Everyday Bliss

In case you missed all the clues I’ve been dropping on Twitter, FaceBook, LinkedIn and other places, I am going to be spending my birthday month of APRIL IN PARIS, baby! Paris! (pictoral tour of the ‘hood is down below) Yep, I’m leaving the hubby and kitties at home and going on an all-inclusive American Woman’s Dream Vacation of a Lifetime to celebrate that once in a lifetime marker for a woman:

TURNING 50 YEARS OLD
(made it…whew!)

And…stay tuned because I’m going to make it possible for YOU TO COME WITH ME. Yep, you read it right,

YOU CAN COME TO PARIS WITH ME!

While not everyone can jump a jet and come on over, you CAN  check it out live and won’t have to leave the comfort of your armchair. Promise. I wouldn’t go without taking everyone interested in evolution, transformation, a LIVE ETHOS workshop, new friends, gourmet food, sexy accents and having a good time!

Hold onto your hats: there’s more juice in this baby than a whole orchard full of fresh peaches!

You probably already know that 25 years ago I was hit by a drunk driver and paralyzed, gaining over 150lbs. And how it took me nine years to walk, even though the doctors said I would never walk again.

I’ll be teaching some super-secrets of how I taught myself how to do “the impossible” and reverse paralysis, PLUS how I’ve lost 70+ pounds in the last year and a bit. Add to that my own “energy facelift” exercises and how YOU too can learn to:

“ACHIEVE THE IMPOSSIBLE”

• Everybody’s been asking me why my pants are falling off! You’ll have a ringside seat as I CONTINUE TO LOSE WEIGHT in Paris, scarfing down all that lovely  gluten-free super-fresh French market food. I’ll teach you how to make some of my favorite yummy dishes too, so you get “Gourmet Paris” and “GlutenFree” too.
• Yes, I’m down four sizes and counting. You’ll learn some of my extra cool weightloss secrets, too
• Plus you’ll visit Parisian restaurants, get to meet neighbors and friends and get the scoop on famous landmarks and not-famous-but-cool Parisian places, people and things.
• You’ll even get to help PLAN MY DAY by telling me where YOU want to go in Paris. I’ll  take you with me – it’ll be the next best thing to being there!
• And of course, you’ll also learn how to Achieve The Impossible in your own life through THIRTY WHOLE DAYS OF LIFE-SHIFTING LESSONS, learning how to get yourself to Possible and Do-able. That’s the Whole Point. 
• You also really need to be here if you’ve always wanted to have a super jumbo deluxe vacation for yourself and you never got to take one.
• Oh yes, there will be massage and spa stuff. And coffee. And sidewalk cafe action. And girlfriends. And a live ETHOS Workshop. And lots and LOTS of energy.

I’ll be getting back to you a little later on the specifics, but if you’re interested in becoming an Early Adopter (we reward Early Adopters very heavily around here)  you can join the  “Achieve The Impossible” Experience in Paris  by filling in this handy form. I’ll be holding some very special calls and giving you previews of what’s going to happen and also what isn’t. Only those on this list will get notification of these juicy free calls, so do sign up now – I’ll even send you a free gift!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 1st, 2010 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Birthday, Bliss Compass, Classes & Programs, Community, Confluences, Current Affairs, Day In The Life, Environment, Evolution, Feel Good, Gluten-Free, Great Offers, Transformation, Yummy. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

I wanted to create a few videos on EFT tapping for Trauma relief for my Healing4Haiti project, but realized, my gosh, they’re already out there! Here’s a survey of several, with no endorsement for these practitioners but giving thanks for what they’ve put out.

The first, from the master himself, Gary Craig – and boy, what a great clip this is – followed by a very interesting video on dissolving the freeze response. Then in the lower set of videos, more addressing specific traumas. The first one of these goes out especially to my extended family, though we can all make use of this young man’s story of clearing a heavy authoritarian figure’s harshness. Tap along as you watch, and your own issues, whatever they are, will resolve as well. Keep tapping, it does work! 

