When Lainie Liberti, a 42-year-old single mom in California, said goodbye to her staff and closed the doors of her office for the Christmas holidays in 2008 she knew she wouldn’t be opening them again. The recession had hit her business hard and she had lost clients by the dozen. Other small boutique consultancies across the world were suffering the same fate. Branding, PR and other ‘additional’ consultancy services were the first to be let go as bigger businesses struggled against the recessional tide.
[responsive_vid]
Sitting at home and sighing about how good things used to be and worrying about the debts that had to be paid was one option, but Lainie decided to think outside the box. She decided to do what she had done for so many businesses over her 18-year career – to rebrand. To rebrand her life.
“I decided to be the change instead of the victim. Miro, my son, was growing up and I wanted to have stress-free quality time with him. I said to my son, ‘What if we got rid of all our stuff and went on an adventure?’ He said, ‘Yes’, and when I told him he wouldn’t have to go to school he said, ‘OH YES!”
Lainie and the then 9-year-old Miro began the process of redesigning their lives. They sold and gave away all of their possessions, and six months later the pair hit the road for an adventure. Rather than be a dictating mom, Lainie took him on as a partner – for every decision they were in it together.
“The plan was to spend a year traveling and to reach Argentina by the end of the year.”
Four years and 14 countries later, Lainie and Miro have not yet reached Argentina. They currently reside in Peru and intend to continue to slow travel around the globe, living an inspired, possession-free lifestyle.
“Of course people thought we were crazy! A blonde single mom from California traveling with her son to all these ‘dangerous’ places. Yes, people thought we were crazy. A friend even recommended that we get kidnap insurance!
“Fear cripples a lot of people and stops them doing what they want to do. I’ve chosen to live without fear and live through inspiration and intuition instead. We decided to participate in the world without fear.”
When Lainie realised their travels were becoming a lifestyle rather than just a one-year adventure she looked into alternative schooling for her son and discovered unschooling.
“Once I discovered that learning never stopped, our world opened up with possibilities. I started learning again, and learning with my son. Learning about unschooling and trusting the process has been a huge gift for both of us.”
Lainie looks back on how they were when leaving and their transformation to the people they have become. Their relationships with the world, with cultures, and their attitudes have changed completely.
“I don’t need a lot of stuff to be happy. I don’t need a lot of money to be happy. I am just happy and my relationship to stuff has definitely changed.”
However, learning to appreciate and live in the moment seems to be the biggest discovery for Lainie.
“I no longer needed to be the ‘doer’ and within the first year, became perfectly fine with just being still, in the moment. Other people had a hard time with that, but that no longer was my problem. For me, that was huge.
“There is nothing more precious than the moment. To think, I almost missed the ones that included my son’s tween years. I missed a lot of the younger years because I was working. Working. A. Lot. I’ll never compromise these [moments] again.”
To hear the podcast of Rosie’s full interview with Lainie click the link below.
It was when she awoke from her 20th colon rectal surgery, and following the reversal of her four-year colostomy bag, which all resulted from a massive infection caused by a botched-up biopsy 10 years previous, that Yulady Saluti, a 32-year-old yoga instructor and mother of six, was told she had Stage II breast cancer.
She had thought the 20th attempt to fix the problem was going to be the last surgery; she had kept her spirits high with plans for the future.
Even though she had had major surgeries in the last few years in an area of the body that most people would be embarrassed to discuss, Yulady managed to excel in her new-found passion: yoga. So much so that she appeared in yoga DVDs with Tara Stiles and Deepak Chopra and on TV with Sadie Nardini, and she was teaching in four different yoga studios.
But now life was throwing her another clanger.
“My husband was standing next to me, waiting for me to regain consciousness again, just as he had been doing since the first surgery I had exactly two weeks after our wedding. I blinked up at him and said, “Hey, babe. How did it go?” He looked back at me. “You have breast cancer, honey.”
Yulady had Stage II breast cancer at the age of 32. Not only was it ruining her future plans but she also had six children waiting at home for their mama.
“I had been depressed before. It’s very easy to play the ‘Why me?’ card – I did not want to go back there. Rectum, colon, colostomy are taboo subjects and definitely not something you want to be talking about in your 20s. It was keeping my illness to myself that caused the depression.
“So I dealt with this a whole other way than my last illness. I googled double mastectomy and you wouldn’t see the women’s faces. I said I want to show the world what a woman looks like with a double mastectomy. I still felt beautiful. My husband thought I was still beautiful. He has helped me a lot through it. I gave myself one ‘Why me?’ day and then I picked myself up and got on with it.
