Music, Writing, And The Mind-Body Connection With Jennifer Roig-Francoli

How can creativity be expressed in both writing and music? How can you improve your creativity by being more mindful of your physical body? How can you manage anxiety when speaking or performing? Jennifer Roig-Francoli gives her thoughts in this interview.

In the intro, Taylor Swift buys back the rights to her first six albums [The Verge];
Understanding the rules of self-publishing, Becca Syme on the Bookfunnel Podcast; Multiple Income Streams for Authors, Beyond Just Book Sales [Publishing Performance];

Melania Trump's memoir audiobook using her AI voice clone with ElevenLabs, which she is selling direct from her website; my own voice clone AI-narrated thriller, Death Valley; AI narration in publishing [The New Publishing Standard];
The New York Times has struck an AI licensing deal with Amazon [The Verge].

Plus, my Fourth Edition of Successful Self-Publishing; Desecration, a British crime thriller, on special; and my AI-Assisted Artisan Author webinar;
The Geography of Belonging and Finding Home [Books and Travel].

Write and format stunning books with Atticus. Create professional print books and eBooks easily with the all-in-one book writing software. Try it out at Atticus.io

This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn 

Jennifer Roig-Francoli is an international prize-winning violinist and certified Alexander Technique teacher. She's also a high performance coach and the author of Make Great Music with Ease!: The Secret to Smarter Practice, Confident Performance, and Living a Happier Life.

You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. 

Show Notes

• Creativity in music and writing
• Timing and readiness when approaching a book
• How perfectionism can hinder your creative process
• Tips for performing and public speaking, and tackling anxiety
• How the mind-body connection relates to both music and writing
• Dealing with physical pain as a musician or a writer (and in the intro, I recommend DeskBound by Kelly & Juliet Starrett)
• What is Alexander Technique?
• Integrating music and writing into a creative business

You can find Jennifer at artoffreedom.me.

Transcript of Interview with Jennifer Roig-Francoli

Joanna: Jennifer Roig-Francoli is an international prize-winning violinist and certified Alexander Technique teacher. She's also a high performance coach and the author of Make Great Music with Ease!: The Secret to Smarter Practice, Confident Performance, and Living a Happier Life. So welcome to the show, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to talking with you.

Joanna: Oh, yes. I'm pretty excited about this. We were just saying before the recording, this is my first podcast that's really around music. I don't know why I've missed it so much after like 15 years of doing the show.

Jennifer: Well, I'm honored to be the first.

Joanna: Yes, indeed. I am interested because why write a book? I tend to think that people have this primary mode of creativity, and yours is clearly music.

Why write a book? (when music is your first mode of expression)

Jennifer: I've wanted to write a book for a long time. My dad was an English professor, so my favorite class in school was writing. I used to keep journals. I wrote poetry and stories from the time I was really little.

I just always loved writing. It’s also been therapeutic for me as an adult, just writing for myself. So writing a book was a thing I always wanted to do.

The main thing was to get my ideas across about, specifically, the work I do with the Alexander Technique, music making, and creativity. I just have a lot of ideas, and I wanted to get them out there. So a book made sense.

Joanna: So your dad was in the literature field. Were you also encouraged into music as a child?

Again, because your primary method, I guess, is music, so writing was second. Did you do that from childhood?

Jennifer: I'm told by my mother that when I was two, I declared that I needed a violin. My parents are both musicians, so it makes sense. They would sit around our living room in the evenings when I was a baby, playing quartets with their friends.

I vaguely remember sitting in the rocking chair, listening to them and watching them. So when I was two, I fell in love with a violin. My mom is a cellist, and my dad is a violist, but I liked the violin.

When I was four years old, my mother discovered the Suzuki method and got me started. So I've been playing the violin since I was four.

Joanna: Yes, wow. It's so interesting, isn't it? I think, clearly, when you were a kid, it was fun for you, and it was all around you.

I said to you beforehand that I don't really listen to music. I think part of that is my mum likes silence, so we were never really allowed to have sound around. I'm a very quiet person as well and often wear noise-canceling headphones. So it's so weird to imagine your childhood with all this music.

Which then sort of brings me to a question about, if that's your main thing that you do—

How did you face the challenges around writing when you're used to doing something so different, something so noisy?

Jennifer: Funny, I don't think of it that way at all. To be totally honest, I don't listen to much music myself either. I really enjoy making music even more than listening to it. Yes, it's pretty loud to have a violin right next to your ear.

