Creating Community, Fighting Boredom, and Keeping the Flame Alive in The Time of COVID-19

We are living in strange times. Words like quarantine and social isolation have take over our shared world lexicon and little by little, countries are enacting measures to keep everyone safe from the global pandemic known as COVID-19.

A lot of my client work for the past three weeks has centered around navigating this new ‘normal’ and I’d like to offer some tips I’ve shared with the people I work with on how to create community, fight boredom, and keep your romantic partnership healthy in the time of Corona.

Creating Community and Fighting Boredom:

Ask how you can be of service: Ask the people in your life if they can use a hand and if so, how you can help. Do they have children that need entertaining and could use an hour of your time to keep them busy? You can use that time for activities such as story time, or teaching them a skill remotely. Are they feeling the financial consequences of being quarantined? Have groceries delivered to their house as a gesture of solidarity.

Make public art: Living in a building in a densely populated city? Make window art so your neighbors can see something beautiful when they look out the window. It’ll give your brain a productive break from anxiety-ridden headlines and could brighten someone’s day!

Jam online: Play an instrument or sing? Connect with friends virtually to jam or write some music using the technology that’s already available to you! Apps and software like Jammr and Jamulus can help you make music in real time with your friends regardless of where they are in the world.

Have a Laugh with Improv story writing: Following the rules of improv, write a story with 5 of your friends. Person #1 starts with writing a page and then e-mails it to person #2 and so on. The result could be hilarious and shared over a group Google hangout session.

Deepen Your Bonds Through Show and Tell: Being stuck at home also means being stuck with some of the objects we love most.  Why not take a page from our primary school playbook and create an opportunity where we get to share those very things and the stories that make them special with our loved ones who aren’t cooped up with us via facetime? This is a great activity for families to do together.

Get Creative with OPP (other people’s pantry) Cooking: The kitchen is a place that has always brought people together. Why not spice things up by making your time there creative and collaborative using technology as an ally? Share with your loved ones a list of what you have in your quarantine pantry and allow them to design your meal for you and vice versa. Who knows, you may even come out of it with a new delicious recipe or two!

Love in the Time of Corona

Limit Your Talk about the Virus: Anxiety is running high and while being informed is important, we must not let COVID-19 be the sole focus of our attention. For the sake of your sanity and relationship, see if you can limit virus talk to a couple of times per day so that your efforts remain productive and your sex drive alive.

Create Physical Distance During Work Time: If possible, try not to work in the same room if both of you are working from home. Why? It can be distracting and eliminate any sort of romantic polarity within the relationship. Relationships are like fire, they need air to survive…even in times like this. To be fair, see if you can switch places every other day.

Make Room for Four Inner Children to Hang Out: It’s been said that our inner children represent our deepest sensitivity. In our modern times and especially under circumstances like these, it’s easy to forget them as we focus on the very ‘adult’ responsibilities we have on our shoulders. That said though, in this particular scenario we don’t have a lot of control over what’s happening and that can be both predictably scary or unpredictably freeing. Why/how? As we’re forced to relinquish our sense of control, our sense of play has an opportunity to come back online. Just because we’re stuck at home and can’t 'fix' the situation, that doesn’t mean we have to be exclusively worried or bored. Why not play instead?

Get Intimate About Intimacy… During Intimacy: When was the last time you sat down to talk about your sex life? Better yet, when was the last time you talked about sex while being intimate? It’s easy for lovemaking with our partners to become predictable (and dare we say it, boring) once we’ve been together for some time and we think we know what to do to please them in bed. The thing is, truly great sex requires radical presence and is both an art and a science. What if we treated it as such and took turns directing our partners on how to please us not just with step by step instructions on what to do (the science) but guidance and inspiration as to how we want to feel (the art) during the act of making love?

Woo Each Other in the Kitchen: In the 1992 Oscar winning film, ‘Like Water for Chocolate’ Tita, the main character pours her emotions into her food as she wrestles with her love for Pedro, a love that seems impossible because he is to marry her sister. Everyone who eats her dishes has quite the experience as they feel Tita's emotions in every dish. What if, rather than just looking at the food you will be inevitably be cooking as mere quarantine sustenance, you think of it as an opportunity to express your love? Courtship doesn’t have to end if you don’t want it to!

