Lessons Read online

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  ISBN 9780525538646

  Ebook ISBN 9780525538714

  Neither the publisher nor the author is engaged in rendering professional advice or services to the individual reader. The ideas, procedures, and suggestions contained in this book are not intended as a substitute for consulting with your physician. All matters regarding your health require medical supervision. Neither the author nor the publisher shall be liable or responsible for any loss or damage allegedly arising from any information or suggestion in this book.

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  To Vivi, Benny and Jack

  Thank you for your love, for being the light of my life, for being the most incredible teachers, and allowing me to travel on new roads, discovering deeper meanings and purpose. You are my inspiration every day to do all I can to make the world a better place. Amo vocês.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  1It All Starts with Discipline

  2Challenges Are Opportunities in Disguise

  3The Quality of Your Life Depends on the Quality of Your Relationships

  4Our Thoughts and Words Are Powerful—Use Them Wisely

  5Where Your Attention Goes Is What Grows

  6Nature: Our Greatest Teacher

  7Take Care of Your Body So It Can Take Care of You

  8Know Thyself

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  This photo was taken for my first modeling book when I was fourteen years old.

  If my intention was to write a straightforward chronicle of my life so far, the fast-cut version might go like this:

  My name is Gisele Caroline Bündchen. I’ve worked as a fashion model for the past twenty-three years. I was born in 1980 and grew up in Horizontina, a small town in southern Brazil, an hour from where you cross the river to enter Argentina. I’m fifth-generation Brazilian of German descent on both sides. My parents spoke German with each other and Portuguese to my five sisters and me. I am a middle child, and as kids, my twin sister, Pati, and I used to argue about which one of us was the third or the fourth in age. When I was growing up, I wanted to be either a professional volleyball player or a veterinarian.

  Me during the finals for the Elite Model Look contest in São Paulo, 1994. I was fourteen.

  When I was thirteen years old, my mom, who worried about my bad posture—I was already 5 feet, 9 inches tall—enrolled two of my sisters and me in a local modeling course. At the end of the course we got to go on a special trip to Curitiba, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. The bus ride there felt endless, twenty-seven hours long. Some of the mothers came with us, including mine. At a São Paulo mall, a man came up to me with a classic creepy-guy line: Do you want to be a model? “Mom!” I yelled, and over she ran. But he—Zeca was his name—was for real, a scout for the Elite Model Management. When we went to his offices, he told my mom she should enroll me in a national contest, Elite Look of the Year, and so she did. I couldn’t believe it when I won second place, which came with a round-trip plane ticket to Ibiza, Spain, so I could model in the Elite Model Look world contest. It was my first time on a plane, my first trip outside Brazil. Somehow I ended up as one of the ten finalists. Everything was happening fast, fast.

  An early behind-the-scenes shot from when I was sixteen and shooting in Rio de Janeiro.

  A year later, in 1995, I moved to São Paulo to launch my modeling career. I was fourteen. As you can imagine, moving from a small town of only 17,000 people to the largest city in Brazil was a big change. After I spent a few months working in São Paulo, the agency sent me to Tokyo, Japan, where I lived for three months doing catalog work. My first big break came a few years later in London, when the designer Alexander McQueen selected me to model in his ready-to-wear show. I went down the runway without a shirt, petrified, a white top painted on at the last minute by a makeup artist, as artificial rain poured down from the ceiling. After the Alexander McQueen show, the industry gave me a nickname—“The Body”—which stuck.

  In 1999, I modeled for Versace, Ralph Lauren, Chloé, Missoni, Valentino, Armani, and Dolce & Gabbana. Vogue magazine chose me to represent the end of the “heroin chic” era of modeling. That year I was on the cover of French Vogue and three times on the cover of American Vogue. The headline on one feature story was “The Return of the Curve.” I ended that year winning Vogue’s Model of the Year Award. In spring 2000, I modeled for Marc Jacobs, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, Prada, Valentino, and many other well-known brands in New York, Milan, and Paris. From 1998 to 2003, I appeared in every one of Dolce & Gabbana’s fashion campaigns, and from 2000 to 2007, I was one of the Victoria’s Secret Angels. In the past twenty years I’ve appeared on 1,200 magazine covers, 450 fashion editorials, and walked in nearly 500 fashion shows. I deliberately took a step back from modeling in 2015, as I wanted to focus more on my family and personal projects. The last time I walked on a runway was during the opening of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. I came down the longest runway I’ve ever been on while a pianist played Tom Jobim’s “The Girl from Ipanema.” It was electrifying! It felt like the culmination of everything that had gone before.

