Episode 1 of the Sacred & Strategic Podcast is live! (I’m so excited!)

This is the culmination of a 3-year transition to an audio-verbal ecosystem that feels like the full and right expression for sharing my work with you and inviting you into conversation around how to integrate the sacred & strategic parts of your work—and untangle the one thing that distracts & derails you from that—at its root.

In Episode 1, I share the why, the what and the how of Sacred & Strategic.

And at 14:50, I invite you to do a short one-syllable mantra practice to ask yourself what the fullest expression of both the sacred & strategic parts of your work feels like.

I’d love to hear what comes through for you.

You will receive Sacred & Strategic here, and it is available in your favorite place to listen to podcasts.

If you are a reader, a text note is below.

Why Sacred & Strategic?

Because you are both sacred & strategic, and your work is both sacred & strategic.

And for far too long, they have been held apart.

You get concrete, practical results for your clients. (You’re skilled. You’re experienced. You’re respected—and you’re excellent at what you do.)

And that is no longer enough. (Honestly, it hasn’t been for a long time.)

You have a deeper aspect to your work—that is how you really want to do what you do.

It’s different from the rest of your profession. (It’s energetic; it’s holistic; it’s revolutionary, even.) And it doesn’t seem to fit (at least not in the ordinary way).

But you can see how your profession needs it.

And how you need it.

You can no longer live with talent (and creativity and depth) wasted. You cannot continue to be disconnected from your own sense of Self.

Your whole life you’ve been identified as a leader, and yet, you cannot get this work, the work you know you are meant to do, out into the world.

Because you cannot figure out how to effectively bring this deeper (sacred) part of your work forward—and integrate it with the strategic, concrete and practical results-oriented part of your work (that already successfully exists).

You have no model for how to bring them together. Not in the same business. Not in the same offering. Not in your profession. Or not at your stage of business.

You’re confused about what that would look like—and how that would work.

You’re afraid that, if you do put this deeper part of your work front & center in what you do, you will no longer be seen and respected for your mastery of your craft.

(And will anyone really pay you for it? Is it even a thing?)

You can do this—the work you really want to do how you really want to do it now—without sacrificing professional respect, personal relationships, or financial stability.

And you will step back into your natural capacity to lead with it.

 

But, right now, it is asking something more of you.

Because you cannot create this kind of new, integrated work in the same old way, using the same old strategies and tactics.

And you know that. You can feel it.

Our existing structures, models and strategies were never built for what you’re creating—and they were never built for you.

Our economy and our culture—and the disciplines, professions, structures, models and strategies they have created—have at their root a fundamental split between: the body and the mind; the sacred and the material.

There is historical evidence of this explicit split in Western culture during Europe’s transition from feudalism to capitalism—peaking in the early 1600s during the Age of Reason, the two-hundred-year persecution of witches, the enslavement and sale of African peoples, and the colonization of the Americas.

The mind was elevated above all else.

The body—reconceived as both mechanical and unruly—was regulated into an ideal for production and profit that had (and has) no relationship with any natural cycle or bodily capacity.

And the Sacred was eradicated.

This split—and value judgment—was reinforced and codified. Until the norms, the values—and the split—were so effectively internalized, perpetuated and reinforced, individually and collectively.

That you (and I) value the left-brain, logical, scientific and strategic parts of yourself and your work and devalue the right-brain, intuitive, creative and sacred parts of yourself and your work—without even thinking about it.

 

But we are both.

I believe your longing—visceral, persistent and unnamed—is to reclaim this fundamental wholeness that was stolen from you—and with it, an entire body of human knowledge and experience.

And to weave back together what you know to be a false divide.

Your work—and the way you’re here to lead—is demanding it of you—for its integrity, its depth and its power.

 

This is not surface level stuff. (You’ve already done all that work, layer after layer.)

This is deep, karmic, soul-level wounding and longing—rooted in the ground of your being.

But it has the power to transform your business, your life, our culture and our economy.

And it is time.

We face existential crises that exceed our comprehension—let alone our capacity for solutions. Our systems are stretched, and our institutions are crumbling. We’re looking for a different way to organize work and life and society itself—and a different understanding of our place in it, the world and the cosmos.

We need this kind of deeply integrated, holistic leadership—and way of being in our professions.

And you are poised (you are called) to lead in this way.

 

What does integrating the sacred and the strategic actually look like?

Because we don’t have a model. (Not really.)