Yulady began blogging and creating YouTube videos about her journey through treatment and recovery.
“It was important for me to show the woman behind the treatment …”
It’s now exactly one year on since her diagnosis and Yulady is cancer free.
Through the highs and lows of the year, Yulady’s frank blogs and bare-chested (and sometimes bareheaded!) empowering photos have helped remove the veil of mystery surrounding the issue of breast cancer treatment, which so many women face every day. It also shows a woman following her passion no matter what life throws at her.
“In my very first yoga class, I felt the happiness and the peace I’d been searching for. And I still feel this way. Practising yoga, I lose track of time. My mind stops thinking about the future or the past. I feel whole. I am able to just breathe and be aware of the breath, to be present and only present. I let go of everything else. Yoga is my happy place, which (I think) makes me my happy place. Because of yoga, I can find the bright side of a crappy situation.
“For me, yoga was the light in my darkness.”
Now, every day on Instagram and Facebook, Yulady posts photos of herself in the most amazing extreme yoga poses and she posts regular tutorial videos on YouTube encouraging others to take their yoga passion to the max.
Cancer is not mentioned much anymore because it is no longer an issue; it’s now more about one powerfully inspiring woman following her one powerfully inspiring passion.
Sharon’s decision to change her life started on a compost heap in Devon, UK. She and her husband, Gary had made it – they had the careers, the big incomes, all the stuff money can buy. They lived in their ideal house in the country. The only problem was their rubbish collection was unreliable, so to cut down on waste Sharon started a compost heap. Then some ‘thing’ began to grow on top of it. This Thing changed their lives.
[responsive_vid]
Our journey into downshifting started very appropriately on a compost heap about 15 years ago in deepest Devon. As a then twenty-something couple on hefty incomes we were about as blasé as you could get when it came to spending big bucks on unnecessary tat and space-absorbing stuff.
I had always loved the countryside and never strayed too close to suburban living and back then Gary and I were enjoying life in a tumbledown cottage just outside Exeter. With a very casual interest in being self-sufficient and a rather unreliable rubbish collection service we started up a compost heap in the back garden. Sometime in the early summer I spotted something odd growing on the heap. I thought it must be something horribly poisonous, but as weeks passed a very large and very beautiful squash-type thing developed. It became clear that we should do something with it, so one night after a horrible day in a stuffy office I bravely sacrificed the globe-like squash and roasted it in the Rayburn. Gary came home from work and we ate home-grown, all be it accidentally, squash with yoghurt and mint sauce and some rice, it was fantastic and it was cheap, nearly free in fact.
We were hooked. So what next? Well in all honesty we both hated our jobs in Marketing and were always secretly looking for something better or different. Over time our lifestyles became less wasteful and more productive – we grew vegetables, we preserved food, collected kindling, made and drank wine, sloe gin and damson vodka, shopped locally where possible and generally lived a fairly ‘good life’ so to speak. However, it would be untrue to say we were ‘green’, more that we were looking after ‘our own’ and not really aware or tuned-in to what was going on with the planet or outside the safety of our little haven where rain and sunshine were plentiful and the soil good. We were complacent.
Moving house to be near Gary’s new job marked a pivotal and pretty low point in our effort to live greener. Life was hectic and spending even more so, time was non-existent and we barely saw each other in order to keep payments up to date on our burdensome credit cards which had amassed over the years. Archie was in nursery and therefore in expensive disposable nappies. I had a three-hour round trip to work each day – somewhere along the line we had lost sight of what crucially mattered in life. We had to change and get things back on track, and so we did.
After many late nights talking through our options, we realised that not only were we time and energy poor but no better off financially as commuting and nursery fees ate away nearly all our income.
We wrote down lists of aims, ideals and plans, we identified ways of earning money in a more family friendly way, and most of all we read, and read some more: books, magazines, newspapers, journals, websites, case studies, biographies and blogs by those who had already made the leap into living more naturally and consciously. By researching options and lifestyle choices I became acutely aware of the wider impact all our individual choices had on the world as a whole, from choosing to buy local and insisting on fair trade to opting to cook from scratch and refusing GM foods.
Issues were raised in our house from homeschooling to politics, shopping to crafts. We both realised that we had taken control of our lives again and could make informed choices on how to live better in the future.
We started our own business and became responsible for our own hours, income and working environment. Working for ourselves has given us much more freedom and allowed us to enjoy time out with our children without having to schedule them around our work. I also completed a year-long course in Horticulture with the RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) and most significantly we moved to a rural area of Tuscany in Italy.
