Live True, Work Well

Heartful Prosperity: Core Practices for Thriving

It seems that everyone is seeking a new relationship with the issues and experience of prosperity and abundance. Our old, habitual patterns have proven out of sync with today's energies, needs, and expanding consciousness.

Over the last year, I noticed this theme arising in a wave of inquiries I was receiving from clients, readers, and Ivy Sea Online visitors. They were all asking: how can I find a new, healthy relationship with prosperity and right livelihood that aligns with my spiritual (or philosophical) values and practices?"

When such a theme becomes evident, I know that Spirit is tapping me on the shoulder with a new assignment!

This seemed fitting, because my own journey has included deep dives into a different, or deepened, understanding of these issues.

After the flurry of inquiries, I decided not just to make this a focus of individual consultations, but to create a PDF guide that would allow a more flexible self-study for those who needed that.

Heartful Prosperity: Core Practices for Thriving, condenses some of the pearls from my own journey, along with some of the wisdom and practices I found most helpful ... not just in coming to a new understanding of 'spirit centered prosperity', but for opening to, aligning with, and receiving Divine Guidance and 'more than enoughness' that exists always, within and around us.

You'll find more information about Heartful Prosperity here.

Blessings and joyful thriving!

Jamie

New-Era Business: What's Out, What's In, What's Emerging?

Greetings,

I just posted the new edition of my Ivy SeaZine newsletter at Ivy Sea Online, which includes articles on 'Are You Ready for 'Slow Business'?' (it's not what you think!) and 'New Era Business: What's In? What's Out? What's Emerging?'.

One reader sent the following note after reading it: "Just a quick note to congratulate you on an excellent Seazine this month. There was something you said that was so powerful, that I felt you could write a whole book around it: 'If it threatens your health, marginalizes your family and community, and violates your heart and conscience, it's not success.' This is SUCH a rich treasure trove! A 'yardstick' that is 3-dimensional. Brava!"

The SeaZine includes other articles and links related to right livelihood, transcendent leadership, and conscious enterprise as well.

Happy perusing at this beautiful May Day and Beltane Season!

Find the Ivy SeaZine edition at Ivy Sea Online.

Sincerely,
Jamie

'Culture of Urgency' is an Empathy Killer

Greetings,

Readers of my Live True, Work Well: Conscious Livelihood blog may be interested in my recent article, "Culture of Urgency is an Empathy Killer", in my Engaged Spirituality & Mystic Activism blog.

Inspired by a talk given by Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, and a social scientist, the article explores how a cultural addiction to speed and urgency has an unfortunately negative effect on those traits which make for a humane culture, organization, or community.

Read more in "Culture of Urgency is an Empathy Killer".

What's your legacy?

There is always much talk, to the point of trendiness, of 'leaving a legacy'. In Western culture, and in the business culture which is at the center of Western culture, 'leaving a legacy' almost always is defined along material and financial terms. Brick-and-mortar legacy -- a big business that 'survives its creator', or a fat trust that 'ensures material security' for those who inherit, just to name two possible examples.

Yet if 'leaving a legacy' is so important -- and we all leave a legacy, whether we're conscious of it or not -- what of the real legacy created by everyday actions and encounters?

We may, for example, leave behind an organization we've created, while the great ripple effect of our existence can be found in the compilation of our actions -- how we treated people along the way, how much of ourselves we truly gave -- not just opening our wallet, but opening our heart; not just accumulating 'stuff', but sharing of ourselves in ways that benefit others; not just allotting our time to materialistic pursuits, but ensuring that the ripple effect was life-enhancing rather than harmful.

If we leave a company, or a bank account, along with a trail of wounded, marginalized, or warring people in our wake, what does that say of the quality of our legacy?

Elisabeth Kubler Ross, whose work on death and dying was groundbreaking and still provides a guiding model, has said that in her interviews with the dying, the major issues aren't about the trophies or dollars or accolades collected, but about the good one has done, the relationships one has cultivated, the love one has shared, and the positive effect one has had -- the things one did and spoke and exemplified along the way.

As with many other things in these out-of-balance times, it makes sense to broaden our definition of legacy -- just as it would benefit many to broaden the definition of 'worth' and 'value' -- to reflect a more human, and humane, set of priorities drawn from wiser, more conscious ways of living and working.

Learn more about leaving a more heartful legacy by being what's most important to you.

Expanding Beyond the Limitation Litany

During a visit to New York recently, I took a walk into some of the local, independently owned shops in the downtown area. As always seems to happen, the shop owner started talking with me about the challenges of keeping the shop open in the face of ever-intensifying pressures of the "Big Box" retail stores and local leaders who haven't a clue about 'economic gardening' and the importance of a thriving local indie-business scene.

