Sell Yourself….Sincerely

I have been doing a lot of work in the last several months to shed myself from our cultural brashness and enter into a new state of honesty, truthfulness and purity. Moving from this point back into the world of marketing and sales is where I’m treading in uncharted waters. How do we truthful, open-hearted yogis, or at least attempting to be so, launch our own business within the current socio-economic order and remain integral and in-tact? What is the yogic business model? Can one even exist?

On some level, it feels wrong to charge a set amount for something I am doing from my heart. I prefer the dana approach- where people donate what they can and want to. It feels more like I offer something as a gift and they return with a gift if they like. As a yogi to maintain that higher self without attachment or desire for the result is very important. So is survival.

Idealistically one can come up with some really beautiful sounding theory, but then trying to work it out is another story. Like the other night- Dario and I went to the Zendo and did meditation for a couple hours. Dario asked me how it went. I said “I had in mind this lovely meditation I would do: Focus on the third eye while chanting Om over and over. I started chanting …and…third eye- what? When you’re on the battlefield of your mind, there’s no room for poetry- I could barely keep up with my Om’s.” When I start imagining pitching myself, going on interviews, etc, it’s like a battlefield. What does integrity mean on that? Truth. Love. Non-Attachment. What I think it comes down to is asking your community to also respond with these same qualities.

At Spirit Rock Meditation center in California, their bookstore doesn’t have any staff. You are responsible for checking yourself out, applying taxes and appropriate discounts all on the the presumption that the community will mirror the morals the business upholds. It’s beautiful. Can it work everywhere?

What do you think?