Author Devon Loftus Encourages Readers To Personify Their Emotions In Her Upcoming Release "Dwell"
If you're a human with feelings, this collection of essays/guided journal hybrid is for you.
I’d heard about Devon Loftus before I met her.
Well, technically, I’d heard about her company, but if you know Devon you know Devon is her company. She is everything she creates. She embodies her passions and does nothing halfway.
What she offers to the world are whole pieces of herself. Her upcoming title, Dwell, is no exception.
When Devon’s lovely publicist, Charlotte, initially reached out to me all those years ago, it was about Moon Cycle Bakery, her hormone-supportive dessert subscription service (now an online store of dry baking mixes, teas, and a cookbook of the same name). I connected with Devon via email interview and taste-tested three of her best-selling treats that I wrote feverishly about for Elite Daily. Each treat was delicious, and the concept behind the company was stellarly innovative.
Just like its founder.
Needless to say, Devon and I became fast friends outside our professional ties. We connected on social media and have had countless chats over the past six years. Though we’d only met face-to-face for the first time this past March (a travesty we’re both well aware of), I consider her a vital part of my circle.
Devon is the kind of friend you can meet for a cup of coffee, take a few sips, and then let your mug go cold in favor of the conversation. She is one of the most authentic souls, a deep-thinking intellectual, and a safe space. She’s also incredibly creative; a true artist who sees humans as beautiful, complex beings and saves space for each and every one she encounters.
But she also wants to make sure you are making space for yourself. Hence her latest title, Dwell.
Dwell, A Journal for Naming, Processing, and Embracing Your Emotions (on sale April 18th) is a guided journal that encourages readers to welcome all of their emotions — whether positive, negative, or prickly — to the table. The pages offer a space where you can sit and talk with the things you are feeling (yes, I said with), as you would with a dear friend, to understand them in a way (I can almost guarantee) you’ve never tried to understand them before: By personifying them.
When I was learning the alphabet, my teacher taught us about consonants and vowels by introducing us to The Letter People (does anyone else remember those?). Each letter had it’s own backstory, it’s own personality. The lessons became less daunting and more relatable because I was getting to know characters. I was getting to know people! I understood where they came from and what their purpose was.
This way of learning resonated with me because I resonate with people. There’s something about humanizing a thing that makes it less threatening, less intimidating, and that’s what Devon has done in this book: She reminds us that emotions are human. All emotions. The happy ones, and the negative ones. The loud ones, and the quiet ones.
Something that is also human, however, is judgment. If we aren’t judging ourselves for feeling a certain way, others are. Through Dwell, Devon encourages readers (and writers) to stop looking at our emotions with a critical side-eye, but with a wide-eyed curiosity, instead.
Everything you feel, you feel for a reason, and there’s a reason you respond to your emotions in the specific ways you do. Learning what these emotions are, what they stem from, and what they look like… it’s a masterclass in how to live with them, rather than in avoidance of them.
Ahead, I share my conversation with Devon on her upcoming release. It reads, to me, like a podcast transcription; two big-feeling friends sitting down for brunch, discussing what it is to have these emotions, to give them the space to be felt, and to co-exist with them all in the closest thing to harmony as you can.
Grab a cup of something good, and join us.
On Dwell with author Devon Loftus
From Moon Cycle Bakery to a cookbook, to now a journal. Tell me about that progression.
DL: I often ask myself that question.
They’re taboo topics that no one wants to look at, no one wants to talk about, like periods and emotions. Things we’re kind of taught to package up in a certain way and keep away from people. I think I naturally gravitate toward those topics, and when it comes to this book… this has been in me since I was a kid.
Dwell is a direct representation of who I am; a very big-feeling girl who needed to learn to accept that and then work with it, instead of shaming it and tossing it aside. I don’t know if there is a how-one-went-into-the-other, logically. But, for who I am as a person, it makes sense that I keep seeking out these themes of: Where are we making ourselves smaller because we’re told we have to? If we were to accept that about ourselves and embrace that about who we are, how would that look? How would that feel? How would that change our realities?
