Take Back Your Life!

Do You Love Your Life?

August 24, 2015 by Giulietta Nardone

Do You Love Your Life?

In my twenties, I had trouble loving my life. After being told what to do for so long by others I didn’t know how to give myself permission to have fun, to play, to explore, to carve my own way through life.

Honestly, I was a person with a shell around me that kept the good stuff out. It was lonely and depressing and meaningless. And it dragged. Every day felt like 50 years long. All the things I’d done naturally as a child — laugh, explore, sing, dance, rebel, learn — disappeared in a fog of fear when I got into high school and beyond. I felt like that young elephant who has been chained for so long that when they remove the chain, she still stands in the same place — unaware the chain has been removed.

I saw a few others living a life they loved. They just filled the room with their enthusiasm about this adventure or that project. Yet, I didn’t know how to join them. Nor did I have the courage to ask them how they got to such a place.

Instead, I cowered behind the fears I’d developed along the way. Fear of saying hello. Fear of making the first move. Fear of speaking my truth. Fear of talking back. Fear of speaking up first. Fear of making a scene. Fear of showing my emotions. Fear of taking a chance. Fear of going for the brass ring. Fear of being human. Fear of overcoming Fear. Ad Nauseam.

It’s sad how a child that loved life gets trained to be afraid to love life. But it happens. It’s important to beat the life out of people so they follow the beaten path – the one that you wouldn’t normally get on because it looks drab and worn out. I didn’t want to get on it but felt like I had no other choice. And it was as bland and soulless as I’d imagined.

How do I get off this ugly path, I wondered?

Fortunately, when a miraculous portal opened to “love your life land,” I stepped through it or got pushed by a friend or the wind blew me into it. Not sure exactly. Somehow I made it to the other side of the looking and wishing glass and it was beautiful over there. Scary, but exhilarating because a life that you love requires you to be fully alive and that means taking chances and busting through your own status quo and bad life training.

Over time, I chose the path of what Robert Frost called the Road Less Traveled. And it is true, it did make all the difference. The first time I read that poem, I felt it was speaking to my trapped soul! God, how can I ever get onto that other path? How do I get there from the one I’m on? They don’t seem to connect. Little did I know I had to create my own connection to the path I wanted to get on.

When I start to feel too comfortable, I look down and notice I somehow migrated back towards the beaten path. At those times, I pick up an imaginary sickle and bushwhack my way back to the path less traveled.

At this moment, you may want to pause and take your own life inventory.

Do you love your life? I mean really love it. Or are you settling for good or okay? And if it’s the latter, is it really the life you want to live? Or it is the default life?

The easiest way to tell the difference? The life you love makes you want to leap out of bed in the morning because you know in your heart that the world needs you to be you because by doing so you’ll be encouraging someone else to step through their own magic portal to find the life they’ll love.
If you want to leap out of bed in the morning and don’t already, please check out my two How To Live A Kickass Life program – on-line and in -person.

The Power Of Downtime

July 15, 2015 by Giulietta Nardone

The Power of Downtime

My favorite part of a yoga class has always been savasana or corpse pose, the part at the end where I get to fall asleep on the mat with a blanket over me. Golly, I could rest like that for a few hours, but the yoga teachers always wake me up after a measly 5 minutes. I’d love to take a yoga class that was 90% savasana. Or would that be a nap?

Not sure, but naps are awesome as well. I always had a tough time at my 9 to 5 jobs because I like to nap around 3 — I NEED to nap around 3. I would close my eyes in mid afternoon and face the wall. If someone walked in, I’d snap awake. I had another job where I’d lock the door and sleep on the couch. Not sure why businesses don’t have nap rooms for the employees. A tired employee can barely stay awake, let alone perform a job function. It’s 15 minutes well spent by an employee.

I toss walking into my downtime pot as well. It relaxes me to stroll around my neighborhood in non-electronic mode. Not in a race to get anywhere, just ambling along with creative brainstorms flashing across my mind. Maybe that’s why I like to have wine with friends. It’s a slow activity centered around relaxing and conversing.

For me, downtime makes me feel more awake, more alert, more happy. I’d like to see schools implement downtime as well. The kids hop from one activity to another, when I bet a lot of them might like a nap. Why we think naps are just for tiny children makes no sense to me. (more…)

Begin Anywhere

June 23, 2015 by Giulietta Nardone

Begin Anywhere

What I’ve observed in life is that many people do not have the courage to begin the things they really want to do. Sure, they’ll begin something that falls into the default living category. But the juicy life things that will free them from some captured element of themselves — those can be hard to begin. They involve a “go for it attitude” and a leap of self-faith. Unfortunately, the ability to trust ourselves to set our own course in life has been repressed until it’s so well hidden even we can’t find it within ourselves.

The good news: it’s still there. You just need some gentle coaxing to get you to take that first step Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu calls the journey of a thousand miles.

We have many fears about taking that first step: we’ll disappear into journey quicksand, we’ll get lost in the unknown mist, we’ll be scared once we leave the beaten path.

To me those fears are the point. I don’t know where I’m going and scared as I may be, I know that to live a wild, juicy life I need to step into the unknown, embrace it as something that will be cool and unforgettable. (more…)

True Love Can Never Be Erased

June 2, 2015 by Giulietta Nardone

True Love Can Never Be Erased

This weekend I watched the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Not sure how I missed it ten years ago, but my library’s DVD collection gave me a second chance to view it.

I loved it.

Creative. Clever. Complicated. Compelling.

Without giving the entire movie away, it’s a maze-like romantic tale about the staying power of true love. You can try to erase it, but true love will always try to find its way back into your life. In the case of the movie, this love was between two people. Outside of this movie, this love can also be between a person and the things in life that make his or her heart sing. I’m sure you’ve heard of Thoreau’s quote: Most men lead quiet lives of desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. And he wrote that back in the 1800’s.

