Finding Your Sparkle: Devi Jags’ Journey to Creativity & Advocacy

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

Hi, my name is Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. I am talking with Devi Jags today. Devi is a producer, writer and activist and was inspired to share the mission of sparkle on her podcast after a series of traumatic events which ultimately led to her advocacy work and raising awareness about gender based violence and mental health. Of course, we talk often about how trauma shapes our lives, and what Devi is working on is right up that alley.

So thank you for joining us. We have a lot in common, and I have so many questions for you. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited. Good. I know this from our previous conversations that sparkle actually means something important to you. What does sparkle mean to you? How? How does it apply to your message? Well, I define sparkle as your happiness, passion, and self-worth, and it's really derived from the times that I was a young, competitive runner. And it was during my time in the Rocky Mountain towns where I missed my friends from that summer camp that I would go to as a teenager, and we missed this fire inside of us that the this, you know, the mountains and the air gave us.

And really it was the sport of running at the time. It was all I knew as, as this thing that got me up and out in the in the day. And I loved it. And I was really fortunate to recognize from an early age that this fire inside you was something that I could encapsulate as a first love. And so I, I really think everyone has a sparkle, and it is about finding that happiness, passion and self-worth inside you. So as a first love, so kind of learning how to love yourself. Yeah, I so I wasn't a lot of date as a teenager and I was like all in on running.

I was like, running is my boyfriend. Running loves me back. I compare even to this day, a lot, to this moment when I was 16 years old and I got to the starting line and I knew it was going to be the fastest I ever run that day for the two mile race. And it wasn't this excitement or adrenaline. It was this calm and it felt like, you know, like when a room is silent and a pen could drop. That's when my body felt like. And I learned at 16 what it was like to trust your body to do really great things. And I have never stopped holding on to that feeling of wanting that again.

Wow. So how do you account for that shift? I don't think I ever did, I don't think I ever expected that it would go away. And then when it did, those years were really, really hard. And my running career, transparently, never got back to that. Coming into college, I had suffered three stress fractures in my hip, femur and groin and to the point where I almost, if I would have ran one more race or one more long run, I would have completely broke my entire life. Femur. And I probably would have never run again. How did you know to stop at that point?

I didn't have a choice, so I actually, I grew an addiction to running, and my parents were really, really worried. Finally, I ran. One of it was a post-season race, and I practically ran it on one leg. It was one of the most mortifying experiences of my life, but I didn't like quitting. And I didn't know back then that quitting for the sake of your health was fine to do. So going into college, I was already so vulnerable. And where when you say vulnerable, was that both emotionally and physically, or are you speaking physically? Absolutely. Like emotionally, I think I was just it was everything.

It was like I was coming from a sheltered childhood home. Like for the first time, I was like drinking alcohol. I was interested in going to parties, interested in meeting boys. One of the best gifts my mom, my mom gave me was when I felt so defeated. At the end of that season, the high school coaches decided they weren't going to take me to the state championship. They said I was a liability. I was just like, mom, can we go somewhere this weekend? Can we go visit? You know, my aunt on the shore? Can we go, you know, like, do something like, can we go down to Philly and, like, see the Liberty Bell?

And she turns me, she's like, Devi, can you be ready? And, you know, the half hour with a bag packed. And I said yes. She goes all right, I, I got us on a on a flight for Paris. To this day, Paris represents perfection for me because it was this beautiful city and full of culture and and history and I remember seeing a lot of, like, teenagers or young adults kind of just lined up, hanging out in groups of people loving life. And they looked really happy. And I was like, maybe I can have that too, where it doesn't have to be this grand achievement to find happiness.

So that exposure kind of gave you room to breathe, to see that you were capable of something other than running, that that was not you for sure. I think it was also scary though, too, because I wasn't. I struggled in school, I didn't I didn't know. Right. But it's a funny thing. We all tell ourselves that this is this is it. You're supposed to now know what you're doing for the rest of your life. Let's say here you were a high school students living living in your parents home. And now all of a sudden, you know what your world is going to be? It's.

