What a fun workday ahead of me, and what a joy to witness wins like that.

I was flooding with gratitude. I looked outside the window and the only thing I could say was thank you, thank you, thank you.

Thanks, life, for so much.

I sent a message to , expressing my joy and gratitude for having him as my partner in this adventure.

Then I felt like writing this.

This is for you if you feel discouraged, frustrated, so fearful that you will never get there. That your work life drains your energy and always has. That you know there is more but you just feel lost about how to get there.

This is also for you if you do what you love but your financial goals never really stabilized to support what you need for an abundant life for you and your family.

It is possible, but don’t give up. Don’t trade what is in your heart for anything. Don’t let fear and disappointment make you believe this is not for you.

It is.

I thought I was a lost case. I thought I would never fully love my work. That this was the reality of most people, anyway.

Don’t believe that.

If you had asked me 10 years ago if I would be doing what I do now, I would have never guessed.

But if I look back and reassess what brought me here?

I would say resilience.

Never giving up, and following all the signs that I could possibly perceive that my heart was always right. Never allowing my thoughts of fear and frustration to dictate how my life would unfold. Instead, I used them as fuel to discover different ways of consciously creating what I wanted and allowing life to surprise me.

Being around people who believed in the same thing I did was huge. It was a way of reminding myself: some people are doing it, so I can too. I am not crazy, I am not alone.

What kept me moving wasn’t only resilience in the hard moments. There was always an excitement about where I was going. Gratitude for where I am, yes, but always a pull toward something bigger than what I currently believed I could have.

And instead of pushing that away, I learned to make it safe. To build enough capacity in my system to hold the desire without making myself wrong for not having it yet. To let it exist with kindness and care, not force it down in the name of staying peaceful where I was.

This is actually the work we do in Radiant Flow, our embodiment community within Sacred Business Flow. Building that capacity so the desire doesn’t have to be suppressed or desperately chased.

It can just guide.

The other part was action. Challenging the beliefs my body held as absolute truth. And often, taking a step before I could fully see the ground. There is a saying: you take the step and the universe gives you the ground.

It’s true. And it’s terrifying.

But it’s how I found my way into something I could never have planned.

Now, I meet my inner child in my workdays. Playfulness, curiosity, wonder. Those are not exceptions to my days, they are mostly alive in my everyday life. Those are no longer feelings I feel only when I’m traveling or on vacation.

They are part of a normal Wednesday when my agenda is full of calls and mostly a whole day in front of the computer.

Uniting joy and money. That hasn’t been an achievement I unlocked. It’s been a gift. One I had to make myself available to receive.

I don’t need to be miserable making money or broke doing what I love.

I can love what I do and make money at the same time. This is my game and I create the rules.

So do you.

The answer is in your heart. Your mind will challenge you, until it jumps on board, because the feeling is so strong you can’t deny it.

Looking back now, I can see that every wall I hit was actually building something. The things that worked and the things that didn’t were all moving me in the same direction, because I never let the desire to experience more of my essence die.

So when you say “that didn’t work,” I want to invite you to pause there. Didn’t it? Or did it just not give you the result you were measuring for in that moment?

If you have a clear intention of where you’re going, nothing is wasted. The failed launch, the client who said no, the thing you built that nobody bought. All of it was building capacity, sharpening something, preparing you for what’s coming.

But there is one condition. You have to stay in it. You can’t land on “it didn’t work” and go quiet. You need to decide that you will believe this is for you too.

It doesn’t matter how long it will take.

As long as you’re moving, as long as your heart is still in it, it’s all serving you.

I am so pleased I never gave up. I would do everything again just to be where I am now. And I know deep in my heart, it keeps getting better and better.

Aliveness, joy, fun, enthusiasm, and money-making can walk together.

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

This week we had the honor of getting to know a little more, and her beautiful project to create a space that supports women in reconnecting with their joy.

Michele’s approach is unique. She meets you exactly where you are, and there is no one-size-fits-all recipe. Through experimentation and embodiment, she guides her group in a safe space to reconnect with joy.

Why does this matter?

In my opinion, this is the medicine for everything. Someone operating in joy is generous. They think about community, about support. Someone operating in joy sees the world as a playground and will do everything they can to contribute to making this planet a better place.

I love this: if you don’t know where to start, start with yourself. Work on reconnecting with what brings you joy and aliveness. That’s my path too, and it changed my relationship with life, affecting my health, my work, and everything else.

Things I’d Like to Share

on Sacred Business Stories

Sam is a huge inspiration to me. I use his example with clients all the time. I call him the master of connection and here’s why.

He is genuinely interested in other people. He loves to support creators on Substack, and he does it with a wide open heart. What does he get from that? I’m sure his own joy of being such a generous human being. But he also receives real support, deep friendships, and has experienced major growth in his publication over the last year.

If you want to understand what real connection looks like in practice, pay close attention to what Sam is doing.

Slow AI is not about learning to prompt better. It’s about learning how to relate to AI in a way that supports your thinking and makes you smarter every time you sit down with it.

Memorable Quote

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop - Confucius

New Here?

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

She finally stopped trying. Now she is building something called The Joy Club Way.

On Episode 5 of In Full Light, Carolina and I sat down with Michelle to talk about the work she is stepping into and the inner shift that made it possible. Michelle is a developmental psychologist and an educational psychologist, with a yoga teacher certification and 30 years of spiritual study layered underneath the academic work. Her credential list is long enough that she has been questioning whether she has any business writing about joy at all. Her answer to that question is the whole episode.

Michelle shared about how she volunteered to teach Intro to Psychology at a prison. She did not just teach the textbook. She showed her students how to use what they were learning to find more freedom inside their cells. Their final projects, she said, blew her away. And the line she said next was the one we kept coming back to.

“I felt more joy there than I felt in church, for sure.”

Michelle is not running a positivity program. She has chronic illness. She has years of meditation she does not actually enjoy. She knows what it is to sit with grief and rage and the long stuckness that nobody’s 10-minute walk after dinner is going to fix. Her definition of joy is sturdier than that.

“Joy is a sense of being connected to your purpose, to being oriented towards growth, to being present and to being connected.”

What makes Michelle rare is that she has the academic credentials to be a one-trick specialist, and she refuses. She wants the mind work, the heart work, and the body work in the same conversation. She wants developmental psychology and contemplative prayer in the same room. She references both Joe Hudson and Thomas Keating in the same sentence. The integration is the work. The thing she is moving away from is the part of her career that asked her to hide.

If you have built a career around credentials and you can feel a quieter voice asking you to bring more of yourself into the room, this conversation is for you. If you have been told to optimize, add the 10-minute walk, fit the meditation in, and you can feel that the prescription is the problem, Michelle has a different way of thinking about all of it.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• Why Michelle thinks the yoga modification is not a consolation prize, and what teachers miss when they prescribe a pose instead of meeting the point of resistance

• The Joe Hudson line she keeps coming back to: joy is the matriarch of emotions, and she will not enter the house unless her children come too

• The Steven Pressfield War of Art passage about resistance, and why scaffolding is her answer to getting unstuck

• The fourth-grade girl with the lowest IQ in the room, the poem she wrote, and the moment Michelle declared her the class poet laureate

• A cold bath, a yoga modification, and a nutritionist’s diet plan walk into the same problem: when a teacher confuses the goal with the practice, students start overriding their own inner wisdom

• The Frozen 2 song Michelle says brought her here, and why she still will not sing it (yet)

• The mind, heart, and body framework underneath The Joy Club Way, and the three forces that derail each of them

• Her closing line for everyone listening, which is the opposite of every productivity message you have heard this week

If you want to follow Michelle’s work, subscribe to her Substack, The Joy Club Way. She is building in public and the goodies only reach subscribers, not followers.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 26, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Not a dramatic dissatisfaction. A dull, persistent one. The kind that doesn’t make noise but never fully leaves.

For the longest time I thought there was something wrong with me.

Why can’t I like anything I do? Why don’t I even know what I like?

I remember my mom telling me years ago how hard it was for her to understand what I was going through. She said: this was never really a thing for me. I knew I wanted to be a psychologist, so that’s what I did. She always knew.

Not me.

I remember watching her face, confused by my confusion. And then turning that confusion back on myself. If even she can’t make sense of this... it really must be me.

