My Journey Into Faith and How I Continue to Cultivate It
Over the last 3.5 years I’ve had to cultivate a number of new skills. But there is one skill in particular that I not only didn’t know I needed, I didn’t realize that it was something that I could learn. In order to talk about the new skill I had to learn we have to talk first about passion and purpose. I know that many people who have been following along with the self-help/ thought leaders of our time will know that many thought leaders are beginning to push back against the idea of anyone needing to find a great big beautiful passion or purpose. I get that.
For some folks the idea of passion and purpose is just too much, too high of expectations. If that feels like too much pressure for you, just let it go now and feel no guilt about that. But listen, I’m straight up, one of those people who’s known since college there was something in me that I had not yet accessed. I knew that there was something in me that I was supposed to be doing and there was a long chunk of time where I had not yet connected with it in the way I was meant to connect with it. In hindsight I can say it was all unfolding perfectly and I was exactly where I needed to be, but even way back then I had a knowing that I needed to figure it out. I’ve never doubted that I had a purpose, I just didn’t always know what that purpose was. I could tell you what my purpose wasn’t, that was always easier. My 20’s and the first 4.5 years of my 30’s involved lots of searching for what I was supposed to be doing. It’s ok if that’s not your journey, but that road of searching was a journey I needed. It prepared me for everything I’m doing now.
There was a purpose in me that prior to finding/creating the work I’m doing now, I had not yet touched and I was hungry for it. Once I understood that I was supposed to forge my own path, once I understood that I was supposed to create a new kind of work, I had to begin to believe in myself in ways I didn’t even know were possible. I had to make difficult choices to leave the life I had been living that seemed relatively safe, secure and responsible to head into the unknown. In one of my favorite songs by the Avett Brother’s there’s a line I can relate to well, “so I cut the ties, and I jumped the track, for never to return”. I did cut the ties to my old life and I chose to start moving forward even though I wasn’t certain or clear on where I’d be ending up. This was my introduction to faith. To cut those ties, to do what I did, I had to cultivate a strong faith in myself and frankly a faith in something greater than me.
Faith for me has come to mean an unwavering belief in self and a non-physical higher power. For me I have a faith in and unwavering belief that I’ve been called to do this work that I’m doing and I will move forward towards it as long as I have to, even in the face of strong sometimes seemingly impossible adversity. The dictionary defines faith as “complete trust or confidence in someone or something” Prior to embarking on this solo journey I would not say that I had trust or faith in much, or even had a good understanding of what faith was. I had to be tested to realize that I actually had faith and learn to realize it was a tool that I could lean on.
Starting a business from complete scratch without much startup capitol, without another funding sources is tough, and it often feels boarder line impossible. It’s very difficult to get a loan from a bank as a new business, in my experience no matter what your business plan is, no matter how solid it looks, a bank doesn’t want to loan to a risky new entrepreneurial venture. Now credit cards with very high interest rates are willing to loan to you in spades during this time, but in my experience, that’s a trap designed for you to loose . A loan would have been very useful for me, a fixed amount that I could create a budget around and a plan to repay. But with business loans you have to have at least 3 years of steady revenue before a bank will loan to you which means if you don’t already have capital to start you’ll probably need to boot strap it which is what I did for my yoga studio and what I did for Yoke and Abundance. This is tough stuff. My family was not in a position to loan me money, I was not independently wealthy. I’m a single woman who takes care of herself, there is no one that helps me out. Someday I’ll write you a blog post about how our whole society is rigid to only support partnerships and is set against the single woman but I digress.
In the early years of entrepreneurship, building a business, you do what you can with what you have as you throw shit at the wall to see what sticks. That’s a technical expression. I promise you that most business owners who are forging a new way are just throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks in the beginning. No one has this all figured out. Seriously run in the opposite direction from anyone who tells you they know what they’re doing, they’re probably a psychopath.
In the beginning of Yoke and Abundance I did project my income wrong. I got it very very wrong. Everything took much longer than I imagined, almost 3.5 times longer than I imagined. It’s only been about 2.5-3 years in that I started hitting the numbers consistently that I thought I could produce in my first year of business. I’ve not been shy to talk about the fact that I had to file bankruptcy in 2019. Even then in the midst of that low place I felt that I was supposed to keep going. And even though I’ve not been shy in talking about the bankruptcy, I don’t like talking about it. It doesn’t feel good that it’s a part of my story, but i can’t change that it happened. If I could have done something different I would have and believe me I tried a lot of different things. But I had cut the ties and I had jumped the track. I was not supposed to be on a train track, I was learning I was never a train to begin with, to my surprise I’m more of a gator or a jeep because I was made for off roading. What told me to keep pushing all of the months when I’ve not been sure if there would be enough in my bank account to make my mortgage payment? It was faith that told me to keep going, faith that I would find a way and figure it out. I was learning to walk with an abundance of faith. It was faith in the work I knew I was put on this earth to do. It was faith in myself that I could keep carving my way forward and get out of the hole I’d found myself in. Listen, I don’t want you to think this is a post advocating for you to do things the way I’ve done them. It’s almost the opposite, in part I tell this story because I think that it’s a cautionary tale. I want to scream, don’t end up like me! Yet, when you are called to make something happen, you are called to do it and you find a way. I tell you this story not because I want you to do it like I did, but because what I learned is that I am capable of doing really difficult things. I have faith that I am going to figure it out and look, the road has not been easy. No part of it has been easy, but through it all I’ve found faith in myself.
There is now a deep well of inner knowing and I lean on it and I can return to it when I need to quench my thirst. There is a knowing that I’m being led, there is a knowing that I can’t see where this off road experience will take me but I’m following the call. I am in service to what I’ve been asked to do in this lifetime. And I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that I do believe in a divine higher power, which was actually a bit of a surprise to me when I came to that conclusion. I have a limited understanding of what the divine higher power is, but I know it’s there.
Now I work to cultivate my faith by…
Continuing to listen to what I’m being called to do. Then answering the call as quickly as I can.
When I fail (and you will fail while trying to do important work, it’s part of the success process) I look for what I learned, reassess and try again as quickly as I can.
Lean into my gratitude practice. Every day I name at least three things I’m grateful for, why I’m grateful for them and then what I did to bring them into my life.
I keep my eyes on who I’m serving what I’m building and why I’m building it which always goes back to thinking about the audience I’m serving.
Now it’s your turn, what does faith mean to you? Do you feel like you have faith in yourself or a higher power? and how do you cultivate your faith? Is there one small thing you can do today to lean into your own faith?