Do We Meditate to Relieve Stress or to Get Closer to Our Divinity?

At harbour.today, Natalie Nzeyimana and her team are helping people build holistic resilience. On this episode, she and Chad talk about building the app at the beginning of the pandemic when she witnessed herself and others feeling like they were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored.

Harbour is a space for people to anchor themselves, find clarity, and set sail. The community offers one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool.

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Transcript:

CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And today, I'm joined by the founder of Harbour, Natalie Nzeyimana. So, Natalie, thanks for joining me.

NATALIE: Thanks for having me on.

CHAD: So tell me a little bit about what Harbour is.

NATALIE: Sure. Harbour is a space for people to anchor self, find clarity, and set sail. We offer one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool. Harbour was built at the beginning of the pandemic when I witnessed within myself, and the people I knew who I'd worked with, friends, family, just a lot of us felt like we were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored. And so, it began as a course to think about the ways we could use holistic strategies to anchor ourselves and set sail. And from then, from November 2020 to now, it's become a product.

CHAD: You started in November. And I know we first met in London a while ago. You were teaching yourself to code working on an education product if I remember right. And we got together at Google Space there and paired for a little bit. Did you code Harbour yourself?

NATALIE: It feels like another lifetime.

CHAD: [laughs]

NATALIE: I think life before the pandemic and life after the pandemic; there’s a real line there. I've done quite a bit of the coding myself. However, I've also used a lot of no-code solutions to create MVPs. They've been amazing at helping me scale, helping me test out ideas incredibly quickly.

And so one of the interesting things about juggling doing client work, and then also building the back end, and building the module, and then building the design work, and thinking about content juggling all of these different pieces, is that equation of do I invest time in HTML, or do I invest time in machine learning that's going to help me scale? And making all of those intricate decisions has been really, really interesting because, of course, I want to make everything myself. But these no-code solutions have enabled me to test hypotheses so much faster so that I can save time in the long run.

CHAD: Well, tell us a little bit more about what the product is today and what you went through to get to this point.

NATALIE: Sure. So initially, I just posted on LinkedIn to see who would want to join the course. I had a really simple Squarespace page, and then that evolved into a Typeform which I would use with clients to help them track progress and checking in with their chakras every day. And so, the way that Harbour works is that we do an energy review based on the seven in-body chakras.

And so, for anyone who might be unfamiliar with this terminology, the chakras are...well, there are different schools of thought on this. They are a system for either focusing during meditation depending on where you sit in terms of your feelings towards energy bodies. They are a subtle body energy system of themselves. And what I find incredibly helpful for those chakras is that they help people map their energy in a way that I haven't found anything else does effectively.

So starting from the root chakra, which is the base of your spine, you can ask yourself, am I feeling safe? Am I feeling grounded? Am I feeling as though my material needs are met?

Traveling up towards your reproductive area, you've got the sacral chakra which governs your sense of feeling as though you can desire the things that you desire in the world, feeling as though you are sensual. You're able to experience pleasure. You're able to be creative and playful.

And then up to the solar plexus, which is around your navel area, governs the sense of personal power, empowerment, will, feeling as though you're able to go after your goals with chutzpah and energy.

And then moving into the heart chakra, which governs this idea of do I feel as though I'm open to receiving and giving love freely?

And the throat, do I feel as though I'm an open conduit for the truth of who I am? Do I feel as though I'm able to express myself fully in the world?

And then into the third eye, which governs your intuition. Do I feel as though I'm able to trust my intuitive leads and to move with grace and ease, trusting and able to go with the flow?

And then finally, we have the crown chakra, which governs do I feel open to receiving divine wisdom? Do I feel as though I'm in this world on my own and there's nothing but pure materiality? Or do I feel open to receiving what some people might call God or Allah or the Tao? Whatever your orientation is, do I feel open towards receiving that kind of wisdom?

What's really beautiful about the chakras is that they've been used by ancient Chinese, ancient Egyptians, Tibetans, Sikhs, multiple traditions, and indigenous systems. And so there's kind of this lovely thread of people around the world thinking about how energy moves through our minds, bodies, and spirits. But that's quite a lot. So we just ask seven questions every day.

CHAD: So I have to admit I was not...and my first exposure to this is this conversation. So is this something that you have been aware of and practicing prior to working on Harbour, or is it something that you found which then led you to the creation?

