Confessions of a Holistic Entrepreneur Part 2: Freedom Time

I’ve never tolerated confinement very well…playing by someone else’s rules or being stuck in limiting situations has never worked out well for me. My wild spirit inevitably rebels and casts off the chains that have bound me.

I’m here in this lifetime to transform. To get REAL. To grow and stretch and explore and discover new, deeper, more authentic and connected ways of being ALIVE in this magical world. 

There’s a story from my childhood that goes back before my own memory can reach that shows me this uncontainable part of me has been there since I was just a wee one. I was probably 2 or 3 years old and my family was cruising down the highway in our old Mazda station wagon. In an act of defiance, perhaps after some arguing, I took off my shoes and chucked them right out the window of the moving car. I was sick of being told to wear shoes. My feet wanted to be free. I refused to be confined in that way. I wanted to go barefootin’!!

This is the energy that wells up in me when my spirit feels confined in any way…I just want to cast off the chains and get FREE.

Needless to say, this doesn’t make me a very good cog in the consumer machine. Climbing the ladder, towing the line, following suit…these are not my strong points.

And that’s one of the reasons I chose the entrepreneurial path. I had to make money somehow but I didn’t want a boss or organization telling me what to do…I wanted the freedom to follow my own creative and spiritual directive…so I struck out on my own…as a free spirited-business owner.

In a lot of ways this way of working has suited me well. I get to set my own goals, make my own schedule, create and break my own rules. As a single mom, it’s given me the opportunity to really be there for my daughter when she needs me and to work around her school events and sick days.

But, after all these years, I realize that these forms of freedom are a trade-in for the deeper freedom that I actually crave.

Being a “business owner” has been its own form of confinement. Relying on the fluctuating income my business generates to cover the basic necessities of life has kept me trapped in a constant state of stress and desperation for years… while learning to strategize and scheme new ways to improve my income and create a steadier flow has not only hijacked the true mission of my work, at times, but has also been a profound form of subjugation and submission to the growth-based capitalism that I see destroying the magical freedom of life of Earth. 

Bound to the need to “build” my business within the commercialized economy I’ve had to continually clip my wings, temper my speech and behave myself in order to appeal to potential clients and keep my head above water financially. 

I am no longer willing to do this.

I am no longer willing to subject my own spiritual mission of supporting, nourishing and facilitating authentic transformation to the confines of the conventional economy.

The type of radical transformation that I believe we are being called to demands us to stretch and grow way beyond the limitations of this dying economic system…to break free of the illusion of scarcity created by the commodification of everything we can possibly put a price tag on…from our food and water and shelter to our most sacred transformational processes.

“When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness.”

– Charles Eistenstein Sacred Economics

Outside of this paralyzing human economy thrives the age-old reality of the Gifting Way…the way of the natural world that gives itself freely to feed the whole. Ironically, the abundance we’re all searching for is right there at our fingertips…just beyond the fence of “civilized” life…just over the border of our industrial hunger.

It is the natural way of all beings…including humans.

It’s not something to “get” or conquer…it’s something to give ourselves to. And it is the very thing that we must rediscover if we intend to emancipate ourselves from the slavery of this modern economy and regain any hope for a future of freedom. The seeming omnipotence of the infamous “1%” global oligarchy and the intensity of our own financial pressures may make this rediscovery seem like an impossible pipe dream. But grand transformation sprouts from the seeds of subtle shifts in awareness and perspective.

And grand transformation is desperately needed.

Right now, I’m working on my own subtle (and not-so-subtle) shifts by giving myself the freedom to give…to create and share as Spirit moves me with no thought of business building strategies…to write and paint and pray and cry and dream as Spirit calls me to…to devote my time to my real 3D life-work of nourishing community and deepening my relationship with the living Earth…to journey with the people who are called to me and facilitate their transformational processes with out the restraints of specified programs and formulas.

This, for me, is freedom time…time to get free.