I finished a book on Sunday.

It changed my life.

I’m keeping the title a secret for now, because it’s slightly misleading. The book is about how we view ourselves, why we do the things we do, and how to make it better without forcing and abusing ourselves.

We learn that we’re bad from a very young age. We’re taught that our bodies are separate from our minds. We live in a mind-based society where we sit and read and compute and learn, and we get the running-playing-dancing joyous movement squeezed out of us.

“Sit still!”
“Calm down!”
“Be quiet!”
“Don’t touch that!”
“Stop wiggling!”

I used to teach preschoolers. My class was always, by far, the best class in the school because I didn’t teach them stillness or quiet. I taught them to play, to move. We had reading time, sure, but then we would play. We would dance, we would sing, we would go outside and run. When the weather was outside-prohibitive (which happens a lot in summer in Texas), we would sneak outside for 10 minutes at a time or I’d clear out the center of our room and we’d run and play tag or spin in circles inside.

Most adults will agree that kids need to move. Kids need to play. Kids need to spend time outside.

So why do we think adults don’t?

We sit around staring at our computers, sitting at our desks, sitting on our couches. And then we wonder why we’re depressed and overweight and unhealthy!

But it’s more than that. We’ve started using food as a substitute for all the emotions we’re suppressing. Need connection? Eat something. Need comfort? Grab a snack. Need excitement? Go out to eat. Need socialization? Eat! Feeling depressed? Stuff food in your face!

And it works. Temporarily. We eat and we feel better. The chemicals in the “food” we eat make us feel sated, even if we’re really not. Ice cream can’t replace even five minutes with a friend, but we’ve learned to feel as if it does.

When I was a little girl, my parents owned a frame gallery. It was attached to our house, so they could both work while my brother and I were both left to our own devices. My brother rode his little firetruck up and down our driveway a hundred million times.

I sat on the couch and ate.

I used food as my love and comfort, because my parents were busy and needed to work.

Now, I don’t blame my parents. They were doing the best they could, and I respect their decisions and I love them both a huge lot. But they were busy, and I was (and am still) high maintenance and need lots of attention to feel loved. I wasn’t getting enough. Food was readily available, and I learned that eating made me feel better, feel less alone.

A habit I carried long into my adult life.

But this book, helped along by several personal revelations, really brought all this to light for me. It offered the simple advice of turning food back into food – nourishment and sustenance – and finding ways to get my other needs met. It advised thinking about why you’re eating, every time you go to eat something.

Thinking about eating isn’t something we usually do, other than a great anticipation for our next meal.

There are two big points in the book; this is one of them. Thinking about what you eat before you eat. Consider your food. Is it even real food? Here’s a hint: if it has a paragraph of ingredients, it’s likely not real. It’s been processed far beyond what food needs to have done to it, and if it says “enriched” – that means they’ve taken the nutrients out of it and put them back in. This blows my mind. It also prevents the nutrients from nutrienting our bodies; we can’t process man-made nutrients very well.

I digress. This one thing, considering my food and the reasons I’m reaching for it, has drastically changed my eating habits in only a few days. I found that, when I’m not actually hungry, I’m motivated to eat by desires and needs for other things, things that food is only a (poor) substitute for: comfort, affection, play, socialization, reassurance. Once I know what I really need, I seek it out.

For example, at the grocery store yesterday, I reached for a pint of ice cream. I read the ingredients (a very short list), and deemed it acceptable. But once I had it in my cart, I started thinking about why I wanted it, what I would feel when I ate it. I realized I was really desperate for comfort and reassurance, so I put the ice cream back. When we got home, I snuggled with Pace for a while. My needs were met and I felt much better – without the ice cream!

The other main point of the book is movement; back to what I was talking about earlier. We stop moving somewhere in our youth, and most of us don’t ever get it back. But we’re creatures of movement, and it’s against our nature to sit still so much! Once we find the joy in movement, we might find that we don’t want to sit still, we don’t want to stop moving. Dance, run, bike, swim, spin in circles, wiggle, fidget, swing, bounce. Move. It feels awesome and natural, once you overrun those ingrained patterns.

