IN THE SPIRIT
Jewel Kilcher first sang onstage at 6, performing with her parents, and was playing piano before she could read. After her mother and father divorced when she was 8, her father moved with Jewel and her two brothers from Anchorage to his father’s homestead near Homer, Alaska. They lived in a saddle barn with no running water or electricity—only an outhouse and an unreliable coal stove for heat. Father and daughter continued performing in roadhouses and bars, sometimes singing five hours a night.
Jewel saw much of her life as idyllic, riding horses every day and spending long stretches of time in nature, but her father—an alcoholic and a Vietnam vet with PTSD—often took his demons out on his kids. At 15, Jewel moved out, and the strain of supporting herself led to panic attacks. A mentor helped her finish high school at an arts academy in Michigan, where she studied opera.
After graduation, she lived briefly with her mother in San Diego but was soon sleeping in a Datsun hatchback. When the car was stolen, she found herself homeless and turned to shoplifting. Her anxiety spiked, and she developed agoraphobia. Then an untreated kidney infection turned to sepsis, but the hospital wouldn’t treat her without insurance. A doctor spotted her in the parking lot and gave her antibiotics—saving her life.
Most stories would have gone steadily south from there, but Jewel made a commitment to prioritize her mental health. She taught herself mindfulness, visualization, and journaling. As she tells Gerry Strauss (“Enlightened Perspectives”), she flipped her own script. In 1993, at 19, she was discovered while performing at a coffeehouse; her 1995 album, Pieces of You, went platinum 12 times—one of the best-selling debut albums ever.
Today, the four-time Grammy nominee has sold 30 million albums. She’s sung for a pope and a president, graced the cover of Time, published a poetry book, and appeared in Ang Lee’s 1999 Western Ride with the Devil. Though estranged from her mother, Jewel says her relationship with her now-sober father is strong.
She cofounded the Inspiring Children Foundation, which teaches at-risk youth practices to strengthen physical, social, emotional, and mental health. Her Never Broken community (jewelneverbroken.com) grew from that work, sharing mindfulness exercises from her New York Times best-selling memoir of the same name. She now empowers others to shift from feeling like victims reacting to circumstances to seeing themselves as architects creating their own lives.
Jewel knows that New Thought teaching is possible because she’s living proof.
Elsewhere in this issue, editor at large Stephen Kiesling shares insights about our nation’s founding principles on its 250th anniversary, Allan Hamilton, M.D., explores the spirituality of mastery, and Louisa Rogers outlines seven steps for taming a shame attack. &
—KATY KOONTZ, EDITOR IN CHIEF
