Growing up in India, poverty, hunger, disease, death, inequity and suffering were visible everywhere. They were in the air you breathe, unconcealed by wealth or privilege. And they lived alongside beauty, love, kindness and celebration. The both-and of human existence.

This is a culture in which the belief in karma often yields a shrugging fatalism in response to life’s vagaries, or a prayerful surrender to the seemingly immutable dictates of fate. Both stances are manipulated by powerful elites in their pursuit of more – wealth, power, privilege, dominance – the usual horsemen.

Karma is a description of a natural law – the law of cause and effect, which states simply that actions have consequences. Intentional actions, which wield more power than unintentional ones, yield greater consequences.

Karma is not justice or retribution; it isn’t a moral force but an organic process of cumulative effects that flow from consistent, consequential actions. We live within organic patterns of continual unfolding, which have their own internal logic and order, and karma is a description of one aspect of that logic, of that order.

In other words, karma is not only personal — it doesn’t pertain just to a particular, individual life. Each of us is an ecology rather than a singular self. And we live within nested ecologies of interdependent being. We are shaped by these ecologies, and we contribute to them through our actions, choices, intentions, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours.

In this sense, we participate in many different kinds of karma. Individual karma is not neatly siloed, nor is it consequentially separate from the karma of a family, society, culture, gender or humanity itself.

Karma, in this collective sense, is a path created by millions of beings walking across the same trackless wilderness along the same trajectory for a long, long time.

Cultural thought-forms, beliefs, and archetypes all make grooves in human consciousness. And we participate in those grooves, because we are part of collective consciousness. We are born into it, we swim in it like fish in the sea, and too often, we remain oblivious to its effects on us. It takes conscious effort to see people, systems, events and things as they are, rather than through the scrim of our individual and collective history.

So, for example, the karma that led to the massacre of Jews celebrating the first night of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach last December emerged from a complex weave of tangled patterns. Beliefs about tribal loyalty and retribution, tribal justice. Beliefs that the good of one group requires the destruction of another. Beliefs that violence is an expression of righteous rage, an eye for an eye, vengeance above humanity. Beliefs that there is one right answer, one right God, one right anything at all —that everything outside of that charmed circle is the Other that must be obliterated to ensure the purity and survival of the One.

All of these thought-forms create karmic eddies, karmic patterns. We contribute to these through our individual consciousness, as well as through the ways in which we live our lives, the choices we make, the people we elect to govern us, the values and policies we support, and a million other variables that make up the ecology of the world in which we live.

Wholeness has a way of asserting itself, regardless of the embers that fly from the fires of fragmentation.

Those who were murdered at Bondi Beach did not bring their deaths upon themselves because it was their karma to do so. That’s a child’s version of tit for tat. The men, women and children who died in Hiroshima in 1945, or the millions who are killed in wars, or who die of poverty, hunger, disease and malnutrition every day haven’t brought their deaths upon themselves either.

The essential question I’m sitting with is this: How am I, how are we, to live today, knowing that we shape the world even as it shapes us? Knowing, too, that we are fractals of the Sacred, that we are wholeness too — that we participate in, and are co-creators with the Great Mystery.

What can you and I do now, today, to carve a different path for ourselves, our communities, and our world? How do we discern and transform the karmic patterns that shape us, and bring to life new ones that contribute to wholeness? How can we as a community make pathways of love and equality, connection, compassion and understanding, mercy, safety, shelter and kindness for everyone?

These are pathways we make by walking. Each choice we make, each action we take, each quality of soul we embody, becomes our evolving selves, becomes our world. We see collective karma in action today in Minneapolis, as a community comes together to protect those who are most vulnerable and to unite against a deadly tyrant.

The questions I’m sitting with cannot be answered intellectually – or not by intellect alone. Rather, they call us to refine our inner world, to seat ourselves in inner stability, so we can take these essential questions into our bodies, into our hearts, into the choices we face day to day. They invite us to live with perplexity, to make peace with the fact that we are stumbling, fumbling beings, shaped by forces we strive to understand so we can make liberatory choices to transform our own and our collective karma into sources of peace and blessing.

We are not alone in this endeavour – we are the Sacred incarnate, and we are held by the Sacred in all life. In our own communities, with our families, in our workplaces, in our civic life, we are the active agents of collective karma and the tracks along which it evolves or devolves.

So, again, the question: What does this mean for those of us who seek to be sources of liberation and agents of divine order in the midst of an increasingly fractious, violent, chaotic world?

For me, at this stage of my life, the call is to slow way down to the pace of presence. To choose simplicity, so I can attend to the currents in which I participate, the ones that move in and through me, and in and through our world, the ones that become our shared reality. It means consciously tending to habits, routines, that scaffold my soul’s purposes, that harmonize my everyday choices with my vision for the world I want to contribute to creating for the next seven or fourteen or twenty-one generations of beings who share this earth.

It means cherishing and tending to my relationships with beloveds who are working, collectively, towards a world of wholeness, peace, and love. As a daily practice, it means discerning and meeting my own fragmentation with kindness and curiosity, crafting playful, creative ways to restore it to its rightful place in the heart of wholeness.

For you, at this stage of your life, the call may be to engage in direct social or political activism, or make art in the face of tyranny, or tend to your elders and neighbours, or something else entirely. There is no one right response to the needs of a bleeding world. Each one of us is essential to the well-being of the whole. At every stage of life, our responsibility is this: to gauge, honestly, the measure of our resources, to understand and honour the limits of our capacity, and to strategically, and devotedly, apply our gifts to the task at hand.

Choices. Actions. Consequences.

Karma: Friend of truth, companion of the real, the path we make by walking.

I first wrote about the tsunami of 2004 fifteen years ago, but that story was not done with me, nor I with it. Slippery, shape-shifting, it keeps evolving, as all living beings do. This is my attempt to understand, more deeply, the nature of Story, and how it functions to make our world.

The stories we are living now can feel overwhelming; a daily onslaught of chaos and suffering. The Deva of Story reminds us that we are the hands and feet of the Sacred, making the world’s story. What we do matters.

*

This is a story about Story. And a tsunami. And wholeness. And how these hold each other, how they weave into the world’s story.

For most of my life, I’ve been in a profoundly intimate relationship with language, in love with Story. I read constantly, lose and find myself in the immersive alchemy of stories that breathe a freer air.

And I write to enter the house of wholeness, to explore its secrets, to discover the stories that live in the shelter of its walls.

Some days, I wriggle in through a half-opened window. Or climb a nearby tree, crawl out on a limb, and fall in head-first through a hole in the roof. Writing, for me, is curiosity and adventure. And sometimes transgression, breaking and entering.

When I first sat down to write today, I felt that familiar urge to cross the sunny courtyard of everyday; to grope my way through the overgrown gardens surrounding the house of wholeness; to find and push open its cracked and creaking front door. There, in a hallway filled with quivering shafts of dusty light and musty shadows, stories breathe quietly. I hear them before I see them. Fragments. Memory; imagination; will-o’-the-wisps rising from the floorboards. A fractal weave, fascia of the world.

December 2004. I was visiting my sister in Bombay. The day after Christmas, while we were still asleep, a tsunami roared across the Indian Ocean destroying everything in its path.

Why this story? Why now, more than two decades later?

No matter. This is the story that brushes against me today. I follow it down a long hallway, up several, increasingly narrow staircases to the upper reaches of the house of wholeness. The dust makes me sneeze; I scribble frantically, trying to keep up with the story. Each sentence reveals a sliver -– a gesture; a heel lifting off a splintery wooden floor. A glimpse of bright hair; hollow cheek. Thrum of distant laughter. Whiff of sandalwood.

What I understand now, all these years after the tsunami washed away thousands of lives, is this: The tsunami was an event, a violent, tragic event that took place primarily over the course of several hours on Boxing Day, 2004.

But the story of this tsunami began long before, seeded in the extractive rapaciousness of colonial imperia, followed by catastrophic climate change triggered through unfettered global capitalism.

The story unfolded over weeks, months, years; a gradual revelation that only emerged as my heart expanded and crumpled, broke and bloomed, becoming year by year tender enough to meet the story whole and unafraid. Becoming, through the scouring mercy of everyday life, through choice and action, creative collaboration and surrender to the necessities of wholeness, soft enough, spacious enough, to discern this story’s true lineaments; to understand something of its place in the community of stories that make up the body of our world.