Maybe this is you too. And if it is, you are not alone. This is real. It doesn’t mean you are broken.

But I didn’t know that.

I did vocational tests and rolled my eyes at the results. Went over every course at every university around me and felt nothing. Not even a flicker of yes.

I picked tourism because I loved to travel, then hated the industry. No time, no air, nothing of my own.

Then business management, because if you don’t know what to do, go generalist. At least you’ll fit somewhere.

Even without knowing what I truly loved, I gave everything I had to whatever was in front of me. I was succeeding. On paper, I was doing great.

But nothing felt natural. Nothing ever felt like mine. You know that feeling… I was born to do this…. nah… not me.

And there was that voice. You know the one. Why don’t you just like what you do. Why can’t you enjoy it. Out of everything in the world, nothing? You are so complicated, so fussy, so hard to please.

Why are you the only one this lost?

I believed it.

So I made a deal with life. Make money here, enjoy there. Stop complaining in between.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

The dissatisfaction kept growing. The headaches too. The few weeks off a year were never enough to breathe. I was always waiting, for the weekend, for the vacation, for the time when I didn’t have to be there. And sucking it up in between.

I had accepted this as truth. This is just life.

But underneath the acceptance, something quieter knew better. A feeling I couldn’t shake, that it wasn’t right to live like this. I just had no reference for anything different. The people around me either genuinely loved what they did, or they did it for the money and complaining about it was ok.

Both options felt foreign to me.

I wasn’t either.

My life didn’t change overnight. But somewhere along the way I got tired of asking what was wrong with me. And something shifted, not overnight, not dramatically.

I just got curious.

Open to something I didn’t know was possible. Willing to stop making myself wrong for the confusion, the frustration, the dissatisfaction that had lived in me for so long.

From self-attack to curiosity. That was the move.

And life started responding. Slowly. In ways I was finally ready to see.

That I didn’t have to choose one thing. That I could take all the parts of me, and combine them into something entirely mine. Not a path someone designed. A container I built. One that finally felt natural. That felt like ease.

I didn’t need to fit anywhere.

I needed to build something that fit me.

With Love,

Carolina

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

He was a tenured full professor with a PhD in atmospheric physics, a decade of public engagement behind him, a science & poetry blog that had peaked at a quarter-million views a year, and a past life as an award-winning playwright. He didn’t need this to pay for anything.

What he wanted was simple. He wanted to give people honest, accessible information about AI at the exact moment the digital divide was about to widen.

The problem with that opening promise was that he was about to spend twelve months learning everything he didn’t know about marketing, pricing, and what a paywall actually does for a creator’s ecosystem. His friend of Robot Stole My Homework, who he’d met through Substack, kept teasing him about it. He didn’t know what B2B meant until about six months before we recorded this episode . And the more he sat with that line in his first post, the less right it felt.

“I think having the confidence to be able to realize that your truth can change with you as you evolve, that’s quite difficult to square.”

Those were Sam’s words on the show. He said them about the day he decided to start charging for Slow AI. The irony is that the moment he changed his mind was the moment Slow AI started becoming what it is now.

The part most people already know is the growth. Sixteen thousand subscribers in under a year. Just under three hundred of them paid at £100 a year. Paid members get access to a monthly webinar curriculum that ends in an accredited continuing professional development certificate, the kind you can write off as a tax expense or stack as actual credits. He runs a Slow AI Live every Monday with his friend from . He just crossed a thousand followers on TikTok, where he does investigative AI journalism. He’s also the author of Gen AI in Higher Education.

So we had him on Sacred Business Stories this week to walk back through how he built it. The part most people don’t hear is what he had to change his mind about along the way.

The arc starts long before Slow AI. PhD in atmospheric physics. Then years on the intersection of science and theater. Then a decade of using poetry to platform the voices of marginalized people in science. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, he saw the next problem coming. AI was going to widen the divide between those who had access and those who didn’t, and there weren’t many academic voices speaking about it in a way regular people could use. That was the gap Slow AI was built into.

The decision to charge came after a hard internal conversation. What would a paid product even look like? Should it exist at all? He kept circling back to something he’d learned years earlier as a working poet. He used to do school workshops and talks for free until another poet told him that doing free work was taking paid work away from the people who needed it to be their living. Free, done by the people who didn’t need to charge, dilutes the field for everyone else.

“There is more than enough room for everybody to succeed in everything.”

That’s the line he kept coming back to. Once he stopped treating charging as the opposite of generosity, he found the structure that worked. £100 for the year. £25 for the month. He set the annual rate to filter for subscribers who’d stay locked in for the full curriculum, not subscribers cycling out at month two.

Two things stood out from the conversation.

The first was the line he said about evolving.

“Your truth can change with you as you evolve.”

That’s a pricing story on the surface. There’s a wider permission slip underneath. Most people who start a publication put something in writing on day one and feel locked in by it. They build a brand around the version of themselves who wrote that first sentence. Sam’s experience says you’re allowed to write a line in July, learn for nine months, and rewrite it. The product gets more clear and refined. The audience gets established. The first promise was a messy first draft in a sense.

The second was a daily practice he described for staying connected at sixteen thousand subscribers.

Two habits, every day. One restack of someone outside his usual bubble, because the Substack feed mostly shows you the people you already engage with and the algorithm needs to be pushed back against. One thank-you note to a creator whose work he wants to platform. He’s honest that this got harder past five thousand subscribers and harder again past ten. The practice is still there, deliberate, against the grain of what the algorithm wants to feed him.

The shift Sam made between the first post and the sixteen-thousandth subscriber is worth bringing attention to. He stopped treating service and money as opposites. He realized that charging was a way of not diluting service for everyone else who had to make a living from this. The audience that locked in for a year at £100 was the most invested audience he’d ever built.

Which reframes one of the most stubborn beliefs in the creator economy. That authenticity and strategy pull in opposite directions. Sam’s twelve months say they pull in the same one. Again, in my opinion, the most strategic thing he did was charge fairly. The most authentic thing he did was change his mind in public.

You can find Sam at Slow AI on Substack, on TikTok at @theslowai, and at samillingworth.com.

Slow AI

Knowing when to use AI and when to leave it the hell alone.

By Dr Sam Illingworth

He speaks to academics, educators, and working professionals who want to make informed decisions about AI without being sold the latest prompt-engineering hack. If that’s you, the curriculum is built for you.

Watch the full replay. I think you’ll love getting to know Sam.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories Episode 44 with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 27th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

The chapter that’s been on my mind since our most recent community Wonder Questions call is the one about pendulums.

what a pendulum is

When a lot of people think about the same thing for a long time, all that thinking turns into a kind of pull on the people who keep thinking about it. Zeland calls these pulls pendulums.

A pendulum has forward pull to keep going. It stays alive by pulling energy out of the people who pay attention to it. It doesn’t care if you agree or disagree. Both put energy in.

Some pendulums are easy to spot. A sports rivalry, for example, or a political argument. For example, right now in Brazil trading World Cup stickers has crazy momentum. The malls even have special areas set up for people to trade.

Others are harder to see. Your Substack feed is one. Your Stripe dashboard in the middle of a mini-course launch is another.

When you're caught in one, it doesn't feel like a “pendulum”. It feels like your own thoughts guiding you. Sometimes even an intuitive hit.

three ways to tell you’re caught in an unhelpful pendulum.

The first one is energy. You spend half an hour scrolling and you feel tired. You didn't move your body. You didn't even talk to anyone. But you have the experience of less to give to the work you wanted to do today.

Next is your attention. You sit down to write the thing you meant to write. Instead, you end up replying to someone else’s post or comment which was just a little bit triggering. The work you planned for today slides into tomorrow.

The third one is a feeling of urgency that shows up out of seemingly nowhere. The feeling that you need to respond to something right now. The urgency feels like something you own. Most of the time, it actually belongs to the pendulum from an energetic perspective.

If you can learn what that urgency feels like in your body, and how it touches your emotional center, you can catch it before you act on it.

fighting makes it stronger

The first move most people often make is to push back. They write a long reply about why the intention behind the comment is wrong, or they mute or block the person who sent it and walk off feeling slightly better.

That action helps a little.

When dealing with a pendulum, fighting and agreeing are the same thing. They both require energy being invested. You can spend an hour writing a takedown of someone’s bad idea. What you’ve done is give the bad idea another hour of life.