That's a tough moment. It is. And I think that's why I gravitated a lot towards, you know, young woman narratives. Because we really need to do an unlearning of knowing what we're supposed to do. Yeah. I think it's crazy. I think it's a lot of added pressure that doesn't allow room for creativity and play at a young age. I agree, I agree. It's just so much stress and and in the end, whether you make that decision on Thursday of this year and change your mind in seven years or two and a half months, it's good. It's all fine. Yes. So much pressure.

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about your experience and how you came to know from your experience. You had an episode, I believe that was devastating, how you found a way to turn that around and likely help yourself and help others as well. And was that purposeful, organic? How did all of that happen? So when I when I got to college, I had started to experience a series of violent events. It changed my body. Not only did it change my my mental state, but physically, I was already in my sophomore year of college suffering from anemia. I was sent to a nutritionist that really just ended up giving me an eating disorder than I had experienced sexual violence and and an incident where another athlete made me feel threatened, because they had a gun.

And so with the combat nation of all these events, plus the layer of normal young people, coming of age stories, first love, heartbreak, not really loving all my classes and feeling kind of out of place and struggling academically. There was this other added intensity that I didn't know how to talk about, because I never knew really anyone that had been through this. You heard about it in movies, but it didn't happen the same way that it happens in movies. And on top of it, I was supposed to represent a team for a major university and I felt like if I got better at running, my life would go back to normal.

When my story started to come out of my own hands, there were other athletes that came to me and started sharing with me similar stories. They were reaching out like, hey, you're not alone in this. And then I got mad when I saw the school not protect myself. Plus others. I got even more mad. That's when I said we got to do something. And I don't necessarily to this day, believe you have to grow so angry and so extreme in order to find your passion. I don't I don't believe that you have to go through violence to discover this, this part of yourself.

But I do think that the collective ness of stories, realizing that you're no longer alone, helps you realize that it's okay to speak up. And that's what was happening to me. And that's where I. I recognize that running wasn't going to be the only thing that was part of my sparkle speaking. And what also became writing became part of my sparkle. And actually, when I decided to leave the team junior year, I was actually at the best that I had been since I had been 16. And it was shocking to a lot of people. When I did leave the team. But it became every time I enter into the locker room, it became a sports team hating me for speaking out.

But what they didn't see were women that I had taken to the hospital and and the women that would pull me aside after class and, and tell me what they were going through on this campus at a place where I represented this university as an athlete. And I couldn't do it anymore. And was that mostly sexual violence? Yes, it's that pervasive. It's absolutely that pervasive in my experience. But also across every campus in America and globally, there is a culture among sports that creates dynamics of power and control, and it creates certain behaviors that, a lot of activists and advocates describe as rape culture, but that it is not just siloed to sports.

Absolutely not. It is across college campuses. And are you speaking basically of men overpowering women? No. Anyone can be a victim and anyone can be a perpetrator. And absolutely, in my experience, when I started speaking out, a lot of the people that would confide in me about their experience were men, men have a really hard time speaking out about sexual violence. I can imagine it goes against every grain in their body. When you left running as a junior, was it because you were saying to yourself, I can't support this because there's all of this behavior that nobody should condone, and yet people are closing their eyes to it.

Or was it that you you just no longer had that desire to compete? What compelled you to give it up? It was both. It was coming off a series of advocacy and scenarios where I was helping different people through through their trauma. I had also taken on an actual work study role on campus as a peer educator to help students identify healthy and unhealthy relationships, and the only thing that didn't fit in the direction and the path when I wrote them all out, the only thing that didn't fit anymore was track. That's interesting that you say, and I think this runs through many avenues of life, that you have a passion for something and you work at it and you work at it, and if you eventually don't find that to be your passion anymore, but you don't have anything else to go to, that's tough.

That's your you sort of are too afraid to give up what you know. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people get stuck. That was one thing that saved me, was I kind of let go at some point in the trauma. I let go of this notion of trying to be perfect. And I found that other part of my sparkle, letting go of the perfection is probably when you find the answers. I think I can say that for every kind of big self-learning moment of my life. Because where does that idea of what perfection is, you know, really come from? And is that a reality for each of us as an individual or some outside notion that we feel we need to live up to?

