Are you clearing out the closets to make space and find a new home for that collection of Hardy Boy Mysteries? Or maybe bidding on that Strawberry Shortcake Lunch Box?

Using eBay, you can use those sales or auction time to help non-profits by using their Giving Works initiative.

You can search for items that have been posted that benefit a specific charity, and/or earmark a certain percentage of your sales to be donated to a non-profit. You can also bid on fundraising auctions (currently going: Go whale watching with Hayden Panettiere or Isabel Lucas to benefit the Whaleman Foundation) They also provide a button to use your PayPal account to make a donation directly to one of the charities.

Since 2003, the program has raised $127 million! I only wish eBay would promote the service even more. I’ll be dropping them an email…

This weekend’s challenge involves creating a quieter environment for yourself.

Do you keep a constant “soundtrack” to fill your space with music or talking? iTunes, internet radio, stereo, or the television talk show “keeping you company”? Do you turn them on the minute you wake up and come home? Do you plug in your earphones every time you walk out the door?

There’s no doubt that music can be very helpful at times to pep us up, but as an experiment, try turning it all off. Just for an hour.

How does it feel? Do you feel a little desperate for noise? What scares you about the silence?

Are you more focused on whatever you’re doing? Or, are you more aware of your attention wandering, instead of to the words of a song or the thoughts of a pundit, to thoughts or images of your own? What are those thoughts or images? If they’re fears, try writing them down to find out what it is that you’re trying to avoid thinking about. If they are fantasies, what is it your heart is asking for?

What does your environment sound like? Are there birds chirping, dogs barking? Are there people outside having fun? Do you want to go join them? Or are there people yelling? Can you send them peaceful poz vibes? What electrical sounds are filling your space? Can you unplug some of them, turn down the hum?

Speaking of humming, if you have the urge to provide your own soft soundtrack, go for it! If it’s a song with words, what are those words, or what is the title of the song? I find if a song appears in my head, it may carry a message for me. Is your mind or heart trying to tell you something? Are you allowing yourself some silence in your life to hear it?

Share your experience!

Even if you’re not a student, there’s something about the end of summer that sparks the desire to stock up on pens and papers! (and crayons and Snoopy lunch boxes…)

But wanting to be lighter and greener, we’re all looking for places to shop that have made a commitment to greener items and production. Here’s a few I’ve discovered:

First and foremost, is The Green Office. In addition to offering all kinds of green office supplies, they also provide lots of tips for greening practices for your office, carbon offsetting your business, and finding other green businesses.

And for some cool specialty items:

• Labels – made from 100% recycled materials, using green energy, on recyclable adhesive stickers, delivered via carbon-offset.
• Eco-Envelopes – two-sided envelopes for business reply correspondence. 100% recyclable.
• Wood-free pencils, and Staple-less Stapler!
• Banana Paper notebooks!
• Lamps made from old ink cartridges!
• Business Cards
• Printing Services
• Printer Ink

What other green office products or stores have you come across?

Earlier this month, the mayor of Phoenix declared the city’s third annual Stress Free Day.

Of course, I’d love it if we could be less stressed every day, but it’s great that the city took time to raise awareness of stress as a quality of life issue. It looks like a local health club/spa was the driving force behind the initiative, offering to consult with local businesses about how they could help their employees relax.  Maybe their success will encourage individuals and health businesses in other cities to talk to their elected representatives about raising awareness and providing stress management/stress relief initiatives.

I hope other cities adopt this idea! I’d love to see towns competing to see who has the calmest, healthiest population! Last week, Forbes issued its list of “Most Stressful Cities.” (warning, just reading the article may be stress-inducing!). By inverting the list to ask the question in a more positive way, I can report for you of America’s largest 40 cities, using Forbes’ methodology, here are:

The 10 Least Stressed Out Large Cities

1. Austin/Round Rock, TX
2. San Antonio, TX
3. Nashville/Davidson/Murfreesboro/Franklin, TN
4. Dallas-Fort Worth/Arlington, TX
5. Kansas City, MO-KS
6. Denver/Aurora, CO
7. Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Newport News, VA-NC
8. Houston/Sugar Land/Baytown, TX
9. Jacksonville, FL
10. Columbus, OH

Wow, Texas with 4 out of 10! I lived in Houston for a year, and must admit it was a pleasure to ride my bike year-round. And they do know how to go swimming and BBQ. Phoenix, if you’re wondering, is 14th.

And I’m heading to Kansas City this weekend, so I’ll be sure to investigate their low-stress ways.

What, to you, makes a city and its citizens less stressful? How’s your city doing?

1. Summer’s almost over! Before you know it, it’ll be time for sweaters.
2. You checked your work email over the weekend.
3. It’s been cloudy, so your Vitamin D intake is clearly insufficient. This needs rectifying!
4. You never charged for that night you worked late last March.
5. You’ve only worn that new red bathing suit once. It deserves another trip out of the drawer!

If there’s no lake or ocean near you, or driving there is going to be more stressful than fun, feel free to substitute a day at the park!

