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows, including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Jules Blaine Davis. Jules is a TED speaker and one of Goop’s leading experts on women’s healing. She has led transformational gatherings, retreats, and a private practice of kitchen healing for over 15 years. Jules is a pioneer in her field, inviting people to awaken and rewrite the stories they’ve been carrying for far too long in their day-to-day lives. With Sounds True, Jules Blaine Davis is the author of a new book. It’s called The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “The way you do anything is the way you do everything?” I think of that phrase when speaking with Jules Blaine Davis. She’s lavish with her love, exuberant, compassionate, creative, resourceful, real, and funny, and she can make something very simple feel like a soul feast. Here’s my conversation with Jules Blaine Davis.
Jules, you have a very interesting profession. You’re a kitchen healer. You’re the first kitchen healer I’ve ever met. So to start with, what does it mean to be a kitchen healer?
Jules Blaine Davis: Oh, I just love us, and I love that question, and I just love the idea of being the first. What does it mean to be a kitchen healer? I would say that that has been the inquiry I have carried around since I started to be in the kitchen with people, nourishing people, and what is the philosophy of you form the … It’s about forming the question. So I think I’ll answer it with another question. What does it look like to nourish our deepest lives? What does it look like to cross the threshold of the doorframe from my office to the kitchen? I ask that to everyone. What does it look like to be in a cultureless culture and value, truly, deeply caring for ourselves? I could go on, but I’m giving you a little few swatches.
TS: Sure. You used this phrase, being in a cultureless culture. Can you help me understand what you mean by that?
JBD: I mean, I would say that I grew up in Southern Florida, so it’s always “check the source,” right? It’s like I grew up in America. I grew up here in a culture that I believe is really hungry. How would I know that? How would I think, “Oh, the culture’s hungry”? It’s because it doesn’t really reflect me. I don’t feel held here, a lot of different things. I didn’t know this growing up, of course. I thought that’s the way it was, whatever that was with my family of origin, my shaping. But I would say, as I grew up, as I began to look at my shaping, as I began to understand that what my life is, is the stories I carry and the decisions I make and the values I have are a bunch of stories that I carry. And inside that was like, “Oh,” and then, of course, traveling to other places and seeing, essentially, values.
It was really like, “OK. Wait, I’m a mess and always hungry for something deeper. I have a longing that can’t seem to get fed,” all these pieces of me, how I was experiencing. Even I would say in my early 20s, 30s, and then, of course, the threshold of becoming a mother, creating home, and raising people that I made with my body, I started to see, “Oh, how I want to do it is connected to what was taken.” I long for ritual. I want to be held and seen. I want to know it’s OK. I’m the perfectionist. I know I’m going super expansive and I’ll probably do that throughout our time together because I do that, but I’ll come back in.
So yes, I mean, I was saying to you earlier, it’s like describing air. I mean, it’s like how do we nourish? What is it to have values? How important are they inside a reactive… I mean, I guess the cultureless culture piece is I believe that our culture is really hungry for a culture. We’re hungry for a self. So it’s hard for a culture to feed you if it’s hungry.
When you go to other cultures, they are fed, they have values. There is an origin that has stayed a tradition. Their linens are stained. Their wood spoons are used and there’s a real connection to the land in certain places, right? I feel like, really, we’re so young here and we’ve lost that and yet we’re so hungry for—we’re so free yet we’re so hungry. So I’m not quite sure if that freedom is really the kind of freedom we’re looking for.
TS: Now, Jules, in the short time that I’ve had to get to know you, I would say you are a supernova of love as a human. You are a supernova of love and healing. Yet I want our audience to really understand how it is that you found the kitchen as the place where you wanted to express the love that’s in you and the healing powers that you have to become a professional kitchen healer. Why focus in on the kitchen as your place?
JBD: Such a great question, Tami. There’s so many different downloads coming in. I would say, first and foremost, everyone wants to be in the kitchen, definitely in my home when I had little babies, now they’re all tall and big people. When I had littles, we were always in there. Then people would come over and then they would be in there. I mean, it was very simple, actually.
Then as I had more people come in, they would start sharing story as they were sipping on a soup, as I gave them a tea. I didn’t really ask them what they wanted. I wanted to just be with them in there. I didn’t know that. It was really through experience that I came to learning what was actually really happening in the kitchen and what the kitchen could be. It could be a place where we heal.
So people, of course, were like, “Oh, are you a cook? Do you teach cooking?” It wasn’t so much that. It was an aroma that they would meet at the door. They would follow it to the kitchen. They would say, “Oh, what are you making? Oh, my grandmother used to dadada,” or, “I don’t cook. I mean, my husband gets home at 10:00 and he cooks because he loves to cook.” And I’m thinking, no one likes to cook at 10, but I hear you.
Then I started to hear the shame. I started to hear the vulnerability, the tenderness in the story. I was just roasting a squash, which literally—the recipes in the book, you just put it in there at 415. I mean, you really, and it softens. That’s what was happening in the kitchen. It was like we were these hard butternut squashes, and then we would turn on the oven, we would turn on the fire, and we would soften. And you could eat all of it, and you didn’t have to cut it before you put it in, but I didn’t know that because I wasn’t taught that.