This is why someone you can't stand can sometimes take up as much of your time in your life as someone you love. You read every post they put out. You complain about each one. Either way, the hours have been spent. The pendulum doesn't care which side you're on.

how to actually stop one

You stop a pendulum by not pushing against it. That’s the whole technique.

When the urgency shows up, you don’t have to act on it. You let the feeling pass and keep doing what you were doing.

In real life, this looks like leaving your phone face-down for a minute when everything within you is screaming to grab it. Or seeing a post that’s getting a lot of attention and choosing not to write one like it just because it would do well for the algorithms . Nothing has to change externally. What changes is the internal stance you choose to adopt.

two questions

When I feel that urgency now, I ask myself two questions. They are simple.

Question one.

“Is this feeling coming from what I actually care about, or is it coming from whats coming into awareness?”

Sometimes the answer is the first one. The urgency is real and I should act. Most of the time, that’s not the answer.

Question two.

“If I weren’t under the pull of an external force, what would I actually want to do?”

This one is more useful. The answer often surprises me. There is an opportunity to choose differently.

not caring is also a trap

Most of us never get good at this because we think the only way to stop being pulled is to stop caring. That isn’t true.

Not caring is its own pendulum. It’s a heavy one. You have to keep reminding yourself that you don’t care about things you actually do care about. That takes effort, and the effort drains you.

What Zeland calls neutrality is something else. Neutrality means you care about something without giving it your energy. You can still respond and you can still act. You just don’t get pulled around by what’s in front of you.

It feels like reading a comment on something you wrote and noticing the small urge to defend yourself. You let the urge pass through before you reply. Then you reply, or you don’t. The reply tends to be better. And you don’t lose the rest of the day to the task.

what this has to do with your business

Your business is one of the strongest pendulums in your life. Most people assume the actual work is what wears them out. Then they look back at their week and notice the writing or coaching took just a handful of hours. The rest of the time went to obsessively checking the sales dashboard and reading the group chat of their favorite community to size themselves up against what other people had done.

A lot of people and I work with have spent years doing inner work. They think if they keep going deeper, the pull of negativity will stop. The inner work matters. But it usually doesn’t break a pendulum.

What helps is changing how you relate to the forces at work around you. You can keep posting on Substack and stop allowing your energy to swing with what you see being published on the platform. You can keep watching your sales dashboard without letting it decide what kind of week you had. From the outside, you can’t tell the difference. Inside, the stance is different.

Sometimes for success to become more stabilized in our client’s businesses, all they to focus on is stopping from bleeding energy into the parts of their business that pull their focus away from the things that matter. The strategy is often fine. The patience to stay with day by day ordinary parts of running their business is being draing by things they didn’t even realize were robbing them of their energy.

try this for a week

Before you check anything, ask yourself one question. “Is this me, or is this what I’m about to look at, pulling on energy?”

Don’t change what you do. Just answer the question.

The first week I tried this, my Stripe number dipped for three days, then came back. The writing got better my sleep got better too.

You are not as free as you think you are. The part of you that doesn’t want to hear that is the part the pendulums rely on to keep them going.

That’s worth thinking about.

Phil (& Carolina)

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Most people building a business only ever know the first one.

If you’re building online, you have to be seen so the right people can find you. There’s no one-size-fits-all recipe for that, and there are many ways to go about it. But in every way, visibility challenges us differently.

In last week’s Radiant Flow class, we tried to experience visibility from neutrality. Because like everything in life, we give a charge to things based on our own experience.

Visibility, on its own, is neither good nor bad, just like money. It carries the meaning you give it.

But it lands differently in each of us depending on how we perceive it. And based on that, we either take action, or we don’t.

Two ways of seeing visibility

From a business perspective, visibility is your ability to be seen so people know you exist and can solve a problem they have.

From a spiritual perspective, visibility is a natural quality of your soul.

Your soul didn’t come here to hide. It came to make the light visible through you, through your body, through everything you create. That is visibility in its purest form.

So what is being visible, if not the act of coming home to yourself and letting someone witness it?

Being visible isn’t performance. It can be executed from that space. But when you find your music within, you want others to experience it. It doesn’t come from forcing or needing. It comes from the desire to experience yourself naturally without protection, without defenses.

The problem: these two perspectives rarely meet

“If I want a business, I need to…” - and there’s a long list of things you should do.

That’s why many gifted people never fully build one. They refuse to play the game of performance that successful people seem to be playing.

But what if you could have a successful business and still operate from the feeling-home energy of visibility? What if you could be consistent, disciplined, and build something real without needing, forcing, or proving?

Visibility doesn’t change when it hits the business world. It gets challenged. By the charge in the field. By all the “you must,” “you should,” “that’s how you do it” advice out there.

You, as a creator, get to choose: do you want to experience visibility as performance, or as a natural quality of your being?

A Sacred Business is where both versions finally meet

Where being found by the right people and feeling at home in yourself aren’t two separate things. They’re the same movement.

You are not committed to posting on social media three times a day. You are committed to your own light. And that changes everything.

Hiding isn’t the answer either

Hiding carries the same exhausting energy as performance. In both, you’re not flowing - you’re protecting yourself.

In hiding, you protect your light from being experienced by many. In performance, you protect it too by being seen only through the lens you think the world will accept.

Both drain you.

What we truly want is to come home to ourselves. To open our hearts and serve. To help others from that space.

I’m learning that being seen, for me, is allowing more of my light to shine. And when I do that, something unexpected happens . I see that light more clearly in others, too. That feels like ease. Openness. Aliveness.

Your business deserves that version of you.

And your soul deserves a business that serves as a container for your light to be seen.

With love,

Carolina

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

and his upcoming book, the Wellbeing Equation

Things I’d Like to Share

Conversation with founder of Second Callings

Eva built her business from the heart, and now she helps others find their second calling. It takes courage to step fully into that and I love being around happy people building fun, profitable businesses that make them feel whole in their expression.

One thing Eva said stayed with me:

You can start a brand new business and still have the old pattern running underneath it. A new dream, same old energy in charge.

The real work isn’t just naming the pattern - it’s going deeper than the label. That’s exactly what she helps her people do.

An inspiring read this week: I Lost Myself Building the Thing I Dreamed Of — by

A raw, vulnerable piece for anyone who feels uninspired, disconnected, or a little lost inside the version of themselves they worked so hard to become.

Sage Marinelli

I Lost Myself Building the Thing I Dreamed Of

This might be the most vulnerable I’ve ever been online, but I thought sharing it might inspire someone else who feels uninspired, disconnected, or a little lost in the version of themselves they worked so hard to become…

Read more

12 days ago · 12 likes · 10 comments · Sage Marinelli

New Here?

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Carolina and I spent close to forty minutes with Bronce for an author spotlight, and the conversation centered on a moment that changed his trajectory going forward

During the pandemic, he was limited by the number of patients he coul see. He moved to telehealth, and his calendar filled in a way it had never filled before. He capped his schedule at nine people a day, five days a week, and even at that pace he started having to turn people away. Long-time clients calling back, asking for an hour, and he had nothing left to give them. In his words, “in my world, that was a little bit of a sin.”

That sentence is the seed of his book.

The book is called The Wellbeing Equation. He has been working on it since the pandemic. He told us he wrote it to 240,000 words before he knew how to stop. He’s now cutting it down to publish at fifty or sixty thousand. He got an agent last October, after thirty years in private practice, and as we recorded this his proposal is currently in front of publishing houses.

What strikes you about Bronce, the second you start talking to him, is the rigor underneath the warmth. He spent ten years getting through his psychoanalysis training. He doesn’t speak in slogans. When we asked him for the one thing in his wellbeing framework, he gave us three (sleep, diet, exercise) and then refused to call it three things. He calls it one thing, because the body and the mind have to be functioning before any of the higher work becomes possible.

His central image is what stayed with us. Bronce describes everyone’s wellbeing equation as a fingerprint. The components are universal. Sleep, food, movement, connection, spirit. But the way they combine is yours alone. Most of the advice you’ve absorbed in the last decade has been someone else’s fingerprint pressed onto your life. His book is an attempt to give people permission to find their own.

