Breaking the Spell that Costs us our Life…
| Hello from Singapore! As I write this I gaze out on this energetic high-rise city/country, teeming with efficient, capitalized visionary creativity & innovation. My daughter, Mia, is writing in her travel journal and sipping tea. Our intention for this 5-week Asia trip is to grow through new ideas, connect through tea, and see our precious world and its beautiful people. Already, I’ve been struck by a half dozen ideas for businesses, books, and tea blends for Magic Hour—and we’ve only been here a few hours! This is why travel is the most effective way of bringing yourself into the fold of the new—seeing human innovation at play while immersing in other cultures shifts both your world and the world itself. We need other perspectives in order to break the spells of our own. Travel not only connects us with the world, but it breaks the spells of limiting belief, homogenized ideas & gives us new footing in a world rapidly expanding & facing an immense challenge. Our country (US) seems to be in a spell, one of divisiveness and an economic trance which finds us working really hard for money that disappears effortlessly. The spell of the US is one of “work hard enough & you can have it all.” But is this true? What exactly do we have? As humans, we rarely realize we are both casting and subject to daily and lifelong spells. An example of a daily spell can be that you do everything a similar way to the way you did it the day before. We love vacations and retreats because it shifts our perspective and breaks habit-spells. Our beliefs are spells as well, seemingly running our lives from behind the scenes as if we’ve been entranced by a seductress. That seductress could be casting a spell that you somehow aren’t enough, or that you’re only happy when an external circumstance makes it so. In the past 8 months, as I’ve been back in start-up business mode with Magic Hour, I’ve found that there can be no limit to how much we work. It became apparent on the plane here when I actually took a look at my iPhone usage and it showed that I pick up the phone 164 times a day! WHAT??? It showed that I spend 2 hours on email, 1 hour on texts, and 1 hour on social media—every damn day. Which means for 4 hours a day I’m looking at a little 3 x 5-inch digital machine and not looking at the world or in the eyes of other humans. Why I hadn’t caught myself being under the spell of my own iPhone is due to the habit of being on an iPhone. It seeps in. We see it everywhere! We know it’s happening but we don’t stop. I added up how many hours that is a week, and it’s 28 hours. I could have finished Love in Detail, Goddesses of Ojai, and several other books by now had I not been working my handheld spell device. I’m on a phone for 28 hours a week—that’s not even considering how much time I spend on a computer! All in all, most likely, 50 hours+ a week. No wonder I’ve gained weight and have to wear strong glasses! I’ve been under a spell—the digital spell of being glued to a screen. It’s time to break it. So often we don’t even know we’re under a spell. Scrolling social media and the news on a screen is one way to lose your connection to the world around you. While I do teach digital marketing, I’m going to take this new perspective and see how I can be less on a device and more in the world. I won’t do a digital fast, but I am going to go on a digital diet. I predict I’ll have ten times more to show for my life if I simply break this spell now. My new digital diet will be: 1-hour a day on email and social, MAX. 4-hours a day writing, creating, and engaging our world. 2-4 hours a day connecting deeply with other humans—in person. Well, Mia and I are off to go do some tea tastings here in Singapore, where we will probably take pictures of everything and I’ll most likely post them to social :). But, the difference will be that I will put the parental lock and a time limit on my iPhone, and give only Mia the chance to create the code. As I do with her screens, she will now do with mine. I’ll report back—but this is a spell I think many of us need to break—the power of the digital world over our real world. And this is one diet that will give us more magic than any other, that of human interaction & connection. Because, you’re not a machine, you’re a miracle. More soon! Zhena |
Club Magic Hour’s Super Sensory Tea Ceremony!