So the piece about what is it about the kitchen, we’re in there. We’re in at a wedding. We’re in there at a funeral. We’re in there at a birth, a bris, a thing, a thing. We’re in there all the time and we’re hungry. We’re hungry to connect with each other. Again, back to the culture piece, the culture, they’re around the fire, right? They’re in the kitchen. Someone’s always got something on low. I feel like that is so connected to our lives, right? It’s like they say, “Oh, the kitchen is the heart of the home.”
I believe it is. It’s the body of the home. The home is a body and the kitchen is a body, and you can access it in such beautiful ways when you give yourself permission and freedom and ease and beauty. There are so many stories that live in the kitchen that truly guide our whole lives. They guide our values. They guide the decisions we make, who we marry, all these decisions that were made from a place of how we were nourished or not.
In the book, I share this and I speak about this a lot. How were you nourished when you woke up in the morning? How did you wake up as a kid in the morning? I asked you, Tami, what’s the first memory? Are you eight? Are you nine? What do you hear? Do you smell something? I’m asking you now.
TS: Oh, yes. Well, and in the book, when you write about waking up to the stories we carry and what was it like when we woke up, I thought of that and I thought of my own early experiences of waking up and crawling into bed with my parents as my first move. As I’m listening to you now I’m also, though, imagining being at the breakfast table where my mom insisted that I eat breakfast when I wasn’t hungry. It was like, “You’re not leaving this breakfast table till you eat.” So it became like force-feeding and how that also left an imprint on me that I’ve had to work out.
I’m curious, because you talked about how important stories are and you work with all kinds of people who start telling you their stories. Let’s say someone shares with you stories of a really traumatic early experience in the kitchen—as in they opened the refrigerator and there wasn’t anything in it, and there was no one there to help provide food for them. How do you help someone in a situation like that have a healing relationship with the kitchen and with food?
JBD: Good way to come into it from your experience. When I think about what you shared, I’m thinking forced feeding and then how that led—and that could be a book and what decisions and what—so it’s the same.
TS: Oh, no, I’m deflecting, of course. I have to. That’s my job.
JBD: I know. I know, and I’m loving you through it. I’m loving you through it in every moment. When you asked about being a kitchen healer, what I realized after the book was written is I’m a grief holder. That’s what’s happening in the kitchen is we’re rewriting the stories. We’re grieving them and then we’re rewriting them. We’re making new space and then we’re turning on the fire. I am not talking about a coq au vin right now. I am going to go out and have that at some beautiful French bistro. I am talking about cutting up some cheddar and gouda. So I just wanted to bring that back and then to hear you. Thank you so much for sharing that. I mean, immediately, I soften and go, yes, and I wonder [about] your mother’s story and the depression and when she came in and how important it was to eat because we had to survive and how we’re still living that story, and it’s 2022 coming into 2023, right?
So this is legacy work. It’s ancestral work. It’s lineage work. So somebody opens the fridge and there’s nothing in there. I can’t tell you how many stories. I can’t tell you where those stories come from. Chef families, you open the fridge, there’s nothing in there, right? Restaurant people work so hard and you come from that and then you’re hungry.
There’s so many different ways to go about how it goes, and it’s super custom-blended. I am all about a team. I love modeling, gathering a team for our healing. There’s a lot of different… It’s like the tribe. There’s a lot of different voices you might need to hear. It’s not just mine. Really, I’m just a vessel for, “Ooh, what happened when you opened the fridge,” right? Let’s write about it. Let’s move our bodies. I don’t know what we’re going to need. First, I’m probably going to make a fire so that we can burn what doesn’t serve any longer. We’re holding onto the story of not having enough, and that could be a gazillionaire. It doesn’t matter. It’s not about the thing. It’s about the deeper piece, the roots, right? It’s about the roots.
So how do I do that? It depends upon the person. It depends upon who I’m with, right? There’s not like three steps to, “Oh, when your fridge is empty, this is what we do.” I mean, I need to be with you in it, and it’s going to call on trust. It’s going to call on willingness. It’s going to feel risky. It’s vulnerable terrain. This is why I’m called a kitchen healer, because it’s vulnerable in there, in those stories, right? Usually, a lot of the times, we’re no longer in the blaming game of our parents, and dadada. We may have already done so much work on that. A lot of my clients have already been in therapy. They’re in a recovery program, whatever it is.
So this is this piece. It’s a recovery and it’s a discovery of what we can open to not fix the problem, but to be with it. So different. It’s such a different place to be with it. I am there with you being with you in it like a midwife, so that we can really birth something new, and that takes time. It takes slowing down. It may take some other teammates. It takes changing your life. It takes valuing your values, having them, learning who you are. So that is why the book and the subtitle is called The Journey to Becoming You, because that is what we can do every time we walk in the kitchen.
TS: You emphasize this is not a fixing journey, it’s a healing journey. What’s the difference?
JBD: I mean, I feel like fixing is topical, and I’m not saying that when you’ve opened your skin, not to get a Band-Aid. I’m not saying just let it… I mean, a lot of people are like, “Let it air out,” but that’s two different kinds of people. Maybe that’s not the greatest analogy, but anyway, all to say in the realms of fixing, I feel that we are a fix-it culture. We feel like, “If I just do this, if you could just do this, I would be great. If I could just fix this, then if I could just make this amount of money, if I could just pay the bill, if I could just marry the right person,” and I feel that that’s in that fixing topical realm.
