We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jill And Jessica Emich. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jill and Jessica below.
Hi Jill and Jessica, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Ahhhhh resilience, it is EXACTLY what the state of the world is inviting us to dig into right now. We would say resilience is in our blood. And truth is, it is in ALL of our blood, and it is just a matter of remembering that and leaning into it. Our grandmother moved here from Italy with nothing. It was in the 30’s when the government was offering money to immigrants that were relocating. For whatever reason, our grandma refused the “handouts” as she called them. She decided she will make it on her own. Well to say she did is putting it lightly. She raised 12 children with our grandfather and was a wildly successful real estate developer in the 50’s up until the day she passed about 15 years ago. Our mom is similar in that she raised triplets (yes we are!) as well as our brother with special needs all while bing an ICU nurse as well as becoming a real estate developer herself. We also learned resilience from our brother who was given the diagnosis of Metachromatic Leukodystrophy and a 25 years life sentence. He is turning 53 this year and his doctors call him a living miracle and attribute his longevity to his resilience, his will to live, and the love that supports him from his family and community. Resilience has been at the forefront in owning and running community and health driven restaurants for 23 years starting when we were 24 years old and into all of the practices we share with our lifestyle company SHINE LIVING COMMUNITY. Jessica followed suit by marrying an immigrant from the Czech Republic who moved to the United States with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket and built a very successful company and is an incredible dad and role model to their two daughters. Resilience is everywhere, just look at Nature, always resilient and finding new ways of expression as are we. Passing on, practicing and recognizing resilience is vital to the health of humanity, so we spread it wherever we can!
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
We are 2 of triplet sisters, Jill and Jessica Emich. We have been building community, we like to say, since the womb. We are from a big ole Italian family. Our mom is one of 12 kids and we have something like 60 cousins. We opened our first restaurant and event space at 24 years of age. Our restaurants were always community driven meaning we had an event space for people to come and share their gifts whether live music, poetry, dance… and a restaurant that even 20 years ago was going farm direct supporting local farmers and craftsmen and women. In our current business SHINE LIVING COMMUNITY we broke out of the four walls of the restaurant to create a global community of people committed to connecting deeper to themselves and to an inspired community. We do this through our classes, events, workshops and retreats as well as our Shine Living Community digital studio app. We use movement medicine including dance, yoga, warrior workouts as well as breathwork meditation, nutrition and of course food. We do this for individuals as well as families.
We are big believers in coming back to the power and resilience that lives within each of us. We access it through the practices and tools we offer where we open the energy centers of the body, we unfurl deeper layers of ourselves, we learn to tap into our intuition and harness joy. When we do this, practicing knowing ourselves better and feeling deep connection inside as well as to community, we aren’t as affected by the outside circumstances, opinions, pressures. In fact, these things start to shift and change because instead of feeling stuck or repeating old patterns, we connect within and learn to raise our energy from fear and anxiety to appreciation and love and we can then see solutions and possibility and move from a more loving and compassionate place. It is our true superpower to learn to do this and we are crazy passionate about it. Liiving a life you love is truly an inside job after all, and when we practice together, it amplifies and magnifies the results. It is then that we start to see it effect our health, the health and wellbeing of our families, our communities and the world. We deeply believe it is the antidote to the breakdown we are seeing in the world right now. These times are an invitation to go deeper within, And so we practice,…
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
1. Community and Connection-Because we always had each other as triplet sisters, we realized how stabilizing it is and we wanted to help build that for others. We do this through bringing together individuals and families. We have experienced that practicing in multigenerational communities helps strengthen family units and build safety, security and playfulness inside family (blood or soul) units. We love leading our unique Freedom Movement Method bringing together dance and yoga that helps expand playful joyful energy through dance and then anchor it in the body with yoga and meditation.
2. You are what your eat-What we mean by this is your food literally becomes you, it informs your cells, your energy and your overall health. We are big proponents of connecting with the food you eat through preparation and also through growing your own gardens or even simple techniques like sprouting or growing microgreens, both of which you can do on a windowsill. Teaching children and adults the importance of eating to SHINE has been a passion of ours and why we chose to open community and health driven restaurants at 24 years of age and continue to teach tools, techniques and recipes to uplevel every area of your health.
3. WE ARE NATURE- Being in Nature teaches us so much about connection, resilience, patience, beauty, and how everything has its seasons. Have you ever seen a plant growing through a crack in the sidewalk? A seed breaking through the dirt towards the sun in the first signs of Spring? How a river flows and twists and turns around rocks into a beautiful waterfall? Nature is always teaching us if we watch and listen. It teaches us resilience, it reminds us of our power, it reminds us in times of darkness or winter that the light and the Spring is sure to come again. We are Nature and we too are that powerful and intelligent. We incorporate being in Nature as part of our offerings through our warrior workouts and our global retreats and workshops.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
Being 2 of triplets we are natural collaborators. We LOVE to collaborate. We enjoy bringing movement medicine to different conferences, business gatherings, team building, and events where we can connect with one another and raise the energy together, we get people landing in their bodies and from there they see life from new vantage points just by breathing and moving. It is one of our favorite things to share. We also enjoy working with schools and children of all ages to teach tools and techniques around being your own superhero by learning to listen to your own body and your own inner wisdom through fun and playful tools and techniques. We wish we had learned it when we were younger so we love bringing it to others!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.shinelivingcommunity.com
- Instagram: Shine Living Community
- Facebook: Shine Living Community
- Linkedin: Shine Living Community
- Youtube: Shine Living Community
- Other: Shine Living Community Digital Studio form the App Store!
We also have our Eat Drink Shine Cookbook releasing October 23rd. Landing page for that will be up in the next few days, we would love to get that in there!
THANK YOU!
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