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 1:35 pm and is filed under EFT, Emotional Freedom, Energy Psychology, Energy Transforms, Group Coaching, Painbody, Transformation. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

“Doggone our families! Why can’t they just ‘get’ us sometimes?”. Lia, who’s been mentoring with me for several years was quite cross over her sister’s unwillingness to use EFT to deal with her marital breakup. Lia had cured her sugar addiction in coaching with me using EFT and wanted badly to help her sister, Martha.

Martha felt EFT was “too weird” however, and wouldn’t discuss it further, telling Lia “that stuff’s okay for you but it’s just too way out there for me”. Lia was frustrated, sick with worry for her sister (which we tapped on) and didn’t know what to do next.

I can SO relate.

When I first started to share energy coaching with my non-energy-savvy family, they raised their eyebrows, laughed, politely patted my hand and said “it’s great you found a hobby, dear”.

Most of us have had friends or relatives roll their eyes at one another and been the odd duck out in more traditional circles when we try to share energy transformation modalities.

But there’s a great way you can get people into the joys of living a clearer, happier life through energy work. And that is….

Drop the jargon.

Don’t say one acronym – not ETHOS, not EFT, not BSFF or any of the hundred others you might know.

In fact, don’t talk about the tool at all.

Just casually talk to your friends or family members about how they feel. And as you’re speaking with them about what isn’t right in their life, as they are in the depths of the “Dang it, if only I’d have had the guts to….” or “It just KILLS me that I didn’t…” or “I can’t stop thinking about it, and it’s driving me nuts!”

Ask: “How would you rather feel?”

This usually stops people in their tracks.

“Huh?” they’ll say “What do you mean?”

“I mean, what would you really want to feel like, if you could drop this feeling of (hurt, anger, betrayal, jealousy, guilt, shame etc.)?”

Then listen and be really open to what they are telling you without the NEED on your part to fix them, or what’s going on.

Your dropping the need you have to make it all better for other people is HUGE!

When I realized this, and simply listened without attachment to the other person’s outcome (and we’re talking about people I’d gladly give my life for, dear friends and family members), all of a sudden, THEY became more open to what I had to say about HOW to make their situation better.

Then, when they’ve told you how they’d rather feel, acknowledge what they’ve said and ask them:

“Would you like to get a little bit of the way to that place right now?”

If they say yes, then if you practice EFT for instance, get them to tap their HAND points as they tell you their story. Importantly, get them to rate their SUDS or intensity of feeling BEFORE you begin tapping.

And chances are, you’ll get them a good piece of the way down the road, not just a little bit, but it’s a good clean-energy practice to under-promise and over-deliver. That way, folks you’re working with get that extra bit that makes them feel like they got a bonus for free. And that’s something we all love. 

It’s important to start off with something they won’t immediately dismiss as weird looking or “too much to remember”. Using just the hand points addresses a large amount of the person’s intensity level without the overwhelm the whole EFT “recipe” can bring new tappers.

You tap, and tell them just to follow what you’re doing as they tell their story. By and by they’ll be on autopilot, tapping their finger points and karate chop point and telling their story.

As they tell their story, tail enders will come up, guide them to tap on these using just the hand points as well.

When they’ve been talking and tapping for about five minutes, ask them to rate their SUDS or intensity level again.

Most will find a few points shaved off, if not more. I’ve had family look at me with surprise on their faces and say bluntly “I thought all that stuff was just [*steer manure*], but I’ll be doggoned, this [*manure*] really works!”

Now, they enthusiastically tap with other family members who think they’re just as cuckoo as I am.

But they feel better about themselves and their lives. And I don’t care if they think I’m cuckoo, as long as we all feel the best we possibly can.

Because, and this is another important lesson, especially for newbies, the better we feel, the more better feeling experiences we attract.

And that’s a story for another day.

I hope this has been helpful. Let me know how you’re teaching your family to use the energy methods you know and love – you can put a post in the forums or in a blog on the ETHOS Community at:

http://ethosmethod.ning.com

Or feel free to leave a comment on this post below – use the handy-dandy tools in the orange bar at the bottom of the page to keep up the conversation!

