The Community Strategy Podcast: The nexus where online community strategy meets intentionality

Episode 82: Key Takeaways from the Community Leaders Mini-Wellness Retreat, Part 2

July 24, 2022 Deb Schell Season 1 Episode 82
The Community Strategy Podcast: The nexus where online community strategy meets intentionality
Episode 82: Key Takeaways from the Community Leaders Mini-Wellness Retreat, Part 2
Show Notes Transcript

As an online community leader, it has been challenging to juggle personal and professional tasks over the past two years. 

Many leaders feel overwhelmed with building, launching, and growing. I’m one of them. 

In this episode of the Community Strategy Podcast, you’ll hear the second part of a recording of the Community Leaders Mini-wellness Retreat, held in June with fellow Find Calm Here Community members who share tips, success stories, challenges, and how to avoid burnout and overwhelm as community professionals. 

Nivi Achanta, CEO and founder of Soapbox Project, teaches a self-care system to sustain your work, time, and energy. Soapbox Project makes it easy for busy people like you to create a positive social impact. Our lightweight climate justice funnel starts with bite-sized climate action plans, scales up through monthly action hours, and engages people further through a membership community focused on local action. 

Ani Papazyan of Last Stop 4 Pain discusses the sources of our pain in the neck. She’ll give recommendations and a self-help technique or two for neck pain relief. Through self-help techniques, suggestions, and recommendations I empower my clients to take control of their health, take charge of their habits, and make informed lifestyle choices. My primary focus is to help them see that living with pain does not have to be their new norm. By taking consistent small steps they can live a happy, healthy, and pain-free life.

Carol leads everyone through a guided meditation to help us tap into our hearts.

After a successful corporate career, Carol felt a calling toward something more impactful, meaningful, and spiritual. She is the Co-Host of the Hearts Rise UP Podcast and shares her guided meditation with the community. 

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The Community Strategy Podcast (CSP) offers interviews with online community leaders who share their community-building journey. Our podcast covers community concepts, community building, community strategy, community structure, community membership, and community management. We deep dive into the best ways to launch with platform reviews, give our thoughts on cultivating engagement, and the keys to identifying ideal members who will keep coming back and becoming super supporters.

Visit our Website Find Calm Here to learn more about working with Deb

Nivi, Welcome. We had met, through the CMX slack channel and Nivi is a member of our community consultants collective, and that’s a group of people who meet. Every month, once a month, there are people who are actually community leaders and consultants who help others build online communities like me.

One of the things that I realized that I wanted to do was I really wanted to bring people together and focus on collaboration over competition. And so part of that is supporting each other month to month and she offered to share with us some self-care for community leader tips. So Nivi, take it away.

Amazing. Thanks for the intro, Deb. So before I start, there are a couple of things that I usually like to do before any event that I get to lead or co-lead or speak at, because I can control it a little more. The first thing is I just like to take a deep breath and I would like to invite you all. My favorite one is inhaling for four counts and exhaling for 10, because that drops your heart rate, like immediately by around 10 beats per minute.

 The second thing that I like to do that sometimes I forget about, but it makes a huge difference is turn off my view on zoom. Uh, there’s a lot of research showing that that, uh, really helps people learn better, cuz you’re not looking at yourself and it actually drains your energy a lot when you’re looking at yourself and prohibits you from actively listening.

So those are the, uh, those are the two things that I like to do. And the last thing is I would like to invite everyone to just get a little more comfortable, especially, you know, if you’re staying for the entire time, um, all of that stuff, if you need a glass of water or just your desk, I just. Filled up on my water. 

So I just wanna make sure that you do that. So now let’s begin, uh, today I wanna talk to you about self-care for community builders. We will see if zoom lets me share my screen. And if not, I’m just gonna go ahead and, and chat with you. Um, but for visual learners, I have a little something for you to follow up.


I just made you the co-host, who you should be able to share. Awesome. Thanks, Deb.  

So here is my screen. So I’m just gonna kind of tell you what I’m hoping that everyone gets out of the next few minutes together. And there are three main things. The first thing is redefining self-care, setting up a self-care system, and creating what, what, um, Brene brown calls, big boundaries.


And I’ll go into that in a second. So briefly why I care so much about this is I run social and environmental justice. Community, which means that if we burn out, we are literally not doing the work of taking action on the issues that we care about. And if we’re burnt out, we can’t do anything about sustainability or climate change or racial justice or any of that.

 

So it’s really important to me to like, think deeply about this concept of self-care, especially as it’s been super commercialized for the past few years. So that’s something that I’ve been spending the past couple of years, just like armchair philosophizing about. So the very first thing, and I welcome you to share this in the chat.

 

It is a big question though. So if you don’t have anything to, to think about immediately, that’s fine, but I would love to hear from you. What do you define as yourself? And I will say that there’s no right answer because then we would solve a lot of things by now. But I’m curious to know if if you’ve thought about it or if you’re thinking about it.

 

What do you define as yourself?

 

consciousness awareness? That definitely resonates with me. Carol, your personality, Deb. Yeah, absolutely. it’s a huge question. Something to do with the values. I love these answers. Definitely keep, keep these coming. And like, I definitely encourage you to think about this more, cuz it’s kind of a mind-blowing question in my opinion.

