Singer-Songwriter Jewel Shares Her Mindfulness Practices

Jewel shares two simple mindful breathing techniques for learning to observe your thoughts.

Photograph by Chris Owyoung

Singer and songwriter Jewel began a mindfulness practice when she was just a kid, long before she’d heard the word “mindful.” Self-taught meditations and visualizations, journaling, and the practice of observing her thoughts and choosing healthier ones, were survival tools she used to navigate a chaotic family life and then, later, the anxiety-filled teenage years living on her own. She still uses them today.

Her digital platform, JewelNeverBroken.com, shares these and other easy-to-learn practices, like Counting Breath and Box Breathing meditations, to support others to help find calm, to build emotional fitness, and to create happiness in their own lives. (Jewel demonstrates the Counting Breath and Box Breathing meditations in the video above.)

“They’re very simple, doable tasks, if you really have the desire to change, and you’re willing to look in the mirror and say ‘Happiness is up to me and not anybody else,’” she says.

“People are anxious because they don’t have a good echo-feedback system. How can you hear your intuition speaking to you—it’s a very quiet whisper—if you have so much anxiety? It’s like having this radio station that is on static constantly.”

“People are anxious because they don’t have a good echo-feedback…