There’s far more information in the book than I can convey to you here, so I will unveil the title and hope you get it for yourself. Don’t let the title mislead you, though – it’s about life and living it joyously rather than just food. Transformational Weight Loss, and it’s for sale as a tree book on Amazon or an ebook on his site. I can’t recommend it enough!

Another Friday, another epiphany from Iron Pentacle class. We know you missed it last week.

In the class, primarily when we were focusing on the Self point, I was dipping into my needs, thinking over the things I need to be happy and content. When my needs are met, I can focus on everything else in my life much more clearly, because I’m not always struggling with those basics.

But what happens when a need can’t be met?

It happens sometimes that something we need just isn’t possible for one reason or another. Perhaps we’ve chosen a path that takes us away from an easy solution, or perhaps our partner or family can’t help us fulfill a need.

I have a need for winter. This is somewhat bizarre, being a born-and-raised-here Texas resident. I’ve grown up in this place where there are two seasons: summer and other. Summer lasts from early March (and sometimes February) through late October (and sometimes well into November). Other is a crazed mix of sometimes chilly, sometimes warm, sometimes hot, sometimes cold, sometimes rainy, sometimes ice, sometimes oh-gods snow (everything closes at the first dropped snowflake). We might have a week of weather cold enough to bust out my actual coat (which, to most other places, would be a jacket). We might have a week warm enough to wear tank tops and shorts.

Ya never know.

It utterly sucks. I hate the weather here with every fiber of my being. Every time someone says, “What a lovely day!” when it’s January and 75°, I want to scream. I start getting surly and wanting to punch people in the face. I wear my hoodie when it’s 70°, for crying out loud, because otherwise I might not get to wear it. I pretend like it’s cold by blasting the air conditioning in my car when I’m going places.

And for a long time, I struggled with this. I’m in Texas, I’m choosing to live here, so it’s not okay to need colder weather. And why is it even a need? Surely it’s just a strong desire?

Yes, it’s true that I’m choosing to live here. An out-of-state move is rough and costly, and our friends, my family, Pace’s day job, and our budding business are all excellent reasons to stay. Austin itself is a fucking awesome city – I love it here. All except the weather.

And the fact that, when Texas finally does decide to ditch the Union, we’re kinda hosed.

But that aside, I was beating myself up constantly because I need cold weather. I need four full seasons. I need a good freeze so the bugs don’t keep me isolated in my house for six months a year. I need the trees to actually change colors. I get dissonance when I go so long with no reprieve from the warm-hot-sunny weather. I get depressed and angry.

Regardless of how odd or silly or weird it is, I need winter.

It’s okay to need what you need.

We’re human. We have needs. Sometimes they seem stupid or ridiculous or even pointless – but they’re part of what makes each of us who we are. Being wholly ourselves, and accepting not only that we have needs but that sometimes our needs are weird, is awesome.

So now, I accept that I need seasons. I need cold weather. I live in Texas, but I’m not a Texan, and we won’t live here forever. Some day, we’ll pack it up and move somewhere where the blue birds fly beyond the rainbow… er, or where there are seasons and cold.

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 11: Ask for what you need

“If you really loved me, you would just know!”

This sentiment reflects one of the most harmful myths of communication. This myth prevents useful communication from taking place and leads to expectations that no one could possibly meet. The broken expectations that follow cause hurt and pain. If we pull back the curtain of this myth to look behind it, we will see the truth: no one can read your mind.

When we grow close to someone, we sometimes feel like we merge together into one person. We’ve seen many of our friends treat couples as if they were one person with the same wants and needs. It happens on the inside of a relationship, too. We sometimes feel that the level of closeness we have achieved will somehow let us merge our minds together. If that were possible, we’d have written a book on mind-merging instead of a book on communication! The only way to make your wants and needs known is to communicate clearly and openly: to ask for what you need.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 11: Ask for what you need (web page)

Kyeli and I just had a conversation about cats. She’s feeling stressed out and overwhelmed from dealing with our cats being high maintenance, and we were talking over our options.

This is going to look like a complete tangent, but I promise it’s related.