Yeah, when I was reading Dwell, I thought, “This feels like Devon.” None of what you do, to me, feels random; it feels representative of who you are. Still, for the people who are going to read your book and zero in on your disclaimer that you are not a psychologist, can you explain why you feel qualified to guide people in this way?
DL: Even when I was writing the [Moon Cycle Bakery] cookbook, or doing Moon Cycle in general, I would always talk with nutritionists. On podcasts or in articles, when people would ask me about hormones and what they’re doing, I only ever shared what I knew.
That’s the same thing here.
I’ll never, ever claim to be something I’m not, especially when it comes to health and mental health because that’s so dangerous, and destructive, and there are a lot of people doing that right now.
So, why I think I’m qualified… It’s funny because, in the proposal for my book, they ask you this. Why are you qualified to write this book? Because I’m a human, and I think that’s it, really. If I’m ever talking about the science or the studies behind emotions, I’m quoting psychologists or people who research this for a living. But when it comes to navigating emotions, and how this worked for me, that’s all it is. It’s just my artistic expression of how I handled really big feelings during really hard times, and how they presented themselves to me.
Did you interview people for this, or were you going off your own research?
DL: I was going off my own research. I have a certification in positive psychology (which I guess makes me somewhat qualified). For nine months, I was trained and went through a program by teachers at UPenn, which has the biggest positive psychology program on the East Coast (maybe in the country). I learned a lot of what I know from that program, and I read a lot of books.
In terms of personifying your emotions the way that you do in the book, which I love because I think that’s so unique, is that something you learned within your own therapies, or is that something you’ve come up with by yourself?
DL: When it came to trauma, and physical and emotional abuse as a kid, I would turn to creativity because it felt like an escape, but it didn’t feel like a complete collapse or numbing of what was happening. (Sometimes it was. Sometimes that’s just how I had to survive.) I would go outside because that’s the most regulating place for me, and then I would create these worlds in my head. Even if I wasn’t meeting with my emotions, the characters I creating were coming from those emotions — whatever I was feeling, whatever I was experiencing — and it was cathartic. I would basically do what I think we all do as writers: I would put myself into my characters.
When I flipped that, and thought, “Well, what if I treated these characters like they were their own people?” If these characters were my emotions, I would learn more about them because I wouldn’t be just projecting myself, I’d actually be listening to myself. I wouldn’t be attaching my emotions to stories, I’d just be hearing what they have to say. And, in that respect, I’d be a little bit distanced, so it wouldn’t feel as overpowering because I’m not my emotions. They are a part of who I am.
As I got older, I just had more recollections that I was doing that. It was after a really hard time — our apartment in California had gone on fire, we had to move home, we were building our tiny house, we had just gotten married, and there were a lot of upheavals - that I sat down and actually listened to what an emotion had to say. (That was Discomfort.) From there, it kind of snowballed and became what it is today.
You touched on this in your explanation, but I wanted to ask: You know how people say “We are not our thoughts?” Are we our emotions?
DL: I think that our emotions are biological responses. That, on some level, they are our bodies. And we can’t talk over our bodies. There’s a sense to our emotions that we can’t logically think our way out of.
There are certain talk therapies like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) where you can reframe thoughts; you can look at the stories that are attached to thoughts or feelings and see how they’re directing certain feelings and certain actions. I like that because, if you’re looking inside yourself, you’re better at understanding what my therapist calls “hurt story patterns.” You’re understanding that you have the power to create your own neuropathways - this is all the science everyone is geeking out on right now. You can’t trust everything that comes up - every thought, every emotion - but that doesn’t mean that we should judge it, or put it in a pile like oh, that’s a “bad” thought or a “bad” emotion.
I do believe that these things come up for a reason, and emotions even more so than thoughts. Emotions just want to be felt. They don’t even want a story. They don’t want us to wrap them up into something. They just want to be felt and then released.