Happy Valentine’s Day to you & a lovely rest of the week!

Warm Blessings,
Maryam

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 14th, 2010 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Bliss, Bliss Compass, Bliss Process, Coachability, Coaching Tips, Communication, EFT, ETHOS Method, Emotional Freedom, Energy Coaching, Energy Psychology, Feel Good. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

Since Thanksgiving of last year, I’ve been contemplating something very big. Quite out of the ordinary and not what you might expect but…I seem to specialize in doing things not the way everyone expects and with the most amazing outcomes no one could have predicted.

In fact, you could say doing the unexpected is something of a brand identity.

I’m going on an adventure, that expresses every single one of the Bliss Keys.

For my fiftieth birthday…

And quite by myself…

Somewhere far away where English is not spoken so often…

And adventures, history, romance abound.

I couldn’t talk about it until now because I didn’t know if it would come together.

But this is an adventure I want to take you on. An adventure we can have together, no matter where you are.

Initially I wanted to take my five best girlfriends and ship all of us out on a cruise of the Greek islands for my 50th. But one by one those friends have dropped by the wayside in myriad of no-fault ways that were nothing more than just growing apart with different agendas.

Now I have new girlfriends who are even cooler and more hip to what I’m into, but I really get that this timeperiod is about me and me alone. Stepping into Unlimited Self it is all so clear, so easy…

to set aside an epochal moment to savor first and alone…
to suck the marrow out of
and grow new wings…
to fly boldly into the unknown,
shrieking with wild, ecstatic laughter
to harvest the burgundy-currant juice of deep wisdom
to savor the clarity, aliveness and precious living in each and every day.

Stay tuned, there will be more. Now that the decision is made, watch what unfolds…

It’s thrilling to be on the precipice of something new and amazing.

What are you doing that is bold, fearless, outrageous and entirely in the service of yourself, for once?

What are you doing to serve your own highest needs today?

Please comment and let us all know, and I’ll be back with more later…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 8:31 am and is filed under Abundance, Bliss, Bliss Keys, Confluences, Consciousness, Current Affairs, Day In The Life, Energy Transforms, Profitability, Travel, Unlimited Self. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

(scroll down for the apocryphal picture of me at close to max weight…and today’s version…)

I am fortunate enough to have a very good friend in social media expert Andy Wibbels (@andymatic on Twitter). We’ve masterminded and built our businesses side by side for years and he has been such a help and such a darling friend to me. Color me very grateful for this high class, high value friendship.

We met when Andy still lived in Chicago. When he and Ron and kitties Astroboy & Downy moved out here in 2008, Andy stayed with us while interviewing at SixApart, where he worked until recently on their TypePad, Vox and other products. Now he’s graduating to the bigtime and toddling off to North Carolina to work for sales shark Jeffrey Gitomer. I’m so proud of Andy I could bust. Love him like a sister. k

We’re getting in a lot of celebrating, dinners and theater, ballet and shows before they leave. Tonight we went to Swan Lake, which was great, though missing the iconic dying swan scene at the end. In Helgi Tomasson’s production of the San Francisco Ballet, Odette simply jumps off a cliff – offstage.

WHERE WAS MY DYING SWAN SCENE?! I waited the whole doggone ballet to see it. Ron was similarly taken aback. You just don’t cut the dying swan. It isn’t done.

At any rate, for afters we went back to the boys’ apartment and shot the breeze as long as eyes stayed open. Followed by a picture taking session (which followed the food pics at Santorini earlier in the evening). The below right picture is tonight’s. The one on the left is of me two years ago almost to the day. That chin is pretty much a straight line from under-lip to collarbone, and was a triple roll at my high weight.

BTW, I got that wrong in the caption below. (hey, it was late at night)  I went back to my records and found I weighed more like 265 in the lefthand picture, not 280. But once I got that large, I stopped counting as many do, so the lapse is understandable. 