Drop the Reality TV and Watch Things that Move You or Inspire You: Whether it be love story for the ages like Legends of the Fall or a documentary that you’re both dying to see, try watching things that help you both connect with your passion and sense of wonder. Doing so will bring you back to a place similar to what it was like when you first started dating and you were discovering each other for the first time.

Put.The.Phone.Down: This one is pretty self-explanatory. Don’t forego the chance for intimate human connection by shifting your awareness and energy to a device. This is a strange time we are living in but this can also be a time we use to remember or see for the first time what life and connection are like when we don’t lose our soul to the scroll.

Prioritize Physical Touch as Part of your Love Language Mix: Part of what is making a lot of folks feel isolated is the fact that they aren’t receiving as much physical touch as they usually do. There aren’t hugs with friends, hi fives with coworkers or pats on the shoulder at the gym. Individually, these things don’t seem to matter much at first glance but they add up and definitely contribute to our sense of wellbeing. That being the case, it is not just wise but recommended for us to very literally hold each through this.

Hope these are helpful to you on your journey and remember, you are not alone. We are all in this together and if you need a little extra support, I’m just a phone call away and you can schedule that here.

Namasme.

Learning to Appreciate the Value (and Opportunity) of Mr. Almost*

DATING and FEAR. What an unfortunately powerful combination. I wrote this some time ago because I felt a lot of women needed to hear this when I found myself in conversations dominated by fear time and time again every time the topic of dating and relationships came up. 

I share it today because it got picked up by Thrive Global and because I think it's time we stop thinking about dating as a zero sum game... where we equate time spent as time wasted if it doesn't lead to "THE relationship" we're looking for.

Screw that. Why not instead, take responsibility over ourselves, do the work to evolve, and allow it to be fun again shall we? Isn't that the whole point to begin with?

Curious? You can read the article here.]

Namasme.

We're Bringing Some Namasme Goodness to the GRAMMY Giftbags!

‘What does it mean to be at the intersection of personal development, service as activism, and art?’

That was the question I got at a dinner party when I explained the ethos of Namasme to the group. Let me explain. To me, it's rather simple:

We have a limited amount of time on this planet to explore, serve, and create… Why not use it to get to know ourselves in a way that enables us to show up to our communities and planet serving with purpose and in purpose? Why not make beautiful art to document the beauty of our journey and to create avenues of communication instead of walls? Why not allow love to guide our evolution?

For that reason, when I was asked if I wanted Namasme to contribute to the gift bags for this year's GRAMMY Award nominees, my immediate gut reaction was to say yes. I knew I had an opportunity to reinforce what we stand for and was going to use it!

Sure, It's a high profile opportunity and that's very exciting... I also wanted to make sure that I came up with something that would be a meaningful one on a more human level too.

Not even 24 hours later, upon some reflection and a conversation I had with a client the week before, the idea for the Namasme Forest Trust was born and I had my gift offering! I worked with Nour Tohme of Draw Me a Song on the invitation design and voila! Here we are.

Each nominee will receive a baby olive tree to plant in service to the planet and a free month of coaching to gift to somebody else so they can be in service to their communities as well. It’s time we start thinking bigger and understand that we all benefit from healing, clean air, being good to each other don’t you agree?

Don't forget to watch the awards on the 26th! This year's theme is #UnexpectEverything so it's bound to be EPIC! The show will air on CBS on Jan 26th at 5pm PST/8pm EST.

Namasme.

The 3 Most Important Questions to Ask Yourself Before Trying to Tackle Your List of New Year's Resolutions... Or Anything, Really.

Chances are that you, like the rest of the world at this time of year, are taking some time to reflect and are thinking about your New Year’s resolutions and what you’d like to do differently next year… Good! Taking time for introspection and structured thinking is important. Before you get all gung-ho about putting your list into action though, won’t you consider the following three questions? In doing so, you may find answers you need but didn’t know you were looking for.