So, it’s yes and no. Our emotions are part of who we are and I think that’s the most beautiful thing about them. We all have them. We all connect there. It’s like a universal language we all speak. And they’re not something we all want to dwell in. They’re not something we want to get stuck in because that’s not their purpose, either. But, when we over-identify, that can happen. When we avoid, that can happen. For me, it’s about finding that middle ground.
Yeah, it’s interesting how we’re talking about this because in my head it’s like… Here is a body. To the left are emotions. To the right are thoughts. What are we? What’s the middle? Maybe we don’t know that yet.
DL: I know, right? Science only goes so far on that. That’s the whole part about having a spirit, having a soul. I don’t know! I think why I’m so intrigued by emotions is because they are so tied to art. They are, scientifically, your body, but they are also lucid. In my mind, they’re biological responses and they are also these big, beautiful worlds that affect everyone, in so many different ways. The world, as we see it, is governed by emotions. If you stop and think about it, we are humans because we feel. So, yeah, it is really interesting and you’re right. We don’t know the answer yet.
I want you to explain the format of your book. The flow of its parts, the reason why you chose to format it in this way, because there are a lot of guided everythings now. There are a lot of guided journals, there are a lot of guided meditations. But, you do it in a way that I haven’t seen done. You’re not just asking people questions; you’re opening yourself up, too.
DL: To have essays and then journal prompts, was always the case. The essays didn’t start as a book, though. They started as me talking to my emotions, and then sharing them, and realizing people were feeling acknowledged and supported and happy that someone was talking about this. So, I wanted them to live somewhere and, yes, I wanted to expose myself because it’s just what I wanted to do as a writer. But I also felt like, how can I ask someone to go through their process and expose themself, if I’m not doing it as well? That didn’t seem fair or supportive.
When I started [writing] it, I started workshops and I would have these [types of journal] prompts for people to do. It was the most rewarding thing in the world. It wasn’t only that people found this to be a great tool, but just to sit and hear people and hear the emotions they created. I always walked away feeling like, my God, I never thought of it that way or saw it this way. It feels like a very collaborative thing. The goal is to learn how to regulate more, which is basically what I want from this journal because that’s something I’ve always been trying to do since I was a little kid. But, what about co-regulation? We have to do it together. Or, I believe, that’s a big part of it. So, that’s why I guess it’s [formatted as] the essays then the prompts because I don’t want to talk at people.
It feels like a conversation.
DL: Yeah! It should be. I think healing is.
But what ended up changing with the formatting was, I had initially had [the emotions] as places in the world. The term “dwell” is a play on words because we can dwell in our emotions, but also, they dwell. They have dwellings. They have places that we go to visit them. So, I had initially [categorized] them as the ocean, the forest, the desert, the city, and the town. I broke these emotions into these places. But, basically, my editor was like, “Why are these emotions in these places?” It was really only my artistic view. There was no reason. So then we came down with the five categories: Prickly, Full-Bodied, Groovy, Spacious, and Transcendent. It’s a little more direct with why [each emotion] fits in them.
You engage the reader in a four-step process: Greeting, Sitting, Conversing, and Saying Goodbye With Gratitute. Break these steps down for me. Why are each of them important?
DL: Greeting is what the psychology world would call “naming.” You’re naming the emotion. One thing I learned in positive psychology is we don’t [name our emotions] often. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that time when you ask someone how they’re feeling and they basically replay what happened. They don’t name the emotion. I find a lot of people have trouble with that and I think [it’s because] we aren’t taught how to name feelings. But that’s important. You can’t sit down with an emotion if you don’t even know what it is. You have to acknowledge it because in that respect you’re acknowledging yourself.
Sitting is really getting behind the story, and understanding what triggers are coming up. We’re not always going to know why [we feel something], and that’s okay. But, [try] understanding. Is there a hurt story here? Is this a wound that’s being poked?