If it is that that outside notion, it's never going to sit well because you didn't create it. Yeah. You know, it's not your personal idea of what is perfection for you. And maybe perfection is not the right word to use, but your idea of your truth, your idea of you coming from your own abundance. Yeah. I think it and it's really hard as a young person to determine, I mean, what you want in order to create that quote unquote perfect life for yourself. And it changes. Sparkle was a movement to raise awareness of sexual violence. And then years went by and I didn't resonate with that anymore, not because I'm not an advocate of raising awareness to the epidemic of sexual violence.

That's the origin story. Again, I found and discovered that it was much bigger. It was a way to discover how to reclaim who you are or rediscover who you are through the power of creativity. And everybody has that. Everybody has a sparkle. Therefore everybody can be creative. Men and women. Yes. And I think that's where at one point in my life, I needed to be the advocate that I became on campus and after college. And then I found new interests and new things that I wanted to advocate for and write about. And that's okay. And that's kind of why sparkle is it's this very, like, messy and non-linear thing.

And it ironically represents who I am perfectly. Well, your first and very worthy endeavor of advocating for those who have been violated sexually was more just saying, hey, we need to be aware of this. Let's call this out. It's not okay to sweep this under the rug. Was it that. Yeah, I was originally supposed to be a bracelet to raise awareness to sexual violence and remind people of their sparkle, and now I'm more interested in something like a movement and tools and healing mechanisms and conversations and stories that point to ways that someone can kind of pick and choose during that time.

What got me through that was the power of story. It was the spoken word poetry group and one of the poets named Olivia Gatewood, who was actually also on my show. But in that moment when I was 19 and she was standing up on stage speaking about all these topics I had just started to become interested in, I pointed to her and I was like, if I can't speak like her one day, I at least hope more women like her can. You're never going to find like, one book that saved my life, or one song that saved my life is is not going to be for someone else. Sure.

Like someone might not love the Counting Crows as much as I love the Counting Crows. Really? Yes. I just I. Don't understand why, but that is just the world we live in. Actually, the training that helped me realize that was the first thing you learn in domestic violence training, and I think it's the best piece of advice for, honestly, how businesses should operate, but how the world should operate. You can't tell someone to leave a relationship. You have to empower them with the tools to be able to leave the relationship. And I will say as an advocate, one of the reasons I don't do hands on domestic violence work is because it's one of the hardest things to do.

But you cannot you cannot tell someone to leave an abusive relationship. It doesn't work. Well, I haven't thought about this in a while, but I was in an abusive relationship myself in my 20s, and I went back again and again, and I didn't want to tell anybody about it because I didn't want anybody to tell me I shouldn't be doing this. Yeah. I mean, clearly my body, my whole being, knew that I shouldn't be doing this, but I kept going back. Yeah. And the same as you. I don't quite recall what strength I finally gathered to pull myself out of it.

And we are obviously so far from not alone in those experiences. I wish I could, I wish that I could gather more of a of a reason why I was just done. It doesn't translate to every individual, and it's so it's so hard. And I think that's where I advocate for someone finding that light in themselves. Again, because you can't have light without darkness. The light never can truly dim. And I think that's really important, as if you can if someone can hold on to an anchor like that, that is the movement that I'm more interested in sharing, especially because we live in such a polarized world now that a lot of voices are just turned off, a lot of voices like myself, they're just tuned out.

I think people really need to start listening to the nuances of things, for sure. Well, hopefully conversations like this can help us get there. So young women in their teens are often so vulnerable and feeling such shame, almost just for being teenage girls. It's hard to be a teenage girl. They are easily targeted because of it and many young women and men grow up not ever feeling their sparkle or knowing they have one, or knowing what self-love is or feeling their truth. Our notions about a woman's place in the world still mean to this day that we are not treated equal to men.

What are the ways that you are helping women find their rightful voices that we've been talking about? But what are the tools that you are providing to young women? I'm a big proponent for writing, if you want. As for your career, but also for yourself. Like I think there's different. A lot of inner child work that you can do. Is that what you were doing through your writing, through your journaling? You were staying up till three and four in the morning? No, those were very much like letters to someone. But I think what it became was a diary.