1. What does this list tell me about what I want to feel?

At the most basic of levels, we want the things we want because we’re under the impression that they will make us feel a certain way.

If you think about it from this lens, your list is more symbolic of what you’re wanting to experience emotionally than anything else. For example, many of us want ‘the house’ because we want to feel grounded and safe, ‘the body’ because we crave the feelings of confidence and acceptance from others, ‘the right job’ because it will enable us feel empowered and purposeful, and ‘the relationship’ because we want to feel connected and loved.

Identifying the primary emotions that you are wanting to experience is a useful exercise for two reasons. Firstly, it answers the ‘why’ behind your list while simultaneously helping you identify other avenues you can explore to source these emotions in your everyday life—making it easier to feel better more often and taking unnecessary pressure off of your list—cause you know, life happens. Secondly, it increases your chances of feeling ‘successful’ in your journey towards change… which in turn, does wonders for your motivation moving forward. Small, incremental changes are oftentimes more powerful than huge radical ones and having many little ways of sourcing a particular emotion can help you feel better as you learn to do better.

That said, sometimes finding or regaining balance is equal parts a proactive input as it is an elimination. Due to that, it is also useful to ask ourselves:

2. What are the things I will NOT do?

Instead of going down the path of things like ‘gluten’, ‘sugar’, ‘cigarettes,’ and ‘late nights on weekdays’ I encourage you to consider the question above and look a layer deeper. What DON’T you want to feel? What are the things that you do consciously or subconsciously that make you feel these undesirable emotions? How does bringing an awareness to these behaviors inform your conscious action moving forward?

In my experience, if you do this exercise thoroughly enough and begin prioritizing your emotional experience above all else, you may even find yourself re-writing your list of resolutions entirely! If not, once questions #1 and #2 are answered, the third and equally important question to consider is:

3. Who do I have to be to make this happen?

We live in an achievement obsessed world where we prioritize the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ over the ‘why’ and the ‘who’—not realizing that the latter two are the more important questions when we consider our long term personal fulfillment.

If your list includes things that you’ve never done before or that will stretch you in new and different ways, the ‘who’ you’ll have to be in order to achieve them is more important than the the actual goals themselves. Why? Because ‘doing’ is a by-product of ‘being’. Think about it, who you are determines what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and even why you do it.

We usually think of a goal and immediately go into planning mode to figure out how we’ll accomplish it before giving thought to why we want it in the first place (questions #1-2) and ‘who’ we’ll have to be to achieve it. In this case, consideration of the ‘who’ we’ll need to be is an invitation to step into a conversation with ourselves about our mindset—an opportunity to focus on the only place we have complete control over and the most impact. We can’t control life and the circumstances it brings. We can, however, control who we are (and therefore how we show up) when we deal with them.

Can you imagine if we focused more of our energy on just our ‘who' and decided to make that ‘who’ the present, empowered, inspired, discerning, disciplined, creative, flexible and open open-hearted version of ourselves? In all likelihood, we’d not only have a better shot at fulfilling our New Year’s resolutions, we’d also feel engaged, purposeful, resilient, and ready for anything. Everything we’d do would be done by this more aware and intentional version of ourselves and would, in consequence, be better.

This is the true meaning of self-empowerment. This is where our lives begin to truly change.

This also takes us so much deeper and further than a simple list of resolutions wouldn’t you agree?

Namasme.

Photo by Jean Gerber on Unsplash

Good News! Announcing our Collaboration with Airbnb to Empower Female Entrepreneurs in Latin America

Inspired women are empowered women.

Educated women are empowered women.

Women with financial options are empowered women.

Women with community support and mentors are empowered women.

And what do these empowered women do?

Well, the research indicates that empowered women, in turn, empower their communities and that those empowered communities thrive and grow for the benefit of all.

To me, this is everything.

This is an important part of the work we need to do to lead our world into a kinder, more equal, more sustainable future. I strongly believe that we must focus on bringing more gender equity to all areas of our society—politics, economics, education, healthcare— if we want a shot at finally changing the story of the world.

Due to that, women’s empowerment has been one of the main pillars of my work for the last 5 1/2 years that I’ve been coaching and an area I will continue to work on for the foreseeable future. The world clearly benefits when women participate in more decision making at all levels.

