Unplugging for me, isn't so much about staying off the computer and staying offline, it's more of a mindset. A choice to not think about work obsessively very much for the weekend.

Getting out from behind the desk

Mostly it's been great. I gone on some great bike rides (made it to the top of Mt. Scott on Saturday), walked/hiked/ran around Portland and the Gorge, laughed with friends, spent time sitting on the porch reading and watching the hummingbirds feed.

It's Monday, do you know where your business is?

But strangely, come Monday morning, while I feel energized, I also feel disconnected, like I have to start all over figuring out where I am work-wise. It'll sometimes take a half day or more to get back into the swing of things, like I've forgotten everything I knew when I got up from my desk on Friday.

This is different than the Monday morning blahs I remember from my days of having a job-job. Even when I liked my job, which I mostly did, well except for that one with the video dating service, it bummed me out to have to spend another week working for someone else. It's been nearly 12 years, but that feeling was different than what I'm experiencing now.

Easing transitions

I'm wondering if a system, or rather a more refined system, could help with these transition times. Something that reminds me exactly where I am, and sets me up ready to dive into work on Monday morning. Or perhaps, I'm not paying close enough attention to my natural rhythms, and for me, fully unplugging for two days in a row is too long?

What about you? Do you unplug or wish you did? How do you ease the transitions? I'd love to hear how you do it, or if you struggle too. Hmmm, I bet my friend Cairene over at Third Hand Works has something to say about this.

Delighted to announce the people- and potion-winners of our contest!

[*Drum roll please!* Picture Shannon and Heidi, in fanciest of fancy Potion-Oscar gowns... Shannon hands Heidi the envelope:]

The Grand Prize goes to:
Karencita

Great Prize One goes to:
Bridget (@intuitivebridge)

Great Prize Too goes to:
Elizabeth B

[When clapping dies down, Heidi hands Shannon another white envelope, this one with the Potion winners... Shannon is opening the envelope... Her eyes widen in surprise...]

“Oh. My! It’s a 3-way tie! And the winners are:”

Night Queen
(to develop your confident passion)

Losing It
(to calm the heck down in moments of overwhelm and fear)

Sassypants
(to help you live what’s true for you, without worrying about the world’s approval)

Wow! Yay! Cheers all around.

* * *

We had loads of fun reading all your votes, tweets and blog entries and send big kisses to everyone who participated and cheered us on.

Contest winners: We'll be contacting you shortly to get your mailing information. Your potions will be mailed out in the next week, and your audio downloads will be available on Wednesday, July 28. Congratulations!

Because we'd love everyone to win in some way, and because we're super excited to start selling these creations now, we are offering a Pre-Release Sale to anyone and everyone who would like to get in on the Audio+Potion Magics:

Order now, and get all 3 Potions &
accompanying Audios for the special price of:

$56 (plus shipping)
(after July 28th, the price will be $80)

Like contest winners, your potions will be mailed out within in the next week, and your audio downloads will be available on Wednesday, July 28.

What will I get?

1/2 oz. of 3 Aardvark Essentials Potions
(artfully blended essential oils in a silky handmade lotion)

+

3 MP3 Inspiration-igniting and fear-taming hypnosis-y meditation audios
(to invite the potion’s intention at the deepest unconscious level)

Read more about the Audio+Potion Alchemy Package.

"Most people think the will to survive is the strongest instinct in human beings, but it isn't. The strongest instinct is to keep things familiar."
Virginia Satir

Such a beauty, it made the cover!

I took my mountain bike out for a spin recently. It had been a *cough, cough* while. The bike was a little out of tune, and so was I.

For the last year or so, I've only been riding my road bike, a sleek lightweight beauty. With it's skinny tires, it's designed for straight flat roads.

On the other hand, my mountain bike is just plain burly. It weighs twice as much, has fat knobby tires and front and rear shocks. It's designed to cushion the ride and grip the trail. Getting back on the mountain bike was a bit of a shock. It's a very different feel.

A different kind of beauty.

I had to reacquaint myself with the shifters, the disc brakes, a different hand and body position.

It just felt weird. And uncomfortable. Part of me wanted to hang it back up and get down my road bike. But, I hung in there, which gave me the opportunity to remember when I first got my road bike.

There's always a first time

Somehow I'd forgotten about how much I hated it at first.

Well, that's not exactly true. I loved the bike, I was just freaked out riding it. It felt insubstantial. It had skinny little tires, weighed hardly anything, you had to lean over so far! And yikes, could it go fast!

Ha. I realized I've been here before, just on the other side. It was all about what I'd gotten used to, not the good or bad I'd made it out to be.

See, it all started when I fell in love with their lotions and potions for mixed up emotions (best tagline ever). Who wouldn’t really, with names like Night Queen, Ease Please and Cha Cha Chai. They smell amazing, feel wonderful, and really do help shift your emotions.

While smoothing on their lotion-y goodness I wondered, how amazing would it be to have some audio goodness to accompany them? You know, really get the experience of ease, or inspiration or relief from overwhelm inside and out as you smooth on the potions, inhale the artfully blended scents and listen to words that reinforce it all at the deepest unconscious level. Yeah, pretty great right?