And so, yeah, it's like maybe if I had been sharing more with my therapist about what I was writing, they would have analyzed it as such. Right? I think now there's actual frameworks that exist that I didn't know about when I was 19. And that is part of what we know we're building today at, at sparkle is these, these frameworks that can help someone be guided a little bit more, because writing as a creative medium can also be a little intimidating, especially like if if someone didn't grow up writing or reading or anything like that. And that's why people do gravitate towards different mediums, whether it's painting or making music, like there's different ways of expression.

I look for other collaborative movements, like one of the ones that I do is democracy. It's kind of just mentoring young girls that want to do activism or some sort of like. And that's the name you're not mispronouncing democracy. It is democracy. Democracy. Yes. There's a lot of high schools now that have, senior year internship programs. And so I work with some high schools that I need an intern, but they want the experience. We work together and I balance the internship more like a, like a mentorship. We'll have, like one on ones where we'll actually sit down and like, I'll listen to them about what their goals are.

And I think the dynamic that that brings versus like a school setting, it's not a lecture setting, it's actually hearing what the teacher wants out of their life, and then not even necessarily giving the advice of how to achieve it. It's that making them feel validated in what they want. That not not judging whatever it is they think they want. Right? I'll ask them like, well, like, how did you created or like what tools did you use to create this, this little character that you drew up? And they like talking about themselves because they feel seen, by the way, that doesn't go away just because you're, you know, you went from a teenager to adult.

Everybody wants to be seen. This is like basic communication skills and well. Look at social media. Yes, exactly. And I think like a lot of people don't stop and maybe realize maybe people don't want your advice. Like maybe people just want to be seen for who they are, authentically who they are, and not made to feel shame when they say they want to be a video game designer, and you tell them it's probably a smarter idea to be an accountant. And I've never believed in that. I've always been a dreamer, kid. I've always been loud and curious and whatever, and I've never fit the mold.

Does it make me depressed? Sometimes, yes. Why does it make you depressed? The typical blueprint that some people follow I can't seem to follow. It's a maze that doesn't have a map and that is very overwhelming. Sometimes I can imagine and that you say it's a maze. Just that very word alone already is complicated through your program that you're building in helping these young women, they're sourcing who they are in terms of their creativity. So they're using their creativity to be able to comfortably express themselves, whether what they're expressing is an unfounded shame or I really am this kind of person, but I can't tell anybody or I really I really want to be a plumber.

I don't want to be an author. I mean, is it giving people space to be okay with what their dreams are and what their fears are? I think it's more of a tool that helps people get back to play. I think social media now, there's a pressure to have again, perfection portrayed and that it needs to be a put together piece. And one of the happiest years of my life was being in my master's program for creative writing. After being a jock business major at Xavier and going 180 to a canvas like Sarah Lawrence. What a big shift. It was wild, and it was. It was one of those things where it taught me and gave me permission on how to be an artist.

This tool would help people discover their creative medium, and not necessarily what it would mean to have a creative medium professionally, but that sometimes one creative medium informs a breakthrough in either another or just your own healing in general. But besides the fact if you've been through something or not, or if you want to be an artist or not, creativity is a vital life force that everybody needs in their life. You can be a top consultant at McKinsey and you can love it. There's no shame in that at all. You can be a plumber and be the best in town.

No shame in that all but you still need something as a creative outlet because, I mean, there's more science and research that supports this, but creativity is is the way that we tell stories. It's the way that we feel, okay. It's the way that we express ourselves. And every moment, no matter what a person needs to be able to express themselves. That doesn't mean they need to sit down and spill their life to someone, but they do need a put, possibly a pen to paper for that release. I know we've talked about it, even just with with dreams like that.

Is your subconscious fighting to say something, whether you keep a dream journal or not? Like it helps. Yes, it's it's a it's a real thing. These dreams, they really are gifts that we receive every night that tell us about our unconscious and all the things that we hold there the good, the bad, the scary, the happy, the ugly, all of that is in there. And why would you not want to go there and explore yourself? It's pretty fascinating. Sounds awfully scary to begin with. You know, I don't want to speak to these demons, but once you do and you you realize that you don't have to take those demons with you everywhere you go.

You can actually have them step away and find out who you really are without having to support those demons, that trauma, the trash that we all carry. And you and I spoke the other day to about Bernard, my husband, and how he had reached a point, even in his amazing psychoanalytic career where he felt that just personally, he wasn't gaining ground in his path towards really knowing 100%. And maybe we never know that who we really are. He was seeing some of the best analysts in the world, and they had these fabulous intellectual conversations, and he couldn't wait to go and talk about these things, this wonderful intellectual topics.