Healing is a forever conversation. I know you know this, Tami. It is forever, right? When we’re in the practice of healing, there’s no graduating from healing. We’re just unfolding. We’re unraveling. We’re becoming who we are over and over again in all the different beautiful places in our lives. We’re just keeping our eyes open. We’re keeping our ears open in new ways. So many of us long for that. I meet people that say to me, “Oh, my God! The way you move your body, if I ever did that, I mean, my neighbors would think I was crazy!” And I’m like, “Great. Give them that. Give them crazy.” They want to do it too. When you heal, I heal. When we have this conversation I go, “Oh, my gosh! Me too. Oh, me too.” Something changes in us. We need each other.
TS: Tell me, Jules, what your kitchen feels like. If I were to walk in to your kitchen, what would it feel like and describe it to me.
JBD: Oh, I love you. I want to take you in there right now.
TS: I want to go right now.
JBD: My kitchen is, she’s small, she’s sweet. She is a sweetsie cola is what I would call her. She is a soft place to land. I would say that when I walk into my kitchen, I see what I need to do to be. So I’ll have a candle there with matches right there with everything else, the chaos. I’ll have some lavender oil. I’ll have a few things next to the pomegranates and the persimmon. That’s the season we’re in. I’ll have beauty everywhere. I’ll have an altar, which I do over my sink that has a few things on it, right? It’s talking about detachment with love right now. That’s in the season.
There’s a few different things. “Pray,” it says, “Breathe,” over the oven. There’s reminders everywhere. It’s a soft place for me to land. It’s a place where I go in even when I’m busy, I’m busy. The book is coming out. I’m busy, right? I’m not even hungry because there’s so much excitement and I know I need to eat something. I know I need to nourish even before our call. So I’d go in and I’m looking around and think, “OK, I’ll cut up an apple. I want to make sure I get some, but I’m not hungry,” and, “Do I have time to cook?” These are all the things. I’m modeling this even in this moment, right?
So I’d go in there and what do I have available to me? I want to see it. I don’t go searching. I don’t have apples in drawers in the fridge. I have it out. I have things on cake plates. My cake plate has a big essentially mended incision on it, a wabi-sabi feeling. It’s broken but it’s put together. I have things that remind me of what it feels like to be me. That is what my kitchen is. It’s a place to be.
TS: Interestingly, this notion of being—because in The Kitchen Healer book you write about a kitchen as a place of being and doing—and I think for a lot of us, the kitchen is all doing all the time. I’m making the food and then I’m doing the dishes. So how do we bring forth more being? You gave some examples from your kitchen, but let’s say someone’s like, “God, I have no idea how to relate to my kitchen as a place of being.”
JBD: Totally. I mean, so many of us. I mean, as I’m hearing you even ask the question, I think those are the stories we carry. We carry the stories of like, “I do it all. I do it all,” obligation, martyrdom, “Anybody going to help me? What am I doing in here? Oh, the dishes again.” I totally hear that. I mean, everyone on the call might be listening to the podcast, “Me too,” which is a good medicine.
When you create a kitchen that is a place you love to be in, it changes the feeling of being in there, right? It’s super simple. Yet how do we do that? “Oh, I hate my kitchen. It’s too small. My God! There’s stuff everywhere. Oh, my God! There’s so many people that live here.” I mean, you just get to hear yourself. So the stories we carry about the event of the meal or what perfectionism—I mean, there’s so many -isms in the realms of being in the kitchen.
How do we get into being in there? Well, start to create a space you love. Not the whole thing, just a corner. Maybe the thing you’re looking at when you’re at the sink. Maybe it’s just a wall and you want to put a piece of something you love, right? Put on the music. Light a candle, right? We do that for a party or we do that for someone else when they’re coming over. What about just doing it on a Friday at noon? Just put on the candle and don’t forget it’s on. I mean, I don’t want to be that, but putting it on, making it an environment that you want to be in and what helps you be. These are tools forever. They’re tools forever.
What makes you feel like you have a body that takes you from this, where you think this is a body above the neck to below the neck, feeling your feet at the sink, letting the water wash away how heavy you might feel. There’s so many ways to poetically live your life through the kitchen.
TS: Now, Jules, I just have to say one question about it. That person who says, “Look, this all sounds great. I’m enjoying listening to this podcast, but truth be told, I’m in a rush. I’m in a rush, I’m in a rush. I mean, come on. Really?”
JBD: I love that. You definitely are definitely not going to light the candle. Do not light the candle in a rush. You will be in the car wondering, “Did I blow the candle out? Did I turn off the stove and oven?” That’s me. I love you and I love your rush. I would say, well, I would say get in the car so that you’re not rushing anymore and go get something you love near your meeting. Permission and freedom all over the freaking place, because your rush isn’t helping you.
So what are we going to do in there? We’re going to do nothing in a rush. We want to be in there. Now, if you still have a little time but you don’t want to rush but you’re trying, then you want to get ahead of it. I can’t tell you there are so many recipes in this book that are all about getting ahead of it, using the rice cooker, the slow cooker, all the things that can work for you. I love a team. I said that already, and I mean that with our tools.
So yes, this is not like, “Then do this, and then do that.” My work is about piercing the fantasy of anything that doesn’t work and why isn’t it working, “Oh, the story I carry says it doesn’t work.” “OK, do you want to look at the story? No? OK, love you. See you soon. I want to look at the story.” “My whole perspective has been life is hard and then you die.” “OK. Well, then let’s talk and let’s connect and get the book.”
