New Marketing Scheme: Look Healthy

Seeing Beauty

A few weeks ago my sister got married. Though I am obviously biased, I mean this quite seriously when I say she was the most beautiful bride I’ve ever seen. She was radiant and graceful and rosy-checked and full of love. It was a sight to behold. But it wasn’t the makeup and the hairstyle, though wow, they did a very good job with both. When we met up in my parent’s kitchen the morning of the wedding and she was standing there with her hair dirty from sleep and her face unwashed she was equally as beautiful as ten hours later walking down the aisle.

Sitting there for a couple of hours in the beauty salon watching as the amazing stylist fluffed and powdered and prepped her hair for her updo I kept commenting that her face looked magnificent. In the three weeks before the wedding she went and received one facial a week in addition to working out and drinking lots of water. Without question I had never seen her glow with such health.

New Marketing Scheme

It got me thinking and its been on my mind ever since. I want to radiate that kind of health. At some point our society said it was okay for doctors to be overweight and for nurses to smoke. It was okay for therapists to be stressed out and massage therapists to go without bodywork.

Well this acupuncturist and yoga teacher is fed up with it. I want you to want my business because you think I am an excellent example of health. If I don’t look healthy enough yet don’t bring me your business.

Starting this week I am challenging myself to be as healthy as possible, to keep better boundaries around work time, to exercise more, to spend more time doing fun outdoor activities, to cook healthier foods and to nourish my soul amidst everything.

So in addition to postering, online advertising and increasing my SEO I’m going to woo new patients with my glowing complexion and boundless energy.

Demand More

If you don’t need acupuncture right now then I highly suggest you start demanding more of your care providers. Find someone who is fit, who has a good glow in their face, who knows more than you about health. I once had a substantially overweight doctor ask me in a very condescending tone if I exercised regularly. I almost punched him. Health providers shouldn’t ask questions unless they can back it up with their own personal experience.

Who is a Health Care Provider?

Yesterday I was talking about this with my husband and we talked about how unhealthy so many Western medical professionals look. He then joked that it is like going to see a skinny chef. I thought about it for a second and said that I want to go to restaurants where there are skinny chefs. It means they are remembering to eat healthy meals at reasonable hours and that the food they sell has healthy ingredients. When I challenged my husband with this comeback he laughed and said that is because I think chefs are health care providers as well. I agree completely. Everyone out there making food, discussing our health, leading us in exercise routines or talking about our mental health is a health care provider. Demand more of them all!

Balance: Juggling Business, Life, and Sanity

Everyone knows the perks of owning your own business, but the downsides are less obvious. I love Window of Heaven Acupuncture & Yoga. It is the most exciting and wonderful job I could possibly imagine, but I think I need to remember it is a job from time to time.

When I am passionate about something my work ethic goes slightly haywire. The month of October has been a crash course in how much my mind can sustain.

Grad school is nothing compared to the hours I’ve been putting in behind my computer writing blog posts, planning marketing schemes, seeing patients, scheduling appointments and keeping up correspondence with long lost friends who have swept back into my life through the start of this business. Whew. It’s been great and it’s been full.

It isn’t sustainable, even if it is tons of fun. Bosses don’t require employees to show up for work before they shower or brush their teeth. I should be drawing the boundaries within the business in a more precise fashion.

I decided to make and publish new employment rules for Window of Heaven employees. Right now they only pertain to me, but I will respect them more if I contemplate having future employees.

1. No work before 8am or after 9pm (small steps)
2. Show up clean, fed and dressed to the office every morning
3. Weekend work is capped at 5 hours per weekend
4. Employees are required to attend one yoga class per week in addition to personal practice for inspiration purposes
5. Lunch is to be eaten before 12:00pm every day
6. Employees must drink 6+ glasses of water every day during work
7. Vacations and days off are fully unplugged (no email, no facebook, no phone)

I am the owner of Window of Heaven Acupuncture & Yoga, but I’m also a yogini, teacher, fiction writer, poet, avid reader, wife, sister, daughter, friend, dancer, bread baker, church member, walker, biker, movie watcher, gardener, cleaner, organizer and napper.

Running a heart-centered business requires that I am in balance in my life. Balance, like chaos, is contagious. Which would I prefer my patients catch? The answer is obvious.

This post will go live, I hope at least, on Friday morning at 9am.  When it goes live I plan to be sitting having my hair done in a fancy salon in preparation for my sister’s wedding. Most of this week I won’t be working or thinking about work. I’ll be playing the role of sister (and Matron of Honor) full time. See you again Monday the 29^th.

My History of Beginnings

Starting this new business is a definite beginning, but unexpectedly it is also a spiraling back to the numerous places in my life that helped bring me to this point. This whirling of names and faces from the past coming out to show support reaffirms I am on the right course and that somehow all along they saw this coming.