That morning, I had just come out of the shower and was towel-drying my hair in the guestroom at my sister P’s home in Bombay. My scalp tingled in the flow of cold air from the juddering air-conditioner. P flung open the door and blurted: “There was a terrible earthquake in Indonesia. A tsunami drowned hundreds of towns and villages. In South India too. No-one knows how many people died. It’s all over the news. I’m going to phone my friends in the Maldives to see if they’re okay.”

Turning to go, she stumbled and steadied herself against the doorframe before rushing out.

Later that evening P’s friends, Tanny and Nilu, came over for dinner. Tanny was the admiral in charge of naval rescue operations for South India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

All evening, while the rest of us picked at our food, and talked, and worried about what was happening out there in the tsunami-ravaged countries that ringed the Indian Ocean, Tanny was on his cell phone. Organizing relief supplies. Deploying rescue ships. Fielding phone calls from frantic parents.

Cabinet ministers, diplomats, billionaire businessmen — those who knew Tanny well enough to have his cell phone number — called and demanded that the navy send out ships to collect their children and bring them home. These young men and women had been vacationing at beach resorts which may or may not have vanished under the sea.

Over the clink of silverware on dinner plates, we heard Tanny explain, over and over, that the navy was needed elsewhere; that the young people would be rescued by plane and helicopter; that he would call the parents back as soon as he had any news. His voice was soft and deep, coaxing, reassuring.

Hours later he dropped into his seat at the dinner table, exhausted. His dinner, congealed on its plate, remained uneaten. Wrinkled eggplant slices. Grains of rice stiff and bristling. Wilted romaine lettuce.

Later still, that night, on the TV screen, the same few images played over and over. Great swells of bruise-coloured sea. Bits of timber and unidentifiable flotsam bobbing on the waves. People running, crying. Frantic men and women looking for family members.

And the death toll, on a banner that scrolled across the bottom of the screen. 2,500. 12,000. 45,000.

I didn’t sleep that night. Or for many nights after. My body knew what my mind refused to comprehend. Every one of those deaths lived in the twanging of my nerves, in muscles and ligaments rigid as driftwood.

The Tuesday after Boxing Day, I had lunch with my older sister, Nivi, and my 90-year-old aunt, at a Chinese restaurant in South Bombay. Nivi looked worriedly at her watch. “I have to get home by two o’clock,” she said. “I have to change for a funeral at three.” She sighed. “If it were just a one- or two-person funeral, I could wear what I’m wearing now. But it’s a five-person funeral so I must change into a funeral sari.”

“Yes,” my aunt said. “Nivi’s poor neighbour! He lost most of his family. His brother and sister-in-law, one of their twin boys, his mother and sister, all drowned in the tsunami. They brought the bodies home from Sri Lanka this morning. The other boy is still in hospital in a coma.”

I went into the Ladies’ Room, which reeked of eye-watering disinfectant. No tears, but I retched up a mouthful of bile and washed my face. This was closer to home; but still not close enough to break through the glacial firn that had crept over my heart.

On the plane home from Hong Kong to Vancouver on New Year’s Eve, an entire section of the South China Morning Post was devoted to the tsunami – one page per country. The death toll had risen to 160,000. More photos and stories. Interviews with survivors.

I tried to sleep on the plane, but my mind remained watchful while my heart pounded painfully in my chest. I wondered if I was having a heart attack.

And then, at last, I was home. Exhausted, wired, tremulous, I hugged my 17-year-old son. So tightly, for so long, that he finally kissed me on the top of my head and said, “It’s okay, mum; I’m here.”

Days later, a wild, January snowstorm slammed the west coast. The wind howled, juddered the windowpanes, blew loose shingles off the roof. The power went out. And stayed out for the next fourteen hours. The house grew bitterly cold.

Sick with the flu, I huddled under my down quilt. I couldn’t feel my nose or face. My ears burned. Maybe trepanning would relieve the surging pressure behind my eyes!

I phoned my son at his dad’s house. Just to hear his voice. To reassure myself that he was still there, still okay. He was patient with me. We talked for a while, hung up the phone.

Then, finally, tears. Snotty rivulets slithering down my upper lip; my heart a heaving sea.

I cried for the souls wandering, bewildered, in the post-mortem realms, unprepared for the sudden, violent truncation of their lives, not knowing where they were, how they got there, or what would become of them in this alien terrain. I cried for the ones left behind, those who survived, cold, hungry, homeless, bereft. Terrified. For parents who didn’t know whether their children were still alive. For our fragile, fragile lives. For this frangible Earth, our home.

The next morning, with the power back on, the house warm again, I showered, dressed, and got to work, joining the assembly of Devas and other beings whose focus is healing and restoration from catastrophic events in times of collective unravelling. We’d worked together for several decades, by then – there was a process in place for events such as these.

As always, once immersed in work, I felt calm, clear-headed, ready to do whatever was needed. My most urgent task was to accompany those who had just died: reassuring them; letting them know where they were and what had happened to them; helping them release the traumatic imprints of their catastrophic deaths; helping those who were ready, to complete karmic cycles from the lives they had left behind; linking them with allies who would walk with them through the post-mortem realms.

It was the most human of tasks, accompanying the newly dead, and deeply humbling. Even among the shocked throng, there were those who naturally turned to comfort their neighbours. Among them were human and more-than-human beings, animals, birds, sea creatures, plant life, entire landscapes destroyed by the raging sea.

Once the newly dead were safely in the care of their companions, I joined the Devas of the Elements, Devas of healing and completion, Devas of the countries that had suffered the worst of the tsunami’s depredations: Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, the Maldives, Malaysia, the Seychelles, and many others.

Together, we tended to the land and seas in and around each of these regions, to release shock, fear, trauma, death energy and more. The field in which we gathered included physical and non-physical beings. The Devas, architects of form who hold the blueprints for all life in their care, brought love and power, and the precise patterns with which they restore order in places of chaos and devastation. Physical beings, including local fisherfolk and villagers, indigenous elders, eco-activists, ceremony holders, NGOs and disaster relief organizers like the Red Cross, laboured to do the same on the ground.

Like most collective projects, this one remained ongoing; we participated in it for a decade or more after the tsunami had subsided. The work required responding creatively, courageously, to the evolving needs of the region and its ecosystems. Love in action.

I am inexpressibly grateful to have been part of this endeavour, and others like it. And I’m reminded yet again that we each have skills we can contribute, resources and care we can offer according to our capacity, no matter how dire or overwhelming the situation. These gatherings, which happen whenever and wherever disaster strikes, are collective enterprises of healing, solidarity, and restoration. They bring together the best of human ingenuity and Devic power in service to the work of community repair.

As I enter this particular story, it enters me viscerally, so that the body of Story, its essence, pattern and form, its structure and function, mingle in the matrix of my cells.

Working together as a community, we experience the power of cohesive, collective action, which brings to life a healing story for this region -- one that is in harmony with the soul of the world, and the pattern it holds for this particular area of our miraculous planet.

The story that emerges from our efforts doesn’t gloss over the destruction that has taken place; it traces it back to its origins, and renders the forces of entropy inert through clear intention, and generative, purposeful, unified action on behalf of an evolutionary vision of what this region’s future will be.

Our world is burning; for decades now, we have been setting fire to our only home. We have poisoned the Earth with chemicals, choked our seas with plastics and oil spills. We have extracted and exploited that which was given to us to love, to cherish, preserve, and protect. We have broken the compact we made when we arrived here, one species among a million others: to live in peace and harmony with all beings; to offer our gifts for the benefit of the whole; to cherish the gift of life, all life, as the presence of the Sacred.

The gasping oceans, whales starving for lack of food in waters too acidic to support that which nourishes them, pelicans choking on microplastics, dying fish — these live in the house of wholeness too. Whatever happens to them happens to all of us. Each species decimated, each song and genome and culture obliterated, is an irrevocable loss. Those losses live in our cells, their molecules swim in our bloodstreams, their silenced heartbeats score deep crevasses in the world’s Story.

We live the destruction we have wrought.

That beautiful sea and coastline, black as a bruise. Those magnificent birds, built for air and flight, trapped by the gravity of oil on their wings and plastic in their bellies. I’ve cried, and raged, and mourned their ravaging.

But each bead of blood in my heart knows wholeness too. I cannot gather up the pain of the world and hold it in my belly. It cannot be healed there — it can only damage that inner shoreline, bring death to that living sea. I am responsible for keeping my inner world healthy and whole. The quality of my presence — the peace or conflict in my heart — is my offering.