And and he was well read and and enthusiastic about all sorts of art and music and literature and psychoanalysis. But he still struggled like I'm the I don't get it. And I can't really help my patients if I don't feel like I know what's going on inside of me. He became really upset, depressed, frightened, and he started to paint, and he just painted and painted and he wasn't doing it for anyone. Yeah, he was doing it for himself. It became his outlet and he was pretty voracious. I have a house full and a garage full of paintings to attest to that.

Through the course of that creative outlet, he learned that he needed to just put everything aside in terms of the way he'd been talking to his patients and sharing information with them. He started with ground zero. In terms of painting, I don't nothing. Yeah, give me a brush. Yep. And he started to write down these dreams that his patients were sharing with him. And it became hundreds and hundreds of dreams. And he just cleared the slate of all previous notions. And he discovered all of this fabulous commonality, all of these things that we report back unconsciously through our dreams about our imprints, about our mothers, about the way we were raised, about the things that we do in life that aren't our own things, the things that we carry, that we support, that we don't understand.

Why do I always have to be the wallflower? What a why? Why do I not feel I'm worthy to be part of the room? He saw that all of this stuff off comes from our ancestors, our mothers. We all have mothers. We, no matter how well we know them or we don't know them. They carried us. They gave us life. And they also gave us all this stuff that their ancestors gave to them, things that they learned growing up. And we can't help but carry that on until somebody gives us a different path. And here we are as humans, as teenagers, as adults, and still trying to figure out who we are because we're so busy being what it is we were told we needed to be.

I think it goes back to the beginning of our conversation of how our culture and society puts so much emphasis on that perfection, and discovering and going into college, right. Of who we should be. Yeah, the thing is. I don't think I will ever know who I am. Do I know the traits that make me me? The motivations that make me? Me? Yes. I think I've always known that there is an intuitive knowing that you that you start to have. And in some ways I also say your inner child always knows who you are. But as far as the ways in which you know how to carry the stories that you live with, they they change.

Like people start talking about healing like it's some destination. I always say like, I'm never going to get over being sexually assaulted. I'm just going to handle it differently. And if anyone expects me to get over it, they're crazy. They're absolutely crazy. Like, what happens is these these memories, this, this trauma, it just comes out and is expressed differently at every phase of your life. I remember there's a period where I was having a high concentration of of dreams about a first love that might be controversial. Oh my God, should you not be dreaming about an X, that doesn't mean you're dreaming about an.

Ex, correct? A high concentration of dreams about maybe an individual or a scenario means something though, and and in my case, what it meant was it pushed me to start writing song lyrics. I don't sing and I don't know how to play an instrument. And they weren't poems, but they felt like song lyrics. And I wrote an album's worth of songs, like, I absolutely have some sort of album about a boy like I am Taylor Swift. Not just kidding. We're all Taylor Swift. Yes. And but and I actually am going to bring her up in the sense that after I wrote these lyrics, I wrote 120 pages about the, the, the character thread that I was going for.

It was that separation of this is not 19 year old Devi, this is a 19 year old girl. And that phase shift was happening. And I do believe it was my subconscious telling me, all right, we're entering a different shift of your life. If you look at Bernie Taylor Swift or Adam Duritz from The Common Crows, an example if you look at their albums across the board, their themes and their stories about particular characters or scenarios repeat themselves. And that's kind of what I mean by the trauma is never leaving. But that expression is still something that continuously needs to be treated like you're training for a marathon, like you're training to be a runner.

And and that's where I don't think running for me was ever so much about the sport of competing. I think it was my first experience of what it meant to be an artist and to embrace being a creative person, and that's why it's really, really vital for young people to do sports, because it is this essence of a performance. It is an expression for a lot of people and so skate for a lot of people. But there is a connection between the athlete brain and someone that is a highly creative person because we're all rhythmic beings. And that's why this tool around sparkle and finding what lights you up like that and that should never leave.

