The Heap Of Hulps

You know that moment when something rises in your throat - a howl, a truth, a need - and you just... swallow it back down?

Jacky has a word for that. Hulp. A howl and a gulp combined. And this episode begins there; right in that frozen, swallowed place, because that's exactly where Jacky found herself when she sat down to record!

This is an episode about what it actually feels like to start something. A behind the scenes look at the recording and deleting, the shame that crawls up when old wounds surface, the "here we go again" of it...

Jacky takes you through the process she used to move from freeze to finally pressing record: writing a letter from her fear, sitting with the grief of it, reaching out - and what happened when she did.

In this episode:

• The HULP poem - and what it means to have a pile of swallowed truths
• Why the antidote to shame is love, not self-improvement
• The gap between your ideal self and your actual self - and why staying with the actual is where the richness lives
• Why feeling like you don't fit in might mean you're a leader, not a misfit

Link to the Youtube video Jacky refers to in the epsiode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0872fKNtIw

Creators and Guests

Host

Jacky Power

What is Words in the Wilderness?

Words In The Wilderness is a podcast for changemakers, cycle breakers, and anyone tired of flatlining their existence with "fine." Hosted by Jacky Power, the Therapeutic Poet, each episode uses poetry as a foundation for exploring the wobbly, lonely terrain of becoming — of unlearning and unlayering — whether you're leaving a relationship, finding your voice, or simply learning that "I matter" is a truth, not an opinion.

Sometimes with guests bringing professional insight or lived experience, sometimes raw and personal, this isn't a podcast about five steps to fix yourself. You're not broken. Your feelings are wisdom to decode. It's about having a cheerleader in your pocket when the path gets lonely and everyone else is questioning your choices.

for brave souls who've
awakened to their truth
and are now navigating the
wilderness of
transformation

Jacky

Hello, welcome to Episode One of Words in the Wilderness. I began to do my first episode. sat here, I pressed record and I just froze! I completely froze and I thought, difficult. And then I thought, actually what an excellent place to start. That can really be what happens when we try to start something new or we make a change. And so how appropriate that I also went through it!

And doesn't that just tell you ⁓ that this kind of work of becoming who we are and unlayering all of the resistant restrictions that we might have is an ongoing job. And so what I thought I'd do is take you through my process of how I got through that because hello, here I am actually recording something. So something must have happened, although I have recorded and deleted about three or four times. it's also important to be honest about that, I think.
And I want to start with a poem I call HULP, which is a word that I made up.
And HULP is my word for a howl and gulp combined.
When you wanna cry out about something, but you don't, you swallow it.
And I think it just really helps to be a starting point so we can kind of meet each other on what the felt experience is like. So this is the poem.
I hulp
A howl and gulp combined.
A technique I mastered long ago to ensure
My shame was not on show as I sat in my heap of hulps.
Oh, you won't see me, no.
For I'll say, never mind and put on a smile I honed for show,
A lie I learned so long ago as I sat in my heap of hulps.

I won't reach out, that's madness, but burn alone.
In a silent chant of I am wrong
That gets carried away with its own song
Serenading my heap of hulps.
For I am so very wrong.
That's what I figured.
So it must be so.
Where my mistakes were put on show
'Cos they're so funny.
Don't you know?
Those moments that made me hulp

So you can see, hulp, is an experience I've had before, wanting to reach out, wanting to speak up, and then freezing. And I absolutely know through people that I have spoken to and work that I've done with clients that I'm not alone in this. I think one of the struggles that I have a lot of times when you hear people being interviewed on podcasts and things is they might talk about like the outcomes or the difficulties, but not necessarily the process.

And that's what I want to take you through today is the process of how did I go from having that hulp moment to being here and recording now.

So when I first, I was really, I was like, ⁓ God, here we go again, which I think can be, I think it's a natural thing to kind of be impatient and to be upset that something we thought we might have figured out and got okay with, that we're back there again.

And I think that that's a very natural part of when we try something new. As a kid, when you tried things, new things, and that was maybe ridiculed by somebody else, or it was dismissed by someone, or there wasn't the person there to support you or nurture you or guide you through that, all of those things can come back up to the surface again in one form or another.