So I don't think of it as something different, in a way. A lot of my work and what I'm most interested in is how we get inspired and how do we take that creative inspiration into ourselves? Like how do we let it flow in the mind, the body, the soul, the whole that we are? How do we take these ideas that we have and then express them?

I feel like I have these ideas, whether they are musical ideas or thought ideas, concepts.

There are ideas in my mind, and somehow they need to get out. They can be expressed through music or they can be expressed through writing.

Since I've always been writing, it was actually very easy for me to start writing this book, when it was the right time. I tried three times to write this book, and the first time I attempted it was maybe 15 years ago.

I sat down to write the book one summer on vacation, and I think I probably sat down two or three times to try to write the book and realized I was not ready at all to write this book. My ideas were not ready. They were unformed. It just was really hard. So I left it for more than a decade.

Then a few years ago, I got back to it. I felt like it was time. I got further into the process, maybe three or four months. Then life events took over and prevented me from continuing. So I took another break for maybe two years or something before I said, okay, third try's the charm. I'm going to try again, and I was determined to make it work this time.

It was actually really easy to write most of the book. It just sort of flowed out of me. It's no different from making music, really.

Joanna: So that had been kind of incubating. I think that's interesting. I've had that experience with a couple of my books, particularly one called Writing the Shadow around that darker side of ourselves and expressing that. I’d thought about that for a couple of decades, really.

You said the third time you tried again. There will be people listening who may well have put off books or tried to write books. How did you know this time it was going to work? Or did you just start again with hope, and then it started working?

When do you know the right time to pick a project back up?

Jennifer: Part of the reason I wrote the book, one of them, to be completely honest, is that it fit into my business plan. I run a coaching business for musicians, and it would serve a number of purposes for me from a business perspective to have a book out.

For one thing, there are so many people in the world that I feel could benefit from my services and what I teach, and yet so many people in the world can't afford my services. So one reason I wrote the book was to offer something really low cost to a much broader audience so they could benefit from the teachings.

It just felt like at this point in time, I knew clearly what I wanted to teach. My system was formulated. I had been teaching it a certain way for a number of years already. I really knew my stuff in a way I didn't before.

I went through certain life experiences too along the way that fed into the book. That's why the first time I tried writing it, I was just not ready. It wasn't the right time. Even the second time just didn’t work because of other life events that ended up giving me more material for the actual book when it was the right time.

So I can't really say other than that it just fit.

All the pieces fit at that time. It was right for my business. It was right in my life.

I had gotten to a point in my business, financially, where I felt I could make my book number one for a whole year, which is what I did.

I really decided that it would be okay for me to focus mostly on the book for a whole year, and that would mean probably bringing in less income from other sources. It was seeing that I could go through this process for a year and still be okay, and not have to worry too much about working hard on other stuff, if that makes sense.

Joanna: I love that you said it was the right time in your business as well. I think what that does too, is that helps you get out of your own head and think about other people. Sometimes that's what we need.

You can get lost in so many words, and then when you think, okay, who is my audience, and who am I trying to serve?

That also helped you because you knew how this fits with the people you coach, and the people who can't afford coaching can afford a book. I think that's fantastic. So often with these deep and meaningful books, we can get lost in our own heads, right?

Jennifer: Yes, I think I was completely lost in my own head the first time I tried.

Joanna: And it's making it out. So you said it took about a year. How did that year go? Was it a lot of rewriting? Or you said it kind of flowed. Was there a lot of editorial?

What was your creative process like during that time?

Jennifer: I have to say, there was one piece of advice that made it possible. Without that piece of advice, there’s no way I would have finished the book in the time I did. The advice was to not edit as I was going along.

I tend to have perfectionistic tendencies. I tell my students I’m a recovering perfectionist. My old way of writing would be about the process of writing and getting it right as I’m writing. That wasn’t going to work for me because that would take way too long.

It also meant that if I started writing that way, there are a thousand different ways to say something. So if I kept finding a better way to say something or saying, “No, this isn’t quite the right word here, let me find another one,” and then I’d have another idea, and it would take me off into tangents. Pretty soon, I’d have no idea what I was writing about.

For me to censor myself and give myself a rule, you’re not allowed to edit while writing, you just write. You’re going to write this chapter today, or whatever it was. Sometimes I did a certain number of words. Sometimes I just said, okay, this is the chapter. Sometimes I didn’t even have a plan.