I mean, I’m not going to make you do anything. What I am inviting you to is to get closer to yourself. I want you to get closer to yourself because I can tell you when there’s permission in the life, in the path, when I give myself permission, I’m constantly reminding myself of my own work. When I give that longing permission, when I feel the freedom of just grabbing a Ball jar and putting whatever I love in it, water, lime, I love tea, all the things, and I bring it with me, it feels so good to be rushed in the car with something that’s nourishing me. So there’s so many different ways to weave being and doing inside your life in the kitchen.
TS: This notion of taking a Ball jar and putting something in it, you teach in the book this notion that we can create beauty water, and when we create beauty water, we have an active altar in the kitchen. Teach us how to make beauty water.
JBD: I love that. I love that you’re bringing that forward. So beauty water, fraudulent alert, it is literally herbs and water. It is a cut up cucumber in water. We wait to go to the spa and we’re like, “Oh, my God, this cucumber water.” I mean, what are we doing? Break the cucumbers free out of the Trader Joe insanity, that is the Earth’s demise, and cut them up and put them in some water in a Ball jar, something clear. It can be anything. It doesn’t have to be a Ball jar, even though they’re the best and they’re at the hardware store and they’re accessible financially and they’re just great on all levels.
You can also steep them and put boiling water in them with rosemary or thyme or anything you have growing, or maybe your neighbor’s the one that grows everything. They’ll be happy to give you things. It’s just beauty. It’s seeing beauty. When you see beauty, I mean, it is a medicine. Even when we call it the beauty way, it’s like it almost gets out of reach because we don’t know the beauty way unless you know the beauty way. You don’t know it. So that’s also fantasy alert.
So how do you make beauty? It’s literally as easy as rosemary, some sliced cucumber, a Ball jar. That’s all that happened. Then you open the fridge, that’s what happens to the person who’s like, “Nothing’s in my fridge.” That’s it right there. We did it. We put that in our fridge. How does that go for a week? Oh, my god, I love that. I’ve had clients, their partners come home and they’re like, “What is this?” It’s on the kitchen island and it’s like this major event. It’s just cucumber water and there’s other little Ball jars around it and the husband’s like, “This is the most amazing thing,” or the partner, and it’s just beauty water. I love it.
TS: Yes. What was amazing to me is The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You, the book, it’s filled with recipes sprinkled throughout, and all of them are really easy to execute. Often, when I see recipes, I think, “OK, now I’m going to have to get out the thing that I don’t have, and the special kind of parchment paper tied with some kind of special ribbon you can put in the oven that won’t go up in flames,” and I just think, “Forget it. It’s too hard.” In this case, every single one of the recipes actually in here I was like, “I could do that. Shoot, I could do that. I could do that.” You cut through that objection that I think so many times people have. I wonder if you can just comment on that.
JBD: I just love that so much. I’m so happy that you felt that. That was, I would say, the main intention of the book was that every single page is, “I can do that. I can do that.” I can do that is a life changer because, I mean, again, cultureless culture, here it goes again. We’re coming around, we’re coming around. “I can’t do that.” There’s so much we can’t do, right? I don’t have the twine. I don’t have the, I want to call it a lamdomin, mandolin, whatever, right? I don’t have that either.
People are like, “I’ve made yogurt. You’d be so proud of me.” I’m like, “Weird sentence slash I don’t make yogurt, not yet.” I mean, it’s coming, I’m sure, in a way that’s easy. I had two kids. I’m busy. Like you said, the rush, the thing, the thing, I want to create spaces to be. So in order to do that and to slow it way down, it’s short prep. It’s tools I love. They’re right out on the counter. They’re not in something that moves out and moves back in by itself. I mean, it’s too much. It’s like a musical, a Disney musical. I don’t have the time to ice skate through my kitchen. I just want to make it easy and then do it, and then I can be it. I can do it and I can be it.
TS: Another great example is something that you call love tea. I think you have examples of tea that’s basically cinnamon and a little sweetener, and maybe some milk or alternative milk product, and we’re good. We’re off. We’re having our love tea. I was like, “Everyone can have love tea.”
JBD: I love that. I love that. The cinnamon milky tea is towards the end of the book and that’s like this yummy evening… We hear so much. We’re just doing so much. We’re trying to digest this craziness of our day or the world. I mean, take both. Warming milk, whatever it is, oat, almond, and just adding a little cinnamon. Oh, my gosh. Then the love tea, which starts the book, is any tea. I mean, you made a love tea to start out this morning and it’s just, I mean, just calling something love tea makes it a love tea.
TS: I know, I know, I know. I definitely brought love tea to this conversation. Yes. OK. Now, I want to circle back to something. This is one of the sentences that I took out of The Kitchen Healer. You already referenced this thought that our grief can be healed in the kitchen, and you write, “You may never have thought grief and the kitchen could go together, yet they do. They were actually made for each other. Grief heals in the kitchen.” I circled that because I thought that’s so true and I want to hear more about it.
