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QUICK OAT + BANANA SOFT COOKIES

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banana soft cookies with a dog in the background
Photo by: Kayleen Mesa
Follow on Instagram: @dearpeachesandgrace

So! So! So! Yummyy!!

One thing about me is that I’m all about MAXIMIZING time. I’m not much of a recipe creator. I Personally feel best just eating simple meals, but I know not everyone is the same so it always goes back to playing and exploring to find what works best for you. The biggest purpose of my content is to inspire you and encourage you to try new things!

These delicous and easy soft cookies are the perfect move for a quick breakfast or pre/post workout snack!

I LOVE oats, not only do they lower your cholesterol levels which in turn helps you prevent developing heart disease or diabetes, but they also energize you with good carbs and nutrients to keep you going for longer during the day.

Those nutrients include manganese, good for bone production and skin integrity as well as magnesium – important for energy production to make you feel more awake.

Same with bananas “the favourite fruit among athletes”not only because they contain a decent amount of good carbs but for being the big players in the potassium game.

Potassium is a very important nutrient for avoiding fatigue and muscle cramps. Pretty good if you’ve got a hard day ahead of you.

RECIPE

Serves: 7-8
Total Time: 30 min.

Ingredients:
• 3 mashed bananas
• 135g Oats
• 2 tsp pure vanilla extract
• 20g Grated coconut
• Tbsp of chia seeds
• Tbsp of organic cacao powder
• Cacao nibs to taste
• Pinch of salt

Instructions:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Line a baking pan with parchment paper and set aside.

2. In a small bowl mix mashes bananas and the rest of ingredients until evenly distributed.

3. Roll 2-3 TBS (depending on how large you like your cookies) of mix at a time into balls and place them evenly spaced on your prepared cookie sheets. (alternately, use a small cookie scoop to make your cookies)!

4. Bake in preheated oven for approximately 18-20 minutes. Take them out when they are just BARELY starting to turn brown.

5. Let them sit on the baking pan for 2 minutes before removing to cooling rack.

I hope you enjoy this fun and easy recipe!! I’d love to know what’s your favorite quick breakfast meal. Share with me on the comments below⇣

Photo by: Kayleen Mesa
Follow on Instagram: @dearpeachesandgrace
Photo by: Kayleen Mesa
Follow on Instagram: @dearpeachesandgrace

How To Cleanse and Activate Your Crystals in 5 Steps

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book about crystal healing surrounded by crystals and a buddha vase on a blanket

Hi beautiful souls! with full moon coming up (August 15th) I wanted to share with you steps for cleansing and activating your crystals during this cycle.

Crystals have become very popular over the past couple of years. These beautiful and powerful stones hold the life-giving elements of the Earth and the universe. Harnessing the energy of the Sun, the Moon, and the oceans, they help to create a special connection between us and mother earth.

This is an ancient pagan practice, where a crystal is used to flush out the negative energy and obstacles from a human body. Laying on of stone involves placing crystals on or around the victim in order to remove vetoing energy.

For centuries, crystals and other gems have been desired for their alleged magical healing and mystical powers. This belief continues today among occultists and New Age healers.

Nowadays Crystals are used during holistic practices and alternative medicine such as massage, meditation, and acupuncture. They are put on or around your body to start the healing process. The crystals can act as a channel for healing which can help positive and healing energy flow into the body, causing negative energy to be drawn out. They are known to have been used for prevention of disease and curing of illnesses.

Another great use of healing crystals comes when creating sacred spaces, which will also helps to enhance and support any healing therapies such as meditation, yoga, journaling, and other similar activies. It’s common knowledge that interior design can affect your mood and well-being. The most important aspect of a sacred space is how the energy feels. Every room in your home should feel special and comfortable for your lifestyle and needs, a basic guideline for optimal living and well-being. In particular, your sacred space should serve as the place where you leave behind the chaos of the world, in addition to any negative energy that might be affecting you, and go inward to heal and restore the mind-body-spirit.