For the most part I would just write and not let myself edit. That saved me. That saved that book.

Joanna: I totally agree with you, and that's how I do it, too. Everyone has different processes, but I think that is really important.

So let's talk a bit about some of the aspects of being a musician, and you cover some of this in the book. In the subtitle is “confident performance.” I was thinking about this, now you've performed at Carnegie Hall, which is kind of one of those amazing things.

As authors, we need to become more comfortable with performing. Many of us are introverts. We just don't want to get on stage and do this.

What are some of your tips for performing our work or reading our work in a way that engages audiences?

Jennifer: Oh, that's a great question. I just have to say that even though I've been performing since I was a really young child with the violin, it took me a really long time to be brave enough to speak in public.

The fact that I'm here doing podcasts and interviews and speaking from stages is just mind-blowing to me because I was an extremely shy, introverted child. Somehow, because I started performing with the violin very young, it was just a natural thing that was easy for me. That was no problem, but speaking, I really had to work on that.

The breakthrough for me was, to give you an example, I actually knew how bad I was at speaking in public. In college, I signed up for this class on public speaking, and we needed to memorize a poem for the second class. I thought, Oh, this is fine. I can memorize music, no problem. So I memorized the poem, but I freaked out. I was so terrified.

So I got to this class, and I stood up, and I think I got maybe the first two lines out, and my mind went totally blank. There was no way I could retrieve anything else from that poem. Unfortunately, I was so mortified that I dropped the class and never went back.

Long story short, I actually didn’t work on speaking intentionally, but as a result of my Alexander Technique teacher training—which takes three years, by the way, so like 1600 hours to get certified as an Alexander Technique teacher—through that process, I opened up in my whole self.

In opening up in my whole self, including speaking with other people in the class, it became much, much easier for me to expose myself and be myself in public through words.

So just speaking off the cuff like we are now, I can do it now, and I find it really fun, but it was mortifying earlier. So I completely understand what you're talking about.

I do have some tips. Performance anxiety is a big thing that I help my musicians with. Through the way that I teach the Alexander Technique—which is actually called Primal Alexander—we’re really learning how to connect how we're thinking with how we're feeling in the body.

So it’s really important when you're feeling nervous or anxious, it’s really important just to notice that without judging it to begin with.

Self-observation is one of our best tools.

It’s a human gift to be able to self-reflect, and for you to see yourself from outside, and observe and watch, and ask yourself, “What's going on? What’s actually happening to me right now in this moment?”

I'm doing this for myself right now, and anybody listening, I invite you to just ask yourself, “What's happening to me right now? What am I noticing?”

If you're nervous, you'll probably notice symptoms like the heart racing or sweating or shaking or shrinking, getting tight. All these things that happen in a fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response. There's a tightening, a constriction going on in the system. It's uncomfortable. We don't like that feeling.

So what we usually do is try to fix it, make it go away, or mask it somehow. None of those things really work. They can work to a point, but the best way I've found that is really foolproof—and it works for everybody I've worked with—is if you really just stop and get curious like a little kid, like you're a Martian with no idea what's going on.

Or you’re just a scientist taking observations, and you are your own science experiment. Or you’re a detective, and you want to find out. You want information. Like, what is happening to this human being right now? What's happening? “Oh, my heart is racing,” or, “Oh, I'm shaking.”

Then if we can develop the response of, “Oh, that's interesting. What else is happening?” and to keep asking “what else?” without and rush and without any judgment. Just be with the experience. That in itself is incredibly powerful.

When you really stick with it, with that attitude—and —

Attitude is everything. It’s that childlike curiosity where you’re giving yourself time to notice and be curious and not trying to change your experience.

Except you don't get fixated on it, so you keep asking yourself, “Okay, interesting. What else?”

Joanna: Yes. Obviously, your Alexander Technique is a physical practice, and this idea of being in the body, I feel like so often, as authors, is different to musicians. Especially with the violin, your body is making the sound. Like you're moving with an instrument.

Writers, so much of it is in our heads, and yet, as you say, going on a stage or speaking is physical. You are a physical human in this experience. So I like that you talk about that.

I also find, because I do a lot of speaking, I always do sort of writing beforehand, and I just write “thank you that I can serve the audience.” Again, like we said at the beginning — 

I'm here for them. This isn't actually about me.

This is what I can help them with. Is that similar to you, as a musician, that you're really thinking about serving the people who are listening?