All the cutting & sculpting done on this body happened pretty much in eight months. Close to 70 pounds, 5 dress sizes, 1 shoe size, 3 bra sizes and 2 chins down, plus over 6″ off my abdomen so far.

I didn’t effort, I just had fun.

I didn’t restrict my eating, I had what my body wanted. How I did it will be the stuff of a future workshop. Something to look forward to! For now though, photos unretouched, just captioned…

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 11:59 am and is filed under Alt Health, Beauty, Bliss, Confluences, Current Affairs, Dance, Environment, Food and Drink, Gratitude. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

If you haven’t yet encountered Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT, you’re in for a treat. If you’re an old hand, you’ll still enjoy this “spiritual documentary” (a la “The Secret”) style introduction to what EFT can do, and features some of my most esteemed colleagues. Really beautiful work – pass this one along to your friends and families. And, as Gary is retiring March 1st and has said he will be taking his website down, if the link at the end no longer works, you can download a free “EFT Quickstart” from me, here (will open in a new window)

http://maryamwebster.com/eftbasics/

EFT Works Great for Pain

I know. I used it to help me end years of chronic pain from a broken back, and to heal those tissues and  even grow new bone. Oh yes, you really can. EFT is a really great introduction to energy magic for people of all ages, cultures and belief systems. Pass this one on too. You can use a sophisticated Energy Coaching technique called “Borrowing Benefits” to tap along with Gary here as the pain is tapped out. Just think of your own pain for a moment, then let it go and use the lady’s set-up phrasing and reminder phrases. Tap right along. Get over it.

GREAT back pain release video

This one is from Robert Smith. He’s a wonderfully intuitive EFT practitioner and teacher. Beautiful NLP related interventions and submodality shifting for you NLPers in the community. Enjoy this video and especially if you had back pain like I did, this will be a welcome relief. Again Borrow Benefits, as you tap along with Robert and the lady with horse related issues…and a big pain in her back that goes away in a really interesting process:

Can KIDS do EFT? You bet’cha! (they’re a lot smarter than we are, y’know?)

I’ve taught children young as four how to tap with EFT and though I don’t have one, I highly recommend a Tappy Bear.  (I turned my childhood bear into such a happy tapping guide a few years ago) They’re the BOMB for teaching EFT to kids! Enjoy this wonderful video from Karin Gustafson teaching a little boy how to tap with a homemade tapping bear. The giggles alone are worth listening – and Borrowing Benefits – through the whole video. For those who don’t resonate to “I’m a good boy” – “I’m okay and feel grrrrreat!” is a good substitute.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 2:20 am and is filed under Alt Health, Bliss Process, Cert. Energy Coach, Classes & Programs, Coaching 4 Leaders, Coaching Tips, Community, Consciousness, Cool Tools, EFT, Emotional Freedom, Energy Coaching, Energy Psychology, Energy Transforms, Great Offers, Group Coaching, Kids, Men's Health, Teleclasses, Transformation, Wellness, Women, Women's Health, Wonderful People. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

Come claim your FREE “The EFT Way To Market Your Services: More Clients, Money & Fun in 2010″ intro class at http://eftmarketingschool.com You’ll learn more in this FREE CLASS than you will in any other, AND GET COACHED ON YOUR BUSINESS. More genuine “take-action takeaways” than you’ll experience any other place.

Why You Need To Take This Class Now

Gary Craig, the founder of Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT, is retiring after many years, and taking his massive, resource-crammed website down. Latest reports say he has put off his retirement from January 15th to March 1st due to the overwhelming amount of requests for a little more time to copy website materials and shut down the business. I for one have benefitted tremendously from Gary’s work and want to tender a personal “thank you and well done – rest well deserved”. Without EFT, there would be no Energy Coach Institute and I would not have been able to create the profession of Energy Coaching!

In this week’s tribute to Gary’s work, my colleague Pat Carrington brought up that people were upset over the fact that Gary’s fantastic marketing skills that would no longer be available to the community. “Who will teach us how to market our businesses when Gary is gone?” she cites one client as saying.