 

And I don’t think we can like really critically think about self-care without this definition. So I put an image of a ship here and um, there’s this Greek paradox called thesis’s ship and you might have heard of it before, but it’s this concept of like if you remove one plank from a ship and replace it with another.

 

Is it still the same ship. And then at what point does it change? And so that I ponder that a lot. It has given me no answers, just more questions, but here’s where I am so far is I define myself as our consciousness supported by our memories and relations to others. So for me, like when I was stripping it down, what does it actually mean?

 

Like, this is what I, this is what I came to and offline. I can share some resources on like why this is my current answer. And this is really important to me because I think of like, I stopped associating only ni with like NI’s body and NI’s mind, it’s kind of meta, but I see those like almost, I see my mind, this body as mind and body as partners in this work.

 

So when I think of self-care, my concept has definitely changed because now I’m like thinking of my relationship with others and my own. Awareness in my own mind and also treating my like physical body and my mind as partners in this journey that I have to invest in to continue doing the work that I do.

 

So if that’s a little complicated, we can all just sit with that later. Um, but this, the first thing that I, I like the first conclusion that I came to out of this is that when I’m talking about self-care, I really wanna step away from the commercial aspect, uh, and focus on like the self-care system of your body and your mind and what it is that yourself actually is.

 

So for me, that looks like these resources, activities, and people that you can combine to create a self-care system. So everyone’s gonna have their own different three different things, but I see like the resources as this lifelong learning journey, building the activities as how I can practice those and the people as you know, my relations with others, which really C.

 

My sense of self. So for me, it’s one of them is this book called to rest, uh, activities, exercise, getting out in nature, uh, meditating, and then people, my friends, and family. I don’t think those are very unique answers, but I just wanted to show you what I had going on. So one of the things that fall under resources is, unfortunately, as humans, we cannot exist outside of time.

 

So for me, taking care of myself really includes managing my time. And so I, I have this template and I’ll share it with you, especially for those of you who use the notion of getting clear on my values and boundaries. I know somebody said values in the chat. And so I wanted to kind of show you how I’m actually doing this.

 

Cuz I think boundaries for me are the most important part of this conversation right now, because. That is like one tangible thing that you can actually do. Um, besides the stuff that you’re already doing, like exercising, and meditating, especially as a community leader, setting boundaries helps you take care of yourself.

 

And Brene Brown said, uh, boundaries are the distance, which I can love myself and you simultaneously. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that. So that’s kind of what I wanted to spend the next, uh, like seven minutes sharing a little more specifically about is resources for boundary setting. So I’m gonna skip over this part, cuz it’s just like different resources that I use to manage these six things that I was breaking down.

 

Self-care is happy to share this with you afterward. Um, but let’s, let’s chat about boundaries. So if you’re not familiar with bene Brown’s work, I highly recommend going into it. She does a lot of, um, she does a lot of. Workaround defining emotions and getting clear on labeling what you’re feeling and how to deal with them.

 

So this quote kind of blew my mind because I realized I wasn’t thinking about compassion in the way that she is. And she says, compassionate people ask for what they need. They say no, when they need to. And when they say yes, they mean it they’re compassionate because their boundaries keep them out of resentment.

 

When I read this, I realized this is not how I was thinking of compassion. I was thinking of like bending over backward to help everyone do everything all the time. And when I thought about it, there wasn’t a lot of high-quality output that I was doing for others or for myself. So this led me to a whole journey of figuring out, okay, how do you actually set boundaries?

 

That is meaningful in the community-building journey. And it really comes down to these two columns of what is okay. And what’s not okay. I know that sounds really simple, but like, that’s just a question that you can take with you when somebody makes you feel off, whether that’s a community member asking you a question, or whether that’s your friend asking you for a favor or anything like that like it’s just easy to go into your head and say, is this okay?

 

And think about that. So the reason they’re called big boundaries is setting boundaries of what isn’t isn’t okay with integrity and generosity, which means you’re giving the other person the benefit of the doubt while also setting boundaries for yourself. So in my little doc that let me actually link that in the chat.



in this doc, I basically broke it down into this little table where. I use this. If I, if something makes me feel weird, I’ll write down the event, say what my boundary is, whether that’s my time, whether that is the way I wanna be treated, whether that’s something else, is this okay? Is this in line with my values?

 

Am I making the most generous assumption? And what do I do next? So two examples are, you know, I’ll just share one. If someone shows up 10 minutes, late to a one on one, one meeting we have together, my boundary is that I need others to show up on time and respect the time that we have together. Is this okay?

 

And no, is this in line with my values maybe because am I making the most generous assumption? No. So the action that I would take is just to reflect on it further and understand the context. And this helps me understand, like how can I make sure that people are respecting my boundaries, but also not yell at someone 

 

if you know, they.

 

or having a family emergency or something like that. So big boundaries can apply to little things. And that’s really the tool that I wanted to share. I’ll close by going back to this definition of self and collective care, the people in your life are so important to take care of when you’re thinking about self-care.

 

Uh, Dr. Elizabeth SA over here said instead of self-care, try out some collective care and see if that changes how you feel. And I think as community leaders, this is our greatest potential is to not just focus inward, but also think about all the things that we’re learning and figure out how to distribute this to others in a way that makes us feel better and makes us feel refilled.