She then shared with me her more expansive visions for the shop and her own livelihood, but had no sooner gotten the words out of her mouth when she began recounting all of the reasons it was nearly impossible, why it couldn't happen in the near-term, and what very specific roster of things had to happen before her more ideal vision could be realized.

As a new-era entrepreneur and self-employed small-enterprise creator, I understand completely how easy it is to let our preconceptions about challenge, struggle, limitation, and lack get the best of us. And as an author and adviser who has written and consulted on visionary enterprise and 'HealerPreneuring' or 'AuthenticPreneuring', I've heard similar Limitation Litanies many, many times before.

Yet there was something in being there, right in that moment, just a few days ago, that allowed me to really see and hear and feel the Limitation Litany phenomenon anew, with a new level of clarity.

You see, buying into and repeating the well-ingrained mantras of the Limitation Litany is one of the key self-sabotaging behaviors, and a sure-fire vision-killer for new-era enterprisers and healers.

When I gently asked the shop-owner here in New York, "What would happen if you assumed that it was possible in the shorter-term? What opportunities, doorways, and resources might you suddenly notice?", she quickly replied, "Well, I have to be realistic," and went on to list a host of reasons that the circumstances were stacked against her, from the rising rental rates to the lack of acceptance about her visionary ideas.

We all do this from time to time, and given a several-year cycle in which bad news and struggle seems to take on an almost overwhelming tenor on the world, local, and personal stage, it's very easy to find ourselves giving over to it constantly.

And yet even as we do it, hear it, read about it -- the Limitation Litanies -- we can feel immediately that the effect is one of shrinking, strangling, constraining, reducing. It is not an expansive habit.

Frank Herbert, the writer of Dune, wrote that, "Fear is the little mind killer; the little death that brings obliteration." The Limitation Litany is rooted in fear, scarcity, and shrunken concepts about our own capacity to create and deal skillfully with whatever might come up.

The Practice, and the Possibility

Herbert continues by vowing, "I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me."

Instead of giving over to fear, and repeating the mantras of the fear-paralyzed (or fear-mongers), we can cultivate a stronger faith and allow our fears and our doubts to lead us into a greater clarity and a strengthened commitment. We can turn the Limitation Litany on its head, and when we hear ourselves beginning the Fear Mantras, we can call forth a different response instead.

We can, instead of the Limitation Litany, cultivate a Possibility Litany. We can recite a Faith Litany. We can recount the plentiful Evidence for Grace that exists, in reality. Yes, there are times when 'conscious limitation' is wise, but contraction as a guiding, habitual mindset only serves to shrink-wrap life that wants to expand.

By choosing the Litany of Limitation, we choose Limitation as a default. By choosing a Litany of Possibility, Potential, Faith, and Grace, we choose to allow those energies to find expression in our lives, and in our livelihoods.

Need guidance and inspired support as you inquire into the possibilities, so that you can see past the Litany of Limitation into your Field of Possibility? Contact us at Ivy Sea to schedule a tele-session.

No Pain, No Gain? Get Over It!

Several communications found their way to me in the past couple of days, all centering in some way around transformative cycles or 'difficult' experiences, the 'value' of suffering and sacrifice, and 'getting over it' or 'breaking through' it. It occurred to me, in typical writer's fashion, that a theme was knitting itself together here!

Almost everyone I know or hear from, in my inner circles and the broader circle of readers and Ivy Sea Online visitors, has gone through some sort of transformative life cycle or series of challenges in these past few years, including me. While the individual journey details may differ, the higher-level experiences of transformation and challenge are similar.

So when I received an email newsletter from a colleague in this morning's mail, and saw the feature article on the 'value of sacrifice', it definitely caught my attention.

Just last night I was reading about our cultural mythos that centers around the merits and 'value' of suffering and sacrifice -- the 'no pain, no gain' philosophy that seems to permeate Western Culture. The book that I'm reading, Not In His Image, by John Lamb Lash, was emphasizing the links between this 'suffering and pain are holy' philosophy and the resulting dissociation from body, compassion, joy, and sensuousness, and the potential for (and often very real manifestation of) cruelty and violence such dissociation breeds. Whether we like to look at and admit it or not, there is an enormous amount of evidence of this, and a historical case that can be made.

In reading the newsletter article glorifying the 'no pain, no gain', value-in-suffering-and-sacrifice feature article, the two came together for me, right along with my own experience on this side of a transformative cycle and the many stories I've been entrusted with about others' journeys.

Glorifying pain and suffering, in and of themselves, does breed harshness, cruelty and violence. It allows us to too easily cast aside 'the better angels of our nature', as well as our own deep soul urges towards compassion, kindness, generosity,  creativity, love, and heart-guided (versus intellect-guided) fierceness. And it allows us to too easily 'look the other way' when gross injustice is done to, and greed wreaks havoc on, people, animals, Nature, and spirit.

