This week is full of Hanukkah parties, and I’m looking forward to my first attempt at home-made donuts, which, if you didn’t know, can be included with potato latkes as a traditional Hanukah food.
Solstice, Hanukah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and probably others, I’m sure. The end of the year’s holidays are predictably Northern-hemisphere-centric, focused on this darkest time of the year when the light is just starting to return. For those Down Under, it’s summer, and our team member Yollana Shore has never failed to make me jealous with her pictures of December on the beach.
For us here at Heart of Business, this is our last full week of work before (mostly) shutting down for the year. We’ve got a fun thing to send you next Wednesday, and again on New Year’s Eve, but for now, I hope you’ll join in me in a bit of fried food, to celebrate the miracles of how good things, like oil in the Hanukkah story, can last so much longer than we think they can.
But first …
Article: How to (not) extract learnings from misfortunes
The end of the year can be a painful one for many. The hopes and intentions from last January are, perhaps, as-yet unrealized. Missed goals, misfortune, and left turns on the path are not uncommon.
Many recommend focusing on gratitude as a proven way to increase all kinds of goodness in your life, being grateful for the good things, and not mired down in the bad things. However, there is a deeper gratitude practice that, while painful to contemplate, is actually a very powerful step forward for your heart and your business.
Everything comes from the Divine
In most moments this truth is acknowledged with just lip service, yet it’s such a profound statement. The Sufi’s teach that everything originates as expressions of the Divine Compassion, Love and Kindness.
Take a moment and face your disappointments, your grief, your missed goals, and ask, “What if this situation I’m in is actually the most loving place to be for me in this moment? What if this is an expression of Divine Caring and Kindness?”
Usually the first thing that comes up is denial, or argument, or self-judgment. But these are still coming from the belief that what happened is “punishment” or something that isn’t truly love. A belief like, “Oh, I messed up and so this is all I deserve?”
Painful.
Rather, what if in the perfection and sacredness of who you are, and with an eye to the bigger picture of your heart’s journey to the Source of Love, if where you are right now is from kindness and love? What if it’s a special treat created just for you?
I don’t mean this as a saccharine-sweet, cloying attempt to put on rose-colored glasses. I don’t mean to deny or ride over the very valid emotions that arise in the face of struggle and challenge.
It’s a version of a perennial question I am always wanting us to ask, “Is Love available even here?”
2014 was a challenging year here at Heart of Business
I won’t hide the fact that this year has been very bumpy at Heart of Business. Implementing a new delivery model, hiring a new person, then letting them go because we hired the wrong position, then hiring another new person, plus a program of ours going sideways (none of the ones we’re currently offering, in case you’re wondering). It’s been painful and stressful at times.
I had had high hopes for 2014, and indeed we accomplished so much. I could draw up a long list of gratitudes.
But what was stuck in my craw, in my heart, was the pain of what hadn’t worked. And I faced it and asked the question, specifically avoiding asking for learnings.
Why did I avoid asking for learnings? Because I could feel in my heart how the searching for learnings was a way to avoid the pain of what happened. If I could understand it, I could control it, and I could move on.
Love doesn’t ask to be understood, it asks to be experienced. I bowed my head, faced the pain, and asked, “What if all of this was a special, beautiful gift of love and compassion from the Divine Source?”
I took time with the process. I say that so you don’t think it was instantaneous, in case it takes time for you, too. But the time was entirely me letting go of my attachments to how I wanted things and instead facing what was.
Finally I felt my whole body unclench, my head bowed, and I started crying- and then I felt an amazing freedom and love pour through me.
Then came the insights
Several insights came in shortly after that, learnings you might call them. My energy felt different, I was in a different, new space. Amazing.
If you go into a process like this looking for insights and learnings, you are most likely, subtly, in a hard-to-detect way, resisting what’s true. You might think you are in acceptance, but in Sufism it’s written, “If you don’t love all of My creation, you don’t love Me.”
The search for learning can be an attempt to control through mental understanding. Often we seek to understand when we don’t like something, and want to change it.