 

So that’s my hot take on transitioning out of the commercial definition of self-care and expanding it to include our values and our boundaries and the people around us. So, yeah, I know we’re almost at time, so if anyone has questions, these are the people that support me in collective care efforts, but I will end here and would love to hear if you have any thoughts or questions.

 

Thank you.

 

Beautiful. Thank you so much. What, an amazing gift, uh, to share with us. Um, I love this template, so definitely checking it out. I put some screenshots from your presentation in, my Google docs note. Um, uh, we have, we do have a break between, uh, 12 and 1215, so we can go longer. Um, if anyone does wanna hang on and if N you’re able to hang on to answer questions for a bit, um, we can go ahead and do that now.

 

Um, I don’t know. I don’t see anything in the chat. Um, I think the biggest question I had was just, um, it takes time, right? To just like put this together. And how do you find the time to, how do you prioritize something like this? Because I think my biggest problem is, just prioritizing these kinds of things.

 

Yeah. 

 

So I can show you my prioritization system if I find it. So there’s two, there’s actually two things. So the first thing which I like glossed over, but that was in the presentation, that book rest that I suggested, the reason that I love it and that it changed my life is basically the author studies creatives throughout history.

 

And he comes up with, I mean, doesn’t come up. He discovers that people generally follow this one-time blocking thing that makes them more productive and creative, 90-minute work chunks with at least 30-minute breaks in between. So I started doing that and obviously it’s not easy to stick to it every single day because of meetings and things like that.

 

But generally, I don’t work more work is a like questionable word, but I don’t really work more than five hours a day. And I started doing this around two or three months ago and it, it hasn’t improved, basically everything I’m getting so much more done because it’s also putting pressure to me on me to choose the things that I am saying 

 

yes to.

 

And also this idea of three work chunks is helping me split out my time better. So I found my, um, this is the doc I look at every day. So I have different tasks that are day specific. So Monday like investing in the community Tuesday, content writing Wednesday asymmetric bets, which is like, what are the things that probably won’t work out?

 

But if they do, they will be huge. So like speaking at a big conference or writing at op-ed and then wall street journal and stuff like that. So having different having, uh, each of my work blocks has a specific task has really helped guide what I will and won’t do the hardest thing about this is stopping at the end of the 90 minutes and it is worth it.

 

It’s very difficult, but it’s, it’s worth it. So I highly recommend testing out that approach. 



Well, I love the presentation. Um, there’s so much to dig into there. The first question that you asked about the self, just revisiting that question, that’s a really deep, impactful question. I think I’ve thought a lot more about this recently and trying to identify, especially when I, the two things I’ll say is that I noticed that, um, when I shaved my head for friends who had cancer last November, um, it was a triggering experience because I just, I connect my identity.

 

So with my curly hair and I felt not me without that hair. Um, it was a, it was a very, and I was just going through a lot of the time, um, personally. Um, and I really think that. Just to say, I have definitely lost a sense of self. And I’m trying to reestablish that now for myself to understand, um, who I am, who Deb is, and what, what that means.

 

Uh, but I think, um, just the thought of it and maybe journaling it out is something that has helped me. Um, and talking out loud. One of the things I was thinking about recently, I don’t know if you ever do this or if anybody does, this is, I was thinking about just, um, putting a zoom on and recording myself.

 

Um, just like without the video or just the audio. And then I could create like a transcript because I’m actually working on writing a book with, um, Kelly. And she said that this is something she does with clients is that she, um, just has to prompt questions and then asks people things. And then they just like talk and sometimes it’s so much easier.

 

To just talk and then piece out what the takeaways are. So those are, another tip that I was thinking of too, is maybe if the question is a big one for you and you don’t aren’t, I’m not a fan of like writing or typing, um, talking to yourself. It’s okay. I’ve been working more on talking to myself too.

 

I don’t know. Um, if you recommend that, Nivi

 

I mean, anything that works for you, right? If you’re a verbal processor or written down processor there are just so many ways. So I’m dropping two more, uh, book Rex in the chat. Um, one of them is by Oliver Burman, and I don’t remember which one it was, but there’s one that he talks about, his whole question of the self a lot.

 

And that’s what got me thinking. And then the other one, um, this is not as tactical, but this book is like the craziest book ever. It’s called the order of time. Uh, I recommend the audiobook. That’s narrated by Benedict cumber badge. And it’s not like it’s not philosophy, it’s like theoretical physics, but he explains it really well about what time actually is.

 

And that like, learning about time made me realize, you know, we have this thing in our society that controls us a lot, but we don’t know. Like us, nonphysicists don’t know anything about it and 

 

it’s yeah, it was just really out of this 

 

world. So, those are my other two things that are relevant to this topic.

 

Cool. I will, um, research, we’ll get in the notes, we’ll get the book, uh, links so that everybody can, um, have those, I’ll put those in the, in the Google, um, notes that I’m taking for today. Um, yeah. Thanks so much for sharing. Okay. So we N did you have anything else to add? Did, did you share your link about where people can connect with you?

 

I know you didn’t really talk a lot about what you exactly do, but, um, just wanna make sure we briefly have that. Yeah. 

 

Yeah. 

 

I put my personal website, which has a link to my calendar too, uh, in the chat and I write. Pretty regular free community-building guides on various topics. And basically, all the things that I learned from a soapbox, I wanna share the things that I’ve worked on, whether it’s matching members, one on one, whether it’s hosting a summit, whether it is setting up a self-care system, uh, like book racks, all of those things.