So rather than fighting that or berating yourself that you're here again or berating someone else that they've got you in that place, none of that is really going to actually change things. But what will change things is getting curious and asking yourself a bit about what's going on. So that's what I did because I thought my lurking fear when it came to starting the podcast and it came to start starting and recording sessions, was going to be around, can I keep this going? Will I be able to get good guests and things like that? And I just thought, well, rather than power through this, I'm actually gonna sit with it.

So first of all, that hulp poem really is talking about shame that, you know, I am wrong, ⁓ serenading all of my heap of all of those internalised messages of, you know, it's silly or that's ridiculous or.
who's going to listen to you or like whatever it is that you have internalised and those internalised messages can sometimes obviously be from what people have overtly said to you but it can also be from what you might have picked up a long way and I think the whole point of the hulp is it's a moment you have that little kind of howly sort of feeling and there's no one to reason it out with.

And I think that's what makes it stay, is there's no one to be a sounding board for. And I think that's where poetry and writing can be brilliant. So this is what I did. So I wrote a letter from my fear and I want to share that with you, maybe because I'm an oversharer. I don't think it is. I think it's because I really am doing this from the place that I hope that it's helpful. So this is what my fear had to say and I find it quite amusing as well.

Dear Jacky, I am your fear and this is what I want to tell you. I have a tight grip on you, so you find it hard to even write. You want to fully be yourself on this podcast, you must do that. It's needed more than ever in the world, but please don't be that whiny, take a selfie of yourself crying and say, this is what vulnerability looks like. That's bleeding from the heart kind of stuff.

We don't need more blood. There's massacres going on everywhere. But we don't need amputations either. Don't amputate off your wounds, your scars. Just, I don't know, I can't put it into words. You're the writer, not me. Just be real. You don't bleed anymore. So speak from that place. You have used your poems to help you heal all your wounds.

Be honest that you haven't got it all together. That's the myth surrounding therapists, that you've got it all together. Just be human. But that's the tricky spot, isn't it? Your safety net for being human is in poems. That's where you've wrangled out how you truly feel. Don't pull back that curtain.

Remember Emily Dickinson's poem, tell all truth, but tell it slant. The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind.

And that reminds me of a poem that I wrote about the power of poetry, which if I'd been prepared, I would actually have easily for me to be able to read to you now, but things don't always work like that. hey, look, I've managed to look it up whilst I've been rambling. So this is my poem,

The Power of Poetry.
Sometimes we don't want to tell our story straight.
For fear its weight will make others stumble in their sentences of reassurance.
Sharing should not be an endurance.
Sometimes what we have to say is unpalatable as we plunge into the depths of the unfathomable.
So we try to make our world more habitable, carrying what's heavy on the wings of a melody
That is sweeter to the ear in the hope that it helps someone to listen.
And not just hear.

I think the first person that needs to hear what we're going through really is ourselves. And so often, I mean literally all the time when I'm working with somebody, what I will hear from them is, I shouldn't feel that way. I shouldn't say that. I mean, I literally had someone saying that to me this morning. They were, were, they made a side comment and it was all, you I shouldn't say that.

But what if you let yourself?

What if you actually gave yourself permission? And I think that's where poetry can be a really helpful place to work from. So even giving myself permission to write from my fear, and then that could go in, it could go in different directions, that, know, that bleeding from the heart kind of stuff. I mean, that's quite dismissive and sneery. I might want to examine what's going on there. And saying, we don't need amputations, don't amputate off your wounds. Wouldn't it be easier sometimes if we could? I think, you know, that was part of my desire. It'd be so much easier if I could, you know, this idea of ideal self, right?

There's an idea of an ideal self that we all have versus our actual self. And wouldn't it be so much easier if we could amputate off the parts of ourselves so that we could be our ideal self rather than our actual self?

