Before Goop There Was My Mom

Image via The Hollywood Reporter

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Before I was obsessed with Gwyneth Paltrow, and before I found the article on Goop that changed my life— there was my mom, my original health influencer.

In every house we had, my mom created a garden (not just flowers but food). She has always been a nature person. I think she did her best in the 90s trying to decipher what had vitamin C and nutrients (though the 90s were a low point, nutritionally, for all of us in the U.S.).

As I got older, we all collectively learned more. By the time I was in my teens, we were mindful of sugar intake, she would order homemade bread from a lady at our church who made it from scratch, and we would make lunch sandwiches with it. We leaned into home remedies and activated charcoal. We became plant-based, which removed a lot of hormone-injected meat from my diet (which I know helped my own condition). I would do exercise DVDs with her, and follow her example. That’s the stuff that stays with you. (Denise Austin is a QUEEN).

She found us a functional doctor who had worked for the military, and always tried to give us the best. As I reflect back on this, I am so grateful I had a mom who led the way with wellness in a time when we were all trying to figure out what was what. When I made changes and protocols to heal my own hormones, I never felt skepticism or gaslit by her, but on the other hand, I felt encouraged. I found support in my mom that I didn’t even find from doctors who were fine to let me know what was wrong with me but offered no solutions. To this day, my mom and I talk about health and the little experiments we try on ourselves. (To fast or not to fast). I am grateful to have someone to talk to about wellness. It occupies so much of my brain space.

My mom is a very strong woman. If at any point I took charge of my own health and found my pockets of healing and process, that strength to research, try and advocate for myself came from her because she gave me the permission to be unconventional early on. She was unconventional early on.

The other day, I heard Tracy Anderson say that those who find her method and do it are those who don’t try to find the easy way out. They take the harder road for lasting results and longevity. When she said this, it reminded me of my mom. She doesn’t take shortcuts. My original wellness influencer— whether I realized it at the time or not.

She had us eating homemade bread. I mean, what a gift.

Forever grateful for my mother.

Happy Home

“To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition.” Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

By: Gabriela Yareliz

This Dr. Johnson was way ahead of his time. This week has felt so weird. Started with food poisoning, a truck soaked me on my way to work— you could have wrung my pants and all that dirty puddle water would have filled a bucket. The city is such a mess; I have had to hop over at least four homeless people to get to where I need to go and a giant dead rat in the middle of the Times Square station. I have felt stressed. Who hasn’t? Some days and weeks you regret leaving your bed. You just want to sleep and stay in the safe cocoon of four blankets.

In addition to reaching for gratitude and intense journaling where I lay out all my puddle-soaked laundry, I have been thinking a lot about Dr. Johnson’s quote. What does it mean to treat a happy home as the best ambition? How does that shape how we react to the absurdities and tragedies of the day?

What we measure as success can be so hollow. Success is only found in the happiness we find at home. Even then, I know some people are in spaces they can’t control or don’t feel safe in (mainly children and adolescents; adults have choices), but there is still another definition of home— the home within yourself. The inner fortress you can retreat to. The place where you make your own safety, and where it pays to make your own joy.

What would change for us if we valued a happy home as the “ultimate result” of all our striving?

Saying “No”

“Saying no is not about lack of ambition. It is about sustainability. It is the quiet act of trusting that rest, space, and discernment will take you further than hustle alone.

This week, think of no as a reset, not a rejection.” Mary Holland Nader

Next-Level Maturity

“One of the ways I used to betray myself (the most) was by sharing my most fragile ideas and intimate ideas with the exact wrong people.” Tara Schuster

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Tara Schuster articulates something we all fall into. Having that level of discernment is next-level maturity.

The Path is Paved By Choices

“If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.” Joseph Campbell

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Our path is one we need to clear. That requires making decisions. Choices. I think the world is full of people who are afraid to take ownership of their decisions because they don’t trust they can make the “right” one. But life doesn’t require a right choice; it requires a strategic choice that is made to the best of your ability with what you know. We can’t control outcomes.

The key to remember as you pave your own way is that someone has to decide. If you aren’t making the choice, someone else is making it for you. Don’t give up your agency even though it’s tempting to want to have someone to blame. Truth is you can’t blame someone you delegated your agency to. That is also a choice. Better to take ownership and move forward in courage.

Pave your own path with your best choices.

When Grief Rips Through

“Let’s not romanticize grief. It is a ghost parade. Sleep doesn’t come. Only reckoning.” Rainier Wylde

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Grief can stem from so many things or circumstances. It is often tied to death, but it can be tied to addiction, abandonment, loss of time, betrayal, not being understood or loved, and the loss of a life that was possible. Grief is a complicated thing we often can’t name. It can also hit you like a tidal wave when you least expect it to.

I was thinking a lot about grief this week. I think it was sort of front-of-mind with the moving Dedication Night on Dancing with the Stars. A night where vulnerability reigned, and some dark moments were showcased as resilience and complicated circumstances turned into pivotal moments underscored by love.

Rainier Wylde wrote a piece on grief that I related to, Ghosts on Parade. He writes: “[Grief] keeps arriving in steady waves, prowling around the door at ungodly hours, tearing through your chest as if the ribs were made out of confetti.”

The more we fight grief, the more it attacks to subdue. Wylde writes, “Let the monsters finish their feast.” And then, when you stop holding it in and trying to repress it, things become “not easier but bearable. And somehow, in its own terrible way, that change(s) everything.”

Wylde wisely writes that “Control is an illusion. Closure is a myth. What we have is the practice of opening, again and again, to what hurts. And when we allow the rains or the dragons to come, we discover the storm is survivable, the fire is livable, and more than that, it clears the air. There is only the possibility for joy is in the present moment. That’s where the real magic is.”

That is what transforms us— the fires and hurricanes we survive. The act of survival leaves you a different person, a stronger person. It’s the seal on the wound that makes a scar.

Wylde continues writing, “We are experts at disappointment.” But then, there is gratitude. The ultimate rebellion in the midst of grief.

“Gratitude has never been polite. You won’t find the grit of it on a Hallmark card or a cheery Instagram caption. It’s feral. It’s wild. It’s a person at the end of their rope who still marvels at the smell of rain in the heat of the day. It’s someone who has lost everything and yet stops to taste a warm tomato. It’s learning to slow down long enough to catch the shimmer of ordinary life before it passes you by. Gratitude is choosing to name these moments as sacred, as enough, even when the world insists it’s still lacking,” Wylde writes.

No matter what you have been through or what you have lost, or what you are currently losing or braving, the question becomes—Will you dare to allow grief to cleanse you? Will you rebel and find the gratitude in the everyday sacred?

I conclude with Wylde’s beautiful words on gratitude—

“Gratitude is, in the end, an impolite refusal. Refusing to be drowned by despair, or bent by bitterness or keep playing the tired game of excuses and blame. It is the rude, beautiful insistence that we our ragged, ordinary, half broken life is still astonishing.”

Embrace the “impolite refusal” and “beautiful insistence.” It’s where we find the resilience, strength, joy and magic of life as the waves cleanse our souls with tears.