The way my therapist puts it is, it’s the sneeze. It’s the sign before the sign. When you sneeze, there’s an *ah* before it starts, and then it’s done. You’re going to sneeze. Everything that comes out after, all the boogers, are the side effect of whatever that emotion was. So, if I rage, the boogers are shame, because when I rage, it’s destructive and I end up feeling ashamed for it. If you can look at the sign before the rage, what is it? I get snippy, or my heart rate speeds up, or my thoughts get really quick. What was the sign before all that? My husband’s tone of voice sounded off or I’d been going non-stop without 30 seconds to myself. What was the sign before that? If you can sit with your emotion before it shows up, before it gets to the sneeze, that’s when we heal in real-time, and how we can work with our emotions so that they don’t feel like they’re taking over us. It’s being aware of the emotion and the space it’s taking up and understanding, to the best of your ability, why it’s here.
From there is conversing and the prompts are about personifying [emotions]. It’s a really fun way to get into your creative brain and see this emotion as you would a neighbor or a friend. When we address people outside of ourselves, we’re a lot more compassionate, a lot more patient, a lot more open-minded. So how can we bring those elements of co-regulation to this emotion? If I’m anxious, is it because I really care about something? Am I angry because I feel a boundary was pushed or is it that I’m just tired? In these moments, that’s when we can ask these questions and sit and listen to what it has to say.
The fourth one is saying goodbye with gratitude, which I love. I think gratitude is a really powerful emotion and that it helps with identifying the things that help you move through an emotion. I would also say it’s not always accessible, so you don’t always have to say goodbye with gratitude. But, consider, for example, healthy anger. Healthy anger is a wonderful emotion because it tells us that we know our worth and that we have self-respect. So, in that respect, even though I don’t like feeling angry, I’m grateful for it because I know there’s a part of me that loves me. I’m also grateful to myself for feeling an emotion. Not running from it or avoiding it or yelling at it, because that’s hard to do.
You mention in the book something called “an activating event.” Can you define what that is/means?
DL: Absolutely. This goes back to CBT. It’s called the ABCs of CBT, and it stands for Activating event, Belief, and Consequence. The way I learned it in my positive certification course was that an activating event is what most of us refer to as a “trigger.” It can be anything from an actual experience to something somebody said. For me, triggers can be elusive in that I can say something like, “I don’t know why I feel so sad,” and have to retrace my steps to figure out what happened. Sometimes, we can’t even define that. But that would be an activating event.
The Belief is that hurt story I keep talking about. I use that term because I actually learned it in therapy and I really like it. Hurt stories and they are there to keep us safe. Eventually, they don’t serve us anymore, but they keep creating the same reactions over and over, so if you want to heal you’ve got to be aware of what those hurt stories are so you don’t keep yourself victimized.
Now, that’s very simple. There are lots of ways in which we are the victim and we can’t just gloss over that. It’s not a black-or-white issue. I’ll give an example of real life. Yesterday, I had an activating event because I’m doing a lot of work on being aware of when I’m dysregulated and burnt out, and how I respond in those times. Well, my husband was in that space and I felt like, when I asked a question, he was very snippy. I felt really reactive. So I took some time, I walked with [my son] Kit, and asked myself, “What was that?” The belief was, I’m doing all this work to be aware of when I’m dysregulated and how I respond, and I feel like he wasn’t holding himself to the same standard. When I could get clear on that, I knew that was not entirely true. He’s trying, too. It's not going to be perfect. I don’t expect that from him, he doesn’t expect that from me. And then I go into the consequence.
The consequence could be that I start to fight with him. Or, the consequence is that I create another hurt story about how I’m trying so hard but he doesn’t care. We can get into these patterns. But when I could look at the belief, and take a step back from it, I could see I’m triggered by the activating event, this is the belief that’s coming up, and I just need to tell him this. Now the consequence is, I’m just going to talk, and that’s what I did. I went back, told him exactly what I just said, and he said “I can see how you feel that way, I’m sorry,” and I gave him a hug and a kiss and it was over. That doesn’t always work like that (giggles), but if we can even get close to understanding [the activating event], it’s like a picture whose corners are folded in. If we can get close to understanding them, then we can see the other parts of the picture. It becomes a little easier to navigate.