NATALIE: Definitely the latter, the latter. So I went through a pretty gnarly, dark night of the soul and just had this huge existential crisis of wondering what am I here to do? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? I don't know if other people might resonate with this, but kind of feeling that you make these huge or not so huge career goals, and then you reach them, and you still feel like something's missing. And in my quest to understand what that missing piece might be, I came across chakras, and I found it incredibly helpful.

I think people who do yoga might be aware of this because they often come up to yoga. Physical movement is often a way of realigning and balancing the chakras. So there are specific movements or specific asanas that you can do to balance out your root chakra or balance out your Sacral Chakra, which is great because it's kind of like all of these different hacks you can do to bring your mind, body, and spirit back in line. And that's why I think I loved it because when I encountered a lot of other systems or other approaches, it just all felt a bit ephemeral and like I couldn't grasp it. But there was something about chakras that really spoke to the budding engineer within me because I was like, wait, you can just hack yourself into alignment? This is great.

[chuckles]

CHAD: So this is something you do daily.

NATALIE: Well, something I try to do daily. [chuckles]

CHAD: Okay. I meant, is this something one does daily? [chuckles]

NATALIE: Yeah. Ideally, yes. Because it's like anything else that we do, if you want to maintain a certain level of well-being or perhaps a certain level of fluency, let's say, for example, in a language whether that's a programming language or the spoken language, you need to practice it every day.

And so, with chakras and aligning one's mind, body, and spirit, it feels as though the stakes are slightly higher when we're in the middle of a pandemic, and there's so much uncertainty, and all of our lives have kind of been exposed to so much change. But yes, daily is optimal. Daily is, at least at Harbour, the bare minimum.

What are some things that you do every day to balance your mind, body, and spirit? You may be aligning your chakras without quite realizing that you are.

CHAD: Yeah. So I run every day. And I've often described that as that's my meditation. So I find that that really does wonders for reducing my overall stress. I do it in the morning before starting my day. And so, I think it really sets the foundation on which the rest of the day is built for me. And it wasn't until I made the commitment to do it every day. And now I run long distance enough where I need to take a rest day once a week. But when I made the commitment to do it every day, it really did change my relationship with running.

NATALIE: That's so interesting. I was thinking about Kazuo Ishiguro's what I think about when I'm running or something along those lines. He's written this great book. And I know several people who run and have spoken of its incredible meditative qualities. And I think that's a wonderful way of connecting with yourself or creating space to connect with yourself.

I also wanted to touch upon something that I know that we tend to move towards or perhaps even a dichotomy: do we meditate to relieve stress, or do we meditate to get closer to our divinity? And so one of the things at Harbour that we try to do is we try to help folks shift from meditating to relieve stress to meditating to connect with one's divinity, and that way, the stress doesn't become as prominent a factor for which meditation is there to alleviate.

CHAD: What do you mean by divinity in this case?

NATALIE: Yeah, great question. Very controversial. [laughs] I mean, it's 2021, and the least cool thing you could possibly do in an engineering environment is talk about God and the divine. I think there is a really interesting choice point we're at as a collective where there is an increased awareness of consciousness. So there's a lot of language in at least the tech community, from my experience, whether you've got things like Burning Man or just a lot of products and offerings out there, which are there to raise your consciousness.

One of the really tricky things about raising your consciousness...and in the chakra system, we do that through something that's called a kundalini awakening, which is where your consciousness does raise from the root chakra all the way to the crown. As your consciousness raises through the chakras, coming from the Indian tradition, what happens is your life force, your consciousness moves through your chakras, and each chakra it touches upon triggers a mini awakening.

So, for example, as your life force is moving through your root chakra, anything that may have happened in your childhood, anytime that you may have experienced any aspect of material instability, let's say you lost your job or you had a partnership fall apart, or any time where you felt like your world completely crumbled, that will likely be triggered when you're going through that mini awakening in that root chakra.

I mentioned divinity because it feels as though there are two paths we can go down. We can either go down the path of I am raising my consciousness. I am the master of my own destiny. I know what I am here to do in life, and I'm in control of my own awakening. Or we can go down another path which is far trickier, which is sort of saying, "At every point in every day, I choose to surrender to the wisdom that is far beyond me. And I'm going to trust the signals and the science that I receive that they are aligned with my highest good."

