Resourcing the Revolution

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7 Self-Care Hacks: An Insider’s Guide to Political Action

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In honor of the People’s Climate March taking place this weekend in New York City and around the globe, I want to share some tips I’ve learned in my years of being involved with large-scale political action. (A note for those of you who don’t get involved with this type of thing, you can also use these same ideas when you’re traveling to large conferences.)

Let’s face it: being involved in days of large-scale action doesn’t exactly lend itself to an environment that is beneficial or conducive to self care. In fact, it’s often exactly the opposite. Long days, most often outdoors, with a stressful lead up… that often end up with us crashing afterward. We push ourselves so hard getting to the finish line that our bodies often collapse right after, leading to sickness and general exhaustion.

But what if there was a way to alleviate some of this stress, and make our participation in days of action a little bit easier on our bodies, and a little bit more fun in the process?

That’s where I’m headed with this post today, and I hope that you can make use of some (or all) of the ideas below as you head to New York or one of the solidarity events this weekend (or the next time you’re out getting your world-changing on).

Plan Ahead!

1. Do your research. Find out how you’re getting to the event, and give yourself plenty of time to get there. Maybe even build in some extra time. When large groups of people converge on an area, there’s often traffic congestion – and that includes not only traffic on the road, but public transit and pedestrian traffic as well.

Giving yourself extra time will help to alleviate our number one issue: stress. Less stress getting to the event = a good start to the day!

When you’re making your travel plans, also make sure to do at least a little bit of research about the area you’ll be in. Take a minute to see where things like restaurants, coffee shops and grocery stores are, just in case you need to make a pit stop at some point during the day.

Along these lines, it may help to have a plan that’s just slightly off the beaten path. Have you ever tried to stop at a coffee shop where thousands of other people are converged? Sometimes walking half a mile can make the difference between standing in line for an hour; plus as an added bonus, you’ll get your body moving!

2. Dress appropriately. Check the weather forecast. Several times. Plan your clothing for the most likely possibility, and then check the weather again the night before you leave. You want to have a raincoat if it’s raining, or sunscreen and a hat if it’s going to be hot and sunny. And, you don’t want to have a whole lot of unnecessary gear to lug around – taking the minimum amount that you need is a careful balancing act, but it’s totally worth the extra planning time.

Wear comfortable shoes. Plan for how much walking you will be doing, between getting from transit to the event area, during the event itself, etc. How many hours will you be standing on your feet? This single item may very well make or break your day.

3. Be Flexible. You know that saying about the best-laid plans? Well, yeah. Having a plan is good, but being okay with that plan changing is a must in situations like this. If you’re the uber-planning type, have a backup plan, or a plan A, B and C. But again, be prepared to improvise. Again, we’re aiming for keeping the event as low stress as we can.

And, sometimes the unexpected adventure that finds you is exactly what you needed. Be open to serendipity!

Sleep

4. Get enough sleep before the event. Hopefully you’ll be able to get in solid nights of sleep in the week leading up to the event. (Organizers, I know you’re laughing uncontrollably right now, but hear me out.) I know that there are only so many hours to get a million hours worth of things done in the lead-up, but also remember how much more efficient you are when you’re not running on empty.

Getting a good night’s sleep can mean that you’re more efficient in your execution of the things you have to do – rather than running around in a fog, you can keep a sharp mind, and the hours you have can be more effectively used.

5. Sleep on the way to the event. I know, I know – it’s hard to do, especially if you’re traveling with other people who are also super excited about the event that you’re headed to. That being said, taking a couple of hours to catch some zzz’s on the bus, the train, or in the back seat of the car you’re carpooling in can be really beneficial. Even a 20 minute nap can help.

I would recommend bringing along a travel pillow – one of those that you can roll up or squish into a tiny little bundle and strap to your backpack. They’re low weight, and take up hardly any room, but they make your travel napping so much more comfortable, and probably a lot more restful. No one likes the neck stiffness that comes from falling asleep with your head against a train window.

Or, take along the Yoga Nidra recording I made for you, and do a modified session. You probably can’t find a perfectly quiet place to lay down, but you can still do a good bit of the practice during your travel time. And think how awesome it will be to arrive at your destination all relaxed and recharged!

Nutrition (Fuel for the Body)

6. Take water. Either carry a couple of water bottles with you, or maybe a single water bottle that has a built-in filter. (I don’t travel without my filter bottle.) Staying hydrated is super important to our health, and especially when we’re outside, or traveling, or a combination of the two. Yes, it probably means having to stop by a port-a-potty during the day, but those couple of minutes aren’t worth getting dehydrated over. Seriously.