 

So if you wanna learn more about what I’m doing, that’s probably the best way to do it. And then on a non-specific community-building level, I’m just gonna link. Uh, so Fox’s website, cuz this is in my opinion, the easiest way to get involved with being more sustainable. Cause we have these free by-size newsletters that go out every Wednesday.

 

So those are the two main ways you can 

 

connect with me. Awesome. And Nivi is in the FCH community. So don’t forget, uh, about the community. You can pop into the FCOM here, community, reach out to NII in a direct message, tag her and tell her one of the things I wanted to ask and challenge. The people here that are in the FCOM here community do is share your takeaway and tag the person who, um, maybe gave you a tip or something you found valuable and share that inside the fine con here community.

 

So we can know. If this is helpful for you, what you’ve taken away from today? Uh, cuz I really wanted to have this be not just, you know, I wanted it to be more interactive, so definitely feel free, um, to take this conversation and continue it in the community. And I really was hoping that. It’s just a way for you to kind of escape the daily grind for a minute and takes something, a little piece of something away that you could actually implement in your life.

 

Cuz that’s really what I wanted to do with the Find Calm Here Community from the inception of it was actionable steps, things that you can actually do. We’re not gonna just philosophies. What’s the word. Anyway, we’re not gonna just talk about it where we’re actually gonna get things happening and make a change and make a massive impact in the world.

 

And that’s what everybody in this room is already doing so brilliantly. So very good. Thank you so much, Nivi 

 

Neck Pain Relief Tips with Ani Papazyan 

 

So thanks for, continuing with us today, Ani and I met quite a while ago. She was building her online community and she’s been a really great supporter of Find Calm Here. We work together in a number of capacities, but most, most notably, help me with having a little less pain. So, with that, I will bring Ani. 

 

Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Hello everyone. So pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. This is one of my absolute favorite quotes because in my 26-plus years being in practice, so pain relief specialist. I see so many people that come in. It’s okay for them. Living with pain becomes their new norm.

 

And one of the things, when I come across them is never trying to find a solution because there is a solution out there. You just haven’t found it. And I love doing this presentation on zoom because there are people from different parts of the country, and sometimes there are people, from different parts of the world.

 

And one of the common things I have with, a few of the members in the fine come community is traveling. And one of the reasons I’m going towards taking my business towards, in a way that I can travel a few months out of the years and still work and help people and make money. Since I’ve been traveling so many, you know, different parts of the world, I can pretty much tell you fun or funny story that happened to me in, every location that I’ve been to, like being left at the airport because they forgot about me.

 

And that did happen. I was working for, Janet Jackson. I was her massage therapist. I did her world tour and we landed in Brisbane, Australia. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Australia, but their customs are very strict. So by the time I cleared the customs, I come out where there is usually a bus waiting to take us to our hotel.

 

There is no bus, they forgot me. They left. So I ended up hopping on the luggage truck and made it to the airport. I mean, to the hotel. But guess what? After that. Every time we get on a bus, everyone, all the dancers is Ani here? They never forgot me ever at the airport again. So with the show of hence, how many of you have woken up in the morning with neck pain?

 

Yeah, pretty much everyone. Don’t you wish you had some self-help technique that you can right away? Use it to either completely get rid of that pain or at least make it easy. So you can go on to your daily activities. Right. And so pretty much that’s what I do. As I said, in the past 26 years, I do have a brick-and-mortar business in Los Angeles, California, but I also educate people on self-help techniques.

 

So they have these resources. They can reach out to like their toolbox and use it any time they need it or teach a friend or a family member, couple of months ago, I get this email from a client of mine and she wrote it to me at two o’clock in the morning. And she says, Annie, I am so proud of myself.

 

Cuz my son woke me up. Her 14-year-old son walks and wakes her up in the middle of the night because he has neck pain and he cannot sleep. She goes, I remember the techniques you taught me. And I walked him through it and he worked. She goes, I am so proud of myself. So imagine having that. So today I’ll be sharing a few, couple of self-help techniques with you, but I don’t wanna just come out and think about what techniques I wanna share with you.

 

So we’re gonna play a little game. If you ever heard of zoom waterfall. Great. If not, it’s a very simple gap. So the way it works, I’ll be asking you a question. You’re gonna type your answers. Just one word or two words, answer in a chat, but do not hit send the way it works is up after you finish typing.

 

Give me thumbs up. Once everyone finishes typing, then I’m gonna say hit send, you’re gonna hit answers and I’m gonna see your answers. So I’m gonna ask a couple of questions based on your answers. It will give me an idea of what techniques would be the best for me to share with you. Sounds good. Okay. So the first question is when you think of neck pain, what words come to mind once you finish typing?

 

Just give me thumbs up.

 

Okay, we got missing. Nivi. done. Okay, Deb. Cool. Okay, Carol. Awesome. Perfect. Now heat send. Thanks, Barb. Steve sleep wrong. Headache, agony checking. One time. The last time I did a thing like this,

 

someone put my EX. I’m like, yeah. I, I can’t help with that. I may know someone who can take care of that, but I don’t do that. So tension, stress. Awesome. So the second question is what do you think are some of the causes of neck pain? Again, just type it, but don’t heat it. Sand. Okay.