I want that for every person on this planet. Definitely. That's a great wish to have for all of us. I'm 68. I still feel a little bit like I'm 22. As you should, as you should. I want to talk about a couple of other things so I know you know about what it's like to have experienced sexual violence and personally and from people that you've coached or helped and from people who have just shared their stories with you and it's more than a shame that young people don't have a real picture of what healthy sexual relationships can be in that if that were the case, we wouldn't have sexual violence.

How do we go about expressing to teenagers what healthy sex is? It's I mean, it's so taboo to talk about you, you know, want to bring it up with your teenager and they cringe and how do we get beyond that? It's difficult to encapsulate in one straight answer, because the ways in which we talk about sex vary from different background religion, all the things where I come from now, and it's not the way that I was raised by the way it was full transparency. So what do you mean by that? Give an example. I mean teaching, teaching a woman's specifically, but also any child about their body like naming, naming their body parts as such, but like let's say at the toddler level, like the preschool dynamic of like sharing toys and asking for permission, like, can I use your toys?

Those are like behaviors that like a lot more younger, educational, like teachers have and are being taught in some ways and maybe not others, just depends. Right? And then now we're living in a in a world where sex education is being pulled out of public schools and all schools in general, which is is so detrimental. It is and my question, you know, sort of applies to what we're used to here in the United States. And it is exactly as you say in other cultures. There's not even you can't even begin to open a door to such a conversation. And this sort of abuse or acting from a place of no good information about each other, I don't know how we're going to stop it.

I mean, I just we just all have to figure out how to really love and respect each other. And that sounds so. It's the most important thing we have to rely on is really loving each other and coming from a place where we take care. And I think that's that was one of the hardest lessons for me. As someone who was trying to understand what sex was, I mean, even before I experienced sexual violence, I didn't have healthy experiences of sex. I, you know, I reverted to that sports mindset of like, oh my God, I'm the last one to lose my virginity. Like, I gotta speed this up.

But like, no one was talking about, I mean, I didn't have any friends at the time that could speak to any sort of like, pleasure that they experienced as a woman. Like that was not a thing. I think that's kind of alien in terms of a topic for most teenage girls. Absolutely. And I think, I mean, I was I don't even know why I was thinking about this this morning. I was like, did I ever stop and think about if I actually ever liked any of the men that I first encountered when I was dating and trying to have sex like I was at that point in my life, I was just so curious to understand what sex was.

It was this desire to please men and what they wanted and what their feelings were, and if it resulted in an experience of sex. I mean, you could say I was using them to, to be honest. But it was it was not knowing my body and my desires, never being able to comprehend them enough. And we even see it in the teen dramas today that I'm absolutely still obsessed with. It's a lot of young people, like men don't understand necessarily, the immensity of of desire and loving someone is either because it's scary, it's vulnerable, it's messy, and in some ways that doesn't violate consent.

It should be right. Like that is the beauty of love. Like the first time you're falling in love or the first time you have a crush. There is an absolute beauty in that. There is, there is. But you're right. Young men come at this with a curiosity to. And this is something I'm supposed to achieve. And and unfortunately, still today, most many young men are not in it as a companion. And what a woman is feeling, a young woman is feeling in that experience is either not considered or certainly secondary. Certainly. And young women agree with that often in that, okay, like you said, selfishly, I want to know what this is.

But for me, it's it's for me, the teenage girl. I don't expect my pleasure to be taken seriously. We're just going to kind of get through this. And there's, there's because there's no media representation. I mean, if you look at something like porn, there's not enough representation of it. And there's there's obviously issues in that industry as well, but there's there's ways to teach and talk about it that isn't being done, which is why I advocate so heavily for the power of education. And we are being stripped of it and it's atrocious, but I think more so when someone is a is a perpetrator or someone does not respect what the word consent means, rape culture is about power and control.

We are seeing that in every level of the current administration that we're living in. And so when you have a culture that thrives and is built on power and control, you are going to have sexual violence and you are not going to have an understand of what healthy sex is, and then in return, you're not going to have healthy representations of love. No, no. And women are less now than several years ago. Have less of a seat at the table. Their position is not as important as it was recently, and it's a very scary thought feeling to contend with. And it does make all of these violence against women easier to come by.

