Jo Kelly - podcast
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[00:00:00] Welcome to the Low Demand Parenting Podcast, where we drop the pressure, find the joy, and thrive even when it feels like life is stuck on level 12 hard I'm Amanda Diekman, author, autistic adult, and mom of three. I'm not here as an expert, but a fellow traveler. Together, we're learning how to live more gently, authentically, and vibrantly in this wild parenting life
In today's episode, I sit down with Jo Kelly, who is a somatic coach who works with artists and creatives and all kinds of people who want to get back in touch with their native way of feeling and moving through emotions. But what I really wanted to talk to Jo about was how she parented and schooled her kids in light of what she [00:01:00] knows about how we feel our feelings.
And the interconnection between those things is fascinating. I'm so excited for you guys to listen to this conversation because Jo has a young adult, and many of you ask me, "How do we know that this is all gonna work? We're raising our kids in this really radical way, and there's no roadmap, and no one can tell us what it's gonna look like to do low demand for the long haul."
And, Jo certainly has. So this has been a really powerful witnessing conversation for me. I know, I know it'll be great for all of you, too
Jo is also a filmmaker who's working right now on a piece related to embodied movement and dance, and what she discovered about the power of dance through her cancer journey. There's tons of great resources about Jo, and I know after this conversation, you're gonna wanna know all of them, so definitely go to the show notes to see more about her work in the world
And on a personal note, in Low Demand world, we are getting [00:02:00] so close to the presale launch for my second book, which is The Parent's Handbook for Kids and Burnout. I am so excited for you to get it into your own hands. Check back. I will update the show notes with a link once the presale is live.
If you're not following me on social media, this would be a great time to find Low Demand Amanda on all the platforms so that you can get all of the inside scoop. If you wanna join the launch team, if you want some presale bonuses, all of that is gonna be on social media and also my email list. So, let's get connected.
And without any further ado, let's get into my conversation with Jill for our Northern Hemisphere folks- ... it's back to school season, right? , And I'm really glad to talk to you today because you have this dual expertise.
You have this expertise in helping people really listen to their bodies, and access [00:03:00] flow, and creativity and intuition. And then you have this massive volume of lived experience with being- Mm-hmm ... a really creative parent in terms of how you've educated your children. And I think that there is a dynamic interconnection between those things.
Mm-hmm. Between listening to ourselves, trusting ourselves, and pursuing alternative paths for how our kids grow up. And I wanna start maybe with the traditional paradigm for a minute. What's that inner tie between the way that we're traditionally schooled, and the role that that plays in us not trusting ourselves, in not listening to ourselves?
Like, kind of how we got here- Mm-hmm ... before we imagine doing it differently going forward. Yeah. So crucial. Such an important question. Um, I think realizing what happened to us and where we are now is, is really essential to us being able to see [00:04:00] past it. So conditioning looks like this: You get out of the womb, you're crying, and there's a piece of rubber that's put in your mouth.
Mm. Everything after that is the same. Nature made a perfect little being. It didn't make a mistakes. The little being has emotions, energy in motion, which are the guidance system, which are the wisdom dropper, which is the universe or God speaking to you. It's y- it's, it's what makes you, you and what makes you able to relate to the world.
And from your first moment, you're being told to shh, or don't yell, don't get angry. Why are you sad? Why are you scared? You're fine. And even when you're hurt, it's like, "No, you're fine. It's not hurting. You'll be okay." You know? So the narrative and the, [00:05:00] the prompts that we're hearing all the time from our caregivers are whatever is coming from me in terms of like really basic, you know, bodily functions, which is my emotions Is, is wrong.
So you should repress it. If you don't repress it, you get the gist very s- very fast as a child that if I don't repress it, mommy gets upset, or daddy, and then there's the withdrawal of safety and love and care. Even if it's tiny, the baby feels it. So what does the baby do very fast? It gets great at adapting, at coping.
And so adapting is a problem. It's, it's genius in the moment because that's the only way to survive and to continue to get the care. I will modify my experience, my emotions, my [00:06:00] perception, my behavior, um, my thinking, my movement, my sound, basically everything, so that you, caregiver, keep loving me, holding me, and keeping me safe so that I survive.
