The World of Your Business Playbook: How to create a world of welcome and belonging for you and your customers.
93 pages. $20. Digital download.

In fourteen chapters filled with exploratory questions, writing prompts, and practical Playsheets, this gorgeous Playbook invites you to creatively shape the world of your business — its language & lineage, laws & customs, economy and ecology. Clarify whom your business serves, how it serves, and why it exists. Create a world that rings with a clear message for your customers: You are safe; you are home; you belong here.

Soul Business: Your business as an expression of your soul and values. 
149 pages. $15. Digital download.

We need wholeness — in our own lives, in our businesses, and in our world. We need to create businesses that support our joy, and the people, places and causes we love. Soul Business is an invitation to respond to that call for wholeness — to discover the everyday miracles that occur when you honor wholeness as the central organizing principle of your business.

Rumors of Home: Poems.
113 pages. $15. Digital download.

These poems are explorations and discoveries of Love in all its forms. Love between you and your soul. The love that brings us together, the love that dances us apart. The Love that wraps us in the arms of the world.

Come and meet the new triplets here!

The first thing she did, when her dad carried her into the house, was scramble out of his arms and race off to explore her new surroundings.

It was a large, two-story house, with a living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom on the main floor, a sturdy, covered deck that led out to a beautiful garden, and three more bedrooms upstairs.

My granddaughter wandered around the entire downstairs with her hands clasped behind her back, like a very small general inspecting the troops, and offered up an excited play-by-play of her discoveries: “Door!” “Couch!” “Chair!” “Glass!” “Daddy!” “Up!” And, “What’s that?!”

As she named each thing, she patted it tenderly, talking to it in an intimate cooing babble that none of us understood, though we all felt her delight and wonder, her ecstatic appreciation, and found ourselves smiling wider and wider as she circumnavigated her new universe.

Eventually, she made her way out onto the deck and carefully climbed down the stairs to the garden, proclaiming her adoration for each bush and flower so loudly and with such glee that we trailed after her, helpless honeybees in thrall to the sweet mysteries of this tiny, pony-tailed adventurer.

Watching her, I realized she was making herself at home. Getting to know each room, each bit of furniture, each patch of grass and garden shrub — making all of it her own by adoring the rugs, the chairs and couches, the doors and dishes, the paintings on the walls (“What’s that?!”), the books on the coffee table, the wondrous fragrance of cedar railings.

She stroked and petted everything, snuggling into the world around her by naming it, delighting in it, loving it, being intrigued, astonished and bewildered by it – absorbing and being absorbed by all of it.

She was offering us a master class in the art of belonging.

We are born knowing we belong. Belonging infuses every cell of our bodies, and brings us into ecstatic, sensual relationship with our world. From the moment we discover the Other in the world around us, we are drawn to embrace it, surrender to its mystery, find our place of belonging with it and within it.

Belonging leads us to feel deeply at home in the world. Engaged. In love. Safe. Secure.

To know we belong is to know we are loved, wanted — essential to the well-being of the whole.

The breakfast table in our vacation home became more fully and proudly itself because my granddaughter loved it as she sat, coloring, on its polished surface; because I adorned it with a small vase of flowers; because our family ate our meals there, and enjoyed ourselves and each other around its generous girth; because we loved and appreciated its sturdy spaciousness.

And each of us became more ourselves because of our relationship with it – for the brief time that we were there, we belonged together.

So, why is it that, as we grow up, grow older, we sometimes feel like new immigrants who’ve been dropped off here by accident – through some failure in the cosmic delivery system? Why do we feel like refugees from a distant star – as though everyone else speaks a secret language that we can’t decipher?

Why do we feel exiled from the country of our belonging?

More urgently, how do we find our way back?

Our souls are the first home of our belonging. On a soul level, we are one with everything, so our experience is always one of belonging.

When we incarnate into the physical world, we enter a world that’s defined by boundaries and limits. We enter the world of form, in which everything and everyone we encounter is utterly unique – individual, discrete, unlike any other.

When we encounter Otherness, we long to merge with it, to feel that first, primal belonging by fusing with the people we love, or admire and want to emulate. The longing to merge is innate – we are born with it. But we misplace it by making objects out of the people around us, and trying to become one with them.