 

Just give me thumbs up once you’re done.

 

Cool. Just whatever first thing comes to mind, it doesn’t have to be long

 

Deb. We’re good. Awesome. Okay. How about your hit? SEND stress tension again, posture, stress, inflammation, sleeping, rogue, sleeping in the wrong position. Um, posture. Stress. Yes, tension. Stress. Okay, so now I have a question for you, but you don’t have to type anything. You just, you know, just kind of nod yes or no.

 

How many of you here think that clenching your jaw or grinding your teeth could cause be a source of your neck pain?

 

Yeah. And you know, over 80, 85% of the clients I see in my office for neck pain, it’s due to jaw clenching and grinding. Some are aware of it. Some absolutely have no clue. And that, you know, especially there was a study done after pandemic dentists have seen 40% increase in dental issues in neck pain, in jaw cleaning in teeth, wear and tear because of all the issues.

 

So I’m gonna teach you a technique which is going to help with stress because it’s gonna help you relax the neck muscles because when you cling and grind that actually affects your neck muscles and, um, it’s due to stress. So the first technique is you are going to. Put your thumb behind your Mandal, the bone here, behind there, there is like a, you’ll feel it softer.

 

Okay. You’re gonna press your thumb then not your heart. Just gently press it. Now. Same time. You’re gonna push the tip of your tongue behind your top teeth. When you do that, you should feel it under your thumb. It becomes harder, like becomes a robbery, right? Okay. So all you’re gonna do is just hold that for 20 seconds.

 

Make sure you keep your head neutral and don’t do this because people concentrate on this and they end up tilting their neck back. Just keep it neutral. Shoulders back. You’re bringing through, uh, breathing through your nose, normal, just thumb here and press your tongue. And hold that for about 20 seconds.

 

What that does is relaxes your muscles of action, your muscle, your temporality muscles, and relax your jaw. Hence it relaxes your neck muscles. Okay. The second technique is when you wake up in the morning and you have a hard time turning your neck side to side, right? So let’s say, for example, you have a hard time turning your neck to the left.

 

What you’re going to do is first you start off keeping your neck in a neutral position, looking forward your eyes only looking far, right? And then you slowly turn your head to the left as you’re looking too far. Right? I know it comes to a point when your eyes are like what’s going on, but just stay with it.

 

So if you have difficulty turning your head to the left, your eyes look far, right. And you gently turn your head to the left until you feel pain, then you stop calm, neutral. Again, you’ll repeat that four or five times. I can guarantee you that will increase the range of motion of your neck. Okay. So these two techniques, work amazing.

 

And what I’m offering you guys, is 30 minutes, of a free consultation, and a zoom session with me. If anyone has further questions, if you have anything specific that you want to work on, please feel free to connect with me. this is this is my zoom link. You can, for a 30-minute consultation, you’re welcome to, just go there and book a time and I’ll be happy to help. Any with anything, any, it doesn’t have to be just neck pain. I just concentrate on neck pain because, currently I launched the online course for, neck pain relief where I do teach it’s a self-paced online course and I teach at least 12 self-help techniques similar to what I just, showed you guys.

 

And then also on top of it, there are other additional techniques. And, if anyone is interested, I did create a coupon code for, just for today, specifically. And, the coupon code, of course, has to be calm 50 and I’ll put it on the chat, if anyone’s interested or, has any questions, this is just a link to the.

 

To get some more information. And if anyone is interested, count 50, you get $50 off the course, or if you know anyone that’s suffering from neck pain. Please send them my way. I love doing presentations like this in different communities, in different groups, and at health fairs. So if you have either a corporate community or any place where you like me to share some of this stuff with you, I’ll be more, I’m totally available.

 

I’m pimping myself out. So if anyone has any questions, anything, please, hop on, ask me 

 

promotional friendly zone here, and, and just FYI for those in the fine come here, community. It is always a promotion-friendly place, as long as you’re not spamming us or creating some kind of craziness, we want you to share what you’re working on, so that if you need help, if you want somebody, another eyeball on your landing page or something like that, please feel free to do that.

 

I just wanna make sure I share that with everyone, Annie, thank you so much. I, I still need to practice. I have not been practicing. I said I was gonna practice, so they still didn’t practice. I just, I need to practice more with that whole head turning 

 

you should, Missy, thanks for your question. Yes, it does.

 

And I get asked this question all the time. What pillow is the best? I do not know. You know, how many pillows I have tried because you know, there are pillows. If you’re a side sleeper, if you’re a back sleeper, if you are sleeping on your abdomen, which you should never do, but I hope you’re not using any pillow.

 

I don’t know, I sleep all over the place. So I like a really flat, soft pillow so I can like crumble it underneath. So it supports my neck. It’s a tr honestly it’s a trial and error.

 

I have the weekend warriors, they just go and play sports, and when they’re injured. So I help with this. Those are acute, those are like really easy to take care of. And there are people that, like, I get a lady who even has a tongue-tied and she’s 50 years old and no dentist ever told her that she has a tongue tie, which completely messed up her jaw.

 

The position of her tongue completely messed up her, you know, her jaw shifted because of her tongue position. And no one told her. That she needs to get a snip, snip, you know, cut that tongue tie so it can open up so she can move her tongue. So everything goes back to normal. And then actually the pronation, how she speaks, even she said after I brought it to her attention that, some words she, she notices when she speaks some words, some letters it’s harder for her to fully pronounce it.