However, there is a different learning- the learning to love. When we love something we know it at a much more profound, intimate level. Understanding can hold something at an arm’s length while Love pulls whatever it is into a close embrace. It’s in this intimacy with our misfortune that the truly helpful insights emerge. But we can only access it through true love.
For 2015
I know you cherish hopes and dreams and intentions for 2015. I do, too. Before you go there, I invite you to embrace, in love, the messiness that was 2014. Accept it and then love it. Be willing to be surprised.
How does that intimacy feel? And then, later, you can perhaps marvel at the insights that arise, unsought. I invite you to share your insights in the comments below.
p.s. I sent an email a few days ago about reaching a heart-centered six figures.
Six figures may not matter to you, although once you pay your business expenses, taxes and save for retirement, six figures starts to look good, without it being overly extravagant, truly.
But the real issue is- are you getting the support you need, so you can rest into your business, and trust it to provide the financial security you long for, while doing the good work in the world?
As a reminder, here are the three starting points:
The Three Starting Points
ONE >> If you’re in start-up, or might as well be, meaning that you have very few and occasional clients, and your business income is way below what you really need, don’t overwhelm yourself with really expensive support. Begin with Foundations1: Clients and Money. Five months of in-depth support, this program will give you what you need to start getting clients and money in the door.
Foundations1: Clients and Money
TWO >> If you’re past start-up, but experience “feast or famine” in your client flow, and you sometimes are kinda making it, and sometimes not, it sounds like you’ve got some good basics in place, but need to expand your reach so you can have more clients. Foundations2: Expand Your Reach will help make networking, reaching out, and “getting out there” in a bigger way easy, organic and accessible even to introverts.
Foundations2: Expand Your Reach
(Note: You don’t have to take Foundations1 from us before you take Foundations2. Read the program description and see if it matches where you are.)
THREE >> If you’re past start-up, and are ready for much more personal, in-depth guidance and support, we recommend working closely with a practitioner, either in a small group or individually.
(a) Small Group
There are still a few spots left in our six-month Small Group Coaching. Each group has it’s own coach, it’s own focus, and no more than 6 participants. Take a look:
(b) Individual
Or, if you know you just want individual, one-on-one support with a coach, that’s our Organic Business Development Program, and there are five of us to choose from. Each of us has 1 or 2 openings only, so take a look and see who would be a great guide for you in the new year:
The Organic Business Development Program
DON’T KNOW? >> Know you need help but unsure which one fits where you are?
I get it. Your business may sound in some ways like it’s in one place, but in other ways it’s in another place. Then start with our Readiness Assessment and we can help you figure that out:
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed with choices. The key is to know that building a business takes time, and that there are specific stages of development you need to go through to get to dependable momentum.
You probably want to be further along than you are… and that’s okay, you’ll get there! Slow down, catch your breath, settle into your heart. You don’t need to spend more money than matches where your business is. A start-up business doesn’t need to spend thousands of dollars on learning the basics, and a more advanced business has the cash flow to get more customized support without stressing out the owner.
Take a moment in your heart and see where your business is. Then follow one of the links above, so that by this time next year, you really can have made the progress you want. Wouldn’t a two or three week vacation at this time of year be really great?
Ask any questions you have.
7 Responses
Mark, I really appreciate this perspective. How easy it can be to distract ourselves from being in full acceptance of “what is” by seeking to know, understand, or race to get to the learnings/insights of our experience.
There’s a saying “The only way out is through.” What I’m “extracting” 🙂 from what you’re offering here, Mark, is that sometimes we are focused on the getting-out part and completely miss honoring and loving the experience itself.
What if there were no “out,” and this is it? And, what if this “it” was a divine gift? How would I treat and sit with it, then?
I perceive Gratitude as similar. It’s easy to use it as a distraction, just like seeking learnings prematurely, rather than allowing them to organically emerge from the experience.
Gratitude is appreciation for the good that has already come to you…..and it’s ALL good, because as you say, “Everything comes from the Divine.”
Tshombé- so perfect… I love how you linked to it gratitude. Thank you for adding it in, brother.
