Six Spiritual Lessons from Learning about Business

Winter has returned here. A windstorm that blew off roofs and blew in snow, and now the temperatures are in the teens, where they "should" be at this time of year, not the 40s.

My current crash course in business building is cross-pollinating beautifully with my focus on personal development. I've realized that my lifelong head-in-the-sand approach to finances, getting by solely due to extreme frugality coupled with some innate blind trust, is not just because I thought money was unimportant. There has been a certain amount of judgment of money as "unspiritual" as well as some scarcity mentality about not wanting to use up resources (who, me?) or not believing there's enough to go around. 
Time to let those go.

Wow, so part of my spiritual training right now is recognition that money, too, is spiritual. And the business training is spiritual training, too. I could go on and on, but here are six quick ones for Sunday night.

1. Abundance! You have to approach your business in the sincere awareness and consciousness of abundance. Acknowledge that there is plenty, there is enough for everyone, there is enough and plenty for you to have abundance. Yes! In spiritual development too, cultivating a sense of abundance is a consciousness-raiser.
2. To work well in business, it's essential to be in the present, aware. If you make a mistake, learn the lesson it encapsulates, and move on: now is the only time you can make a difference. In spiritual life too.
3. To build a good business, it's wise to have a daily practice that supports--and maintains--daily habits that focus your attention in the places needed. This is also important for self talk and change of personal habits.
4. When figuring out the focus of your business, it's wise to brainstorm before researching marketability--come up with ideas. And in the personal development sphere, spinning ideas is a great way to connect with a broader, one-mind reality. James Altucher talks about building an "idea muscle" as a way to access one's subconscious and become more creative and generally more productive.
5. Be your best for the greatest good. If you make your business as good as it can be, it will produce the most it can and satisfy its consumers to the greatest degree. If I am my best, I can do the most for the universe.
6. A business is part of an ecosystem, with consumers and suppliers and complex interactions on many levels. Acquire a sense of being part of a greater whole simultaneous with autonomy and personal accountability. And the same goes for my individual self. In both areas, there is a grace to the sense of being part of something greater than oneself, to being a channel, being of service.

Gratitude for spirit! I want to stay in that space. Perhaps my body can just run on pure spirit.

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On a different note, RIP Maxine Kumin, Pulitzer prizewinning poet, essayist, novelist, children's book writer--and back-to-the-lander. 
In her honor, here's a sonnet of hers that proves she had a wryly humorous appraisal of death:

Purgatory
And suppose the darlings get to Mantua, 
suppose they cheat the crypt, what next? Begin 
with him, unshaven. Though not, I grant you, a 
displeasing cockerel, there's egg yolk on his chin. 
His seedy robe's aflap, he's got the rheum. 
Poor dear, the cooking lard has smoked her eye. 
Another Montague is in the womb 
although the first babe's bottom's not yet dry. 
She scrolls a weekly letter to her Nurse 
who dares to send a smock through Balthasar, 
and once a month, his father posts a purse. 
News from Verona? Always news of war. 
Such sour years it takes to right this wrong! 
The fifth act runs unconscionably long. 

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much love.

Directions--Translating the Dictionary Into Poems, Consistency, and About that Cake

Often, after I write something, its cadences and sentences will run through my head for some time. I lie awake at night tinkering with lines of poems and making sure my changes are committed to memory so I can write them down in the morning. After publishing a blog post, I often go back and add a sentence here, adjust a sentence there, several times over. This time, I realized that my "Goals and Intentions" post of yesterday left enough things unspecific to merit another post. The spirit of my goal for 2011 putting in an appearance, perhaps: the spirit of paying attention, revising, reviewing.

I'm not about to give up paying attention, revising, reviewing because it's 2012! And that's the major point I feel I need to make: my goals, both in the rest of life and on the blog, are for more, better, deeper of the same general directions rather than branching off into something surprising and new.

James Altucher's blog today has a wonderful graphic illustrating the concept of "focus." Seriously, check it out: I'm a non-visual person and even I was struck by it! All these psychedelic circles appear to be in constant motion, until you focus on the black point at the center, at which point, all becomes still.
I take this not as a message simply to tune out the black dots, but in fact, to find ways to integrate the distractions into the points of focus, perhaps even use them as bridges to connect the dots. For example, in some ways, teaching Linguistics 101 feels like something of a distraction in my goal of becoming the best writer I can be. But on the other hand, as I spend all this time preparing the course, I find myself constantly using examples from poetry, or thinking how a topic in theoretical Linguistics is interesting from the poetic standpoint. I'm going to need to get better and better at written communication, since it's a web-based course, and at "knowing my audience" and giving them what they need. In that way, the moving circles are centered around the "point" and contribute to it.

Similarly, for one of my other jobs, I translate dictionary entries from Italian into English, referring to Ancient Greek. I adore this job. I adore it because it has me working right there in the guts of language, and also constantly dipping into fragments of Greek Literature for examples. I want to do more in my own poetry in terms of bringing in themes from Classical Literature, and I'm endlessly fascinated by words. So, another "interconnection between points" is that one of the first poem drafts I've been working on is a meditation on the concept of "equal" (a very complex adjective I translated a while back) interwoven with the story of Sisyphus. I don't even have a complete first draft yet, but it's one of those that keeps me awake at night.

I do best when I don't lie awake all night, though, and I think I blew off the "consistency" concept a bit last time. I do have some resistance to it, and mostly because I'm afraid of losing my crazed flair or something, but even if my sole motivation is being a better writer, I have to admit that I'm not much of a writer when I'm psychotic or suicidal, and that consistency in certain areas helps me to avoid spending too much time in either of those places.

And on the theme of continuity, as Mindy pointed out, my series posting "food as pleasure" has kind of fallen by the wayside, but is not totally forgotten. That cake I made on New Year's Eve was supposed to fall under that rubric, so I should say more about it in the near future too. A hint: zucchini!

I mentioned feeling less "connected" to food writing of late. It's partly because, although I was commissioned to make food several times last year, it's getting on for four years since I actually worked as a chef! How time passes!

But nonetheless, when I made my smoothie this lunchtime, I caught myself composing a post, or several, about how smoothies are so much more than the sum of their parts, how you can pretty much make a smoothie version of your favorite "anything," and other enthusiastic tidbits.

So, building on last year and aiming to do everything better, and to use the psychedelic circles to join the dots--that gives a fuller picture of what's to come. "A new day's never a blank page..."
How are you building on last year?