One of these paths is more egoic, and the other one is more surrendered. That's not to say that we don't need an ego. But the ego can get into really tricky territory when you're doing this kind of alignment and awakening work, and it can really do a lot of harm. And I don't say that through judgment. I say that because I've been through the wringer with a lot of ego deaths.

And so, one of the safest ways to mitigate that risk of the ego taking over is to surrender to something that is far more wise than you. Perhaps you don't resonate with the idea that there is only one creator, and that's fine. But perhaps just from a logical point of view, it does seem to make more sense to surrender to the fact that there's something that knows more than I do at any moment.

CHAD: So this is some really big stuff.

NATALIE: Oh yeah.

CHAD: Before we get much further into it, I think for listeners who want to learn more or are interested in what they're hearing and want to give it a try, where do they do that? Where do they find Harbour? And what is it going to look like?

NATALIE: Sure. So you can follow us at harbour.today online on our website also on Instagram. And I'd love to invite your listeners to try out our 30-day trial, where if you complete 30 days of your chakra daily check-in, you'll receive access to our platform with activities, reading prompts, and also different course materials for free for a whole year. And I know I'm probably giving this away to a lot of people because all the engineers I know are very disciplined, [laughs] and they'll do this 30-day streak like it's a GitHub streak.

CHAD: [laughs]

NATALIE: So I'm shooting myself in the foot a little bit. But I'm really keen to offer folks who are asking these questions who are thinking about what am I here to do? Is there more? How do I engage with literature that could help me ask these questions more deeply within myself? And the daily check-in and the learning platform is a really simple way to do that.

CHAD: Great. That's great. I hope folks check it out. So, in addition to the daily check-in, you just gave some hints on what is actually on the platform. There are reading prompts and those sorts of things. Is there more than that as well available?

NATALIE: Definitely. So we are launching a monthly course on October 6th, and then the next one will be in January when we come back from the break called Organic Cycles. And the purpose of this course is to help people who are thinking about launching something. So you may have a side project that you're thinking about launching or perhaps a hobby that you feel like you want to take up, or maybe you even want to become an entrepreneur full time. But you're a little bit overwhelmed by what might be involved by that.

And so at Harbour, we're real big believers in cyclic, iterative, sustainable growth. And so, we use the moon cycle for our sprints. We use it for measuring our tasks. And in Organic Cycles, you will learn about the moon. You'll follow the Moon Phases. And let's say, for example, you want to start a new business selling socks. [laughs] On the new moon on October the sixth, you will join us, and you will tell us all about your sock business. And we'll listen, and we'll make a plan as other people in the cosmic plan.

In the first quarter, we'll start thinking a little bit about why do you love socks so much? Where does that come from? And what are the small steps we can make together to help you grow your sock business within this moon cycle? Which is, of course, 28 days. On the full moon, we'll celebrate all the progress that you've made with your sock business. And together, we'll figure out the next steps. In the last quarter, we'll think about hmm, what were the experiments making the sock business so far that worked really well? What are the ones that didn't? Which ones would you like to take into the next cycle? And on the next new moon, we'll start all over again.

And so it's very similar to an agile workflow, except you're learning about the moon. And the reason why I believe that's important is because a lot of our day-to-day lives are just so focused on abstract entities and not necessarily the natural world. And so a lot of the prompts in the daily review for Harbour are getting outside, all sorts of different things that reconnect you to nature as a way of rewilding you.

So yeah, I'd really love for folks to come on board. If you have any experience with agile, even if you don't and you're just curious about the moon, and want to find out a little bit more about the stars and anything natural, and meet other people who are curious about energy and ideation and how to create cycles which feel more organic, we'd love to have you along.

CHAD: I really like the sound of this in that it's a structure to anything. A group environment where you're helping each other is great. Layering on the information about the moon and everything adds an additional element of interest to it. I'm just a big believer in being intentional about what we do in our businesses and in our lives. So any structure that can help people be intentional about what they do, I think is going to help people and help them be more successful than if they just don't have a plan and aren't intentional, aren't consciously thinking about what they want to achieve, and what they want for themselves. And helping people do that, I think, is great.

NATALIE: Definitely. And I definitely have been on both sides of that coin, either having too much structure or no structure at all. And I think there's something really beautiful about naming things in ways that feel soft and ways that feel different to people so that they can access that idea and be playful with it and be creative. Because I know that for a lot of people who we work with, post-burnout, folks who are incredibly structured. The Harbour client is a recovering Type A like me who has probably been an overachiever at school and has probably been incredibly structured in their lives but didn't really know how to let go and didn't really know how to create fluidity and flow in their life.