So in a way, it's genius. But the problem with that on the long term is because we live in a culture that functions like that, so your first step is parenting, second step is school, which is long. It's 12 years of being told what to do, how to think, what to learn, how to behave, what to feel. And then you have the whole culture that's been conditioned that way, and you go to work, and you have to be like others and compete and et cetera, et cetera.
Well, you are obviously being trained from the get-go to disconnect with your truth, with what makes you you- Mm-hmm ... with what, um, is guiding you through life so that you fit, belong, and [00:07:00] stay safe. Mm-hmm. And so obviously you can continue to live like that forever and never notice. You can continue to cope, to numb, to buy, to eat, to drop into any addiction, drugs, sex, shop.
You know, you can do all of the things to get little- injections of pleasure and satisfaction to numb all of that repression and colonization. And you can do that your whole life, and you can increase all the numbing just to stay in balance. Like, I have all this pain, but the more I do this intense sport or the more I watch porn or the more I eat or the more I do drugs or the more I do self-development, wh- whichever it is.
'Cause some coping mechanisms are very elaborate and sophisticated, so we don't see them. Well, you can s- continue to survive like that- Yeah ... and may- and maybe hit the wall with a midlife crisis [00:08:00] or, or not. You can go for more and more and more and more and more stuff to numb it all. But there's also an option of, realizing, oh yeah, so I've been asked to repress everything that was me and to replace it with everything that made others around me/the authorities accept me.
So all of my worth is conditional to my behavior, so, so ouch. I'm disconnected. Yeah. Yeah. And that ouch moment, at least for a lot of the listeners here, comes when they have a severely dysregulated kid. Mm-hmm. And all of the therapeutic, the best parenting advice right now, which isn't wrong, is saying- Mm-hmm
look, they're gonna co-regulate through your- Mm-hmm ... stable nervous system. Mm-hmm. But the parent realizes, "Oh, I don't know how to be- Yeah ... regulated in my- Mm-hmm. I don't even, I don't know if I've ever experienced that. Exactly. I've [00:09:00] only experienced what you've just described. Mm-hmm. And that's that kind of breaking open point of- Mm-hmm
"Okay, well I guess I can't give my kids something I've never experienced." Exactly. Mm-hmm. "So I have to get busy figuring out how to feel, and how to feel safe so that I can invite kids, you know, these- Yeah ... these beautiful, beloved, struggling- Mm-hmm ... hurting kids into something better than what I received." There's another kind of crisis moment that people experience,
that, , the traditional self-help skills that we've been handed are so individualized. Mm-hmm. They only work for people who have a certain amount of privilege and safety- Mm-hmm ... they don't take into account what it's like to be living in late stage capitalism, to be watching wars and genocides right on our phone screen and not- Mm-hmm
be able to do anything they don't take into account what if you can't afford groceries or your child is chronically ill in an [00:10:00] incredibly broken, Mm-hmm ... medical system, right? There's just so many systemics that- It's all of it. Mm-hmm ... are working on us, and then we're trying in our own little bitty way to be like- Yeah
"I just wanna feel better." Yeah. And you mentioned that even the self-help can be a numbing or an addiction or a distraction. . Also, I think what the self-help culture has done, and of
It's not a criticism because of course we're better than we were in the previous generation. We wouldn't talk about emotions at all. Now we're in the healing world, and so we're talking about healing it. And I think what's, what the opportunity really is, is to realize that it's really not about healing because none of these things that we're feeling are wrong.
They're not to be fixed or to be healed, or to wish that they were different. They're to be integrated. Live in a context where we've been told, everyone's been told it's not okay to feel, and so we go behind closed doors and we pay someone [00:11:00] to feel these feelings so they go away so we can go back and do more, and be more confident, and win more, and make more, and all of that.
But it ... That's not the human experience that we came for. Mm. First of all, we came to have a human experience. And so it's really integrating those feelings and reconnecting, in my work I call it resetting- It's going back to who you were when you were a child preconditioning- Mm ... which is a fountain of things that are moving and that are not too sticky and not that scary to feel.
It's just like rage and joy and pleasure and hatred, and they're all together. Mm. They're the magnitude of the experience that we can feel, and they drop wisdom every time you honor. But if we're still trying to fix, you're s- you're still abandoning yourself.