JBD: It’s so true. I love hearing you read it. It’s so true. I talk about it a lot throughout the book too. There’s a lot of places too—when we slow down, grief’s there. I mean, I don’t know about you, but when I sit down to just breathe at the altar or wherever, put my face in the sun or just go out and put my feet in the soil, or I’m in the kitchen at the kettle and I just give myself that. I don’t go to the phone and look at the thing. I just give myself the moment at the kettle. I mean, in a minute, it could be tears.
We’re grieving all the time. We are going so fast. I’ll speak from the I. It’s more powerful, and I know that it works better in relationship. I feel so much. When I slow down, I mean, it’s the last thing you want to do is slow down and feel everything. Yet if you don’t, you’re going to be stopped somehow through something. It’s just when you start to do it incrementally, it’s not like, oh, you get used to it and you know how to grieve. I wish, but no, not for me, at least. It’s more just like grieving is a part of it. It’s a part of everything, grief, right? I mean, I don’t know. I wasn’t raised with that. Grief is for a certain time, for a thing. You’re going to sit shiva and you’re going to grieve, I mean, right? It’s inside every part of my day. When I do something that didn’t maybe feel right, I’m like, oh, what was that about? Oh, my gosh. I didn’t do … OK, I’m going to make amends. OK. But in there is grief or even grief with joy. I’m so grateful. The gratitude list is always longer no matter what I’m going through. Oh, that also has grief in it. I mean, it’s just in every moment I’m slowing it down, and I invite us to do that throughout the book, just feeling my feet at the sink because I’m going so fast most days.
I came from that. I came from fire. I have a 9,000 moons in fire, suns in fire in my chart. So for me to slow it way down and just be, grief meets me that second. There it is. I have now come into a time of my life where I don’t have a choice. I have to let it go through me. My daughter will say, “Are you crying again?” We’ll be listening to a song in the car. I am. I won’t hold onto it. I’m going to let it go just like laughing. She’s like, “Oh, Mom.”
I don’t have a norm on it like, “Oh, it’s for later,” or, “It’s for death,” or, “I feel like I’m dying and being reborn all the time.” And that can happen in the kitchen, the beauty and the gratitude, and also what I’m powerless over. All of it is also woven with grief. Don’t you feel this way too, Tami?
TS: I do, and I want to keep going with this because it’s one thing to be in the kitchen to stop, to pause, whether we’re lighting a candle or sitting with our love tea and have the time to be and let our grief bubble up, but then—and this is what really struck me about the sentence that I read out loud—“Grief heals in the kitchen.” There’s something about making a meal relating directly to fresh vegetables and seasonings. There’s something about the artistic act of creating something beautiful, nourishing myself, nourishing someone else that feels really healing. That to me is part of the healing of grief through the kitchen activities.
I know you pointed to how kitchen healing work is legacy work. We’re working out at times grief that has come through us from our family lineages. I’d love to know more from your own experience, Jules, if you could share a story of healing that’s happened for you with your grief through the kitchen.
JBD: I mean, so many, so many stories, so many pieces to my grief being. I’m like, even if I wrote healed, I feel like it’s actively healing, right? It’s so nonlinear. I would say that this is not in the book. This is the second book, Tami. Get ready. Before I wrote this book, I went through a journey of the unknown and a very, very deep journey, very close to the island of mortality. I had never been that close. I was called forward. I call it an invitation to get closer to myself. Inside that journey, which had to do with my body, it had to do with surgeries and health and also stories and healing stories through why it was coming and why it was here. So it was one of those unknown times I was diagnosed was that scary, shocking, “What? Not ready to go. They don’t know anything and there’s no research for this,” and it was all these words.
Well, I can tell you that I had no hunger. I didn’t have any hunger inside that journey. I just wanted to stay alive. I think that’s all. I’m just going to pray and stay alive and I’m going to light a fire. I’m going to light a fire. I would. So I would be in the back where you’ll see it in the book where I had a fire going the whole year, cords of wood. I live in Los Angeles, as you know. So there are times in LA, you don’t want to be making a fire. Also, it’s hot for a lot of the months.
When I was by the fire, I knew I would be OK. When I was not by the fire, I would lose that sense of being OK. Now back in the kitchen, the fire, I would turn it on and cook even if I wasn’t hungry. I would just turn it on and make something as ritual because the fire is transformational. It changes thought, it changes energy, it changes cellular formation and it disperses things, right? I mean, in how much ritual and prayer do you give tobacco to the fire? You learn these rituals.
So I would say that through that time, which was deeply embedded in grief and many other feelings—vulnerability, fierce fear—I would change every time I was by the fire. I could be more grounded. I could feel that it’s going to be OK no matter what, that I’m not in control. I could just sense that in my body much more than when I was just in my head, not by an element like fire that holds the medicine of change.
TS: Now, for someone who’s listening who says, “I’m going to go into my kitchen and I’m going to light the burner or turn the oven on.” How can they relate to that in a way that’s powerful and not just like, “Yes, I get it. I mean, it’s a change agent. Great. I hope it makes my water hot so I can drink my love tea”?
JBD: A change agent, I love that so much. Goes back to even the last few questions where you were saying about cooking and the vegetables and all the things and how healing it is. It’s like when we, again, slow it way down, even in the second, just take an inhale, I’m not talking about slow it way down for 40 years while you also hold a job. I’m not talking about that. I’m saying in the moment, and you’re looking at these veggies, right? You’re thinking, oh, my God! They were grown for me. They were grown for me. That’s pretty profound. I think your food was grown for you to keep you here, to keep you here being an offering to the Earth, to learn what that even means, what is that unconditional relationship the Earth keeps giving to us?