The journey into downshifting is a continual one and each day brings a new challenge or discovery; I am constantly amazed at how many people want a simple way of life but do nothing about it. The debt issue is universal, most of my friends owe large sums to the bank, us included, although we are nearing the end of a long period of miserable loan repayments. Personally, I only recognised the link between income and expenditure in my late twenties when I had already immersed myself in the debt culture.
What has changed most remarkably in our lives is not what we do but how we think. I have always been a sucker for a bargain and trawled charity shops for cheap clobber, but now I consciously ask myself do I really need that novelty cake tin or pink spotty teapot or do I simply want it because it is cute. This train of thought is saving us money every day, and every day we are able to decrease our financial commitments and buy time and freedom. Of course, actions speak volumes and in our household things that come naturally nowadays are recycling, re-using, revamping, cooking food from scratch, growing our own, creating new plants from cuttings (totally free and makes great gifts), eating as a family, turning the TV off (well, as much as we can), enjoying the outdoors, and sharing our enthusiasm and home-grown produce with friends.
The move to Italy was more to do with loving life than downshifting. We’d had a long romance with the country and I wanted our children to enjoy a childhood in an environment where kids counted for something and were cherished by those around them. Sadly, the UK still struggles with this concept in my opinion. Children are welcomed in all restaurants here in Italy and there is no such thing as a children’s menu; most Italian food is loved by kids – you can’t really go wrong with pasta and pizza after all!
Italy has got recycling down to a fine art; we take all our rubbish with us when we leave the house and place it in the designated large roadside recycling bins, all clearly labelled. Train stations boast a minimum of three recycling bins and plastic bags are shunned by most food shops. One phenomenon sadly missing is the ‘charity shop’ as Italians are by nature very proud and do not entertain the idea of buying other people’s cast-offs. However, I think this may be offset by the strong make-do-and-mend approach still very much alive within both the home and workplace. Here, you can pretty much find parts for any type of electrical appliance or white good and everyday things such as shoes and leather goods are made to last.
The essential thing in changing your lifestyle for the better is to recognise your ‘energy thieves’ – in other words what really drags you down. If it’s your job, why not think about learning a new trade, one that inspires you and has purpose? If it is where you live, what are the possibilities of renting a house somewhere different, where you can enjoy nature? I long ago gleefully rejected the ‘must own a house’ mentality and now live happily and mortgage-free in sunny Tuscany. By taking a few logical steps to a simpler lifestyle you could literally be saving your sanity whilst saving the planet.
Sharon’s top three tips for downshifting:
Grow something to eat
As a little girl I remember my dad carving my name into the side of a marrow and each day we watched my name get bigger and bigger – pure magic.
Say No to stuff
Gadgets, gizmos and all those mad-capped supposed timesavers are just money wasters and space guzzlers. Learn to use your brain and your hands and reduce electricity and battery use.
Rescue some animals
What better way for children to learn about life than to watch an animal grow. Whether you choose livestock for food or pets for pleasure, loving and nurturing is a core life skill and one that gives back tenfold. Always check out rescue and rehoming centres for information – there is no better stress buster than a hug from an old dog.
I want to introduce you to a person I met in New York at a course recently: her name is Josephine Bila and she brought me nightclubbing and to dinner after the course and showed me the best of the city that never sleeps. She is one of these people that you meet and you say ‘what a positive person, full of energy and full of life’. We were having lunch a few days later and she threw a clanger at me, something that I didn’t know. We were doing a business course and I was asking her about her business, now she works for a TV company full-time, but she’s also an emotional coach for people with chronic illness. I’ll let her tell you about herself and her business.
Josephine, when you were born you were a beautiful healthy baby girl but something happened so, could you just tell us a little bit about the background?
So, I was born the first child in my family and I guess after a few months I started looking jaundiced and tired, so they brought me to see the doctor and the doctor did a bunch of tests and they discovered that I actually was born with a genetic illness called Thalassemia.
That’s a long name!
I know, it’s a really long one which means that you know it’s rare and no one has it and no one knows about it. So, what this means is my bone marrow cannot produce red blood cells that function, so I need transfusions every few weeks to survive so I’ve been getting transfused since I was a little baby and probably will for the rest of my life.
How often do you have to get them?
When I was a kid it was every week. Then I got older and I guess I could sustain the blood so it changed to every three weeks and now it’s like every two to three weeks.
Okay, so you rely on people donating blood just to survive?
Yeah.
It’s something that I never thought of – I am very embarrassed to say that I’ve actually never donated blood but I’m going to now.
Oh good!
