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.

_____________________________________________
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. 

_____________________________________________
much love.

Regularity in face of crazy weather; fasting

While the lower 48 is in the grip of the icy gods, it hit 50 degrees Fahrenheit here yesterday. This photo, taken today, could be from late May.

A couple of weeks ago, a little farther down the same road, a more typical scene.

I was talking about paradoxical pieces of advice for being best self/manifesting destiny/personal development. These two pictures of the same road exemplify a piece of advice on which all the gurus and advisers are unanimous, which seems to contain a paradox within itself:

Have a daily practice. How you start up your day sets the tone for how you move through the day, so be intentional about it.

and--here's the paradox--

The more consistent and stable you are with this practice, the more resilient you'll be when destabilization happens, for whatever reason, and you're prevented from practicing.

(I guess because by repeated practice, you've been diligently building the neural net, and that same net becomes a safety net that protects you from curveballs.)

This advice is sweet to me in several ways. First, because I've had experience of the benefits of a regular practice--the lived experience that life can feel more full of sparkle and opportunity when I live it with that level of intentionality. Second, because one of my favorite quotations from Rumi (Barks's translation, of course, I'm of that generation) says "Submit to a daily practice...Keep knocking, / and eventually the joy inside / will open a window / and look out to see who is there." I tend to think pieces of poetry stick for a reason. Then, because my doctor has been telling me for years now that such regularity is my best medicine against my own inherent instability. It's not that a bipolar person can't maintain a regular practice; it's that a bipolar person must work more diligently than most to maintain such a practice, which is one of her best protections against falling off the rails/the deep end/the face of the earth. Having a check-in first thing in the morning, and taking time to make a note of three or more things I'm grateful for before bed is feeling so good.

And so, when the vista looks like midsummer although it should be midwinter, tune into clues, like the absence of fireweed on the hillside...

...or the fact that the sun is nonetheless very far to the south in the sky...
And even though nature herself is one big curveball right now, stay in that winter, seed, potential energy space. 

I hope my own regularity of practice and prayer can be one small piece of stability to protect this local ecosystem, while bluff-edges become landslides, bugs and buds come out of dormancy, the ground thaws. I hold a piece of true north winter within me, watching that sky-southerly sun.

I've continued to fast twice a week. Twenty-four-hour fasts, dinner through dinner, so not a great long fast. I've been advised because of where my weight is that this isn't the best thing. I've come to agree that I probably shouldn't do it days that I have to drive, especially when the roads aren't good. But it is a form of practice of its own with much to commend it, and I haven't yet been able to convince myself to give it up. I guess one way to talk myself around might be to say that not-fasting is a form of regularity.

I'll make a few more posts about lessons I'm learning right now. And my next post will be about the big decision I was agonizing over and how I finally decided.
Meanwhile, I'll be getting up early for the Future of Nutrition Conference! It runs on East Coast time, 9am-9pm. 9am Eastern is 5am here!