So… it is with great pleasure that I announce that I will be working hand in hand with Airbnb to empower female entrepreneurs in Latin America in 2020. The details of our engagement are still being worked out so I can’t share much more but I’m incredibly excited to be a part of this initiative!

***That said, I also believe strongly in the power of collaboration. If you have a women’s empowerment program in your company, are looking to start one, or want to contribute to the cause, let’s chat and see how we can unite forces!***

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

Introducing: Office Hours

I have exciting news y’all!

Before I give you the details though, let me create some context…

You see, the longer I coach that more I feel the need to make my coaching accessible to as many people as possible. I’ve seen time and time again the transformative nature of the work we do and would honestly love to help anyone who feels like they could benefit! Unfortunately, I can’t.

In late 2017, in order to expand the reach of my work, I established what I call the Karma Coaching Program. The idea was to help people get access to my coaching who were good candidates (willing/dedicated/eager) but who couldn’t afford what I charge. Within the last two years, I worked long-term with 13 people free of charge through the program and felt really good. Thing is, I want to do more!

…But I also want to honor myself and my time. So I got to thinking and came up with the following solution/experiment!

Introducing: Office Hours

From now moving forward, I will allot 3 hrs / week of my time to do 60 minute one-off coaching sessions on a discounted sliding scale pricing model ($50-$250) to make it more accessible to those not necessarily interested in a long-term coaching engagement or to folks struggling financially. Sessions will be offered and given on a first come, first serve basis and will be limited to 4 sessions per human.

If this sounds like something you’d like to try, shoot me a note! I’d love to chat and hopefully help you sort out whatever is on your mind. Please share this with your friends and anyone you know who could potentially benefit! I would sincerely love to help you or them to walk a little lighter.

In love and service,

Mona

Celebrating a Win with Tamara Mellon

A couple of weeks ago when I had the opportunity to co-facilitate two workshops at Tamara Mellon with my college friend and fellow coach Carol for Tamara herself and most of the staff of the company. The topic? How to Silence Your Inner Critic. From a professional and personal perspective, that was a big day for me and worthy of some celebration. Why?

Firstly, Tamara Mellon is a company dedicated to making beautiful things, yes… but it’s also one that uses its platform to advocate for gender equality, women’s empowerment, and other social justice issues like immigration. It’s a luxury brand that actually cares about more than just profit and to me, that’s a beautiful thing. Why? Because sometimes we forget that beauty is a language. A powerful one at that and one that can be leveraged positively to shift our perception when used mindfully. In an industry notorious for not caring about or ignoring the bigger issues, they’re purposefully going there… even if it means raising some eyebrows and losing a customer or two. In times like these, courage is it’s own form of currency and these ladies are making investments where it matters most.

Secondly, the people we worked with! I deeply admire Tamara as a human, creative mind, and tenacious business woman. What she did as founder of Jimmy Choo and what she’s doing today with her team with this, her namesake brand is nothing short of remarkable. The fact that Jill, the company’s CEO, was who reached out to bring our workshop to their people speaks volumes about how they care and invest in the well being of their employees and the quality of their leadership.

Thirdly, it was a great reminder of how good it feels to work with companies who I feel are aligned with my values and that some beautiful doors are opening for me at this point in the life of Namasme and lastly, it gave me an opportunity to merge my music with my work once again…blurring the line between both just a little bit more and in the process making me a happy little clam. This is good and giving me all sorts of crazy ideas of what I want to do/create moving forward. Stay tuned y’all. This is bound to get all sorts of weird and wonderful.

Namasme.

1 European Prince, 60 Silicon Valley VC’s, 21 Creative Visionaries, 1 Magical House in San Francisco and Yours Truly… This is What Happened.

Things in the land of Namasme keep getting sweeter and sweeter. The clients and work that are coming our way get progressively more fun and interesting and our intention to collaborate more this year is bearing some beautiful fruit. Case in point—a week and half ago I had the opportunity to co-lead and facilitate a conversation (well, a songversation really) on the future of money and prosperity with 60 of the brightest and most influential minds on the planet at a dinner hosted by Prince Constantijn of Holland.