 

And English is her first language. So it makes a huge difference. I do a lot of tongue release. I do a lot of intra-order release because it makes such a huge difference, in every part of your body. So it’s a lot of fun. Thanks for this opportunity to present to all of you. And I love the Find Calm community 

 

thank. Thank you, Annie. And thanks for everybody hanging out.

 

Meditation as a Practice for Self-Care with Carol Chapman 



We’ve got Carol up next. She’s gonna share with us a little bit about how she brings some calm to others. She’s like I said, has been in the Find calm here community, pretty much since the beginning, and she and I have become best friends, really, and supporters of each other over these last two years, she helped me with writing my speech and rewriting my speech for when I presented down in Orlando and, practiced with me, while I was working on that.

 

So, Carol, thanks for being here and sharing a little bit of your amazingness. So make sure you tell us about it, it cuz not a lot of people know you here. So tell us about you and, and get us, bring us some. 

 

, thank you so much for being here, Deb. I just, uh, I love your community and I wanna thank everyone who’s presented so far.

 

Just, I, I love all the stuff I’ve learned and, Ani that’s, those are some great techniques. I, I definitely wanna, to take you up on your, 30-minute consultation., but first of all, I’d like to ask a question before, I get into a little bit about myself and then I’m gonna lead us through a meditation. I would to know how many of you meditate regularly when, I mean, meditate regularly, really like every day, raise your hand. That’s awesome. How many of you have tried to meditate, but. Haven’t really been able to keep up a regular practice, raise your hands. Yeah. That’s, that’s typical of a lot of people.

 

What I’d like you to do? When I ask you this question, I’m gonna take Ani’s lead here because I love the way that she said it, you can type it in, but don’t push the button. I just, I want you to, to, what do you think is the primary reason why people can’t keep up a meditation practice?

 

Go ahead. And just, and it could be more than one reason. Just go ahead and type into chat, what you think, and then give a thumbs up when everyone’s pretty much ready. It’s looking like everyone’s pretty close. Everyone’s pretty close. All right. All right. All right. So go ahead and just hit the key.

 

Ah, yep. I’m unsure of what to do. Not focused. Well, these are all typical. Don’t prioritize it. Lack of a routine bad at habit building love it. Distracted monkey mind yes. And really what it all boils down to. Yes. Busy head space, monkey mind, and that’s very, very common, for most people 

 

there are a lot of different types of meditation, but really the biggest primary reason and all of these fall under that is just the fear of failure. Doing it wrong. You can’t relax. Your mind is too busy, you’re restless. And there’s an expectation of how you’re supposed to do it or how you’re supposed to feel.

 

And nowadays you’ve probably. Have seen a lot of hype around meditation and mindfulness, and it has positively impacted people’s lives. There are a lot of high-performing athletes that use meditation as their go-to practice to help them improve their performance and all aspects of their life.

 

There are a lot of business owners, and a lot of people from different walks of life that use meditation and have,, a regular meditation practice. But there are still a lot of people who do struggle with it. And I have to admit, I started when I was in my twenties, but I got away from it for about a decade or so at the height of my corporate career, I was an absolute, exhausted mess at the at, and by the time I decided just.

 

Pull the plug after 23 years. And really whether it’s reducing stress, anxiety, helping you, improve you’re, I mean, there are so many benefits to it, improving sleep, improving your focus, your concentration. It makes a huge difference if you take the time to really, get into it. And I, I got out of it, but when I did get back into it was after I left corporate two months later, I suffered a brain aneurysm.

 

I had a lot of fatigue and I started just meditating, after that again, to really kind of focus on my health. And then I realized a number of other benefits and those benefits were increased focus and concentration because those are two things I had some difficulty with after my aneurysm and also my creativity and I, I started, after a while I got myself in much, much better, space, through, through meditation that it really, my creativity just went through the roof in terms of a building, a couple of businesses, authoring, a book, creating proprietary methodology, doing, a lot of different things.

 

it’s made a huge difference for me and still does today, but it had, it, it, it really became a tool, for me, what I found was I really needed to just continue to do it regularly because the more you do it, the better you get at it because there’s no right or wrong way to meditate.

 

There are so many different types of meditation that are out there. And the one that, that I, that I go to all the time is focusing on the breath, but that’s not one that we’re going to do today. I do wanna take you through. A short meditation is a guided meditation for opening the heart and expanding the heart and the purpose of this meditation is to help you open your heart, and expand the energy field surrounding your heart. When we do that, that creates more coherence between our thinking brain and our feeling heart and the meditation helps. And, and here, here is what it does.

 

It helps to harmonize the neurons between the brain and the neurons and the heart. And yes, the heart has neurons. In fact, it has many more neurons than the brain 40 plus thousand neurons. And if you go to heart math Institute, Many of, you probably have heard of them. They’ve done a lot of research, but when you really focus on opening the heart, and of course you need to protect the heart too as well.

 

When you expand that energy field, it not only affects you positively, but it affects others in your vicinity and people that you are interacting with it, positively impacts them. So what I’d like to do, is to take you through. This meditation helps to create, emotional balance.