Jennifer: Yes, that's a beautiful way to think of it. I love how you do that before you go out.

Joanna: It just changes my perspective from being obsessed about how I feel to trying to help other people with whatever they're looking for.

Jennifer: That's really a great point. It is so good to include both. Ultimately, the way I look at it is that I want to be open and responsive to both what's going on inside me and what's going on outside of me.

Ultimately, I feel like I can best serve the world around me when I'm making sure I take care of myself first. When I'm at my best, that's when I have my best to give.

So it’s interesting what you said. Also, you might be surprised because I never thought of playing the violin as a physical activity until I ended up having physical problems. I really thought of it as a mental thing.

I really had a mind-body split, where I had this false notion, first of all, that there is such a thing as a mental activity that's just mental or a physical activity that's just physical. That’s just not true.

Even as a writer, you do have an instrument because you have a pen or a pencil or a computer, and you need to use your physical body to get those ideas out of your brain. It's really not so different from a violinist who has a violin and a bow to get the ideas out.

So I actually always used to think it was a mental activity, and I had this prejudice against what I thought of as physical activities. My brother, for example, was really into sports. I liked sports when I was really little, I didn't have a mind-body split when I was really little.

The older I got, the more praise I got for being more intellectual, getting good grades in school —

and all that kind of thing. The violin was included in there for me. So then I didn’t think much of sports.

There was a whole dynamic in my family too that was, in me, kind of messed me up. It caused problems down the road because if you don't recognize how you can't really separate the mind and the body, ultimately something will suffer.

Joanna: This is so funny because this is exactly the same for me. My brother also was the sporty one and played basketball. He snowboards and skateboards. In terms of physical intelligence, he is physically intelligent, in terms of just amazing physical awareness.

It took me, also, probably 25, 30 years, and then you hit 35, right, and your body starts hurting. Then you hit 40, and it gets worse. Then you have to start doing something. I ended up damaging myself and getting help for that.

You talk in the book about chronic pain and your own physical stuff that led you to the Alexander Technique. Tell us a bit about that, because—

People listening, if they're not already in pain from writing, they’re probably going to be.

Jennifer: Oh, dear. Yes, so I found the Alexander Technique because I had neck pain. It wasn’t directly from playing the violin because at that time, I had young children, and had not been playing the violin seriously for a while. I had a major career that I cut short when I was 19 and got married at 20.

I stopped playing as a soloist. Then I spent quite a few years playing the violin in other capacities, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I’m just, by nature, a soloist. I loved doing that. It made me happy. It was exciting.

I stopped all of that, then I got married at 20. I started playing in orchestras and teaching violin—things I never really wanted to do—just to earn money.

It was good because I kept up my skills, but ultimately I was suffering because I didn’t have a creative outlet other than my family. Of course, having children is a beautiful creative outlet. But carrying toddlers on my hips, my alignment was completely off. It was really stressful, like I didn’t have family around to help.

I got progressively less happy. As I got less happy, I had more stress, and the physical stress of lifting my children and carrying them around. One day, I ended up with neck pain that wouldn’t go away.

I ended up going to doctors and chiropractors, and nobody could really help until I finally ended up at an Alexander Technique teacher’s studio. That completely changed my entire life. So I went for pain, but it was actually a deeper, creative kind of pain. It wasn’t about the violin, it was about blocked creativity for me.

Joanna: I guess if people don’t know—

What is the Alexander Technique?

Jennifer: Sure. You mentioned earlier that it’s a physical technique, but actually I think of it as a whole-person technique. I know why you’d think that because if people look up Alexander Technique, they’ll probably find things about posture. You’ll see a practitioner touching the student gently with gentle manipulation, and moving, sitting, and standing.

It can give the impression that it’s about the physical body only, but it’s much deeper than that. I’ve been fascinated since the beginning of my Alexander journey to know what was underneath. For me, the Alexander Technique is a way to connect how you're thinking with how you're feeling, both physically and emotionally.

When you learn how to connect and integrate your whole self—your mind, body, emotions—when you are more integrated and whole, you bring that whole of you into activity, you can learn to do whatever you want to do with much more ease, much less effort, much less tension, and much more joy.

So that, to me, is what the Alexander Technique is. That’s also why I teach it with that touch, so I can empower my students to learn to think differently to get different results.