There’s a moment about halfway through the conversation where he turns the questions back on us. He asks how we built what we built. How Carolina and I work together. What the experience has been like inside the container. It’s a generous move from a guest, and it’s the move of a working analyst. He doesn’t perform expertise. He listens.

A few other threads from the full episode:

The Trifecta of Wellness, and why he refuses to call it three things.

What he means when he says writing this book has become a spiritual journey.

The phrase “experiments in living,” and why he keeps returning to it.

The five-word sentence Carolina gave him near the end that he said would change how he thinks about waiting: “holding the pose.”

What he might write next, sparked by listening to us describe our partnership in real time.

Subscribe to his Substack and read his pinned essay, “Your Wellbeing Equation is Like a Fingerprint” here. When the book launches, his readers there will be the first to know.

The Wellbeing Equation | Bronce J. Rice

Psychoanalyst | Psychologist | Health & Wellness Coach dedicated to helping you understand and enhance your wellbeing.

By Dr. Bronce Rice

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

and I spent an hour with her on Episode 003 of In Full Light, and the conversation was the kind that doesn’t really leave you. Eva is the founder of Second Callings. She works with midlife professionals who built a good life, hit the markers they were told to hit, and now feel something else stirring. Her job is to help them name it, see the pattern that has been running quietly underneath everything, and build the work that fits who they’re becoming.

She did not arrive at this work in a straight line.

Eva’s father died when she was fifteen. He was a physician, a dreamer, and he left blueprints for a hospital on the dining room table. Plans he never got to build. Eva spent the next three decades trying to make her time matter in his honor. She went to business school because her mother was struggling with finances after he died and Eva promised herself she would never not understand money. She built businesses that looked successful from the outside. She fainted at her desk once from exhaustion. She gave from a cup that was empty for so long she forgot what a full one felt like.

Five years ago she started circling the work that is now Second Callings. She could not quite step into it. She kept editing, kept hiding, kept telling herself she’d be ready when she was ready. Eventually she stopped trying. She surrendered the whole thing to God, the Creator, in her words. She said whatever you want me to do, I will do it. I have no desire.

And then a door she did not expect opened. An opportunity came to manage some investments. The part of her resume she had been most ashamed of, the finance training she resented for two decades, became the thing that funded the launch of the work she was born to do. She told us she can’t quite recognize her life now.

The reason this episode matters for our community is not just the story. It’s what she’s doing with it.

There is a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what she wishes more people understood about her work. Eva’s answer is the cleanest articulation of a pattern we see constantly. Most people, she says, know the label. I’m an achiever. I’m a perfectionist. But naming the pattern doesn’t change it. You can build a whole new business with the same old energy running underneath, and it will just hustle in a different costume. The real work is slower. It’s quieter. It goes deeper than the labels.

She also said something about authority that I want to underline.

She used to equate her competence with her income. If she wasn’t earning, she wasn’t good. The marketing world made it worse by selling proof-of-competence through screenshots. What she has come to believe, and what she now offers her clients, is that the credential people actually want is lived experience. They want a guide who has been where they are standing. Not a curriculum. A witness.

If you are someone who built the life you were told to build, and you feel something quieter and truer trying to surface underneath it, this episode is the kind of conversation you’ll want to sit with twice.

A few other threads from the full episode:

• The Care framework she built during her pause year, and the moment of internal safety it depended on.

• Why play is not a reward you earn at the end. Why it has to be part of the process or the process eventually hollows out.

• The Autopilot Assessment that names the pattern running in the background, and why she designed it as the first step.

• Her 25-year vision, including the conversation she is currently having with her university about bringing this work into education.

• The phrase she used that we keep coming back to: “We are a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event. There is nobody like you.”

Thank you , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This episode was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Look closer and you'll see a pattern. There are five.

Together, Carolina and I have been working with a specific kind of person for a few years now.

Smart. Spiritually awake. Has done the inner work. Read the books. Completed quite a few trainings in many cases. And still hasn't built the thing she desires most in her heart.

What we’ve noticed is that the stuckness doesn’t show up the same for everyone. Which make sense, because we are all highly individualistic. Once you slow down and actually listen, there are five patterns that show up for the majority of folks that choose to work with us. They look different on the outside. The stories are different. The wiring underneath is the same.

These aren’t personality types. They're not your enneagram number or your astrology chart. They’re five specific ways the work that wants to come through you gets quietly held back. Most people fit one of these. Some fit two.

Here they are.

You’re hiding the best stuff.

You have credentials. Years of trainings, study with specific teachers. You also have something else. Something that didn’t come from any of that. You’ve lived through hard things and worked through them yourself. By now those two things are mixed together so completely that you couldn’t pull them apart if you tried.

But you haven’t claimed any of it as yours. When someone asks what you do, you point at your teachers. You name the method. You don't say the real thing, which is that people get results because of you, not onl because you are incorporating a specific method.

You keep the work mostly to yourself. Charging for it feels like turning something sacred into a transaction. Sharing publicly feels like too much exposure. You only post when something feels really worth saying. Which doesn’t happen often.

You can’t think your way to ready.

You take your work seriously. More seriously than most people do. You’ve put years into trainings and study. You actually know your stuff.

But you keep prepping instead of starting. Every new program opens up new questions. Every new question pushes “ready” a little further out. You finish the offer you were going to put out, and by the time it’s finished it doesn’t feel right to you anymore, so you start refining again.

You buy the next program hoping for new answers. You write the post and don’t publish it. You plan the launch and adjust the date. You’ve been at this for years, and the body of work you’ve built has never actually been seen by the people it was for.

Yes to everyone but yourself.

You are generous. The people in your life would say it and mean it.

And the phone rings, and you pick up. Whoever asks first gets the time. Friends, the school, your partner, your kids, a client. By the end of the week your schedule got eaten by everyone else, and the one thing you said you’d do for yourself didn’t happen.

With your work, the same thing. You lower your prices. You let them slide. You have the tendency to answer questions and solve the problem for free on a call. You take on people who aren’t really your people because they’re hurting and you know you can do something. The pattern is the same whether you’re three years in or just getting started.

Lots going on. Nothing actually launches.

You see things other people miss. Where things are heading. The next ten years. How a small thing today connects to something much bigger.

The trouble is the vision keeps multiplying. You’re working on something and Then something new and exciting shows up. Once you see it, you feel compelled to start working on it. By the end of the year you have four or five projects in various stages of incompletion. The thing you started two years ago is still sitting there, waiting for you to come back to it.

Your year looks the same most years. A few months of high energy. A stretch of trying to keep multiple projects alive. A crash. The empty months. The next exciting idea. Money comes in waves instead of adding up.

The inner work has become the hiding place.

What you carry is rare. The depth of inner work you’ve done, most of it not by choice. You read energy. You see what’s under what someone’s saying before they’ve named it. The depth in you is something the people you work with feel immediately.

And you don't put it to work in the world. The inner work has become the place you live, and you don’t come out. Every time it’s time to take an action in the outer world, something stops you. Your energy isn’t quite right. The moon’s wrong. You’re honoring the season. Your nervous system isn’t quite regulated enough to handle visibility yet. There's one more piece you have to heal first.

That moment of being ready to share your light never quite arrives.

Why it matters to know which one is yours

This isn’t the kind of list where you pick the one you like. You already know which one is yours. You knew by the second pattern, maybe the third. Seeing yourself in one of them is the point.

Because the wiring underneath each of these patterns is specific. What keeps you hidden isn’t what keeps you over-giving. What breaks the prep-forever loop isn’t what breaks the start-everything loop. Treating them like the same problem is why most of the inner work you’ve already done hasn’t changed anything in your business or professional life.

We built a short quiz to help you find your primary pattern with more precision than reading five descriptions in an essay can give you. Seven. Three minutes. You get back which one is yours and how it shows up both as a gift, and as a challenge to work with in putting your work out there.

Take the archetype quiz →

The work that wants to come through you has been waiting on the other side of one of these patterns for a while now. Naming it accurately is a great first step.

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Maybe you still have a job and you juggle both.

It’s been years. You keep investing in yourself, refining your craft, staying up to date with everything that makes your service more powerful. With the time left after your family and your job, you put effort into the business that has a big space in your heart but very little in your life. You understand marketing.

Or maybe you already left your job. You have the time now. You have a few clients. You took the leap.