What are some of the emotions you think people have the hardest time confronting, even in this day and age where being open with our feelings and being “real” is celebrated on social media? Because it isn’t always easy.
DL: Shame. I think that’s a really hard emotion. It’s just used so rampantly, in the wrong ways. I talk to my therapist about shame and I told her how it’s just one of those emotions I get really stuck in, and she said it’s actually meant to do that.
In the brain — I want to say it has to do with the vagus nerve — the goal of shame is to literally halt our system. Back when we were living in communities of, like, 35 people out in the wild, it used to be that if you went out to collect berries for those 35 people, we wouldn’t eat them because shame would be there to halt us. The reason it was there was because if we ate those berries, we would all fucking die. My point is, it was very biological. In a very primitive way, emotions are biological. Shame halts our system. It literally causes a freeze in our nervous system, or collapse. So, where do you go from there?
Shame is also so hard to have compassion for. I think we use shame in society to control and manipulate and it’s super, super destructive and I’ve seen it erode people’s self-confidence, their trust in themselves. I’ve experienced it myself. In my book, Shame is one of the few emotions I just leave. I acknowledge it is a messenger, as they all are, but at the end of the day, we want to be free of it. So I think that’s a hard emotion, in any way. Social media can be “hip-hip-hooray,” but with cancel culture, we all love to shame people. So, that’s confusing.
Then I would say, my favorite emotions like grief and melancholy are hard, but they’re so fucking beautiful. I think they’re being celebrated more, but I think they’re hard for people to confront because we’re told toxic positivity stuff.
Oh, and rage. It’s a hard one to heal from on both sides — the person giving it and the person receiving the rage. I’m learning that it also occurs when you’re so dysregulated that you’re not even in your body anymore. So rage can be such a messenger because if you’re raging, you have deep pain that needs to be addressed. I don’t know that we look at it like that as a society, but that is what I’m learning about it.
What were some of the hardest emotions to write about for you? What were some of the easiest?
DL: Rage I wrote three different times, in three different ways. It is such a complex emotion of mine. It’s probably the emotion that I will go to my grave trying to understand. Where I landed is closest to how I identify with it right now, but I’m sure that will change, and that’s the meaning of this process. It’s going to change.
There are still some emotions in the book that I’m still figuring out what they mean to me. Like humility. I don’t necessarily think that I’m not humble, it’s just not an emotion that I think about often, and I don’t think it’s loud. The louder emotions are somewhat easier, whether they’re uncomfortable emotions or they’re free-spirited emotions. If they’re loud, they have a lot to say. But some of these other emotions that are a little quieter, for me, weren’t as easy because I really had to sit a lot longer with them. They were like people who were quieter; I had to give them more space to speak up.
Moxie came from my time on the West Coast. I met so much of myself living across the country from my family and leaving an older version of myself I was ready to grow through. I left right after college and a lot happened. I was just coming off anti-depressants. There was a lot of change. I worked for Meredith Corporation and got laid off. I’d only been there not even a year so I was like, what do I do? Do I just go home? I was just starting to learn the place and [my husband] Brian just finished cooking school. That’s when Moxie came to me. I had a way I wanted to be, I was just stepping into myself. I had to lean on that.
In the book, I talk about taking the bus across the city. That was true. I took a bus and took the completely wrong direction across town. 45 minutes in the wrong direction. I got off in a not-so-great area in San Francisco, called my mom, and was like, “I don’t think I did that right.”
That’s humbling.
DL: It totally is. And she was like “Okay, well, get back on another bus and go the other way.” And that’s what I did. So yeah, I guess it was humbling (laughs), but it made me feel really confident like I could get completely lost and find my way again.
Moxie was an easy one. Vulnerability was an easy one. Grief, sorrow. Those are two of my favorites; they were easy. Grief came to me long before I even wrote it for the book. I really love Awe, and he’s an emotion I try to connect with more.