 

It helps you to, improve your, creativity, and your intuition. And of course, all the other things reduce stress, and anxiety. And that’s what a lot of people mainly use meditation for today. But I have found overdoing it, for many years now that it has really helped me gain more insights, understand more of myself and get more, more creative, so let’s go ahead. If you would just sit comfortably and I’d like you to just sort of relax your body, close your eyes, cuz this is the best way to meditate. If you can, is to close your eyes. And I want you to just listen to my voice, my voice will guide you very gently through this meditation. So what I’d like for you to do is to begin to breathe in.

 

Slowly and deeply deep inhalations through the nose and long exhalations. Also through the nose. When you breathe this way, your body is receiving the messages to relax.

 

To continue to breathe in and breathe out through your nose. Feel your feet on the ground and your hands in your lap. As you settle into just being here. And now I’d like you to do is to just breathe in calm, then calm, gentle breaths, just settle into a natural rhythm with your breath. And as you feel the sensation of the breath also feel.

 

The sensation of space all around you. Now, I want you to feel the presence of your body in space. Feel the volume of space above you, beneath you all around. Do you sense that spaciousness? That’s it. Now I want you to place your hands or your fingers just gently on your heart space. Feel your awareness begin to focus, on your thinking brain, bringing it gently down to your feeling.

 

Heart space, breathe in and out. That’s it. Nice and gentle. Now turn your attention inward right into your heart space. Feel the space, feel the volume of space, feel the volume of space in and around you behind you in front of you. And just imagine now a soft golden white light bathing your heart. Imagine that with each breath, this light glows, brighter emanating, pure loving energy.

 

And as you inhale, feel unconditional love with the light that’s growing within you. That’s it. And with H in and out breaths. See and feel the field of light energy around your heart. Expanding with unconditional love.

 

See the light as a clear pathway, a stream of golden energy that links everything in your body. Harmonizing all parts into a complete hole. That’s it. Your heart is now at the center of all this pure love. Your heart is the center of who you are.

 

Relax and breathe. As you trust in the deep intelligence of your heart, see the stream of light moving calmly all around your body, flowing wherever it needs to go, and feel the rhythm of this loving light. As you breathe in and out feel how it flows and glows feel how this light and love is a part of you.

 

Now, I want you to visualize a feeling of gratitude. You can bring to mind a specific person, a situation. Or perhaps a thing that you appreciate deeply, something that uplifts you, something purely positive. Think of this. Now

 

allow yourself to connect to the way this feeling of gratitude feels. That’s it. See what it is that you are grateful for? Feel it, taste it, smell it, see it in your mind’s eye. Allow the feelings it evokes to permeate your entire body. And remember you are learning to feel from your heart. You are feeling this enormous gratitude and appreciation from your heart space, a high vibration feeling that lives in your heart.

 

It’s always there to allow these high vibrations to flow freely from your heart center. Feel the sensations, energize your heart, making you feel so alive. That’s it feels the sensation spreading out in all directions, moving through your entire body and you feel it within this virtual room spreading outward to everyone else in this beautiful heart space.

 

The energy field around your heart is wide open and expanding in all directions. It’s so expensive. You are glowing with life. Feel your heart feeling up with love, gratitude, joy, and peace. Your heart space is the quantum field of all possibilities. Now I want you to gently let your attention drift back to your physical body.

 

Feel your feet on the floor. Allow your eyes to relax and your jaw to relax. There is nowhere else you need to be other than right here. Right now, being yourself. Enjoy these moments of deep breathing, breathe in and out, be in your body, and feel in your heart.

 

And now you can come back into your surroundings and gently open your eyes, ready to embrace the world with an open heart.

 

How does everyone feel right now? , I hope this is been a great benefit to you today, and I think it’s a great way to round out this session. And I do have a complementary meditation. I’d love to give to you all it’s, called access your inner wisdom, and I’ll put a link into the chat box, it’s in an app, a mobile app, and all you have to do is just follow the instructions and you can grab that meditation within that app.

 

And also, if you could send it out to everyone in case, you know, others didn’t get it who have left here today. Thank you. And it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.

 

Thank you, Carol. Thank you so much for sharing your gift, yeah, let’s definitely make sure we have the link that we share with everyone in the chat and I’ll have it in the notes. And then of course we’ll have it., And anything in the Find calm here community, from today, if you wanted to do that as well, Carol or anyone else, if you had any resources, so we’ve got about 10 minutes left.

 

I do wanna open it up for any questions or comments from, either Carol’s session or the other sessions that were before it. I wanted to just ask the question and maybe we can, , put in there if you guys wanna put in, how you feel, right now, but don’t press send yet. We’ll do the waterfall thing again.

 

You know, what is one takeaway that you really, had from today?

 

if there was just one thing that you either learned or experienced, What is that one thing? So tell me when you have those two things, how you’re feeling right now, and, maybe, a quick takeaway. One thing that really, was impactful for you, and then give me a thumbs up when you’re ready.

 

Ani got all excited. We were doing your waterfall thing. Ani. She’s ready. She has to go through, maybe. Okay. So whoever’s ready. Send us your feelings. Okay. So, relaxed, grounded, the definition of self, so many ways we can better ourselves, our minds and bodies, amazing, feeling calm.