In both scenarios, you know most of the pieces. The social media presence, the newsletter, the lead magnet, the funnel, the sequences. You’ve enrolled in challenges. You’re part of marketing communities. You know what to do.

You know visibility is important, you know authenticity matters. Consistency and discipline, oh yeah, everybody talks about it, you get it.

You want more but you feel like you’ve been spinning at the same level for years.

So you buy one more template to improve your emails, you create another lead magnet, you create another course. You learn more strategies on how to grow your social media.

You post more, you keep showing up.

And yet, you don’t feel you have a business. You know way more than what you can actually do.

You have more strategies than most people. You are actually tired of marketing but you know it’s important.

What you don’t realize is, all the strategies you choose to do, you either choose them because they fit in the range of emotions you were willing to feel, or you adapt them to stay safe in your own bubble.

Not consciously. But every time a strategy required you to be more visible than felt safe, you modified it.

Every time an approach asked you to be more direct about money, more bold in your marketing, more truly seen, something in you found a reason why that particular thing wasn’t right for your business, even maybe thinking it’s not authentic.

And you moved on to the next strategy.

The strategy wasn’t wrong.

Your system was protecting you from the emotions that the right strategy, well executed, would require you to feel.

Cookie cutter strategies running through a protective nervous system produce nothing.

You operate in the short term because your system doesn’t allow you to dare to think strategically for the long run.

The energy behind every action is protection. And protection cannot expand a business.

This is what nervous system work actually changes in a business. Not your tactics. The system running underneath them.

A business run by someone with a regulated nervous system doesn’t mean everything becomes easy or that you get results in every tactic you apply. It means you keep moving anyway. And more than just moving, you collect information, you learn, you are paying attention in every action you take not quickly jumping to conclusion like “this is not for me”

It also means you enjoy the journey, and in that openness you experiment, you dare, you take risks.

You have a LOT of fun.

The challenges don’t disappear. What changes is how you meet them. You approach them with curiosity instead of dread. You feel triggered and you know what to do. Hiding is no longer the answer because you have the capacity to stay.

You stop building complexity to stay safe.

Your business gets simpler, clearer, more powerful. Because simplicity is only available when you stop protecting.

You feel authorized to do what you do. You stop needing to reference every teacher and certification as proof. You own your experience and you speak from it.

You make more money. Not because you found a better funnel. Because you know your value. Your visibility expands.

You stop talking people out of investing in you. You enjoy making money, no guilt, no shame.

You consistently feel inspired. You keep growing and evolving. The business keeps pushing you forward and you accept its invitation. And you like it.

You rest without guilt. You hire help. You stop doing everything alone. You start knowing what works for you and what doesn’t. You innovate. You feel clear!

Why?

Because a regulated system operates from the present moment, not from the memory of past outcomes. In an unregulated system, the past becomes a prediction. Instead of learning from experience, it blocks you from taking action because your system expects the same result.

Regulating your nervous system is the foundation of a successful business. In fact, the level of success you want exists only in a regulated system.

Because even if the business grows, if your system spent the whole way there in protection mode, you won’t be able to feel what you built. You won’t be able to enjoy success. It doesn’t matter how much money you make.

Real success in business and in life asks for an open system. One that can take action, receive the result, stay present with what it means, and keep going.

Strategy will always have a role. But it is only as good as the system running it.

And to be clear, knowing about regulating your nervous system is nothing if you don’t practice. The knowing you have about this is only as good as your ability to apply it.

With Love,

Carolina

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

There’s a call we host every month that we’ve barely talked about here in our newsletter. Starting today, that changes.

It’s called Wonder Questions. Over 200 of you are in the Sacred Business Network at this point, and a group of us shows up live for it every month. It’s an hour long. We pick a passage from a teacher we’re sitting with. Carolina or I read it. Then we open a few questions that don’t have right answers. People share what’s actually alive for them in their business and their life. We listen. We respond. An hour later you've seen something about your business or yourself that you couldn't see when you first joined the Zoom.

Once a month from here on out, I’ll be sharing what came up on the call. Not what individual people said. That stays in the room. But the teaching we sat with, a few thoughts from Carolina, and a few from me.

So here’s what happened this month.

We read from a book called Reality Transurfing by Vadim Zeland. The passage was about pendulums.

A pendulum is what happens when a big group of people get worked up about the same thing at the same frequency. Think sports games, social media, the news, a political fight. Once enough people are feeding the same emotion at the same frequency, that energy starts to behave like its own thing. It pulls more people in. And it feeds on whatever attention you give it, including the attention you give by being against it.

The person who can’t stop hate-scrolling and the person who can’t stop telling everyone how bad social media is are stuck in the same pendulum. Energy is energy. The pendulum doesn’t care which side of the argument you’re on.

The way out is what Zeland calls disengagement. Disengagement is more subtle than it sounds. You don’t have to leave the situation. Your external behavior can stay the same. What changes is on the inside. You feel the pull and you don’t latch on.

This concept has been one of the more useful things I’ve read over the years for how I approach my own business.

After so many conversations with people building heart-led businesses, I see the same rollercoaster everywhere. You get into a high state. Vision work, a great coaching call, a moment of real clarity. You feel like you are on the top of the mountain. The next day you crash. A week later you’re doubting the whole thing. Then you’re back up. Then back down again. That’s the same pendulum, just one you set in motion yourself.

Carolina shared on the call that freedom doesn’t sit on either side of the pendulum. It sits in the middle, in what she calls neutrality. You’re there with people, warm and paying attention, and you’re just not getting swept away by the river.

She told a story to make it real. A few years back she was in the middle of a divorce, had moved countries, was Airbnb-hopping with her kids, and had just lost a big chunk of her money. Her mom came to visit. Carolina was bracing for sympathy. Her mom took one look at her and said, this situation is so bad, all we can do is celebrate. Let’s go drink a beer. They went and got a beer. They laughed about it. The pendulum broke right there.

For me, the practice has shown up most around sales. I used to tighten up the second a sales conversation got real. Now when I notice that pull, I get up from my desk and put on music. I dance for 30 seconds to a minute. It looks ridiculous if you saw it. It also works. My body remembers it has a choice.

That’s what the call kept circling back to. You don’t have to fight what’s pulling on you, and you don’t have to withdraw from things. The work is simpler than that. Remember what isn’t yours, and choose what frequency you actually want to be in.

This kind of conversation is why we built the Network. There are plenty of places online to talk about funnels and pricing and Substack growth. There aren’t many where you can sit with people who already understand what it means to build a business from the inside out, and explore the actual questions that change how you show up in the work.

If you want to be in the room for the next one, we just put up a new page for the Network. You can see a bit more about the types of folks that show up for these calls, read what they are actually like, and decide if it’s a fit.

Join the Sacred Business Network →

See you on the next one.

Phil

Who We are Celebrating This Week:

Gary writes for midlife people who feel a pull toward something more. His Substack is about reshaping your life to fit who you are now, not who you had to be to get through your thirties. Practical, grounded, and worth a read if you're in that stretch.

Gary runs the Life Design Collective. He’s our latest member to join the Sacred Business Network, and we are so glad to have him in the fold.

The Life Design Collective Substack

Here you find my musings on what it takes to design the life you want and deserve to live. We ALL have it in us to design our lives and I'm confident this space will support you in that pursuit

By Gary Allen

Things I’d Like to Share

Most conversations with doctors stay clinical. isn't most doctors. This episode of In Full-Light stayed clinical for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear physicians willing to go.

Here’s what had to say about it:

Most marketing conversations chase the sexy stuff. isn't most marketers. He spends his days on the unsexy infrastructure that decides whether any of the sexy stuff actually reaches a human.

Here’s what had to say about it:

Here’s what had to say about it:

Memorable Quote

Vadim Zeland — “Pendulums are not malevolent in themselves. They simply need energy. They do not care if they devour you in the process.”

New Here?

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.

Matt runs a boutique email performance agency. He helps entrepreneurs make sure their emails actually land in inboxes instead of spam. It sounds dry. But oh so important.

Most first-time creators don’t think about deliverability until they have a problem. They build an audience, they send emails, and suddenly half their emails are landing in promotions or they’re getting spam complaints they don’t understand. By then, the damage is harder to undo.

Matt is the person you call when that happens. I’ve called him. When we were moving our list from ActiveCampaign over to Kit and connecting it with Substack, when we needed to understand what was actually happening with our email health, and that’s when I reached out.

