Top 10 Tips to Prepare for an Ecstatic Birth:

1. Plan this event like you would plan your wedding, so that every detail serves your
pleasure. You wouldn't choose a catering hall known for lousy food for your reception and just
hope for the best, would you? Choose every detail of the birth with your highest pleasure in mind.
And yes, that includes thinking about what you will wear.

2. Flood yourself with positive birth stories, images, and videos. Consciously reprogram your
cultural concept of birth.

3. Knowledge is power. Enrolling in the most comprehensive childbirth education class you can
find is just the starting point. Educate yourself about every aspect of birth.

4. Begin a desire list for your birth. Write down every birth desire you have, however large or
small. Read and update the list regularly.

5. Be honest with yourself and your partner about your fears. Contemplate how you can
support yourself through each one. Birth counseling can often be a very powerful tool.

6. Do whatever it takes for you to feel healthy, strong, and beautiful. This often includes eating
well, getting appropriate exercise, and enjoying your maternal curves.

7. Connect with your sensuality often. Notice the conditions that turn you on, that enable you to
relax and open. Include as many of these into your birthing environment as possible.

8. Practice listening to your intuition every day. Sit, breathe, relax, and listen.

9. Breathe deeply. All the time. Especially when you are stressed.

10. Gather SUPPORT!! Surround yourself with people who will cheer lead you and enable your
vision during pregnancy and especially in the birthing room. Don't forget to look beyond birth and
make sure that you will be well supported postpartum, so your attention can be on enjoying your
baby.

12 Actions You Can Take To Make Your Customers Feel Ecstatic

As a result of my recent experience in a Lush shop (the company is really called Lush – I’m not trying to get down with the kids!), I thought I would share some tangible actions you can use to make your customers ecstatic!

Read about my recent customer service experience here: Great Customer Service
If you’ve ever looked in to courses or advice about customer service, you’re probably familiar with the theory that underpins great customer retention.

People are always telling us we need to make our clients feel unique, or special, or heard.

The Problem…It’s Just Theory

The problem with this kind of advice is it looks great on paper, and we can nod and agree with every principle, but it’s a bit like eating candy floss.
Great at the time, but it fizzles away in to nothing as soon as it’s finished.
The problem with theories is that we can understand them, but translating them in to tangible actions can be tougher than we may first think.
I know that I need to make my customers feel unique, in theory.

But what does that actually mean, in terms of concrete activities I can do?
Let’s take a look at the top twelve real, actionable ways we can make our customers come back again and again, through great service.
They fall in to three categories:

• making them feel unique

• listening to them

• communicating with them

Let’s delve into each one…

Make them feel unique

OK, here’s that principle again.
To turn it in to an action, we need to understand what feeling unique may be.

For me, it’s about real steps:

1. Send your customer a thank you message when they have been using your services for a set period of time. It’s about remembering who they are, when they joined you, and tracking what they have purchased from you so they know you fully understand them
2. Visit their blog or company web site, and support their business through comments and interaction
3. Be proactive about your customer proposition, offering long-term customers incentives to stay with you such as discounted rates once they have been with you for a year, or a loyalty scheme where regular users get special offers and services which you would not provide for new clients
4. Where possible, use the services of your own customers, supporting by offering them your business, just as they bring you their own.

Listen to them

One of the primary goals for business owners is to make our customers feel as if we understand them and their needs, and can respond to them.

In a tangible way, this means…

1. Remembering their name, even if it means keeping a database of all your contacts, and letting them know that you remember who they are, and what they require from you
2. Hearing exactly what they are saying to you, making notes of what they have said, keeping their mails and revisiting their messages before you get in touch, so every time you speak to a client you know exactly who they are, what they want, and how you can help
3. Being practical. If you know that a specific solution could benefit your customer, put it forward to them even if this means that you can’t charge them as much as if you had delivered their original request
4. Making the effort to sit down before making contact, and considering what they need from you, and then proposing the ideal, tailored solution to meet their needs.

It’s harder than you think to listen, and actually good listening is much more about strong administrative processes than being quiet and taking in what they are saying!

Communicate with them

Staying in regular contact with your customers is much more than dropping them a spammy newsletter once a month.

Strong communication involves:

1. Mailing them directly to give them an update about what you have been doing, calling them by their name, and avoiding corporate-style whitewash correspondence that only serves to frustrate them
2. Communicating with your clients well by calling them up on a schedule, to let them know you are there and asking if they need anything
3. When you deliver a piece of work or a service, call your customer up and get their feedback, and make changes based upon what they say
4. When you meet someone who could benefit from networking with another of your customers, offer to link them both up to help them out. If you’re in your customer’s part of the world, offer to drop in for a coffee and a catch up to do some proper networking. Hold your customers in your mind at all times, and think through how you can take real actions to show that you are thinking of them.

The boomerang effect (i.e. ensuring customers come back time and time again) is simple to achieve, if you build in real activities to a strong schedule. Your customer relationship strategy is just as vital to your ongoing business success as the products you provide and the service you give, so you can up your retention rate by actively applying the principles of service that we all know.