 

One takeaway. People are here to provide support in many ways. Yep. Community delight, blessed out, taking away from Nivi’s reminder, benefits of time blocking. Yep, fascinated with neck pain discussion. I think that’s also something, when I connected with Ani I keep learning so much from her and she’s been so kind to keep sharing her gifts with me.

 

Today, what I really wanted was a sense of community here in this space to. Recognize that we all have gifts to share with each other and to support each other. And so part of my hope for you, is that in the fine calm here, community, you’ll be able to share resources, share your challenges.

 

Cuz you can know that this is a safe space. Obviously, the people, that have joined us today, whether they were speakers or just participants, are all people who. Our positive, motivated, energizing people all want to struggle. We all struggle at some point in our lives with stress, and anxiety overwhelming, right.

 

And the Find calm your community. Isn’t about just, you know, how do we get to finding calm? It’s a practice. It’s what we do every day. Some days are not calm for me. Some days are more stressful,, some days are calmer, a lot of the time I just work to simplify and I think that’s what, one of the things I took away from Nivi’s, the talk was, it doesn’t have to be complicated.

 

It’s really just about what I just need to say and not feel like I have to apologize for my feelings, my experience, or what I need without the apology of, sorry, I can’t do something. Why do I need to say, sorry, I just need to say, you know, this is just not a good time for me to do something 

 

it’s okay. It’s, it’s valid and it’s not something I have to apologize for. So that was my big takeaway from today. thank you so much for joining us. Of course., Lisa posted, don’t need to explain or justify your boundaries. Yeah. I feel like we always wanna explain or, or, or say, well, here’s why, you know, the purpose and it’s not necessary.

 

Like, I feel like I give, you know, I’ve learned and that’s given so much information away, because in a way, because, and that’s one of the things I learned with community building too, it’s that they have all of these messages and ideas and concepts, but number one, people cannot consume all of the things all of the time.

 

And number two, some people are gonna need your message at certain parts of their life, wherever their journey they’re on. And so in your community that you’re leading, they all need you. It just might not be a time when. Like when you think that they need you they might come back later, to your community, they might stay in there and be quiet for six months and then all of a sudden say something. I think just, just as a community leader to know that it’s a lot more, about providing this. And less content. So that’s what we’re going to do in the Find Calm here community.

 

So, if you’re listening to the recording I did open it up to, I also offered a bonus free trial right now. So there’s a free trial. If you’re listening, I will keep that open, until August. So, by the time this goes on the community strategy podcast, we’ll still have this available to listeners, because I really just wanna cultivate a space for people to be seen, valued, and heard. That is my mission. And I feel like as a community leader and a community builder, that is what I hope that I can help community leaders find calm in knowing that they don’t have to create a whole lot of content.

 

They don’t have to spend six months creating a course. You don’t have to, have it all figured out. Actually, it’s not even good to have things figured out. It’s actually better to do it with people inside an online community. And we’ve experienced that amazingly, this past couple of years, and you are here because you are a Testament to wanting to.

 

Build other communities bring other people together as well as help yourself find a little bit of calm in the process. So thanks all for prioritizing this day and spending all of this time with me., if you have questions, following this event, Please post them inside the Find Calm here community.

 

They’ll be recording as available later. each month I go live in the community at the beginning of the month to kind of give you the community strategy for the community. We’re shifting to live interviews. So each month there’ll be two live interviews starting in August. they’re on Fridays every other Friday at 12:00 PM Eastern, listen to a guest and I speak about some aspect of community building. And then you are able to ask questions to the actual guest. So,, this is a new,, a habit we wanna create inside the community, an opportunity to give you the ability to ask these questions to these speakers that are on the community strategy podcast.

 

I have to say I love Carol’s meditation while actually sharing that with me

 

I can do only guided meditation because if it’s just like music and I’m gotta do it myself, I’m all 

over the place. I see what I’m gonna cook for lunch or dinner or whatever. So I love the guided meditations and I love, Carol her voice is just awesome when she’s, sending you so you are on my phone quite often.

 

We shared, we shared private moments together. You just don’t know it. So thank you for 

 

that. 

 

Thank you, Ani. I didn’t realize that that’s, that’s great to hear that. I wanna say one, I love the neck practices and I definitely want to incorporate more of that and wanna chat with you Ani, about that.

 

And I loved everyone’s presentation., Nivi’s presentation worked just five hours a day. I could, I could sign up for that. So you can find ways to, really incorporate, you know, the right practices and boundaries and rest, in the day and, you know, the right processes to get it down and do it.

 

Thank you. I wanna thank you again, and Deb as well for everything. 

 

Yeah, of course. Yeah. I was gonna say thank you, Deb. And thank you thanks Callisa for organizing this and bringing us, you know, together. So we get to know each other. Otherwise, we would’ve never met and created friendships and relationships here.

 

So thank you. True 

 

story. True story. We met in taking the design master class with the Mighty networks, back in 2020, and from. There Karen actually spearheaded it., Karen said, Hey, does anybody wanna connect after these five weeks? Everybody was like, yeah, we wanna do that. From that this, this friendship developed with, with everybody. 

 

all right. Well, we will see you soon. I have some events coming up, so, make sure we, connect in the fine calm here community until next time. I hope you’re finding calm on this day. Evening, morning, afternoon, Tuesday at three. Find calm until the next time. Take care. Bye.

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