What makes Matt different is that he can explain something genuinely technical and boring and make it clear. He doesn’t overcomplicate it. He doesn’t hide behind jargon. He just says: here’s what’s happening, here’s why it matters, here’s what you do about it.

What We Talked About

We went deep on how email performance actually works. Not the copywriting part. Not the psychology. The mechanics. The infrastructure. The stuff that determines whether your best email ever written lands where people can see it or disappears into the void.

We talked about:

• Why your sender reputation matters more than most people realize

• What happens when you import a list incorrectly (and how to catch it)

• How to keep your email health strong as you scale

• What to look for if your deliverability starts dropping

• Why the platforms you choose (ActiveCampaign, Kit, Substack, whatever) have different capabilities for protecting that health

The conversation was technical. But it was also practical. Matt has built his entire business around the reality that most founders and creators don’t know this stuff exists until they need it.

Why You Should Listen

If you’re building an audience and you send email, this is relevant. Not because you need to become an email infrastructure expert. But because you need to understand the baseline. You need to know when something’s off before it becomes a crisis.

Matt also has a gift for making complex things sound simple. That’s rare. And if you ever hit a deliverability wall, you’ll want to know who to call.

He’s building at deliverabilitynow.com. Subscribe to his newsletter. It’s good.

There are a lot of people right now being invited to upgrade their perspective on what service means for them, and to take action from that new space.

This essay is for you if you have already experienced some level of success. You know how to make money. You’ve had a strong career or you have been running a practice or a business that works well. And yet something feels missing.

Your needs are met. You can keep going exactly the way you are. But there is this invisible, ongoing feeling. A quiet thought that keeps coming back.

Do I really want to keep going like this?

You find yourself going through the motions. Not dreading the work exactly, but not lighting up from it either. Waiting for it to be over so the good part of your day can begin. The fun part. The alive part.

And then you feel a little guilty for feeling that way because if you look around, everything is fine.

There is nothing really wrong.

Service is one of the most common breakthrough frequencies. And it almost always comes paired with discipline. People say they want to create something new but can’t seem to find the discipline to do it.

So they assume that is the problem.

They are trying to build something new from a place of flatness. Dissatisfaction. Almost discouragement.

They know it is not the same thing they have been doing. They just don’t fully know what the new thing looks like yet.

And you would not be where you are today if you lacked discipline. The problem is not discipline. It is that you will no longer give your discipline to something that feels boring to you. Your soul is done with that.

And honestly, that is a sign of growth, not failure.

Most of us built what made sense at the time. Early on we don’t have the full awareness of our own creative power yet. So we do what seems possible. What people around us expected. What we believed would make money. We didn’t question it much because it worked.

And for a while, it was enough.

But that version of you built from need. From proving. From what felt safe and acceptable. And it served its purpose.

You are not that person anymore.

The question has changed. It is no longer what do people need from me, or what will make money. The question your business is asking now is what do you truly want.

You still want good money. That has not gone away and it doesn’t need to. But money stopped being enough. And that is not a problem to fix.

That is the invitation.

Service is asking you to move from need to want.

From doing what makes sense to doing what sets you on fire.

From building what was expected of you to building what your heart has been quietly asking for.

Desire. Passion. Fire. Adventure. That is the frequency of your next level.

And when you let yourself go there, even just in a question, the mind gets loud. It will give you every reason why this is not realistic. Why you should be grateful for what you have. Why this is not the right time.

That is not the truth speaking. That is fear. It is protecting an identity that will need to be let go for the new thing to be born. The mind cannot see how to get there, so it tells you it is impossible.

Don’t let it fool you.

The want is real. The desire is real. The feeling that there is more, not just more success, more aliveness, that is real.

Let the question exist. What do you truly want? Go there. Have fun with it.

That is the energy of your next business. And the upgraded version of your service.

With love,

Carolina

Take the Harmony Map

I want to say something plainly at the top. If chronic pain came back into my life tomorrow, is the person I would call. Carolina and I just spent over an hour with him on Episode 002 of In Full Light, and I want to tell you why.

For anyone newer here, I spent eleven years in chronic pain. From around my 29th birthday to about 40. I’m roughly four years on the other side of it now. So when I say I would hire David, I’m saying it as someone who tried a lot of things during those years, who watched a skeptic slowly emerge inside me as one modality after another didn’t deliver, and who had moments where I genuinely thought I was just slowly dying.

David is Harvard-trained. Double board certified. Almost thirty years in integrative and functional medicine, with training in rehabilitation, internal medicine, pain management, and osteopathy. He started out as an engineer in San Diego, woke up energetically during a Tai Chi class one day, and decided he needed to find out what that energy actually was. So he went to medical school. His Tai Chi teacher thought he was crazy.

What’s happened in the thirty years since is the reason I would hire him.

Here’s one story he told us. Early in his osteopathy training, he was working pain management in a 500-bed nursing home in the Bronx because he needed the job. He met a 38-year-old woman on long-term care for brain inflammation from lupus. She was on 300 milligrams of OxyContin a day, a dose that would kill most of us, plus a heavy load of Lyrica. He looked through her file. The inflammation was gone. Something else was keeping her locked in.

He had her lie down. He held her head and listened the way his teachers had taught him. The membranes around her brain felt like cardboard. He waited. He let his attention rest with whatever subtle movement was there. After a while her whole system released, and she stopped breathing for almost a minute and a half. He sat there wondering if she had just died.

Then the breath came back, slow and rolling. She opened her eyes, started laughing, and said, I hadn’t exhaled in ten years. That was the end of her pain. They tapered her off the drugs. She went home.

When you ask David about moments like that, he doesn’t oversell them. He says they took the ideas of anatomy and physiology he learned at Harvard Medical School and made him hold them more loosely.

There’s a moment later in the episode where I tell him about my own pain years and ask what he says to someone who feels like they’ve tried everything. His answer is the most honest I’ve heard a doctor give to that question. He doesn’t reach for a method. He reaches for what’s underneath despair, and he tells the truth that even there, something small is still worth believing.

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A few other threads from the conversation:

• The framework he uses called the three M’s, and why most doctors only work with two of them.

• The concept of “four worlds healing” and why most integrative medicine stops at three.

• His take on the recent wave of fallen gurus, and the word he uses for what’s missing: sovereignty.

• What he saw in a 12-year-old patient who walked in radiant despite a brain surgery five months prior.

• The 25-year vision that came out when we asked him where this is all going, and the part of it he didn’t expect.

If anything in this conversation lands for you, his Substack and drshiller.com are both worth a visit. Tell him we sent you.

Torah Healing & Medicine

Accelerate healing and recovery at the interface of science, consciousness, medicine, and lifestyle; Practical tools in the light of the ancient healing wisdom of Torah and Kabbalah.

By Andrew David Shiller, MD

If you are just tuning into this series for the first time, last week we were joined by , and up next is !

And thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into episode 002 of In Full Light w/ and !

Even with all that visibility, the real her wasn’t on show.

The moment that broke it open was a conversation with the dean of her faculty. She proposed bringing a coaching approach into how the school cared for its students and staff. The answer came back as a flat no. She fully walked away from her traditional career not long after, before she had the financial safety net to make it comfortable, because she couldn’t stay in a place that didn’t believe in possibility.

Four years into the business she’s built, we asked her what the work actually looks like in practice.

She told us about a client of hers, a very accomplished writer who was three drafts into a novel that wasn’t quite landing. Rachel never read a word of the manuscript. They worked on something else entirely. And the book that came out the other side was completely different, with a soulful quality the writer didn’t know she had in her.

That’s the kind of work Rachel does.

There’s a moment in the conversation where Carolina asks her what her body feels like when she’s speaking from performance versus speaking from essence. Rachel describes one as head and eyes only, disconnected from the rest of her. The other has weight in the feet, gravity in the lower body, a kind of dimensionality that opens up around her.

We’ve sat with enough practitioners doing this kind of work to know how rare it is to hear someone name it with that much precision.

A few other threads you’ll catch in the full conversation:

• Why she holds the word “coach” loosely now, even though it’s still in her bio.

• The seven-minute writing practice she gives every client, and why messy is the point.

• Why she calls the first stretch of her work closer to healing than coaching.