But I think there is so much richness when we stay with our actual selves. So after I wrote this fear letter, I reached out to a couple of friends. What I say is that poetry is this amazing place to be witnessed, but I think there's also something about it being witnessed to a certain point, and then it's nice to reach out to people that we feel can meet us in that place. So what the fear let me do, what the hulp poem let me do, was kind of start that thought process of: I've got some old messages, some old wounds are cropping up, that's made me go into freeze, so I'm gonna be with that, which I think is fear, in this letter.

And by doing that, I'm taking action. So that helps me to kind of come out of that freeze and to find some kind of regulation actually, even in the writing, because the page is blank. There's nobody that is gonna answer me back here, so that feels safe. I can say as much or as little as I want to. I can repeat myself as much as I need to. And as I start to write, as we start to write, we kind of get some kind of lyrical sort of type of things going on, which can be interesting as well.

So there I am, I've got my letter and said that now I've got much more context to be able to go to a friend and say, you know, I'm back here again. I'm not beating myself up, which happens so often. I'm not shoulding myself. It's just like, here I am.

And then that's where there's a place really to grieve.

you know, to grieve that this process is tricky for me. And to be alongside somebody in that grief, to have someone else say, I see that and I get that. And luckily the two people, because I reached out to two friends, but the two people both went, yes, me too.

And I think, and then, you know, that's what we say about the antidote of shame is that connection, or is love really, I think it's love. And to be loved in that way, of people to hear what the struggle is and to be able to not try and fix it helpful. And I think also just the natural humanity of it is really important to notice.

So as human beings, we naturally compare. So I think part of my fear, although it didn't really come out in there, you know, the fear was around being human and about really showing myself without the
protection of a poem or without the protection of another guest. Like when I did the Therapeutic Poet podcast, I think I had a guest pretty much every single time. So there's a protection in that that I don't have, can ask the questions that I want the answers to be shared to through asking a question to someone else, you know, rather than me kind of say, this is my opinion on something.

Whereas when it's just me with you, it's me having to step into a different role leading the conversation. as I was saying about, you know, it is natural for us to compare and we can do that in one of two ways. We can upwardly compare where we compare ourselves to others and see ourselves in a less favorable light because we see them as better or we compare ourselves to someone that we see as being worse than us. But the point is, is it's all subjective. There's no objective scoreboard for whether you're doing it all I think that's a key thing is this is part of a natural process of doing anything new or of changing.

And then I also just, don't know if you ever saw, that video of the man on the hill dancing. There was this guy, if you Google it, you know, look on YouTube, there was the man on the hill that was dancing away all by himself at some kind of ⁓ festival or something. And he, you know, he was really letting go. He didn't care what anyone else was thinking. And he was just absolutely enjoying the music and loving it. And that started to attract other people. Not that he was doing it to attract other people, but other people started to join in and then as soon as one or two people joined in, then more people came along and the guy was delighted to see all of these people joining in, but it didn't change anything for him. He was involved in the enjoyment of the music and his own experience and it was great that that got enhanced by sharing that with other people.

And I think there's a really important lesson in there that when we're doing something, when it's for our own self-expression, then that's always gonna feel good. And the halt moment is a moment where that self-expression got denied. And so self-censorship wanted to come in. It's a protective mechanism, but it's never really going to...
let me change anything if I stay there. So yeah, so I did those. And then I also looked at, do EFT tapping, which is a tapping technique that you can do, which is a lovely way to sort of regulate your feelings. And it can be a really helpful way to explore the narratives you have and the limiting beliefs. And my limiting belief was that I don't get to have big goals.
And I could trace that back to something that happened when I was much younger, when I went for something and it didn't work out. And again, it's not that it didn't work out, but it was that there wasn't an opportunity around me to reason that out with other people. And I think that that's the fear that we can have. If this goes wrong, I'm going to feel even more isolated. So it feels safer to go with the as is.

But what if we say, yes, feeling isolated is part of the journey. It is part of the process. It's not that you're doing anything wrong. It actually just means that you're very centered in what you want. And it might be that you haven't found your tribe yet. Or, you know, I was saying like, if you feel like you don't fit in, maybe it's because you're a leader. Maybe you're leading something into a different direction.
So there we go, that was all out of my freeze moment when I went to record this first episode. I'm very glad you're here ⁓ but that's it for now. Until next time.