This is a sensitive argument to make, because all of our lives include things beyond our control, some of which can turn our lives and all that we believed upside down and inside out. We do suffer, and we do feel pain, and many of us do sacrifice our own pleasure or needs or dreams for 'good' as well as 'bad' causes. Some important goals, visions or missions do require us to set aside lesser priorities, though we often set aside greater priorities for lesser goals as well. Wisdom can come out of such suffering, and often does.

But the question remains regarding our cultural glorification of suffering and suffering-laden sacrifice -- do we, by glorifying suffering and sacrifice in an unquestioning, knee-jerk 'programmed' way, actually create and perpetuate and, in some cases inflict, unnecessary and thus 'unholy' suffering on ourselves, others, Nature, and other life forms?

As with many things, it's not a clear-cut, either/or issue, though we too often have defaulted to an 'either/or', with 'suffering' being righteous, holy, and thus in some masochistic way, 'virtuous'.

We as a group -- humanity -- find ourselves in a time of great change that has been forecast in the wisdom of many ancient cultures, as well as in the heavens themselves. We find ourselves with the great opportunity to look beyond these old and outdated viewpoints around which our actions have streamed forth, and, in questioning them, choose more mindfully ways of being and doing that are heartful and uplifting of life-affirming 'virtues' and ripple-effects. We can make a 'break through' rather than 'getting over it', which too often means 'sucking it up' and repressing heartfulness.

There is no merit or 'virtue' in suffering, in and of itself. So while we may draw great wisdom and compassion from those times in our lives when we suffer, and while such wisdom and compassion may greatly benefit us and others, let's choose not to glorify suffering or sacrifice where it denies life and, in fact, increases true suffering unecessarily.

Let's really choose life, and the vibrance, sensuousness, awe, beauty, diversity of experience and expression, and true joy that is embodied in it. Rather than 'being suffering' (and thus 'doing' it), we can 'be Life', and allow the possibility that we may very well be able to 'gain' without 'pain'. What if we said, "No Joy, No Gain" instead?

The Substance and The Secret

Following on my previous Zaadz blog post about the movie, The Secret, and the debate that has sparked about it, I wanted to share the link for an excellent article and much-needed perspective on it from Cathy Pagano of Nine Muses.

Cathy's article, The Secret About the Secret, reviews several of the primary concerns about the one-dimensional nature -- and potential harm (and possibly less than savory underlying motives or strategies) -- of the movie and book that have become an enormous 'hit' in a world where there is a growing gap between 'rich' and 'poor' -- defined, of course, in purely financial terms. The Secret takes direct aim at people who, desperate for a sense of meaning and self-worth,  equate an abundant life with getting rich quick, and with as little effort or challenge as necessary, regardless of whether this is truly heartful or purposeful for the individual applying its magic without the requisite self-awareness.

Unlike much of the mainstream-media criticism of The Secret, which I found often shrill and too-quick to reactionary conclusions (Ladder of Inference, anyone?), Cathy's musings are graceful, thoughtful, and well worth a read. It is exactly this sort of perspective that helps to create a meaningful and actually helpful dialogue, as compared to the mud-slinging.

True abundance is multifaceted, and about much more than simply 'show me the money' and 'get me my McMansion' (but don't make me be too patient in getting it, or think about whether it's really what will make me feel worthwhile).

True, full, heart-and-soul-centered abundance is a deep wellness, and a sense of deep connection with the "All That Is" that weaves in and through all 'manifestations', including we the people. It includes wellness, wellbeing, and joy that transcends fleeting circumstances, no matter how 'good' or 'bad' we deem them to be in the short term. it includes the 'Wisdom to know the difference' between what's an 'ego want' and what's truly meaningful in our lives and to our sense of purpose and contribution to 'the world's deep need'.

I hope you enjoy and appreciate Cathy's article, as I did, and I hope all of these dialogues are helpful to you in finding your own standard, definition, and adventurous pathway to real, lasting, unshakeable abundance.

Wishing you well and joyful!

Jamie Walters
Founder, Ivy Sea, Inc.

To read my first entry regarding The Buzz About The Secret, visit my blog at Zaadz.com.

The Visions & Possibilities of 2007

Happy New Year!

There is something special about ending one calendar year and beginning a new one, or at least there can be something special about it.

A sense of possibility and creative tension percolates, in the same way it does for an artist contemplating the potentials for the blank canvas or a writer readying to midwife something new onto the blank page. Such is the creative energy at the dawn of a new calendar year.

Like other rituals throughout the year, observing New Year rituals as the sun goes down in December and rises in January can be an opportunity for a powerful practice that can have an equally powerful effect.

Most people realize now that one's intention, beliefs, thinking patterns, and sense of vision and purpose can and do have  an effect on one's experience. And yet it's surprising just how frequently we 'back-burner' visioning and reflection time -- and even conscious planning time -- in our enslavement to busy routines. But as the old saying goes, "If you don't know where you're going, any place will do." Another version of that saying is, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else." You get the point!

