If It Isn’t Hanuman Heart-Based, I Don’t Want It

This drop is a return to devotion—live from a text convo about launching, of all things:

This is a look at Hanuman as the archetype of selfless service, and what it means to lead, build, and create from reverence rather than ego;

a Venn diagram of Hanuman-esque creation and the reminder that your sacred work isn't about you,

like I often say, as best being a human allows.

If you are holding a body of work, a practice, or a business, this is a recalibration back to devotion, with a deep recognition of the human-ness present too.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Business Priestess Activation, audio drops for mystics in business where entrepreneurship is ritual, strategy is soulcraft, and expansion is inevitable. I'm Elizabeth Rowan, spiritual mentor, yogi, and business priestess. Here we don't do formulas, we do fire. These transmissions are potent activations to ignite your long-term strategy, self-leadership, energetic mastery and embodiment, and lasting legacy in the world. Because your sacred work isn't just business, it's business and being. Let's begin. Welcome back, Priestess. Over the weekend, I was on text and in voice notes chatting back and forth with a dear friend, also a spiritual business owner and practitioner who is currently mid-launch. And if you are here, you have certainly yourself moved through the initiation that is launching. Maybe you are currently mid-launch yourself. And something that I said to her in passing struck us both, and I want to share that with you here today. And what I said was essentially if it isn't Hanuman heart-based in origin, I don't want it. If it isn't Hanuman heart-based in origin, I don't want it in this world of increasingly AI, quick cash infusion offers this really outside of yourself offering created on a whim and so on and so forth. And I realize it's not as simple as just the Hanuman archetype. Stay with me here. This is what we're getting into today. Because yes, there's a Venn diagram of the Hanuman heart-based creation that when you are creating it, certainly when you're launching, when you're sharing, when you're selling it or not selling it, as it were, it feels like the visceral experience. You might imagine Hanuman with his sharp monkey claws ripping open the flesh in front of his heart to expose himself in his devotion. It very much feels like that. And the Venn diagram comes when that devotional, heart-based, almost inside-outness of it all intersects with the liberating, I find, reminder of it's not about you. And thus the spiritual practice of entrepreneurship begins. We are talking today about the devotional state that moves you outside of yourself. Because even in the myth of Hanuman, it's not about him. He actually is not the center of the story. He is in deepest service to something greater. And this is the standard that we get to consciously cultivate day after day after day, and come back to when we lose our way in spiritual practice, certainly, and absolutely in the spiritual practice that is entrepreneurship. So let's talk about devotion. Devotion is not a feeling. Devotion creates a feeling, but devotion is not how you feel when things are working. Rather, it's how you continue to orient whether or not they are. Let that land for a moment. Devotion is how you orient yourself. Yes, in your work, yes, in the world, as a being whose existence is an extension of the divine, while simultaneously being in deepest service to the divine. Being in devotion governs your decisions, especially when your ego would rather contract or react or take the wheel. Devotion can certainly be what keeps you in the work when that ego, when you're in air quotes, identity wants comfort or the easy path more than the responsibility or the initiation. And this I think is where a lot of people misunderstand devotion in treating it like inspiration, when that is not what we're talking about here. It's a form of spiritual life raft. It is like the Yoga Sutra translation talks about, I believe this is in regard actually to Tapas, a golden rope where, as needed, you're able to tug on the golden rope to the divine to get yourself in or out of whatever situation you might find yourself in at the moment. So let's reframe as often as we catch ourselves, just like in asana, with remembering your breath, the frame of devotion being as a landing pad and a destination. So equally where you're always stationed and the state that you are constantly, intentionally co-creating for yourself as many times a day as it takes, again and again and again. Related. Related to devotion very deeply is leadership because it takes a profound degree of self-leadership to maintain your state of devotion, to reorient back to your state of devotion when you have metaphorically wandered astray, right? And gotten caught up in the outcomes of the launch and gotten caught up in the ego narrative or the fear story pattern that is omnipresent and ever trying to take over and take the wheel. And the reality of leadership is that if you are building anything for yourself, for your life, certainly for your work in the world, you are in leadership. And leadership requires devotion. Leadership requires a reverence, not for yourself. This is back to the Venn diagram thing of the Hanuman Heart openness and the it's not about you. Because what you're doing is cultivating this profound devotion and reverence to what you're stewarding that is in service beyond just you. And we know this intellectually, but this next piece, how human of us. But the moment your business becomes about you, and this gets really tricky if you're a personal brand like I am. The moment your business becomes about you, your moods, your doubts, your fluctuations, your preferences, it risks destabilizing. It risks destabilizing, not because you're human, but because you've made yourself the center of the instrument. It would be like if Hanuman ripped his heart open and there's just a Hanuman sitting in there, which it wasn't, of course, it was Sita and V. And so this is the near paradox around leadership. Is yes, at any given moment we are leading ourselves to and through ourselves in this