And I think what the saddest part was, even when I was so angry and starting sparkle, I didn't know if I was ever going to believe that I was going to stop sexual violence. It actually wasn't. Of course, it was my goal, right? I wouldn't have been doing it if I didn't want to stop sexual violence. My goal was more that when something so atrocious an injustice happens, that you don't lose yourself and that you can't lose yourself because no one can take that light away from you. And that's what I'm leaning on now, because I think a lot of people are feeling hopeless.

Especially young people, and especially now. And this is where art becomes the resistance. This is where love is and will always conquer all. Is that when you can lean on a collective of aligned people and yourself and find that trust within your body and your mind, you will find love and it will allow you to keep going. Yeah, I think if you really allow yourself to know yourself, you'll find in yourself this love or this sparkle. And with that tool, with those feelings, you can't help but give that to the people close to you and so on and so on.

And there's this ripple effect. So someday, 1400 years from now, maybe there'll be no more war, no more famine. And we will have figured out that rather than control each other, rather than have power and money be our rulers. Love. Just love. I do think it comes with finding that light and knowing that the messiness of of the dark and the light is kind of what makes it all beautiful. Yeah. And the and the playfulness you can find in yourself when you really give yourself the grace to just be who you really are. Exactly. Such a nice place to be when you aren't thinking.

You know, Jerry over there is really going to judge me if I say these three things or, you know, Betsy is going to look at what I wore and think I'm a fruitcake. I mean, when you stop thinking about those things and, you know, if we are who we truly are, we're not designed to hurt each other. We're not designed to make each other feel bad. And that's just a beautiful thing. We just all need to get to that place. We're not designed to be miserable and mean and full of corrupt shun and greed and and and here we are. It just sounds so, I don't know, to flower field to just say, where is love?

But I mean, man, that's that's what makes us who we are at our very, very best. Yeah, exactly. And I don't think it sounds like that at all. I think that part of even the, the shame that's being perpetrated is to make it feel that way. And like, I think that's why I like shows like this and and spreading that is more important than ever because that message will prevail if enough people start to believe them. So I think so. I think so, and I must say, in all of my years, of course, it wasn't until recently that I had a platform like this, but I have never been so thoughtful about speaking my mind in and I mean by that, am I going to get in trouble for saying what I want to say?

Am I going to get in trouble if I if I write this thing? If I am looking at Instagram and I love that thing, is someone following me? Is someone watching? What I'm doing is is am I falling into some framework that is calling me out as an undesirable? And I don't know if if there's an intention to that, but I feel like we are being corralled, you know, just sort of stay within our band boundaries. We we need to stay in our lane. We so need to get in another lane. I, I mean, you're not the only one. I mean, there are real things happening on a platform like Instagram that yes, if you do like something, if you do post something.

Your voice will be silenced. You will see new platforms, you will see creators building new frameworks, building new algorithms that train to not do that, to let people express themselves freely and to create without the fear of being punished for who they are. I don't want to live in the world that we're living in now, and I don't think a lot of people do, and I think that's where I think so many people and young people are lost is because they don't know what to do. But the the thing that you need to do is, is go back to that inner child and, and ask her what were her dreams.

And I think that's a great place to start. I do too, it seems like there is so much that parents just don't know about their daughters. How do you think grown ups get to a place where little credence is given to the thoughts and opinions of teenagers? After all? I mean, we were all once teenagers, and I suppose that most of us skimmed over or pushed aside our feelings as teenagers as there was no place throughout history to comfortably express them. And as I would say, our imprints certainly direct us to unconsciously behave like our parents. So how do parents begin to see beyond themselves and hear what their teenagers are saying?

I feel like we don't give enough credence to what our teenagers are trying to express, and we shut them down by either not listening or making light of it. They're too young to have a valuable opinion. Their thoughts about what they want or too immature. They can't know enough about the world or even themselves. We don't value their voice, and I think that just sets us up on a bad path of helping these people close down these children, these teenagers that we love and take care of to some degree, we take care of. Well, again, this actually goes back to power and control and not in the violent necessarily way that we were talking about before.

But a lot of adults and parents specifically, they themselves have forgotten what it's like to be a student of life. They get set in their ways, they get set in their jobs and their rhythm as they should, because they have the responsibility, the hardest responsibility in the world, which is to raise and take care of a child. Right? And granted, a lot of parents don't even have the time that they wish they had to take care of their children. They're so busy just putting food on the table. Exactly. And that doesn't make them the villain all the time.