• What Carolina noticed when Rachel’s writing shifted, and the Zoom call where Phil watched a lightbulb go on in real time.

• The 25-year vision she reads most weeks, and what’s actually in it.

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into episode 001 of In Full Light with and !

You can name your pattern. You can name what’s underneath it. You can probably describe your own nervous system better than most of the therapists you’ve paid.

And there’s a move you’ve been almost making for five years.

I keep meeting this person. Mid-life. Decades into their craft. Sharp. Other people come to them for advice, and they can explain what’s happening inside them with more precision than the people teaching the courses they’ve taken. Five years after naming a desire for something new in their work life, they remain in a holding pattern.

There’s a sadness in this that nobody really names out loud. You did the work that was supposed to free you, and the freeing didn’t follow.

Some people can describe exactly what is holding them back in their internal landscape, and yet, still cannot make the move that would change their life. There’s a reason for that, and it has nothing to do with character.

Seeing a pattern uses one part of the brain. Changing a pattern uses a different part. You can get very good at the first one without ever giving any energy to the second.

Inner work shows you the pattern. It shows you the wound. It shows you the protection that grew around the wound and how that protection shows up in your behavior. And that work carries significance.

But seeing the pattern is not the same as changing it.

Someone said this to us a few weeks ago. “How do I undo that wiring?”

That was the question. She’d done the work. The question wasn’t about seeing anymore. The question was about wiring.

What someone in this situation tends to do, without quite noticing, is to keep repeating work that intellectualizes the pattern, without really making any new progress. A new method. A new framework with a slightly different angle on the same wound. The hope underneath each one is that this time the insight will allow them to carry something different forward. That if you understand the pattern deeply enough, the pattern will let go on its own.

It doesn’t. The understanding stays sharp and the pattern keeps running.

Then there’s something else mid-life is doing that makes all of this harder to see. The question underneath your life changes shape. The first half asks one set of questions, mostly about survival. What do I need to feel safe? Where do I belong? How do I build a life that holds it all together myself and my loved ones? By a certain point those have been answered. The life is built and it works pretty well to keep you safe.

A different question shows up on the other side of “it works.” Something like:

What do I actually want to build now, while I still have the energy to build it?

People who have built lives that are “good enough” often find, somewhere in their forties or fifties, that good enough is also flat. Their day-to-day needs are met, but something is missing. The thing you came here to do, maybe, that building your life from an energy of survival left no room for.

“If the old way no longer fits, what is the real next expression of my work?”

That question doesn’t respond to more insight. The first one did. The first question responded beautifully to inner work because you had to understand yourself before you could stop repeating what was hurting you. This second question carries a different energy.

This question wants you to make something. To put something visible into the world that has been internalized for years. To powerfully stand for something in public. To do the actual work instead of more work about the work.

Someone else we spoke with made this declaration:

“I just don’t believe it. I don’t only not expect it. Deep inside, when I look, I know I don’t believe it.”

She’d looked. She’d found a belief that she held as true for her there. Finding it didn’t change it.

What changes it is doing something new enough times that your body begins to register it as safe. Having someone close enough to see the moment the old wiring kicks in, naming it as it happens, so you can choose differently before the old layers of protection cause you to retreat.

That’s a practice. It needs you to create the real conditions for charge.

There’s one more thing worth sharing here.

Safety lowers urgency. When the life you’ve built is working to keep you safe, even strong dissatisfaction won’t push you the way fear used to. What has to lead now is desire.

I’ll tell you what this looked like for me.

A few years ago I’d been doing marketing for almost a decade. I’d done the consulting work in the creator space, built online programs, and reached a certain level of mastery that would keep carrying me forward. And I was good at it. The bills got paid. The clients kept coming. By any reasonable measure, I had “made it”.

And there was this question that kept showing up that I couldn’t shake. What would it look like to play this game on hard mode? Not because I wanted life to be hard, but for the love of a pursuit of a good challenge. This thought created a certain level of fire within me that felt really good to feel rising again. What if I tried doing this with the people who’d resisted every conventional form of marketing? People with real blocks around money, and resistance to selling and being seen? Some of the same challenges I had encountered at various moments along my path. People who’d already rejected the standard playbook, for a lot of good reasons. Could I actually help them?

Around the same time, Carolina started showing me a piece of the equation I’d been missing for years. I’d been helping people build the business and the structure and the marketing. She’d been helping people unlock what was inside them, and to feel the calling of their heart’s desire. And neither side was capable of taking people all the way to where they wanted to go. You’d unlock something beautiful in someone and then lack the structure to hold that vision and support carrying it forward. Or you’d build a perfect structure, but someone wouldn’t yet be deeply connected to their own inner flame.

That was the desire we were both following. Not “we need more clients.” Something more like, what would it feel like to do this differently? To work with people most business support wasn’t reaching? To see if the inner and the outer could actually become one practice.

That’s what got me to the next move. Not insight. Desire. A question I wanted to answer enough to keep showing up to it.

So what is it that you actually want to create? What would you regret not having built by the time you get to the end of this life?

Maybe right now it’s not completely clear. More of a felt sense than a fully formed answer. For you, that’s the piece to keep investigating.

Without desire, there’s nothing the inner work is pointing toward.

None of this means the years of inner work weren’t helpful or appropriate for your moment. They got you to a place where you can ask better questions than most people will ever ask of themselves.

That work has taken you to this moment.

If you are feeling stuck, it’s not because you’ve missed an important life lesson. It’s because you’ve been using one tool to do the job of two. The tool you’ve been using is great at what it does, and it also isn’t built for what’s coming next for you.

What’s needed now is practice. Repetition. Showing up over and over again in a new way. The question you’re following matters too. Make sure it’s one that pulls you, not one that’s only trying to fix what’s behind you.

If I’m putting words to something you’ve felt without having words for it, subscribe. I’m continuing to write on this theme the next couple of weeks.

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If you want a clearer name for the pattern that’s been keeping you in the holding pattern, we built a short diagnostic for it. Five questions, takes about three minutes. It names the specific shape your stuckness takes, not just that you’re stuck.

Take the Quiz →

If you know someone deeply self-aware who keeps hitting resistance at the same edge, send this to them.

Sometimes the next chapter doesn’t need deeper insight. It needs a new kind of practice. And a question worth following.

Almost without exception, that’s the work that hasn’t taken shape yet. They know what they want to be doing in the world. They’ve known for years. The work is alive in them. What hasn’t settled is the form. The offer keeps changing shape. The pricing won’t sit right. The messaging won’t quite hold. They’ve launched versions and pulled them back. They’ve started and restarted.

If you’re reading this, some version of this is probably you too. You’ve been working on the same thing for two, three, five years. You can feel exactly who it’s for and what it would do for them. And the form keeps moving on you.

This used to look like substantive work to me. People refining their offer. Reconsidering their pricing. Rewriting their messaging. The kind of thing that should obviously make it better.

Over time, I started seeing it differently.

The endless refining of the offer is part of the pattern. The pricing reconsideration is part of the pattern. The messaging that won’t quite land is part of the pattern. They look like substantive work, which is what makes them so hard to see. You think you’re making progress. You’re actually running a loop.

The work that means the most to you has the highest stakes. Higher stakes means more protection. The protection comes from a layer underneath your conscious mind. The part of you that’s spent decades figuring out how to keep you safe. And that part has decided in some way that fully stepping into this work is dangerous.

Your wiring doesn’t have a reference point for being seen doing the work. That’s what registers as the threat.

So you protect yourself from the very thing you most want. Not by avoiding it directly. By staying in the version of the work that never quite gets solidified. The offer that needs one more pass. The pricing that needs one more think. The messaging that needs one more iteration.

You’re not lazy. You don’t lack commitment. You’re not undisciplined. The push-harder advice that’s everywhere in this space made you tired in the first place. Whatever’s keeping this work from landing has a different shape than character flaws.

The thing you’re calling stuckness has a structure. It’s a pattern. And patterns have reasons for existing.

The reason your particular pattern exists has nothing to do with your character. It has to do with what your body learned was safe a long time before you got here.

One of the women in our community said it like this: “It’s so hardwired in my head. How do I undo that wiring?”

That’s the right question.