Just as I took up the challenge to help Gary market EFT along with several other top tappers and EFT Masters five years ago, I’m taking up the challenge today to offer this kind of training to you, the EFT Practitioner.

Gary and I both trained in the same neurolinguistic programming business marketing methods, and I have additional experience as a professional industrial psychologist researching what makes products & services sell, plus training in Guerrilla Marketing, in how to Get Clients Now and Book Yourself Solid. These are only three of the over thirty service business marketing programs I’ve taken in the last ten years.

I’ve spent probably fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars to learn these secrets and now, I am going to share them with you in a unique program created especially for EFT Practitioners, Coaches & Therapists – a unique blend of time-tested techniques you simply CAN’T learn elsewhere.

If you’re ready to stop practicing at it and get really good at your business – good enough to take lots of time off, be there when you want to for your family, take liberal vacations, buy whatever you need without worry and all the other things you may have been putting off, go over to:

http://eftmarketingschool.com

and GRAB YOUR SEAT FAST. We have two FREE classes that begin next week, so hop to it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Business, Classes & Programs, Coaching 4 Leaders, Communication, EFT, Emotional Freedom, Energy Coaching, Great Offers, Mastermind, Money, Teleclasses. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

The New Year is here. 2010 – woohoo! We’re all sure it’s going to be a MUCH better year financially and every other way. But what if your business “isn’t there yet”? What if you’ve never made a dime of take-home profit? Are you at the point of giving up? Of retooling? Of running screaming back to corporate life?

If so, come take a FREE CLASS SERIES with me as I share the same marketing ideas Gary Craig, creator of Emotional Freedom Techniques, asked me to share as I helped him with his marketing of EFT. All that is right here PLUS you get a bonus free eBook from Joe “Mr Fire” Vitale on spiritually marketing your business!

http://eftmarketingschool.com

I’ve been enjoying the posts of several people around the issue of transparency. One of them, a young lawyer-turned-coach, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein had an interesting opinion on the “six/seven figure coach” – most of them aren’t making what you think because they’re plowing all the money they make back into their businesses. In the interest of full disclosure, I, like Elizabeth have put most of the money made back into my business from the start. I feel fortunate to have had the resources to do that and still live a rather nice lifestyle. We can all take a valuable lesson from this: Revenue Does Not Equal Profits.

If you still need profits and revenue however, you’ll want to join me for this free class series. Even if you’re in another part of the world and the time doesn’t work, sign up anyway – you’re going to get a free replay, even if you come across this blog post a year or two down the line. Again, the free class is here:

http://eftmarketingschool.com

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Business, Money, Profitability, Teleclasses, Video, social media. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

Be it ever so humble…here’s our New Year’s Eve in Redwood City, CA – complete with interesting neighbors, mariachi (which unfortunately you can’t quite hear thru the Flip’s limited mike), a gen-u-wine Radar Range, gunfire, rockets, Dick Clark, brother Johannes on the FaceBook, @andrealee and other darlings on TweetDeck, shrimp & assorted sauces (only a fraction of the truly decadent parade of food we had during the evening – oh yes), Piper Heidsieck champagne and the much-beloved JBear…

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under Abundance, Bliss, Holidays, Homelife. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Comment, here.

I’ve been a psychologist, shamanic practitioner and trainer for 30 years. My longevity as both a student and teacher of mental and spiritual processes is what prompts my comment on good buddy Andy Wibbels’ recent post on the James Arthur Ray Sweatlodge Deaths which I reproduce most of below.

What gets me is on page 12 of the James Arthur Ray International Co’s Search Warrrant (http://bit.ly/4zDRlm) that Ray played “God” and if anyone did anything he didn’t like would point to them and say “You’re dead”. The person then had to play dead until Ray told them they could “live” again.

Ye gods. What an egotistical sham.

How could otherwise rational people be taken in like this?

