Tag Archives: Michelle Ghilotti

I Tell Him About My Life

What I’ve seen and felt incredibly helpful in the closeness and growth of this treasured relationship each year is to tell him all about myself, not a one dimensional sliver of me or what’s supposedly in the “parent rulebook”.

We sit and we talk. We really talk.

I tell him about my life and about the range of my moments: those happy, confusing, sad, decided and in-between, over and over again, showing my own humanness (though I don’t say it outright it’s akin to letting him feel into this truth: I am you, you are me and we have range…things come, things go but what stays is this deeper understanding and belief in/of yourself).

Their sense of community starts with us. #schooloflife

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life.

Life is good.

My Sandal Slapped Me In My Face (A Family Story)

We were in our hotel room last night doing that thing we do anywhere (and a lot at home) where we act like the best of roommates —

The guys talking on one bed for awhile, one or two of us poking a good kind of fun at the other, Nolan beginning to wrestle Josh, me joining in, then trying on a couple impersonations, plus, a wild dance that ended slapping me in the face with my sandal as I kicked it off in a finale (they ~ and I ~ roared with laughter!)…

As it all flowed like the Hawaiian breeze, a feeling of complete comfort and ease, of being home, filled the space between the four walls.

And then ~ the best of all purposeful pangs…

I thought, as I have many times: I want to keep them both in this nest always. I want to keep all of us safe, I want to keep Nolan safe and, bottom line, keep us alive for always.

Many of us feel this way.

It’s a type of anticipatory mourning, of things changing, of kids who are people growing up and leaving the house etc, *but* a mourning of sorts wrapped in the deepest gratitude, the mix of the two, unbelievably helpful in guiding us to be more present, to spend more time in quality ways *and* to be more ourselves.

Re: the latter, I’m not sure there’s a greater daily gift we can give ourselves or our kids — our goof glory, no Instagram filter, no perfect ‘leg out this way because you’ll look skinnier’ pose, no monitoring how much of our stories we share, nothing, but more of the most of a lighter, light-filled, childlike you (and, therefore, of them).

Because it’s only ever been this more full opening up of ourselves to another, one that says, “I trust you (to see all of me)” which sustains the bedrock of a truest love.

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life.

Life is good.

No Feeling Is Final

As I listen to the song Khalid and John Mayer did together, this:

Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

For my first-ever quote share, it needed to be a f’ing good one and this one dropped into my lap the other night.

What Rainer says is something our kids don’t know yet and that we, as kids, likely didn’t know slash weren’t told either (still today, we may know this intellectually, but not feel it beneath the throat) ~ that all feelings are transient, the “good” and the “bad” ones.

One of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves and our children, then, is the gift of a calm nervous system (maybe even more than mindset) — specifically, the tools for calming a nervous system…the ability to come back to a perspective that helps us understand, and, most importantly, feel that life is about the moving of emotion (e-motion = energy in motion) and that there’s nothing wrong if you’re not feeling just one way all the time.

For our kids, teens or young adults it starts with the simple sharing. Over and over again that, hey you, everything moves AND hey, too, you’re not alone in feeling what you’re feeling. Whether that be your joy OR the sadness or confusion.

Terrifyingly helpful? Telling them about ourselves and about ALL of our moments, those happy, sad and in between, over and over again, showing our own humanness.

Because their feeling of community starts with us.

Where else will they read about, know or trust about ____ or _____ or e-motion? School doesn’t teach us this. WE get to teach us this. By way of constant conversation, and, as much as we can muster, by modeling it, too…

If, as adults, we are afraid of being fully seen by those sitting front and center in the living room of our lives because our nonexistent parenting playbook says we’re supposed to show only a sliver of who we are, how will we (planet/families/teens) ever understand healing to know healing?

It’s probably one of the more creative and purposeful things we can do is let ourselves be seen by our kids. No Feeling Is Final.

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life.

Life is good.

Let’s Normalize ____!

You need not suffer or heal in silence.

Talk about how you’re suffering. Tell us, too, about what you’re stepping into for your healing.

We learn from you…from each other.

When we talk about what we’ve lived through (my life. being one that has included with it traumatic loss of almost each family member in my immediate family, a parent figure’s alcoholism and more), both privately with those we love and trust (friends, family or those we hire) and yes, even publicly, we heal…

***Every time we tell the truth, we heal.***

Also — we pass along our findings AND we learn we are not alone. The last being everything, too.

This is how we end up *really* knowing community and end up connecting more deeply with ourselves much more (aka: growth, purpose, wholeness, peace).

Ultimately, it’s this connection to self that heals.

So many people hide away when feeling the breaks AND even when stepping into the healing (the shhh and shame becomes our silence & solitude) — for a whole host of reasons — not the least of which being that they think they’ll be judged (for being human and having experienced life).

But we all have pain and if more of us talked about it, we’d realize that, well, we all have pain.

Let’s normalize being human. What it actually takes to move from problem to solution or from the break to a return to more wholeness.

Let’s normalize the deep heartbreak, gaining weight or that losing someone we deeply love h a p p e n s…

Let’s talk about a parent disappearing, or that our teenager is struggling. That we’re having a hard time loving our body or getting up in the morning…

Let’s bemore consistent with our openness (and, therefore, eventually society’s acceptance) of talking about suicide.

Let’s talk about divorce. It is a loss of huge proportions…and through all the above, let’s be there for a friend or BE the friend who needs the support.

We can be both.

We are pain *and* we are immense joy.

That’s the ying & yang of a life.

As important, let’s also normalize the owning of it all in a way that motivates us to search out the salve or solution to the wound vs. talking about the same thing year after year that keeps you in the suffering.

Healing means naming it. And that involves talking about it in a way that leads you somewhere DIFFERENT.

Grab a friend, a therapist, write it out, research plant medicine or all the forms available of cutting-edge psychotherapy.

Finding your unique path of support to move through it is exactly that, your unique path. And you’re ready, maybe, to walk it…

Of the 7.44 billion who feel the murmurings of a desire to move past their brand of a hard something, but aren’t ready or practiced at talking about it or moving through it, you can feel it, you’re ready.

You’re ready to…

You’re ready to heal.

Let’s make happiness your business by creating your authentic brand…

To the best of the rest of your life.

Life is good!