7. Take snacks. I don’t know about you, but I get seriously cranky if I don’t eat. I never, ever leave home without at least a few granola bars in my backpack when I’m headed to a direct action or large event. Even if I can’t find any other food to eat during the event, I know that I have enough in my backpack to keep me going during the day.

 

How many of these things do you usually incorporate into your routine when you’re traveling to events? Do you have any tips to add?

I’d love to hear them in the comments, and I look forward to seeing you out on the streets!

Calling Bullshit: Changing the Conversation Around Worldchanging

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Last night I was tagged on Facebook by a friend, inviting me to join an environmentally focused activist group that is looking for volunteers. While I believe 100% in what they are doing, there was a line in that call to action that pissed me off. (Enough, in fact, that I pushed the post I was supposed to publish this week to make room for this topic.)

Clear your calendars and keep ’em clear. I don’t care if it’s goddamn yoga night- if you flake out our wells get poisoned.”

I get where they are coming from; wanting to make sure that people are committed to the cause is perfectly acceptable. And sadly, there is a very real tendency for people to enthusiastically overcommit to many projects and then later drop a few balls. However, it’s the way this statement is worded that really gets to me.

So I’m calling it:

BULLSHIT.

This is the root cause of so many of the problems we face as worldchangers – the expectation that we have to martyr ourselves for the causes we believe in, sacrificing ourselves for the greater good. Look, I get it. I know that the work, the cause, the fight are all important – imperative, even.

That being said, I wish to counter: the work is important but, damn it, YOU are just as important.

It’s time to change the conversation. It’s time to start standing up for ourselves and our needs as adamantly as we do for the subject or objects of our work. It’s time to cut the bullshit.

And, it’s not going to be easy. This particular mindset has become an expectation, and has almost become a cultural norm. By stepping up and declaring that you’re opting out of this mentality, you challenge the system and the status quo. You become a rebel against the rebellion.

I don’t see that as a bad thing. The revolutionaries in our world have always seen a better future, and have been willing to step forward and say “enough”. It’s time that we honor ourselves – our health, our bodies and our minds.

It’s time.

We are worldchangers and our time has come.

Reflections on Giving Yourself Permission

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These days, I’ve been starting off my yoga classes with a reminder to my students: every time we step on to our mats, it provides an opportunity for us to practice being okay with both where and who we are at this moment.

It’s an opportunity to give ourselves permission to be okay, to take a look at ourselves (bumps, bruises, rough edges and all) and honor that this is the very best version of ourselves that we can achieve in this moment. There is nowhere else we have to be, there is nothing else we should be doing, and to expect more is doing ourselves a disservice.

What’s funny is that even though I speak this truth every time I sit down to teach, I have a really hard time following it in my own life. It’s a fairly classic “do as I say, not as I do” scenario, and it goes hand in hand with making excuses instead of just following my own advice and taking care of myself.

This is where I fall into the “not enough time” trap, or where I end up “trying to take care of myself” instead of actually doing it. We can make all the excuses in the world about why we can’t do certain things, many of them completely viable. But in the long run, we’re missing out on making a positive impact in our lives by making these excuses.

My question is: why in the world do we do it??

Why, when we know that we need to get enough sleep every night, do we cut corners and try to get away with the bare minimum? Why, when we know how good we feel after a yoga class or a good workout, do we procrastinate and end up skipping it? Why?

I think it’s because we’re human. We’re these inherently flawed, yet unimaginably wonderful and capable creatures who are wired for immediate gratification, and our human nature often wins out over the intellectual argument between our bodies and our minds.

And speaking of the mind… we often live so deep inside a constantly active, chattering, future-thinking, past-remembering clump of synapses that we forget about this moment. Remember in last week’s post where I compared the mind to a drunken, scorpion-bitten monkey? It’s no wonder we have such a hard time just being, much less being okay with where we are in this moment.

Toward the end of the last Skype call I had with my business coach, we touched on this subject. Between being in location transition and it being summer, I have the perfect opportunity to really settle in and do my own work. Instead, I’ve been beating myself up about all the things I should be doing, and the fact that I haven’t progressed as quickly as I would like in certain aspects of the business. Instead of being honest with myself, I claim that I’m “trying” to take care of myself. Instead of being proud of the things I’ve accomplished, I beat myself up over what hasn’t happened.

One of the things that I hold dear with Rebel Yogi is the chance to be transparent about the process. Yes, it sucks (a lot) to admit that I struggle as much as the next person. But my hope is that by laying open the dark side of the story, rather than just the bright and shiny side that is usually the only side of the story that makes a public appearance, we begin to see that we’re not alone. We are all on our own twisty journey – the yoga journey (of the self, through the self, to the self) – but we do have traveling companions along the way.

