Entrepreneurial Spiritual Idealist

It’s been awhile since I shared what’s been going on for me personally, so here it is. It’s a longish read so skip to the bottom if you’re been asking about my Self Mastery coaching program and just want the deets, otherwise settle in and allow me to share.

I’ve been struggling lately and, in a sense my whole life with merging the Entrepreneur with the Spiritual Seeker in me. I’ve been struggling because these two ideas, culturally and socially, are problematic to bring together. With books like ‘The Monk who sold his Ferrari’, movements like Minimalism and the Purpose- driven job ideal, there is a (not-so) underlying belief that states that in order to be happy, in order to follow a life of meaning, you must also be prepared to sacrifice financial reward. Not only should you be prepared for it, but others will expect you to.

To a certain extent I bought into this belief myself and spent a fair amount of my time as a starting-out- yoga-teacher traveling the world leading retreats and running from private yoga session to public class stopping only for a soy latte with my other yoga teacher friends in a vegan cafés. Yup. Been there.

Of course my own practice was vital to sustaining this and so attending 2 hour long Yoga classes were just part of life. You can imagine how much time I had left for creating any kind of financial security, let alone, wealth.

At the same time there was always a burning desire to create something more, and I didn’t run my yoga career like this exclusively for very long. My entrepreneurial identity (if you will) is centered around creating and building. Building communities, creating and building brands that go beyond a name. I am not interested in creating enough just for myself. I want to create something that benefits all who come to the party; be that the customers/students/clients and those who join me in the mission in terms of partners, collaborators, co-conspirators, and revolutionaries.

And yes, I want us all to have enough to eat; more than enough. I don’t however, want the ‘more than enough’ if it means sacrificing my values and my vision. This has both cost and rewarded me.

It also meant that it didn’t take me very long into my career to open a Yoga studio, which I did 16 years ago in South Africa. The studio is called Living Yoga and still lives on today; this is something that continues to warm my heart, perhaps a little bit like a mother would feel watching her grown up children from a distance.

Living my entrepreneurial ambitions has been more challenging in Germany and to a large extent I had to go back to my yoga teaching lifestyle starting essentially from the beginning. I still, however felt the need to build and create and it was out of the struggle of making it here in Munich that dharmaKaya® yoga was born. I developed my own style of yoga and ran (and continue to run) teacher trainings in this method. The passion behind dharmaKaya® was also community and I was on track to open my own studio just before Corona hit.

My own Spiritual interest and development continued and continues to be a constant companion with as urgent a voice as the entrepreneur and I realised that yes, I could teach a good yoga class, but where I felt I had the most impact, and the space I got to witness the deepest transformation was in the coaching space. I started my coaching business shortly after creating the yoga style as a way to bring these two worlds together. That eventually evolved into my 10 Week Self Mastery Program. As with dharmaKaya®, the Self Mastery program became something others wanted to learn and so I created my very own coaching programs in this method.

2020//21 of course has seen the Spiritual Seeking Entrepreneur, needing to adapt to the new world she finds herself in. It was in April last year that I decided to start offering yoga online, with the view to open an online platform that could bring all of it together in one space. Finally a place where both Entrepreneur and Seeker could co-exist. A community driven brand centered around a Deeper Experience of Life.

When I think about what my Spiritual seeking endeavors are about, it is always revealed to me as simply experiencing life more deeply.

The yoga, the coaching, the connections, the creativity, the business, the challenges, the changing environment, the competition, the collaboration, the management, the playfulness and the products (soon to come) can all live together under one ideal:
Raising Consciousness.

And so The Conscious Lab was born.

A year later she has her own domain, her own platform where all videos and online sessions are hosted. The Conscious Lab is an experiment. It is a place to talk all things Consciousness related. It is a place for collaborators to experiment with what lights them up. That might be yoga, it might be forest bathing, it might be conscious fashion! It’s a place for those who understand that life is both spiritual and material; a place for deep silent reflection and a place to enjoy life in all its color.

Openly acknowledging that the spiritual and the material can co-exist and focussing on the enjoyment of life as much as the renunciation (at times) of it has cost me a seat at the Yoga table (tribe) to a large extent, and this has often times been both sad and down right comical. So it is with The Conscious Lab that I create my own table that perhaps only a few will sit down to, but as long as we all eat, we all enjoy and we all have a truck load of fun, that’s more than I could hope for.