Simply put, it is becoming masterfully adept at both spiritual practice and sound business strategy—and at moving seamlessly between sacred practice and strategic practicalities.

So that you hold both—as a lived reality—for yourself, your work and your clients.

It is also finding the thread that runs through all of your talents, training and experience—and the relationship between them that reveals a unique, coherent and powerful body of work.

Practically, I’ve witnessed that there are at least 8 ways that you can weave the sacred and strategic parts of your work together—without sacrificing financial stability or professional respect.

Most, if not all of the models and examples we see are of two ways to do this: how you make your decisions (from your intuition or your perception of subtle energy, for example), and to a lesser degree, how you create your work (for example, by allowing it to show itself to you or by working according to natural cycles).

In addition to those, we are going to explore what it looks like (and what it shifts) to weave sacred practice and sound strategy all the way through your body of work and your business in the way that’s most natural & potent for you.

 

I’m Rebecca Rama Devi Prien. I am a business advisor, a spiritual teacher, and an attorney with more than 20 years of experience at the leading edge of holistic change in unlikely professions.

My life as a lawyer and my life as a spiritual practitioner have always been inextricably intertwined. By happy (or not-so-happy) accident, I began practicing yoga asana and meditation while in law school.

Six years later, and for nearly 20 years since, I’ve been a practitioner, initiate and lineage holder in a lineage of Śaiva tantra (a source tradition of yoga within the Hindu diaspora).

This has always been my lens.

Over 15 years, I integrated spiritual practice and strategy into every aspect of my law practice to to transform—and inform—who I was in my practice, how my practice was structured, how I showed up and worked with clients—and how I understood, talked about, and engaged with the law itself (as trademarks, copyrights and contracts).

It was not an abstract, conceptual spirituality—detached from the everyday experience of life and business.

Nor did it ignore sound strategy—and internalize every question as a personal spiritual failing.

It related directly to the practicalities, recognized strategy as sacred—and resulted in a powerful clarity, rooted in the truth, that transformed the practicalities of my practice in surprising and miraculous ways.

Now I mentor visionary women to integrate the sacred & the strategic parts of your work in your own unlikely professions—without sacrificing professional respect or financial stability.

My clients include all manner of unlikely professions for spiritual, energetic and intuitive work: physicians, financial advisors, psychoanalysts, architects, advertising executives, academics, attorneys, ordained ministers, and public health professions.

They experience results beyond what they would let themselves imagine, and they find that, far from losing professional respect and financial stability, as they might have feared, they transform their lives and their professions in deeply needed ways—and inspire their colleagues—in the process.

 

What you are doing is extraordinary.

But it is asking more of you. And what it is asked requires a different kind of support and a different kind of practice—both personally and professionally.

That is still rare to find.

I invite you to join me on the Sacred & Strategic podcast for Insight, Experience, Perspective, Practice and Support, and what I hope to be Community and Conversation, about:

• How to integrate the sacred and the strategic parts of your work—without sacrificing financial stability or professional respect—so that you can step into your natural capacity to lead doing the work you know you are here to do; and
• How to untangle the one thing at the root of what distracts & derails you from clearly & consistently doing that—by working with it as a karmic knot.

We will explore these together through the lenses of spiritual practice, specifically that of my adopted tradition of Śaiva tantra, psychology, neurology, the history of our socio-economic system, intellectual property strategy, business model design, and lived experience.

In the course of that, we’ll talk about all the questions, uncertainty, criticism, spaciousness and wonder that come up—and how to navigate, metabolize, and be with them, to glean their wisdom.

I’ll be sharing episodes in three different formats:

• short excerpts from my book, This Again? Untangle the Root of What Distracts & Derails You from Your Life’s Work, and my blog, Sacred & Strategic.
• longer, unscripted episodes that expand on a specific topic and offer a practice; and
• conversations with guests.

You will also learn more about how we can work together to integrate the sacred & the strategic parts of your work and untangle the root of what distracts & derails you from it—in exactly the way that’s right for you.

I am so excited! This feels like the best and fullest expression of my work to date. So, thank you for joining me here and on the podcast. (It’s available wherever you listen to your podcasts.)

For now, I invite you to do a short one-syllable mantra practice with me to ask yourself what has landed for you —and what integrating the sacred & strategic parts of your work might feel like in your body and your being. You can access that practice in the video at 14:50.

I’d love to hear what comes through for you.