In this wonderful world of vibrations, crystal energy helps you on your spiritual journey because it works to hold your intention and remind you of your connection to the Earth. A well thought out intention is the starting point for healing crystals because specific intentions will most likely guide you into your daily thought patterns and will also become part of its energy.

If you’re just beginning to use crystals, a great way to harness their healing power is by using healing stones for manifesting your intentions and what you want to create in your life. 

When choosing your crystals, let your intuition guide you to choose the right healing stones for your spiritual journey. Crystal experts often say that the crystal chooses you instead of the other way around. Take your time, have fun and see what crystals stand out to you. Whether it’s the dazzling colors, sparkles or otherworldly shapes and patterns that draw you in, each crystal has a unique vibrational energy that works to clear blockages and ward off negative energy. It also helps to identify a particular problem or challenge you’re currently facing. 


Finding the right stone is like any practice of wellness. I also like to think of it as a creative and magical experiment. It requires time and patience while you quiet the mind and realign the mind/body balance. Hold the stone in your hand and carefully think of your intention. Notice if you feel sensations such as hot or cold, pulsations, or a sense of peace and tranquility. These are all signs that this particular rock is perfect for your healing needs. Remember- your intuition will be your best friend here!

CLEANSE & ACTIVATE YOUR CRYSTALS IN 5 STEPS

1. WASH THEM WELL.
A simple rinse under the faucet will do here. If you live near the ocean or a stream it’s ideal to wash them there.

2. SET YOUR CRYSTALS OUT.
The ideal time to put them out is just after sunset. A natural surface is best outside. If that isn’t an option put them near a window where they will get direct moonlight. As you set each one down name something you want to let go of. You can name the same thing over and over or pick a different one with each crystal. Don’t name more than 5, it’s too many and will start to lower our vibration. This is a supportive practice that helps to seal in what we are ready to release with this full moon.

3. PULL THEM IN THE NEXT MORNING
It’s nice to give them a little reboot with the sun’s energy, but not for too long. Through sunrise is a great rule of thumb.

4. CHARGE YOUR CRYSTALS WITH INTENTIONS
This is one of my favorite parts of the ritual, it’s even more important than naming what we want to release. Once you have all of your crystals back inside charge them with your intentions. Charging crystals with your energy helps them stay focused. Once they are charged it’s best to not let others handle them (unless you are charging specifically for others or client work) as they will absorb the energy of other people.

You can charge all of your crystals at once by imagining them soaked in healing energy. They can also be charged individually or in groups. It’s really up to you, there is no right or wrong way to charge them, let your intuition be your guide.

Here are some examples of what I am planning for this cycle:

  • Charging Rose Quartz with love to support my relationship.
  • The stones I use with clients will be charged to intensify their healing properties.
  • Smokey Quartz with energy to help me stay grounded during the transition into a new season.

5. CLOSE THE RITUAL
I like to close the cleansing and charging ritual with thank you prayers and white candle. A simple thank you to Mother Earth for the ways she supports our life and a humble bow to the crystals for all of the work that they do. Acknowledging all of the elements that came together to make these healing tools seals in their healing vibrations and reminds us to stay focused on what matters most to our hearts. After giving thanks I burning a little cedar, sage or palo santo to bring in more positive energy and close the ritual.

Allow yourself to be open to exploration. Step into the knowing that magic exists for you no matter what. Our thoughts create vibrations throughout the universe, which makes setting intentions a powerful tool for achieving happiness and well-being. Having a clear purpose provides us with insight into our aspirations, dreams, beliefs and values. It also helps us to focus and live in the present moment instead of being caught in negative thought patterns. Intentions are like magnets. That’s why it’s important to be careful and make sure to choose the appropriate thoughts and desires. Setting an intention is a powerful tool for achieving happiness. Crafting an intention starts by setting goals that align with your values, aspirations, and purpose.

May all your wishes come true!

