Part V: I felt my mortality staring me in the face …
(The Sacred Business Manifesto Part V)
When I found myself with that golf ball-sized tumor growing in my neck and 50/50 odds of cancer, this was unsurprisingly a very low moment in my life.
If I’m honest, I felt very certain that I was dying. After a decade of what felt like a consistent, gradual decline in my health, it made sense.
I couldn’t seem to get elevated enough to see that this belief was the greatest illusion I was facing.
But because of this “dying” illusion, I also felt the need to give my life meaning and figure it out quickly. To create some sense of legacy and meaning for everything that had come before.
Just as I applied strong pressure on myself to perform and achieve from a place of fear, I was able to rely on my strengths of being a self-starter toward finding a solution to the problem that I had.
I decided to take a stand for my health and for creating a life that was not driven by fear.
To instead create a life guided by a purpose greater than just grinding it out for some dollars.
So I gradually shifted my work to supporting authors, teachers, and spiritual guides who had figured out how to take a holistic approach to life and business. They were already living their lives from the premise that everything is connected.
I had met KC Carter at a Camp Good Life Project event in upstate New York. He deeply inspired me with his This Epic Life Manifesto and the way he deeply embodied living the path of the yogi while also fully playing in modern society. KC would eventually become a great friend and client.
He later offered me a personal introduction to Jonathan Fields, who was running a seven-figure business while living a zest-filled life. I was later honored to support him in launching his Sparktypes framework, which became a global success. His book became a #1 bestseller. From Jonathan, I observed how it was completely possible to drive incredible business growth and financial abundance all while supporting a powerful mission.
I learned how you could honor what is in your heart — the message you feel you came here to share — while living a life of freedom without compromising.
I had learned about Leo Babauta’s work with Zen Habits by following Tim Ferris and a great blog called Lifehacker. In time, Leo and I would embark on a three-year journey of collaborating to bring his Fearless Training Methods to the world. During this time, while I still held a lot of questions in my own life, I observed how he had a sincere and strong connection to the divine. And Leo’s ability to weave simplicity into his business and daily life while building a readership of more than 2 million was deeply inspiring.
His entire business was built on creating more connection and being in service to others.
He also possessed an ability to show up with a level of discipline that, at the time, didn't feel accessible to me.
There have been so many more clients and teachers I have been deeply inspired by, but these three come to mind as truly powerful allies in shifting the direction of my work towards a more aligned vision.
Carolina finally cures her headaches…
Around the same time, Carolina was beginning to arrive at a similar understanding of how everything in our lives is interconnected. After years of trying to find solutions to her headaches, she was introduced to the field of bioenergetics by her own mother.
One day, her mother called her and said, “Hey, I'm learning this new thing called bioenergetics; I think it will be helpful for your head!”
Naturally, Carolina was a bit skeptical at first due to having looked for so many different solutions, but she remained open to giving it a try. She had her first session when her mother visited her in Canada.
During the session, her mother was touching what seemed like random points in her body, even though her complaint was the headaches.
Right after the session she felt as if her head might explode and found herself having to go to bed early that night trying to see if she could ease the pain.
She continued to have strong headaches throughout the night. After many hours, she was finally able to fall asleep.
Then, a curious thing happened.
She woke up feeling that something had shifted. She couldn’t explain what had happened, but the pain was not there. She was completely headache-free.
Days passed, and she noticed that things that would prompt her headaches were no longer triggering them.
In the end, bioenergetics helped Carolina completely heal from the years of crippling headaches she had experienced.
She grew curious about the technique that had led to such a powerful shift.
Inspired by her own results, Carolina began to study this healing modality herself in early 2017.
This required regular travel back and forth on the weekends to Brazil to study with her mother’s teacher, but she was committed.
She learned bioenergetics is based on the principle that the mind and body are connected, and by working with this connection, you are able to relieve physical and emotional tension.
The Bio-Energetic Synchronization Technique (B.E.S.T.), was developed by a chiropractor in the United States, Dr. M.T. Morter, Jr., over 45 years ago. He was trying to understand why some adjustments to the physical body would initially work, but then the body would go back to old patterns of experiencing pain shortly after the sessions.
It is a gentle healing system used to address stress and promote balance in the body, including the nervous, muscular, circulatory, digestive, and hormonal systems. When a system moves out of balance and becomes exhausted, it creates a pattern of physical, emotional, and chemical symptoms, like a “short circuiting,” sometimes leading to illness and disease.
Bioenergetics has been used in many areas around the world, but mainly in the United States and Brazil.
As Carolina moved toward becoming a master practitioner of bioenergetics and toward a deeper understanding of everything being connected, she also began to open herself up to the possibility of creating a different life for herself.
Unlike the many years of feeling like she was just drifting without a choice, she became intentional about the things that she liked and began to ask herself powerful questions like the one she now asks all her clients:
“If I had the life of my dreams, what would it be?”
By simply asking this question, she began to create amazing life experiences that just a few short years earlier she would have considered impractical and, honestly, impossible.
And as she worked with clients, it quickly became very apparent how someone’s back pain could be tied to something emotional going on in their life like relationship trouble or the loss of a job.
As she treated clients’ bodies using the energetic principles of the mind-body connection, not only would their bodies begin to heal, but life circumstances like relationship challenges also began to improve.
So often we try to improve one area of our life, whether it be business, health, or relationships but working with our energy using bioenergetics will affect every area of our life.
We’ll see powerful changes happening at a speed much faster than if we were only focusing on symptoms in an isolated, fragmented way.
Continue to Part VI ↑