The next time I see the (blood donation) van I’ll be in it. We hear about blood donations if there is a major tragedy or national emergency, when everybody goes to queue up to give blood because people need it, but we don’t actually think about kids (like you needed it since you were three) needing it to survive and people like you with chronic illnesses who need donations.
Also cancer patients. Most cancer patients who need chemotherapy, also need it. I always sit with cancer patients when receiving blood. So many people need blood transfusions.
So, it’s not just for accidents and emergencies. It’s a part of life and survival for some people.
Something like this illness which people didn’t understand and a lot of teachers were unkind to me – like very, very cruel, actually – separating me from kids, not understanding and talking about it. I really didn’t talk about it at all with my friends and my parents just wanted to separate hospital life from real life. And so we didn’t talk about it at home so, I thought that since I got so much negativity from teachers, that I wanted to work in a school when I got older and tell kids who were just like me that they can achieve whatever they want in life as long as they try a little bit.
So, I got my Degree in Social Work and while I was getting the degree I worked in an elementary school counselling children and the stories that they shared with me were so tragic that I couldn’t separate my own story from their stories, so I’d go home and cry every single day and that made me decide that I couldn’t work in that type of industry so I asked myself what is the complete opposite? And that is entertainment. I bought a book and I taught myself HTML which is a web coding language and I got a job working in web design right out of college.
Okay, so you went with something completely different, but then because you’re going to the hospital quite regularly you were having some bad experiences and actually that probably dragged you back into what your calling is, as such, so that’s what you’re doing now.
I listened to what the other patients were saying – that the hospital was giving them care, informing them about taking vitamins, get transfused two times a week instead of three, etc. They said that no one was helping them with their emotional problems; they had all kinds of anxiety and stress and fear about just life in general and no one was really answering the call to that, so, I thought since I had all this training and I’ve experience of illness, and have taught myself so much – like how to get through all the adversity – then maybe I could start a blog and help people.
Okay, so you started a blog to actually help people with the emotional side of things. When did you start that?
I don’t know if you know Kris Carr, she is a cancer survivor? She has a website that has a massive following and I wrote a blog for her and after I wrote that blog I decided I should start my own website. So kind of in conjunction with launching my post with her, I posted my own site and people have been taking notice and now so many people have written to me from all over the world. I Skype with people in so many parts of the country and I’m coaching them and giving them advice on how to talk to doctors or other various things and it has been really amazing.
With some models of psychotherapy, you keep talking about the past, the past, the past, and you are never really in the present moment and what’s happening with your emotions right now. So I coach people who are experiencing a lot of worries and anxieties around having an illness. The transformations that I have seen are amazing, so it’s kind of cool. This is the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever done.
So, it’s emotional coaching – it’s more focusing on the positive?
Well, I don’t want to say ‘positive’ … it is positive, but it’s more of trying to understand your thoughts while you’re caught up in the cycle of negative thoughts and understanding how to basically control your mind more.
Right, so it is more about not allowing the illness to be your life but rather just be a part of your life?
Exactly!
You’re now writing a book, is that right?
I wrote a book and I’m meeting an agent at the end of the month. We’ll see what he says!
You are going to Dubai, to speak at an event as well, aren’t you?
Yes, I spoke nationally and now I’m going to Abu Dhabi actually to speak.
Cool, are you speaking to doctors or is it patients that you’re talking to?
They’re from all over the world – patients, doctors, family members, scientists, pharmaceutical reps … everybody!
So this has all come out of you taking action about and listening to what people need and using your experience to write a blog about it and this has all developed from that. That’s amazing!
Exactly!
So, obviously, having a chronic illness, there’s not very many positives about it, but what I find amazing about your blog is I read it and I’m lucky that I don’t have a chronic illness and I’m healthy as far as I know, but I get so much out of your blog because one of the things that you were saying is how you appreciate life more, so could you just tell us a bit about the positives that you have found out from your negative situation?
Well, I find that people get caught up in really trivial things, I do too sometimes – when it comes to relationships they can be difficult – but going outside and knowing that I’m completely free and I’m not trapped in a hospital, because I have been like that. That feeling of just being able to do what I want when I want: I recognise that every single day and you know not being attached to an IV or any kind of machine, I feel so incredibly blessed and it’s just that I think I’ve seen so many things like really horrible, tragic things, that most people never ever see in their lives, so it’s made me kind of slow down and step back and understand why it’s important to not obsess over very trivial things. To appreciate the little things in life.
I’d like to thank Josephine very much and we’re going to have her back on the show when her book comes out.