Footnotes:
https://crystalbenefits.com/crystal-uses
https://www.energymuse.com/
https://crystabelles.bigcartel.com/

Ideas For The Most Effective Job Titles – Namafit learning moments

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The best start to a great job post is writing an effective job title that will get the attention of the right candidates and entice them to apply to your job. If the title gets the viewer to click the job, then having an effective job description is the next important step in finding more great candidates.

Write a job title that clearly states what you are hiring for. It only takes a couple minutes to post a job on Namafit. We suggest a clear separate job post for every type of job your are looking to fill. For example, post “Looking for yoga teachers” and “Hiring front desk staff at fitness center” as separate jobs.

Namafit gets a lot of exposure for your jobs, so we suggest writing clear, specific job titles and descriptions that will make your ideal candidate’s eyes light up! Read on to see some examples of proven job titles and descriptions that have been working!

In analyzing jobs that get the most applications, we have found that job titles that clearly state the job are very effective. A job title like “Boot Camp Instructor” and “Vinyasa Yoga Instructor” get better than average number of applications. And an insider trick to make your job stand out even more is to use a lead-in like “Seeking…” or “Looking for…” at the beginning of the job.

Here are some suggested job titles that work well:

  • Seeking Office Meditation Facilitators
  • Hiring Facilities Manager
  • Looking For A Cycling/Spin Instructor
  • Now Hiring Front Desk Sales Person For Yoga Studio
  • Front Desk Staff Shift Managers Studio Hands
  • Now Hiring Group Fitness Instructors
  • Hiring Yoga Instructors
  • Remote Independent Online Health Coach Needed
  • Looking For Hot Vinyasa Yoga Instructors With Personality Plus
  • Looking For A Yoga Or Pilates Instructor At Midtown
  • Part Time Front Desk Associate Needed
  • Now Hiring Personality Plus Hot Power Vinyasa Teachers
  • Strength And Conditioning Coaches Needed
  • Tuesday Night Boot Camp Teacher
  • Yoga And Mindfulness For Adult Ed Esl Classes
  • Yoga Fitness Instructors Needed
  • Yoga Instructors Needed
  • Looking For Yoga Instructors With Desire To Learn
  • Yoga Spa Looking For Yoga Instructors
  • Yoga Studio Looking For Experienced Passionate Yoga Instructor
  • Yoga Teacher

The bottom line is, be direct, fun and creative. And look at your job post through the eyes of the candidates you want to apply. We are confident that we can help you reach them.

man on cell phone walking by a wall with the word productivity on it

Linking your social media to your Namafit page is a great way to stand out!

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When you create a Namafit account, you get a professional profile page with a unique URL address that you can use to promote yourself! Take charge of the level or privacy you want, and add your instagram, twitter, facebook and website links to your profile to get more exposure, more SEO love, and showcase your dedication. Stand out to employers and the industry!

Instructors, trainers, teachers, professionals aren’t the only ones who can add social links to your page. BUSINESSES can too! Go to https://namafit.com/business/edit to add your social links to your business page and get more exposure for the business you work hard to make successful.

Link your social media to your professional Namafit page
Linking your social media to Namafit is a great way to stand out

If you have a Namafit account already go to http://namafit.com/profile/edit to add your social links to your page.

If you haven’t created your professional profile page yet, you should! Just go to https://namafit.com/signup – it only take a few minutes and will open up new opportunities for you in this industry!

You can also confirm and adjust your account privacy by going to https://namafit.com/settings

Thank you for sharing your gifts with the world…and happy job hunting

How to Use Yoga to Start Your Day

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Every day is a different day. After practicing yoga for over 6 years, one thing that I’ve learned is to have intention in your actions and thoughts. Each new day is an opportunity for us to start with an intention and purpose that will permeate throughout the day. Here are three ways you can use yoga to be more mindful and purposeful in your life.

