Sara Hauber - Blog

7 Tips for Starting and Maintaining a New Practice

Thu, 09 May 2019 22:00:00 GMT

In March, I started to talk with you about the concept of practice and what it means when you practice something so long it becomes a habit.

If you decided that what you’ve been practicing--whether an unhealthy behavior, an unhelpful way of thinking, or an absence of any healthy behaviors whatsoever--is no longer working for you and you’re ready for change, then you’ll want to read today's post.

Because here, I’ll break down for you exactly what steps you need to take in order to give yourself the best possible chance to succeed at starting and then maintaining a new, healthy practice--even if you're totally scared to start or afraid to fail.

But first, a little prep for your mindset.

Do you remember learning to talk? Probably not, but these days, you probably can speak pretty well and rarely make mistakes. Did you learn to talk when you were young by thinking about talking and then just doing it perfectly one day, without being really bad at it first? No way. You tried to repeat everything that came out of an adult’s mouth, sometimes catching all the consonants, most of the time, not. The adults around you likely applauded every effort you made. They probably even repeated words again and again, encouraging you to keep trying to form those specific letters, to keep getting a feel for how your tongue worked in your little mouth, hearing how the words sounded. And you probably kept right on trying, getting closer to speaking real words. Not immediately, but getting closer nonetheless.

Or what about when you were learning how to walk? One little step and then, boom!, you hit the floor—only to get right back up and try again. Every adult in the room applauded every little step, every crash-and-burn, every second or 22nd attempt at standing on your own two feet. Eventually, you did it, wobbly and hilarious in your big baggy diaper, but standing up! Within days, you were probably running.

This is called practice, and this is the verb that infants and children perform—and get applauded for—as they grow.

We average adults seem to have had the word “practice” surgically removed from our vocabulary when it comes to changing our own behaviors or adopting new ways of being. We expect to try something and get it right, right away. Which is a giant shame, because the ability to practice is the most important ability you need in order to successfully make healthy behavior changes and/or start working toward a goal that is important to you.

If you expect perfection right away, or a linear path to adopting a new practice, with no mistakes or set-backs, you will certainly fail, you will surely give up, and you might not try it or anything like it again.

My challenge to you is this: Adopt that same open attitude and that same undying belief in yourself as you did when you were learning to walk and talk, choose a practice you wish to adopt, and then use my 7 tips for starting and maintaining a new practice. Here they are:

The 7 Steps to Starting & Maintaining a Practice

Step 1. Choose a practice that is aligned with your goals, dreams, or desires. This step is the most important, because if you are changing a behavior or trying a new behavior just to make someone else feel better or to meet someone else’s idea of what matters in life, you will likely give up the practice and/or not enjoy it one bit and not get anything good out of it. During this step, you might find your thoughts and beliefs clouded by all kinds of "shoulds." Frankly, discovering our own values and goals can be much more difficult than letting societal and familial noise crowd out our own spirit’s needs and desires.

In my coaching practice, I have found that I spend a lot of time asking all the right questions to help people get clear about their own values, desires, and goals and parsing those out from old, adopted beliefs about what they “should” be doing with their lives and their health. Even without a coach, you’ll need to spend a lot of time on this step before you start to adopt a new practice, or it simply won’t stick. You must feel and imagine (with emotion) the person you want to be or the result you want to achieve by engaging in the new practice you identify. Make sure it’s aligned with the new you, and not the old you or someone else’s value system.

Step 2. Start small. Change is hard. Our bodies and brains are built to conserve energy, and nothing conserves energy more than acting out of habit and doing the same things over and over (even when those things hurt us). So make adopting your new practice as easy as possible in order to maximize your chances of actually doing it. Follow the rules of SMART goal setting. Each one of those pieces of the acronym is important, and over the years I have come to appreciate more and more how crucial it is to start small. As we get older and busier, small changes are the only changes that seem to be possible (under normal circumstances).

Step 3. Be curious. This mindset of curiosity might just be the primary thing that can make adopting a new practice/behavior FUN. Yes, fun! How on earth can changing a habit or adopting a new, healthier practice be fun? When you’ve never done something before, you can imagine that you might like it or it might help you lead the life you want to lead, but you don’t actually know until you try it. With each new practice or behavior you attempt, you’re giving yourself an opportunity to learn: Is this right for me? Do I enjoy it? If not, what could I change that would help me enjoy it? You’re trying, and you’re doing so because you’re curious; there is NO failure! Know that if your first selected practice ends up not working for you, there are always more things to try, always more practices to approach with curiosity.

Step 4. Turn off the inner critic. Closely linked to the mindset of curiosity is the commitment to not letting negative judgments or beliefs stop you from trying. Along with Step 1, I find that in coaching, I spend a lot of time helping people turn off their inner critic or habitual negative beliefs. It often helps when you remember that attempting to start and maintain a new practice is not about being perfect, it’s about practicing something. Remember yourself learning to walk: When you know that your selected practice is aligned with your values, dreams, and goals, you will approach it with curiosity and give yourself every opportunity to succeed, not allowing naysayers (even those in your own head) to keep you from engaging in your practice.

Still 3 more steps to go! Click here to keep reading...

How to Use the Stages of Behavior Change

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 10:54:36 GMT

Back in the year 2000, when I was a fledgling personal fitness trainer, I started to study coaching. I could tell that my weight-loss clients were not finding it easy to stick to recommendations like walking more, eating less sugar, drinking less alcohol. I knew they wanted to change, but they didn’t seem able to. I wanted to help.

Luckily, two behavioral researchers, Prochaska and DiClemente, put their brilliant minds together in the early 1980s and delineated a simple little theory that would go on to help millions of people work through sometimes difficult lifestyle behavior changes. I wrote an article in 2007 to help fitness professionals learn how to use Prochaska & DiClemente’s Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change (which is commonly referred to as “The Stages of Change”). Now, I’m going to help you learn how to use this brilliant little theory in your own life, when you’re toying with the idea of changing some behavior or adding a new creative or healthy practice to your life.

She's not resisting change--she's just not at the right stage to attempt it.

The Stages of Behavior Change
There are 5 stages in the Stages of Change. To illustrate the stages clearly, let’s take “adding a yoga practice to your wellness routine” as a possible behavior.

Precontemplation: In this stage, the concept of starting a yoga practice is not even on your radar. You might hear your friends talk about it and think, “Oh, that’s nice for them” and then not even give it a second thought. In other words, you’re nowhere near actually starting to practice yoga. It’s not interesting, you don’t see the benefits, and you have no interest at all.

Contemplation: In this stage, you suddenly have some interest in how your friends’ yoga practice is going because you see how happy they seem to be. They love it; they’re sleeping better and feeling stronger. You start to listen to what they have to say and ask yourself, Will yoga help me feel as good as they do? It’s starting to feel like not such a silly thing to do. But you know there are still drawbacks to starting a yoga practice: It takes time. You have to figure out how to fit it into your week. You don’t feel like you are flexible enough and will feel silly in class with other people. In this stage, you actively weigh the pros and cons of adding this behavior to your life, and it’s likely you will make a choice to change within 6 months.

Preparation: In this stage, you’re pretty convinced that yoga is a good idea, so you start to ask your friends questions about their yoga practice: Where do they go to classes? How often are they practicing? What do you need to know in order to start? Do they recommend a specific teacher? You engage them in a conversation, and you’re actively making plans so that a yoga class will fit into your own life. You follow my tips for how to start a yoga practice as a beginner and start calling the yoga studios near you to see if they have a good class for you. You intend to start in the next few weeks.

Action: In this stage, you’re actually starting to add a yoga practice to your life. You take your friends’ recommendations and ultimately end up going to class with one of them, just to make sure you go instead of deciding last minute to stay at home on the couch. You’ve correctly enrolled one of the most important aspects of successful, lasting behavior change: Support! You make a calendar and write--in permanent marker--your yoga class each week. You’re changing your behavior, one specific, actionable, measurable goal at a time.

Maintenance: As this stage suggests, yoga has now become a regular part of your life. You don’t even need to write your classes into your calendar anymore because you just know: Mondays and Wednesdays are your sacred yoga evenings--no dates, no dinners, no drinks after work. Your yoga classes are seamlessly merged into the rest of your life and you have no desire to change that fact. Sure, you are human, and you have to miss classes sometimes due to illness or appointments that you can’t cancel, but you know you’ll get back on the yoga bandwagon as soon as those things are done. You might even try a new class on another night to make up for the ones you missed.

There Is One More Stage…
Relapse: This “secret” sixth stage is likely to happen, and it usually is caused by some outside factor--a long vacation that gets you out of your healthy routines; an injury that keeps you from your healthy or creative activities. Once that outside factor is resolved (the vacation ends or the injury heals), you can sometimes find yourself back in the Preparation phase of the Stages of Change, considering how and when you can reintroduce your previous habit back into your life.

Relapse is not failure. Simply use the 7 steps for starting and maintaining a new practice to make sure you find exactly the right practice to introduce. If you find yourself at the Contemplation stage again, in which you’re weighing the pros and cons of going to your Monday and Wednesday classes each week (Cons: it takes time to get there! You need to pay for parking! You would rather spend those evenings with your new romantic partner!), then it’s time to think creatively about other options. What other options might you have for adding yoga to your life? Perhaps getting DVDs from the library and practicing at home in the morning before work? Or finding weekend classes that you can walk to from your house?

Remember that if you are resistant to starting a new habit that you know you really want to do, you just need to figure out the best possible way to start that habit without making it unattractive or difficult. Enlisting the help of a trained coach or a group of thoughtful friends can really help when you are on the fence between Contemplation and Preparation, especially after a relapse.

The Keys to Using the Stages of Change Effectively

Don’t force yourself into Action if you’re really only in one of the first 3 stages! It won’t work.
When you notice yourself weighing pros and cons of a previously unquestioned action, you’re likely going back to the Contemplation stage and your brain is telling you it’s ready for something new. Listen! Take some time to find out what the habit in question was providing you or doing for you, and make a list of other/new/different behaviors you could try that could give you those same benefits. Pick the one that you are ready to go for (i.e., Preparation or Action stage).
Remember that relapse is to be expected and is not failure! Simply use the 7 Steps for Successful Behavior Change if you need to brush up on how to start and maintain a habit after a relapse. Tweaking and choosing a totally new habit is always your option; you’re an adult, and this life is yours for the making.
Make extra-super-100% sure that the behavior you think you want to add to your life is really something you want to do, or you’ll either never get to Action or you’ll relapse every chance you get and your change won’t stick. Getting clear on what YOU want, and not what others want for you, is the most important step in any behavior change attempt.

I hope this explanation helps you as you explore your own enthusiasm for or resistance to adding or changing behaviors in any aspect of your life!

Life: It's what we practice that counts

Wed, 13 Mar 2019 08:58:41 GMT

What we practice is what we get good at. You likely already know this, but have you really thought about what that means in your life? To your own wellbeing? In your relationships?

Maybe you spend the majority of your time worrying. Or serving others. How much time are you devoting to holding grudges? Is putting your health first (or last) a regular top contender in your daily list of things to do?

