You Are Not Broken. You Are a Funky Puzzle Piece.

You are fine when your brain gets fried by noon and you lose your focused mojo at work. You are fine when you fail to get yourself out on a daily six-mile run. You are fine when you accomplish no true learning despite having warmed a library chair for six hours.

You are not broken. You are not a misfit who needs to stretch further or push harder. You simply need to get to know you, and build a world around you that works.

We are nothing but funky-shaped puzzle pieces. Externally imposed schedules, demands on our energies, and forced productivity time blocks assume we are perfectly formed cubes that slip right into predefined slots in this world. But we are not. And the story we tell ourselves about doing more, longer, harder to achieve the best outcomes? That story is fiction.

This is the foundational premise of the KindEdge Experiments philosophy. And this is why I tried naked yoga.

What Are Experimentos?

The word comes from my son. When he was very young, he turned his bathroom into a chemistry lab. Bottles, bubbles, liquids, gels, purple things, blue blobs, greenish goo everywhere. He was making a perfume for me. I kept the poison control center's number close at hand.

Experimentos, he declared with each completed concoction.

I loved the spirit of my mad little scientist. The word has lived in our home ever since as a way to play with whatever life throws at us. It carries a mindset of play when things break. A joy in testing the unknown. An openness to simply see what comes of a new venture — not to control the outcome.

That is what an Experimento is. A venture for the purpose of discovery. Scientifically observe, not judge.

Why Experiments Are Not Optional for Big Life Change

When you are working toward a big goal at KindEdge — changing careers, training for a marathon, writing a book, starting a charity, redesigning your relationships — you will inevitably discover that you need to consciously curate every element of your life to support that goal. Not just your schedule. Everything. The people, the environments, the communities, the objects, the systems, the daily rhythms.

This is what KindEdge 360 is about. Conscious curation. Re-choosing everything to build a foundation that makes your day flow downhill toward your goal instead of constantly fighting upstream against it.

And the way you find what belongs in that foundation, the things that genuinely feed your brain, your body, your soul, and your energy, is through experiments. You cannot know what works until you try it. You cannot know what to keep until you have data.

Here is what I mean. I used to think yoga was just exercise. Then I started doing it and watched it grow roots into me. Hot power yoga became something different from just another workout. The mindfulness, the connection between body and mind, the way it defragged everything and made the rest of the day roll downhill — that became irreplaceable. I would never know that if I had not experimented. If I had just kept doing the running and the gym work that I already knew, yoga would not be in my foundation today. And my days would be worse for it.

Every experiment is a little idea factory. You try the thing, and whether it works or does not work, new connections start forming. You see patterns. You unlock desires and interests and capabilities that were muted before because you were only ever doing what you already knew.

The Naked Yoga Experiment

A candle-lit class with eight or nine other women. Journaling. Introspection. Sharing. And naked yoga.

I gave birth to both of my boys at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, which is a teaching hospital. There were times during labor when a mother could have her knees spread wide open, fully dilated, with a basketball team's worth of medical students peering into the abyss. Somehow I came out of that still retaining a bit of my girlish modesty and timidity about my body's appearance.

But graduates of this naked yoga class truly level up. When all your googly bits are in motion, upside down, right side up, sideways, backwards, and in between, you just get over it.

All the therapy, all the self-help books, all the journaling in the world hold nothing to the rapid-fire self-confidence you grow when you are in a downward dog position in a class full of naked bodies. It is not something you can get from a book or a podcast. It is something that happens in real time, in your body, in a room full of other humans being vulnerable in the same way.

That is the power of the experiment. It accelerates growth of your mind and mindset in ways that reading about it never could.

The Art Class: What Painting a Black Dog Taught Me About Perception

I also took an art class and painted a picture of my dog. This might sound like a casual hobby experiment. It turned into something else entirely.

Here is what the art class revealed: our eyes do not see what is true. There is a famous psychology experiment where a solid gray bar appears to be changing color based on the gradient background behind it. Remove the background and you see the bar was the same color the entire time. What you believed you were seeing changed based on the environment — not the object.

Painting a black dog taught me the same lesson in real time. I looked at the light shining off my dog's nose and thought: that is a warm yellow. It was blue. I mixed colors expecting one result and got another. The color I needed was not white plus something. It was turquoise plus yellow.

I had to completely retrain my eyes to see what was actually there rather than what I assumed was there. And once I learned to see differently in painting, I started noticing it everywhere. In how I had been looking at certain situations in my life. In assumptions I had been making that were as wrong as the color of that light on my dog's nose.

That is the idea factory at work. One experiment lights a transmitter. The transmitter starts making connections. The connections change how you see.

Building Your Customized Daily Foundation

Here is what decades of Experimentos produced for me: a custom-fit daily arc that works with my brain's wiring and my body's energies.

Some of the discoveries were tiny but transformational. I put 64 ounces of water next to my bed every night so that by the time I reach the bathroom in the morning, hydration is already happening. Simple. But the days I forgot the water were measurably different from the days I had it. Jagged, tense, hungry at the wrong times, off. Once I found the pattern, I needed to make it automatic. Now it is always there.

I experimented with wake times and found that 4:00 a.m. was a lossy battery for me. Great for a few months, then I would bonk midday. 5:30 a.m. is my superpower. I can rev excitedly for a few hours on offense before the world puts me on defense.

I experimented with work window lengths and found I am not a 30-minute Pomodoro person. I am a 90-minute to two-hour deep focus person. I need to go completely in, then come up for air.

None of these things came from a productivity book telling me what the right answer was. They came from running the experiments, tracking what worked, keeping what stuck, and throwing out what did not. No judgment. Just data.

The Unregulated Influx of Demand — And What to Do About It

Here is what life looks like before you do this work. Demands from work and kids pour into every gap in your day with no safety valve or shut-off valve. You put all your energies into serving that unregulated influx of demand. You are always rushing to squeeze into the one class on the schedule that might fit. You are never fully in control of your own rhythm.

Conscious curation is the answer. You stop absorbing unregulated demand and start designing your days deliberately. You try different things. You find out what works. And then you negotiate with the outside world to protect what works, because you now have proof.

Without experiments, you never have the proof to go to bat for yourself. Without proof, you cannot negotiate. Without negotiation, you stay in someone else's predefined slot.

You are not a cube. Stop fitting yourself into cube-shaped slots. Join me at kindedge.com. It is not going to be easy. But it is going to be fun. Cin-cin and hugs.

If you want in on the community taking daily action on their big goals — not just thinking about them — subscribe here: kindedge.com/subscribe

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