So when it comes to turning on the fire to the stove, to the, I always say like a mug warmer, I don’t care what it is that you’re turning on, and maybe you don’t feel that connection just yet, but it’s the seed that I’m throwing out here. That’s possible. It’s just possible. So you might fake it till you make it, right. You’re going to fake it till you make it, until you feel it. If it feels like something that is for you, again, our stories are in the way to even knowing what’s for us or not. So all this is an invitation to opening up new ways of being.
TS: Now, I said, Jules, that my experience of you, and I’m meeting you here new and afresh, is that you’re this supernova of love and the kitchen is the place where you express and teach us about that love. Did that supernova of love, my language, did that become further exploded through this crisis that you went through, this health crisis, and are you through it? If so, what happened? How did that change you?
JBD: What do you mean by exploded?
TS: Did somehow it become bigger?
JBD: The love?
TS: Yes.
JBD: Yes. I’m on borrowed time, Tami, and so are all of us. So I didn’t know I was going for a PhD in my healing field and I’m a yes for this life, and I let spirit know that. I am a yes for this life. So I am here to know how to do this. How can I be more of an offering to love, how can I be that vessel. So yes, did it change me? It changed everything. It’s changed everything. The unknown and when things aren’t researched, you’re forever in that journey, which is what life is. So that heightened time of the few years that I was in that and I went through those surgeries and there was no, “Amazing. You’re done.” It didn’t come at that. I don’t even know what that is and why we even do that. Even though, of course, 95 percent of people, for other people that might go through different things like, “You’re going to be good.” That wasn’t it for me.
My surgeon, who’s the most phenomenal human being and totally came for me, said, “If you keep thinking that this is not over or you keep wondering like, ‘What’s next? What’s next?’ you’re going to create something.” This is an incredibly conservative surgeon. Totally for me with the language I needed to hear. So, oh, now I need to go on another journey with my mind and fear. Again, I’m never graduating from this program. Forever in it, right? So it keeps me awake. Do I forget? Yes. There’s a gorgeous Mark Nepo… I mean, he’s incredible on a gazillion levels, and I have a quote from him in here, “Remembering and forgetting is the dance,” right? We’re remembering and we’re forgetting. We’re remembering and forgetting.
I can tell you that when I come back from forgetting into remembering, oh, my gosh, the grief that meets me there, it’s a loving grief, but boy, it is a grief. So in the journey of that unknown, I was in remembering 24/7. There was no forgetting. It was a hypervigilance of remembering because I wanted to be here and I was ripped to living because I’m super not ready to go anywhere. So yes, maybe if I enroll forever with Pema Chödrön in a dying course, I won’t be afraid anymore, but I don’t know if that’s the case either.
TS: You said that you declared, “I’m a yes, I’m a yes for this life.” In The Kitchen Healer, you help people find their yes in some way related to the kitchen, their relationship with food. Tell me more about this whole thing of, it’s like finding what is a undeniable yes for us.
JBD: Yes. I love the word yes. Here’s the great news about yes. A no could totally be a yes. So it’s not like yes, yes, yes, and totally be a selfless person with no self. No thanks, we did it. Done. Check. We’re good on selflessness and sacrificing ourselves—are so done with that story. You done with that story too?
TS: I’m done with that story.
JBD: I think we’re freaking good, and then claiming our lives. Yes is saying yes to me, yes to me. The more I heal, the more we heal. The more you heal, the more we heal. We don’t come from a we culture. We don’t come from a we. We don’t know that. It’s much more of a way back in the tribes, right? They came from the we. They had a we relationship with the Earth. It wasn’t in an I. I really feel like yes is such a we word, especially when it comes in this landscape, in this terrain of just saying yes.
I can say the other piece and this, of course, is through recovery language, but contrary reaction when you’re like, “No, I could never do that.” Now, through the journey I went on, it’s like, “Oh, that’s what you’re going to do. OK, love ya.” I’ll hear that that is not, “OK. OK, I know my resistance. I’m going to have to do that too.” So it’s really getting to know yourself. Yes is getting to know who you are and who you’re becoming. Again, it changes and it’s an active creative practice. There’s no period at the end. It might be a dot, dot, dot. There might be a dash, you take a minute, but I feel like it’s just a run-on sentence in the best way.
TS: Now, we talked about beauty water. We talked about love tea. One of the other things you are well known for is WBL, wood board love. Oh, wood board love, tell me about that.
JBD: Oh, way to bring it in. Tami. Wood board love is the best. Again, fraudulent alert. It’s cutting up food on a wood board. Whoa. Everybody, stop what you’re doing, but really do stop what you’re doing. Go cut up a little something. A wood board is the Earth. Hi. How is it? There she is. Again, just coming towards us and loving us unconditionally all the time. Again, what we do for events, what we do when people are “coming over,” quote, unquote, right? You’re a person, you’re coming over, right? What is it about us? It’s like, “What do you feel like? What do you eat?”