It’s the major reason I started the Changemaker Q&A series – to share the stories of those fellow travelers, to remind us that we’re all in this together. We all struggle, we all fall, and we all have this beautiful opportunity to smile anyway – to get back up after those falls, to dust ourselves off, to find the beauty in the struggle – and to find a way to be okay with where we are, even in the midst of that struggle.

So am I okay with where I am in this moment? If I’m being honest: most of the time, no. But I’m making an effort to be more aware of the times when I’m not, and taking those opportunities to pull myself out of the boiling pot of mind-stuff, to become present in the moment, and to just be.

Our lives are a work in progress. Let’s give ourselves a chance to open up to that idea, and maybe ultimately to be okay with it.

I’m in. Are you?

Saving the People Who Save the World: Adventures in World Domination

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Three weekends ago, I had the chance to hang out with over 3,000 of my favorite people. Those of you who have been following along for a while might recognize the World Domination Summit (WDS) as that place where I met a whole bunch of the people I’ve interviewed for Changemaker Q&A, or you may very well be one of those awesome people who came into my life due to WDS (hey you!).

I’m one of the old timers – those who have been in attendance at every WDS since the beginning. This was my fourth year at the event, but with one big difference – instead of being an attendee, this time around I had the opportunity to see behind the curtain and to serve on the Ambassador team. Given how many awesome people I’ve met during the event, and the number of opportunities that have arisen due to those connections, this year it really felt like it was time for me to give back.

If you’ve ever been to WDS, you know the energy that comes from being around thousands of world changers all in one place. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life. I distinctly remember standing at the front of the room during the inaugural event with my friend Brandon and getting the craziest goosebumps I’ve ever had; we were talking about the similarities in projects we had been involved with around the BP Gulf oil spill, and that connection was so powerful that it was like we were tapped into a power grid.

And, if you haven’t been to the event, take my word for it: it’s intense. I knew going in to the event that it was going to be a challenge to honor my own Rebel Yogi work – taking care of myself. I was scheduled out for three really long, intense days and if my history was any indication, I had to be very careful about listening to my body during the event.

I could feel it even from the first couple of hours at the pre-party on Thursday night: this was going to be a challenge. Being in the room with so much energy, catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, I could feel my body starting to take on the tense edge that comes along with being in that kind of situation. Even breaking away for dinner with just a couple of other people, I could still feel the tightness in my gut when I got home.

The next morning dawned bright (er, dark) and early, and I got to Pioneer Square just after 6 am to start laying out yoga mats for the Great Namaste world record attempt. Five hours and 808 attendees later, the mad rush of the attempt was over but my day was just getting started. After doing registration for the Jonathan Fields RevolutionU Academy and sitting in on the talk, it was time to head over to meet and greet at the official opening party.

If you were there, you may have seen me dancing like a fool, high-fiving, cheering, and generally carrying on in the greeting-line of orange-shirted Ambassadors on your way in to the party. It was at about that point when I realized that I was starting to crash, hard. A little bit later, I found myself talking to an old friend, almost swaying from exhaustion, realizing that I hadn’t eaten since lunch. It was then that I made probably the best decision I had up to that point: I talked to our volunteer coordinator, asked if I could leave, and did. I took the bus back to the east side of the river, grabbed a healthy dinner and then headed home for a relatively reasonable bedtime.

Now, that may not sound like much of an accomplishment, but for me, this was huge! If it had been even last year, I would have ignored the signs that my body was giving me. I would have pushed through, probably not eaten until really late that night, and only managed to get a few hours of sleep. But, knowing what I do now, and knowing that I had two more really intense days ahead of me, I made the smart choice, and took it easy.

The next two days of the conference were a balancing act. I was scheduled to take lunch breaks, which I took advantage of. When asked to do something during my break, I politely let them know I needed to go eat. I had a backpack full of healthy snacks, and a water bottle that rarely left my side. I took a nap during my lunch break on Sunday where I crashed so hard that I drooled on myself. Yeah, classy, I know.

All in all, the weekend was another amazing experience. Getting to be an integral part of the experience for so many other people, giving out thousands of high fives and smiles, and seeing WDS from the other side was truly awesome. Did I push myself a little too hard? Probably. But, did I do better than previous years? Absolutely.

It’s like I have talked and written about on a regular basis: it’s all about the journey. We’re all learning as we go. We stumble and fall, and we learn from it; then we do a little better the next time around. This year’s WDS was a success for me. I had the opportunity to hang out with some of my favorite people in the entire world, to make new connections and to reaffirm how important the work is that we’re doing in this world. And, I heard the same thing over and over when I talked about what we’re doing with Rebel Yogi: “how can I get involved” and “wow, I really need that, when can we start?”