It makes sense when you’re a big-feeling person, that those would be the emotions you can write about. Then, when you don’t feel small, with those emotions it’s like, who are you?
DL: Totally. They’re there kind of quietly happening behind the scenes.
They regulate.
DL: Yeah! Very well said. You don’t hear them as loud because regulation is quiet. That’s the stillness. That’s how you know you’re regulated. It’s not like the stillness of Awe or the stillness of Peace. Those are loud, still. It’s a really interesting topic in and of itself: What are those middle emotions that just hang out with us and that we don’t even know are there?
Apparently, we can feel thousands of different emotions that we don’t even have names for.
DL: Yeah, there was someone who went through and gave them names. They’re not real names, but they’re awesome. But that naming bit, right? The Dalai Lama said that we need a map to find the new world; we need a map to find the worlds of our emotions, but we need names to do that. This is where I want to go back to grad school and study emotions for the rest of my life. It’s fascinating because, at one point, emotions were deemed unimportant by scientists. In today’s age, that’s not the case. And, I guarantee it will continue to change, so we might find more names.
What do you feel people need to know more about emotional boundaries? How to set them, and the role they play in our well-being? Because in your book, yes, you visit your emotions, but you also set boundaries with them.
DL: That’s a really great question. You’d think you did this for a living or something (smirk).
It’s funny because I don’t think I’m great at setting self-boundaries. I think I could actually have stronger boundaries with myself. But I guess it’s more subtle than I’m giving it credit for. Why are they important? Because we can’t live if we’re constantly processing something.
A lot of what I’ve been learning from my healing is that part of healing, is living. We’re healing to be. We’re not healing to think some more or ruminate. We’re not well and we’re not being if we’re stuck in constant thought about what we’re feeling. Although it’s good to acknowledge our feelings, and listen to them, saying goodbye is so important. There has to be a time you connect with your body and know that it’s too overwhelmed to deal with [enter emotion here] right now, I need to go for a walk. Or, I’m good, I’ve processed this emotion, and I don’t need to keep visiting it. It’s different for everyone, and it depends on where you are in your healing. I also think it’s dependent on where you are in your day, and in your cycle, and eight million other things, so your boundaries are going to look different every time you meet [with your emotions], probably.
With certain emotions, like shame, my boundaries are pretty solid because that isn’t a conducive emotion for me to heal. I can acknowledge it’s there because to deny it would also not be conducive to my healing, but I’m not going to let it create a story about who I am, and that’s why I walk away. It’s similar with Rage. I rage because, as a kid, I was abused so I had to. I had to survive that way. Or, that’s the way I chose to. So, the way I look at rage is, my mature, adult self can acknowledge what lies there, but I don’t need to rage to survive anymore. That boundary is in place because, as an adult, it’s just destructive.
I think the more you learn about your emotions, the clearer your boundaries become. It’s like anyone; the more you get to know a person and develop a relationship with them, the more you learn the boundaries you have to set for yourself, and they learn the boundaries they have to set for themselves. That’s respect.
Last question. Where are you going from here? What’s next?
DL: I’m just going to do nothing, and I’m looking very forward to it.
I’m a very big believer in something bigger than me. Call it God, call it the muse. Whatever it is for you. I just think we channel things that need to come through when they need to come through. This book just felt so effortless in that I just let it be, and I’m not usually good at that. I want to keep creating space for that.
I don’t know what’s next. I could have a million ideas, but I’ll know when I feel it, and I can’t do that, like any artist, until I’m quiet again. I’ve got such a full, wonderful life with a toddler and a full-time job, and I want to make pottery again, I want to paint. I just finished my end-of-life training, so I want to go volunteer at a hospice. I want to live my life a little bit and figure out who is Devon now. And just be with myself. Then we’ll see what happens.
Something will.
That’s how life goes.
I’m excited.
I absolutely loved reading this! I plan on purchasing “Dwell” as soon as possible because I’ve been going through a lot with my own emotions recently. This sounds like just the thing I need to help me work through them! Thank you Devon and Julia!