Why do I focus on spiritual practice first, before strategy, when I work with you to integrate the Sacred & Strategic in your body of work?

Reason No. 1:

You are well-versed and well-practiced at strategy—and you are not as well-versed and well-practiced at using spiritual practice for the practicalities of your life and your business. 

You have spent more than 20 years learning and practicing how to think strategically. You know how to look at your metrics and your market. You know how to assess your team and your systems. You have been trained and coached and encouraged to do this—and you’ve been good at it. 

You might have blindspots, but as a skill set, your strategic thinking is well-developed—and likely over-relied upon. 

It couldn’t help but be: we live in a culture that demands it.

Spiritual practice—and sourcing from your relationship with the Sacred—is under-developed in our culture and therefore, most likely undeveloped in you personally, especially if you, like me and my clients, are trained in a traditional profession, and have been praised and rewarded for the strategic and logical parts of yourself and your work. 

Your capacity to source from the Sacred—and to use spiritual practice for the practicalities of your life and your business—needs support, encouragement, and development. 

It gives you access to intelligence, wisdom, and solutions that you don’t otherwise have access to—or of which, you might get a glimpse, but quickly ignore. It can do what you and strategy alone cannot. 

And it is the skill that you haven’t fully developed (how could you?)—and that you doubt (because culturally, we have a long history of making it suspect). 

In my experience, this is true, particularly with regard to your body of work and your business, even if you have a decades long, devoted spiritual practice. 

And it can be all the more maddening, if you do have a long, devoted relationship with spiritual practice, and it is not creating results like you would expect from strategic-decision making, because you are not taught how to use your spiritual practice to create both profound transformation and effective, practical guidance—or what to realistically expect when you do.

Reason No. 2:

Your spiritual practice, when used intentionally, will reveal sound strategy. 

Strategy is not separate from—and set outside of—your spiritual practice. It is woven into the body of knowledge and the guidance that you will receive when you engage in spiritual practice. 

Just like every other kind of wisdom, experience and intelligence—that you, and we collectively, hold. 

When you practice, you access the universal field of potentiality. This is the field from which everything that is manifest arises and to which everything that is manifest returns. And it holds a memory of all that ever was and all that ever will be. 

Śaiva Tantra, which is my adopted tradition of spiritual practice, understands this potentiality and this memory to be held in the Ākāśa (space or ether), which is “a field that records all that has happened in the universe.” 

Quantum physics understands this potentiality and this memory to be held in the zero point field, which is “a vast, inexhaustible energy source” of vibration in the background of what we experience as empty space that emits subatomic waves. These subatomic waves “encode information in the form of energy” and “are constantly creating a record of this activity.” 

The best synthesis of science and spiritual practice—and explanation of the mechanics, magic and practical application of the practice of mantra, which is the primary practice I use in working with clients, is Sound Medicine by Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, and I’ve used some of her words here. A link to Sound Medicine is in the show notes.

When clients ask, “How did you do that?” or “How did you know that?” This is how: We access this universal field of potentiality when we practice and work together—and I focus my awareness to receive information specifically relevant to them at that moment. When we pinpoint a strategy in this way, you can then implement it where and how it’s most effective—and let what is irrelevant drop away. 

Still, if that feels too abstract and distant to be practical, consider that, on a personal level: All of the strategy you need is likely already in you. 

And if there are aspects of it that you need that you cannot draw from your current experience, you will be nudged to seek those out.

Because you’ve already done all that work. You’ve already cultivated and honed that skill set. 

You will not suddenly forget that—or fail to use it—because you’re now engaging in spiritual practice as a process of decision-making. 

No, rather, you will put strategy in its right place—and gain clarity about its best use, rather than simply reach for it as a default in every instance. 

And you will clear the way for your work to arise internally and organically in a way that you can receive and recognize. You will root into what’s true, which will eliminate the should’s and allow you to follow the natural form, timing and rhythm of the work that wants to come through you. Rather than jumping to strategizing first—and by-passing the right form and right timing of your work.

Your spiritual practice, when used intentionally and effectively, will give rise to possibilities that you cannot imagine—and outcomes beyond what you can fathom or create through strategy alone. 

Which is exciting—and what you want. 

Because most strategies are based upon, and intended for, existing structures, systems and models. They are a strategy to position and navigate within those structures, models and systems, not create outside of them. You, and the work that wants to come through you, have reached the limits of those structures, models and systems. They likely do not provide the right process, the right form, or the right support for your work to emerge and evolve—let alone thrive. You need to find a different way, and to find that different way, you need to source from something outside of existing structures, models and systems.  

Spiritual practice allows you to do that—without eliminating sound strategy where it is useful.

Reason No. 3:

You know what the work is that wants to come through you—but something is keeping you from seeing it clearly and developing it fully.

In my experience working with clients, I’ve overwhelmingly witnessed that you know what the work is that wants to come through you. You know how your interests, training, experience and expertise all come together. You know how you most fully show up in it. You know who you want to work with and how you want to work with them. 

Your soul, your work and your business each hold its own divine pattern of unfolding. It knows exactly what it is, what it needs, and where it’s going. And you can sense that—even if you cannot fully see or articulate it right now. 

Something is hiding it from you,or something is keeping you from fully embracing and expressing it. 

Clients have described feeling like a veil is between them and the full expression of their work. They can almost see it. They can almost reach out and touch it. But something that they cannot grasp or name is in the way.

And this, most often, is not something you can identify and resolve through strategy. If you could, you would have. It requires another skill set—a decidedly spiritual skillset of listening and letting go. 

So that the work that wants to come through you can show itself to you, and so that it can ripen. And so that you can grow into the woman who can hold and steward it—by trusting your own wisdom and the coherency of the work above the purported wisdom of existing systems, structures, models and narratives. 

If you are like me and my clients, that kind of letting go is likely the most difficult thing of all.

Because you are highly practiced, and highly comfortable, in the doing. You likely know yourself and your own agency this way. You understand it to be how you get things done—and more significantly, and mistakenly, you understand it to be what gets results.

There is nothing wrong with this. Your mind, your competency, and your willingness to take responsibility and to take action are beautiful, powerful things.

But you are likely uncomfortable in not-doing—in the quiet, still space of seeming nothingness that is necessary to the germative in-between—and that is what seeing the shape of the work that wants to come through you, and committing to it, is requiring of you.

Spiritual practice gets at this. It will reveal the internal coherence and structure of the work that wants to come through you. It will untangle what’s in the way of you seeing and developing it clearly and fully. And it will cultivate your capacity to be in the not-doing that allows you to do this.

Strategy is not going to get you that.

No one tells you this—that spiritual practice garners strategy as well as intuitive guidance and energetic shifts. 

And no one teaches you how to do this—to pull the thread of continuity between spiritual practice and strategy and use each intentionally for its particular strength and purpose.

But it is a skill set that I propose the work that wants to come through you is requiring of you—for its integrity, its depth and its power. 

I’d love to hear how this lands with you.

Join me December 17 for a conversation?

If you’re reading after December 17, you can opt-in to receive the recording immediately.

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.