200% ROI, 0% risk

Say a friend you trust 100% says, “If you let me borrow ten bucks today, I promise I’ll give you twenty bucks two weeks from today.” Sounds like a no-brainer, right? You’re doubling your money with no risk; what have you got to lose?

But what if ten friends make you the same offer? A hundred? A thousand? At some point, as tempting as it seems, if you take them up on the offer, you won’t be able to pay your rent.

The Challenge Budget and the Stress Pie

The point of this story is that if something is both more challenging and more rewarding, and the reward is greater than the challenge, it might initially seem like an obvious win. But that doesn’t take into account the fact that everyone has a Challenge Budget. Or, if you like, a Stress Pie.

As you add responsibilities and challenges to your life, your pie fills up and gets bigger. When it’s a medium size, you’re totally cool. When it starts getting big, the challenge turns into stress. If it gets huge, the stress turns into overwhelm, and after that, panic and freakout.

Think about the five things in your life that are currently stressing you out the most.

Here are mine:

When I look at this pie, it seems like there are some little things I could do to make my whole pie smaller. I could get my inbox back under 20 emails, which would probably only take me 3 hours, and I could do some SXSW planning with Kyeli when she gets home. Then my pie would look more like this:

Ahh. Now my pie is only medium-sized, and I’m not feeling overwhelmed or overstressed anymore. I’m still feeling anxious or uncomfortable about a few things, and I’ll work on them, but it’s no longer at the level where it’s distracting me, making me unhappy, and knocking me off-balance.

In Kyeli’s case, it might be that the other slices of her Stress Pie are so big that the cat slice is the one she’s focusing on. Sure, we can figure out ways to make the cat slice smaller, but if our goal is a happy and de-stressed Kyeli, let’s not forget those other slices. Figuring out ways to make the other slices smaller will make the whole pie smaller, and maybe the cat slice would be a manageable size if it weren’t for all those other slices making her pie huge.

Kidney Stone Stub Your Toe

This is related to what we call, unfortunately, the “kidney stone stub your toe” effect. A few years ago, Kyeli had chronic abdominal pain for what was it, Kye, 13 months? One day she stubbed her toe and totally flipped out from the pain. She wouldn’t have flipped out if she weren’t in so much mysterious abdominal pain. It wasn’t the size of her stubbed-toe slice that caused her to flip out, it was the size of her entire Pain Pie.

(Eventually we figured out that it was a kidney stone and got it fixed, but that’s another story.)

Okay, but how is this going to make me awesomer?

Whenever you’re feeling overstressed or overwhelmed, follow this recipe.

1. Make a Stress Pie. It will help you see all the things that are stressing you out, not just the one you’re currently focusing on.

2. Look for things that cause a lot of stress but would take a small amount of effort to make better. Low-hanging fruits, if you will.

3. Eat the low-hanging fruits from the pie.

4. It’s delicious!

We interrupt Iron Pentacle Friday for a special bulletin:

Today is Kyeli’s birthday!

(For those of you not playing along at home, Kyeli is my lovely wife. We’ve been married for three and a half years, and they’ve been the happiest and awesomest years of my life. So far. I’m sure the ones to come will be even awesomer.)

She’s a brilliant star, and this is her day to shine. She’s sweet, passionate, intense, fierce, brilliant, creative, powerful, gorgeous, clever, sexy, and caring.

And so, on this special day, I could do no less than to hire a potato to send her special birthday wishes.

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 10: Fierceness

Our culture holds the illusion that there are only two ways to be: peaceful or violent. If you are peaceful, it’s not acceptable to stand up for yourself when someone crosses your boundaries. Peaceful people don’t rock the boat. Peaceful people obey authority. Peaceful people will go to any lengths to avoid conflict and appease those who are angry.

Your alternative is to be violent. Violent people aren’t nice. Violent people don’t respect the boundaries of others. Our society sometimes has a kind of sick worship of violent people, like ancient conquerors or CEOs who cut employee health plans to pad their own retirement funds. Violent people don’t necessarily cause physical harm, but they do whatever it takes to get their way, crushing whomever stands in their path. For ordinary people, however, it’s unacceptable to be violent.