The longing to belong is holy desire – it’s the longing to be one with our souls. When we follow that longing inward, to the place where we are always at home, it naturally brings us into right relationship with the world around us as well. We belong as effortlessly as my little granddaughter did in our very temporary vacation home.

If, on the other hand, we abandon our souls and look to the Other for our belonging, we feel exiled. Lonely, invisible, isolated. Restless. Filled with a longing that can’t be assuaged.

When these feelings assault us, they offer us an important reminder that we’re encountering one of the central paradoxes of incarnation, in all its sometimes painful complexity.

These feelings are not problems to be solved, but rather, portals to the deeper truths of your soul, your incarnation, and the essential question of how, to whom, and where you belong.

At the essence and unity end of the spectrum of being, you don’t have to do anything to belong — you belong, because you are a fractal of the Sacred, a fractal of Wholeness, and belonging is the nature of your soul.

It’s within the boundaries of your life that you experience the pain of not-belonging.

When you disconnect from your soul, you feel lost — you feel as though you don’t belong. This disconnection happens for many reasons. You may be ill, or exhausted, and that leads to disconnection. You may be living a life that isn’t right for you, or that is not in harmony with your inner being. This will lead you away from your soul too.

Your responses to life’s experiences can contribute to disconnection. You may have lived through experiences of dislocation — of not being rooted in geography and place, or not being anchored in a loving family and community, or other forms of exile, trauma, or instability. Each of these experiences can lead to a pattern of turning away from your soul, looking to the world around you for safety and belonging.

Your body needs rootedness and flow, stability and adventure, safety and freedom. If any one element in these seemingly contradictory pairs of needs is not met — if there’s too much of one and not enough of the other — it affects your first chakra, and your ability to be present in your body and in your life. That, in turn, affects the way you use your energy, and it shapes your relationship with the world around you.

You know that you belong, when you experience and live from your own center, and rest fully in your place in wholeness. You have to feel safe, to do this.

When you don’t feel settled and at home in your body, you move outside yourself to seek safety from others — loved ones, family, friends, society, even ideologies. You project onto them the power to bestow what only your soul’s presence can give you — belonging, love, acceptance, appreciation, and all the rest of the qualities of soul that are as essential to your life and well-being as air, water, and food.

So, when your childhood or adult experiences are ones of dislocation, this contributes to a pattern of moving away from your own center, out to the periphery of your energy field, where you can more readily tune into & parse other people’s feelings, thoughts, beliefs & ideas, to help you fit in. You think, ‘If I can just figure out how to fit in, I will belong, I will feel safe.’

The attempt to fit in is the sword that slices through belonging, because it takes you away from yourself. Instead of your soul being the clearest, strongest energy in your life, other people’s energy, ideas, feelings, & beliefs colonize your center.

And, with that, you experience the pain of not belonging.

So, how do you get back to yourself, to your own belonging?

• Take your energy back from everyone & everything onto which you’ve projected your belonging.

  You belong to yourself. You belong to your life. You belong to the Earth, to your soul. This isn’t just a lovely sentiment, it’s an energetic reality.

• Connect with your soul. Talk with it about this excruciating pattern of wandering away from your center, in order to fit in. Ask it to be the clearest, strongest energy in your body & your life.
• Connect with the Deva of the Earth. Ask it to fill your first chakra with its presence. Open up your feet chakras; invite more Earth energy in through your feet, up through the energy channels in your legs, into your first chakra.

  The Deva of the Earth is one of the primary elements of your first chakra, and its presence is essential to your sense of belonging. When the elements that form your first chakra are out of balance with each other, bringing in more Earth energy will help restore harmony in your first chakra, and with it, a greater sense of peace & sovereignty.

• Participate, joyfully, in the life of your world. You experience belonging through love, devotion, commitment, absorption.

  Begin by extending your love to the objects in your home, and experience the love that flows back from them to you. Develop deeper relationships with the Devas of your home, your neighborhood, the geography and landscape of the place where you live.

  Cultivate your relationships with the Devas of your hometown, your region, your country. Find out what they’re up to. Ask how you can participate in and contribute to their work of unfolding the patterns they hold for a peaceful, harmonious, loving, beautiful home, neighborhood, landscape, city, country.