I conferred with Mr. Aardvark and Heidi. They thought so too. So we’re combining our superpowers. But, we had a dilemma.

Which potions to choose?

We couldn’t decide, so we’re letting you have the honors. Yep, that’s right, you get to vote for the potions you’d most like an audio companion full of meditation-y, hypnosis-y goodness.

Oh, and voting gets you entered into a contest to win all of the potions and all three audios. Head over to Heidi’s Table and read all about the contest and vote for your favorites. Hurry though, the contest ends at noon PT on Tuesday, July 13th.

Enter the contest now.

Who knows, you just might win.

2. To hear it more clearly than anything (or anyone) else.

3. To understand that the things you do that seem like self-sabotage actually contain kernels of self-preservation.

4. Recognition that fear is normal, in that everyone has it (you are not a weirdo freak).

5. Fear is not necessary for motivation and doesn't really work all that well in the long run.

6. That it is possible to live with substantially less fear than you have right now.

7. To move your body every single day. If you can do it outside, especially in nature, even better.

8. It's possible to enjoy a quiet mind, even for just seconds at a time.

9. It's not about never getting stuck again (or messing up or insert bad habit here) it's about how you treat yourself when you inevitably do.

10. A deep breath is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself.

Bonus – Change is not only possible, it can be easy. Angst is not a prerequisite.

Everyone else? Let me divert your attention to a past post you might have missed: NLP Trainings and Shakespeare

Now, back to AWeber.

Have you met Wendy Cholbi yet? She has the amazing super-power of being able to explain technology to people so that they really get it, without all of the overwhelm. She helped me understand a few things in just minutes, when I’d been putting them off for days weeks months. She also plays a mean game of Scrabble.

Not too long ago, we were chatting about using email service provider AWeber for our various lists, and how we've both noticed that many of the people we’ve talked to are intimidated by the technological process of setting up an email list and using it — and at the same time they often feel kind of icky about doing email marketing at all. It’s no wonder that they get stuck and end up paying for a service they aren’t using.

Wonder Twin Powers Activate!

So we put our heads together and came up with a one-hour teleclass and a four-week workshop to help you get past the overwhelm and the ick, and learn to love AWeber. It’s a magical combination of Wendy’s genius step-by-step tech-teaching style and my ability to help people reframe difficult situations. We believe we can help you overcome both the technological and the emotional barriers to happily using email marketing in your business.

If those feelings of intimidation and ick are familiar to you, then check out our free teleclass, Love Your List: Three ways to get more out of your AWeber investment.

Free Teleclass details

Date: Tuesday, May 18
Time: 10am Pacific (what’s this in your time zone?)

Yes, we will be recording the call and sending the mp3 to everyone who signs up.

Cost: Your email address so we can send you the phone number and access code, and the mp3 afterward

This call is for you if: You have an AWeber account but don’t know how to get started using it, or you’re planning on signing up for a new AWeber account in the near future.

We’ll give you three steps you can take immediately to start using AWeber’s powers (for good, of course!), and we’ll address that “ick — email marketing is yucky” feeling with a dose of my perception-shifting mojo.

We’re also holding a four-week workshop in June to delve into these topics more deeply, and we do plan to mention the workshop briefly on the free call. But our intention with this call is to give you good solid action steps and a perception-shifting exercise that you can use again and again, not spend a lot of time giving you a sales pitch.

Ready to sign up?

Just head over to Love Your List and fill out the cute little AWeber form and we’ll send you the dial-in number, plus the call recording afterward. Hope to see you on the call!

Just so you know, don't expect any sage advice, or morals to these stories (unless of course you want to provide a moral in the comments!), mostly me probably embarrassing myself. Enjoy.

The That's Not a Pen Edition

Don’t let the name fool you, Crystal City, Virginia isn’t really a city.  Just South of the Pentagon, it’s populated by high rises, all interconnected underground, and teeming with defense contractors. The people spend their days in the hermetically sealed air-conditioned buildings.  A cross section would look like an elaborate granite and steel ant farm. Which didn’t really matter because, as far as I could tell in 1987, hardly anyone actually lived there.  The tens of thousands that arrived each weekday morning for work, left for their real towns and real homes, soon after the bars closed down the free happy hour buffets each evening.

I had nailed a waitressing position at the Crystal City Marriott to pay for my stay that summer in Washington, D.C.  It was the summer of the cicada on the east coast, and my first full summer away from home in Oregon.  I just turned 20 and had been away to school in California for two years, but I’d always returned to the security of home each vacation.  Now, I was renting a house in Arlington with one old friend and two new ones, and working in Crystal City, a bus transfer and metro ride away.

The big money was in dinners where the tabs were higher, and money flowed freely from expense accounts, but I was scheduled for lunches.  The work was fast-paced yet uncomplicated, if you worked hard you could make decent money.