Most of the work you’ve done so far, the therapy, the retreats, the courses, the years of inner work, has been good for naming the wiring. It’s been less good at undoing it. Naming and undoing are different jobs that use different parts of the brain.

I had to learn this the hard way watching people try strategy after strategy that didn’t take them where they wanted to go. The strategies were in many cases good. What was in the way was something else.

I’m going to be writing about this for the next several weeks. About the five specific patterns I see most often in people who’ve done years of inner work and still struggle to put their body of work out there. About what those patterns cost. About what actually shifts them, which isn’t what most of us were taught.

If you’ve been in this loop for a while, you’ll probably recognize yourself somewhere in the next few essays. That recognition is useful. It’s also the starting point for a different way of thinking about growing your business. Recognition by itself wont fully take you where you want to go. But something else will.

I’ll get to that.

For now, the thing worth sitting with is this. What you have to offer isn’t stalled out because you haven’t refined it enough, or you lack required experience. It’s held up because what’s in the way of it is wired in so strongly that its hard to see anything beyond that way of being.

Years pass quickly when you’re stuck.

That’s what I want to write about.

If this moves something in you, the next few essays will probably keep doing that. I’m not suggesting that you take any new actions yet. Just notice what gets stirred up. The recognition is the start.

Phil

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Who We are Celebrating This Week:

Josh Woll has been part of our community for a long time, and we’re celebrating him big right now. He’s about to head to Machu Picchu for a retreat, then jetting straight from Peru to Rio de Janeiro for a VIP In-Person experience with us. What a run. Honestly Josh, that’s the kind of trip most people put on a vision board for ten years and never take. You’re just doing it man!

He’s the first of our community members to come for a VIP experience here in Brazil, and we’re excited to host him. He’s also a brilliant cinematographer and photographer, and he’ll be capturing some of the time on camera with us, and helping us out with some photos. We are overdue for a refresh!

Josh runs The Sober Creative. For 22 years, drinking was just part of who he was. Five years ago he committed publicly to a year without alcohol and told people. He removed the exit. The work he’d been trying to do his whole career started happening. Not despite sobriety. Because of it.

That’s what we’re really celebrating. Josh built a life he doesn’t want to escape from, and now he’s out living it. Peru one week, Rio the next, the camera on his shoulder, the work he loves in his hands. That’s the whole point.

If you’ve been quietly wondering about your own relationship with alcohol and could use some support, take a look at what he’s built.

Visit The Sober Creative →

The Sober Creative

The Sober Creative shows how removing alcohol restores the energy, clarity, and capacity that gets buried under incomplete recovery—with practical strategies and real stories from people who've made the shift.

By Josh Woll

Things I’d Like to Share

Most marketing conversations stay in tactics. isn’t most marketers. This one started in tactics for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear marketers willing to go.

Here’s what had to say about it:

If you’ve ever caught yourself opening twelve tabs because Claude told you all twelve ideas were brilliant, this interview with is for you.

Here’s what had to say about it:

Here’s what and had to say about it:

Here’s what had to say about it:

Memorable Quote

Anaïs Nin — "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are."

New Here?

When we start building a business from something we hold close to our hearts, it’s never just a business.

It’s the healing you found after years of struggling with your health. How you overcame addiction and rebuilt your life. How you went from barely surviving to actually living.

Maybe it’s how you want to bring more humanity to big companies, or help people connect with their inner wisdom… because for so long you didn’t have that yourself.

Maybe something you discovered with your kids that you want to share with other parents.

A Sacred Business always starts from something personal.

A transformation you own.

Something you deeply care about… and you know with your whole body it can help others.

Then you start learning what building it actually requires. And things get serious.

It’s real work.

The desire to make it happen is so big that just the thought of failure is terrifying. So we do what we’ve learned, we become very serious about it. The responsible ones.

We are so wired to believe that when something truly matters to us, we need to be serious about it. In that seriousness comes rigidity. A strong need to control the outcome. A sense of bracing that never ends.

I need to make this happen. What if it doesn’t work? What if we don’t get this right? This is too important to mess up.

In that gripping and needing to control, you are not executing your work better. What you are doing is cutting the flow of life from your experience.

Instead of allowing life to play with you, you stop playing at all. And what is life if not a game?

When you think you already know exactly how things should go, you stop yourself from receiving surprises. Unexpected collaborations. Serendipities that could take you faster to where you truly want to be.

Releasing the grip is how joy finds its way back in.

Joy is not carelessness.

Joy is your connection with the present moment — and that connection makes everything you do better. But when you need a specific outcome, that connection disappears.

Letting go doesn’t mean caring less. It means becoming a clearer channel for something bigger than your plan.

Your business is inviting you to become more you. And you, at your core, are pure joy.

So if you catch yourself being too serious about your business — it’s normal.

It’s because it matters a lot to you. It’s because it’s important work.

But I want to remind you: you did not choose this work. It chose you. And joy is what will take you where you want to go — not what you will feel when you get there.

With Love,

Carolina

If joy is what takes you there, the Harmony Map shows you what's currently in the way of it. Take the free assessment.

For context, Billy is the guy who supported the creation our messaging foundation for Sacred Business Flow back when we were too close to it to see it ourselves. Author of Simple Marketing for Smart People. Creator of the Five Lightbulbs framework, which we still apply almost daily. He just launched a new Substack called Fractal Faith, and the conversation we had with him went somewhere I wasn’t expecting.

Most marketing conversations stay in tactics. This one started in tactics for about six minutes and then went somewhere I rarely hear marketers willing to go.

Billy uses a metaphor early on about fish, water, and what we’ve all been swimming in without realizing. I’d heard him use the metaphor before, but the way he applied it to the entire marketing industry stopped me. Where he takes it from there is the part I want you to hear from him directly.

He also names a single question, near the end, that he says will tell you whether your marketing is crossing a line or not. One question. He gives it to you in a simple sentence you can sit with for yourself.

Carolina said something in this conversation I had almost forgotten about her. She confessed she rejected marketing entirely for the first three years of her previous business. Why she changed her mind, and what she heard from Billy that supported her own growth, is a pretty nice moment in the episode.

And there’s a story Billy tells about leaving his energy industry job at twenty-nine, expecting his side business to take off. What actually happened next, and the phrase he uses to describe that in-between place, is worth pressing play for if you are feeling stalled out right now.

Another fun surprise connection was hearing about ’s influence on Billy’s journey, after just having him on the show a few weeks ago.

The whole thing runs about fifty-five minutes.

If you’ve ever caught yourself avoiding marketing because something about it felt off, or you’ve quietly wondered whether there’s a way to do this work without giving up your dignity or theirs, this is the conversation for you.

For more from billy, check out his new substack at Fractal Faith and marketingisanargument.com

Phil (& Carolina)

Fractal Faith

I used to find reality puzzling. Christianity was the missing piece.

By Billy Broas

Thank you , , , and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories with and !

This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 5, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work there.

We sat down with last week. About twenty-five minutes came through in the replay. The first fifteen didn’t. Substack swallowed the opening. Honestly, I was pretty gutted, and I sat with the recording for a few days wondering whether to share the replay at all.

Then I caught myself.

This was a conversation about beginning before you’re ready and shipping the imperfect thing. And I was about to scrap it because the recording wasn’t perfect lol.

Honestly, Leo’s been someone I’ve considered a friend for years now. So here it is.

Imperfect, missing the opening, but still some great food for thought, as Leo is one of the wisest dudes I know. I listen to what this guy has to say, and you should too.

A few things from this conversation I think are worth drawing attention to:

There’s a moment where Leo names a particular trap AI is setting for ambitious people, and and interesting framing. He calls Claude his “best cheerleader.” Why he frames that as a problem is the part you should check out.

Carolina asked him about fear and resistance. He answered with a sewing project he’s been working on for years. (Yes, sewing.) Where he took that, and how he tied it back to his own Substack, was also a great moment worth watching.

And toward the end, he answered a question about growth in a way you might not quite expect from someone who’s built the audience he has. The line started with “growth is a loaded topic for a lot of people.”

The whole thing runs about twenty-seven minutes.

If you’ve ever caught yourself opening twelve tabs because Claude told you all twelve ideas were brilliant, this one’s for you.

Phil (& Carolina)

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into Sacred Business Stories with and !

The Zen of Doing

A book in progress, on doing hard things with ease, by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.

By Leo Babauta