What we talk about around here.

The relationships in life that don’t always get enough — or any — attention.

Specifically your relationship with your internal world, your stuff, your stucknesses, your business (if you have one), creative play, and fuzzball monsters who may or may not like cookies. With time and with space and with piles and with projects. Basically, working through the stucknesses that keep you from doing things that you care about. Figuring out what your stuff is and how it works, so you can take care of yourself in really important ways.

I go out of my way to avoid the conventional names for this work — “self help”, “personal development”, “marketing”, “time-management”, “productivity” — because I find them vomit-inducingly depressing.

We do that stuff, except it’s PLAYFUL and CREATIVE and FUN. And not cheesy, annoying, preachy or obnoxiously motivational. We do it with mindfulness and light-heartedness.

We talk about destuckifying, biggifying and projectizing.

That’s what I write about during the week, with lots of notes from my own process.

On Fridays I review the week (it’s more of a Revue than a review) with something called the Friday Chicken.

Feel free to join in. Lots of people do. It’s such a sweet thing, and it’s really become a gathering place of sorts. Lucy calls the Friday regulars the Chickeneers of the High Seas, which I think is hilarious.

And on Sundays, I write Very Personal Ads, which are little gwishes (goals/wishes), hopes, dreams and things that get thrown into the pot. Another neat communal experiment that has become a shared ritual.

See also: Whee! The People for what my people are like and who tends to hang out here.

An imaginary interview! With me!

Side notes!
1) You can also read this actual interview with me to support the Communicatrix in her amazing 50-for-50 project.

2) Also! A sort-of interview with me where TJ gets me to confess to the 30 Things I Love Right Now.

Okay.

Define yourself in a ridiculously limited series of words.

Uhhhh …. thinker of thoughts. Writer of words. Educator. Trilingual bookworm. Obsessed with patterns. Baker of great (sugar-free) bread. Smart-ass. Eccentric.

Convictions, beliefs and such: do you have any?

Yes!

Things I believe in.

Love. Love is awesome. And it’s inside you which is kind of weird but also really liberating because it’s there whenever you need it.

The generosity of strangers.

The often hard-to-access inner ability to really, truly get to know yourself — with all of your stucknesses and horribleness — and like yourself anyway.

Things I don’t believe in.

Mt. Hood.

Things I don’t believe in but wish I did.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster. Alas, Pastafarianism is not for everyone.

One thing you might not know about me.

I’m the #2 world expert in …something you may not have even heard of. Shiva Nata is brain training that looks like martial arts and acts like drugs-that-make-you-smart-and-hot.

One thing you probably don’t want to know.

I dislike the word “diphthong” with a passion. In fact, even typing it is creeping me out. It’s my kryptonite.

One thing no one should know.

My filing system is organized by chakras.

I know. I warned you, though.

How long have you been doing this work?

Facilitating a process of people working on their stuff has been a thing for a long time. I’ve been teaching in some form or another since 1993.

The vision for this emerged in March, 2005 in Berlin. This website went live that August. March 7, 2006 is the day I walked into City Hall in San Francisco and announced that I was starting a business.

I started blogging regularly in June 2008 — you can peek at the archives for a sense of just how much things have changed since then).

In 2010, we opened the Destuckification Playground, a studio for creative self-work, in Portland Oregon.

As of April 2012, we’re opening a much larger space where anyone can come and play whenever they like.

I heard you’re the one who invented the word biggification?

Also “stucknesses” and “right people”. See the glossary (it makes your hair all shiny!) for other Havi-isms you might run into around here.

Life philosophy?*

1. Napping is good.
2. So are pretty much all forms of quiet, intentional, guilt-free navel-lint-contemplation.
3. Use your powers for good. Live by what you teach. When you can’t, forgive yourself.

* Just my personal take on things, not something I expect anyone else to live by.

I want to send you fan-socks! Or other lovely things.

Ohmygod. I love fan-socks. My mailing address is on the contact page. Or, really, at the very bottom of every page on the site. That’s where I go to look it up too.