These lunch guys, and they were mostly men, were on a tight timeframe, so you could turn over tables quickly, and they were, most of them anyway, decent tippers.   Occasionally though they’d leave you a Denny’s Sweep – just a few coins that you had to sweep off the edge of the table with one hand into the outstretched palm of the other.

The restaurant staff was like a mini-United Nations.  Two of the other waitresses and the bartender were Ethiopian, the manager was Iranian, one busboy was Afghani, another Thai.  There were workers from Bangladesh, Peru and many other parts of the world.  The funny thing was they thought I was exotic because I had been living in California.

As the summer wore on, the days blended into one another, unremarkable.  The suits started arriving around eleven and the last left at about two in the afternoon.

One day, I had a difficult section, with a large six-top and a half a dozen deuces.  Between requests for ketchup, iced tea refills and making change, it seemed I was running more than normal.  Maybe it was just that I was grumpy with cramps and had to go to the bathroom.  Usually, I’d try to go before the lunch rush, and not again until after things had slowed down, but I wasn't going to be able to wait.

On my way out the door, a gentleman from the six-top waved me over.

Oh for God’s sake, this better be important, I’m about to pee my pants.

He was sitting at a table of clones.  Six professional men in their mid-forties, with short dark hair, and dark, slightly rumpled suits.  Only their ties were subtly different from one another.

“This pen doesn’t work,” he said shaking it back and forth in the universal gesture of pens with no ink.

“Oh sorry,” I mumbled, willing my bladder to remain crimped shut.

I handed him another pen from my apron pocket and waited for him to take it so I could get to the bathroom.  He didn’t.  I shifted my weight, and restrained myself from throwing the pen at him and running for the bathroom.

I looked at him, and then at each of the men.  They all were staring at my hand.  I followed their eyes and saw that I wasn’t offering him a pen, but instead my Super Plus for heavy flow days Tampax brand tampon.  It felt 20 degrees warmer as a bright red flush of embarrassment filled my face.

“Uhhhh, that’s not going to work, is it,” I finally blurted, handing him a real pen from my pocket.  I turned and quickly made my way to the bathroom. I hid out as long as I could, but soon the need to earn tips from the other tables outweighed my mortification at having to face the six businessmen and my co-workers and I left the safety of the bathroom.

When I walked back into the restaurant, I did so at a slight angle, turned enough that I didn’t have to look at the table but could see it in my peripheral vision.  It was empty, and had been re-set already.  Next possible crisis averted, they were gone.

“Congratulations!” shouted the manager. Oh great, let the teasing begin.

“What?  Why?” I said a forced smile appearing on my face.

“You must have given those guys some great service, because this is the single-largest tip anyone has ever received here,” he said, thrusting the credit card receipt in my face.  Apparently the men had felt the best way to assuage everyone’s embarrassment was to give me an outrageous tip.

My hourly pay average just skyrocketed.  It was almost enough to make me want to carry a tampon in my apron pocket at all times.  Just in case.

Really, it's a the gift of an Experiment with Getting Quiet, because I also want to give myself the gift of not turning this into another thing on my long to do(n't) list.

A gift of the present

I've had this feeling of wanting to meditate pushing at my edges for years.  At least ten years, as I'm thinking about it now, and probably more. I've dabbled in different things, taken classes, read books, tried different techniques and ideas from different traditions, and nothing really sticks for long.

Yet I keep hearing this little bitty voice in my heart saying, some quiet sure would be nice.

So this experiment is the opportunity to ease that nagging energy and notice what happens when I spend time getting quiet every day.  Not being quiet, because you can't always control that, but getting quiet.

It's just an experiment

And, because it's a one-year experiment, if at the end of the year, I can stop if I want to, and not give meditation another thought for the rest of my life.

I'm assuming that won't happen, but I want to leave plenty of space to be surprised. I want to look as this openly, not put a lot of expectations about what will happen or how I'll feel. That's hard to do, so I'm going to be really clear about what this gift looks like:

• Spending 10 purposeful breaths in quiet each day.  Ideally at least 10 x 10, but I'll be satisfied with just 10.
• Jotting down some notes about what I'm noticing.
• Providing a weekly update here.

Care to join me?

I keep trying to explain it, though, because I love it for myself and for my clients, and there are things about hypnosis that make some people nervous.

• I don't want to lose control.
• I don't want to be told what to do (especially if it involves making animal sounds).
• Can I even be hypnotized?

Twitter to the rescue

I was hanging out on Twitter the other day, reading and bantering, and came across a Re-tweet from my friend Eileen over at Soul Sleuthing.  She was passing along a link for a blog post called, "On hypnotherapy and hot grocery store mamas" on a site called Cleavage. I fell all over myself to click on that title.

Boy, was I happy I did.

Kelly Diels tells a funny story, and follows it with a fantastic and completely unexpected description of what hypnosis feels like.

She describes it as lucid dreaming.

Yes.  It is a lot like that.  And it seems to give you exactly what you need in that moment.  And you know how in dreams, all this weird stuff just sort of fits together?  It's like that too.

How about you?

What intrigues you about hypnosis?

What scares you?