Sacred Entrepreneurship

My Three Spiritual Secrets For Starting A Business

 

Beginning a business is a wholly spiritual endeavor. I don’t hear many people talking about this, but it’s true. Some people know from the get-go that they are meant to be an entrepreneur— I wasn’t one of them. To me, starting a business seemed like a complete mystery. For a long time I didn’t even know where to begin. Some days it felt like becoming an entrepreneur would take me away from my spiritual connection, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Unbeknownst to me, starting a business was the most profound spiritual journey I could have signed up for. Over the years, One Willow revolutionized my life from the inside out. I began to see who I really was, and why I was here on this planet. I transitioned from being a closet tree-hugger, to an internationally recognized teacher in the realm of spiritual plant medicine. On a very tangible level, I went from qualifying for food stamps to running a six-figure enterprise with a whole team of people behind the scenes. But the outward success was only a reflection of how rich the inner journey became.

Inevitably, people began to ask me… how the heck did you do it?  I had been through enough valleys to understand how to get to the peaks, so I started offering coaching sessions to help people make their business dreams a reality. Pretty soon my waitlist became so long, however, I had to close my schedule entirely. So today, I want to share my top three spiritual secrets (shhh) for starting a business with you.

 

 

 My Three Spiritual Business Secrets

 

1. A business has its own consciousness, and you need to court it

 

Business isn’t an inert entity that just exists on a piece of paper, and it is not wholly a creation of your consciousness either. A business has its own sentience, soul and energy. One Willow is both me, and entirely more than me. One Willow has an energy field, and an intelligence, all its own. Channeling a business is a kind of relationship and, like all relationships, sometimes it needs to be courted. One of the first things I always tell my clients is to build an altar to your business. Call in this creation like you would invite in a new baby, give it a physical place in your world to land. Altars make the intangible, tangible. Make this offering to the spirit of your business so you can begin to tune into its particular personality. If your business was a human, what would they be like? How would they speak? What would they desire? This is a relationship that might well last a lifetime, so begin this partnership with deep respect and curiosity.
2. Business is a mirror to help you grow

 

People often start businesses because they wish to be of service, but the primary purpose of a business is to help you in your spiritual growth. Your business is a kind of sacred mirror, showing you all your talents, but also illuminating everything that is blocking you from bringing those gifts to the world. Businesses are meant to help us expand our energy and our consciousness, to mirror back to us our own inner processes and bring us to our growth edge. Businesses are truly about the business of becoming ourselves. No matter what is happening (or not happening) in your business, exactly what transpires is important. There is a message here that will help you transform every other aspect of your life, if you can receive it. My favorite practice for embracing the sacred mirror of my business is giving gratitude. Over the years of building my business I would verbally thank One Willow every day. Some days it was hard, particularly when the business was literally taking my last dime to stay open. But every time I did, my heart opened to seeing how the business wasn’t my adversary, but my teacher, who was here to help me see myself more clearly, to unlock my blocks and reveal my life’s purpose.

 

 

 

3. The more you do you, the more successful you will become

In the beginning of my business I made the products I thought people wanted — love potions, sleep aids and anxiety relievers. They were popular, but I still struggled to pay the bills. Eventually I began to feel so burnt out I knew I either had to give it all up, or begin doing what really felt exciting for me. I was able to see, by looking into my business mirror, that I was scared to put new ideas out there because I believed that the “real me” was too poetic, lyrical, philosophical and spiritual to be able to earn a living. Overtime, I faced my fears. I began making vibrational medicine, writing sweeping philosophical blog posts, and offering classes on entirely metaphysical concepts. And my business exploded. I had assumed that there would be no market for me being my full self, but it was me doing me that ultimately made my success possible.

The problem was that for a long time I wasn’t clear on what I actually had to offer. I struggled to see myself from the outside, to put my skills into words or understand what exactly I was “delivering” through my work. Then I started seeing business itself as a spiritual journey … and everything changed. Slowly I got over my block to marketing, I figured out how to talk about what I was doing, I opened the gateways for abundance and developed the kind of relationship with my business that I had been dreaming of.

 

 

All healing is about relationships– whether it’s a relationship to a tincture, a landscape or a teacher. Which is why I created my online course, Business as a Spiritual Journey, to be like a healing academy for your relationship with your business. Because when we approach business as a spiritual journey, we see how our “audience” is actually our soul group, how our blocks are just here to show us our gifts, and how becoming an entrepreneur is an initiation into fulfilling your soul’s blueprint.

The five week program, created to help all my fellow empaths flourish on the path of entrepreneurship, is open for enrollment… I would love to see you there!