Joanna: Yes, I've definitely found—I do a lot of weight training—and I felt like I've learned so much about what the body and mind connection is, just from being much more present in my body, which I wasn't for so long as an author.

Obviously, you work with musicians who are suffering pain, and some people listening might also be musicians, but—

What are the things that people come to you with that relate to the mind and body connection or the creativity that some people listening might recognize or find useful?

Jennifer: Yes, I'll just say as an aside, I'm always open to working with non-musicians. In fact, when I first started teaching Alexander technique, I wanted to work with anybody but musicians, believe it or not. I spent quite a while working with firefighters and journalists and teachers and all kinds of other people.

So I'm always open to that. Recently, I had a photographer join one of my classes. Ultimately, we're all just human. We are all working on the same things. We're working on how do you bring your whole self to whatever activity it is that you're engaged in, that you're interested in? Whether you're a musician or a writer or whatever it is that you do.

The specific things that people come to me for generally have to do with improving their skills to get better at whatever the activity is, or they have physical pain. A lot of musicians end up with tendinitis, neck pain, back pain, carpal tunnel—real physical issues where it's career threatening. If you have tendinitis, you can't play the violin or the piano. You have to stop.

There are a lot of famous musicians in the media, like recently, there have been quite a few people who have had to just take long breaks. It happens with athletes too. Ultimately, musicians are athletes. We just work with fine motor skills, and obviously what we’re producing is different. We are producing music. Athletes are producing a football game.

It really doesn't matter because we are human. We need to learn how to think in a way that—well, here's something I always come back to. It's a favorite quote of mine from Frederick Mathias Alexander, who is the originator of this technique. He said, quote, “Mine is a method for the control of human reaction.” End quote.

“Mine is a method for the control of human reaction.” We are reacting to stimuli in our lives all day long, unconsciously or consciously.

For me, this process is about learning to be more conscious of how we're reacting to things. Noticing, okay, if I react to XYZ by getting tight, for instance, if I react to speaking in public by getting tight and my body's getting stiff, do I like that result?

If I don't like that result, then maybe I could examine my attitude or how I'm thinking and think differently. Alexander started all of this, the Alexander Technique originated in his performance issue of getting hoarse when he was speaking in public. He was an actor, not a musician.

So everything we're talking about is really pertinent for writers who need to speak in public too. That's what Alexander had to do. He would get hoarse, and then he wouldn't be able to recite Shakespeare, which was his love.

He went to specialists and nobody could help him. So he figured he had to either quit and not speak in public, not be an actor, and do something else, or solve the problem himself. So that’s what he did. Thanks to him, we have this method that is amazing.

Joanna: Yes, I find this so interesting. For people listening, you mentioned carpal tunnel. I know loads of writers who end up having that operation for carpal tunnel. Or people with back pain who are just on a lot of meds. I feel like people think that it can't be solved in any other way than medically.

I pretty much gave myself a shoulder injury from hunching over my keyboard and basically tore my rotator cuff from hunching.

Jennifer: Sorry. Very common, though, I'm sure.

Joanna: Exactly. I went to a specialist. I got the steroid injection to immediately stop the pain. The shoulder guy said to me—this was about six years ago, I was 44 years old—he said, if you don't sort this out with your posture, do weight training, reverse this, you will be back here and I will have to keep seeing you.

It was good. He gave me a real talking to and basically said, get out of here and sort this out. It’s so interesting to me because I know some people listening will be like, well, no, this is clearly just a physical thing that I have to fix with an operation or drugs or whatever.

Do you incorporate the medical side into your practice, or is it very much that this takes time to work on your body?

Jennifer: I don't diagnose. I don't have that training. I'm not trained to diagnose anything physical like that. Alexander Technique, there's actually quite a bit of research on it. Unfortunately, it's like the best kept secret in the world. It really does help anybody with anything.

It's hard to get people to believe that. If you're saying, I can help you with anything, but that's been my experience.

Of course, thank goodness for surgeons, thank goodness for doctors, and thank goodness for drugs that are helping people and saving lives. I'm in no way saying we shouldn't have all that. However, there are so many surgeries performed that are unnecessary, in my opinion.

In my experience, I've worked with many people who were about to have surgery and then came to me as a last resort. Or they had the surgery, and it wasn't getting better, and it didn’t solve the problem. Or they had the treatment, and they had to keep going back again and again.

It's pretty clear to me that there's a purpose and reason for the medical profession. They serve a very important purpose. Yet, there's a huge aspect that's completely missing that they are not trained in, which is seeing the whole person and treating the whole person.

