Pass the ketchup, and hand me my crown…

For the past seven weeks, in Sovereignty Kindergarten, we’ve played with crowns and capes, with energy building blocks and tools, Devas, qualities and essences to explore what it means to be the queens and kings of our own kingdoms.

We’ve learned energy technologies to help us craft our lives.

As I get ready to teach Become Your Own Business Adviser in a couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about sovereignty-how essential it is to living an authentic, creative, free, exuberant life.

We come into this world filled with the joy and radiance of our souls. We are overflowing with love, brimming with excitement at our own miraculous capacities, thrilled about all that we intend to create, to give and to receive.

We offer ourselves to the world without fear, shame or inhibition. We expand with delight to meet what’s in front of us.

If we’re lucky, our parents or caregivers see us for who we really are-powerful spiritual beings incarnated as babies. They see our physical vulnerability and our spiritual wisdom. They know we have our own purpose, creative vision and gifts.

If we’re lucky, the people who love us help us grow more fully into ourselves. They take care of our physical needs, and keep us safe, warm and nourished. They give us space and freedom to feel our feelings and think our thoughts.

They don’t impose their agendas, their fears or their beliefs on us.

They encourage us to explore the world, to develop our own relationship with it, to follow our natural rhythms and our curiosity wherever it leads us.

If we’re lucky, the grownups in our lives support us in experiencing ourselves and our world directly, unmediated by expectations about how things should be. They show us their love and appreciation openly and often. They encourage us to trust in our own judgment and choices, to learn from our mistakes, and to celebrate both our successes and our failures as milestones of learning and growth.

If we’re lucky, we grow up trusting ourselves, knowing our limits and our powers, and having faith in our ability to shape our lives by following our inner guidance.

If you haven’t been so lucky, you may find yourself with what my friend Mariko calls a wonky GPS system. You may have trouble making decisions about aspects of your business or your life.

Decisions like: Should you lease that extra office space now, while it’s available, or is it simply going to add to your overhead without increasing your sales.

Should you spend a chunk of your budget to hire that marketing consultant, copywriter or VA? Will they be a good fit for your business, or will hiring them be a costly mistake?

When’s the best time to launch your new product, and how much should you charge for it?

These day-to-day decisions shape your business and can make the difference between a successful year and one that’s less than great.

Since you’re a responsible, intelligent person, you gather information, research your market, and make your decisions based on the variables you know about.

But there are often hidden factors that affect the success or failure of any course of action.

Intuition and clear seeing are two of the capacities of your soul. We’re all born with them. They are practical, useful qualities that can help us navigate our lives and our businesses with skill and wisdom.

These capacities can be developed, just as you develop a natural talent for language, or sports, or making art. Practice makes us more skilled at using intuition and the ability to see things as they are, and as they can be.

Inner guidance-knowing what you want and what’s right for you-is a useful and practical way to make good decisions for yourself and your business.

But energy technologies and sacred skills have more profound, equally practical applications in every aspect of your business and your life.

For example: You may be a person who has many creative ideas, but they never quite seem to get off the ground. Maybe you begin new projects with great enthusiasm, only to see them fizzle away when the gremlins of resistance, anxiety or self-doubt rear their heads.

Your projects fail to gain momentum, not because you’re lazy or incompetent or lack willpower, but because you don’t have the skills and tools to work with the fears, beliefs and issues that inevitably arise when you set a creative intention and begin to act on it.

Intuitive skills are powerful. And because they are already within you, using them reconnects you to your own power.

Instead of driving yourself crazy making pro-and-con lists, asking all your friends for advice, or hiring costly professionals, you can turn to your intuition for guidance.

As you practice applying your intuition to concrete situations in your life, you regain trust and confidence in your choices. You begin to use energy skills and processes to help you work through fears and resistance. You make friends with your emotions, and with your inner selves. And you learn to work with non-physical allies to help you create your business and your life in seemingly effortless, miraculous ways.

How about you? How do you experience sovereignty and intuition in your life and in your business? What challenges do you face? What do you wish you’d known, or learned, about these skills and capacities that are so much a part of you?