  * * *

  —

  Everything above happened—though I’ve left out all the details. It’s the story of the public me. But the life I’ve lived in public has very little connection to who I really am, or what matters most to me, or what I believe in and want to give back to the world. The irony is that though I’m known for my work as a model, I’ve never felt that the person on the runway or in magazines and TV commercials was me. In school in Brazil I’d been mocked by my classmates for my height and my weight and my appearance. I don’t believe any level of success as an adult completely changes how you saw yourself as a child.

  So when I began modeling, even though I supposedly had a model’s physique, I felt awkward. It didn’t help my confidence when some people in the business told me that my eyes were too small and my nose and boobs were too big. At age fourteen, nothing felt more unsettling or made me feel more self-conscious than a designer telling me I was pretty, or a photographer telling me how to stand, or an editor commenting on my body or my breasts or my eyes or my nose as if I weren’t even in the room.

  That’s why, starting around the age of eighteen, in an effort to protect myself and to avoid getting hurt or feeling objectified, I created a shield around myself. The private me was Gisele, but the model Gisele was her. That’s what I called her, too—her. She was an actress. A performer. A chameleon. A made-up chara
cter expressing the fantasy of a designer. I showed up at the job. I learned what the photographer wanted, what the stylist wanted, what the makeup artist wanted. Their ideas came together to create a mood, and suddenly I could see her, feel her. Modeling was a way for me to explore all the colors of my personality, including ones I didn’t know I had. As she or her, I could act out any emotion, any attitude. It was as if by detaching myself I could be free, while keeping the real me hidden and safe. She could be sexy or demure. She could be a soldier or a brazen woman. She could be a face or a body somewhere in between. Modeling had never been my dream—growing up I didn’t even know it was an actual profession. I simply saw what was happening to me as an opportunity to make a living. Doors opened—first one, then another—and I walked through them. There was a practical component to it as well. As a child, I had heard my parents arguing about money. I thought if I tried out modeling, and maybe even got good at it, I might be able to help our family, instead of being just one more mouth to feed. So I decided to take the opportunity I was being offered and see what might become of it.

  But instead of writing about her, I want to focus on who I am. So in this book I’ve laid out the lessons that have helped me live a more conscious and joyful life, inspired me to overcome challenges I’ve faced over the years (including panic attacks), and given me a deeper understanding of myself and the world around me.

  Some of these lessons I learned the hard way—through personal experience. Others I learned through watching others over the years and concluding what not to do and how not to act. Each of the chapters in this book has stories taken from my own experiences, illustrating my learning process and what was happening in my life at the time. I’ve had many teachers along the way, too. I’ve discovered that nature is the most powerful teacher and healer. I’ve learned to pay attention to my inner voice, which has given me many important insights even when I didn’t want to listen. I’ve learned that our thoughts, words, and actions are all connected, and why we need to be careful with them. I began nourishing my body, mind, and spirit through meditation, healing foods, and a positive outlook, and as a result was able to experience a deeper clarity and greater sense of purpose. I hope that sharing my own story can serve as an inspiration to others and be of help.

  So if the model I talked about earlier was a her, who am I?

  Me as a baby at home in Horizontina, 1981.

  If there’s one word I use to describe myself, it’s simple. I’m a barefoot-jeans-and-T-shirt kind of girl. My family will tell you the same. I’ve always been a student of life, always curious, always wanting to know more. Naturally, when I left my hometown to begin modeling, I started to experience the world in new ways. Over the next two decades, I began the process of discovering who I was. As I said, that Gisele is very different from my public self. I was born into a hardworking, middle-class family in a city in southern Brazil called Três de Maio. Along with my parents, there were six of us girls: Raque, Fofa, Pati, Gise (that’s me), Gabi, and Fafi. My mom worked as a teller at a local bank. My dad was an entrepreneur who worked in real estate, as a sales representative—he had so many different jobs. Forever reading, learning, and creating, he was—and still is—a genuine free spirit. Today he is a motivational speaker and sociologist who works with me on environmental projects.

  We were lucky to have many varieties of fruit trees in our backyard—avocados; pitanga, which is a kind of red cherry; peach; guava; papaya; butia or jelly palm; and three different kinds of tangerines (my favorite fruit)—which I would fold into the front of my T-shirt and lug home.

  I always loved nature. I felt that the dirt or sand under my feet and the trees and the clouds and the birds and the sunlight were a part of who I was, that I was nature. I remember how much I loved visiting my grandmother’s farm, where she milked cows, grew most of what she ate, and sewed her own clothes. She would cook us delicious food such as cuca, a German version of panettone, but with tiny chunks of strawberries or grapes baked into it, which she served with fresh heavy cream still warm from the milk bucket.

