(The Sacred Business Manifesto Part V)

Back to Part IV

When I found myself with that golf ball-sized tumor growing in my neck and 50-50 odds of cancer, this was a very low moment in my life. If I’m honest, during this time I felt a high degree of certainty that I was, in fact, dying. After a decade of what felt like a consistent, gradual decline in my health, I couldn’t seem to get the elevation to see that in fact, this was the greatest illusion of my life.

In spite of this deep-seated unhealthy belief, I had somehow managed to create an outward experience of success in my life, and to some degree, this belief did serve to bring a sense of urgency that I believe was a catalyst to my growth.

I felt the pressure of time, and a need to give my life meaning, living with the belief that I didn’t have that much more time to live.

I’d push myself to the limit on many days, crashing straight from my desk into bed. 

In reality, none of us have that much time, but this belief made me feel a sense of urgency to try to make the best of my life and figure out why I was really here. To create some sense of legacy and meaning for everything that had come before.

And as I applied strong pressure on myself to perform and achieve from this place of fear, I was able to rely on my strengths of being a self-starter with a strong ability to figure things out on my own. 

And this worked for quite a while to keep up the facade of having it all together, until it didn’t. 

As it became harder and harder to keep up the pace that I was running at in my business, I had a moment where I realized that I could just apply these same strengths 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 dollars. 

And so I gradually shifted my work to supporting authors, teachers, and spiritual guides who I felt 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, and they weren’t putting too much weight behind business success being the only measure of a life well lived.

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 with the way he deeply embodied living the path of the yogi while also playing full-out 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, and the book became a No. 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 solely out of a need to add more zeros to the bottom line.

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 …

And around the same time, Carolina was beginning to arrive at a similar understanding of how everything in our lives is interconnected. After years of frustration trying to find solutions to her headaches, she was introduced to the field of bioenergetics by her mother, who had begun studying it. 

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, and I’m excited to share it with you!” 

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. Finally, she was able to fall asleep after many hours, but 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.

As she continued through her days, she began to notice that things that would often trigger headaches were not triggering them anymore.

In the end, bioenergetics helped Carolina completely heal from the years of crippling headaches she had experienced.

After two months of being completely headache-free, she became very curious about the technique that had led to such a powerful shift in something she had been struggling with for so many years.

Inspired by her own results, Carolina began to study this healing modality herself in early 2017. 

Because she was still living in Canada, this required regular travel back and forth on the weekends to Brazil to study with her mother’s teacher, but she was fully committed to learning this powerful technique.

She began to learn that 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, including illness and disease.

Bioenergetics has been used in many areas around the world, but mainly in the United States and Brazil. 

And 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 during the many years of feeling like she was just drifting without a choice, she became very intentional about the things that she liked and began to ask herself powerful questions like one that has become a question that she now asks all her clients:

“If I had the life of my dreams, what would it be?”

And from the simple asking of this question, she began to create amazing life experiences that just a few short years earlier she would have deemed impossible.

And as she began to work with clients, it was very easy to see how someone might show up in her office complaining about back pain, but in reality this would 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 everything being connected, not only would their bodies begin to heal, but life circumstances like relationship challenges would also begin to improve. 

This is a primary principle of everything being connected. 

So often we believe that we are doing the work to unblock one area in our life, whether it be business, health, or relationships, but at the end of the day, working with our energy using bioenergetics will affect every area of our life, and we’ll start to see powerful change happening at a speed that can be surprising to those of us who have previously just been focusing on symptoms in a fragmented way.