You can become habitual and masterful at anything you spend enough time practicing.

Whether an instrument, a sport, or a way of thinking or behaving, everything we practice sets electrical patterns or grooves into our central nervous system. Over time, and with enough practice, any action or reaction to a situation becomes stuck in those grooves, habitual, automatic. And when what you are practicing is anger, hate, fear, prejudice, judgment, or self neglect . . . imagine what happens in your body as you wake up and default to those ways of feeling and being every day.

Because there is no true destination in life, nowhere to end up other than (eventually) dead, the only thing we must do while we are here is wake up and practice . . . something.

For some people, that practice turns out to be an addiction to numb or escape from trauma or traumatic emotions. For others, that practice is a frenetic chase for the next best thing, something bigger, something more. I’ve certainly practiced both of those in my life. But now, I’m working really hard to practice something that serves my health a bit better. Now I choose, no matter how challenging it sometimes can seem, to practice the following:

Being Present (e.g., meditating). Probably the hardest thing to do in a competitive, “you’re worthless unless you’re DOING something" culture is to sit still and be quiet with yourself, just watching your thoughts go by and hearing or counting your own breath. This practice is a gift. It’s one of few things that shuts my brain up for a split second so I can experience being present instead of worrying about or planning for a possible future.
Dancing and/or Yoga. Both of these practices invite me to be present and fully in my body--that same body that I practiced judging and blaming and hating almost half of my life and only in the last decade have learned to appreciate, revere, and thank.
Gratitude, Compassion, Forgiveness, and Acknowledgment. In January, I decided that 2019 was my year to practice Gratitude, Compassion, and Forgiveness. So I bought a journal, created a daily reminder on my calendar, and every day by 8 p.m. I open that journal and write at least one thing I am grateful for, at least one person (myself included) I feel compassion for, and at least one person (myself included) I forgive. It’s the only healthy, non-addictive resolution or practice that I have ever stuck to daily for more than a couple of weeks (10 weeks and counting!), and it’s keeping me aware of how beautiful my life is. And last week, thanks to an activity we did in a recent writer workshop, I started keeping a “New and Good” journal, too. So now, after my gratitude, compassion, and forgiveness is written, I open that pretty journal and write at least one new thing and at least one good thing I want to acknowledge that day. This practice, also, is making me feel ecstatic about this glorious life I am privileged to have.

Each of these practices makes me a more relaxed, open, loving person, ready to encounter whatever external things happen along the way. In total, though, they take up only about 50 minutes of an average day. The return on this time investment sure feels like much more.

Next time I’ll tell you my best tips for how to go about starting a practice or a new behavior when you are terrified of judgment and afraid that you are not good enough to change your ways. Those tips really do work, even if you're scared of failing.

In the meantime, I’m curious to know what practices you engage in and which ones especially keep you happy, sane, loving, or present in this frequently noisy, frequently challenging, frequently distracting world.

Judgment and Unconditional Love

Thu, 14 Feb 2019 12:04:33 GMT

It’s Valentine’s Day. True, a “Hallmark Holiday” for many, but a good excuse nonetheless to look at Love.

Love is a vast topic, and perhaps the only topic truly worth discussing. Love is, in the end, everything. But love is also incredibly misunderstood.

The concept of love that many of us grow up with is (quite unintentionally, most of the time) conditional: The basic assumption is that “I will love you when/if you do this.” This assumption is not typically stated out loud (although sometimes it is brutally drilled into kids’ bodies-minds), and most parents really would never mean or think such a thing. But whether they are aware of it or not, parents’ actions and seemingly benign statements can sound to a kid like...

“I will only love you if you get good grades.”
“I will only love you when you behave at the table.”
“I will only love you if you perform/achieve/do/don’t do this particular thing.”

The flip side of these beliefs is that as kids, we start to believe, “If I don’t [do these things/act this way] I am unlovable and will not be loved” and “I am not good enough just as I am.”

Because we are human, unless we are explicitly told that those conditions do not need to be met in order for us to truly be loved and deemed lovable, we bring those conditions into adulthood. There, we place them on ourselves, on our partners, on our kids and our colleagues.

As adults, we can easily identify the conditions that we place on ourselves (or that we feel have been placed on us by our parents, culture, or society) when we hear ourselves using the word “should.”

Since I started my much-needed sabbatical, I can’t even count the number of times I have felt a strong anxiety and the overwhelming feeling that I SHOULD be performing or producing something. After some searching, I found that the judgments I absorbed somewhere along the line sound something like:

People who take time to just “be” are lazy.
If I am not working to serve other people, I am not only lazy, I am selfish (and selfish is bad).
I am only valuable as a human if I am actively earning money; my own health and needs be damned.

Those are all judgments. They are all false. They probably sound really familiar to those of you like me who grew up in an enormously competitive, capitalistic society.

Luckily, I now know the antidote to judgment. It’s unconditional love.

This is an active practice (and yes, it is a practice) that we all have available to us, anytime we notice we are judging ourselves. Common judgments I hear from friends and clients include things like:

I should lose weight (even though her weight is fine and her health is not in danger at all),
I should exercise today (even though she is healthy and feels good and does not need or want to achieve any particular fitness goal),
I should write some of my book today (even though there is no deadline and she is not totally awake enough to think about the plot clearly),
I should put more thought and effort into advertising my business (even though business is good and she has enough income to support herself and her family).

Here’s how I have learned to eliminate the "shoulds" and welcome unconditional love into my own life:

Step 1: Notice the judgment. What behavior or choice am I telling myself is wrong or bad?
Step 2: Ask if it's really true. Will someone die or something awful happen if I do not do that thing/change that "bad/wrong" behavior today, right now, or soon?
Step 3: If the answer is yes (such as with the statement, "I should take the car in because the brakes don't work right"), then I go on with doing the thing and feel good about actually doing what needs to be done to avoid an emergency or tragedy. If the answer is no, which it typically is, then I notice and accept the fact that I somewhere, somehow, learned that that thing I am judging about myself was not an acceptable way to be or thing to do--even though I know for a fact that that statement is not true for me, at this time.
Step 4: Ask myself “Do I want to change or do XYZ differently? Is that something I willingly and lovingly want to change or do today, right now, or soon?”
Step 5: If it’s not, decide then and there to love myself and my behavior or choice. Then give myself compassion and forgiveness for being perfectly human, and decide to feel deep gratitude for the fact that I am alive and get to experience this amazing thing called Love. From myself! Any time I want!

You know when you are actively practicing unconditional love when you can decide that you will not perform or engage in a "should" and you still totally, authentically, deeply love yourself.

I have about a billion other thoughts and connections to make about love and judgments, where judgments come from, how we can figure out which internal messages are true or false for us, how we decide to change things we truly want to change, how judgments ruin our relationships with ourselves and our partners/loved ones, and how we can stop judging others in a marketing-driven world in which nothing and no one is ever deemed “enough.” Not so long ago, I would have told myself I “should” edit this post, add more to it, streamline the argument, etc etc. But I’ll leave it as it is. The sun is shining and I want to meet a friend for a writing date. I’m incredibly grateful I made the choices I have made so I get to do exactly that.

I wish you all unconditional love on Valentine’s Day and every day! You are perfect and enough just as you are!

Social Integration: We All Need People

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 23:00:00 GMT

I’ve recently started a creative writing group at my house. We eat homemade scones, chat about writing topics, and do some creative exercises to get the words flowing onto the page.

The other day, one member of the group seemed distressed that I would be the only one responsible for organizing our gatherings: “Isn’t it a lot of work for you to plan and host us every time?” I looked at her with what can only be described as shock. And then I realized why she might interpret the planning and hosting of such an event as a relative burden. She has a family, her own service business, and a deeply rooted local community to tend to that she’s built over 20 years. Therefore, she has lots of roles and possible demands on her time and energy. Adding one more ounce to that load might, indeed, feel as though it could break the camel’s back, especially if she weren’t careful to engage in self-care first.

As opposed to my new friend, however, I have no family here. I have been on a long-overdue sabbatical from a draining desk job that I took after we moved, so I have not had students or clients to tend to since last spring. I have had no local community and no friends at all, outside of my wonderful husband, since we moved overseas 4 years ago. (FOUR years!)

Lately, I have had no social roles. And because I have spent the months of my sabbatical carefully, consciously, lovingly engaging in much-needed self-care, I am ready to have a role again. Or rather, several roles. Now that I know how much people and social connection mean to me, I'm thrilled to engage in the responsibilities associated with my writing group:

selecting a creative-writing prompt,
finding just the right inspiring passage or poem to share with the group,
tweaking my scone recipe and testing new flavor combinations for my guests (oh, that testing is tough work!),
even vacuuming and dusting one more time than I normally would!

Indeed, all of these “duties” that comprise the planning for and hosting of a group so that we can talk, explore, and experience creative energy, are the most fun I have had in years!

No Person Is an Island
Whether we admit it or not, we all need people. We are social. We cannot survive alone. Or, we can, but after a while we go crazy. At times during the last four years, I did feel crazy--at the very least, extremely depressed and isolated.

As always happens in emotionally distressing situations, I developed physical symptoms: hair loss, digestive problems, frequent infections, nutritional deficiencies, inflammation…the list is tedious and endless. And that is how life started to feel to me, too. All because I had no social identity, no local friends, no community to reflect me back to me and say, “You’re here. You’re fine. We’re in this together.”

In fact, evidence shows that an important factor--if not the most important factor--in longevity is social integration. (Watch the rich, engaging, fascinating video below. The first half is about social support/integration research.)

That facts presented in this video don’t surprise me: Without a local “tribe” to belong to and share my time and energy with, I started to actually feel dead inside. This is the only place I have ever lived where I could not make friends easily. I wondered what the point of life was if I didn’t have friends or a community to share it with (Facebook and remote communication do NOT count! See the second half of that video above). I was socially isolated, and it might have, indeed, as the research in that video reveals, been killing me.

In the several months I have been on sabbatical, I discovered that the biggest reason--maybe the only reason--to live a long life like the folks featured in the video, is to share time, energy, and love with other people. Not just with my husband, but lots of other people: My family members (when they visit us), friends near and far, people who share my interests, care about me and let me care about them.

I had those relationships in Chicago. I had them in North Carolina. And that reminded me of a post I wrote almost two years ago about what “fun” meant to me. Fun is a crucial part of well-being. As I have been meditating on and visualizing joy and what that word means to me now, I took a peek at that list again. I was not surprised to see that a number of those items included things I wanted to do with friends, or groups of like-minded people, or that allowed me to meet new friends easily.

Now that I understand how crucial social interaction is to my wellbeing, I fully understand why I had lost my sense of fun: I had simply lost my tribe. My vision of a wonderful, ecstatic, joyful life is clearly crowded with other people. This writing group at my house is simply the first step in finally realizing that vision where we now live.