The theme? Tomorrowland— a glimpse into our world during the year 2119 and how we got there. The venue, Tao Haus, a beautiful creative sanctuary in San Francisco became a one-night museum dedicated to telling the story of the shifts we made to create a more beautiful, sustainable, and prosperous future for our planet. How I ended up there? Well, that’s a story worthy of it’s own post. Let’s just say that serendipity and I are on friendly terms these days.

Seeing as the house was transformed into a museum, each of the 5 common areas where guests were received was turned into an interactive exhibit of some sort. As I mentioned before, I was given responsibility to cover the future of prosperity… to a room packed with people who have mastered the language of money and who had thoughts of their own on the subject and in some cases clearly communicated them publicly…People who in the last two or three decades have helped shape that very same conversation in this country and worldwide.

To say that I was intimidated would be the understatement of the year. That said, I’ve always liked a good challenge and I decided that this was an opportunity for me to rise to the occasion, to possibly have a positive impact, and to have some fun while doing so. I had enough research and contemplation under my belt to feel prepared to carry at least an informed conversation so I jumped in with both feet.

Our 60 guests were divided into smaller groups of 12 for each session. I didn’t want to go down the traditional route when thinking of the structure of mine so I came up with a concept where I would role play and be an AI robot that embodied the consciousness of money in the year 2119. The idea was that we would have a sort of inspired Q&A with participants and to let the evolving relationship/conversation dynamic determine the direction of each session. This gave me the opportunity to be a little cheeky in my interactions with our guests to ensure that everyone was having a good time discussing what is usually a very serious subject.

I reached out to Lukaijah, a friend of mine who is a prolific spoken word and hip hop artist and together we wrote a song/rap that I would perform at the end of each session. (see vid below) To add a cherry on top, as we drew closer to the event, I was joined by Bear Kittay, an improv genius, solid guitar player, and proper expert on the topic of finance as a collaborator for the session as co-leader. To complement my robot self, he would play the role of a futuristic yet medieval-like troubadour to serve as the musical glue and comedic relief in our effort to stimulate conversation. The result was incredible!

We led our guests in a discussion that encouraged them to participate… to take ownership of the fact that they were in a key position to create a more prosperous future for all. To ask themselves how many of their peers (and themselves) they knew to be genuinely fulfilled and happy—big houses, yachts, islands and all. To realize that being wealthy and prosperous are two very different things and that a better, brighter future would require us to focus on the latter and not the former… That our current societal zero-sum mindset combined with destination consciousness sets us up to never ‘make it’ and to always be afraid and feel like we’ll never have enough… and isn’t that exhausting?

The key question we focused our discussion on was:

What role did you play in creating the more beautiful future that we know is possible?

What I loved about this question is that it compelled our participants to A) assume and admit the big responsibility they have as key players in the development of the future of the world and B) to open their hearts by allowing themselves to be guided by a positive vision… to philosophize a bit rather than offer overtly logical or linear present based thinking… To switch gears and not engage in a problem solving exercise but rather in the creation of an overarching Vision and reverse engineer from there.

It was truly magical to see moment when some of our participants realized that in order for this exercise to work, they had to engage their deeper purpose, open their hearts, and to allow themselves to perhaps not offer tangible solutions to problems but to instead work with us to dream a bit. Their faces softened, their posture changed and their voices took on a different tone. From the feedback I got from our guests, it proved to be a useful and inspiring exercise. As far as I was concerned, mission accomplished!

As for me? Well, I learned that:

1. Art is a universal language and a very potent one at that.

2. An engaged mind is a beautiful thing to witness in action. An engaged mind at the service of an open heart? That’s the reason we’re all here.

3. Good improvisation requires two key components: 1) presence 2) trust. If you’re present, the energy of the space will guide you. If you trust yourself and the moment, you allow others to do the same and you can turn whatever it is that you’re doing into a fun co-creation.