You're just doing a more sophisticated version of the conditioning. You've just internalized the [00:12:00] system in you, and you're thinking, "This should be different. There's something to fix. I should be doing better." No, you're having a human experience. You're alive. It's great. You're gonna lose everyone and everything, and you're gonna die.
So there's feelings to be felt, when we feel, we receive the medicine that we need for our next step, for what we're choosing to do, for how we wanna show up, relate, be in our body, create.
It's, it's all in those feelings. Hmm. So it's fabulous So 13 years ago, roughly, you were facing the threshold that many parents face, which is, oh, your kid's old enough to go to school. Mm-hmm. And what are you gonna... Are you gonna send them into the same machine? Mm-hmm. Or- Mm-hmm ... are you gonna do something different?
But if so, what? Yeah. How did you face that moment? [00:13:00] What, what path did you take? Yeah. Um, I think this was a, this was a wonderful, uh, deepening of my belief system because I was blind to how bad it was. So initially, I sent my s- my son to a, I think he was four and a half. It was a progressive school. Looked great online.
And, um, he went there, and I didn't feel it was right the first day in the classroom. It feel- felt very regimented. So I was like, eh. And when I picked him up, he looked in my eyes very clearly teary, and he said, "You have to find another school, Mommy. This is not okay." Mm. And so he explained what it looked like, the progressive school.
He had to sit down and do this every time he was in school. For people who are just listening, you had your [00:14:00] arms crossed and your finger over your lips, like silencing- Mm-hmm ... yourself. Yes. Um. Totally. Peeing, only allowed at the recess time,
you lose points if you go to the bathroom during class, literally. So, that would be illegal if it was done to adults, right? Mm. It's not illegal for children. He had homework, and he was four and a half. So I was so shocked and I'm Belgian, and I was in America, so it wasn't my country, so I was like, "How? What, what is this?" And I had heard of an ideal school, which was where the teachers were not allowed to teach unless the kids specifically demand to be taught, and it was really honoring their needs, but I thought it was in another state.
So I was holding that model as that's what I want for my child, but I didn't know that there was another version of school. And so by complaining and going every day to the principal and being like, "This is supposed to be a [00:15:00] progressive school. What the hell is it?" You know, et cetera. , I was alone at that time. But there was a voice in me that was like, "Am I crazy?
Should I just... Is this just what it is?" And, and I thank the Lord a mom said, "But what is your ideal?" And I described the school, and I was like, "But it's not in this state." She said, "Yeah, it's in Culver City. My neighbor goes there." And I was like, "What?" So I went there right away, looked online, called them crying.
I was like, "You have to take my child." And that was a humanistic, um, education, which means the opposite of traditional. It means we trust the human to be the genius that they were born to be, and so we are going to honor their needs and what they want to learn, how they want to learn it, when they want to learn it.
So that looks like some kids are writing at three and a half 'cause they wanna learn how to write, and they teach themselves. My son couldn't write until he was 11 'cause he wasn't [00:16:00] interested in that at all. But he was reading all the time, and he was counting all the time 'cause that's what he wanted to do.
Some kids don't wanna learn anything. Some kids wanna learn everything. It's just like trust, again, the human technology and what nature did. It's perfect. Let everyone become the genius they're meant to become when they want, how they want, with who they want.
It's breathtaking to see pure beings be honored and see how respectful they are and wise and It's like they don't know shame because they've never been shamed. And i- in our traditional education system, shame is, you know, what, what is used to make little people conform. Whether the shame is expressed or whether, it's under the carpet, they feel it.
And so when they don't know shame, they're very much into their [00:17:00] body. They can look at you. They can express what they feel. They can stand up for someone when someone's being disrespected because they have full integrity. They've never been out of integrity. They haven't been raised out of their integrity like in the traditional system.
They have been honored, and so that's all they know. Mm-hmm. All they know is to honor you, too. Mm. I wanna ask, some people have expertise about how to work inside the system. Maybe their expertise- Mm-hmm ... is, okay, how do you get to an IEP meeting and fight for your kid?