• Make friends with The Deva of Belonging. It will help you anchor the quality of Belonging in your body & your life, if you ask. Explore ways in which you can participate in its activity of unfolding the pattern of Belonging in the world.
• Surrender to the gifts of this journey — it will take you to your own becoming. Hold both your painful feelings, and your deeper sense of belonging, in your spacious, generous heart.

  There’s room for all of you, and for everything you experience — the grim and the glorious, the wounded, wounding, healing and healed.

Reclaim your belonging, first by reconnecting with your soul – and then by loving your world from that powerful center of love, sovereignty and wholeness.

Prayer is the longing of the heart to know and be known by the Beloved.

Every prayer is deep Desire.
Every true desire is prayer.

If you’re going through one of those narrow places in your life where you feel alone and unprotected — that trapped, not-enough-air-to-breathe feeling where the walls of your world loom over you, steep and hard-edged, and there’s no inspiring star to guide you — please know that this is a passage in which we all find ourselves bewildered, from time to time.

When your past experiences echo this story (you, alone, slogging through the clay and grit of joyless work, teeth clenched, heart sore), then finding your way out – into the clear sky of relationship, into the intimate truth of interdependence — can taste like despair in your mouth.

Yet, when you feel most attenuated by time and circumstance, you are still cradled in a living lap of love and relationship. It breathes with you. It holds you in infinite tenderness, this lap of the Sacred Earth. This lap of sweet, sweet belonging.

Every breath you breathe is a gift, from the Earth to you, from the Sacred to you, from your soul to you.

There’s a simple way to find your way home, to snuggle back into the lap of the world.

It’s the magic of loving attention to what is. It restores you to the wide open horizon of love and belonging.

Love what’s in front of you.

Love the air that enters your nostrils and sustains your life.

Savor your breakfast. Love the bowl from which you eat. Love the table on which you rest your elbow. Love the sunlight that warms your hand and gilds your fingertips.

Love begets love.

Feel the love that flows to you from the everyday objects in your home. They are not conscious in the way that you are conscious, but they are emanations of the Sacred too. Love them, and they’ll love you back.

Everything responds to love. Everything becomes more fully and radiantly itself, in the light of love and appreciation.

Give yourself the gift of loving things as they are.

When you see the walls of your home through the eyes of love, they are shelter and belonging, sanctuary and the kiss of your Beloved.

Love the chair that holds you, the desk that lends itself so patiently to your work, the generous floor that supports your feet. Discover the miracle at the heart of their being — they are Love incarnate, Love expressing Itself in these humble, beautiful forms.

As you extend your love to the world around you, every object and life-form reveals its secret, shining self. You rediscover the truth of your place in the world — you are a star in a glowing galaxy of love and communion.

This is the gift of incarnation, this radiant web of love and connection that unites us. This is your soul’s inheritance.

You are held by grace and gravity in intimate relationship with all of creation.

Play with this. Discover it in your own body, in your own felt sense of how and where you belong.

Trust is built through experience. Choose to build a body of experience through which the light of your life can illumine your world.

Every cell in your body knows its place in wholeness. Focus your attention there — on the star that is you, on your place in the galaxy of being — and discover the miracles that are unfolding within and all around you, in this very moment.

There’s an epidemic of exhaustion, overwhelm, and not-enoughness among our tribe of online entrepreneurs. We care, deeply, about the state of our world. And we forget that giving and receiving are in-breath and out-breath. Too much of one without the other will leave you passed out on the floor, unable to help yourself or anyone else because you’ve forgotten to breathe.

We deplete ourselves in order to serve our clients and customers. We don’t mean to do this. We recognize the need for harmony and wholeness, for loving care. But our needs can seem infinite, untenable, impossible to meet “in the real world.”

So, we serve our vision of an abundant world through a kind of spiritual and energetic anorexia. We don’t give ourselves what we truly need, in order to serve deeply and joyously. And since we can only give what’s within us, we offer emptiness from our emptied-out selves. We feel hollow, disconnected from the sources of our power and presence. Uprooted from the ground of our being, our doing becomes desiccated, dusty, ineffective.

We feel chronically guilty about not giving our businesses what we think they need in order to flourish. We forget that, to nourish our businesses, we must first nourish ourselves.

