Semi-Together

We’re back from a hiatus, during which a lot has happened on every level of our lives: individually, in our communities, and in the world. In this episode, we’re discussing a question that comes up all the time these days: How do we cope when it’s all just too much?  We’ll share how we’ve been managing through overwhelm with the challenges that keep on coming: what’s been helpful, what hasn’t, and...

For ADHD Awareness Month, we talk with painter Ellen Langford about her ADHD journey and how it intertwines with her creative life. Ellen shares the gifts and challenges of neurodivergence as an artist and small business owner, and the strategies that help her thrive. Ellen Langford is a painter whose body of work is inspired by landscapes, chance meetings, and the cross-currents of the South. As...

There’s rarely enough time in the day to do everything we want to. So how do we zone our time to reflect our priorities? We discuss strategies to sort out what we actually value, as well as experiments to build our schedules around these values. Resources: Big Rocks & Little Rocks priority setting (Stephen Covey video) Previous episodes: Ep. 86: What Makes You Feel Alive? Ep 81: What Makes a G...

We're back after a bit of a hiatus! We talk with Jeff Hamilton, our older biological half-brother, collectively telling the story of how we met as adults and became a big bonus family. This is the first time the three of us have talked about what this life-changing experience was like for each of us. Jeff grew up in Livermore, California and lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, Melissa an...

We discuss the question: What makes you feel alive? It’s been on our minds during this mid-winter period, when we often get the blahs or the blues. We talk about what energizes, fuels us, or puts us in a flow state – and how we make time for it. We also share four strategies you can use to figure out what makes you feel most alive.  -- Find us on the web for show notes and extras: ⁠www.semitogethe...

In this episode, we discuss how to acknowledge (vs "celebrate") emotionally complex anniversaries of life-altering challenges, like serious illness or loss. How do we process these events? What kinds of rituals help us through the peaks and valleys that accompany them? We talk with Tara Blumenthal, owner of Tara Yoga Movement and Wellness Clinic, about her experiences moving through diff...

Happy New Year! To celebrate last year's wins and set intentions for this year, we each share three "Got It Together"s from 2023 and three "Get It Together"s for 2024. That is, three areas where we've made meaningful strides, and three areas where we would most like to progress. Get It Together, Got It Together, is a segment we do in most episodes, where we share someth...

The holiday season is beginning ... and it's a lot! We talk about how we’re approaching the season when our bandwidth is limited and our plates are full: gauging capacity, setting intentions, and communicating boundaries.

It’s spooky season, and we’re talking about how to find our just-right amount of thrills and chills -- what feels fun or engaging for each of us (eustress), and what’s too much (distress). The amount of challenge that we desire in each arena of life can differ quite a bit, depending on our individual nervous system and season of life. What’s brave for one of us can be too extreme for another, and...

Most of us aspire to live a good life. We may assume we know what that looks like, without asking what a good life looks like for us -- which may diverge quite a bit from cultural ideals. In this episode, we share research findings on the essential elements of general well-being and discuss how our own ideas of a good life have changed over time. Links: ⁠The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Lon...

There's a simple action you can take to lower anxiety and stress, calm your nervous system, and increase your feeling of connection with others and the world around you. It's free, straightforward, and takes only a couple of minutes to feel the benefits. That practice is finding everyday awe. In this episode, we share the eight wonders of life from the research of Dacher Keltner, a profess...

What feels restful to you? Some of us are so accustomed to doing and striving that we’re not quite sure anymore. Still, our minds and bodies need real rest to function, especially when we’re under stress. Coming off a restful week together in Spain, we discuss how to identify what renews your energy and carve out time for it.  ----- Find us on the web for show notes and extras: www.semitogether.co...

Spring cleaning has a number of mental health benefits. It gives you a sense of control over your environment that can help you manage stress and anxiety in your daily life. And making your space more open and tidy is both calming and energizing.  We share 5 guiding questions, with examples from our lives, to help you figure out: which types of spring cleaning will free up the most bandwidth for y...