state of Hanuman-esque bhakti devotion and reverence. Now, this is where your practice comes in. And for many and most of us, practices plural. Not the one you do for an hour, not the this is what I do, not the pre-dawn meditating, sitting on my couch, pulling cards, a little spell work, lighting candles, etc., listening to chanting. This is not that. This is the practice that we actually live inside embody from head to toe. The practice of holding our own humanness protests and witnessing our own power-hungry ego and not collapsing into the shadow while also not casting it out and not outsourcing your authority, practicing all of that and still showing up. That's a lot going on at any given time, as you are so well aware of. And this is not a perfect practice, this is a conscious one. This is where your practice is not perfect but conscious. The work is not to eliminate, you know this, but it bears repeating the very human part of you. And I'm kind of amusing myself here and thinking about this through the context of launching, because there is very little business related that is acute in your face, shadow work, but getting feedback in real time, whether people do or don't seem to want your offering. Listen to what I just said. We're talking about someone else, maybe maybe not desiring your offering when we've forgotten the fact that it's an offering. It's an offering, right? So the practice becomes yes, the devotional aspect, yes, the getting out of your own way and your own head aspect without eliminating your humanity. I just got off of a one-on-one fire of transformation mastermind call, and we were refraining how human of you, how human of you, as she navigates a pivot and exploring a new way of expressing this new body of work while holding down an existing business and so on. How human of you to have all sorts of internal protests and stories and resistance. Yes. Our practice is to hold all of this without letting it lead. If you have worked with me in any capacity, you know this by heart. If you are a spiritual practitioner in any capacity who embraces shadow work, you know this, yes, by heart, you know this intellectually, you dedicate a portion of your practice to it. So it gets to stay front and center when even after years, a lifetime's worth of practice, it can really risk bumping up against the how human of you element of this whole thing. And the how human piece with it not being about us. And now we arrive at the beautiful and sometimes heavy and responsibility phenomenon that is your legacy when your work is absolutely not about you, not your expression, validation, your experience of it and creation and launching, whatever. That might be how it starts, but it certainly is not how your body of work matures. Legacy work on the heels of your leadership requires some shifts. And in this Hanuman-esque lens and intersection point, with it not being about you, the shifts of legacy work are often from self-expression, which is certainly how personal brand can begin, to stewardship, from identity. Who am I to teach you a thing? What transformation can I invite you into and co-create together, from identity to a degree of responsibility from what I feel like doing to actually what is required of me. I was actually also just talking with a client today about that, the responsibility, and not in a heavy, laborious way, but this way that I find really liberating because it actually lets you get out of your own way. I am responsible for stewarding this thing that actually has very little to do with me, even though in current day marketing, social media expression in that regard looks like it's only about me, right? These shifts are the embodiment of the Hanuman heart-soul extension energy, that archetype of you holding your entire body of work there in the middle of your near-bleeding chest. And that is what makes your work last. This applies everywhere. You know this, and it's easy to forget until we receive it perhaps in this way. This applies everywhere. Your business is practice. This applies to your teaching, your relationships, your creative work, and yes, your business. And you know, again, business is not separate from your practice. In fact, as far as I am concerned, your business is an absolutely exceptional format through which to practice. It is a metaphor. Everything that you do in your business actually is a metaphor and a ritual for your personal expansion. All of this reveals the depth of your work in the world. So everybody here listening is certainly building something with weight. There's gravity, there's an oomph, a meaning to it. It matters. And you know, this is the level of devotion of getting out of your own way, of yes, the Hanuman heart openness and the what a relief. None of this is about me. Not even duality, but seeming almost oxymoron, right? This is the level of devotion required to hold it. This is the level of responsibility required to maintain that devotion. And conversely, this is the level of devotion required to hold it down in your business. This is the work that I do together with my one-on-one clients. We get into this inside initially a one-on-one monthly intensive. We absolutely embody this on the regular inside my Fire of Transformation Mastermind. Not to add more, but to really arrive at this state of deep integration, whereas you no longer have to battle the ego-ness, is or isn't it about me over here, alongside of the but the soul creation in me, the divine creation coming through me, Hanuman flavor expression, and really start to embody both in this beautiful alchemical union. This is the work that I do with you. If you are listening to this and you are launching, if you are mid-launch, if you are in full, it's definitely all about me. My ego is on having a field day vibe andor the, oh my gosh, I can't even think about the structural pieces for being so heart over heels in the Hanuman creation state. Let me know. I would love to hear from you on this and hear, furthermore, how this lands and how you might apply it to your business and your launching and sharing your beautiful work in the world. Thank you as ever, Priestess, for tuning in. I will be back with more where this came from.