This is for all of you who sometimes feel as though you’re hiking through a desert of musts and shoulds and ought-tos and never-enoughs.

First: Take a breath… And another… and… another…

What is your deepest desire, right now? Quick, without thought or reflection — what do you know you truly and deeply want?

Trust your deep desire. Honor its call. If your desire is for peace, for spaciousness, give yourself breathing room. Give yourself whatever you need, to feel peaceful, to feel spacious. Rest. Do the bare minimum and explore what ease and grace can do for you.

Discover what really needs your time and attention. Partner with the soul of your business to make it happen with just the amount of effort necessary to bring it to full and flourishing life.

I promise you, your long to-do list is not part of your soul’s purpose.

First and foremost, you offer the world your presence, the quality of your incarnate being. Cultivating this is your primary responsibility.

What would your life be like, if you shaped your business with your own well-being — your joy, your relaxed, rested, deep presence — at its heart? How would you serve? How would you serve if you served yourself first, and let the fullness of your presence overflow in service to your world?

This is what I’ve been exploring, experimenting with and playing with in my own business.

Start with the assumption that your deepest desires are holy, evolutionary, and blessed.

What happens when you follow them — beyond what you think you should be doing, into the truth of a life and business that is truly yours, that rests on the ground of your presence?

Be curious.

When those fears inevitably arise — that you are letting opportunities slip through your fingers because you’re too tired, or you’ve depleted your time, your energy and your finances on things that don’t nourish you; that you’ll never be able to have what you need because you’re caught in a desert of not-enoughness — remind yourself of this truth:

There is no such thing as a lost opportunity. That which belongs with you will return to you in many forms, until you are ready to receive it. Wholeness gives you everything you need, in each moment.

Meet your immediate needs first — and trust that when you’re ready, what you need next will offer itself.

We live in a universe of infinite potentiality. Incarnation is the art of choosing — from those infinite possibilities — the one or two things that you are willing and able to lend your creative power to at any given time. When you choose that which is in harmony with your deepest desires, your choices will nourish you, your life, your business and your world.

This is the art of creating and manifesting within boundaries. Boundaries are not walls — they are living containers within which your desires can breathe, gestate and grow until they are ready to be born.

Choose what your heart truly desires, right now. When you’ve had your fill, your desire will lead you to the next creative choice, and the next.

Choose truth. Choose compassion for yourself. Choose loving kindness.

Discover how your life and business unfold, when you place your own well-being on the altar of your world.

Jen Louden is the best-selling author of 6 books, including the pioneering best-sellers The Woman’s Comfort Book and The Woman’s Retreat Book. Her retreats are richly creative experiences, and often booked months in advance. She’s the proud mom of a college freshman, and the creator of the beloved course Teach Now.

You can sign up for a free sampler of her Teach Now program, a live class, on April 4th, here.

Jen is a teacher’s teacher, and my dear friend. I’m delighted and honored to share her wisdom with you. In this conversation, we talk about teaching as a sacred path, as service, as a calling that taps us on the shoulder in unexpected ways and won’t be denied.

We also talk about the practical aspects of teaching — what makes it effective, soul-filled, rewarding, and profitable? How do you know when you’re ready to teach? How do you begin?

Listen in on our conversation here:

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or right-click here and save the audio to your computer to listen to later.

If you teach, or want to, sign up for Jen’s program. It’s a remarkably rich and rewarding 6-week journey that will take you to the heart of why and how you teach, and offer you the skills and tools to share what you know, most beautifully. You’ll also learn from the wisdom of more than 44 master teachers whom Jen interviewed for this series — including Natalie Goldberg, Sharon Salzberg, Christina Baldwin, Elizabeth Lesser, Mark Nepo, Parker Palmer, among others.

Today, all that shelters me descends
with the sudden, clamorous weight
of a collapsed safari tent. Tangled

in its heavy canvas, its guy wires and
flapping doorway, I struggle
to my knees, scrape the palm of my hand

against flinty ground, stagger upright
in the ruins of shelter gone rogue,
its domed roof and foldaway

walls revealed for what they are:
a flimsy intervention.

Until the bird in me, that
leather-winged pterodactyl,
resumes its interrupted flight

choosing the accommodation of wings
to uplifting air, leaving the mortal need
for pretexts of home far, far behind.