And so one of our tag lines is between discipline and surrender and a devotion to flow. And flow is made possible through that playfulness, and through that structure, and through those rituals, and through that surrender, which is really fun. And it's always really, really fun to see people connect the dots and see, oh, it's quite interesting. Like on full moons, I do have a lot more energy. Or on the new moons, I do feel a little bit more restful, and giving people prompts to add self-care and add meditation to their existing structures.

CHAD: So this might be an overly practical question, but I'm curious how you manage time zones.

NATALIE: [laughs] With naps.

[laughter]

CHAD: Okay. Fair enough.

NATALIE: No, really, I do. I have naps. And I really love work...as you know, I've been working with folks in the U.S. for the last ten years. And I really enjoy it because I think it feels like transporting to a different environment. So, yeah, just a nap, and then I wake up, and I'm in a different country. It's great.

CHAD: [laughs] So it's almost like you've actually traveled then.

NATALIE: Exactly. Exactly.

CHAD: Hopefully, a little less jetlag.

NATALIE: Yeah, it's really great. What about in your work? I know that you're one of the most organized and structured people I've ever met. But sometimes, when I'm in Notion, I'm like, what would Chad do? [chuckles] But how do you find the balance between order and structure and allowing yourself the space to find flow and surrender even as a leader, even when you're building a product?

CHAD: Well, thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it. Let me preface by saying I think that nothing ever stays the same. And so what I do today and what's working for me today is probably pretty different than three years ago because our teams are in different places, and the people I work with are different, and I'm in a different place.

So the thing that's working for me now is putting times blocked off on my calendar where I want to either...it's a regularly scheduled time. And I have one on Thursday; it's from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. It's just blocked off, and it just says, "Focus time." And each week, then I decide in advance what I'm going to be doing during that focus time. And it might be exploring something new. It might be working on something specific. And then, when I need to accomplish something else, making sure that I block off the time on the calendar. And so that's working for me now. And it's not what I used to do. I used to be much more freeform. Nowadays, if I don't block off the time, I lose it.

Previously, I could maintain a lot of free time on my calendar and use that as the time I was doing things. And as we grew and as I was working with people more across all of thoughtbot, across many different time zones, I needed to be much more conscious about what my scheduled time actually looked like and make sure that I'm scheduling time to work on things more freeform.

NATALIE: Yeah, definitely. That's so helpful. And I like the idea of time blocking. I've been trying to do a little bit more of that. What's interesting, too, is as Harbour grows and the product grows, and thinking about scaling and trying to anticipate things before they happen, even though you can't anticipate everything, one of the exercises I've been thinking about is what would it feel like to have a team of this many people and meditate on that idea and see if it feels right? And do I necessarily need to have a team that looks like X or a team that looks like Y? And trying to meditate into what that experience would be before making the decision. And I'm wondering if, through your experience having run this global company and having scaled it over more than a decade, what are some of the things that you've done to pre-pave and to support the sustainable scaling of the business?

CHAD: I think thinking things through in advance is very important. And I don't say the next thing I'm about to say because it's not important because I think that it is very important, and I certainly do it. But I've also come to grips over the years with the idea that no matter how much we plan, it's not going to go like we plan. And so there's this interesting balance between planning too much and reacting to what's happening.

And I'll come back to intentionality. And the way that I talked about it at thoughtbot is letting fulfillment be our North Star. So we shouldn't be doing things just because we think they'll be good business decisions or because we think they're the right thing to do for some arbitrary reason. We should be driven by what we want to be doing in our work and what kind of company we want to be, and being fulfilled in our work.

And when we're faced with a decision to make about who we are, or what we do, or how we're going to approach this, letting it be driven by fulfillment is very powerful. Because it means that likely what everyone wants from their work is not so different from one another, especially when we curate a team of people that want to work together for our working lives what might be. It's probably not so different from each other.

So that's also very powerful because it means that I don't need to be the one to make all of the decisions. Other people can make those decisions around who we are and what we'll do, and which direction will head in. And they'll very likely be what will be fulfilling to the rest of the team as well. And so it sort of democratizes that decision-making in a way which is more resilient and then can be more flexible. As our best-laid plans start to go awry, we're making decisions based on fulfillment. And I think that allows us to be resilient.