So, no. I’m not about to give up the planning and hosting of that group. It’s already a highlight of my month, and I now find myself having more and more ideas for ways to get other like-minded folks together to share, laugh, relate, explore, create and simply enjoy the fact that we are alive and we’re not alone. I’m so inspired to be my healthy, social, happy self again, that I even started doing something I love again. It might have taken me four exhausting, challenging years, but the reasons we moved here are now obvious, my social integration is finally beginning, and I have never felt happier.

How is coaching different from therapy

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 22:00:00 GMT

Because the concept of “coaching” is still so nebulous to the majority of folks, I thought I’d whip up this quick list of comparisons that should help differentiate it from counseling or therapy.

General Un-ease vs. Specific Goal
If you are not sure what’s wrong but you feel generally bad or awful and you need someone to help you figure out what’s wrong, figure out why you feel like things are wrong, or diagnose you with something, you need a therapist, not a coach.

If, however, you feel generally healthy, but you really want something specific to change in your life—your job, your fitness level, your joy level—and you are simply not sure how to go about getting that specific change to occur and you could use some guidance, you need a coach.

Investigating the Past vs. Planning for the Future
If you want or need to carefully investigate events from the past to figure out “why” things got the way they are so you can try to heal those things, you need a therapist, not a coach.

If, however, you are far more intrigued by “what” to do next so that your future can unfold of your own making, in service to your specific goals and dreams, then you need a coach.

Ascending toward Normal vs. Flying toward Amazing
If you feel like you’re in deep pain and you can’t see a way out of it, you need medication to stop yourself from harming yourself, or you generally can’t find any happiness in any part of your life, you need a therapist (and maybe some effective meds, I don’t know). You really just want to feel "normal" again--whatever that means for you.

If, however, things are generally OK in many areas of your life—even great in some of them—but you want some specific parts of your experience to be even better (or amazing) and you want assistance figuring how to make them so, you need a coach. You already feel pretty normal, it's just that something in your life is "stuck" and you want it to be unstuck so you can fly.

Other Oriented (sometimes) vs. Self Oriented (always)
If you have an awful marriage or you feel like your family (present or past) is holding you back from the life you want and deserve, you definitely need a therapist.

If, however, you are more concerned with how to maximize your own wellbeing, joy, and contentment within the family and relationships that you currently have (and wish to keep), then chances are good you need a coach.

Asking "why" vs. Asking "how"
Often in therapy, one needs to stay entrenched in past events—what happened and why did it happen—in order to heal them and move toward living in a present with greater knowledge and understanding.

In coaching, we deal with the present and the future: what you have and what you really, really want, starting now. Knowledge and understanding of the past are wonderful to have going into it, if they are put to use in an active way to help you achieve the present and future of your dreams. But the “why” is always far less important to us in coaching than the “what” and “how” you will approach things right now to move into the future of which you dream.

The Summary
In general, I would say that people who need therapy or counseling tend to have larger, more encompassing feelings of un-wellness that are very challenging to address in terms of goal setting and attainment.

• I’m totally depressed and I have no idea how to get out of it.
• I’m anxious all the time and I can’t work.
• The abuse I suffered in my childhood is preventing me from having the relationship I want.

But in coaching, the client’s specific goal or desire can be explained in a specific statement that clearly warrants active brainstorming and future-oriented goal setting:

• I want a new career and have no idea how to leave the one I’m in;
• I want to live my life traveling the world and have no clue how I could make that happen;
• I want to have a more active lifestyle and I can’t figure out what steps to take to get there;
• I want to write this novel that I have been thinking about for 20 years and I am too scared to start, etc.

In coaching, you can identify a goal or a dream or an outcome of deep desire, and the coach will help you find out ways to attempt to achieve those things. Coaching is about forward motion into the you that you always wanted to be, or the life you always wanted to lead, or the feelings you always wanted to feel on a daily basis. Without so much concern for the “why” or the “how did I get this way.”

In addition, coaches are not typically qualified to work with really sick people. I am the first to admit that I will never be able to tell you if you should be on an antidepressant and, if so, which one. I won’t even recommend diets or supplements to people—those are not the things I do.

Rather:
• I listen to you more carefully than anyone (even you) ever has;
• I ask effective questions, getting to the heart of your dreams;
• I get you to think about things you have never thought about in service to your goals and dreams;
• I recognize where you’re at and I hold space for you to move forward in the direction you want to go.

That’s what a coach does. That’s what I do. Do those things resonate with you? Are you ready to start leading the life you desire? Why not try coaching?

And by the way, I am a huge fan of effective therapy. I was lucky enough to have had one of the best therapists ever when I was feeling a huge overdose of general un-ease and needed to figure out for myself why I was not able to have the life and relationships I wanted. I would not trade that therapy experience for the world! You can read a bit about my experience with therapy here.

What I learned from Elizabeth Gilbert & Big Magic

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 22:00:00 GMT

First, let me say than I loved Eat, Pray, Love. Both the book and the entirely adequate adaptation made me laugh, cry, and feel pain and joy.

Second, let me also say that, as a marriage skeptic who actually got married a year before I found Committed, I relished reading that book more than any other non-fiction book I had until that point read. What a gift to independent, intelligent, not-the-marrying-type women everywhere, like me. It’s a splendid work of research, writing, and storytelling. And I don’t find it meaningful at all that Ms. Gilbert’s marriage has since ended. (Well, it’s meaningful to her and her former husband, but it says nothing about the quality of the book or the quality and validity of her actions.)

Finally, though, today, I want to talk about Big Magic. Because this, of the three* books I have read by the lovely and wonderful Ms. Gilbert, is the book that contains

two bits of wisdom from Ms. Gilbert that have helped me up and change my life…for the absolute best.

The back story is that I am an ENFP. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry: I’ll write about it someday because it’s fascinating. Anyway, as an ENFP, I am always seeking to be my truest version of myself; to be ME in the most complete way. To serve that cause, I have learned and grown and changed so many times, my family and friends and acquaintances have always had a hard time keeping up. What is Sara doing now? What is she concerned with now? Where is she now?

The shortest version of my story is that, in the course of my becoming more truly me, I realized I needed some things in my life (freedom, travel, steady work that allowed me both, to be my own boss, etc. etc. etc.) and I made some of those things happen and was in the right place at the right time to allow the rest of them to happen.

But something has been missing for the last 17 years, and only by reading Big Magic and doing the kinds of brainstorming and soul searching I have been doing for the last 15 years, have I been able to realize what’s missing.

The reason I salute Ms. Gilbert and her book Big Magic for helping me get to the ecstatic point in my life is because of two important lessons that she teaches in Big Magic:

1. “Follow your passions” is an awful thing to tell people because (a) not everyone has a passion, and (b) if they do, they’re probably already doing it. Follow your creativity is the way to go.

2. Don’t quit your day job to follow your creativity. Support it so that it doesn’t feel pressured to support you.

Hot damn, these were totally new concepts to me, which I had never read in any self-help book previously (and I have read ALMOST ALL of such books). Let me tackle these two concepts one at a time in relation to myself, which is what this post is about.

“Follow your passions” vs. “Follow your creativity”
Hallelujah for this insight! I have been deeply excited or totally in love with many things in my life. Dancing to House music, riding my bike, speaking and reading Italian, being in Italy, traveling, walking around all day watching life happen, petting fluffy cats, taking photos of amazing scenery, meeting new friends, and so many more. I mean, I LOVE these things so much. They make my heart sing and my face break out in immense smiles.

But not one of these things is a passion so big I would eat the shit sandwich (read the book!) that goes along with it in order to do it every day of my life, every waking hour, so I could make a living out of it.

So, when I have read in the past to “follow your passion and live your dream!” I have been stymied by that word “passion”: What happens if I have too many and none of them presents a viable way to survive? What then?

Ms. Gilbert has come up with the answer: follow your creativity. And this is where it got interesting for me. Because as a kid, I used to love to draw and paint and take pictures wherever I went. I don’t find such joy in making art nowadays. I draw every once in a while, and that’s fine, and I still love taking beautiful photos wherever I am (especially in this amazing place I live now), but I am certainly not so passionate about drawing or photography that I feel a constant pull that draws me to do either one daily. Not even close.

And although I have always written and I am, actually, a professional editor and translator, I am not super passionate about the idea of writing as a career. I do love communication, and because 99% of what we all do involves email these days, I guess that makes most of my communication writing. But I would much rather be speaking to and listening to someone. Because—and this information is something I have struggled with for years and not known what to do with—I am a performer, not a producer. What I mean by that is, I want to engage in something that takes place in real time, with me being wholly present, and then is over. I am not drawn to working on something for weeks, months, or years to “give birth” to a “product” that then results from that work. That is not appealing to me in the least. It killed me when I had to work 2 whole years on my masters thesis. Ugh! I like immediate “perform this, do it excellently, and be done with it, never to have to think of it again” kind of work. Being present at its finest.

Which led me to consider acting. For about 5 seconds. Nope.

But then I realized something. I love conversation, with people, in real time. I love being present, and “performing” active listening, in real time. I also love reality, with all its awfulness and wonderfulness. And back in the day, about 13 years ago, I was drawn to the art of coaching, and I took to it like a moth to flame. I was home. It was exactly what my body, my mind, and my soul were meant to do. I was in total flow, in complete Magic (as Ms. Gilbert would say), when I was coaching. Listening, being present, asking exactly the right questions at exactly the right time—not through hard effort, just by being “with” my client and truly hearing what is being said and not said.

That is my art. That is my Magic.

Is that also creativity? The funny thing is, I don’t think so. I’m not “making” anything. In fact, coaching is sort of the opposite of me making anything: I’m offering my clients an invisible force to help them dismantle things: their obstacles, their fears, their whatever that’s keeping them from reaching their dreams and goals.

And that fact fascinated me.

Here, Ms. Gilbert had finally shattered that awful myth of “follow your passion” and was telling me instead to “follow my creativity,” and because I know myself so well by now, I learned within a couple of hours’ brainstorming that my creativity was, instead, simply being me in the presence of another person who was attempting to reach her own goals and be the best version of herself. It’s a revelation that has changed my life, and I thank Ms. Gilbert for that.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job
Now, this point that Ms. Gilbert makes is actually what got me to immediately formulate my method for allowing coaching back into my life and imagine that it has a real shot at flourishing--which I did not imagine back in 2003 when I knew coaching was my thing.

As she points out, and as so many of you likely know, there is this weird undertone to all of those “follow your passion” and “live the life you always wanted” books that says “drop everything in service to your passion/dreams right now and risk it all to pursue those passions/dreams.” But I am 43 years old, and in no way am I comfortable doing that. It’s terrifying and, frankly, stupid to put my home, my health, and my family at risk so I can try to make a new venture work, from scratch, in a foreign country where I, sadly, struggle with the language.

My husband and I have talked about this for 2 years now:

“I feel like I have to leap off the cliff without a parachute in order to live my dreams,” I’d say.
“Well, when my business gets going, you can,” he’d lovingly promise (and he was not lying).
“But, we have no idea how long that will be, and I don’t know if I can handle working every day in something that doesn’t feed my soul,” I’d complain.

