If your heart breaks with your longing and desire to feel actualized. 

To bring forth this work that’s calling—and to lead.

If it breaks with the pain of not being able to figure it the fuck out. (Because that is not like you.)

You are not alone.

Everyone I work with experiences what you’re experiencing. 

And everyone feels alone in it—including me.

For many years, I felt like an exception. 

Strategy seemed to stop working for me. I refined my messaging and my sales process. I shifted my business model, and I developed robust systems for client service delivery. 

But I seemed to have an inverse relationship with strategy and marketing. 

When I’d focus my energy and efforts in one place, clients would come from somewhere completely different—and it would surprise me every time. 

When I’d build and implement systems, cash flow or my team would implode—or both. 

When I went it alone, I would have some kind of health crisis.

I desire-mapped. I took courses on manifesting. I had my akashic records and my astrological chart read—and my pranic field cleared. I fine-tuned my vibrational frequency.  

I tried any number of practices with the intention—and the increasingly bewildered and insistent plea—that they exact the result that I wanted, but they did not. 

Meanwhile, I was 10 years or more into my spiritual practice—and that didn’t seem to work for me either (although it worked in all the other areas of my life). 

My professional peers seemed to grow their work and their businesses through the strategies, processes, and techniques that were gaining me no traction—including from work we’d done together with the same mentors, coaches and guides.

And my clients got much better results than I ever did. 

Coaches I’d hire would tell me that I implemented—and that I was devoted with a purity of intent—like few they’d ever met. 

That I was on point with a rare intensity and consistency. 

But the growth, the visibility and the financial reward that I wanted—that I felt I deserved, damn it, after all that time, with my expertise and my experience, with the precision of my guidance and the miraculous depth and breadth of results my clients experienced—did not materialize in any consistent way. 

Why—why—did none of this work for me? 

No one seemed to know—least of all me. 

(And those who did think they knew, their direction didn’t create any major, sustainable shifts.) 

 

This was an unusual and perplexing (no, a downright maddening, fall to my knees in desperate, pleading confusion) experience for me.

I was an achiever, and I had previously experienced fairly smooth, easy (and arguably exceptional) success. 

I am the daughter of a commercial fisherman and a public elementary school teacher who applied to one college—and it was Princeton. 

(My mother called me her Plan A kid, because I never seemed to need a Plan B.)

I did not doubt that I would be on Law Review in law school. I was offered, with few exceptions, every job I interviewed for in my first 8 years of practicing law—in BigLaw and at the U.S. Courts of Appeal. 

And after being laid off during the Recession in 2009, I changed practice areas and grew my solo law practice to 6-figures in 13 months. 

I had never doubted my ability to learn what I needed to know, implement it—and achieve the result that I wanted. 

It’s the way the world worked for me. Or so I’d thought.

 

My experience at owning my own business—and my pursuit to integrate all of my creative, spiritual and professional self into my body of work—was a complete unwinding of that illusion.

I couldn’t figure out what it was that wasn’t working—or more importantly, why it wasn’t working.

And so, my law practice (and my life) became a practicum—a messy, profound, maddening, and delightful immersion and incubator.

Over 15 years, I used my spiritual practice 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. 

 

I knew—and I didn’t know—how highly unusual this is. 

Until I spoke to a pioneer of integrative law—who likely knew the scope of us, worldwide, who were practicing law holistically—about possibly mentoring me to grow and work with my law practice’s team in rhythm and flow with the Sacred.

She said, “I’d love to work with you. You would be an ideal client, and you would be an advanced client.”

I laughed. “What do you mean, advanced client?” 

“We’d use some fundamentals of the work I do with lawyers, but we’d be finding our way through.” 

“Are you saying that I’d be the first lawyer you will have worked with to do this?”

“Yes.”

It felt like the loneliest day of my professional life. 

And it was intensely clarifying about why perhaps things didn’t work for me the way they seemed to work for other people. 

I had forgotten that I had had this experience of being a class of one—of having a special program or course of study created for me because the parameters of existing ones didn’t meet me where I was—from a very young age. 

I answered questions people didn’t know they asked, turned in assignments teachers didn’t know they gave, had symptoms doctors misdiagnosed. 