Why else do you deserve a day at the beach/park?

Just in time for Be Softer’s opening days, the Body Shop has launched a campaign that gives you softer hands while giving you a chance to help others.

The campaign, called Soft Hands Kind Heart, benefits ECPAT International, a global consortium of organizations whose goal is to put an end to child prostitution and porn.

You can of course instead make a donation directly to ECPAT.

And you can join the facebook group to spread the word.

Every Friday, I’ll be offering up something fun and/or courageous for us all to try over the weekend. Be sure to comment to let us know how it went!

This weekend’s challenge: smile at strangers.

Depending what size city/town you live in, this may seem like a radical idea. I remember my sister telling me once on the New York subway not to smile because people would either think I was crazy, or a gullible, easy-target tourist!

Smiling has been shown to improve our health and attractiveness, and to improve our own mood.

Here’s how you do it:

I live in a decent-sized prairie town where people are pretty friendly, so I’ll up the challenge by going to the downtown district where we have our share of suits rushing by on Important Business.

Things to investigate:

- Is it contagious? Do people smile back? Does age or clothes style affect the return rate?
- Does it feel good just to do it, even if people don’t respond?
- If people don’t smile back, do you feel judged somehow?

Maybe another weekend we’ll try something radical like saying “good morning” to our fellow world-dwellers…

(Continued from Part I)

Whoa. “Work Softer.” What would that look like? And what if I don’t want to be working at everything all the time? How about just Being? Be Softer. Enjoy a Softer Life. Yes please. Yum.

Almost immediately though, I felt guilty. (Ah Guilt, the charming companion to The Badger*). Who was I to live a softer life? Life is hard. “Everyone knows that.” And if I decided to have a softer life, what about all the people in the world who truly do have hard lives? And what about the planet? Wouldn’t having a soft life mean being totally reckless and greedy and disregarding environmental impact? That’s not what I meant, that’s not what I was after. Could I create a concept of Being Softer that went beyond myself?

I hope so. That’s my experiment here. To find a way to be Softer with myself (gentler), Softer to others (kinder), and Softer on the planet (greener). In short, doing my part to create a softer world, where everyone can experience a softer life.

Interested? Let’s try it together. See what happens. See if, as the coked-up inner Badger warns us, the world crumbles, nothing gets done, we’re taken advantage of, and we end up on the street. Or, as I believe, we end up way less stressed out — calmer, happier, healthier, more peaceful, more content, having more fun, more in touch with the world and universe — and able to pass along all those poz vibes to others.

I’ll be offering techniques, thoughts (my own and others’), resources, suggestions, experiments to try, and opportunities to share your own experiences and findings. I look forward to playing and seeking softness with you!

* Martha Beck calls this our prehistoric “Lizard Brain” sending out constant messages of fear. Julia Cameron calls it our Inner Critic. Some religions call it Illusion.

One day, not so long ago, I was burned out from working on a movie, and trying to recover by lying down on a couch to read some mindless fiction. But I kept hearing this voice saying, “What are you doing on the couch? You should be looking for your next gig! You should be revising your resume, you should be out networking, you should be cleaning the house, you should be figuring out how to make more money…” Perhaps you’ve heard this voice? It’s not very restful.

I was talking to a friend about how frustrated I was that my energy was sapped, when I needed to get going on future projects and ambitions and achievements, and she asked gently, “Is this working for you?”

I stopped, mind officially blown. What kind of question was that? I was On My Way, on a Career Path, heading to Success, checking off a list of Achievements.

I breathed for a moment. And thought. Or rather checked in with my gut instinct, which is much more likely to bring me the truth.

No, I realized, “This” was not working for me. “This” being a lifestyle of multi-tasking, hyper productivity, constantly striving to be Better, to do More, to have More, to achieve More. In fact, “this” was exhausting the heck out of me, draining me mentally, physically and emotionally. I was not, in short, having fun.

But what else was there? I wondered.

I asked myself, “What is the opposite of Work Harder?” Certainly not “Work Smarter,” which is just another form of pressure: figuring out what “smart” is and deciding whether what I’m doing now is “smarter” than what I was doing before. No, being “smarter” or “more productive” is still a voice in my head constantly badgering: asking, yelling, judging whether I’m being Smart Enough, Fast Enough, Tough Enough or Productive Enough.

So that left the true opposite of Harder: “Softer.”

On to Part II

I’m so glad you made it to this new site!

Some things we’ll be talking about here:

• Tips for being Gentle with yourself
• Ideas for being Kinder to people you know, and even those you don’t
• Ways to Live Lightly on the Earth
• Very cool people who are helping make the world a softer place.
• New ways of approaching work, play, health, life…
• How creativity and living softer are inter-linked.
• Challenges to living softer in today’s world
• Fun things to try
• Tips for stress management and stress relief
• Tips for simplifying your life and decisions
• Your thoughts, ideas, inspiration!

Please join me in the experiment, and join in the conversation!