SEPTEMBER 2016 EDA INCLUSIVE!

Hello my lovelies!

While my tour ended at the end of May, I have continued to be a busy bee this summer.

I have been working hard to make sure my new website Never Broken is ready to launch by September 20th, and have had some amazing people helping me get it together. 

So many people have been asking me about the 20 principles in the back of my book, and if there were specific exercises I created to help me live them and make them second nature in my life.  Indeed there have been many exercises I developed over my life, and so I decided to share them with you.  They are all the mindfulness practices I used to create change and resilience in my life.

I am starting with the launch of 3 principles and exercises- Gratitude Practice, Hard Wood Grows Slowly, and Retrain your brain.  Each principle will come with 3 Things,

1- the philosophy that inspired them, 

2- the written exercise, which is simple and easy to do and practice in your life,

3- the science behind why the exercise works- so you can see just what a powerful impact these practices can have on your brain, and thus your life.

Descartes said, "I think, therefor I am."  What I have learned in life is "I perceive what I think, therefor I am."  If we can perceive our thoughts, we are something other than just our thoughts.  I call this my Greater Sense Of Intelligence.  It is this force in us that is the best guide and driver of our life.  This website is designed to give you some of the tools I have gathered that helped me get in touch with my greater sense of intelligence. Cultivating this relationship with my own internal knowing and intuition in turn helped me witness my thoughts, and begin to learn how to abstain from self-defeating ones. Basically, this helped make my inner knowing the driver, and my mind the steering wheel. And this is what a mind was intended to be- a powerful tool that helps align our intent and purpose and values to our will to create action.  In an awakened state the process looks like this: Our Intuition/Soul/Inner Knowing informs us about what our passions and truth are in life, our thoughts then help us align action to this command, and our actions are the final physical manifestation of this alignment. The outcome in the scenario is a life that outwardly shows the peace, confidence and wisdom that was first created in the inner world.  The alternative, and what many of us do in life, is we forget whom the driver is- we loose a relationship with our self, and so no one is behind the wheel, and our minds run away on us, like a car with no driver, and hijack us.  Our will and actions never align to anything deeper than the minds ramblings about being reactive to a series of events on any given day, or projection past hurts into the present where they wreak havoc.  In this scenario our actions reflect a disorderly, scattered and anxiety-driven mind. 

We are much more than our minds. We are more than a collection of thoughts - there is an I AM in there, with the power to witness and choose our thoughts. And it's this that I have a passion for helping others cultivate. And much of it is done through cultivating stillness (this helps you hear the quiet voice of your own knowing), and learning to reverse the negative voices of your mind. 

Each month I will debut another Principle, and we will feed you more information and inspiration on that month’s topic

I'm very excited to share this information with you, as I truly believe happiness is for everyone. It does not depend on your socio or economic position in life- (in fact, I developed most of these while I was homeless, and I credit these simple mindfulness exercises for changing my life). Happiness stems from what we think and how we perceive the world.  

I hope you will join me over at JewelNeverBroken.com September 20th!

What else? My summer has been spent in my beloved Telluride, where Kase and I go to escape the heat. My heart is in the mountains, and I love to hike each morning amongst the splendor of Nature's perfection. Kase and I have had a blast on mommy and me getaways over the weekend, - exploring in the mountains and playing in streams and mushroom hunting.

I have also been busy preparing for the first of several movies I will film for Hallmark channel, called The Fixer Upper Mystery series, where each movie builds on the last one. I play a female contractor named Shannon Hammer, whose keen eye for detail and natural curiosity helps her become a good mystery solver! It should be a lot of fun to film. Kase and I head to Toronto to film for the month of October. 

What else? Oh! The Rob Lowe Roast! Well, this was a brand new venture for me.  One I wasn't quite sure how to tackle.  My hard-core fans already know I have a love for making people laugh in my shows- often weaving dark stories from my own life with humor. But this was the first time I was asked to just have a go at a room full of virtual strangers. The whole concept of the roast is a weird one- people tune in to watch people hurl insults at each other.  But I believe the spirit of the roast is to go for it, as they say, and so that's what I did.  It felt like putting a character on where you were in a universe where it somehow felt like the standard was to be insulted and to insult, all in the name of comedy.  I was given staff writers and they helped craft jokes. I was amazed at the talent of these groups of writers I collaborated with. I know there has already been a lot of controversy about the roasts focus on Ann Coulter.  Here is my take on it. First of all, I wish no harm to Ann, or to anyone else on the stage.  We all are adults that made the decision to do the show, and Ann knew exactly what she was signing up for.  She is an incredibly bright woman. She also knew she had no association with Rob, and agreed to do the show knowing she would be a lightning rod for jokes as the only political pundit up there, and she was free to write jokes and have jokes written to give it back.  Ann was transparent about her reason for doing the show- the opportunity to showcase her book, and to be the headline.  She is very savvy, and I personally am impressed with how she played it- it stirred up her base and promoted her book and she got every headline, all while looking like the innocent. Her mentor Trump would be proud, I think.  I knew every comedian would have jokes about her, and the rest of us. As for me, I tried to keep it even, trust the writers I was working with, trust the concept and premise the show was founded on, and do my best to deliver the lines with good timing and feel.  I have no idea how it went, and I guess we will see how 8it comes out once it's all edited, but my friend Jessica was there and she did check in with Ann before she left, and she seemed fine, as did everyone else.  

I never talk politics, but if anyone is wondering, I don't identify strongly with far left or far right views. If I had to identify what party I belong to, it would be closer to the Libertarian party that anything.  I am into the live and let live of life.  In my own life, I try to focus not on what makes us different, but instead on what our common threads are.  But for the roast, it was a free for all and open season on my self and my own perceived flaws, as well as everyone else's.  While I was on stage I was thinking, "how odd it is that everyone up here is very talented and very accomplished- (no one up there could be called a slacker in life), and yet here we all were, trying to capitalize on exploiting flaws society tells us we should feel we have."   It was a fascinating social experiment, that's for sure.  At the end of the day, it's comedy, playing a character, going against type in the name of comedy, and I had fun learning a craft that folks like David Spade and Dave Peterson have made a living at. 

OK- plane is landing.  Off I go! Talk soon, and see you over at JewelNeverBroken.com Septem ber 20th!  

Xx Jewel