FEATURED
Written by Yelena Brezhneva
Jewel’s inspiration has done so much for children and troubled youth through books, educational programs, mentorship, charity concerts, performances, and philanthropy. She has teamed up with Inspiring Children Foundation (www.inspiringchildren.net) and has been sharing her tools transforming children from surviving to thriving in a loving non-profit way alongside her Jewel Never Broken Program. Her collaboration with Ryan Wolfington, the founder of the “Inspiring Children’s Foundation” has been a wonderful team effort. Jewel shares her insights, her experience and her wisdom with readers of High Rise Life Magazine in our exclusive interview. Her quest of self-discovery and solving her own problems has become a road map for success for others. There’s so much knowledge and wisdom in her words. Q: What is your definition of happiness? Happiness is when you are at peace with who you are and the choices you make, when your actions are in line with your values and ideals. Happiness is not something that comes from other people, places, or things. It comes from
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within, by making right choices. Every day I earn my happiness. I am willing to be the one who is accountable and take responsibility for my own happiness and the shape of my own life. For a long time, I lost myself, and when I had my son I really had to do a gut check, and I realized who I was wasn’t who I wanted my son to know. Now, I’m becoming someone I want my son to grow up knowing. Q: You had a tremendous hardship as a child. What helped you to beat all odds and become successful? At times, I was just on survive mode, when I was homeless and living out of my car. Most people think that period was because I was pursuing my music career, but that’s not quite true. My boss propositioned me, and when I turned him down, he fired me. So, I lived out of my car for a couple of months, but then my car got stolen. I got sick, I had panic attacks, I almost died of blood poisoning. That’s when I started stealing a lot. I worked hard. I was always working, always had a job, always found a way to get through— I had grit. One day, I saw a reflection of myself in a mirror while I was shoplifting a dress, and knew that I had become a statistic. At that point, I decided to turn my life around. I created these mindfulness exercises, long before that was a commonly used word. I meditated, journaled, and started to live mindfully, by observing my hands. That is what my song “Hands” is about. I was writing about that very dark time in my life and the lessons I needed to learn. As a child I credit nature for keeping my love alive. No matter how abusive my home life was, I always had the trees, mountains, and grass to bring me back home, to my true self.
Photo by Matthew Rolston
Jewel is a pop sensation with more than 30 million albums sold worldwide. She has received four Grammy Award nominations, and her debut album, Pieces of You, released in 1995, has gone twelve times platinum. She has reached Billboard’s year-end singles chart in the Hot 100 in 1997-98 and has become a New York Times bestselling author with five published books. If you haven’t read Jewel’s “Never Broken,” please do so. It’s an incredibly inspiring life story of this amazing woman.
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