It’s an exquisitely delicate relationship, this response of my heart to the need of the world. Because the moment I forget that the Sacred is in the world as well as in me, my little self sinks under the impossible weight of a million tsunami-ravaged lives.

Then I am no longer part of this generative gathering, no longer a source of blessing and radiance, of healing and love. Instead, I stagger around blindly, stunned, bruised and bleeding. A casualty of violence, adding to the fear, chaos and confusion around me.

So, I pace myself. Assess my capacity honestly and serve in the ways I still can. At age 76, facing increasingly complex health challenges, I no longer have the stamina to contribute in the ways I have for the past sixty years. My intention remains clear -- to do what I can when I can; to be, in the simplest way, a source of kindness, support, and nurturance. And in my everyday communion with the Sacred, to work with the realm of the unconditioned, to shape and amplify its immense creative power through collaborative practices with the Devas.

These days, in despair and in gratitude, my prayer remains the same: May we love, cherish, tend and protect our beautiful Earth and all beings who live here. May we love and nurture the Sacred in ourselves and in our world. May we serve wholeness with glad and grateful hearts. May we be sources of love, peace, justice, provision, creative joy, and abundant blessing.

The story I’ve been trailing through the house of wholeness leads me to a sun-scooped rooftop terrace. Here, she stops and turns to face me. Blinking in the sudden light, at first, I see only her silhouette. Gradually, she comes into focus. Beautiful, ragged, her hair a cloud around a face seamed by sun, wind, sorrow, laughter. The set of her mouth is a twist of iron. In the depths of her eyes, in her frayed fingertips, all the stories that have ever been, all the stories yet to be, are alive and whispering.

A slanting, late-afternoon light quivers along treetops and bushes, gilds the glossy black feathers of a raven lifting off from a heaving branch; his grunk-croak scores the afternoon. Crickets percuss in the dilapidated gardens far below.

It’s been long neglected, this house that births the world’s stories, that shelters us throughout our lives with such exquisite tenderness. It’s been ignored, shunned, dismissed, its presence deliberately obscured by human arrogance, human greed; by vision too pinched and transactional to comprehend the breathtaking generosity of the Sacred in the heart of our world.

The house of wholeness offers hospitality to its desecrators too. We live within its sheltering grace, whether we revere or defile it.

Here, on a rooftop parapet in the house of wholeness, Lady Tsunami and I lean against each other, co-conspirators catching the last rays of the setting sun.

Live it today.

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul #AdventuresInCreativeConsciousness

One of the great delights of post-entrepreneurial life is that I can now spend entire days reading, if I so choose, which makes my book-loving heart intensely happy! Books have been my life-long companions -- beloved, mind-expanding, heart-opening friends who invite me into their worlds and share their bounty with boundless generosity.

Reading is joy, avocation, necessary as breath, a devotional habit cultivated since childhood. I was a girl enchanted by words and the worlds they conjured. I read constantly, everywhere — in bed, in each nook of our house, on the bus to and from school; at recess, meals, family gatherings; at parties; in the sheltering limbs of climbing trees; weaving my way through the crowded streets of Bombay with my nose in a book, oblivious to the cacophony of honking horns and ambling cows all around me.

That habit has never left me. Now, at age 75, I am more discerning in what I choose to read. But I choose with my heart, and my nose, following my curiosity into alleyways and ocean depths, exploring the pebble in my shoe and the far reaches of the universe.

Reading, for me, is a way of being in conversation with questing minds grappling with issues that are singularly important to me, of significance for all of us who are alive at this time in our collective story. Such conversations enlarge my perspective, synthesize new awareness, open new possibilities for ways in which we might contribute to a world that serves all life in becoming fully and exuberantly itself.

As in any good relationship, I read books with close and open-hearted attention, willing to be transformed by what they reveal. I ask questions to help me understand the nature of the book, the intentions of its creator, what it stands for, what it wants for its own life and the life of our world.

Here are some questions that bubble up when I’m reading:

• How does this book and the world it presents contribute to a deeper, more nuanced, refined, contextual understanding of what I know, and what I don’t yet know?

• Does it show me where my received notions are fossilized or simply out of date? Does it upend certainty and transform stagnation into curiosity and a desire to explore further? How does it change my mind, my heart? How does it engage my senses?

• Does it offer a portal into experiences and worlds which I know little about, which enrich my understanding of its world? Does it offer access to greater wholeness, interdependence, relationship, love, truth, the wisdom of the natural world, or multidimensional reality, among other gifts?

• What supports its theses, how robust is its research, what is the quality of its citations, how sound are its conclusions? Does it offer information or describe experiences that I can translate into creative action? Can I apply what I learn here to my own life and creative practice, however tangentially? Is it testable, can I craft ways to experiment with its principles to see how they might function in my world?

• Does its central thesis align with my values, and serve my soul’s purposes, and the purposes of my incarnation? Does it inspire, provoke, interrogate, expand, illuminate, or blow apart my understanding to positive effect? Does it bring me into more intimate relationship with the soul of the world?

• Does it speak to the questions that are foremost in my heart right now? Does it provide context for one or more of the urgent issues facing our world? Does it inspire actions I can take to address these issues directly and locally?

I imagine you have your own set of questions that you ask yourself when you’re reading, or learning in some other way.

In the spirit of sharing, here's a wholly idiosyncratic and wildly abbreviated offering of a list of non-fiction books that live on the shelves of my personal library.

These are books that have opened my eyes to the wonders and fractures of the world around me, and to the possibilities of creative transformation available through playful imagination, purposeful intent, generativity, generosity, and heart.

This book list is by no means comprehensive. I’ve chosen a brief collection of titles within each genre, and the genres themselves emerged through a contemplative process of attunement as I sat with the question: Which books might serve us, now, today, in developing a richer, fuller, more meaningful relationship with our world?

For those of you are deeply immersed in inner-world practices, as well as the energetics of transformation and collaborative co-creation, this book list offers contextual breadth to balance the terrain you traverse daily — a zooming out to take in the broader landscape in which we live and work.

Our souls want to experience, create, and serve. We work to weave wholeness in ourselves and to nurture it in all life. So, what can I offer you, an intelligent, deeply caring, creative person who wants to explore, reflect upon, and craft a way of living that is responsive and responsible, nourishing and nourished, in a world that often seems inimical to your soul’s purposes?

The selections in this book list reflect both my current preoccupations and curiosities and those that have been with me for most of my life. They are also one of several creative ways to develop a mature understanding of how we, as a species, arrived at this present moment; where we’re headed; the evolving forces that shape us and all life on this Earth; and what we need to do to restore health and well-being to our world.

There are dozens of other areas of enquiry that belong here. Since I cannot include all of them, I trust you will use this abbreviated list as a departure point, from which to explore whatever speaks to you.

I’ve selected a variety of voices in each genre. Most of the books listed here sprawl across the margins of genre, which are arbitrary at best, and dissolve in the face of reality.

So, with those caveats, wander through these stacks and let your curiosity and felt sense guide you to those books that might be significant for you now. At other times in your life, other areas of enquiry, other books, will call to you. I trust you’ll answer that call in whatever ways your heart guides you.

Like everything else, this is an organic and evolving list. Add to it your own areas of interest, research, and influences. Include books from your own collections, or ones you want to read. Create a resource library that is uniquely yours, and continue to curate and update it as you go.

May this collection inspire you to embrace your own questing, curious, adventurous nature wherever it leads you.

Click here to download the non-fiction book list.

Love,

Hiro

From the Deva of the United States, for whom this election is simply another aspect of the country's ongoing evolution:

There is a thick vine of grievance, entitlement, fear and aggression that winds around the tree of democracy in the US, threatening to choke the life out of it. Since it is a vine, it's essentially a parasite that feeds on the tree. Despite its smaller size relative to the tree, it can suck the life-force out of it until the tree dies.

But, there is another possibility.

The vine cannot be negotiated with, persuaded not to kill its host, or otherwise rendered ineffective. The rot at its heart will eventually cause it to wither, blacken and fall away, although whether it will kill the tree first remains to be seen.

So, what do those of us who stand for freedom and justice for all beings do now?

For my friends in the US, this question is complicated by the fact that many of you have family and friends whom you love, who have voted for that deadly vine. For you, the potential consequences of this election are dire, and marked by loss no matter who ends up in the White House.

We are not powerless. Democracy is still the tree. Nourish the soil in which it is rooted. Water it with love and care; feed it with the light of courage, hope, and acts that uphold the dignity of all beings. Begin close in, with your inner selves, with your family, your community. Find the places where social justice, care and equity are most needed and offer your gifts in whatever ways you can.