And then we’d come to the real, true conclusion that if I were happier in other parts of my life (like my social life, which disappeared entirely when we moved overseas), I might still love my current teaching job like I used to. And then we’d analyze what I needed more of (more in-person people contact, please! More problem solving and energetic collaborating, please! More coaching, basically, but I didn’t know it at the time…).

But after reading Ms. Gilbert’s amazingly simple and yet totally profound words, which went exactly against the grain of “you must stop working at a good-paying job in order to devote 100% of your time to your passion/dream/art,” I realized with a shock that I could start coaching again RIGHT NOW, while working at my current job!

It did not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition, and, in fact, I would be a silly child if I dropped my sole source of income so I could attempt to build a coaching enterprise from the ground up. Silly! And stressful. And the last thing I wanted was stress. I wanted JOY. And here was the way to get it.

Keep your day job and make room for your joy/creativity, too.
They need each other to flourish.

So now, that’s exactly what I’m doing. I made room for coaching. Really, my job requires so little of my time, I have more room for coaching than I might ever fill. And being engaged in coaching, and writing about my own experiences with wellbeing and self discovery, and making the time to connect with other seekers and soul-inspired people, has already brought so much JOY into my life, that I approach my paid work with almost as much joy as I approach coaching.

To put it simply: Ms. Gilbert and her insights have changed everything for me. My gratitude is eternal. Not just for her, for having the chutzpah to write Big Magic and speak her truth at every turn. I’m also grateful to me for dedicating so much time and energy to following my truth and my joy and being dedicated to reaching both all these years, and to my husband for being so incredibly supportive despite his being baffled by my agony over the years and trying the best he could to understand and assist (he is not an ENFP, folks). And really, I am grateful to each of my friends who are on the path, too. They get it, and we have spent hours and days and years of our lives inching closer together to knowing ourselves, living in joy, and being the truest version of ourselves we can be.

I wish the same for you, with all my heart.

Maybe Big Magic will help you as much as it’s helped me? I’ve embedded one of the (many) excellent interviews with Elizabeth Gilbert available on youtube, in which she speaks about so much of the amazing content in Big Magic. (Even though it’s not my personal favorite interview**, this whole interview is brilliant. But pay attention right around minute 19. Because that, my friends, is it. IT! YES! Finally someone speaking the truth. Do the thing you love and, even if you fail, it will be effing worth it. Amen. This is why I don’t even care if it takes years to develop a coaching business. I’m DOING it, regardless whether the response is a hailstorm of clients arriving at my door or <<crickets>>!)

Look for more excellent links and tips below, after watching the video here ...

Afterthoughts and Asterisks:
Their conversation about “it’s all been done before, but not by you” always reminds me of Kat Robichaud’s incredible song “Of Course There’s Still Room.” If you don’t know Kat’s music, well…you’re missing out on serious Big Magic. This link will help remedy that problem (just buy the Darling Misfits album!) And here’s an acoustic version of the song, with some beautiful chord changes, that made me cry. To me, Kat is the epitome of authenticity.

Here's the link for Big Magic.

Strategies for Staying in Recovery

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 22:00:00 GMT

As I revealed in this post on overcoming sugar addiction [there's a link at the bottom of this post], I am deeply into trying to stay in recovery from an addiction that covered up some really negative emotions. And wow, has it been a lesson. I mean, I have known and dated addicts my whole adult life, and I have studied and had a deep intellectual understanding of addiction for decades, but never did I actively try to heal my own because I conveniently kept myself unaware of the important/necessary emotions I was covering up. Now that the process of uncovering and healing the emotions has begun, so has the process of sticking to my recovery from addiction.

These are my basic strategies, probably subject to change. I am no expert, just a person dealing with healing and wanting to share what I do.

Photo by the brilliant J. Bonigut.

1. I remember to honor FUN and joy. My addiction kicks into overdrive when I am denying my need for fun and childlike-ness and focusing only on Ms. Responsible’s over-the-top adultlike-ness. I have done this a lot since getting married. That's why my addiction went totally off the deep end recently. Now that I know that I have these two sides, and that both of them need to be honored in equal measure, I stop each time I am craving cake or sugar and I think, “Where is the fun today? What can I do to honor my emotional and spiritual sides?” There’s always an easy answer: call a friend, read some Italian, find a good movie to watch, dance to my favorite music, etc.

2. I read The Tibetan Art of Serenity, by Christopher Hansard, whenever I feel like I’m going overboard and not dealing with the emotions that my addictions helped cover up. I have had conversations with religious-minded folks who are in recovery, and some have told me that they flip open a Bible or other religious text daily, read a passage, and the passage always seems to be exactly what they needed to read that day to help them make it through. As a religion skeptic, I scoffed at that. But I can now say that it always happens to me when I flip open this book. I bought Hansard's book on a whim because the title sounded cool, and it has been the best book purchase I have made all year. And I have bought some other amazing books this year, so that says a lot!

3. I engage in conversation with my loved ones who know what it’s like to be facing such tough issues. This is a big one, because it involves being totally honest and vulnerable. I don’t have a problem with this, but I know that a lot of people do. The humans in my life who are dealing with recovery have, without exception, learned to be vulnerable, and they have no issues with opening themselves up to that vulnerability and letting me see it. In return, I feel totally comfortable doing the same. I think all addicts in recovery need this, and maybe that’s why group recovery sessions are so popular?

4. I engage in Yoga/checking in with my body. This is an extremely important one for me because 99% of my trauma has been in my physical body. Ever since my parents’ divorce, my physical body seems to have taken over the role that “feeling my emotions” should have done. I won’t go into that too much here, but I know that I need to get on my mat or on the floor, sit or stand quietly, check in with what needs to be addressed, and then engage in either pranayama, asana, or meditation for as long as it takes to feel centered again. Sometimes it’s 5 minutes, sometimes 75 minutes, but it always happens. And I no longer crave sugar to hide my emotional discomfort afterward.

5. I engage in outdoor activity. Moving my body forward, using my own two legs and lungs, always makes me feel better and allows me to focus on the positives in life. Sitting indoors, staring at a computer, makes me feel awful unless I have already made time for fun and physical activity first. So frequent walks in the hills (like those pictured up there, near my house), breathing fresh air, feeling what my muscles were meant to do (i.e., propel me forward on land), I feel like myself again—the healthy self, not the unhealthy one seeking ways to cover up the emotional discomforts of life.

6. I start writing in my journal. Anything and everything is fair game, but it usually has to do with what I am feeling and/or trying to not feel. I do this writing with pen and paper, because nothing is more satisfying than YELLING on paper with ALL CAPs and double underlines and many, many exclamation points!!!!! Writing on screen can never compare, although once the dust settles, writing blog posts like this one is always enjoyable and something I consider fun. That’s new for me, and I am pretty ecstatic about it.

7. I find healthy ways to release unwanted emotions. This one is a new activity for me, and I love it. I can recognize now, easier than ever, when I am boiling over from some emotion that I have not been adequately dealing with. When that happens now, I beat up the mattress or the huge pillows on our couch. Damn, it feels good. I have to be careful not to clench my teeth so hard that I break them, because really, when I am engaging in this boxing match with padded furniture, I seem to clench my jaw pretty nicely. J recommends I wear my mouth-guard next time, and I think it’s the right suggestion. I don’t feel the need to do this release very often, but the mouth-guard is ready when needed.

The funniest part of this strategy—and hell yes, it’s funny—is that I think we have all seen it played out in movies and thought “How cliché and ridiculous! No one ever needs to do that ‘beat up this pillow’ thing in real life!” In fact, it reminds me of that hilarious scene in “First Wives Club” when Diane Keaton’s meek character is faced with whacking her therapist (who she just found out was sleeping with DK’s character’s husband, also in therapy) with a foam tube to “get out her anger.” She just can’t do it, until finally she snaps and… watch the clip below. It’s classic. I wouldn’t attack a person—even with a foam tube—but pillows, mattresses, and couches are fair game the few times a year when I need them.

Like I said, hilarious. If someone has a good GIF for this, will you post it in the comments?

To wrap up, those are my most salient ways of dealing with being in recovery from my sugar addiction and finally learning to handle the “negative-labeled” emotions I have been covering up and allowing to fester for so long.

You can read my post about sugar addiction here.

ENFPs: Interact and Discover vs. Act and Know

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 08:11:31 GMT

For a while now, I have been saying that I’d write about ENFPs because they fascinate me (or I should say, “we” fascinate me). You probably want to know, what is an ENFP?

To understand what it is, you need a little background.

Back in the '90s and early '00s, you might have heard of the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory and/or read a book called Please Understand Me II. Both resources include the comprehensive personality test commonly known as the Myers-Briggs. I think a friend introduced me to it in about 1999, and I continue to be blown away by the accuracy of the description of this, my personality type, over the subsequent decades.

Keep reading to find out.

If you are one, you might already know it, because we ENFPs are seekers, determined to learn more about ourselves. In the language of Myers and Briggs, ENFPs are people with personalities that score highest on measures of extroversion, intuition, feeling, and perceiving in the Myers-Briggs scale of 4 different dichotomous pairs of traits:

Extroversion (E) – Introversion (I)
Intuition (N) – Sensing (S)
Feeling (F) – Thinking (T)
Perceiving (P) – Judging (J)

Your score on each of these pairs is determined by your answers to carefully crafted questions. Once you answer them, you get a score for each pair, and viola! You have a “dominant personality type.”

So why do I keep referring to this little quartet of letters when I explain my desire to coach or my constant seeking for what’s next in my life? Because the description of the ENFP personality type—in particular the “NF” part—captures me and my tendencies so well. To wit:

Interact vs. Act Alone
“People-to-people work is essential for ENFPs, who need the feedback of interaction with others.” p. 175

Discover vs. Know
“The thought that the visible is all there is is untenable for the NF.” p. 65

Novelty vs. Certainty
“They can become bored rather quickly with situations and people and resist repeating experiences” [specific to ENFPs] p. 174

People vs. Ideas
“As with the NT, the NF is future oriented and focused on what might be. But, rather than thinking about the possibilities of principles as does the NT, the NF thinks about the possibilities in people.” p. 65

To sum up:
“In Apollo, the NFs find their prototype. Their hunger is not centered on things, but people. They are not content with abstractions; they seek relationships. Their need does not ground in action; it vibrates in interaction. As the NF seeks self-actualization in identity and unity, [she] is aware that this is a life-long process, an ideal toward being and becoming a final, finished self.” p. 66

These quotes are, I think, from Please Understand Me II by Keirsey and Bates. I don’t actually know because in one of my many house moves, I sold all of my books. I only have photocopies of some of the pages regarding NFs and ENFPs. If anyone has access to either Please Understand Me or Please Understand Me II, could you tell which book these quotes are from? The page numbers I list above are accurate.

Who are ENFPs?
Typically writers, speakers, coaches, public figures. This explains my professional preferences so much! It also explains why I became so painfully disenchanted with—indeed, disgusted and burnt out by—my editing jobs. There was no interaction, only one-sided, asynchronous communication done in isolation with no real-time presence of another human being. It explains why I am constantly enthusiastic about coaching. It also explains why I am determined to grab hold of every possibility to participate in my favorite fun things to do, starting now and hopefully not finishing until I’m dead.