This game is rigged! We’ve been offered the “choice” to go into either of these two boxes: the peaceful box or the violent box. The peaceful box sings of niceness, happiness, calmness; who would want to go into the violent box? Only bad people go in there. It’s a bait and switch. We choose the peaceful box, but the baggage that comes along is passivity, obedience, and complacency. We learn that it’s wrong to stand up for ourselves, and if we do, we’re often called mean, harsh, or cruel, and put into the violent box.

Luckily, there is a third box: fierceness.

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 10: Fierceness (web page)

Since we started really moving in our business, I’ve been struggling with the differences between Pace and myself.

Pace is a Rock Star.

I am a wallflower.

Being a rock star is super useful when you’re an entrepreneur. She makes friends easily. She’s open, she’s popular, she’s extremely charismatic. People flock to her. Everywhere we go, she runs into someone she knows and likes. She makes new friends easily, trusts easily, and sees the best in everyone. She joined Facebook a few weeks ago and in 24 hours had over 200 friends – and the same with Twitter.

It’s amazing. It’s awesome. It’s even useful.

But for a wallflower, it’s intimidating.

I spent a lot of my time feeling like I’m lost in Pace’s shadow. She’s so bright, people forget about me or don’t see me to begin with – and then I forget about my own awesome and started wishing I was more like Pace. I see how awesome and confident she is, how much others adore her, and I lose sight of myself and focus on how different I am from her: I open slowly. I make friends easily, but get close with difficulty. I have trouble with trust. I’m a Guardian, so I guard myself. And, like most of us, I get insecure sometimes.

When I get insecure, I get that desire to walk pre-forged paths. And Pace forges her path with a flamethrower, so that seems like a nice, easy way to go, eh?

But when I walk my own path, I’m fully myself. And I love myself – I like being me! Being Pace is awesome – for Pace – but it’s not for me. For me, it involves a lot of being someone I’m not and acting in ways that are discordant with my nature.

It sucks!

Wednesday, we were on a marketing call with Naomi from IttyBiz. The subject at hand was “networking for wallflowers”, so when she opened it up for questions I asked, “What do you do when one partner is wallflowery and the other is a rock star, and you want to make sure neither are held back or outshined?”

She responded, “Play to your strengths.”

I started crying.

I didn’t know my strengths! And the few I was aware of don’t feel like anything that would help the business – and I felt like I’m not good enough to be Pace’s business partner. She deserves a rock star partner! After many tears and much talking, Pace suggested I sit down and make a list of my strengths.

So I did.

Sitting there on the floor staring at the blank sheet in my notebook, I expected five or ten things to come out. A few here and there, things I’m awesome at and really enjoy. A short but awesome list.

In the end, I had 53 things.

53 things.

I was giddy by the end of it. I stopped writing several times, dazzled at myself. 53 things I’m awesome at, 53 things I can count as strengths. 53 things that I do well – most of which Pace doesn’t (which isn’t the point, but was a surprising realization).

I’m the yin to Pace’s yang. I’m the coolness to her heat. She’s the sunshine that helps my flowers grow. She’s the…

Okay, enough with the dorky metaphors, but you get the picture. Pace has strengths – but so do I. And hers aren’t better than mine, they’re different. Without me, there’s a lot that wouldn’t work well for her, and vice versa. Our differences are what make us a good team.

To go back to being dorky, our differences are what make us special. Without them, we’d be on Camazotz, and that’d be no fun whatsoever. All that ball bouncing, ick.

Anyway. If you’re feeling insecure, if you’re wondering what you bring to the table – or to the world – make a list. Write them down. I bet you’ll be as surprised at the sheer quantity of your strengths as I was at mine.

53. Who’d've thought?

Another Friday, another epiphany from Iron Pentacle class, this time from Kyeli!

Power over: I have power over you, he has power over her, the government has power over us all.

Power with: We share power, I have power with you, we are powerful together.

In Iron Pentacle, we talked about power. The Iron point is power, the gilded is power over, the rusted is powerless.

I have a long history of struggles with power. I spent most of my life feeling powerless. It was unsurprising, then, that I would get into relationships with people who would take advantage of that. Nearly every relationship I had, friend or romantic, prior to finding and standing in my own power was unhealthy in some way or another. People who had power over me, people with whom I was powerless.