This created a profound sense of exceptionality—and a profound lack of place. 

The work I’d felt called to do—the weaving of all of myself into meaningful work—had always felt like an awkward fit for the world. 

But I had only been looking at the landscape of what already existed. 

My work alchemizes—and it calls forth what does not yet exist.

It holds you in calling forth what does not yet exist—and midwives you while you alchemize it into form. 

And that is an entirely different endeavor altogether. 

 

It is a lived alchemy.

And for me, that has meant a decades-long evolution through at least 5 different phases of integrating the disparate parts of myself and my work.

These phases are not hierarchical. They’re not even necessarily linear. But I happened to have experienced them as a process of evolution, and I thought it might be helpful to you to name them. Because so much of what we experience in this process goes unseen and unnamed, and we have few discernable bearings by which to navigate. (It’s kind of like going through menopause. You’re navigating an unknown sea on a starless night.) 

 

The 5 phases of my experience integrating all of my talent, training and experience into a coherent body of work that is both Sacred & Strategic have been: 

1. Compartmentalization 
2. Topic Integration 
3. Presence Integration 
4. Process Integration 
5. Full Integration.

I share examples of each on the podcast here.

This full integration stage solidified for me in 2015-2016. Since then, in continuing to use my spiritual practice to transform and inform both my law practice and my integrative business advisory, I’ve found that there are at least 8 ways to integrate the seemingly disparate parts of yourself and your work into a cogent and powerful whole. 

I call those what-feel-like-opposing-and-inconsistent parts the Sacred & the Strategic, for short-hand, and because it goes to the heart of the split and value-imbalance inherent to our socio-economic system, and therefore, to the longing you feel, but might not be able to name. 

 

This framework for integration is undoubtedly helpful. It can put you at more ease and light something up within you to recognize where you are in relation to your evolving body of work, and how it fits together, especially when you have very few cultural reflections. 

But how you integrate the sacred and the strategic parts of your work is not an intellectual or a strategic decision. It comes from you—and through you—and it requires a shift in your state of being and a shift in your orientation toward your work. 

I recently had a client say, “OMG, it’s clicked! The pieces of the work drop in, and when they’re right, I can feel them in my solar plexus, and I can feel myself move from my solar plexus.”

Yes! That is exactly it. Your solar plexus is where your will meets the will of the Sacred. Your work is revealed to you, and it is alive in you as it moves through you. 

To give some shape to this process, I’ve witnessed that your work will come into form in a cyclical process that allows you to gain and utilize the wisdom of 3 states of awareness and creation—intellectual, experiential and mystical.

Most likely, your intellectual wisdom is well-developed (and wants to take the lead) and your mystical and experiential wisdom are under-developed—or under-utilized—especially when you are in transition. 

 

No one tells you this.

No one tells you that there are numerous (at least 8) different ways to integrate the sacred & the strategic parts of your work. 

No one tells you that there are phases to this evolution—or what those phases are.

No one tells you that it will ask you to utilize at least 3 different types of wisdom—and that you likely have not equally developed all three (and you need to give yourself space and grace and support to do that).

And no one tells you—because they don’t have to, you already know it—that you’ll feel like you’re navigating an unknown sea on a starless night.

So, let’s have that conversation. (Click here. Details below.)

What No One Tells You | December 17 at 3:30 ET

I invite you to join me for a conversation about what (else) no one tells you about:

• Weaving together all of your talent, training and experience into a cogent body of work—and an effective business model;
• Integrating sacred practice and sound business strategy;
• Creating holistic change in traditional professions;
• Stepping into your natural capacity to lead; and
• Untangling the one thing at the root of what distracts and derails you from it.

You will have a chance to share what no one told you (and you wish they had), and I will share from both my own experience and my work with clients.

I will also share practices to navigate the strange, unexpected, tricky and surprising—but universal—things that come up (because they will come up).

We’ll be live on Zoom December 17 at 3:30 ET. Come as you are. Nothing is being sold, and it will be recorded. 

If you’re listening to this Episode of Sacred & Strategic after December 17, you can opt-in to receive the recording immediately.