Of course, there are alternative practitioners and people who do that. That's great. I don't think of myself as a medical practitioner of any kind, in any way. It's remarkable that I've had many people come to me, primarily because they had pain.

I'm thinking of one person in particular that comes to mind immediately, now another one. Two people actually, who were told by their doctors they would always be in pain because the issues they had were so severe. Like from multiple car accidents, from broken vertebrae, from slipped discs.

These were very serious physical things you could see on a scan, they’re real things. Yet, through practicing the awareness etudes, those are studies, like little awareness exercises I give my students. I have them do just a few minutes every day.

I tell them, take these like they're antibiotics. Don’t skip a dose. Prioritize this. It's really easy, really simple, but you have to stick with it.

There's a kind of paradigm shift that happens when you start to look at life a little differently.

You notice everything’s related. You start noticing how you react to things and get curious.

You keep observing, wondering, experimenting with thinking differently. Then your pain starts dissolving. It's amazing. I've had so many people actually use the word “miraculous.” I don't know what's going on. I do believe there are mysterious forces in the world.

It's also a very practical technique that people don't have to believe in it. They just need to be curious enough to try something different. If you keep doing the same thing, you'll get the same results.

That’s what we do when we go to the computer, for example. We open up the computer and we typically do the same things. We have the same attitude. We are not aware of the rest of the world. We shut out our peripheral vision. We forget about space behind us. We forget about the rest of our lives.

We become so narrow-minded that our bodies just follow the mind. The body becomes narrowed because it follows the narrow-mindedness and the narrow focus. We're taught that in school. It’s drilled into us that we need to focus and concentrate. The way we're taught to concentrate is to narrow how we're thinking.

The body is innocent. The body just reflects what we’re doing with the mind. That's why we end up in pain.

Joanna: Yes, and particularly, like circling back to what we were saying about what we were rewarded for as, you know, good girls who were doing well at school, and doing what we were told, and doing well on exams. I feel like I spent 30 years denying my body and what my body needed.

Then I've essentially had to change direction.

Now a lot of what I do every day is physical movement in order to help fuel my creativity and everything else. I'm much happier when I move.

If I start to be in pain, I will get moving. So I love what you're doing. I think it's fascinating.

Just one last question before we go. So at the end of the book, the subtitle is “living a happier life.” I wondered, how do all these things come together for you now, with the writing and the music and your business?

Do you still have your music as a separate thing to your business?

Jennifer: I love that question. I've basically spent my whole life working on integrating everything. Actually, it is pretty integrated, I have to say. I do my own marketing, for example, for my coaching business, which entails a lot of writing.

When I first started this business and realized how much time was going to go into marketing, it was overwhelming, and the last thing I ever thought I could enjoy doing.

Selling anything was far from my artistic beliefs about life. But it's either market yourself, or have somebody else do it, or starve.

So I learned how to market. I realized if I need to do this, I might as well figure out a way to enjoy it. I do love writing. So I actually have done a lot of training. I've bought courses, had coaches, and had a lot of coaching in copywriting.

My writing is definitely a part of my day every day. My music is what I write about. Even though I'm not necessarily performing much anymore these days, it's been a few years since my last real performance—I've performed live on Facebook, if that counts.

I still play my instrument, but I don't need it to feed my creativity. That’s what I realized when I was 19, honestly, that I didn't need it to be a creative person. I don't need to write, but I enjoy writing and I enjoy making music. I also enjoy going for walks in nature.

Ultimately, it's really about—and this is what I'm really working on—how can I be really myself, authentically myself, right now? Being who I am includes connecting with people. That's a form of expression, and that's creative.

If I can get out of my way and allow inspiration to guide me, that’s a really creative process. I'm doing that right now, and I hope to get better at it as I go through life. That makes me happy. That’s where the happy comes in.

Joanna: Yes, absolutely.

Where can people find you, and your book, and everything you do online?

Jennifer: I have a website. It's www.artoffreedom.me. That's my website. Facebook is my main way to connect with people. I'm very accessible. People can also contact me through the website.

I have a YouTube channel. If anybody wants to hear my music, just look up my name on YouTube and you'll have plenty of music to listen to, as well as teaching videos talking about these kinds of things.

Joanna: Brilliant. Well, thanks so much for your time, Jennifer. That was great.

Jennifer: Thank you so much.

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