Not at. All. But I think that part of of sparkle. Is that what it means to discover your sparkle and learn and dream throughout a lifetime, right? So that's the first thing. And the second thing is, I see this happen a lot with my students that I work with sometimes, is that a lot of people listen to try to understand when you don't need to understand, you don't need to understand what they're going through or or even necessarily feel what they do by the way, I think we do that because we're empathetic people, but most teenagers and kids specifically just want to be heard.

Your job as a parent is, again, to empower someone with the tools to be able to leave the nest and become that person that is authentically them. I'm also just like everybody else is. I do want to be heard in what I'm saying too, but I want to be doing it with my own style and my own flair and my own discovered, because that is the excitement of life. It's important to just embrace them for who they are and not listen, to understand, but listen for the sake of listening. Because that's what you do when you're a parent. Yeah, clearly, I believe that this imprint that we all have placed upon us in utero and on and on and on, directs the way we behave.

So that directs the way we behave as parents, which then directs the way our children behave. And it goes on for generations. So really, parents, grandparents, children all need to be given the gift of finding out who they are, which is in their in their unconscious and letting go of the trauma that's been pressed upon them. Whatever it was, that trauma that was traumatic is not going away. Like you said, it doesn't disappear. But we have ways of giving ourselves respect and not feeling shame or taking the blame for something that we've been carrying.

As you bring up the word imprint, because I absolutely believe in the ways in which our ancestry and our family, generational trauma impacts us. That in a way, even if we haven't, were the direct person that was impact. Because in my Indian culture, the, the, the concept of namesake is very, very common. I think there's real power in namesake. My grandmother, she's a she's big emotions. I've really big emotions. I love and respect my grandmother a lot, but there are times that we forget to disconnect from that. I am not my grandmother and this happens in every family.

This is not like anything that I'm just going through. It's that yes, you are going to resemble your great grandmother, your mother, like all the things that's very real. They say like that racism is carried through physical ailments and health impact like that is all true things. But you, there's a time where there's a there's a power that you have to rewrite your narrative and break through, that you will carry it and you will express it differently than your ancestors. And this is the way we're going to help future generations by you sort of undoing this ongoing thing.

That's just been this thread, not the positive thread, the unhealthy threads that we continue to carry. Just because we continue to carry them. Yeah. If we tune in to your podcast, we're going to see you having these kinds of conversations with your own guests. Yes. I think the goal with my guest is to elevate their creative practice and their process and their sparkle, learning what works for them and what doesn't work. And the ways that they put together songs or paintings or books. And what was their pivot moments like? Just like how I express here.

And I appreciate you letting me share. We all have moments in our lifetime where we can point to it and be like, yeah, that was a day that my life started change, or this was an age where everything was going to be different, and I love to capture those years. I love to be able to hear someone else's point of view. It's like taking a photograph. It is. And I don't think everybody has an opportunity to do that. I think more often than not, we just live our lives thinking, this is the life I was given. I'm I chose this path. I'm on it. I'm not leaving this lane.

And to see examples, to listen to people talk about something that motivated them to change their life or to look at the world differently. That gives us all some strength, some resolve. You you think, if what happens if I if I go out of this lane, I am not sure that next lane is safe. I know this lane. Why would I do that? Well, take a risk. It's so awesome. We've got to step out of our our pre-planned zone and change it up. I mean, look, the way our world is going. I agree, I think it's what I think about when I think about the word like legacy.

My legacy is just kind of showing up and doing whatever I want and being me while I do it like loud, sparkly pink, like. Well, you're doing some great things. So thank you so much. Thank you. So how do we find you? Yeah. So on Instagram, social media, the sparkle podcast. But on Apple Spotify sparkle on with David Jags. Also you can just search me David Jags thank you so much for having me. And I mean I think our aligned movements are one in the same as sparkle is love. And at the end of the day love is all we have. I think so and thank you so much for wanting to help people find that in their lives.

Yeah, I think yeah. Thank you for watching and listening. And tune in again and be sure to tune in to David's podcast. Bye for now.