Living Spirituality in a Messed-Up Marketplace

Birthday notice! Heart of Business, Incorporated turns 12 years old next week! To celebrate, we’re having an informal meet-up Friday afternoon, 3:30-5:30pm. If you’re local, come by and share some gluten-free cake. 🙂 If not, go get yourself a slice and join us in your heart. 🙂

If you’re thinking of coming, please send an email to susan at heartofbusiness.com and we’ll send you more details next week.

Also, remember that the earlybird deadline to save $100 on Heart-Centered Article is coming up fast! September 5! If you’ve been considering joining us, for your own sake, jump in now. 

Living Spiritually in a Messed-Up Marketplace

One of the struggles many heart-centered entrepreneurs have is reconciling what you have to do to make a business work, with the spiritual values and love at the core of who you are. There’s often a sense of defeat or numbness that comes when it seems you can’t do what needs to be done to make it financially without abandoning your heart.

So let’s take a little trip into the Columbia River Gorge, to a town named Corbett.

Out in Corbett, Oregon there is an incredible Chinese medicine clinic, the Hai Shan Clinic, founded by the well-known and revered Dr. Heiner Fruehauf. We’re lucky enough to know the Freuhauf’s because they are part of our Sufi community, and he was a major reason my wife got better when she was *really* sick with Lymes disease.

So, I got to watch it all unfold when they purchased the land in Corbett and then set about having the building built.

It’s a very green, passively-heated, energy-efficient, straw-bale/mud wall construction building. And it is beautiful. Not just to look at it, but in the way it feels.

You walk inside the building, and you feel held. There is an air of calm and peace and love that fills the space. Did I mention grounded? Solid? Trustworthy? Wow. When our Sufi guide visits Oregon on his annual trek from his home in Jerusalem, he stays at their home, and does his two days of teaching and overnight retreat there. (Did I mention it’s also a very large house?)

There was a lot of hard work that went into building that house. Sweat. Heavy construction and power tools. Work, I’m telling ya.

What led the construction efforts was a deep understanding of Feng Shui, prayer and reverence, among other spiritual building principles. It’s not my speciality, so I can’t explain it all, but Dr. Heiner Freuhauf and company are steeped in it and made it a part of the building process.

The result is a flourishing clinic that is booked full despite being in a remote location, and a beautiful, amazing, solid building that nourishes all who enter it.

The world of construction and home-building is dysfunctional and can even be deadly. It is full of chemicals and ignorant of how people are best suited to live. Our neighborhoods and homes can make us sick and make our lives harder to live. Simple things like the orientation of our front doors often disconnects us from our neighbors.
Yet, the spiritual principles are there, and beautiful community-oriented buildings can be built. The Hai Shan clinic is a testament to this.

It’s similar in the world of business. In the dominant paradigm business is incredibly dysfunctional, even deadly in its application. It’s driven by greed, ignorance, and a complete disconnection from the natural world. Yet the spiritual principles are there, and beautiful businesses can be built.

One example: Every marketer tells you to start by talking about the problem. Ignorance of the spiritual principle behind this can lead to manipulating people through fear.

Yet when we look through our hearts at “starting from the problem” we can see something very different. From this perspective we are all connected and longing to see and be seen.

As the Sufi teachings express it, recognition of the truth that we are all from the Infinite Source of Mercy and Compassion, and Infinite Source began the creation from a deep, primal “yearning to be known,” means that we all were born from that yearning to be known.

When you start with empathy for the problems people are facing, holding a trust that they are not broken, then that yearning to be known can begin to be filled. People feel empathized with. A listening space opens up that is holy and filled with healing.

In other words, they feel seen. Now you have their attention. And when you hold that attention with true care you create trust and a nourishing business relationship.

Out of the ashes of manipulation can rise a realization of wholeness and love.

Although I can’t learn Feng Shui just by walking around the Hai Shan clinic, there are some universal principals we can pick up when trying to bring spiritual love into our businesses.

• Don’t settle for the gas tank approach.This is where you sit on your cushion and do your spiritual practice, fill up with love, then run your gas tank down doing business. Spiritual practice is important, but also hold out for the truth that love is available in the doing-ness of your business as well.
• Look for beauty, not just effectiveness.The Hai Shan clinic is prosperous and beautiful. There are lots of prosperous businesses, but are they truly beautiful? Look for beauty in the people you learn from and look to create beauty in every aspect of your business, because beauty is a reflection of love.
• Don’t settle for just for the beauty.Spiritual feelings are amazing, but realize also that hard work, sweat, and loud power tools went into building the Hai Shan clinic. Your business will require hard work at times, and that’s okay. The practice is in remembering to look for and witness the Love available in the work you are doing.

Love, beauty, effectiveness are available in business. Don’t settle for anything less.

I’m curious what you see when you look at your business. Are there any places you’re still wondering where the spiritual principles are?

With love and appreciation,

Mark

p.s. Struggling to write beautiful, effective content for your business?

I wrote the first complete draft of the article above from scratch in about 35 minutes. The only way to produce content consistently is to be able to do it with some ease, where it doesn’t take you an entire day or more to write a piece.

It’s unfair to you and your business to expect writing to just pour forth stream-of-consciousness style. Instead, you should know that the above article is actually assembled from 5 separate elements. It is SO easy to first identify and write each element and then assemble the article. Kapow! Easy-peasy.

No one probably ever told you just how to put an article together, what actually goes in. “Express your heart!” sounds good, but it doesn’t tend to work so well. Five pieces of structure, an understanding of what makes compelling content in the first place, and practice means that you can write beautifully, consistently, and quickly.

Why don’t you join me for Heart-Centered Article Writing? It starts September 11. The early-bird deadline is this Friday.

Take a look: Heart-Centered Article Writing