My ENFP Journey
So when I say “because I am an ENFP,” it’s shorthand for explaining why I am acting the way I am acting and why something is important to me that is not important to most other people (only about 6% of the population is said to be ENFPs). It also explains so very clearly why most people I know, including my relatives, seem to have no ability (or, perhaps, simply no desire) to understand me and my life choices at all, and why I have naturally gravitated toward other ENFPs in my life.

Check out this link to the Myers Briggs Inventory. It's so much fun!

Peeling the Layers of the Onion

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:44:13 GMT

[Update 2025: This has been my most popular blog post for 8 years running. If you're reading this now, pop a comment below letting me know what brought you here today.]

Peeling back the layers of an onion. It’s a metaphor for life and growth that might not be perfect but never gets old.

As you might know, my life has been dedicated to mind-body healing.

Growth on a deep level.

Investigating those things that hold us all back from getting the life and love we want.

The most poignant part of the onion metaphor for me is that peeling onions can sting and make you cry.

With every layer of adult defenses we peel back, we can potentially face great pain and lots of tears.

But it’s worth it, because life, just like an onion, is so tasty when its outer layer has been peeled way and we decide to use it in a way that is totally different from how it started.

With life, it seems it’s only in the unpeeling (discovering), chopping (analyzing), and making us cry (healing) that we learn, grow, and become our true selves.

Is it uncomfortable? Hell yes, just like peeling and chopping an onion can be.

Is it worth the discomfort?

For me, yes.

Because for me, the best and worst part is this: Unlike an onion, we humans always seem to have another layer to peel back. Even when we think we’re “done”—Haha! No way. Our next lessons and learnings will come, bringing with them one more layer, more crying, and more opportunities to dig deeper toward our core.

The result can only be good.

One thing I learned from EMDR therapy is that every time something makes me cry, it’s a thing that I have not fully faced and resolved yet—another layer of childhood trauma and adult defenses.

I would get SO excited—and I still do!—when a thought or a memory makes me cry. I know something has healed when I can talk about it or even think about it without it making me cry.

Just today, I was talking about losing my Grandma only two years ago, and I cried so suddenly. I realized after she died that she had been my greatest source of emotional support for decades. And the fact that she is gone hurts me greatly. I’m crying now, even as I type those words. There’s a lot there--a lot in that relationship that I need and want to explore so that I can dig into my next layer of onion, my next layer of healing.

Right now, I know that the crying has something to do with her unshakable belief in me—and her undying belief that I am a writer. “You ARE a writer,” she’d say, every time she got one of my many hand-written letters. “I just don’t know how you make such simple things sound so beautiful!” She kept everything I ever wrote to her. Knowing that she savored them when she felt lonely (which was often) or alone (which was even more often) made me feel that at least maybe I eased something for her in some small way, just like she eased so many things for me over the years, in both small and big ways. She sat through many a teary phone call as I cried through another layer of healing, listening and actually doing an amazing job of understanding me.

There is so much to this latest layer of my onion, it might take me years to get through. All I know is that I am finally dedicated to being honest with myself about my deepest needs and desires. It wasn't always so.

Does anyone else do this? Do we lie to ourselves to avoid peeling back the layers we most need to peel back, taking the “easy” route that just happens to not be the route we need?

I'm fascinated, simply fascinated, by how the whole body-mind-emotions continuum works, and how all these layers represent distance between our current life and our real, authentic spirit.

So I’m going to keep peeling. Crying and stomping my feet and feeling utter despair, but peeling all the same, through the fear and fury. The result is bound to be a tasty dish, with all that damn onion, peeled and chopped and ready to dive into with gusto.

Teaching and coaching: What's the difference

Wed, 31 May 2017 14:45:14 GMT

As I enter the world of the coach again, I find myself pondering the differences between coaching and teaching and what they mean to me.

I don’t think I ever bothered to investigate their differences very closely before, because I had never spent so much time teaching in my life. But now that I have 17+ years of teaching under my belt, I can pick apart the qualities of teaching and coaching quite well. These are my realizations.

Teachers want to teach and coaches want to learn.
This one holds the most weight for me, because I love learning. I love learning so much, I can’t ever stop. It's what I do in my free time. I’m curious about everything. And what I found after so many years of teaching the same things (whether yoga, or back-pain exercises, or scientific writing—yes, I have taught them all) is that I am sometimes bored by teaching the same things over and over and over again, even though my students are different and the information is all new to them.

I love when my students learn—it’s thrilling when they “get it!”—but that doesn’t give me nearly the thrill that learning about my students gives me. That’s why coaching appeals to me. When I am coaching, I am constantly learning about the person sitting in front of me, telling me her story, revealing her struggles, her reality, her hopes, dreams, life. Teaching is goal oriented and I know the outcome when I begin; coaching is goal oriented and the outcome constantly surprises me, every step of the way. This main difference is why I integrate so much listening, learning, and coaching into my Hauber Method program!

Teachers can go through the motions and students might still learn; coaches must be 100% present at all times or nothing/no one moves forward.
Have you ever had a teacher or professor who was so boring, so clearly bored, so disengaged from the class he was teaching that you were not inspired to learn one bit? Of course! We all have!

That’s one reason the great teachers stand out so well: We constantly engage with and require the engagement of our students. I love coaching so much because it demands that I be present and engaged every moment, and when I am fully present, I am in flow. To teach something that I know so well takes a lot of effort because I never want to become one of those bored/boring teachers! I think all students deserve better than that. Teaching less frequently, and integrating the give-and-take of coaching more in all of my teaching endeavors, helps me make sure that I keep my energetic spark as a teacher. Straight teaching, without the added coaching bits, might get boring, and neither of us wants that.

Teachers have answers; coaches have questions.
This one goes right along with my first point. I might know a lot of stuff and have a lot of answers, but my job as a coach means I get to ask questions to help someone figure out their own answers to the biggest questions in their life. Answers I could never dream of, answers that surprise me (or us both), answers that are totally perfect for that person. And that, to me, is thrilling and never, ever boring. Watching someone solve their own problems is one of the most exciting things in the world to me. It’s like seeing growth happen in real time. I love it.

The stuff I know and teach is finite; people’s minds, desires, and goals are infinite.
What I mean by that is, the stuff that I have taught in my life (fitness and back-pain solutions, writing) have rules and limits. There are right and wrong answers to every question because the systems (the human body on the one hand, and English-language usage on the other) are closed: Once you learn the rules and how they work, you have the answers to all the possible questions and you’re basically done learning. Then, you just apply what you know. The structural makeup (muscles, bones, and joints) of the body doesn’t change each year, and language rules don’t change each year. They both exist in pretty much the same form all the time. When problems crop up, I apply the rules (i.e., my knowledge) to fix them. I’m not learning anything new when I do that.

But with coaching: EVERYone is new! Everyone’s goals, desires, dreams, and everyone’s realities, lives, and obstacles—they’re all different, all the time. Some people change goals and get new motivators and new obstacles every year. People learn, grow, and expand, unlike the finite, totally learnable body structure they carry around. This is why coaching holds my interest no matter how much I do it: It’s always new because to me, YOU are always new.

Example: If I had two clients, both 42-year-old mothers who each had a 1-year-old daughter and each lived in a walk-up on the north side of Chicago (let’s say Ravenswood) and each loved riding her bike along the lake and each wrote short stories in her spare time, and each of those mothers wanted desperately to write the world’s most amazing mystery novel about a mother of a 1-year-old daughter who solves crimes by dreaming the solutions every night (yes, these women have exactly the same goal!)--their motivations, obstacles, support systems, realities, preferences, solutions and every coaching session we had together would not be similar at all. They would be completely different people, so their coaching would be unique to them. That is amazing to me. That is what fascinates me and makes me hope I get to do this work forever.

Coaching is about each client, and each client is unique.

Which brings up another important difference between teaching and coaching. Even if I was a 42-year-old mother of a 1-year-old daughter who had written the world’s most amazing mystery novel, and then I had these women as my coaching clients, I would not talk about my experience during their coaching sessions. Our coaching would never be about me, because my solution won’t work for other people. As a coach, I know that everyone’s motivations, obstacles, support systems, realities, preferences, and solutions are unique, which means they are also DIFFERENT FROM MINE.

So in my coaching sessions, I don’t talk about me. I ask you. And I ask you. And I ask you… all the right questions until your unique solutions arise. (I guess one could put it rather simply: I really enjoy listening better than talking.)

As a teacher in this same situation, I would do a TED talk and tell people how I wrote my amazing novel while juggling life with a 1-year-old and then you’d try to follow my advice. It would be about me, me, me and then you might set about trying to copy me, me, me.

I'm so much happier integrating the best aspects of coaching into my teaching nowadays. It makes learning fun for my students and for me. Everyone's engaged, and we all leave our time together energized and excited.

Without my coaching experience, I think I'd have burned out on teaching long ago and never come back to it. When I see all of the testimonials from people I have helped over the years, I know in my heart what a shame that would have been.

I'm looking forward to teaching or coaching you soon!

And if you're interested, you can read about the differences between coaching and therapy in this blog post.

Overcoming sugar addiction: Uncovering pain

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 22:00:00 GMT

I could have called this post so many things:

Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Now I understand what crack addicts feel like in rehab.
Mourning the loss of German Black Forest Cake.
My husband and I can no longer eat the foods we love together, and that sucks.
Please, gawd, make this torture stop.

This used to be lunch.

But the truth of the matter is, I am hopeful that the process I am going through right this minute (and have gone through about 43,200 minutes already) will cease to feel desperate, not remind me of crack addiction, no longer have me mourning, allow me once again to eat meals with my husband, and have me not feeling as though I am being tortured most hours of most days of the week.

I’m hopeful that I will, indeed, overcome the sugar addiction that I have been unconsciously feeding for over a decade now. It went into overdrive when I met and married another sugar addict (isn’t that how it always goes?) and discovered I needed to drop sugar to heal a damaged gut (more on that later).

The funny part to me is that I never realized I was actually dependent on sugar.

Is this true for other addicts? I mean, do smokers not realize they need nicotine? Do drinkers not realize they need alcohol? Is that how it works? Denial writ large, every time?

All addictions—whether as destructive as crack or as seemingly benign as exercise—serve one purpose: to cover up any emotions we perceive as negative (anger, rage, guilt, fear, sadness) and prevent us from feeling and/or expressing them and their attendant shame.

And being 4 weeks into my withdrawal from sugar, I can say, holy shit, did I have far more negative-perceived emotions than I ever thought possible. And this, from someone who has practiced and tried just about every possible healing modality and self-help process on the planet to heal my longstanding wounds!

The crazy thing is, I went easily and happily without sugar for many years. But during those years, I was exercise addicted. I’d get physically and emotionally agitated if I could not exercise, and it had nothing to do with blood sugar (good excuse!) and everything to do with the fact that the exercise—as all addictions do—prevented me from feeling the emotions I did not think I was allowed to express.