NATALIE: Yeah, that's so helpful.

CHAD: Because so much of what we've tried, particularly when we intentionally try to grow, so many of the decisions that have made thoughtbot successful we weren't making them for business reasons, we were making them because --

NATALIE: They felt right.

CHAD: They felt right. We were the first consulting company in the world to switch to Ruby on Rails. We didn't make that decision because we thought Rails was going to be popular. We made it because, as developers and designers, we were more fulfilled using this new thing, Rails, than using PHP or Java. And, in fact, if we had been focused on what we thought would be the successful business thing, we might never have chosen that because it can feel very risky because you're choosing something entirely unknown.

So the opposite example is we've tried very hard to grow over the years non-organically geographically. So someone is moving to this area, or we are going to hire someone in this area. And we're going to grow into this area. And it's not driven necessarily by fulfillment. And in a lot of those cases, it's been very difficult, or it's outright not been successful. And so, being able to react to those situations and adjust has been critical for our long-term success.

Another word I use often is grit. And grit, for me, means we fail a bunch but we stay at it because we are driven by...what's driving that is fulfillment. So even if we really believe in it, even if we've failed in execution for business reasons or something like that, we tend to stick with it over the long term and just try a different way.

NATALIE: Yeah, I hear that. There is so much grit that's required to sustain something over a long period of time. And it feels like quite an incremental grit as opposed to huge pushes of energy that we might witness in different business models, for example, venture capital. And having been in the whirlwind of the VC world a little bit and now building what I hope is a more sustainable model, the grit is very moment to moment. It's continuous. Each task, each decision, it's a soft resilience that kind of grows over time as opposed to having to wield huge amounts of chutzpah to get through this investment cycle. Do you know what I mean?

CHAD: I do, and I think that has a flip side as well, which I try to be conscious of but don't always do a good job with. I tend not to project too far; that’s one side. And then the reverse is also true, which I tend not to celebrate successes enough. I tend not to reflect on the past too much because I'm on to the next incremental improvement pretty quickly. That has benefits because when you have a down day, tomorrow is a new day. It's a brand new day. But that has downsides too, which is when you have a great day, [laughs] you're on to the next thing the next day as well, at least for me. I move on very quickly. And like I said, I think that has its benefits, and it has its downsides.

NATALIE: What are your rituals for celebrating both personally and professionally? How do you celebrate yourself and the ways that you've grown? And how do you celebrate the business that you've grown with others?

CHAD: Just being honest, I probably have not...I do not have rituals. And I think this is where having good partners, or other members of my team has been helpful because knowing that this will be my tendency, having other people backing me up to recognize the successes or to call me on when I’m moving on too quickly or something like that has been helpful.

NATALIE: Yeah, definitely.

CHAD: Are you working on Harbour solo right now, or are you working with others?

NATALIE: Sure. Sometimes I work with a really wonderful ayurvedic practitioner called Sriram, who was an engineer for 15 years before he became an ayurvedic practitioner. So completely similar to you in that thought about going about and finding a co-founder or partnering with someone. And then I just had this really lovely chat with someone on Lunchclub. And we ended up talking about chakras for an hour and also coding. And I was like, this is my dream. [laughs] I get to talk about chakras, and I get to talk about product. This is great. And so, I work with Sriram sometimes on client work. Normally, the split is that he takes approximately a third of the client sessions, but we work on the one-to-one coaching.

And so, I'm your accountability coach. And we're hiring more now, which is really exciting. And I'll do the weekly reviews with clients, and then Sriram will put together the ayurvedic program for the client. So that's always really great fun. And I'm also working with a wonderful designer based in San Francisco called Christina. And yeah, so the three of us...Sriram has his own practice, and Christina has her own agency. But there's a lot of collaborative work that's happening there.

And I'm currently onboarding more coaches, which is exciting and very necessary because I came to a choice point, and I said, do I want to study chakras and become qualified? And I realized I didn't. I wanted to talk to all the people who knew about chakras and who were qualified, and so that's been a lovely experience onboarding them, and onboarding therapists, and onboarding other personal development coaches who are going to be able to serve clients as we scale.

CHAD: Nice. You mentioned Lunchclub many times in the story of Harbour on the website. I have never used Lunchclub. But I heard of it before. And if folks haven't heard of it, what's the pitch for Lunchclub?

