This week I had an incredible new idea, but I honestly couldn’t tell if it was genius or heatstroke.
It happened midway through a Hot Yoga class, one where the room hovered around 106 degrees.
And it came right after an emotional avalanche.
Twenty minutes in, the studio co-owner’s voice started to tremble.
At first, I thought maybe she simply needed to clear her throat or take a gulp of water.
After a moment, though, the reason became clear.
It wasn’t only sweat dripping down her face.
She was gently crying.
In traditional hot yoga culture, “stay in the room” is one of the central psychological teachings.
The basic philosophy is:
You don’t have to do every posture.
You don’t have to do anything particularly well.
You don’t even have to stand up; you’re welcome to just lie down.
But unless there is a true medical issue, you are strongly encouraged to stay present.
The practice goes beyond the postures.
It’s about learning not to flee the moment your mind says, “I can’t” or even “I’d rather not.”
Part of it is learning the difference between danger and discomfort, between intuition and escape impulse.
More than anything, it’s about not abandoning the moment.
And sometimes — perhaps especially in “real life” — staying present in the room is our greatest challenge.
The day before, I budgeted 15 minutes for the back-end setup tasks for my social media launch.
I figured it might take 30 minutes at most.
Four hours later — my delusion fully punctured — I found myself deciding I’d done enough.
The next morning, I woke — after an eerily prescient dream — to find that, for unrelated reasons, my entire online universe had collapsed.
Not only were all my project websites down, but because of that domain/server disruption, I was unable to log into email.
To make matters worse, logging into my hosting account required a one-time passcode sent to my email, which gave things a particularly Catch-22 turn.
There was no way to log in to get help, and there was no phone number to call for tech support.
Suddenly, I was trapped in an escape room with no emergency exit system, no phone, and no game master secretly watching over me.
The theme I’ve been exploring this month is Intuition (Meditation HERE).
Often, Intuition can feel quasi-mystical, but that’s not always the case.
Sometimes Intuition is simply the body registering a truth before the mind can make sense of it.
The popular saying is: “The gut is the second brain.”
A more accurate version might be: “The gut has its own nervous system, and it is constantly sending information to the brain.”
Gut feelings are not anti-intellectual.
They’re information arriving before explanation.
Interestingly, people often think gut instinct means “get out.”
But sometimes the brain has to interpret the gut more carefully, until the message becomes:
This is uncomfortable, not wrong.
Maybe you should stay.
Speaking of which…
If you need a song to provoke a good, sobering-yourself-up cry, look no further than Nina Simone’s live cover of “Stars” at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival.
Her performance is brilliant and devastating. (On Spotify HERE.)
The song’s central idea is brutal: fame may look radiant from the outside, but for the person inhabiting it, the experience may be very different.
They may be lonely, depleted, exposed, or discarded.
But this week I learned something astonishing: the recording omits a crucial moment, one preserved only in the film version HERE.
Nina introduces the song, then playfully asks the audience, “Isn’t my necklace beautiful?”
She stands up to show it to them and says:
“It is from Greece and Claude gave it to me.
It is an antique and over 200 years old.
And it is meant for a Queen and I am a Queen.”
Then she laughs, sits back down at the keyboard, and sings the first lines of the song.
She stops almost immediately, however, pointing toward the balcony at an audience member getting up to leave.
She commands:
“Hey Girl, Sit Down.”
Then she repeats it twice more: “Sit Down…Sit Down.”
Apparently, the woman does, and the audience claps.
Nina begins again.
Nina is not singing it as a young artist imagining the dangers of fame.
By 1976, she was singing from inside the aftermath — after success, exile, exhaustion, activism, and the career consequences of choosing political music over radio-friendly material.
How dare anyone consider leaving during something this powerful, this personal?
Especially with a queen like Nina, you’ve got to stay in the room.
Watch it live HERE.
Back to the fever-dream idea I had in the middle of Hot Yoga.
A new 3-lesson course sprang into my mind.
Its title:
The Soul of Social Media™.
For many of us, social media has become the front door to our work.
But no one taught us how strange that would feel.
No one told the writer, the healer, the artist, the coach, the teacher, the introvert, the sensitive person, or the spiritually oriented person:
“By the way, in order to share your gifts, you may also have to become comfortable being seen by strangers on a tiny glowing screen.”
That is a lot.
And that’s why the real question at the heart of The Soul of Social Media™ is:
Can I share my work without abandoning myself?
This is not a course about beating the algorithm.
It’s about staying in the room of visibility without losing yourself.
Let me circle back to the Hot Yoga room.
My lovely instructor friend apologized and explained why she was crying.
That day, she and her co-owner husband had just sold the studio they’d founded to another popular teacher.
They assured us the changes would be minimal — that they would both still be teaching their usual classes — but somehow the weight of it all just hit her mid-class.
Like with Nina at Montreux, it became a moment where she had to stay in the room because something real was happening.
Of course, the room embraced her.
And one student even called out what we were all thinking: that her honesty and visibility are a large part of why we keep coming back.
Fortunately, I found an old email from the new hosting company’s sales rep.
The tech is slightly beyond me, but apparently the DNS was still pointing to the old platform.
In a few hours, everything was redirected, and a day’s worth of emails came gushing through in minutes.
My projects — and I — were once again visible online.
Again, in the cool air of real life, my intuition tells me that this new course — still in development, still beta, and highly interactive — is a strong idea.
I personally need this inquiry.
It’s very clear to me that I don’t want to teach people how to beat the algorithm.
Instead, I want to explore how we can remain visible and honest without losing ourselves — how we can stay in the heated room, even online.
Tell A New Story. Transform Your Life.