Sugar, exercise, crack—all the same in the eyes of the emotions. All willing to give us poor, mortal people an easy way out as we struggle to (unsuccessfully) cope with all the trauma and drama of being born, being brought up by imperfect people, and becoming adults in an emotion-retarded, addiction-overloaded world.

I’m not sure what the point of this post is (maybe it will reveal itself). All I know is that I felt it was important to share a few insights and then ask some questions of my fellow addicts in recovery.

First, the insights:

Sugar addiction is subtle and very, very real!
Living without sugar is extremely hard in a country where cake is a national specialty.
Living without sugar is easier when one eats enough fat (especially saturated fats).
Eating a lot more fat and no processed sugar or grains makes my body leaner, happier, more energetic, and without inflammation or painful/crunchy joints. I had been wondering where those fun physical symptoms had come from, and now I know.
I still crave and imagine eating cake almost every day. Despite the above-listed benefits of not eating it. Which explains why many alcoholics in recovery go to an AA meeting every day, no matter where they are. Daily support when recovering from addiction is really a must.
My negative emotions are finally allowed to surface, and man, do I need EVERY one of those modalities and self-help processes I have previously learned and practiced to safely let them out. Recovering is a daily practice of self care that requires focus, sometimes extraordinary effort, time, and intention. In healing addiction, there are no shortcuts. And did I mention that patience is not really my forte?

Now, my questions for fellow addicts in recovery:

Does it ever get easier? [Updated Feb. 2018: Yes, it does!]
Did you have to stop and start when you first tried to quit your thing, or did you stick to it at the first go?
How did you find support for staying off the thing?
Did you ever notice, once you committed to recovering, that you had been addicted to more than one thing in your life? And how long did it take you to stop just trading one addiction to another? (Only took me about 20 years…)
What daily practices do you do that help you not get overwhelmed by your cravings and their real cause (our deep desire to not express the “negative” emotions we need to feel)?

Anyone else silently struggling with addiction, even to something as benign-sounding as sugar, I hope this post lets you know that you are not alone. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of people we encounter on a daily basis are addicted to something. Yeah, there are that many negative emotions being repressed in all of us—and that many great addictions (coffee, anyone?).

Addictions are so easy, and none of us needs to be ashamed that we have succumbed. Even if you’re not ready to quit whatever it is you’re addicted to, and not ready to face whatever emotions you’re avoiding feeling, at least know that you do have the option to quit hurting yourself, and you will find support. I’ll be posting my strategies for dealing with my negative emotions and resisting my addiction in the coming weeks. And maybe some of my fellow addicts in recovery will be so inclined to share theirs below?

Why I Love Yoga: Part 2

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 02:30:55 GMT

As I contemplated the continuation of the list of reasons I started in Why Do I Love Yoga, Part 1, my mind went in so many different directions. At first. It always came back to one single idea, though: I love yoga because Yoga is not about my body.

That statement probably doesn't make any sense, so let me explain. First, you have to know some backstory.

When I was about 10 years old, I was told I had scoliosis (curvature of the spine).

Yep. That's my back.

At about the same time, I was told I was a likely candidate for Marfan Syndrome, a potentially deadly disorder of the aortic valve. I was pulled from daily gym class and spent that hour each day in the library with the "special" kids. I was required to have echocardiograms and EKGs every 6 months for the foreseeable future, if not the rest of my life.

I don't remember if it was a few months or a year later, but sometime after that initial diagnostic period, I was fitted for a back brace. I was expected to wear it 23 hours a day until I stopped growing--approximately 6 years. Yeah, right.

Needless to say, I was in clinics, hospitals, doctors' offices, medical imaging suites, and medical device offices far more than the average kid. And, to keep the story short, let's just say I did not wear that damn brace 23 hours a day, especially not to high school. But every single day of my young life, from age 10 onward, I was acutely aware of my body. How I sat, how I stood, what I did. Would it hurt me? Was it bad for me? Was I in danger? When would I have surgery? Would I survive? Would I never be able to play sports?

This trip down memory lane is meant to illustrate just how obsessed about my body I was forced to become as a kid. My body was always there, tormenting me in some way, making me "different." It also felt like public property, being poked and prodded and measured and discussed by so many adults (e.g., doctors, nurses, attendings, surgeons, and on and on and on) that I don't ever remember just having my body be my own. Imagine that for a minute. The only people whose bodies get analyzed that much are supermodels, and they at least make boatloads of money.

So when I say that I love yoga because Yoga (with the capital "Y") is not about my body, that's exactly what I mean. When I practice Yoga--which includes intentional pranayama, meditation, and carefully selected asana based on what feels good and "right" that day--my body is purely happy going along for the ride, following the suggestions of my breath, my mind, my imagination, and my joy. My body has no limitations when I am in Yoga, but I also am not actively trying to "change" or "fix" anything about it when I practice. I don't apologize for it,

I can practice Yoga even if I can't bend my back. On a roof. In Southern Italy. Yay!

I don't care what it looks like, and I don't let anyone tell me that what it's doing is wrong. My body just is. Finally, while on that mat (or on that beach or in that park), judgments against my body cease. No one can tell me it's damaged or different or wrong or bad, because it's not: It just is, and it's finally mine.

And that's why I love Yoga. At the end of it all, it's a spiritual practice designed to unite body and mind and spirit and breath. And that's exactly what it does for me. And you know if you've taken my classes, that's the space I hold for my students, too. I'm still working on having other parts of my life "not be about my body," too. I find it hard when so much of our society is concerned with analyzing women's bodies to death. Maybe if you and I keep on practicing together, we can all embody the truth of Yoga every day, with every breath, and the world will be a little bit better, less judgmental, and more loving for it. What do you think?

Why Do I Love Yoga: Part I

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 02:12:01 GMT

Sometimes it's nice to take a minute and remind myself of all the many reasons why I love yoga. Because I'm hyper flexible, I often have to forgo extensive asana practice in favor of targeted strength training for my hips, shoulders, back, and core.

But yoga is my rock, the calm eye of the hurricane, the lighthouse pointing the way home when seas are rough and skies are menacing, the thing I return to after allowing myself to get scattered in the ego-driven winds circling us all at any given time. And here are some answers to the question, "Why do I love yoga?":

Yoga creates space for me to just be me, however I am in that moment, with no judgment and no expectations
Yoga allows me to breathe and do nothing more than that, without guilt or urgency to "do" something else
Yoga is about nothing more than being present, asking the question, "What's happening, body o' mine?" and listening to what comes up with no desire to judge it.

These three reasons why I love yoga just begin to scratch the surface. You can read the second part of my answer in Part II, here. And really, I want to hear why YOU love yoga. Please feel free to share your comments here. And if you're curious, maybe you'd like to read more about why I teach yoga, too. That post elaborates on this fun list quite nicely.

Happy practicing, everyone!

Me practicing in my happy place: Italy.

Fitness for Women Over 40

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 10:21:17 GMT

Now that I am in my 40th year on this planet, women ask me all the time about weight loss, healthy exercise, and being fit when you're over 40.

I am more than happy to coach women through the process of adopting and adhering to an effective fitness plan, even those who have never worked out or experienced the improved mood, energy, and metabolism that accompany an effective fitness routine. The older we get, the more important effective fitness training is for our mental and physical wellbeing.

Thus, when I was approached by Outreach NC, a broad-ranging lifestyle publication for active adults, to contribute to their May 2014 issue, I jumped at the chance. You can download and read my contributions in this article by Michelle Goetzl entitled "The Gift of Health" by clicking the link at the bottom of the post. In it, I touch on:

Starting a new exercise routine
Motivation and sticking to a routine that works
Osteoporosis and the role of strength training

If you know someone who is 40 or older, please share this piece and know that, yes, women over 40 can be as fit and healthy as women at any other age!

outreach-nc-may-2014-sara-hauber-fitness-over-40-web.pdf
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It Was a Self-Massage Day

Fri, 23 May 2014 20:43:32 GMT

Self-massage, also known as self myofascial release (SMR), is a method of giving your aching muscles a serious rub down without having to pay much money or even get undressed.

As a fitness pro with decades of experience and a really crooked spine that causes all sorts of muscle imbalances on a daily basis, I need self-massage or I'd be 1) in pain all the time, or 2) spending a fortune--more than I already do--on professional massages.

The gift of my favorite cheap DIY massage is just that: It's cheap, and I can do it myself, no matter where I go.

This is it: My magic tennis balls in a sock!

I travel with my "magic tennis balls" even when I fly overseas. There's no way I could bring a foam roller (which is most trainers' first pick for self-massage), but my little tennis-balls-in-a-sock fits in every travel bag I own. I can even roll my feet (as Hauber Method students learn to do) in the aisle of the plane on a trans-Atlantic flight. Brilliant.

To get to my main point, today was a self-massage day. It was 90 degrees and super-humid. I had gone to the gym and lifted weights for the first time in 3 weeks just yesterday. And I slept horribly when the cat kept waking me up to purr in my face. I woke up with a kink in my neck, a tweak in my right hip (my constant trouble spot), and a scowl on my face.

I knew that no act of persuasion would get me to go lift again, so I opted for what my body really needed: self-massage, on my yoga mat, in front of the TV. It was the most glorious time of my day.

For 25 minutes I rolled and suffered, my body weight making the small, hard tennis balls feel like sharp objects as they broke through the adhesions causing imbalance in my muscles. I spent extra time on my internal rotators, which I discuss in detail in my Save Your Neck & Shoulders program, because even though most people are troubled my internal rotation that can sometimes lead to rotator cuff injury and impingement, my left side collapses on itself even worse than most due to my spinal rotation.

In the second edition of the Hauber Method, just released this week, I have integrated the myofascial release instructional videos into each weekly workout session because I wanted to acknowledge just how crucial this form of treatment is to healing back, neck, shoulder, hip, and knee pain.

It's 8:30 at night, 2 hours after my self-massage session, and I feel like a new woman. Ready to hit the gym again tomorrow--and roll again afterward, just for good measure.

If you're curious what my spinal hardware looks like, take a peek at the blog post I wrote about Why I Love Yoga!

Jillian Michaels Hates Her Butt

Thu, 20 Feb 2014 18:18:28 GMT

If Jillian Michaels hates her butt, then you should too.

That's the underlying message behind this news from Ms. Michaels [this was an Examiner article and it's no longer live so I removed the link]. It's just one more piece of evidence that

Even really fit women are not allowed to love their bodies in public
The messages that "our bodies are not good enough" are ubiquitous and pervasive
The fitness industry (and the diet industry, and the fashion industry, and the cosmetics industry, and the plastic surgery industry, and the porn industry... Gezus...) is built on and profits from women's self-loathing rather than self-love.

I spent years hating my body. It was never going to be good enough because I was comparing it against some unrealistic ideal (the origins of which I still don't know). I finally got smart, though, and realized that my body was here not to look a certain way but to do certain things, such as...