I’ve been pondering this question several decades and wrote a scholarly paper on it back in the 90’s. This seems to be the question most people are asking. From a therapeutic perspective, these people were so very desperate for approval that they abdicated their good sense in favor of Ray’s good graces.

But even so…there were way too many early pointers to disaster that the average person should have been able to sense. IF – and this is pivotal – their better judgment had not been intentionally crippled prior to the incident.

I was blessed to be trained in shamanic practice by a real elder whose kindness, deep wisdom and grace inoculated me against ever getting involved with scams like this, no matter how glowingly packaged or how much I wanted the transformation promised. More on that, and this whole mess here: http://bit.ly/OnSpiritualAbuse

One of the first things ego-identified cult leaders do is to wean people from their support networks, their internal sense of right and wrong and teach them their natural bodily reactions are not to be trusted.

Ray did all three. The affidavits list numerous times Ray’s seminarians came to harm – breaking bones, death, suicide, subsequent mental illness…a shameful laundry list that incredibly, has been growing since at least 2003 by current eyewitness reports.

I still do not understand why this man is not behind bars right now.

When I was a therapist, I had a history in dealing with spiritual abuse survivors and developed a certain amout of expertise in being able to spot the fakes and engage proactive protection. As a community gift for 2010, I’m rewriting my early-90’s paper on surviving and avoiding such situations, to more broadly address a wide range of spiritual abusers. Even in well-meaning communities, inexpert group therapy perpetrated by leaders often results in harm to the participants. Most of this is inadvertent, but sometimes it is not. Here are some excerpts that I hope might be helpful:

When human ego is stoked by the drugs of greed, money, ambition and adulation, there is always danger and high potential for abuse.

Some tips for folks in any potential spiritual or mental abuse situation:

Always trust your gut. ALWAYS. No matter what anyone tells you, no matter how initially comfortable you feel with a leader or group. Do you feel queasy or like you’ve been slimed around a leader or teacher you once trusted? Your gut-wisdom is your final defense against harm to the organism. Trust it.

A measure of discomfort is sometimes necessary to grow and change. BUT -

* If you feel Ill either emotionally or physically during a lecture, process, workshop, etc. and it gets WORSE or doesn’t go away – LEAVE.

* If a teacher’s words or behavior make you feel BAD about yourself or ridicule others – LEAVE.

* If a teacher encourages you to drop associations outside of their group, particularly with old friends or family – LEAVE.

* Just as a rule of thumb: ONLY do intense mental/spiritual processes (and definitely those of native origin) with someone who is HIGHLY trained to offer them.

* Do a thorough background check on anyone offering a sweatlodge. Who trained them? Who trained that person’s trainer? What is their track record? Do they have people who have been through the entire process that you can speak with about their experience? Do they have medical staff or medically trained assistants on standby?

* Check the teacher’s exterior relations: What is their relationship with their local Better Business Bureau or Chamber of Commerce if they are a commercial concern? How do other teachers/leaders regard them? Do they have testimonials from anyone OUTSIDE their own organization familiar with their work – in other words, not only testimonials from adoring acolytes or outside parties who haven’t really experienced the work.

These are reasonable questions to ask ANY leader of ANY training like Ray was offering. Most teachers are scrupulous and will have no problem giving you cogent answers. Most are proud of their lineages and will readily cite them, on their websites, in other documentation or to your face if you ask.

* If the teacher you’re investigating refuses to answer, ridicules you for asking or becomes upset – LEAVE. Behavior like this is indicative of ego-strength too low to be teaching or advising anyone.

STAY CENTERED.

DON’T LET ANYONE TELL YOU WHAT TO DO….

ESPECIALLY IF YOUR GUT SAYS DIFFERENT.

If in doubt, check your participation in such ventures with friends, family members or professionals you know to be rational and un-invested in your decision.

Thanks for reading and please pass these tips on – they could save a life.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 11:47 am and is filed under Coaching 4 Leaders, Coaching Tips, Community, Confluences, Consciousness, Cultural Evolution, Current Affairs, Health, Intelligence. Read/follow Comments through RSS 2.0. Or Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.