For me, today, this looks like a forensic examination and tender befriending of the places within me where vines of resentment, avoidance and attachment are strangling life, choking off vision, right action, power, sovereignty. And then, with loving purpose, uprooting them to tend to the tree that is life.

Today’s adventure: Imagine. Then, decide.

Decide: Today, you’ll dance with your desires. Fast and slo-o-w, bend and twist, slide that corner, glide downhill.

Wherever your desires lead, you’ll follow.

You know them, your desires, mysterious though they sometimes seem.

Desires that explode across your heart-sky like meteor showers, trailing rivers of light. Desires that linger at the corners of your vision, shy, as all wild creatures are shy.

Desires that live beneath your ribs, subtle ache, longing — blurry shape, barely there. Feel them now, their rounded edges and sturdy bones. Their gravid weight. Their soft and hard, contract, release, yield, deflect. Assert. Warm, shiver, blaze.

Stories tangled in their hair, salt-scented, roosting. Stories that become your tomorrows, the tomorrows of your world. The world you’re building together, your desires and you. The world that’s building you.

Wrapped in your arms, your desires sing remembrance: You are home, beloved you! You belong here — yes, right here, with us, and we, with you! Breath and limbs and hollows syncopated to this beat, this drumbeat our heartbeat the thrum-beat of our world.

You are essential to the whole. Elemental. Joy and sorrow, pulse and glow, weave your light in the net of the world.

Your desires are elemental too — entirely themselves. They aren’t seeking approval; they’re not pounding on the gates of Common Sense, begging to be let in.

They are loyal only to your soul, to the wild soul of the world. They sing, in whatever language you can hear, of what is most ardently alive.

There are no trivial desires. Shallow waters are fed by deep, underground springs.

Every true desire is an invitation, a generous invitation from your soul to join the dance of your own becoming. True desires shape a greater wholeness.

What keeps elbowing you off your carefully plotted path? What startles your dreams? Nudges, whispers, cajoles. Beguiles. Bewilders? Insists?

What do you sense that makes no sense, that’s true as water, faithful as gravity?

What magnetic pull do you evade or avoid? What feels too frivolous, too impossible, too dangerous to dream of, too elusive or expensive to pursue?

What pulls you from the life you know, to the life that awaits you?

Pause a moment, beloved you.

Breathe.

Tune into the Sacred that is the earth and sky of this, your desire; that is the river and the riverbed of you. Feel the pulse of your desire, systole, diastole, in your throat — your love for it; it’s love for you.

Feel it, a current in the tides of desire from which all life is born. Feel it vast and wild, intimate and friendly.

Just for today, lower your sword, bury it in the earth behind you. Lay down your shield, your shield of logic, your shield of reason.

Reach out, enfold your desire in your arms, skin to skin — your yearning bodies, your humming hearts.

Feel the warm breath of love and union settle between you.

You’re choosing this adventure. You’re choosing love, and trust, play, art, life, creation. You’re choosing yet-to-be over what-has-been. You’re choosing mystery, the tender, unfurling unknown.

The Sacred lives in every atom you’re dancing through together — you and your desire. In wild rose and wetland, thorn-bush and thistle, the Sacred lives here.

The Sacred lives here.

Wholeness lives here.

If you’ve grown accustomed to squeezing through impossible crevices, scrambling over scree with skinned knees and aching ankles. If you’ve grown/groan to anticipate the hostile, the inhospitable, the stop-and-start, the sputter-and-fall — turn. Turn to face a new sun now.

Be heliotropic.

The whole world awaits you.

Stand tall — stretch to fill the full volume of you. Open your heart to the sky; feel the sun on your face. Release your shoulders’ hunched or militant stance. Soften your belly, widen your hips, gentle your knees. Soles of your feet, yielding earth.

Your desire holds you in this dance.

Turn towards lushness, warmth, delight, welcome. Velvet moss. Insects’ drone. Sky.

Let your desire dance you

through

fragrant flax meadow; fat, humming bees. Fireweed. Blue, blue forget-me-nots. Bird-wing air brushing your cheek. Springy footfall, humus, soil.

Peat. Woodsmoke. Singing creek.

Beauty. Holy.

Dance, my love. This world is yours.

Feel its beauty in you, its wonder in you. Feel the stars in your belly wink at their sister constellations shimmering in the night sky.

Rain moistens your heart, your liver, your eager lips — inner rain, outer rain, same source, same effects, different flows.

This miraculous, everyday world. Miraculous, everyday you.

Illumined by your desire, your willingness to dance into being.

#ToBeSoul_DoSoul #AdventuresInCreativeConsciousness

Whether you long to make art, write a book, nurture a business or engage in sacred activism to create a world that works for everyone, To Be Soul, Do Soul offers wisdom and inspiration to fuel your journey with love, joy, delight and magic.

This exquisite volume comprises a collection of playful and profound practices to support you in strengthening your relationship with your soul, and to more fully embody the soul qualities that lie within you as seeds or potentials. As you practice being soul, you’ll expand your ability to do soul — to serve the soul of the world.

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NEW! Exclusive audiobook

We have lovingly created an audio version of the book, to enhance your experience and enjoyment of its wisdom and practices.

Listen to this selection of beautiful recordings during your meditation time or as a part of your creative practice. Take them with you on a walk in the woods, or simply listen on the go, anytime, anywhere.

The audiobook has never before been available for purchase. It is available exclusively here on our website for $25.

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Enjoy a preview of the audiobook:

About To Be Soul, Do Soul

“You are an incarnate, embodied soul,” author, mentor and mystic Hiro Boga assures us. “You don’t have to do anything to be soul – soul is who you are.”

Yet how often, in the course of an ordinary day, do you experience the depth, beauty, power, and radiance of your soul?

If you want to strengthen your soul connection, do as soul does. Let your being inform your doing.

To Be Soul, Do Soul offers a collection of profoundly light-hearted mini-experiments in creative consciousness. Play with them to develop the capacities and powers of your soul, and create a soul-infused relationship with your world.

Using powerfully lyrical prose, the book takes you on a sublime adventure beyond the boundaries of your mind, into the realm of infinite creative potentiality. Each of these practices is designed to expand your consciousness, develop freedom and flexibility of mind, and inspire you to act to create a more just and generous world.

You’ll embrace your own beautiful complexity. You’ll honor the sacred beings, both physical and nonphysical, traveling alongside you on this grand adventure. And you’ll abide in the love that weaves you into the web of wholeness.

With each practice, you’ll invite your soul’s presence more fully into your life, and strengthen your capacity to be a source of soul in the world.

Whether you long to make art, write a book, nurture a business or engage in sacred activism to create a world that works for everyone, To Be Soul, Do Soul offers practical wisdom and inspiration to fuel your journey with love, joy, delight and magic.

Use these mini-experiments to ignite your creativity. Add them to your daily practices. Or curl up in your favourite spot to explore the vastness of your soul, and partner with the inter-dimensional realms of consciousness to bring your deepest desires into reality.

There are no right or wrong ways to engage with these practices.

They are explorations, mini-adventures. Each one will lead you someplace that only you can go, in that moment. And each time you revisit them, you’ll find yourself in the midst of a new adventure.

Approach these explorations in a spirit of openness, curiosity, and playful experimentation, and discover where they lead you.

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Within the pages of this book, you’ll recognize your own deep self, your soul’s imperative to reach out and caress the vision glowing on your horizon. Here, you’ll find reflections of your struggle and mine, to create, from the clay of our contradictions, the shapes and forms of our art.

Throughout the three sections of this book you’ll encounter different ways in which I’ve sought to explore the themes that have preoccupied me for seven decades. Who are we? Why are we here? How do we live a true and authentic life? How do we take our place in the ecology of being? How do we contribute to making a just and joyful world?

In narrative poems, long-form poem sequences, persona poems, lyric poems, and StarSeeds, quiet raindrops of meditative inspiration, you’ll meet your Self in many incarnations, through stories and dreams, soundplay and wordplay, intimacy with the natural world, and on voyages through the stars.

Available at your favourite online book store.

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About Rumours of Home

Award-winning writer Hiro Boga’s new book of poems celebrates the slip-sliding, stutter-step nature of our being as the true expression of our human divinity.

Within these pages you’ll find an unfolding story of home and belonging, told in a variety of forms: narrative poems, long-form poem sequences, persona poems, lyric poems, and StarSeeds — quiet raindrops of meditative inspiration. You’ll meet your Self in many incarnations, through stories and dreams, soundplay and wordplay, intimacy with the natural world, and on voyages through the stars.