Again, even moms with kids or when people come over, “Hey, what kind of tea do you want?” I mean, I love that. I’m coming back to wood board love in a second, but it’s totally connected to getting ahead of it. Just make what you love. When I come over to you, Tami, I want you to make what you love. I want to have what you love, and then we’ll know if I liked it or not. I don’t know. I don’t know if I like turmeric with oat milk and the thing. I think I will. I mean, I’ve had it before, but I haven’t had it from you. I’m probably going to love your love tea. I want to have you. I want to be nourished by you.
So I feel like when people come over or, again, when you’re on your own and you have Zooms throughout the day or you you’re getting started early or even—wood board love really was something I did early in the morning for my kids. I still do. Of course, they’re growing, and so wood board love and the culture of that is changing. It’s a culture. It’s creating a culture in our homes, where there’s food out and then people go, “Oh, my God. There’s food out. What about dinner? What about dadada? OK. What about dinner?” It’s a story we’re carrying, not to eat before dinner. What? You’re going to have a body later.
Here’s the thing. With the wood board love, you can put things in a smoothie later. They can be out. There’s just, again, we’re being with doing. All the things I’m sharing are totally connected to wood board love. Wood board love is like a thesis of this work. It’s cutting up food on a wood board. If you’re having people over, if you actually are or even the play date or dadada, we’re all hungry. So have something out. Great. Then cook. Then put what you’re cooking on the wood board, whatever. Permission, permission, permission. We can’t get enough of it to rewrite the stories we carry around waiting for food, “What are you going to eat? What do you like? I hope it’s good. Did I make it well?” I mean, are you joking? Who has time?
We’re so tired of our own thoughts in those ways and we just cut up some yummy stuff. Cut up an apple that you love. Cut up. When I go to people’s homes, I’m like, “Here’s an apple,” and of course, they know me. They know it’s a Japanese mitsu apple, and it’s in season this next two weeks because I love that at the market. It doesn’t have to be you. It could be from anywhere, but if you love it, you’re offering love. Here we are again with love. We’re circling around wood board love.
TS: Introduce me to one of your wood board friends that you have in your kitchen. Describe the wood board to me, what she looks like, how big she is, why you love her?
JBD: Oh, my gosh! I mean, I love that so much. I have to get up because I’m going to show you why I love her. These are in my love shop. What? Here’s my heart love board that I’m showing Tami, and—
TS: Yes, it’s about a foot and a half almost across, shaped like a heart.
JBD: Yes, and guess what?
TS: It looks like some beautiful walnut or a beautiful type of wood.
JBD: This is a walnut. They come in Maple. They’re in the love shop on my website. They come small, they come big. What are we doing on this? We’re not using it as a platter. Here’s the greatest news about wood board love. We’re cutting and we’re staining with strawberries or whatever. We’re putting the story on the board. We’re cutting it. We’re putting it on here. We’re not moving it to the pretty thing because this is the most gorgeous thing ever. So I have them all. I have heart boards. I have round boards that I love hanging. If you have a smaller kitchen, you can get things that hang. You want to get things that are not coated. You want to get wood that’s not coated.
People always say, “Do you balm it? Do you think?” No. Do I have time? No, I’m the woman rushing. I totally—no, I don’t have time. What’s so amazing about the board is it’s out, again, just like my oils or the candle. It’s out. What’s next to it? A bread knife because who has time to go get their knives freaking sharpened. Not me or at least not me 10 years ago. So I have a knife right there with apples in a bowl and whatever season we’re in, cara-cara oranges. Grab a little cheese. Grab some hot Cheetos. I don’t care. Permission everywhere.
So you put them on the board. Again, for each person, single person, kids, cousins coming over, I don’t care what it is, just a partner, I mean, it’s an offering of love on so many levels, and definitely for yourself. It’s so much easier to make something for someone else. We all know this, right? So the beauty of it is that when you can actually cut up a little something by the computer, you have your tea. Again, you’re being nourished. You’re nourishing yourself.
TS: Now, I mentioned, Jules, how one of the things I love about the book, The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You, is that the recipes and the suggestions for things that I could make in the kitchen are all things I could do. No big speed bumps, no big problems. The book is put together in a very unusual way. It’s a feast. It itself is a kitchen healer meal. Describe a little bit the elements that have gone into making this unusual feast of a book.
JBD: I love that offering and I will. The beauty of being with you, Tami, and with Sounds True is that this was a pioneering effort, the book. When people would say and, of course, my agent, she said, “Well, you need to know where it’s going to go in the bookstore,” and I’m like, “I mean, maybe five places,” or maybe we’re just pioneering a new genre called Intuitive Being, which I’m super into doing.
So I knew that the book had to be visual and I knew that there was deep content. So that’s a pioneering effort on its own. Then the other parts of it are, the reader takes a journey if the reader wants to. Again, if they’re clicking on the stove, do they want to say, “Hey, fire, show me the way,” or do they want to just click it on like they always have? It’s up to you, right?
So the beauty of this is that I invite you to get closer to yourself in all different ways, because what is so important to me about any kind of healing is that it meets you right where you are. My team of healers, who I share about in this book, they meet me right where I am. There’s nothing to fix and I’m right on time. I wanted this book to exude that.
So there’s story, there’s the origin story. There’s pictures of my home so you can go, “Oh, I can do that,” like Tami was sharing. There’s quotes. Then there’s my poetry from many, many, many years ago where I was like, “Hey, I’m here. Just wanted to let you know, inside, early motherhood dying, not knowing what’s happening. Witness me. Somebody help.” So some of those poems are in here, and there’s recipes like we were just sharing. Then there’s something called heart work, which, when you work with me one-on-one or even on retreat, there’s heart work, there’s accountability. That is such an integral part of transformation, of change, is that accountability piece.