If we try to repress our true loves, we end up repressing ourselves. I am convinced that much of the brawls that break out around the world happen because the people involved have been divorced from the activities that would make their hearts sing. You may have noticed that most brawls happen to younger folks in their twenties. It’s a weird decade for many. The one decade I would never want to repeat.

Somehow in my twenties I got disconnected from everything I loved in life. It didn’t happen over night, it just became more apparent when I graduated from college and had to carve my own path through life and wasn’t sure how. Young adults go from being told what to do, to being held responsible for their lives. The endless waiting and preparation to do most anything can stifle a person’s natural ability to just go for it, like I did as a young girl.

The best advice we can give the young is to say at an early age, “Just go for it.” It gets harder to do that once you’ve been told, “Don’t go for it, until you have all your ducks lined up.”  (more…)

Live, Now

March 26, 2015 by Giulietta Nardone

In the summer of 2012, I stumbled on The Opposite of Loneliness, a moving essay that went viral, an essay written by Marina Keegan, a terrific young writer who died in a car crash on Cape Cod five days after she graduated from Yale. She was from my home town.

I’ve read this essay maybe 10 times and each time I do, it brings me to my knees because it speaks to my soul.

Marina writes, “There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out — that it is somehow too late.”

Haven’t we all felt that it’s too late? too late to start over? too late to begin? too late to live? too late to find love? too late to travel? to late be ourselves?

I remember looking in the mirror at 23, yes 23, and feeling washed up, old, a has been. This went on for about 5 years until I managed to slap my own face and say, “girl, wake up. you’re really young.” That’s when I decided to just go for things and forget the “rules” folks who don’t want you to live a full, rich life have written for you.  (more…)

Do You Take Enough Chances?

October 17, 2014 by Giulietta Nardone

“A lifetime isn’t forever, so take the first chance, don’t wait for the second one! Because sometimes, there aren’t second chances! And if it turns out to be a mistake? So what! This is life! A whole bunch of mistakes! But if you never get a second chance at something you didn’t take a first chance at? That’s true failure.”

~ C. Joy Bell

I love taking chances, especially emotional because I find those are harder than taking physical or or financial ones. Trying something new that pushes me emotionally keeps me feeling alive and kickin’. Has really helped me step out of my protective shell aka prison.

But I know that isn’t the norm. Folks have been conditioned to be frightened of taking chances, of trusting their own guts, of taking leaps into the unknown.

Yet, the irony is that life is one BIG unknown, so why we get afraid of the unknown inside the unknown can get perplexing.

People seem to be terrified everywhere of doing something new, of breaking some tradition, of making someone angry. I am convinced most of the strife in the world happens when folks feel so bottled up by not taking chances that they explode and do horrible things to each other. (more…)

Go For It! Yes, You.

May 24, 2014 by Giulietta Nardone

“Whatever it is your heart desires, please go for it, it’s yours to have.” ~ Gloria Estefan

Too many of us put off living our most glorious lives. We use all sorts of excuses to stay emotionally safe: when I get more money, when the kids get older, when I retire, when we downsize, etc.
The problem with the do-it-later philosophy is that today’s excuses get replaced with tomorrow’s excuses. Ten years go by and you are still meaning to take that improv class or hike up Mt. Fuji or write a memoir about your childhood roaming through the rain forests of Borneo.

We act like our lives will last forever and we’ve got plenty of time to do that “X” we’ve always wanted to do. It’s hard to know how much time any of us has on the planet. All I’m sure about is that I have today and that’s the best time to commit to something new. Don’t think you are alone. I put off things as well. (more…)

Stand Up For Yourself

April 15, 2014 by Giulietta Nardone

As a young child, I felt powerful.

I used to speak my mind, entertain adults with my provocative personality and roam the neighborhood in search of adventures. School definitely put a lid on my power. Way too many of my teachers wanted to tame me, put me in a box, turn me into some obedient little clone. I tried to fight it and ended up in corners, in hallways, in detention, etc.

They just keep working me until I retreated into myself and went along with the mind and soul numbing program.

Why do we do this to kids and young adults and think it’s a good idea? (more…)

Take the Interactive Marcel Proust Questionnaire!

January 19, 2014 by Giulietta Nardone

Quote of the day: “We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.” ~ Marcel Proust

Hello all!

I’ve been a Marcel Proust fan for years after reading a book about the writer called, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain De Botton. For those of you who are not familiar with the quirky, yet wise and sympathetic french author who died in 1922, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust wrote the epic: In Search of Lost Time, also know as À la recherche du temps perdu. Years ago, I got out the heavy 7 volume tome and tried to read the 3,200 pages, but could not get past the first 200. Exhausting! It’s the kind of book you almost need to take as a class in order to make yourself stay with it. However, I wanted to “read” it so I cheated and watched the movie. He spends a lot of  his life ill in bed reflecting back on his life – much of it as a child at the beach – and the lessons he has learned.  (more…)

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

April 22, 2013 by Giulietta Nardone

I’ve been watching Twilight Zone Episodes at 11 pm every night.

Great training for writers who want to learn to “twist” their readers all around. Masterfully written. No special effects. Just a few characters. Scary. Short. Make a social or political statement.

Last night — Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder.

A woman sits up in bed wrapped in bandages. She wants to know if she will look more presentable when the bandages come off. The nurse and doctors cannot guarantee she will become less “hideous.” She’s already had ten surgeries to alter her appearance. Folks turn away from her in disgust because of her disfigurement. You don’t see anyone’s face.

They remove the bandages s.l.o.w.l.y. The nurses recoil in horror. She is still “ugly.” (more…)

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