These poems are explorations of Love in its many forms. Love between you and your soul. The love that brings us together, the love that dances us apart. The Love that wraps us in the arms of the world.

In the words of best-selling author Jennifer Louden, “Hiro’s tender lyricism reunites divisions and illuminates what it truly means to belong to yourself, your soul, and your world.” 

For those of you who love poetry, and are called to explore the mystery of what it means to be fully human, Rumours of Home invites you into intimate relationship with the Sacred in the heart of our beautiful, fragile world. 

This collection of poems opens a pathway home to yourself, to the heart of your belonging. It will inspire you to make your own art, whatever that might be, and offer it to a world in profound need of your gifts.

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When you create a business, you are entering into sacred partnership with its Deva, or soul.

You are its champion, in the physical world. Through your love, work, heart, and devotion, the soul of your business expresses itself and serves your community in ways that you may not dream of on your own.

The World of Your Business Playbook includes profound & playful questions, prompts, and worksheets that provide a flexible structure within which to bring your intentions for your business from the realm of vision, imagination, and subtle energy into the physical world. You’ll create your business in alignment with your deepest values, while receiving loving guidance and wisdom to help you put them into practice.

The brand-new print edition of The World of Your Business Playbook is available to purchase now. Formerly available in digital format, this print edition offers you a sensuous experience. Run your fingers along its pages. Carry it with you to your favorite café and write in it with your favorite pen. Scribble in the margins. Sketch illustrations in the white space.

Available to purchase on Amazon and most other e-retailers.

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About The World of Your Business Playbook

Do you remember a time when you walked into a business that felt like a sanctuary?

Maybe it was a yoga studio, a theater, a bookstore, a spa, or a neighborhood café.

Perhaps it was a virtual business — a website or blog that expanded your heart, lifted your spirits; that made you go, “Ahhhhh!”

As you entered the business, you felt embraced, welcomed and at ease. You may have felt a sense of spaciousness and possibility – an inner feeling that you could be all of yourself, here. A feeling of: I’m home. I belong here.

Remember that feeling.

Now, consider your own business…

When your customers visit your website, do they feel welcome? Do they feel at home in the world of your business? Do they sense, immediately, that their tender hearts and their precious businesses are safe with you? That they can trust you?

When a potential client emails you, do you have systems in place to ensure gracious, clear, consistent communication for each and every person?

If you have a brick and mortar business, do your customers feel a sense of belonging each time they step inside? Do they love your space so much, they can’t wait to return?

The World of Your Business Playbook invites you to explore questions like these — and many others, from the sacred origins of your business to the practical parameters of each project you choose to undertake.

Filled with exploratory questions, writing prompts, and playful worksheets, this one-of-a-kind playbook invites you to intentionally and creatively shape the world of your business — a world that rings with a clear message for your customers:

You are safe. You are home. You belong.

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It’s midsummer, and the weather here in the Pacific Northwest has been moody, unpredictable. In the grocery store, in the teller line-up at the bank, people shake their heads and say: “July!” Mournfully.

Fog erases the contours of the land; melts sea and sky into a seamless mist; swirls like a cloak around the dark apparitions of trees.

In the course of a single afternoon, July morphs into March, or November.

And then, with the suddenness of a baby’s smile — radiant sunshine in a cobalt sky; the sea shimmers, an undulant gold.

And people smile at each other in the street. They turn up in droves on the beach near my house, lugging picnic baskets and beach towels, toddlers in tow. Raising their faces to the sun.

Each moment of weather has its own presence, its own qualities, unlike any other.

July isn’t trying to be some notion of July. It is itself — shifting, changing, wet and cold; hot and dry. Muggy. Sultry.

Like children trying to make sense of an unpredictable parent, we make up stories about July’s changing moods.

Sullen, we say. Or sparkling. Dreadful. Glorious!

We judge. We complain, or rejoice. We rush about, protecting ourselves from the wet; eagerly seizing our place in the sun.

And our judgements — our likes and dislikes, our stories about what we experience — obscure the truth of this moment, this weather, this day. They keep us disconnected from the world around us. They keep us disconnected from ourselves.

Thicker than yesterday’s fog, our bewilderment about the changing weather keeps us from savouring the delicious coolness of summer rain. It numbs us to the rush of awe at the delicate tremble of a thrush’s wings as she shakes raindrops off a pliant branch and launches herself into flight.

There is nothing cleaner, more satisfying, than unadorned attention to what is. There is nothing more magical, more extraordinary than the simple truth of things as they are.

Beyond our dreams, beyond our drama, lies the elegant body of life. It offers itself in each moment.

This big-eyed buck, with his two-pronged velvet horns, munching leaves off the cherry tree in my garden. The crow with his sideways waddle and glossy black feathers, pecking at the grass. Clouds resting softly against the mountain’s face as it kneels in a pewter sea.

The body of life. Its sacred, inexplicable beauty.

Your business has its weather too. Its own particular, unique, ever-changing landscape. It is itself; and no amount of moaning and complaining, hoping and longing, clinging or running away, will change its essence.

Your relationship with your business is also a landscape. One you nurture with your energy and attention. One you shape with the quality of your thoughts, feelings and actions towards it.

The real basis of all transformation is love. You cannot grow your business — or change what isn’t working — without loving it first. And to love it, you must give it your simple, direct attention. Beyond your stories, your dreams, your drama — to the truth of its own being.

When you try to make it something it is not — more special, more dramatic, more successful; or less demanding, less exhausting, less whatever-you-think-it-ought-not-to-be — you miss the power and beauty and magic that are its beating heart.

Can you see the beauty of your business when lightning strikes? When it rains in July? Can you love your business, when your product launch fizzles, or your systems spring a leak?

Business is as challenging as any intimate relationship. Every bit of fear, doubt, resistance you harbour in your body, will show up when you create your next thing, when you give your heart to it.

Love keeps you connected to the shining soul of your business. And love keeps you holding your business’s hand when the skies open up, the monsoons hit, and the ground under your feet dissolves into a swamp.

Love keeps you nourishing your business when your team members bicker like kids hyped up on sugar, and your biggest client walks off into the sunset with another beauty on his arm.

Love gives you the courage to change course; the resilience to explore new options; the trust to step into the swamp and to know the path will appear underfoot.

Love is the single most essential element in your business. It is the air you and your business breathe. It is oxygen, and life, and sustenance. Without it, there is no relationship between you and the soul of your business. And without that relationship, your business cannot thrive.

How do you nurture love in your business? How do you suffuse the culture and landscape of your business with love? What do you do to keep your attention to your business clean and alive?

A decision is a bucket you dip into the creative Flow of the universe, which is the raw material from which all forms are made.

The Flow takes the shape and form of the bucket you dip into it.

The Flow also shapes and reshapes the bucket, bringing its essential nature to life in ways you cannot foresee when you first immerse it in those living waters.

Understand the nature of the relationship between your decision and the Flow, and the process of decision-making becomes far less fraught with what-ifs and yes-buts and all the phantom fears that jerk you this way and that until you say Yes to this, No to that.

Your decision is the creative catalyst for a pattern to unfold. How it unfolds, and what it looks like when it does, is yours to discover and delight in, once you say yes to the adventure.

What decision do you need to make today? What happens when you partner with the Flow by giving your desire a shape and form through which it can come to life in your world?

#DevaAlchemy

If you’ve arrived at a brave new horizon in your business and don’t know which dream to activate next; or if you’re crafting a new body of work that makes your scalp prickle with delight, makes every little hair on your body stand up and wave…

…and, the shape of your emerging work is a haze, a blob, an unformed, not-yet thing…

…here are some questions to carry in your pocket as you explore this new terrain:

What are the fluid, vibrant, dancing elements, in your work and in your business? What has power, depth, vitality, that sparkles and surges like the sea on a sunny day, but has no discernible shape, at least, not yet?

Ask the folks in your community: What do you dream about? What do you long for, that makes you breathe so deep you didn’t know your lungs could hold so much air? What lends thrust and power to your legs, lifts and lofts you onto your feet? What lives in the belly of your joy?

What restlessness wakes you at night? What do you truly, deeply desire, that brushes past your fingertips as it flies by, just out of reach?

Now, ask yourself: What do I long for? What dreams thrum in my bones, widen my wingspan?

What urgent hand shakes me awake at night?

What do I truly, deeply desire?