Hi Mark, thanks so much for this post. For me when life is painful, really painful, I’m not able to say it is a gift of love, it just is. Like all of life it is a chance for love to be known and love to be shown. When the pain is deep I hold it with as much love as I can. When the joy is deep, I hold it with as much love as I can.
Yes, Peter- I hear you. That’s what I was writing in the article- that I can’t get there quickly- and the more painful, often the more time I get to. And the “change for love to be known and love to be shown” is what I was getting at.
Hi Mark. Thought you might like the poem by Michael Leunig
We struggle, we grow weary, we grow tired.
We are exhausted, we are distressed, we
despair. We give up, we fall down, we let go.
We cry. We are empty, we grow calm, we are
ready. We wait quietly
A mall, shy truth arrives. Arrives from
without and within. Arrives and is born.
Simple, steady, clear. Like a mirror, like a
bell, like a flame. Like rain in summer. A
precious truth arrives and is born within us.
Within our emptiness
We accept it, we observe it, we absorb it.
We surrender to our bare truth. We are nourished, we are changed. We are blessed.
We rise up.
For this we give thanks.
Amen
I really appreciated Tshombe’s comment. I often hear coaches and healers tell folks that you’re right where you’re supposed to be, and then dodge the experience of being in the pain of the moment. We’re quick to look for a lesson or find another distraction from whatever it is we’re not fully experiencing right now.
The funny thing about that is that we often end up repeating that experience on the spiral of life if we don’t sit with it. It’s similar to “getting the learning” but in a different way. It’s “getting the experience”, and well, if you don’t get it, then it only makes sense to repeat it.
When clients come to me in “the inbetweens” it’s often a difficult transition pinch. And yet, there are experiences here that have value, the pain of loss or what came before, the hope/anticipation for what’s coming next, as well as whatever lessons life may have handed to you along the way. Each piece is valuable to our development.
It’s always rough when you recognize you’ve made a choice in your business that didn’t go the way you hoped or planned… especially when other people are in the mix. But having the experience (as well as feeling and learning from it), better inform your future decisions and solidify the path you’re taking to business (and life) success.
I’ve been nourished by both this article and the comments – thank you all! I really needed to hear this right now. I’m healing myself through a supposedly incurable illness, and this is basically one description of the state I have had to be in in order to find my way as far as I’ve come.
I hadn’t realized how much this applies to the business (or possibly businesses) I’m slowly starting, though. I’ve tended to segregate business from healing, and this is part of what the difficulty has been for me, I see: I’ve associated business with the perennially, aggressively cheerful, with no allowance for pain or weakness whatever. (I’ve regarded learning a lot the same way.)
So the article and comments are an excellent reminder for me: my intention is to do my part of healing business as well as myself as I proceed – my business, of course, being the healing itself; my pain being that I keep running into energy deficits, and have to suspend the actual getting-into-the-material-world of the business in order to be physically well enough to go on.
What’s here on this page seems such a clear way to deal with this situation; like so many thing in healing, it turns out to be very simple. Not easy – but simple.
I really appreciate this article and the thoughtful comments, because it helps solidify me in the feeling that I’m not delusional, that the course I’m following actually can have physical-world results – and that it’s not separate from a way that would allow me to earn a living.
I will say something about gratitude that may be helpful. For some of us, gratitude can feel like an obligation: “you should be thankful you have thus-and-so, not like the starving children in India” – that kind of attitude, even if it’s not actually spoken, is kind of rife in various spiritual worlds, and can be trained into us at an early, unsuspecting age.
It’s not helpful, and it means that a lot of people (including myself) have been trained to conflate that healing frequency you’re calling “gratitude” with obligation. This is similar to the notion of learning to avoid pain; if you just hop to “I’m so happy” part, you can skip the pain. In healing, that definitely doesn’t work.
I’ve found it useful to just skip the word gratitude – which for me has a lot of “I owe you” overtones – and go to other words people have been using here – appreciation, savoring, enjoying – yeah, there are even weird ways you can enjoy pain, and I don’t mean sadomasochism! I mean the divine opening in which sadomasochism, guilt, and shame all unfold and transmute through divine energy.