I started practicing yoga in my bedroom when I was a freshman in high school. Every night after my parents went to sleep I would pull out my copy of The Sivananda Companion to Yoga. This creased and flattened book introduced me to pranayama, meditation, postures and a healthy diet. When I started practicing I didn’t know anyone else who did yoga. Literally no one. My mother and aunt had taken one class together in the 70s, but that was it. This was before google and certainly before the idea of finding a yoga studio in the yellow pages was feasible.

I was alone in this new exciting world. Everyone in my life knew the word “yoga” the way they knew the word “tofu” but had never tried either. I still remember the first time I saw a “Namaste” bumper sticker. My father and I were in Santa Fe and we took a picture of it we were so excited.

In college the yoga morphed into dance and from there into the desire for anatomy training. When I graduated from college I just decided to pick a town, move there and figure life out. Because the universe provides in its mysterious ways I stumbled into my first job and found my first two mentors. These two amazing co-workers taught me everything I know about employment, job searches and how to build a career.

I was your typical post-private school elitist who thought I could just roll out a resume and everyone would come knocking at my door. But you don’t make or even start a career by looking through the want ads. My two brilliant co-workers taught me the first step to getting a job is knowing what it is you want and what it is you have to offer. Then they taught me not to compartmentalize my life. Instead of thinking of writing as my only career option and having a mile long list of interests and passions, I could design a career path. I could imagine a career that incorporated writing, yoga, health, nutrition, business, organizing things, planning, birthwork, sexualities, researching, helping others and dance all at the same time. In fact if I could figure out an angle and had the guts to try, I could actually make a living from the delightful mix of all of my interests.

Now years later, though not many, I’ve got my angle. For five years the IRS has received taxes from the occupation: yoga teacher. This year I could add the occupations: acupuncturist, herbalist, doula, writer and business owner to the list, but I won’t in order to avoid confusing them.

My point is your path is there for the finding. You must first know deeply what it is you want. You have to find that which causes the utmost passion. That which makes you desperate to know more. Then you brainstorm and push and pull. You ask questions, you get hung up and you get confused. Yet all the while you have to trust that your desires are worth exploring. Let me say that again, your desires are worth exploring.

As my insightful father-in-law said to me the other day “You’re going to have a rich time building this practice, whether you get rich or not.” This has already proven itself tenfold. The opening of this business has reminded me of the richness of my community. Thank you to my marvelous network of loved ones, friends, mentors, inspirations, students, teachers, clients and patients. This beginning is the most spectacular homecoming of my life.

Window Of Heaven

The logo for my business had its infancy in a google search for beautiful windows. Windows have long been a fascination of mine as they are only half about what is inside and what is outside, but also half about this moment in between. I am lover of houses with special, distinctive windows on the street side. These spectacular windows always seem like the journey or transition period from who I am on the street to who those people are living inside their unique life.

It wasn’t until we were canoeing this summer that I saw the window inspiration for my logo. Seeing it from the water made it all the more stately and elegant. Before I could protest my husband had his camera out and was swiping a picture while we paddled by. The house was one of those dream retirement houses. Okay, it was one of those houses we like to dream about retiring to—close to some quiet, but deep body of water where we could keep a sailboat, big backyard looking over the water, and a grand kitchen with tons of floor to ceiling windows so every meal cooked and tasted is also a picnic. I bet we would have missed that whole house if it weren’t for that window, which stole our attention and offered us a moment.

Windows do that. They offer a pause, and a possibility.

I decided to call my business Window of Heaven Acupuncture & Yoga when we learned about Window of Heaven points in my theory class at school. I came home that night told my husband, wrote it on a card and put it in my desk. This set of 10 points mystifies me. They are on 9 of the 12 meridians and are mostly located around the neck and throat. Here is the exciting part—they are suggested for use when the body and the mind are disconnected.  Needling them is like making a small stitch in an invisible tear between the thinking head and whole of the physical self.

It is that separation that brings me to yoga and brings me to acupuncture. I desperately want everyone to feel what is going on in their body, if they so desire. If they don’t want to feel what is happening, I want to teach them how to ask the question why. We get separated from fear, from too strong emotions, from pain or from forgetting. Naming that reason is half of the way to welcoming the body back.

On the mat this morning I was lazily enjoying a delicious moment in a hip opener as I was thinking about writing this post and the phrase “this is a window too” popped into my mind. This following of sensation and search for exceptional moments in yoga is the seeking of windows to the inner self.  In fact it is the exact way I teach though I never before would have used that word.

Some Westerners prefer the translation “Window of the Sky” because the word heaven is too loaded. I’ve never been afraid of loaded words. So today I want to express my use of the word heaven in naming my business. I’m taking the definition of place. A perfect place or ideal location. A place we arrive at every time we stumble upon beauty in any of its forms, within ourselves or in the world around us.