[chuckles]

NATALIE: It's LinkedIn as you'd want it to be.

[laughter]

CHAD: Oh, that's great. That's great.

NATALIE: I think Lunchclub gets rid of all of the bravado and all of the stuff on LinkedIn because I think a lot of us do really struggle with self-promotion online. But at the same time, we want to connect with people. And we want to have real conversations that hopefully lead to more conversations or more opportunities for both parties.

And when I started on Lunchclub about a year and a half ago, it was just an incredible way to connect with people around the world. I'd just moved into a flat. I was living on my own in the middle of the pandemic and in the middle of the lockdown building product. And I thought, I really need to chat to people because I really enjoy doing that.

And through 45-minute conversations, you get matched by their little magical AI, and you connect with people who might be related to the interests that you have. And you can build streaks. And the more streaks you build, the more points you get. And the more points you get, the more you can choose who you connect with based on geography and business development goals, et cetera. Well, even if you do choose I want to meet an investor or I want to meet a Biz Dev specialist, this isn't really a sales call or an investment pitch. It's just I want to increase the likelihood that the person I meet will be aligned with where I'm trying to get on my journey.

CHAD: Well, the pandemic has been a really difficult time for everybody, parents, and of which I count myself in that. In particular, seeing it across thoughtbot, obviously, a trend is the people who live alone had an especially challenging time during the strictest of the lockdowns that were happening. And it was challenging. We saw a lot of people struggling. And because we were all remote, you're remote all day working. You don't necessarily want to be reaching out to people remotely, just that energy there. And I think that's maybe where Harbour comes in is solving that energy problem that I think many of us are feeling now.

NATALIE: Definitely. I think what happened over the last year and a half, two years, has created a tectonic shift, but I think also a portal because it's forced us to reckon with ourselves in ways that perhaps we had been ignoring, in ways that we didn't know we needed to, in ways that we've been forced to. And it can be really scary. And even as an adult, that's weird. It's weird to feel that scared as an adult. It's weird to feel that displaced as an adult. It's weird to feel so unmoored. It's weird to feel like you're starting from scratch again, not necessarily in terms of your career or what you post on LinkedIn about who you are, but inside that, you really are starting from scratch: Who am I without access to my friends? Who am I without access to family members? Who am I without X? Who am I without Y?

And so, the pandemic kind of energetically takes everything away, and so we can see ourselves more clearly. And that can be really strange because we haven't had the opportunity to do that in the past. And for many folks, often, we don't engage with mental health or well-being until something goes wrong. And we don't really engage with these ideas until we feel we're at a breaking point. And so the pandemic being the biggest breaking point we've had as a collective, at least in the Western world, we are forced to do that reckoning.

And so, of course, it's not just a loneliness pandemic; it's not just a burnout pandemic. I really do think it's an existential pandemic because people are wondering, or at least I am, and I know others who are, and I think others who are listening might be: Who am I? What am I here to do? What's my destiny? Why am I here? What's next? How do I make sense of all of the things that have happened in my life so far? And because there's no noise and no distraction or no busyness much as there was before the pandemic, you really are just there with yourself reckoning with those questions.

CHAD: Well, Natalie, I'm happy to see that someone emerged on the other side of this with a new product.

NATALIE: [laughs]

CHAD: And I wish you the best.

NATALIE: Thank you. Thank you very much.

CHAD: Again, if folks want to sign up or check it out more or just follow along with you, where are all the places that they can do that?

NATALIE: Sure. I would love for folks to connect on Instagram, harbour.today. You can also sign up to our newsletter. We have a daily email that comes out with questions from our community. So folks might ask things along the lines of what I've been describing, and we'll respond with some chakra guidance, some ancient philosophy that might be helpful, and also some practical tools, things that you can do like walking barefoot in your local park. Or some breathing exercises that might help you find balance within, or some yoga can really help you hack your chakras back into alignment, or some scripture that may help you reconnect with your divinity.

CHAD: Wonderful. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. And we are emerging into this new season with full transcripts of every show as well. So you can find those on the website. And it will be included in the show notes, so they appear in your podcast player as well. I'm excited. It's something that we have been talking about doing for a while, but the time and expense of it traditionally was prohibitive. But we've made it happen for this new season in no small thanks to our new editor and producer, Mandy Moore.

So if you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and edited by Mandy Moore.

Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

Special Guest: Natalie Nzeyimana.

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