I feel like what your wisdom is here to offer us today is how to step outside, how to- Mm-hmm ... create a really vibrant alternative, and then- Mm-hmm ... and then commit to it for the long haul. Yeah. Yeah. People ask me all the time, " what happens to these kids when they grow up and hit the real world?"
Mm-hmm. I can testify that my children can read and write and count, and- ... [00:18:00] they're very curious, and they're avidly learners.
I can testify that there's some research that says that when kids come to learn what they want to learn and how they wanna learn it, they learn seven times faster than if you shove it down their throat when they're not interested. Seven times is a lot faster. Mm-hmm. So when my son switched to middles- middle school, which was progressive but not humanistic, because the humanistic school stopped at 12, um, like I said, he was an avid reader and counter, but he didn't write 'cause he had never been interested, so he arrived at middle school, and he couldn't write.
And the week after he was writing. Hmm. Because he didn't wanna be the guy who couldn't write. Hmm. And w- writing is like walking or speaking different languages. It's not something that you need a, a manual to learn. It's just, it takes curiosity, envy, determination, and then you do it. So, um, [00:19:00] my 18-year-old, um, finished, um, his high school with, you know, wonderful grades.
He was always, like, an A type of student. He was a student that, um, every, you know, um, principal or, um, teacher when we would have the conferences were always like, "Wow, your child, what? Where? How come? What did you do?" Wow. You know? And... Or he was the child that would stand up for someone in the classroom and get the teacher all, you know, destabilized, and then we would have those meetings about, "Well, yeah, he, he...
If you're disrespecting that girl about how she's sitting, he will stand up for his friend and say, 'Hey, I'm wondering why you're telling her that she can't sit how she wants to sit.'" You know? So- Hmm ... so very, very, respectful but will stand for everyone's, needs to be met. When he switched to middle school, [00:20:00] after a week he said, "I need to skip a grade or two if possible, because those guys I can't hang out with. They're not my level." And we're like, "Really? You've never done any academics. Are you sure?" And he was like, "Absolutely."
So we said, "Well, okay then." Humanistic also means you never take care of things for them. You let them advocate so we said, "Well, maybe go talk to the principal or the office," and he did, and they tested him, and he skipped a grade.
Hmm. And then he took a gap year when he finished because he really wanted to sit with what he wanted to do, whether it was continue his studying or open a business, or he was interested in piano that he started only two years ago and was completely self-taught, and in philosophy, 'cause he loves philosophy.
And he sat for a year and contemplated and traveled and journeyed and had many conversations. As he gave himself that [00:21:00] space to sit in the uncertainty of what he wanted, piano became sharper and sharper and sharper. And of course, as a self-led child, he doesn't learn with a teacher or for a couple hours.
He is eight hours a day on his piano. So I know that when now he's decided to go to university and study music, and so when he does meet the teachers, they also come to us and are like, "T- really two years? Is that all?" Because he plays like someone who's played for 10 years. Hmm. And we're like, well, inevitably when you don't tell children to do all of the things at school and all of the extracurricular activities that can be disguised way of controlling what they do, they actually choose to put their time in their passion.
And so they show up and their brain opens up in a different way. So I would say that it really, cultivates, extraordinary adults, the kind of adults that, or the kind of [00:22:00] beings that we need to create the new world that we want. If this one is collapsing and it hasn't been working we need to make sure that the way, we, nourish and enable them to become humans It's coming from a different place than our own conditioning Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm ... I remember my parents being like, "But w- what do you mean they're not learning anything? How ... What ... You're, like, ruining their chances of being stimulated by so many things." No, you're not. They'll, they'll, they'll bump into things. They're alive.
They're part of this world, and they have an instinct. They'll be drawn. I just wanna put a tiny little noticing on your use of enabling. Mm. I've started using the word that way as well. I get- Mm ... that gets thrown at me in a, in interviews sometimes. Yeah. "How do you know you're not just enabling them?" And I've started saying- Mm ... "Oh, I am." Yeah. 'Cause what's the opposite of enabling?
It's disabling. Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. [00:23:00] How did that word- Enable their gifts ... it get turned against us? Yeah. Yeah. I love what you're saying. It's not that your son is extraordinary.
