Over the past four decades, I’ve collaborated with thousands of clients and students to help them create lives and businesses that they love. Much has changed, in the landscape of our world, during that time. But this truth remains: No matter what circumstances you find yourself in, or what issues you face, the key to creating your heart’s deepest, truest desires is to reconfigure your inner ecology to unite it with your soul. The more skillfully you do this, the more gracefully your outer world takes on the shape of your soul, and harmonizes with the pattern it holds for your life.
This is just as true of your business as it is of your life. When you make this ordering of your inner ecology and the ecology of your business the center of your daily practice, your soul and the Deva of your business together can craft stories that heal, transform, bless, and re-shape your world.
Business is a soul path. At every stage, it calls you to free yourself of whatever binds you -– outworn beliefs, stories about who you are and what you can create, ancestral agreements about the nature of the world and your place in it. Anything that attempts to shrink the vastness of your soul into a story, template or pattern that is –- inevitably — too small for you, must go.
This isn’t easy. When you’ve been immersed in a particular story or world view for much of your life -– especially if your identity is shaped around it -– it can be hard to see that it is just a story. Hard to look beyond it to see that there are an infinite number of other stories you could choose to shape and to live by.
And, not all stories bind you. True stories liberate you. Like true desire, they are the voices of your soul, calling you to a fuller, more creative, more abundant life.
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Today, consider the effects that your stories have on your business. Often, these are stories you’ve shaped out of accumulated past experiences, layered over earlier, childhood beliefs. And, hidden in the life of your business is a treasure-trove of stories that holds a map for its becoming.
If you wish, here are some questions you can explore in your journal:
Draw a timeline of your business, from its inception to now. Mark these occasions and name them, on your timeline. No occasion is too small to celebrate. Draw or sketch an image or symbol, or add photos of these stories, if you wish. Create a story of triumph and celebration.
On your business’s timeline, mark those events, experiences and turning points when your vision and determination, your foresight, courage, perseverance and grit, your wise choices, your wiliness to take risks, your heart and generosity expanded the world of your business. Take some time to acknowledge each one. Embrace and celebrate each of these essence qualities. Celebrate the You who embodies them now and has done the work to plant them firmly in the world of your business.
Mark these down on the timeline of your business too, in the order in which they occurred. Thank them, and bless your past selves, who created and nurtured these stories. Then, release them with love, and erase them from your timeline.
I wish you the miracle of true stories, forgiveness, gratitude, and celebration.