 

What Does Ecstatic Mean?

Ecstatic is the adjective form of the noun "ecstasy." The feeling of being ecstatic or the feeling of extreme joy and bliss is called ecstatic. Here are a couple of examples which justify the word in a sentence:

1. England had an ecstatic win against Australia in the last test match.
2. The feeling of emerging as a victor in spite of so many obstacles is almost ecstatic.

The feeling of ecstasy or ecstatic is also used with reference to spiritualism and sex. An altered state of consciousness caused by spiritual awareness is also known as being ecstatic. The person in such a condition will not feel bound by time and space and will feel transcended into another plane altogether, as he experiences a heightened sense of euphoria. Such a feeling of rapture or extreme delight can also be felt while having sex, especially in the orgasmic stage. People also resort to the illegal drug aptly titled "ecstasy" to experience pleasure and the blissful "ecstatic" feeling, which can even border to hallucinogenic. 

When the Ecstatic Body Grips

When the ecstatic body grips
Its heaven, with little sobbing cries,
And lips are crushed on hot blind lips,
I read strange pity in your eyes.

For that in you which is not mine,
And that in you which I love best,
And that, which my day-thoughts divine
Masterless still, still unpossessed,

Sits in the blue eyes' frightened stare,
A naked lonely-dwelling thing,
A frail thing from its body-lair
Drawn at my body's summoning;

Whispering low, "O unknown man,
Whose hunger on my hunger wrought,
Body shall give what body can,
Shall give you all- save what you sought."

Whispering, "O secret one, forgive,
Forgive and be content though still
Beyond the blood's surrender live
The darkness of the separate will.

"Even if in the veins we know
Body's delirium, body's peace-
Ask not that ghost to ghost shall go,
Essence in essence merge and cease."

But swiftly, as in sudden sleep,
That You in you is veiled or dead;
And the world's shrunken to a heap
Of hot flesh huddled on a bed.

A discourse on the meaning and practice of ecstatic dance.The body has its own wisdom and knowledge of how to move and express itself. From a very early age we begin to experiment with moving around, crawling, then walking, then running and jumping. We become explorers of the world around us and all its wonders. We search out the joys of the world using our bodies, seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching everything in sight. The body becomes the vehicle of our exuberance, our curiosity, our expressions of delight in our discovery of this playground called life.

Also from an early age we are taught how to act, how to move or not move, how to behave. "Please quit jumping around", "Don't touch that", "Stand over here and be still", "can't you please calm down?". Our enthusiasms are restrained, our zest for high activity is tempered, we become over time "domesticated", "refined". Over time we accept these trainings and internalize these restrictions to our movement. We now know how to "behave".

Now, socially acceptable behavior has its place in getting along with others. But if it happens at the cost of losing out on the joys of expressing oneself, then this is something worth addressing. The wisdom of the body is still there waiting to be tapped. But that wisdom is overshadowed by the concepts and ideas we accept as adults. Ideas such as "I can't dance", "I am too uncoordinated", "I will look silly", "I have to look cool", "I am too (fat, skinny, old, young, whatever, etc)". These are just the internalized adult versions of earlier scoldings to "be still".

Ecstatic dance is about letting go of these now self-imposed restrictions. It is a setting aside of the intellect and all it's concepts of how not to move. It is an opening to new ways to express oneself in movement, to explore the world again, to have that passion once more, that love of life that you once had as a child. This dance is not a structured dance that follows a certain form. It is not taught really, but rather invited. It is an invitation to explore different rhythms, patterns and movements. It is an invitation to listen to your own body, which now becomes the teacher. It is an invitation to tap into that internal wisdom of how to express yourself through the body. It is about finding your own dance from within.

There are certain factors that create a safe environment for this inner dancer to emerge. First off, this is not a social dance. It is held in an alcohol and drug free environment. Drugs and alcohol are for a different type of consciousness. This is dance consciousness. Secondly, it is not a place for people to come and observe others dance and make them feel self-conscious. Everyone participates in the dance. We all become co-creators of the energy on the dance floor. Thirdly, the dance floor is to be respected as sacred space. It is a place for moving meditation that can take many forms. It can be deep, introspective inner work or high energy, extroverted dancing alone or with others. Ecstatic Dance is perhaps the oldest spiritual practice on the planet. Fourthly, it is requested that there be no conversation in the dance. You wouldn't chit-chat in a yoga or meditation class. The same goes for this dance. Talking is a distraction to those in deep inner work. Talking brings in the intellect, which we want to leave outside the dance. This dance is the abandonment of the intellect, forming a direct body-spirit connection experience. Hooting, hollering, animal sounds, energetic noises all OK.

It is an invitation to push the envelope, to listen to the body, to tap into the body's own intelligence that already knows how to do outrageous dancing. To break free of personal boundaries. To co-create fantastic energetics on the floor with other dancers. To play again with the wild abandon of a child. To revel in spirit and the joy of life while moving to the sounds of world grooves.