So there’s a lot of hard work throughout the book, which I love so much. I’m asking everybody from the get go, stain this book, Sharpie it up, pen it up, put your own experience, highlight it like Tami was saying, “I circled that.” Circle things. It’s a legacy piece just like the board. We’re not going to be here forever.
That’s great news, by the way, because this is going to go to somebody else that you love or your descendant, your daughter, your son, a friend, a neighbor, whatever it is. So give it everything of you. One of the other parts of the book, another section is the Hello Body, because you have one, just in case you forgot. So I like to do that throughout the book, “Hey, hello, Body. Let’s move this. Let’s move that.”
Then of course, the middle of the book, you have a body, the middle way, which is a different section than any of the other ones. Doesn’t have any recipes, I think. There’s a lot of quotes, and then there’s so much beautiful heart work in there called Move You. I have to say, Tami, that was a little bit, I mean, it wasn’t risky, but what I share in it while I’m writing it is to write about moving—already feels like we’re separated from the body.
If you come into my home and I have the music on and I’m like, “We’re just going to stretch and move right now while we go make a quinoa on the rice cooker,” you might be into it. I mean, now you will be because I know you’re slow to love, but maybe we’re there now. So the point is that writing about that can be, I mean, it’s like how you were speaking to me like, “What if there’s a listener saying dadada dadada?” Well, yay, here’s an opportunity. You may not want to do it, but then what if you do it? We won’t know unless you do it, and then you’ll tell us what happened. So yay for offerings. So the book has so many different—and the poetry and then poetry from other people who I love. So yes, it’s got a lot of different terrain.
TS: There’s one thing you didn’t mention that I particularly like about The Kitchen Healer, which is the end of each section has a cake recipe you can make. Let’s bake a cake.
JBD: I totally didn’t say that. I mean, you’ve got to leave a little mystery, but the cake—
TS: Well, we won’t tell them what kinds of cake, except I’m still trying to decide which one I’m going to make tomorrow, because so many of them were good suggestions. But I probably will go in the C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E direction because that’s just the kind of person I am. Yes.
JBD: I mean, it’s so good. Again, like you were saying, these are cakes that were—I would be able to make them within an hour because my profession hasn’t been like a kitchen blogger. I mean, I love that idea, but not all of us are doing that. So I love how accessible and doable it is because that’s what I feel we need.
TS: To end, Jules, you write, “Self-care is we care.” Go ahead and explain that. How is self-care, taking out the wood board for myself to cut the apple up and beautifully display it for myself, how is that we care?
JBD: I mean, if you’re not fed, we’re screwed. I don’t know. I mean, Tami, you run Sounds True. I need you to be nourished. OK.
TS: No, no. You don’t want me hangry. You don’t.
JBD: I really don’t. So I mean, it’s a really simple answer. It’s like I grew up in a home of origin that was hungry, who was looking at me and reflecting me or who wasn’t was hungry. I mean, yay for becoming a kitchen healer, and lots of pain in there too and grief. Yay. Go team. So the piece about us caring for ourselves, I mean, it’s a modeling. We have to feed ourselves in order for others to know how to feed themselves.
Of course, motherhood is that journey. I mean, you hear it, you hear it, you hear it, but until you start to actually do it and then become it, I mean, they’re experiential. I will never be able to find the words of what it will feel like for you. You have to do that part. So what I’m saying is, “Hey, I’ve been doing this a bit forever, and I would love for you to experience this because what I found is this.”
When I make a wood board for myself or I make whatever I did before I came on, a little soft scrambled egg or, or, or to get onto here—even what I’m calling in or what I’m asking spirit to be with me and to even share in the podcast is going to be different than if I didn’t or if I hadn’t eaten, right? If I came here hungry, then I’m really not being true. Well, I’m definitely not being true to what I’m even speaking about, but also, it literally changes everything. We’re so separated from our cells being fed with nutritious things we love into, “What should I be doing? What could fix this?” We’re so separated from it.
So my ask is that as you care for you, you care for me, and I’ll say the last bit from that unknown journey that I’m still on in the realms of the beautiful medicine that came from it, not inside the center of it, it was like if people would say to me, “What can I bring you? What do you need?” and I literally would say to them, “I need you to heal. I need you to yell. I don’t need a casserole.”
I could also use probably some new underwear. When people come for a dinner, they’re like, “What can I bring?” And I’m like, “Bring what you love and a T-shirt you love.” You know what I mean? I’m not at the store trying things on, but I got the food down. So really, it’s like asking for what we want. How do we know who we are? How do we become who we are? We become who we are when we’re nourished.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Jules Blaine Davis. She’s the kitchen healer and she’s the author of a new book called The Kitchen Healer: The Journey to Becoming You, a beautiful book, a beautiful resource. The book itself is a living altar. You can offer yourself to it and turn to so many different pages and options. I just turned to oatmeal in the rice cooker as I was breezing through the book right here and carrot ginger soup, quinoa in the rice cooker. Altars everywhere. Jules, thank you. Thank you so much for you. Thank you.
JBD: Thank you, Tami. This was amazing.
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