I mean, he is, but every human is extraordinary. We all are. Yeah. We all are. That's, that's the thing. On the other side, right, because I work with adults and I help them dismantle and undo the conditioning so their instinct can be awoken. I have never seen an adult that's not extraordinary when they drop back into their instinct, into their flow, into their zone.
It's absolutely mesmerizing. It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen is when a human is human. Mm. It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful creation ever. Mm. It's intoxicating. We are incredible. There's nothing to heal, just to return to the humanity that nature created.
Mm. [00:24:00] And I, I can imagine someone listening thinking, "Well, maybe Jo's just had this semi-charmed kind of life." Mm. You can be intoxicated on humanity and raise these alternative- Mm-hmm ... kids because, oh, you have everything- Mm-hmm ... handed to you. And we are having this conversation as two white women.
Mm-hmm. I'm American, which brings- Mm ... great privilege. Mm-hmm. , Acquired and unearned privilege yeah. And also, the complexity of your story is, is not- Mm-hmm ... as simple as, "Well, everything was just handed to me, so that's why I can- Mm-hmm
see this beauty." Mm-hmm. So first what's coming to me is the, the, the privilege is systemic, right? So again, I'm always looking at the root of, well, w- how did we get here? Mm-hmm. And how do we show up so that we're no longer here?
Mm. And so , if we drink the Kool-Aid and work [00:25:00] to win inside the system, we're perpetrating everything that the system has created. So I think our biggest responsibility, is , how can I contribute so that this stops? Mm-hmm. And so that's where I focus my work, on making sure that I speak to, I raise the children who I, I facilitate people who are interested in dismantling that inside of them so that we can show up differently and create a different world.
Yeah. And, have I felt that I have lived an easy, um, pain-free experience? Um, not at all. I've had a very human and humbling experience. So my childhood would, was my dad wasn't much there. He was busy, and my mom was a dysfunctional, hard, hard, hard trauma mom who was doing her [00:26:00] best, but I was terrified most of my childhood.
So a lot of dysfunctional relationships.
The husband who I was with, was a, was dealing with depression for the whole time, so I was carrying that. My second child was born with a blood disorder, which means that she's transfusion dependent, so she gets, uh, transfusions, um, once or twice a month with all the complexity that it entails and the complications and the research of, ugh, you know?
So it, that, that is a full-time job in itself. Mm-hmm. And then, um, the recent sequence, sequence of events is at one point I w- wasn't able to function anymore, um, without neglecting myself in the relationship with the dad who was dealing with depression. So I chose to separate, and six months after that, I worked with breast cancer- Oh
for a year, um, as a single mom with my [00:27:00] child who had her hospital needs. And, and then when I finished my treatments after a year, I decided to move to Portugal. Uh, so from LA to Portugal, so another continent. So it, it hasn't been knitting and cocktails- ... absolutely. Definitely not. To me, this is the essential work of integrity for ourselves, and the biggest contribution we can do to each other is, to be in our truth and our humanity, and our biggest contribution to the dysfunctions of everything that's happening out there.
Thank you so much for spending- Thank you ... this time with me, with all of our listeners. some of- Sure ... Some people who are thinking, "I'd really like to spend more time with this human."
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. "I'd like to know more." Yeah. The initial work that I do with people is called resetting. The reset journey is a month daily, um, practices where I help you reset your own [00:28:00] authority, and freedom, and instinct, and all of that. So it's a lot of body, somatic, kinetic work. Unwiring and rewiring. I'll make sure that there are ways for people to find you, and I just wanna- Good ... highlight for our PDA-ers listening, it feels like maybe you'd be a really safe place for people who are very demand sensitive.
It sounds like this is a- Mm-hmm ... a, an integrally low demand space, a, a self-trust- Yeah ... self-led. Mm-hmm. Even for adults, right?. Yeah. , And we try to also walk our talk. We're doing it inside of a gift economy, so that also means that people can take part of the work at a financial level that fits their needs.
So it's not all hidden behind a big paywall. Mm. Beautiful. I saw that. Mm-hmm. It lives within the kind of the pay what you can, offer what you have model. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you.
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I'm Amanda. Remember, it takes great strength to let things go. I'll see you next week
