The thing we don't realize about going into business is that once you announce your intentions to the Universe, you are immediately calibrated to a much more amplified frequency due to your desire to share your work with others. The desire to share our gifts with the world elevates us with a call to action. We sit down to write the business plan and are instantly met with questions about our vision, our mission and the impact we hope to make. And there begins the quest.
Self employment is a quest for golden fleece.
I came into small business as an artist. From the outside, all I really knew was that I needed to sell my art so that I could experience freedom from the 9-5. After working in a hospital for the past few years, I was so burnt out on healthcare, and craved a completely different scene. I was happy to find work in a bead store until my friend convinced me that my designs were amazing and would sell at festivals. It was her belief in me that inspired me to start taking myself seriously as a working artist. When a shop owner in San Francisco wanted to carry my jewelry in her boutique off the corner of Haight, I was thrilled and then terrified because I hadn't even made a business name for myself yet, let alone business cards, lookbooks, line sheets, wholesale pricing, etc etc.
I stumbled into business and continued to learn everything on the fly as the needs presented. I learned how to build a website and file my own quarterly reports and income taxes. I made all the critical mistakes. I couldn't see it then, but every single challenge I faced in my business was a direct result of my energetic signature at the time. The patterns that I struggled with in my personal life had a way of showing up in my business and when they did, it was always hyper-amplified and in the public eye. The burnout I experienced went deeper than changing algorithms or rising overhead costs. My decision to quit and abandon what I worked so hard to build was a deeply personal last-ditch effort to survive. This intuitive act of taking myself away to the wilds was the first step in recalibrating my entire approach to small business, even though on the outside, it looked and felt like defeat.
Inspired by the Wild revealed itself as a Call to Action, and in admitting to myself what I truly wanted to do with this space, I was confronted with all the things my business would need from me if I was going to be able to keep up. I unraveled everything. I started collecting pieces.
I invested in my first mastermind training and worried a bit while everything else became peripheral and nebulous. I felt mostly lost in this void for a few years, but despite everything I did to find my joy and inspiration again, I still felt dead inside. It wasn't until I was finally able to figure out how to surrender into the void that things shifted instantly. That shift was almost violent as my entire situation fell apart within a week of itself and I was suddenly plummeting back into alignment and things started to make sense again.
My experience of The Void is pretty common amongst the creative and spiritual communities. It is the space in between the versions of ourselves. If you are in the process of learning to manifest the life of your wildest dreams, or up-leveling your business, or doing some intense personal development etc, it is likely you will find yourself in The Void after the old paradigm falls away and before the new can fully gel in your world.
I didn't have the insight to understand what was happening at the time, but now I can see how badly I needed that cocoon in order to integrate and synthesize all the pieces I had been collecting. Andre Gide once said that "in order to see new lands, one must be willing to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." I feel like nothing describes the void better than that.
Inspired by the Wild is a vision brought to life through creativity, intuition and a deep committment to healing. Born into the fire of greif over losing a close friend/business partner right at the moment of stepping into the public eye as an artist, this path has not spared me one bit of pain, but it has given me the wings to rise up from the ashes. Getting my wings has afforded me this bird's eye perspective, so Inspired by the Wild is my nest.
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