Carry me around, sometimes for hours at a time
Keep me alive, every day
Help me explore the places and things that pique my interest
Experience pleasure and joy from dance, touch, and contact with nature and other human beings

As you may have noticed from reading any post or page on my sites, my focus is NOT on appearance. At all. I don't give a crap what your butt looks like, or how big your biceps are, or whether you have "thigh gap." (WTF?!?!) What I DO give a crap about is that you

Understand how your body works
Learn how to take care of it so that it takes care of you
Live a life free of physical pain

No one should hate her body. No one. Does a dimply butt make Jillian Michaels a bad person? No. But in the world of fitness and celebrity, it's apparently important that Ms. Michaels makes public her self-loathing. I guess it helps sell her products? Maybe it helps other women feel OK about loathing their own "imperfect" body parts? A strange kinship of females despising themselves?

Apparently, this is the only view of herself acceptable to Ms. Michaels.

Yuck. If you hate something about your body, please stop. Seriously. Because here's the truth: Your body is a beautiful, wonderful, incredible piece of existence that is designed to work, to do things, to function within certain parameters to keep you alive. What it looks like is no one's business. How you feel in it is up to you and you alone. I'm really sad that Ms. Michaels feels bad in hers. And I'm even more sad that she felt compelled to say that to the media. Perpetuating women's self-loathing is the very last thing fitness celebrities should be doing.

If women loved their bodies would the fitness industry, the diet industry, and the plastic surgery industry collapse? Talk amongst yourself, then discuss here. I'm really dying to know.

Yoga for Beginners: How to Start Off Right

Sun, 01 Dec 2013 18:05:48 GMT

It's the end of the year. Already, I'm hearing people talk about New Year's Resolutions. For many people, resolutions revolve around one thing and one thing only: getting fit. And for many people these days, yoga classes seem a rather non-threatening point of entry on the path to greater fitness.

I applaud their interest: yoga is an incredible method for getting in touch with your body, uniting the body and mind, and learning how to breathe fully. So I'd like to give beginning yoga students some tips on how to start off their yoga journey the best way possible.

Every yoga class is different. Well, not so if you go to a Bikram (or "hot yoga") class, or if you're learning the Ashtanga series. But most beginners are not headed straight for the 105-degree oven that is Bikram or the rigid, extremely disciplined practice of Ashtanga. Most would-be yoga students are interested in learning some poses, sweating a little, and feeling like they did something good for themselves.

Beginners are more likely to head for a Yoga Flow class or a Hatha Yoga class. And I have to reiterate--every single one of them will be different. So how do you know, when you see a class on the schedule, what you're getting into?

The fact is, you don't. I know first-timers who were so turned off by (or even injured by) their first yoga class that it became their ONLY yoga class, and they'll never go back.

So while searching for the right first class for you, do these things, and don't be shy about them:

Ask everyone you know if they have taken a good yoga class that is suitable for beginners--not too fast, not too strenuous.
Find your local studio (the closer to your house or work the better--it eliminates "time" from your list of excuses!) and ask to speak to the owner or manager. Once you get through to her or him, ask what teacher or class he or she would recommend for a beginner. It's the owner or manager's job to know each teacher's style and strengths. Some teachers and classes just aren't right for beginners.
Once you have a list of potential teachers, ask the manager or owner for the teachers' contact information. If you can't get an email address, I'd be surprised. But your next strategy would be to look up each teacher online and read anything and everything they have written. Some teachers have Yelp pages, some have web sites and blogs, some have public Facebook pages. These searches are golden for learning about the teachers' personalities, styles, and interests.
If you find a couple of suitable teachers and have found email addresses or phone numbers for them, go ahead and contact them. Tell them your interests and see if they will talk with you about their classes and teaching methods. Teachers suitable for beginners will include modifications of poses for beginners, will be careful to assist newcomers with poses, and will do a lot of explaining so beginners know why and how to do each pose or breathing exercise. Their focus is on helping you get inside your body, understand what you're doing, and also feel unselfconscious as you embark on this brand new journey into yoga.

Once you've spoken with a few teachers and feel confident about trying one of their classes, go for it! Just remember, if you have back pain or if you're a really flexible woman already (I don't worry about men being too flexible, just because of hormone balance), be sure your teacher understands how important strength training is to your practice.

Have fun planning your entry into the beautiful world of yoga! If I can answer any questions from beginners out there, please post them here. I'm happy to help you find just the right practice for you.

You can read a little bit about why I love yoga in this blog post.

Use SMART Goals to Increase Health & Wellbeing

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 23:00:00 GMT

Did you know that the secret to increasing your health and wellbeing is to use effective SMART goals?

When people set out to achieve health, wellness, or fitness goals, they mistakenly focus on outcomes (i.e., "I want to lose 15 Ibs," or "I want to lower my cholesterol," or “I want to live without back pain.”).

Successful clients instead focus on actions—things that they choose to do, practice, or take part in. Well-chosen actions lead naturally to the ultimate outcomes people seek. They are the centerpiece of what we wellness coaches call SMART goals. These goals are:

S = Specific. "I want to feel better" is a vague outcome. "I will walk at 3.6 mph for 30 minutes on Monday and Friday" is a specific goal that will likely help you achieve the outcome of “feeling better.”

M = Measurable. "I will walk today" is too loose. Does walking to the car, which is 20 feet away, count? "I will walk at 3.6 mph for 30 minutes on Monday and Friday" is a measurable goal—there is nothing vague about it.

A = Actionable. "I will lose 20 pounds" is not an action. Can I look at you and see that you are losing 20 pounds, right at this moment? No. But if you say, "I will walk at 3.6 mph for 30 minutes on Monday and Friday" and it is Monday and I see you on the treadmill, I can see that you are likely on your way to losing that 20 pounds.

R = Realistic. "I will work out for an hour every day this month" is not realistic. If you set your goal too high, and then you don't succeed, you will feel bad about yourself. Set your goal at a reasonable level to make sure you succeed. After all, success breeds success. Achieving even one tiny action goal—perhaps "I will walk at 3.6 mph for 30 minutes on Monday and Friday this week"—will set you up for bigger and better future goals. Always start small.

T = Timed. "I will work out" is not a SMART goal because it has no timeframe.
In order to reach a goal, you must have a set time within which you will complete that goal. Set new action goals each week, and make sure your goals can be accomplished by your next goal-setting date.

Click the image to download your free SMART goals worksheet.

Now that you know what a SMART goal is, download the SMART goal worksheet I created and craft a SMART goal that will help you reach an outcome you desire.

Be sure to follow the tips in my super-explanatory post about how to make sure you can start and maintain a new practice first.

And remember, stay curious and find something to enjoy about each SMART goal you set!

Looking Perfect or Feeling Good?

Sun, 07 Jul 2013 16:24:11 GMT

Looking perfect or feeling good. That struggle has been on my mind a lot lately as I welcome a host of new internal and external conditions that have a direct impact on my identity as a "health and fitness professional":

severe iron deficiency, which makes me fatigued if I even think about exercise
aging, which makes me not care one bit about whether I have the most toned body on the planet because other things seem far more important
building a business, which takes up a lot of time and intrinsically feels more satisfying than spending an hour each day listening to testosterone-heavy muscle-heads groan and yell at the gym I belong to
my yoga mind, which knows without a doubt that the appearance of my physical body is perfect just as it is--however that may be on any given day--and its lack of muscle does not have one tiny bit of impact on my status as a lovely/loving/lovable human being.

The items in the above list have undermined the major belief that drove me to exercise obsessively for the first 10 years of my professional fitness career: my body was really messed up from scoliosis and other health issues, and I had to work really hard to make it appear "perfect" or I wouldn't be respected, successful, or loved.

I think perhaps a majority of women are led to believe something very similar, and that is what countless "love your body" campaigns and groups are designed to help defuse.

But as anyone who has made a major shift in her life knows, old beliefs and thought patterns die hard. Really hard. It takes more than a simple ad campaign or a support group to change our core beliefs.

Especially when every bit of advertising and social conditioning in our society says, "Women are their bodies, nothing more, and we demand that those bodies appear PERFECT!" And as a professional in the fitness and wellness industry (and, sadly, also in "Westernized" yoga)? Forget about it: We are ALL supposed to be perfect icons of bodily perfection: no body fat, no cellulite, no structural malformations, no outward appearance of aging, perfect curves in exactly the right places, and energy so abundant we work out hours a day without a care in the world.

Hmph. I don't think anyone can adhere to those expectations without being sick and obsessed.

So here I reveal the strategies that work to ensure that I don't fall into the "trying to appear perfect" trap again. If you recognize yourself struggling with anything I've mentioned so far, maybe one or more of these can help you, too.

Practice some form of meditation or internal awareness exercise on a daily basis, no matter how briefly. Turning inward has an incredible impact on my sense of well being and my awareness of what's truly important in life: a mind-body relationship built on mutual understanding and admiration.
Question everything, and choose which option feels right. When I walk past the mirror and see loose upper arms, flapping along beside me, my first, fleeting reaction has been "Oh, man, I should go lift weights!" But then I learned to pause and think, "Why? Is it hurting me at all to have floppy arms?" I quickly acknowledge the deep feelings of "should" and contrast them to the much more important knowing of "want to"--and the "want to" part of me just knows that lifting weights would be profoundly worse for me than simply accepting my body's current condition (see list above) and realizing I'll get excited to lift weights again when my body and mind are screaming in unison, "Yay, now we want to!"
Do what I can to stay healthy and feel good. That means taking my iron and vitamin C and D on time with lots of water; doing at least one foundation move from the Hauber Method a couple times a week so I maintain a pain-free back; walking or biking to my appointments when I feel up to it, but taking the bus when I don't have any energy; getting a massage when I can, and using my magic tennis balls for self-massage when I can't; and balancing my precious work time with measured amounts of high-quality social time with people who mean a lot to me. (I'm a big believer that social support and sharing have a huge impact on health and well being.)
Participate in EMDR. What's that, you ask? Well, this little acronym has probably gone the farthest, after my yoga training, to help me defuse any remaining delusions that my body's shape and appearance determine my value in life. The acronym stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprogramming, although newer research has shown that any bilateral stimulation of the sense organs (eyes, ears, hands) brings the same beneficial results. The technique is too complex to explain in a paragraph, but in practice with a qualified therapist, it's simple and utterly profound. I participated in it, with Chicago-based therapist Vanessa Ford, because it's got decades of support from high-quality research studies, especially on its benefits for people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I can tell you, though, that it worked wonders for me and my seemingly small (when compared to military combat or rape, the two most common causes of PTSD) problems. In combination with my Buddhist and Yoga meditation practices, EMDR has given me a new life. And I can tell you without hesitation I'll simply never go back to hating any part of my body ever again. Or lifting weights when I don't want to. Or feeling like a failure for having floppy upper arms. The effects of EMDR are lasting, and treatment takes mere weeks or months, not years and years like often-ineffective traditional therapy.

When faced with the choice to "look perfect" or "feel good," I'm opting for feeling good from here on out. What about you?

** I had so many wonderful, heartfelt comments to this post on its original Wordpress page. It's too bad I could not preserve them when I moved the site. Perhaps new readers would like to add some helpful comments of their own?