I came out of this year’s event both slightly exhausted and completely recharged. We are all doing such great work in this world – let’s keep it up, and keep finding our balance as we go along. We’re all in this together, and it’s going to be one hell of a ride.

The Zen of Getting Shit Done

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If you’re anything like me, you struggle with the number of things that you have to or want to get done on any given day (or week, or month). The thing is, we tend to overestimate the amount of stuff we can get done in a day, but tend to actually underestimate the amount we can do in a longer time period.

And, we get stuck in the “all or nothing” trap.

  • If I can’t do this perfectly, I’m just not going to start.
  • I don’t have enough time today to finish this project, so I’m going to start tomorrow.
  • Ugh. I don’t have the mental bandwidth to think about this right now. I’ll do it later.

Do you see a common pattern to all of these ways of thinking? Yup – shit doesn’t get done.

I fall into this trap all the time. In fact, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’ve been sabotaging myself with this very thing pretty much every day since I got back from my teacher training. I have this gloriously long list of things that I intend to do for Rebel Yogi, many of which are time sensitive, and most of which are still sitting on my to do list, staring me in the face and inspiring large amounts of guilt every time I push them off.

I know this intellectually – if I could just break these big tasks into small bits and do one thing each day, I would have already accomplished most of what’s on that list. But, because I let myself think about the fact that they are all “big important” things, I psych myself out, and then I do nothing. I give myself an excuse, and I push things until tomorrow, or next week. And then next week the cycle starts all over again.

But what if we could start to train ourselves out of this “all or nothing” mindset?

What if, instead of looking at the big, important things that we want to accomplish and allowing the mental chatter to overwhelm us, we simply looked for the one small first step we can take. What if we took that step, no excuses? And what if we allowed ourselves to feel accomplishment around that small step instead of guilt around procrastination?

My guess is that we would all accomplish a whole lot more than we are now, and be much more relaxed in the process.

So what’s the balance? How can we start to convince our inner critic that it doesn’t have to be all or nothing, that giving ourselves permission to “do something” is just as important, if not more?

What’s the first small step you can take today?

Now go do it.

Caring Sucks: Why We Shouldn’t Do It

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Yeah, you heard that right. I know what you might be thinking: she’s gone over the edge, lost it, let go of her grip on reality. But, do me a favor and stick with me.

You might not have paid attention, but there’s a definition of the word “care” in the dictionary that frightens me. To care brings us worry, anxiety, trouble, concern, stress, pressure, strain; sorrow, woe, hardship…

Let that sink in a minute.

We “care” deeply about our family and friends. We “care” deeply about our causes, the work that we are doing in the world. There’s usually a laundry list of people and things that we “care” about – did you ever imagine that you could be causing yourself harm by caring?

To go a little bit deeper into what I mean, I’m not asking you to actually stop caring. It’s just that there’s a dark underbelly to the way that we world-changers tend to go about things. When we care about something so deeply that it brings overwhelming stress and anxiety into our lives, maybe it’s time to take a step back, take a deep breath, and reexamine what we’re really trying to accomplish.

Yes, the things that you are working on are important, perhaps even life-altering. (We are world-changers, after all.) That being said, is your work more important than you?

Stop.

I know the answer that just went through your head, because it’s the same answer that I came up with as well. Take a second to think about it, though – to really think. Examine the question, and then reframe: what would be lost to the cause if you were no longer around to champion it? Imagine the world, minus the world-changers. How much more of an impact could you have if you brought a whole, happy and healthy you into the game?

Now, I want you to answer that question again: is your work more important than you?

I have a theory that we can actually increase our impact by taking a step back to care for ourselves. If one out of every 50 people is doing world-changing work, but going about it in an unsustainable way, burning out, eating poorly, getting sick often, always stressed… what kind of impression does that make to the other 49 people looking in at that person?

What if that person were to take a step back and take care of themselves, going about the same work with enthusiasm, a peaceful demeanor, good health and a positive outlook? My bet is that far more of those 49 onlookers would be willing to give that lifestyle a try versus the alternative example.

So here’s my challenge to you: quit caring. At least quit the kind of caring that makes you fifteen different kinds of stressed, and replace it with the kind of caring that allows you to provide what is necessary for your health and happiness as you go about making a difference in the world.

This is the basis of what I’m looking to bring into the world with Rebel Yogi – the good kind of caring. Do you have thoughts, comments, counter points? Let’s discuss!