Where does my desire live in my body?

Touch the body of your true desire. Caress its outlines and curves, its secret folds. Breathe in the scent of its scalp, trace the soft mound of its cheek, feel the huff of its breath on the nape of your neck. Kiss its crooked pinky finger, its belly button, its knobbly knees.

Feel your profound love for it filling your whole body. Feel its great longing for you, for the life you will make together.

Now, enter the canyon of your own body. Follow its contours of light and shade, its free-running rivers of blood and lymph, its singing winds, the rare metals buried in the vault of your brain.

What does your body know, about your desire? What does it show you about its capacity to drink in your desire, to digest and transmute it into cell and organ, muscle and bone? What will it keep, of this infusion? What will it expel?

Next, step into the daylight of your discernment.

Given the truth of your life, the truth of your business, what can you say Yes to that makes your whole body sigh with gratitude, soften with delight? What makes you feel round and contented, wide as the sky, fertile and rich as the soil beneath your feet?

Now, turn to the Deva of your business and ask for its illumination. Where does its desire live, in the body of your business? Is it twin and sister to the desire that arises in your own body?

Where is the shoreline, where the treasure of your fluid, creative heart meets the body of your clients’ desires?

Walk this boundary. Hike its height, breadth, depth. Take in its dappled light, its smells and sounds, the various textures of its terrain.

What animals live here? What birds, insects, fish, reptiles, fungi, plants, trees, mountains, valleys, rivers? What do they show you about themselves, about the story of their borderlands?

Feel its place in the body of your business.

Then map it out. Draw it, sing it, sculpt it in clay. Paint it, write it, make a mess and another and another until it shows you its true shape.

Build an altar in your garden, or under the roots of a sheltering tree, to welcome its soon-to-born being.

When you know it in your bones, when you love it with all of you, craft your offer to reflect its shape.

This past week has been a swirl and whoosh of such delight! After three long, pandemic years, my whole family was here in my home — both my sons and their partners, my 11-year-old granddaughter, and 5-month-old grandbaby whom I met for the first time this week.

Being with an entirely new-to-the-world little person has been a masterclass on sovereignty in action.

On the one hand, because she is still so young, my granddaughter is utterly dependent — on her parents and family, on all of us who love her — for everything from nourishment to locomotion. Her very survival depends on the care and tending she receives from us and from the natural world. This care is shaping her biology and her rapidly growing nervous system every moment of every day.

She is picked up, fed, cradled, swaddled, held, rocked, swayed, cooed at, sung to, jiggled, carried here and there in her baby seat, in her stroller, on her dad’s shoulders, in her mom’s arms.

Where she goes, and when, and how, must seem entirely arbitrary to her, determined by forces beyond her control. On the surface, she appears about as sovereign as a loaf of bread.

But sovereignty is an inner quality of being.

My granddaughter meets every experience with a solemn, alert attentiveness. She expresses her feelings freely and fully the moment they arise, her whole little body responding to whatever captures her attention. She frowns, sucks on her lower lip when she’s unhappy; babbles in her own inimitable language; opens her mouth wide to explore, through taste and touch, whatever catches her eye. She squawks in protest when she’s hungry or tired; leans way out of her dad’s arms to snatch at the glint of sunlight on a leaf; smiles a secret smile at who-knows-what delight.

She doesn’t aim to please or provoke; she acts only on the truth of her own experience.

This is sovereignty in action. We are all born with this quality within us.

Having just arrived from the realm of spirit into our world, she brings the raw power of divinity into our midst. Her presence here is both startling and wondrous — like meeting a lion or a gryphon in my living room. We are her acolytes, puddles of besotted love, devoted to her tiny self, eager to serve her magical life. She stirs in us the remembrance of truths we once knew and did not know we had lost. The world comes alive in the aliveness of her gaze.

This is the creative enchantment that lies just under the skin of our world. At one time, each of us made that journey from other dimensions to this one. Each of us arrived, as magical as a unicorn, carrying within us the glory of which we are made, and the promise of renewal that our presence gifts to our world.

Throughout our lives, we remain as vulnerable, as creative and curious, as receptive, exuberant, present and powerful, as intricately woven into the life of the world as my baby granddaughter.

Life batters us, however, until we lose our sovereign shape, lose sight of who we are. The wellsprings of our curiosity, of our joy, get buried under the debris of the world’s sorrows, and the keening of our own dismembered hearts.

To protect ourselves, we build labyrinths and walls; imprison ourselves and others in mansions, churches, malls; masquerade in masks designed to please, placate, pretend, intimidate.

We defend and submit, manipulate and mould, push and perform, label and are labelled. We pretzel ourselves into neon shapes; we become unrecognisable to ourselves, unknowable to our world. We exsanguinate our souls in a desolation of disconnection, loneliness and loss.

And yet…that powerful love that brought us here is as undeniable as the wind.

If you’re reading this, chances are, you are making, or have made this journey back to yourself, perhaps many times over. You’re dancing or strolling or stumbling home to your wild and sovereign, beautifully interconnected, radiantly human, creatively wonderful being.

I wish you a joyous season of love and renewal, a return to your miraculous, essential, irreplaceable being. May you always know and treasure the gift that you are, the jewel that is your life. May you celebrate and be celebrated, dear friends, today and every day!

Let there be cake!

It’s been my great privilege, these past forty years, to mentor visionary founders and leaders who are actively creating a world that serves and blesses all who enter their sphere. The world of their business is built on the foundation of their values, and serves the soul of their communities in deeply meaningful ways.

Many of these leaders began working with me mid-career, when their businesses were successful by all external measures, and yet they felt unfulfilled in their own lives and in the business ecosystems they had so carefully crafted.

Many of them have continued to work with me for years as their businesses have developed beyond anything they initially dreamed of, as they have been called to grow into their own potentials, to become the leaders of powerful, impactful organizations.

The steps you take to arrive at initial success are rarely the ones that will nourish and support the next stage of your business’s development, or your own.

If you’re at an early stage in your business, my business development program, Become Your Own Business Adviser, will serve you in establishing the world of your business on a firm foundation of clarity, simplicity, and focus on what is essential for you and your business to grow.

Once you’ve already established brand recognition and robust revenue streams, once your signature offers are strong and running efficiently, and you’ve built systems and developed a business culture that enables you to deliver a great client experience, you begin to ask yourself more nuanced questions.

• Is the ecosystem of my business coherent, integrated, and harmonious? Where are the gaps and what are the areas of underdevelopment or misalignment?

• Where are the places where we’ve become so accustomed to things as they are, that we are ignoring or avoiding opportunities that were not on the horizon when we arrived at our present stage of growth?

• How have the needs of our customers changed, and how can we meet those needs effectively?

• How have my own needs and those of my business changed? Who must I become, to meet those needs skillfully?

• What is essential, in my business, for meeting my goals and intentions? Is that where our efforts and resources are concentrated? What is superfluous? What do we need to let go of or change?

• What is my role as a leader now, and how am I being called to step into my evolving leadership?

You ask yourself more epistemic questions as well.

• What is my vision for my business now? In what ways has this vision changed, as both my business and I have evolved?

• What and how are my business and I being called to serve, now that we have built the capacity to powerfully catalyze positive change in our world?

• How do we refocus our operations to fulfil this expanded vision?

• What opportunities are emerging in our environment, and what do they reveal about the vision that the Deva of my business holds for its next stage of development?

When you truly love your business, when it is both your calling and art as well as your source of provision and prosperity, you will find these questions arising naturally. They reflect your commitment to refined, purposeful action on behalf of your own evolution and that of your business, in alignment with your most cherished values and your soul’s truest desires.

As you develop a deep and lasting relationship with the Deva of your business, and learn what wholeness and coherency feel like in your body and in the body of your business, the answers to these questions will emerge organically. You will trust your responses to them, and act swiftly and decisively to fulfil your evolving purposes.

If you’re anything like my entrepreneurial friends, colleagues, and clients, you may be asking yourself some essential questions right now.

Is there really a way to grow your business so it flourishes, fulfills its profound potentials, serves wholeheartedly – and supports your own undeniable longing for ease, spaciousness, room to breathe, feel, dream, live your life, and create what’s tugging at your heart?

Can you reshape the world of your business so it provides a home for your own genius and the gifts and genius of your team, and nurtures the gifts of your clients and customers as well? Can you make a world in your business that grows organically, without losing what you’ve worked so hard to build? Can you transform how you do business so you and your business grow in joy, prosperity, flow, and ease as well as in annual revenues and impeccable service?