By observing various opportunities throughout the year to take stock, reflect, note progress and unexpected blessings, and more, you not only add a greater sense of meaning to life and livelihood, but also strengthen your own sense of co-creative power, gratitude, compassion, and possibility.

So rather than rotely setting 'New Year's Resolutions', which too often are a list of half-hearted 'shoulds' aimed at conforming with some expectation that comes at you from outside of yourself, build in some time during the coming days and weeks to really reflect on the year or cycle past and the year ahead of you.

What do you appreciate most? What did you learn? What do you know now that you didn't know one year ago? What new friends did you meet? What opportunities presented themselves? What didn't happen as you expected? What calls to you now?

These are just a few of the very powerful (and, believe it or not, fun) questions that you can 'ask into' with the intention of finding the gems in the quarry pile of the last year, and also connecting anew with the deepest yearnings that can lead you into a new level and depth of joy, creativity, abundance, and gifted service in the coming year.

Start with New Year's, and find your way through a joyful, dynamic year by using the power of inquiry, ritual, and 'co-creative action'.

If you'd like a journey guide to inspire, muse, and lead you through the inquiry to a stronger connection with your unique purpose -- and a clear idea of how to translate that into co-creative action -- contact us at Ivy Sea, and schedule a co-creative vision consultation.

Wishing you a wonderful, joyful 2007. Why not intend to have it be the most wonderful year of your life ... so far?

Sincerely,
Jamie Walters
Founder & Journey Muse, Ivy Sea, Inc.

The power of communication

Last week, I came across this comment shared anonymously: "Most of the problems in organizations come down to miscommunications and meetings gone horribly wrong."

Today, an Ivy Sea Online visitor emailed me, sharing a story about how she'd had repeatedly found herself working for people who never acknowledged her work, unless it was to criticize it.

These are just two of many available examples pointing to the importance of communication, not just in organizations, but between people wherever they may interact. In our workplaces and organizations, there are usually more interactions between people of sometimes radically different personalities, styles, and levels of intention and skillfulness, so there are increased opportunities for problems due to miscommunication.

One of the problems is that while communication is such a vital discipline, it is one loaded with assumptions and false notions of skillfulness. In other words, a lot of people assume that there is 'nothing to it' and that they themselves are 'excellent communicators'. Alas, the number of miscommunications would suggest otherwise!

Most wisdom traditions include skillful communication as a primary area of mastery and practice, and with good reason. Not only does it make an enormous difference in the quality of our interactions, and thus the quality of our organizations and efforts, but it also makes an 'expansive practice' -- one that expands us into new realms of potential and meaning.

The first step towards realizing increased communication skillfulness -- and decreased miscommunication -- is to recognize it as a priority, and then allow for 'beginner's mind'. By acknowledging the likely fact that there is something to learn and some new skill and level of mastery to gain, you open the way for learning, positive development, and smoother relationships.

And that feels pretty good.

For resources on communication practices and strategies, including skillful listening and other interpersonal practices, contact us or wander through Ivy Sea Online.

Until next time, I'm wishing you very well!

Sincerely,
Jamie Walters
Founder, Ivy Sea, Inc.

Feeling Stuck, Stale, or In-Between?

One of the things I'm hearing a lot from people these days is "I feel like things are just stuck!" or "I feel like I'm in between the old and new." Does this sound familiar to you — is there any part of your own business, livelihood, or other key life-aspect that feels 'stuck', 'stale', or 'in between'?

It's normal, if you've been in business for any length of time, to go through all of the life-cycle phases, including 'stuck', 'stale', and 'in between'. But each situation is unique, with its own energy signature, so even if you've been through it before it can seem like a whole new challenge. And if it's the first time, or you're a new entrepreneur, it can seem downright depressing.

It's important to keep in mind, whether you're a veteran business owner or a new entrepreneur, that there really are phases or cycles that come and go. And as my grandmother used to say, when things seemed 'stuck' or particularly challenging, 'this too shall pass'. It does, but what do we do in the meanwhile?

Try to look at the challenge or apparent 'blockage' as an opportunity, or as a creative problem to solve — creatively. When we're feeling 'stuck', 'stale', or 'in between', it really is a call for us to elevate our inquiry into the situation and adopt fresh perspectives.

Once we've done that, it's a whole lot easier to be patient in the 'in between', and to take very conscious action that will help us 'unstick' and get things moving in a vibrant, energizing direction.

For more inspiration, more than a few helpful resources, or to schedule a more personalized consultation-session about your unique situation and vision, visit us at Ivy Sea Online.

Until then, I'm wishing you very well!

Sincerely,
Jamie Walters
Founder, Ivy Sea, Inc.
Author, Big Vision, Small Business