This dinner served as confirmation for me that I will never stop being amazed by people. I can genuinely say that collaborating with such incredible folks changed something in me. When we surround ourselves with people who inspire us and who push us to think bigger, love harder, and be more open, we flourish. This also applies to the ideas we entertain in our daily lives. Are we investing our energy wisely in the thoughts we entertain and the work that we do or are we allowing our mind to hang out in the gutter? Are we finding ways to connect and to grow together or are we, in our search for significance and individuation, losing ourselves and each other?

At the end of the day, creating what you want to see more of in the world is infinitely more energizing and efficient than fighting against what you don’t. We did a video of that not too long ago but it never hurts to remember that as Buckminster Fuller so eloquently phrased it,

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

I truly believe this is our task moving forward if we are to be successful in creating a new paradigm for the planet. Will you join me?

Namasme.

Wanna hear the rap? Check this out! Made y’all a video after I hit the Highland Bowl in Aspen earlier today.

*** The photo for this post was taken by David Redish. You can find him on Instagram at @redishd***

Feeling Whole

As a society we’re anxious and addicted. 🍸🚬🍫💋📱

One of the reasons we’re so anxious is our almost compulsive desire to control... To control our environment, our journey, our emotions, and if we’re being really honest, at times the people we interact with. Why do we do this though?

It all stems from a lack of trust and feeling of wholeness within ourselves. When we seek in the external to source what we yearn to feel inside, we will always fall short. We will never be satisfied because we’re aiming at a moving target…. Just ask anyone who got ‘the job’, ‘the house’, ‘the body’ how they feel 6 months later. 🤔

Rather than look at our anxiety squarely in the face, we routinely numb, distract, and disconnect from ourselves thinking it will disappear.

We drink too much, spend hours on our phones mindlessly scrolling, eat crap that will stimulate just the right pleasure receptors in our brain so we don’t have to actually feel what we’re feeling, and date people we aren’t interested in to pass the time… but the anxiety always comes back. ALWAYS.

Why?

Because we haven’t dealt with the root cause of it all so we’ll never be able to drink, smoke, eat, or fuck it away. Because it’s all about us and our perception of ourselves. Because to make it go away we need to understand where it’s coming from in the first place and in order to do so we have to open doors that are painful.

We have to learn to sit with our discomfort and learn what it’s been trying to tell us all along. We have to let go of this notion that we can actually control anything other than the way we react to what life throws at us. We have to embrace the fact that we have a responsibility to ourselves above all else and most importantly, we have to focus more on the process rather than the idea in your head about what it ‘should already look like by now’.

When we do, we’ll start seeing that much of our strife isn’t actually real but a product of the stories we’ve decided either consciously or subconsciously to tell. We’ll see that we have a choice to adopt a new narrative and we’ll see the Truth in choosing to run with the one where as the protagonist we’re already whole...Not perfect, just whole.

On that day, you’ll no longer need to numb out or sedate yourself because your anxiety won’t own you anymore. She’ll visit once in a while but her trips will be shorter and fewer and farther in between. You’ll start seeing her as a friend rather than foe because she’ll remind you to remember who you really are and to re-commit to yourself to your process. You’re already whole baby, you just have a tendency to forget that.

Now put that in your pipe and smoke it! 😉

On This Thanksgiving, Chew on This.

This is the story of my favorite part of my solo cross-country road trip, one of my most recent failures, and ultimately one of the most profound lessons I learned all year...

I share it with you today in hopes that you'll have a quiet moment in all the holiday madness to give some thought to the question of where your privilege plays a role in your life and how it can get in the way of being a better ally to people you may want to help or be of service to.

White folks, this one’s especially for you. ;)

While most of us are celebrating today as a holiday focused on family and gratitude, we must not forget that to our Native American brothers and sisters today is seen as a day of mourning. So let's do ourselves a big favor and yes, celebrate what to many of us this holiday stands for but let's not do so conveniently forgetting that to many this day commemorates the beginning of a still continuing oppression of their people.

The whitewashing of our history is unacceptable for many valid reasons. One often overlooked reason because the painfully clear injustice of it all takes center stage? If we don't know or even acknowledge what really happened and how it still affects our country today, how will we ever grow from it? How will we ever make it right?

Would love to hear your opinion on this one folks. Do share!