#1 Visualize Your Day

Start your day with mindfulness and meditation. Before you get out of bed, take a few minutes to visualize how your morning will look. Prior to leaving the home to head to work or to run errands, try to see how you want that to look. Will you need to make coffee? Freshen up in the restroom? Get dressed? What will you wear? Do you have to walk the dog? Vividly think about how you’re going to start to your morning and then begin your day. If it does not line up, that is OK. Try it again the next day until your mind is aligned with your actions. This quick meditation and mindfulness exercise will allow you to move with intention as you go about your day. Feel free to use it throughout the day (i.e. visualizing how your workday will look, and what your preparing for bed process may look like).

#2 Start with Pranayama

Breath is our life source. It’s important to reconnect with breath on a regular basis, either through yoga or meditation. The practice of pranayama allows us to connect to that life source that flows through us whether we want it to or not. A pranayama technique that I love to use is breath counting.

How to Count Your Breath:

  1. Sit in a comfortable seat in a chair or on the ground on blocks or a meditation cushion.
  2. Place your hands on your knees or find dhyana (concentration) mudra.
  3. Close your eyes and take your drishti or focus point inwards.
  4. Take three deep breaths and sigh audibly to exhale them out.
  5. After the last breath, take a pause and then begin to slowly inhale as you count up to 4.
  6. Pause at the top of your inhale and then count down from 4.
  7. Repeat by counting up and then counting down one more time.
  8. On the next two rounds, count up to 6, then to 8, then to 10.
  9. Once you’ve completed your last two rounds of counting up to 10, stay in your seat and breathe normally.

#3 Move Your Body

This last tip is what most people think of yoga, as a way of moving your body. While it is important, the yoga poses, or asanas, or only a fraction of what yoga truly is. Yoga is the connection of mind, body, and the present moment. I recommend doing 8 cat and cows, 3-5 sun salutations, and then a child’s pose (balasana) to start your day. Do this every day and reflect on how it makes your body feel. Listen to it, and modify if you need to.

woman in child's pose doing yoga
Yoga practitioner in child’s pose

Guest Contributor Profile: Alex Tran AKA Schimiggy is a Digital Marketing Strategist, fitness fashion, travel, and food-obsessed raconteuse. She currently resides in Seattle and teaches yoga while writing about her favorite topics.  Schimiggy Reviews is a lifestyle blog where Schimiggy shares her passions and interests with the world!

How To Use Your Namafit Profile Page As Your Professional Webpage URL

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Did you know that when you create your profile on Namafit that you get a professional URL so you can share your page?

That’s right.  You can customize your profile to highlight your skills, expertise and interests, so you will stand out to prospective employers and partners.

To get your Professional URL address just go to your profile page, https://namafit.com/profile and highlight the website address at the top of your browser window. Then click “copy” (command + c in Mac, windows + c in Windows).  You now have a shareable profile URL copied to your clipboard.  Go share it!!!!

Of course, sharing is even better when your profile is complete!

Update your profile

  • Go to https://namafit.com/profile/edit to complete your profile details.
  • Add your profile photo.
  • Update your “About Me” section.
  • Confirm your location city and state.
  • Update your social links.
  • Update your certifications.
  • Add your resume.
  • Update the styles and levels that you teach and practice.

Update your personal preference settings

  • Go to https://namafit.com/settings and select the settings you prefer.
  • You can:
  • Change the distance for job notifications you receive
  • Select who you would like to be able to see your professional profile
  • General Public
  • Only logged in Namafit members
  • Only those businesses you apply
  • Update your password
  • Update your email address
Namafit profile preferences
That’s it- we’ve worked hard to make it easy to make you profile page and keep it up to date. Please email or message us if you have any questions. Happy holidays from the Namafit team.

The Journey Begins. How Namafit Got Started.

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How I Solved My Own Staffing Problems At My New Fitness Studio

handstand

When I opened a yoga, fitness and dance studio in 2010 I was embarking on a journey very new to my family and me. Prior to opening our new studio, I had been a software engineer for over 16 years, a husband and a father of 3 boys. As you can imagine, my wife and I were very busy — on top of being an awesome mother to our boys, she owns and operates a busy local restaurant.