Why Do I Teach Yoga

Wed, 01 May 2013 13:57:03 GMT

"Why do I teach yoga?"

It's a question I often ask myself, because sometimes I get lost and need to find my way back. I get caught up in the very American view of yoga that promotes yoga practice as a way to lose weight and work on one's body shape and size. I feel pressured to teach a fast, flowing, aerobically stimulating class even when I know that the students asking for such a class are not ready for it physically. I let myself fall into the trap that I have fallen into since I was a youngster: trying to be what people want me to be instead of what I am.

In the last week, during my lovely yoga retreat in Puglia, Italy, I found myself falling into the traps that I just described, and I had to pause and ask myself again, "Why do I teach yoga?" Below are my answers.

I teach yoga because yoga is about acceptance and change. It is a practice that unites the body and the mind by way of the breath, and it allows us the opportunity to accept where/who we are and make the choice to move forward into someplace/someone new.
I teach yoga because I believe so strongly in the power of the mind that I can't help getting excited when I can introduce someone to that massive power they hold within themselves. Changing the mind does more for our health than changing the body alone does, in my opinion--and changing the mind leads to changes in the body that last.
I teach yoga because in each class, I get the opportunity to reserve a little slice of space and time for my students and myself to shut out all outside influences, to turn inward, and to truly listen to what our bodies and minds are telling us. For most people, my yoga class offers them the first time all day or all week that they actually have been aware of their own breath--the one thing keeping them alive, and the primary thing for which we should all be grateful.
I teach yoga because it allows us all to achieve an awareness of our mind, our thoughts, our emotions, and our bodies' incredible ability to store these thoughts and emotions and clearly display them even when our minds think they're fooling everyone.

My yoga is a meditation: a turning inward, a noticing, a practice of mindfulness, an experience of being fully present and focusing on one thing (as much as possible). The object of the focus may change from day to day, from class to class, but the method for achieving that focus is consistent: breathe, notice, imagine, repeat.

My yoga is not about getting your body to shrink or your biceps to bulge or your belly to flatten. For that, ride your bike, lift weights at the gym, or do my core and back strengthening exercises. Instead, my yoga exercises the one part of us that affects our physical well-being more than any physical practice you can participate in: the mind.

If you're interested in my yoga, let me know. I'd love to share it with you.

Pranayama and the Laws of Giving & Receiving

Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:29:25 GMT

The law of giving and receiving is one of what Deepak Chopra calls The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga. This law tells us that the universe is constantly nourishing us when we are nourishing it. When we give what we would like to receive, we actually get just that. For example, when we put love, gratitude, and joy out into the world by way of positive interactions, a welcoming demeanor, and random acts of kindness, we get all of those good vibes sent right back to us to receive.

I feel particularly connected to this law after having taught a charity yoga class at Namaskar Yoga in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood.

The entire experience exemplified the law of giving and receiving:

I gave my time and energy to teach the class
Students gave their time to attend, and donated $5 to a worthy charity (Inspiration Café)
The studio owner gave her location to house the class
And every single one of us was showered with the benefits as we shared space, breath, and laughter in the course of that 75 minutes.

What could be more beautiful than that?

We all, in fact, have a simple method for perpetuating this giving-receiving continuum every minute of every day. It’s called breathing, or pranayama.

When you think about the act of breathing--how you are taking into your body these particles that had previously been swirling and twirling around outside of you, and then release them a moment later to take in breath anew--you can see how we humans are always giving to and receiving from the atmosphere in which we live.

When we add consciousness or mindfulness to this typically automatic action, we deepen the practice of giving and receiving even more. Imagine: consciously breathing in love, joy, and kindness and intentionally breathing the same out into the world! How bright our smiles could be! How connected we could feel to our neighbors and friends! Just by sharing the simple act of breathing, colored with the beautiful qualities of love, joy, and kindness.

We can also use the action of the breath as a metaphor and try to emulate its cycle of giving and receiving in other ways throughout our days.

Recall that to experience the law of giving and receiving, you just need to be willing to give to others exactly what you’d like to receive. If your wallet feels light and you’d like to encourage abundance in your life, tip your waiter a little extra the next time you eat out. If you are desperately in need of some cheering up, extend some extra kindness and a smile to the bus driver as you board today. If you’re feeling alone and crave affection, reach out to an old friend and express your gratitude for their presence in your life. You’re telling the universe that everything you need, everything you crave, is already there inside of you--and the universe will respond in kind, giving you even more.

Mr. Chopra gives us an excellent set of affirmations regarding the law of giving and receiving. It’s amazing how something so simple can be so profound.

Relaxation Improves Performance

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:17:42 GMT

Ever since I can remember, I have gotten sick when I have been forced to work a solid "8-hour workday." I never drank coffee until I started working in the corporate world, as I tried to force my energy level to adhere to the false notion that a worker at a desk job for 8 hours is a productive one. Nothing could be further from the truth, but only recently have scientists and corporate bigwigs been catching on to that fact.

It's been shown time and again that we humans need rest--and lots of it--to be at our best, cognitively, emotionally, and physically. We start to destroy cells and important muscle tissues as soon as we cross that line from "working optimally" to "being a little fatigued," and it's all down hill from there. The thing is, we humans cross that line after a much shorter time than 8 hours! As Tony Schwartz reveals in his excellent New York Times piece, "Relax! You'll Be More Productive," in as little as 90 minutes after an energetic high, we need a rest.

The bottom line of the article, and what my body seems to have been telling me for years, is: Relaxation improves performance.

And by performance, I'm talking not just about work. I'm talking thinking/reasoning skills, emotional skills, and life skills that are crucial to "performance" in relationships, day-to-day interactions in public, and self-care.

We need vacations and time away from the "grind" sprinkled heavily throughout our days, or we just don't feel and act right. If we don't get that needed time away, addictions are a frequently used crutch to help us push through, and we all know that addictions can have some dire consequences.

I realized after trying to work for other people many times that I just couldn't play by someone else's rules (which required someone else's schedule) without getting dead sick. It happened every time! My body told me loud and clear, "Sara, you need regular relaxation built into your days or you'll die." Or at least, that's what it felt like. So I put a plan in motion to get out of the 9-to-5 (or, more often, 7-to-6) rat race and into a life that better suited my values: healthy life, healthy relationships, healthy body (none of which I had when working the corporate gig).

As we emerge from winter to spring, keep your needs for relaxation in mind. Honor your body's rhythms. And if you think you need some good brainstorming to come up with ideas for how to find that relaxation even during a 9-to-5 (or 7-to-6) gig, let me help. I can't give you answers, but I can ask you all the right questions to help you find what'll work for you.

Now, isn't it nap time?

Gratitude Leads to Better Health

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:00:00 GMT

I learned long ago, probably during one of my many self-help-book-reading jags, that expressing appreciation to others makes them feel really, really good, and it actually has a profoundly positive effect on relationships.

As I exponentially increased my expressions of appreciation and gratefulness--by consciously choosing to do so--I started to notice just how rarely I had heard such appreciation sent my direction. Such warm-and-fuzzy, heartfelt feelings of gratitude were apparently more rare than I ever imagined them to be, and I never would have noticed if I hadn’t made the concerted effort to increase my own delivery of these simple, yet meaningful, expressions.

In my inbox last week, I received an e-mail from the leader of a women’s chorus that I belonged to in Chapel Hill, NC. Every week, this amazing woman sends out announcements of uplifting, healing, love-focused events, requests, and news items. Amongst the long list that day was a link to ArtofGratitude.com [sadly, the website is now defunct], described as “a free resource designed to help people create a daily practice of expressing gratitude.”

I had only recently begun to keep a “receiving journal,” in which I list all of the tangible things/kindnesses/acknowledgments, great and small, that I receive throughout the course of the day. I began cultivating this practice so that I would get accustomed to being the recipient of abundance in all forms. So the practice of recording my daily expressions of gratitude--in addition to hearkening back to that day many many years ago when I began my unrestrained vocal expressions of gratitude for others--seemed a perfect complement to that practice.

I signed up immediately.

Why, you might ask, is it so important to record our feelings of gratitude on a daily basis? Robert Reichner and Adam Feuer, the founders of the site, do a nice job in their home-page video of explaining just why gratitude is so important in our lives.

And there is plenty of research emerging about how the expression of gratitude not only benefits the recipient of that gratitude, even those under extreme stress, but it also improves the well-being of the ones delivering it.

If the yogic law of giving is really at work, which I have no doubt it is, when we say and write the words “I am grateful for . . .”, we’re pretty much guaranteed to receive more and more things to be grateful for. The more we give out, the more we get back.

I haven’t completed my Art of Gratitude email for today yet, so I think I’ll do so right here, right now:

I am grateful for my giant, throbbing heart of a chorus leader, Kathleen, for sharing so much great information with us all!
I am grateful for the Art of Gratitude web site and app!
I am grateful for the support of my friends and family, no matter where I am in the world.
I am grateful for the Internet for allowing me to share this news with you so that we can all spread the word, spread the gratitude, and increase the positive vibes of the world!

And you? What are you grateful for today?

•And if you use any online gratitude journal or gratitude app that you like, please post it below in the comments. It would be nice to have a link to something good since the Art of Gratitude site is now offline.

Mindfulness: Changing the Experience of Pain

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 22:00:00 GMT

This piece by Elizabeth Landau on CNN.com [the full link appears below this post] is a beautiful account of how mindfulness can change the shape of both physical and emotional pain.

Back pain is the type of pain that I see and work with most frequently in my events and classes.

When a person is experiencing pain--or is accustomed to feeling pain--the mind runs amok with negative thinking. Whether it be anxiety, depression, blame, shame, or the anger that Monty Reed (in Landau's piece) describes, those negative emotions actually cause pain to increase or intensify. Judging yourself for having a particular feeling or emotion, or believing you are victimized and disempowered, can cause anyone's back to hurt!

I know--from years of teaching mind-body integration, empowerment, and back-care--that one reason my work is so successful for back-pain clients is that I help these clients become mindful and to see themselves not as victims, but as I see them: fully functioning, healthy, whole people who have a choice to judge themselves and their situations harshly or to simply notice each moment as it is.

That self-acceptance, that mindful awareness of their "whole, healthy" state, and that empowered feeling of "Oh, I have a choice in what I feel, notice, and believe about myself" go a long way toward reducing and eliminating bodily pain (and emotional pain, by the way). The fact that I also teach the most effective, fastest-acting core-strength exercises is just icing on the cake!

Believe what you will about effective treatments or therapies for physical and emotional pain. But I know in my heart of hearts that the way I teach (my perspective) is just as important as what I teach (my back-care methods). That's one big reason why I gravitated so naturally toward teaching Yoga.

To me, Yoga IS mindfulness and empowerment. Each asana and each breath presents an opportunity to be conscious of and curious about each emotional and physical sensation we have. An asana/pranayama practice is just one 60-minute string of individual moments of "being in the present, watching what comes up without judgment." When you take my yoga classes, you'll experience it for yourself. And it just might make your pain go away.

Here is the link to the original article by Landau.