  My dad and my mom (holding Gabi) and in the middle Raque and Fofa, at Pati’s and my birthday party (that’s me in the front left, making a face). Brazilian birthday cakes are usually made with condensed milk and are absolutely delicious!

  I grew up Roman Catholic, and my mom made us go to church every Sunday. Like my sisters, I wasn’t all that happy sitting on a hard bench, listening to the priest talking. But I did love the singing (my mom had a loud, beautiful soprano voice) and, afterward, eating whatever dishes the church ladies set out—cabbage salad, pasta, and churrasco, a way of grilling meat and chicken on a stick—with the other kids. I still love the stories in the Bible, and I teach them to my own children. But I was always digging and digging to find out the why of everything, and at some point I began questioning what I was being taught.

  One day in religion class when I was twelve or thirteen years old, we were studying Leviticus. I raised my hand. How could the mandate “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” exist side by side with Jesus teaching us we should love our enemies and always turn the other cheek? How did that work? I wasn’t trying to be smart, but it made no sense. Instead of answering the question or starting a discussion, the teacher looked surprised, and then frustrated, and sent me to the principal. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong! (I still don’t.)

  Left: My sister Pati’s and my birthday party, 1987, Horizontina. I think you can tell how happy I was after waiting a whole year to get Fofura, my favorite doll ever! Right: Pati and I loved playing with the chickens at my grandmother’s home, 1983. It was my favorite place to go as a child.

  Why couldn’t she give me an answer? If she couldn’t, who would? Not my parents. My mom and dad were too busy running around working while trying to raise six girls. And the questions I wanted answers to were accumulating. Who was I? Why was I here? How did the world begin? As the questions increased, so did my resistance against any kind of system that said, These are the facts, this is how it works, and there’s only one way.

  Maybe it was my constant searching that led me to be fascinated by the world of spirit. I’d pray at night to God, to my star, to my guardian angels. In my early teens I began reading not just about religion but belief and metaphysics and mythology. Those are still my favorite subjects. At some point I began believing that all of us live in a world ruled by illusions, and that my—our—job is to find out who we truly are, and discover our individual purpose. Everything we experience, good and bad, has a meaning, even if we may not understand it right away. It’s all happening for us to learn.

  I tell my own children that God is an energy that stands behind the creation of everything. God is visible in the mountains, the oceans, the sky, the trees, the sunlight, the rain, the animals, and the seasons. Without nature, nothing and no one would exist. Nature is divine, and is what keeps us all alive.

  Today, at age thirty-eight, I feel I’m on the cusp of a whole new life—a rebirth of sorts. My goal now is to continue learning, and developing my talents in order to use whatever gifts I have to help serve the greater good. I believe many people are preoccupied and distracted by information overload and bad news, and my hope is that this book can serve as an inspiration tool that focuses instead on internal, spiritual values. When I was young, I had no way of predicting what would happen to me twenty years later. I was too busy living, too busy making choices. I once read that when we look back on our life, we can see a story line or an order or a plan, as if it were composed by an invisible force—and that the events and even the people in it that seemed random or unimportant at the time become in the end indispensable to our story. Our lives play an important role in the lives of others, too. It’s as if our lives were cogs in one great dream of a lone dreamer in which all the characters are also dreaming. When we look back, it’s as if, without knowing it, we were all co-creating our lives—b
ut how, though, and with whom?

  I know that I’m still relatively young, but looking back on my own life so far, I feel an enormous sense of gratitude. I’ve been given phenomenal opportunities, and I have worked hard to make the most out of each of them. My life didn’t just happen to me. I chose to move to São Paulo when I was fourteen. Many years later I chose to marry my husband. I chose to have our two children. I could have never left Brazil. I could have played professional volleyball (I was good at it) or become a veterinarian. I could have married somebody else, or never married, or never had children. The life I live today is an accumulation of dozens of decisions I have made. When I was younger, I took advantage of the doors that swung open for me. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started to push the doors open—for myself. If we make choices more consciously, and with greater self-awareness, we will find ourselves more closely aligned to our purpose in life, whatever it may be.

  Over the years, friends and strangers have confided in me about the struggles of the girls and women in their lives. They’ve told me that their daughters or friends were facing depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm—and in response I’ve shared some of my own challenging experiences with the hope that they would feel supported and know they were not alone. We are all bombarded today with images of how we should look, and how we should behave. And yes, I know that for more than two decades I worked in an industry that can have a tendency to exalt unattainable images of beauty, style, and glamour. I know, too, that social media is about showcasing the best moments of our lives, not the worst ones. On my own Instagram, you won’t find a lot of photos of me with a headache or with bags under my eyes from staying up all night with my children when they get sick.