I always knew that I wanted to open a small business close to our home — something that would help contribute to the overall wellbeing of our community. After living in our area for several years, we realized that there was a need for an awesome local dance/fitness studio. We had lamented the fact that there was nowhere in Menlo Park to take good fitness and yoga classes. We also noticed that the dance studios where our boys were taking classes were packed with kids. We have both been active and into athletics our whole lives, and as parents, that segment of our lives had definitely been neglected for years! So, looking back, I guess opening a yoga, fitness and dance studio was a pretty natural thing to do.

Getting the business systems setup, finding a space to rent and getting ready to open was time consuming but all fairly straightforward. I called a contractor to help with the interior build out. They took care of the details. I opened bank accounts. I signed up for MindbodyOnline to handle reservations and payments. Making a schedule of classes was actually pretty difficult because it meant taking into account the demographics in the neighborhood and neighboring cities, figuring out what types of classes were appropriate at which time of day. The initial goal was to offer youth classes, mostly dance, in the afternoons, so factoring in the times that schools let out was important. But in the end, it was all set in place. This was all in motion leading up to an opening date.

Staffing for a new fitness, yoga and dance business

Staffing (hiring professionals who were going to instruct my classes, not to mention represent my business to the public) was something of an unknown. After doing some research online, Craigslist quickly became my go-to resource for posting job ads to find teachers. Being a new business, I had a budget for marketing and advertising, which helped cover the cost of the $75 each job post cost with Craigslist. Everyone knows Craigslist — you write up a job title and description, pay $75 and submit. The job loads into the “fitness/spa/salon” category search results and you wait. At some point for most Craigslist posts, just like anyone else who posts on Craigslist, I received emails from people interested in my open positions. Sometimes I would get an email with a nice paragraph about the person, along with their name, email, phone number and resume attached. Sometimes, I would receive a quick request to be hired, with a name and nothing else. The rest of the responses I saw fell somewhere in between those two extremes.

When I did receive enough information about a person applying, my next step was to google their name and hopefully find out more about their background, where else they teach, how long they’ve been teaching, etc. After several email and phone call chains, followed by onsite interviews, ultimately, I was able to hire enough professionals to fill my staff sufficiently to run thebusiness.

Connections

A big part of running a business that relies on independent contractors for its staff is the maintaining and building of professional connections. I found out very quickly that my day-to-day staffing needs relied heavily on my ability to search my rolodex in an efficient manner for not only “great instructors”, but “great instructors” that could teach the types of yoga/fitness that we were filling classes for. (I don’t actually have a rolodex, as I’m sure you may have surmised, but instead have several email lists that I am constantly curating.)

Basically, this is how my current “networking” efforts have gone:

  1. Post to Craigslist
  1. Email/phone back and forth
  1. Invite potential instructor for an onsite chat
  1. HIRE them for a class
  1. After hearing feedback from those who participated in the class, add the instructor to my list.
  2. Repeat steps 1–5 next time an instructor bails on a class (which happens more often than you’d think)

After going through this process more times than I can count, I started to think that there had to be a better way. After doing a bunch of research, and interviewing a bunch of my instructors and many similar businesses, I came to realize that there wasn’t anything available that suited my needs. As it turns out, the fitness/yoga industry is very word-of-mouth driven when it comes to staffing. Most other studios and gyms follow the same pattern of Craigslist and email lists to fulfill their staffing needs.

Enter Namafit

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been a Software Engineer for years, for startups all over the Silicon Valley. After experiencing the above issues for months in my own business, I decided that enough was enough! I hooked back up with a buddy of mine that I’d worked with for years on other projects and we built namafit.com.

Namafit is a platform that completely solves my fitness instructor staffing problems. I’m able to quickly post opportunities, which are then automatically broadcast to all of Namafit’s extensive database of instructors. Instructors have the ability to create their own profile, which includes information such as their qualifications, styles/levels they teach, and even their resumé. We have been hard at work building a product that will replace the dreaded email list, and will give businesses such as myself a tool to find quality instructors quickly. And it’s a tool to for fitness instructors and trainers to find more work, and more importantly, have more work find them.