As humans trying to keep up with the lightning-fast pace of the modern world, many of us often feel overwhelmed. It may be in a certain area of life --  like health, work, family, or current events -- and commonly, it’s all of the above all at once. In this episode, we share what overwhelm is and how to take small steps to break through it, including reading your body’s warning signs, calming your...

We bring in our husbands, Brian and Darren (a.k.a. The Dudes) to discuss our love languages and how they show up in our relationships. Gary Chapman published the book “The 5 Love Languages” over 30 years ago. Since then, the concept of “love languages” have become an enduring part of our pop culture lexicon, beyond the original five from the book. People talk about their love languages being tacos...

It feels important right now to figure out how to navigate the major stressors in our lives and move forward even when we’re struggling. Some of the people close to us are going through hard times right now, like infertility, serious illness, and loss of a loved one. It makes sense that as we get older, the more illness and loss we experience, but it doesn’t make it any easier. We’ve been coping b...

We’ve always been amused by the holiday song that begins, “So this is Christmas,” because of its ambivalent vibe, like, “Welp, I guess this is happening.” But this opening line actually captures how we feel about the start of 2023.. In this episode, we talk about framing our intentions for the new year at a time when we’re both dealing with some big challenges and not feeling 100% peppy. However y...

The holidays can be A LOT, especially when we’ve been in survival mode -- as many of us have been since the pandemic started. This has been a challenging year for us: Gill has been managing her cancer diagnosis and treatment, while Melia has been building her coaching business and moving to New York with her family. There’s a lot of cultural pressure to make the holidays “the most wonderful time o...

A lot of us are going through major transitions right now: moving to new locations, changing jobs or relationship status, having kids, or going through losses or health challenges. Many of us are shifting into a new phase in our lives or re-evaluating our priorities due to the pandemic. The bittersweet nature of many of these transitions has been on our minds lately for a variety of reasons. Melia...

Our upbringing, culture, and traumatic experiences can disconnect us from our emotions and intuition. Many of us get stuck in our minds and stop noticing the pain or discomfort in our bodies, so we miss signals that are crucial to our well-being. In this episode, we discuss why feeling your emotions matters and how to do it. We share practices that are teaching us to feel it all, and which you can...

Wellllll 🤬🤬🤬 Sometimes things don’t go as planned. You realize that a situation is out of your control, there’s nothing you can do about it, and it just plain sucks. This episode is unfortunately inspired by recent real-life events. We were supposed to meet in D.C. this month for some much-needed sister time, but the universe/ pandemic had other plans. One of our coping mechanisms is thinking,...

If you’ve heard us refer to our Enneagram types in previous episodes (Melia is a 1, Gill is a 7) and wondered what the heck we were talking about, or if you are familiar with the Enneagram framework and want to learn more, this episode is for you! We talk to our dear friend Alicia Ross, a certified Enneagram coach who is starting a new Enneagram training and coaching business this summer. The pand...

When we think about setting boundaries, many of us focus on external boundaries: the limits we set with other people around our time, physical space, privacy, etc. But internal boundaries – those we need to protect our inner worlds from outside influences – are just as important, and often more difficult to set and hold. In this episode, we discuss what it looks like to have healthy internal bound...

Heads up that this episode contains swearing. Let’s revisit The F**k It List ! We recorded an episode on this topic back in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, when we were reevaluating our priorities and deciding how we want to spend our precious time and energy going forward. Making a F**k It List is a fun and liberating exercise. Think of it as the anti-Bucket List. Instead of “Things to d...

As National Poetry Month begins, we discuss the power of poetry to express emotion, read some of our favorite poems, and share what they mean to us. Become a patron of the podcast on Patreon (linked below) and read a couple of poems we’ve written that are close to our hearts. Gill gives a health update and thanks our people for all of their loving support. Melia reveals what is helping her sleep b...