Or is this a pipe dream, one that hovers on the horizon without ever drawing any nearer?

Think about something you’ve long wanted for your business, that hasn’t happened despite your most valiant efforts. A revenue goal that remains out of reach. A dream team that never quite seems to coalesce. Clients who are ready and eager to craft their businesses in alignment with their vision and values, but who don’t enroll in your masterminds, or don’t show up to do the necessary work. A framework, an offering, a signature program that hasn’t yet gelled into something tangible, useful and beautiful.

You’ve worked hard, with fierce commitment and enthusiasm, to get to where you are. You’ve given your business, your clients and customers, your family, your beloveds, the very best of yourself. Now, you’re asking yourself – is this all there is? Do I just keep doing more of this while the joy and dynamism, vision and desire that fueled my early days as an entrepreneur dissolve in overwhelm, in resentment at running on this hamster wheel that never stops and never really gets to where my heart wants to be?

The short answer, from my own experience and from working with thousands of clients and students over the years is – yes, and no. No, this is not a pipe dream. Yes, it is possible to make your business your art, to have it be your joy and freedom, your creative contribution to your world, and the foundation of your wealth, prosperity, and freedom.

I’ve been blessed with a long and always-interesting entrepreneurial life – forty-plus years of creating and serving, adapting to changing needs and landscapes, innovating in generative ways, embracing the gifts and challenges of leadership and business. Developing life-long friendships, and a body of work that continues to serve my community all these many years.

There is so much delight and creative freedom in being an entrepreneur. And there is also this – the tight-rope-without-a-net of bone-rattling risk, responsibility that can feel like a bear on your chest, digging deep for more courage, more faith, more trust in yourself, more strength and vulnerability and flexibility and heart than you ever thought you had in you.

That’s the thing about creating a business that’s bigger than yourself, one that may well outlive you. As you grow it, it grows you. You grow in power, in discernment, in focus, purpose, clarity and wisdom. In your willingness to do hard things, take bold risks, handle consequences with humour and grace, pivot when necessary, stay true to your vision through wild success, abject failure, and everyday service and devotion.

You can have a business that serves the wholeness in you, and in everyone who enters the world of your business. It’s the kind of world I’ve created in my business. It’s the kind of world many of my clients and students have created in their businesses too. You can craft such a world for yourself, for your community, for the future you want to shape for all you love.

“Bask in each sun filled word of the divine wisdom well and soul of luminary, Hiro Boga. 

You will not be the same after you listen to her. If you listen long enough, your transformation is inevitable. Read her. Take her programs. Be in her orbit.“

— kind words from Robyn Ivy about our conversation for her podcast.

Here are some things you’ll discover in this episode:

• Hear Hiro’s beautiful story of growing up in India, meeting the Devas and how to work with multi-dimensional consciousness and subtle energies in your life.

• How to hear and return to your soul’s desires so you can enjoy being the powerful, free and whole person you are.

• How to live in harmony with your vision and values, in partnership with your soul, and in service to the Sacred.

• Simple practices to deepen your felt connection with the spiritual dimension of your life, your community, nature and the more than human world.

Listen in:

Learn more about Robyn Ivy here, and check out the Robyn Ivy podcast here.

As entrepreneurs, we don’t live in self-created bubbles, insulated from the storms that flail the rest of the world. Our lives and the lives of our businesses are embedded in an ecology of systems and structures that shape each of us and our businesses in fundamental ways.

If you and I have wealth and privilege — however relative & contextual these might be — we have a concomitant responsibility to determine what the true and complex costs of our privileged lives are, who bears those costs, and how they are distributed across the world’s ecosystems.

First, let’s take a clear-eyed look at the numbers — what kinds and quantities of resources does it take to sustain the life you live, to support the life of your business?

Then draw closer — explore, invite, listen to the lived stories of those who make your privilege possible, and those who benefit from your privilege as well. What are their lives like? What do they feel, worry about, dream of, wish for, love? What do they want their lives, and their children’s lives, to be? What are their souls here to experience, express, serve and create?

Listen for stories from the human and non-human world, as well as from the Earth herself. Explore this rich treasure of stories in a variety of ways — through books, films, essays, reports, novels, poetry, plays, memoirs; through dance, music, art, writing, spoken word; through travel, fireside conversations, community gatherings; through soul investigations, deep attunement, contemplative prayer, direct communion with the non-human world.

Next, articulate what right relationship with wealth and privilege means to you, what right relationship with the ecosystems in which you and your business flourish means to you. Then, map out the pathways through which you will craft your life and business to accord with your values, to stand in right relationship with wealth and privilege.

Wealth and privilege are the promised land of entrepreneurship. After all, you’re in business to make money, otherwise you’re running a non-profit, not a business. Every choice you make arrives with its own costs. As a conscious entrepreneur, you want to understand what those costs are, who primarily bears them, and how the systems that allow you to gain wealth and privilege function to keep others outside an aspirational and in many ways fantastical and illusory paradise.

This is capitalism at work. But, for most small business owners, it’s more complicated than class rhetoric might indicate. You may have people working for you, but chances are, you are also working in your business. In Marxist terms, you are both capitalist and labour.

Small-business owners: We’re a breed that didn’t exist in Marx’s industrial model of class division. We take risks no sane corporate worker would dream of taking. We do it over and over. We thrive on a degree of adventure, a daily, brisk walk with the unknown.

Our ongoing dance with neoteny takes its toll on our health and well-being as well as the health and well-being of our communities and our planet.

Looking outside my window on this late October morning, I see vermillion trees dancing in the wind, their leaves dressed for joy, not yet releasing into descent. And I see others — bare branches with their last fluttering flags drifting silently earthwards.

There is a rhythm to the natural world that we, as entrepreneurs, would do well to emulate. Here, in the Northern Hemisphere, we are in the glory of autumn, a spectacular letting go, a final blaze of colour before winter’s steel-grey cloak descends to blanket us in rain, sleet, snow — in silence and rest.

Know which season your business is in. Know how the seasons of your business alter your relationship with wealth and privilege. Choose a way of being that aligns with the truth of your body, the truth of your world.

How much wealth do you actually need, at this stage of your life, in this phase of your business’s life? How much wealth and privilege do you need, to fulfill your soul’s purposes, the purposes of your incarnation, and the purposes of your Business Deva, at this time? Raising a young family, living with a chronic health issue or life-altering diagnosis, approaching retirement, investing in community development or a new direction in your business that will serve a deeper, more generous purpose — each of these will require different resources than when you’re in a phase of relative stability and consolidation.

Wealth is not innately bad, nor is poverty good. Wealth is provision, and provision is essential for all life on earth to flourish.

Wealth makes so much possible that remains out of reach when we’re struggling simply to survive. It affords us the leisure to deeply consider what kind of world we want to live in and to leave behind for future inhabitants of this planet. It offers us the means to make significant contributions to the web of interdependent being within which our own lives and all life is embedded. It gives us room to fulfill our own potentials, and to nurture the unfolding potentials of life around us. Wealth provides us with time and space for creativity, art, music, play, justice, equity, support for the causes we believe in and are willing to take a stand for.

The Deva of Provision sustains the life of our world, and we are its allies.

Ultimately, how mindful we are of the limits of the earth’s resources, and how we choose to allocate and share them, determines the quality of life for all beings.

Our past does not have to become our present or our future. We have the power to choose a more coherent, integral, wholesome relationship with wealth and privilege. One that affords all beings the possibility of fulfilling their soul’s purposes and growing into the fullness of their being. One that supports healthy bioregions and ecosystems in which all life flourishes.

If you choose, you can begin today by asking the questions that your heart yearns to explore about your relationship with wealth and privilege. Listen closely for what emerges from your enquiry. Take one small step, today, each day, to build right relationship with wealth and privilege.

Notice how your inner being, and the world around you, changes as you live into your enquiry.

Poems are living beings.

They enter through your skin and eyes and ears; they swim in through your dreams. They burn through the fog of everydayness to reveal life’s brilliance hiding in plain sight. They transform your biology, your history, the rhythms of your breath. They unfurl clenched fists, open compressed throats, soften and smooth corrugated hearts.

Poems open windows in your spine, in your bones, in your brain and belly, in the soles of your feet.

And in through those windows fly the songs of the earth, the keening of stars and galaxies, the sturdy, honest presence of the Real. The entire cosmos lives in each poem. And if you invite them in — the poem, and the cosmos — they flower in you; they re-enchant the garden of your life.

