I'm not f*ing around anymore
And introducing a five-day retreat in May!
Los Angeles was my home from 2006 to 2019, and the devastation is impossible to comprehend. My dear friends Ken and Shino Charlson, and Annabel Inganni and her family, all artists, lost their homes and small businesses in the Eaton Fire. If you’re a part of this newsletter community and you’ve been displaced, please email me at emily@emilyonlife.com and I’ll share your GoFundMe in an email next week.
Altadena is also a historic Black community, in which 80% of Black residents own(ed) their homes, double the national average, because the area was one of the few in LA County that didn’t enforce racist redlining laws in the 1960s. Many of these were family homes, passed down through generations. A massive number are now gone. If you have the means to donate, Altadena’s Black community needs collective support to rebuild and retain its culture and history. Developers are just dying to get in and build more places to buy $17 juice, and they’re preying on desperate people with lowball offers.
This spreadsheet, built and frequently updated by Community Aid Dena, contains info and links to GoFundMes for over 800 displaced Black families, individuals, and businesses.
Hi, hello, hi.
On Tuesday, I broke down in sobs when I discovered we were out of milk, which is what happens when you shove down grief and worry and anger because you have clients to meet with and people to make chicken for and the shower drain is clogged and the cat is peeing in the fireplace.
A lot of thoughts have been swirling around these last few weeks, but the one that won’t leave me alone is I’m not fucking around anymore.
For me this means yes to community. Yes to mutual aid, which is another way to say helping each other. Yes to shining the flashlight on the path and saying hey, watch out for that big hole. Yes to pulling each other out when we fall in. Yes to here, put on these dry clothes. Yes to making delicious food out of things that grew in the earth, and to making whatever kind of art makes me happy. Yes to buying less shit I don’t need. Yes to joy and laughter and not tracking in real time every terrible thing happening everywhere. Yes to work and activities that feel good in my body and bring me peace. Yes to stillness. Yes to trees and meadows and oceans and the sky. Yes to love.
No to everything else.
Someone I don’t know just wrote me a LinkedIn message and opened with “Hi Emily, hope you’re keeping busy!”
I don’t hope to be kept busy, and I don’t hope for anyone else to be either. I hope for all of us to be kept peaceful, fulfilled, joyful, spacious, loving, connected, and safe.
I’m not fucking around anymore with answering that person’s email like it’s normal for our salutations to be written by capitalism.
Things I’ve quit in the last 7 years that have changed my life, in no particular order:
Allowing my thoughts, and other people’s opinions, to override what my body knows
Absorbing strangers’ feedback about me, both good and bad
Doing things because a voice in my head, or another person, or our culture, told me I should (I learned from Martha Beck that our intuition never says “should”)
Having a career (and identity) I spent a decade building and was very very good at
Believing that having a “big” life or having a large and visible impact is somehow more important than making a different kind of impact. (And believing that it’s possible to even know what our impact IS! We have no fucking idea!)
Betraying myself by choosing other people’s needs over my own so many times that I didn’t even know what my needs were anymore
Believing, secretly, that I didn’t actually deserve to have needs
Believing that life was one big performance review and I had to be extraordinary in order to be loved
Attaching my worth and identity to my job above all else
Treating my creativity like a resource to be extracted
Sucking in my gut to try and look smaller, which meant literally not getting enough air for 46 years
Treating exercise like a punishment for my body being wrong
Believing my body was a liability
Trying to be a daisy in order to fit better into a fucked-up culture that mostly values daisies. There’s nothing wrong with me; I’m just a tulip.
Giving myself to relationships that didn’t feel mutually supportive, easeful, and safe
Participating in 99% of social media
Believing that success requires suffering and life is always going to be hard
Believing that constant hypervigilance will keep me safe
There are more. And there are so many more to go, that will come in time. Being done fucking around is about the letting go, too. What am I letting in, and what am I putting down?
And how might life feel different on the other side?
On the topic of letting go and letting in: I’m leading a five-day retreat with Lacy Young in Oregon this spring!
Introducing YOUR TURN: May 16-21, 2025
Over five nights and four full days, at a tranquil, private healing sanctuary outside of Portland, Oregon, Lacy and I will show you how to:
Dive deep into old stories and future goals (Come as you are and find your place in your story!)
Release what isn’t yours (So long, obligation, striving and second guessing!)
Clarify and express what’s sacred to you (Welcome in peace, healing, and freedom in the ways you define it!)
You’ll leave YOUR TURN with a personal mission statement, unique and meaningful to you – no generic BS from the internet about loving yourself here. Your mission statement will serve as your North Star: a guide to what feels most important and aligned for you, a touchstone to support you in being true to your authentic self, and a tool to help you evaluate the choices on your path: is this a yes or a no?
We’ll be practicing meditation, creative writing, breathwork, sound healing, burning shit, vocalizing (also known as yelling), movement (no coordination or flexibility required), sharing, witnessing and being witnessed, plenty of space for self-care, rest and solitude. All activities are optional.
There’s also a contemporary bathhouse with an unobstructed natural view, featuring a six-person cedar sauna, side-by-side soaking tubs, and cold plunge; amazing food (really); and special surprises, and REALLY RAD PEOPLE. Attendance is limited to 20.
Edit as of January 28: A few spots are still available! All remaining rooms are shared. This group of people is incredible and the vibe will be so welcoming. FWIW, with much trepidation, I roomed with a stranger at a retreat with
in 2014, and she turned out to be so awesome that we’re still friends 11 years later.All the retreat details, pics, FAQ, and application link are here.
Just some casual outdoor bathtubs at the retreat center.
My co-leader Lacy Young is also a dear friend; some of you will remember her from the medical GoFundMe I shared last year on her behalf. (Thank you, again, to those of you who donated!) Lacy has been leading retreats since 2014—I’ve attended two of them—and she is the absolute realest deal there is. She’s a meditation guide and an incredibly skilled coach, and her support has been instrumental in my own healing. Her unwavering commitment to living with joy and alignment, while also navigating the limitations of a serious, chronic health condition, translates to walking her talk big time.
Our main indoor gathering area.
I can’t wait to welcome you into this retreat and hug you IRL.
As always: thanks for reading, and for being here.
