Imagine this:
Your work feels easy.
You feel deeply aligned with your soul’s purpose, and trust implicitly that you are in the right place.
Every day, your business itself guides you to where to focus your time and energy. This business is an entity that you have a relationship with. It has a clear vision of where it wants to go, and knows that you are the person it wants to go there with.
You love showing your work to the world, because you do it in a way that feels completely authentic to you.
Earning money feels effortless, fun, and a way to really affect change and do good in the world. You feel completely worthy of every bit of success that you have, and know that the better you do, the more you can help lift other people up.
You have no need to listen to anybody else’s advice because you trust your path implicitly.
If your business isn’t there, it can be.
To those of us who work in the creative, healing, or magical fields, the world of business can seem like a hostile landscape: an ill-fitting, rational framework we have to force ourselves to adapt to in order to ‘succeed’.
Deadlines. Pushing. Schedules. Discipline.
5-year plans. 10-year plans. Elevator pitches. Strategies. Stress. Effort.
Hustle. Pushing. Exploitation. Scarcity. Competition.
In the current business model, it is normal for people to work more than they have capacity for. It is ‘heroic’ to be exhausted. It is ‘discipline’ if you push yourself harder than feels good. You have ‘potential’ if you wrestle this beautiful, creative thing that you have into a strategy, and try to tame its wildness into something that is easy to package and sell.
It’s maddening, and often feels like we’re constantly striving to be understood in a world that doesn’t speak our language.
How is it that in order to succeed as a business, we have to cut off the very thing that makes our work so beautiful to begin with?
Our creative work is grounded in a connection to the ‘other’ side:
Creating, healing, plants, magic(k). All of these things come from inspiration, from being receptive and open, and allowing this work to come through us. It is ludicrous to try and fit something that we surrender to into a framework where we are supposed to be in ‘control’ of the process.
Yet that’s what we try to do.
This framework we try to fit into is a part of an outdated model that most of us want nothing to do with. A model of capitalism and scarcity that doesn’t even acknowledge the magical or the creative, let alone be guided by it, as we all are in our creative lives.
If we don’t like the model to begin with, then why should we have to build our businesses this way?
Many of us rebel against the current system by opting out of its business model entirely. As a result many healers, artists, herbalists, and magical practitioners do not earn very much, feel guilty about earning, and cannot see a way to thrive as a business without ‘selling out’.