Each poem I write is an invitation into realms of becoming that I have not yet entered, or that have not yet entered me.

Each poem I write emerges from the Womb of Being, from the fluid shore where formlessness meets form. This creative matrix, which loves and cherishes all unfolding life, waits patiently for me to turn toward it, to stay in its presence long enough for its particular alchemical nectar to work its way into my bloodstream.

I enter its service willingly, glad and grateful for its invitation.

Once it’s written and shared — and poems are made to be shared — a poem’s magic burrows deep in the soil of your heart. There, it takes root and flowers in a rainbow of colours, scents, textures, as you, who read or hear it, water it with your tenderness, your joy, pain, sorrow, love, your own unfolding story.

Poems are powerful medicine. They lead us home: to ourselves, our souls, to our own particular place in the ecology of being, our place of belonging.

Poems heal, palpably, the fractures and wounds of separation. When I stumble on an inner pattern that causes me pain, I stop and feel its pathways in my body. Often, one of my own poems, or that of a poet I love, will echo in my ear and I’ll read it aloud, taking in its resonance and power. The pattern dissolves, its pathways and well-worn grooves smoothed to silk by the grace of the poem.

Poems restore us and our world to wholeness.

My clients will tell you this — I read them poems, when just the right poem speaks, directly and eloquently, to the truth of their experience, the truth of something profound beyond words that we’ve been exploring together.

O, the earthy and ineffable treasures of poetry!

Eleanor Beaton is the founder of SafiMedia, an education and coaching company for women entrepreneurs that is committed to advancing global gender equity through women’s entrepreneurship. 

Eleanor and her team are on a mission to double the number of women entrepreneurs who scale past $1M in revenue by 2030. Eleanor is also an award-winning writer, and the host of the Power + Presence + Position podcast, which reaches millions of women around the world helping them to unlock their leadership and their entrepreneurial potential.

A year into her private mentoring immersion with Hiro, Eleanor sat down to talk about her experience.

Enjoy the rich conversation between these two powerful women. 

Eleanor shares stories about what impels her to work for women’s empowerment and the freedom that comes from building entrepreneurial wealth, how her mission grew out of her early career experiences, and how she has built her business to reflect her values and serve her community of women founders and leaders.

You’ll hear Eleanor talk about why she has chosen to be mentored by Hiro for over a year now, (you may see yourself in her story!) and all the goodness that has unfolded in her life and business as a result of their mentoring partnership. 

Eleanor’s mentoring journey has transformed her life and her leadership in profound ways. She is open about the vulnerability and anxiety she’s experienced at each new threshold, and grateful for Hiro’s guidance and the powerful skills she has learned from her, which have enabled her to move through each phase of her evolution with grace. She has discovered that the more she has embraced her own well-being and made space for her creative spirit to flourish, the more effective she has become as the leader of her business and her community. 

Some highlights and insights you’ll discover during the conversation:

• How a key event in Eleanor’s childhood planted the seed for her mission of supporting women’s economic empowerment.

• Her early career experiences in attempting to fulfill that mission — and how she learned not to discount or leave behind those experiences, but to integrate them to powerfully serve her evolution as an entrepreneur.

• How leading a very successful business still found her at an impasse, where she knew the methods she had used to grow her business to its present success were not going to lead her to the more soulful evolution she desired as an entrepreneur.

• How she navigated the inevitable period of uncertainty that came with embracing a new way of doing business that didn’t include more hustle, more doing, more complexity, more top-down leadership.

• Her insight that true change is not a “makeover” but is grounded in deeply transforming from the inside out and becoming a truer version of who she really is.

• The realization that she had been leading her life and business using only a portion of her genius and capacity — and how looking deeply inside, and coming to know herself, dramatically increased her capacity and effectiveness as a leader.

• The powerful skills Hiro offered to help her discern what is hers and what is not hers, in any situation — so she can stay aligned to what is true for her, rather than absorb and try to manage the energies of others.

• How acting on the insights she’s gained through her mentoring with Hiro, despite fear or discomfort, has led to incredible shifts in her outer world (including, among other opportunities, prestigious awards and a viral article on HuffPo).

“The more that I became truly at home in who I was, and who I am, and learned tools to be able to listen to that, especially in a culture that often [trains us to separate] from ourselves — things started to happen.” — Eleanor

• How she has met both the excitement and the radical reshaping of her life that came with all these opportunities.

• How she has learned to allow her business to become a truer version of what it has always been.

“As with any relationship, the more you inhabit your own being, the more deeply you can be in relationship to your own business. Because then it is not an extension of you, it’s not a projection of your unfulfilled desires — it’s your partner.” — Hiro

And, Eleanor’s closing words for anyone considering private mentoring with Hiro:

“Once you know what to do in your business — you have a pretty good sense of tactics and marketing principles, you know how to find clients — you have a choice to make. Do you continue moving down this road of learning more tactics? Or do you commit to making your business something that can be transcendent? That is a work of art. That is soulful and rich and joyful and capable of making a difference in the world.

This work, in my view, is an incredibly powerful way to unlock that. I am just so grateful for the impact it has made in my life, and my world, and my business and [my] reality.”

Listen in:

Learn more about Safi Media and Eleanor here, and check out the Power + Presence + Position podcast here.

It’s a quiet Sunday afternoon; the sky outside my study window is a pale, luminous blue undulant with sunlit clouds. Grey-shingled slant of roof; lift and droop of linden branches at play in a July breeze. Pollen sifts golden to the ground.

My heart widens into the peace of the day.

This week has been rackety with blare and screech, banging and hammering – the controlled chaos of reconstruction. A crew of workmen has trooped through my house over the past few days, replacing the floors in my office, reading room, and library.

Those floors have needed replacing for a couple of years now, but I’ve put off getting them done. First, because — pandemic. But also, because the cacophony and disarray that accompanies any renovation disrupts my life and the energetic container within which my work unfolds.

These days, my tolerance for chaos is limited; there’s more than enough chaos in the world. I can’t and don’t attempt to avoid its fractures, but I won’t voluntarily put myself in its path except to fulfil a purpose compelling enough to make tangling with it worthwhile.

My new floors are beautiful. My study, where I’m writing this note to you, is light and spacious, lovely and — transparent. (Yes! That’s the word I’m looking for.) It holds me and my work in a field that is so quiet it’s almost invisible; yet it’s richly generative. This field leaves me free to explore and create; it never imposes itself. It serves its function beautifully — and is itself beautiful.

I aim to be that too.

In my work, in my life, in my heart, I am an artist who collaborates with the cosmic field — and all that it holds of beauty and blessing — to create environments, programs, practices and processes that serve us in becoming the whole of who we are so we can skillfully offer our gifts to the making of our world.

Our world needs us, each of us, to bring our whole selves to the task of renewal and regeneration. Steadily. Faithfully. Devotedly. With focus and power.

To do this, we ask ourselves these simple questions, and answer them as honestly as we can.

What do I really want?
What must I let go of?
What will I devote myself to?
What does the soul of this creation want — for itself, from me?
How will I partner with it to fulfil its desire and my own, in the field that holds both of us?

I have asked myself these questions at every stage of my life and the life of my business.

My work now, in my 70’s, is to mentor and nurture those who have the desire, capacity and willingness to immerse themselves in the body of work I’ve created over the past 40 years, learn from it, experiment with it, embody it, and build, on its foundation, their own lasting contribution to our world.

Last Fall, I opened the Deva Alchemy Mentor Training – a 9-month, private, professional mentoring and training program for leaders in the field of transformation.

Last month, the first of my mentor trainees graduated from the program. Her life and business have transformed beyond her most star-bright dreams. She is living, creating, and serving her community from a place of inner cohesiveness, integrity, power and clear purpose. And both she and her business are flourishing, beautifully.

This journey took her through a complete re-formation of her life and work. She met it with courage, heart, willingness, trust in herself and in the process, and in loving, intimate partnership with the Deva of her business. I’m immensely proud of her, as I am of the other leaders who are on their own pilgrimage through the program.

Last week, she and I talked about what that journey was like for her; the unravelling and reweaving it has called her to. She spoke of where she finds herself now; and what’s emerging as she continues to develop her body of work.

Your art and journey will be unique to you. Ask yourself the questions I’ve shared, above, or craft your own questions to help you pinpoint what matters most to you, and what is calling you now. Then clear the decks of anything extraneous to your purpose, and walk your path with courage and confidence.

I wish you clarity, willingness, trust, and the immense powers of your soul to accompany you.