A few years ago, I underwent a dramatic Phoenixification. I suddenly and rapidly burned away a huge chunk of myself, replacing the old tattered bits with new, stronger, shinier, healthier bits. I started embracing myself, embracing my light and my darkness, my flaws and fears and strengths. I became powerful.

I found my magickal center of power through ritual and tattooed a dragon with a negative-space unicorn there, to mark the wholeness of me – I am light and dark, good and bad, whole and strong.

Around the same time, I started losing friends. All of the sudden, some of my best friends started snapping at me a lot. We started bickering a lot, stopped getting along so smoothly. Eventually, those friendships died, the relationships ended, and I was left wondering what the hell happened.

In Iron Pentacle, I figured it out.

When you’re in a power-over dynamic, the one with power isn’t going to easily give it up. Power over others corrupts the ones with it and weakens the ones without it. My sudden growth spurt into a powerful being broke the connections in those friendships based on others having power over me, because I was no longer willing to accept being in a powerless state.

It wasn’t entirely one-sided: I accepted those relationships and allowed them to keep me powerless. They accepted the power and used it. And when I came into my own and wanted to move toward shared power – a more equal relationship – it didn’t work.

It usually doesn’t. Power over stays power over until the relationship ends in some way. It’s so all-consuming, so unbalanced, that bringing things into balance often either breaks things or results in different imbalances. In my case, in all of them, I found that my desire to share power wasn’t shared by those with power over me – they wanted to stay in control. In some cases, I spent years struggling for balance before giving up and going my own way.

Eventually, though, I did go my own way. I found power in myself, and that gave me strength, self-love, and confidence. It is hard and painful when relationships end, but forming a solid, loving relationship with yourself is the most important thing in the world – after all, when everyone else is gone, you’re left with you. Best if you like who you’re stuck with.

We’ll be at SXSW ‘09!

We live in Austin, so we (presumably) know our way around and stuff. Feel free to ask us questions, or if you want to say hi or hang out, here’s our contact info!

Email: pace@freakrevolution.com, kyeli@freakrevolution.com
Twitter: @PaceSmith, @Kyeli
Phone/Text: 512-797-4640 (P), 512-705-2144 (K)

Hope to meet a bunch of y’all there! Leave a comment (with contact info if you wanna) if you’ll be there too!

Each week we give away the next chapter of our book for free. We hope you enjoy it! Here’s this week’s chapter:

Chapter 9: Holding healthy boundaries

Boundaries are tricky things. By “boundaries,” we’re not referring to lines on maps or fences in fields; we mean the boundaries of responsibility.

Becky’s Example: Too Late for the Show

Becky made plans to see a movie with Wes at 4:30 on Saturday. They agree on a time and a theater a week in advance. On Friday, they have a conversation:

Wes: “Hey Becky, could we do dinner tomorrow?”

Becky: “Sure, how about Clay Pit at 8?”

Wes: “Sounds good.”

On Saturday, Becky shows up at the theater and Wes is nowhere to be seen. She calls him to ask where he is.

Becky: “Hi Wes, are you running late?”

Wes: “What? It’s only 4:30, and we’re not eating until 8, right?”

Becky: “Right, but we were going to see a movie at 4:30.”

Wes: “I thought we were having dinner instead of the movie. If we were doing both, I wouldn’t have expected you to suggest a time, and I wouldn’t have expected the time to be so long after the end of the movie.”

Becky: “Oh, I thought we would have dinner in addition to the movie. We never canceled our movie plans, so I assumed they were still on. I guess we miscommunicated.”

Wes: “I guess we did.”

Becky and Wes had a misunderstanding about their plans. They each made the usual error; they filled in the gaps in the conversation with their own assumptions. Does Becky place the responsibility on Wes for misunderstanding her, or does she take the responsibility upon herself for not having been clear enough? In other words, where do they draw their boundaries?

…and here’s the rest:

• Read The Usual Error ebook, Chapter 9: Holding healthy boundaries (web page)

Our special guest voice actors for this week’s audiobook chapter are Amanda Ray as Becky and Nathan Winant as Wes. Yay! (: