 Have you ever wrestled with marketing a program or workshop or finding coaching clients? Do you have no problem developing good services and helpful workshops but selling them is agony? Have you sat up late googling, How to market my spiritual business? Then you’ve probably come across “empathy marketing.” In the past month, I’ve been working hard on getting the word out for my new seminar, teaching a form of peer-counseling, and if the interwebs are right, empathy marketing is the holy grail. It suggests I should not think of myself as the customer as this would fatally bias me. It boldly stated, Not everyone is like you! To which I cried at the computer monitor, practically wringing my hands, I know! It’s no use! I can’t do it! Any time I have to get the word out about a course I’ve created, an article or blog post I’ve written or a service I offer I feel like crying. I might know what people need or what might be helpful to them. But I just don’t think I know what they want! Even as I rack my brains, I don’t see how that helps me get into your head! One-on-one, when we get into the territory of mysticism, of spirituality, that’s where I excel! I know you are whole and wise and divine, deep down, or high above, take your pick. I know you long for connection. You want to be seen, to be understood. I know you long to be able to let go and really, really, really love. With all your heart from the top of your head to the tips of your toes! When we’re seated across from each other or your face shines from the desktop monitor in a Zoom session I know that our human connection brings you joy. I can see it! I feel my heart answering. But when you ask me, what do people want, I draw a blank! I revert back to talking about what I can offer you, hoping you’ll be able to put two and two together and see how my seminar or workshop or service will fit your needs. When you ask me to think about what people want, and yes, I’m being judgmental, but I have to be honest here, I think about the violence on TV and movie screens people seem so ready to consume and the nonsense flooding magazine stands, and I just can’t even. If that’s what people want, I cry, I’ve got nothing! Because I’m a diamond miner in the tunnels of the soul, I’m a spelunker dropping into the secret caves of the heart. I’m a spirit surfer, meeting you where your spirit dips and soars. I know — more than anything else I might know — what the soul wants, what the spirit wants. I also know that what for me feels like a desirable step — to get in touch with the innermost self — can be a dubious leap for others. Why are we going there, the “people” ask. We’re not going there, I answer, unable to help myself, we’re coming home. Home to the divine reality of our being. So, yes, as the reader can see I’m very good at pointing out how we’re so different and how I can’t understand you or help you understand me. But I want to be better at understanding you, not just as the ideal divine self that flies free in meta reality but as the screen-scrolling, movie-watching, working, grousing and loving, every-day self that you see in the mirror. And the one thing I know about that self is that this you also wants to be seen. Not always right away as your divine self but as the self you came to be as a result of the opportunities and knocks of life. With flaws in your earthly personality and mistakes on your resume. With your selfishness and magnanimity living side-by-side in you. You want to be seen and loved for who you are in the every-day. I can do that. I know you’re not perfect and you shouldn’t have to be. I’m clear you’re not “the people,” you’re a unique person. Sure, you can watch dumb movies, I do too. That’s neither good nor bad. And it’s also not the sum of me nor of you. Yes, you judge others just like I do. We’re all judgmental, caring, selfish, helpful living, breathing contradictions. At once the holy divine self and the earth-bound wildly mixed-up self. And that’s exactly what I love us for. So I still don’t know how to do empathy marketing. On the other hand, maybe empathy marketing is just another term for “quick fix” or “panacea” and what there is to do is old-fashioned putting it out there everywhere in any way we can and persisting. While you’re here, if you liked this article, please comment here and or like and follow me on Medium. Remember that for you this is one click, and for the author it helps to build their audience and offers them the much needed and appreciated motivation to keep write and giving their all. Thanks for reading! I’m a nonbinary certified life coach & peer-counselor, course developer & leader, Reiki master, published author and award-winning speaker with over a decade of experience guiding people to become empowered to create the amazing life that is truly possible. I especially focus on helping people on their Hero’s Journey to fulfill their life purpose. Come visit my website at henryhello.com.
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 Recently, I posted on social media, requesting of people that they please stop “picking” flowers. “Picking” is a euphemism that hides the fact that what we're doing is separating them from their life-giving source. Flowers, like all of nature are living manifestations of the Divine and deserve to have their lives honored on their own terms, not as decorative objects in our homes..
I was blessed to get one response which was enough to carry on the conversations. The innocuous enough post informed me that the individual grows flowers for the garden as well as the house. (I’m paraphrasing as I wish to maintain the person's privacy.) Upon reading these words, I immediately got a strange feeling in my gut and wrote back: "I've been wrestling with this for a while now, to understand myself not as the "actor upon" the living earth but as the "actor with." In that sense, when there are tulips in my garden, I see that it is the earth that has grown them. It is the flowers that have grown themselves. I've participated only in that I've put the bulbs into the ground and perhaps facilitated access to water. I'm striving for a meaningful humility by letting myself sense the flowers' sovereignty. Part of that respect is to refrain from breaking off their blossoms. That has led to my actually not in any way enjoying seeing broken living parts of the flower beings. I know with certainty they don't belong to me and I have no rights to their lives." My conversation partner was kind enough in their response, calling mine an interesting perspective and reminding me that we eat plants and that life feeds on itself and is a perpetual cycle of life and death. They also volunteered their view that flowers are nature’s way of expressing joy. They continued by suggesting that it makes no difference to flowers if we cut off their blooms. I very much agreed with them that the reality of life as manifest in time and space is that it consumes itself in order to perpetuate itself, that life recreates itself from itself. It's a system as terrifying as it is ingenious. However, to think of flowers as nature's expression of joy seemed truly anthropocentric, a perspective shaped purely by viewing the subject through the human lens. To me, flowers are flowers are flowers. And we, as humans, have a particular response to them. This response lives within us and is about us. I answered: "I felt distressed by your saying that it makes no difference to the tulips if you cut their blossoms. How on earth do we know these things with such certainty? There is a considerable amount of respected research that points to that plants feel pain. We used to think that animals don't feel pain, either. This is where I feel compelled to search myself. Yes, I feel I have the right to eat the carrot to sustain my life and the carrot has the right to eat the microbes to sustain her life. But isn't that very different from taking life for purposes of decorating our homes? We can enjoy the flowers' decoration without having to separate them from their source of life by cutting them. I think in that sense, the human consciousness is still in a state of barbarism. Barbarism from its root, "to speak like a foreigner." We are foreigners to plants' lives." I see this as being about more than a tulip blossom. Cutting blossoms off tulips speaks to how we conduct ourselves as a species in relationship with nature. The rest of nature can't check us (as evinced by climate change and mass extinctions). That’s why we have to cultivate the humility to check ourselves. That's such a journey. My conversation partner suggested, perhaps in jest, that I put the question to the tulips in my garden directly. I answered back that, yes, in fact I had. I wrote: "I’ve asked the flowers how they feel. I've been in communication with flowers my entire life. It was the central reason for incarnating this lifetime. I can tell you unequivocally, they do not want to be cut." My friend ignored this bold assertion. But their final comment was generous. They, too, believe that Western culture needs to alter its relationship to nature. And they support me in doing what is right for me. In essence they told me, You do you. I appreciate that. I appreciate the idea to agree to disagree, too. My only concern with that is that while I’m doing me, you’re doing you, and all of us amiably disagree more species go extinct, more CO2 enters the atmosphere, more plastic floats out into the ocean and all the rest. Another way to say “You do you” is “Live and let live.” I think that’s the better motto for us to adopt. Live and let all the other species and the rest of the planet live, too. Here is a link to a piece of research about plants possessing the ability to feel pain. While you’re here, if you liked this article, please comment here and or like and follow me on Medium. Remember that for you this is one click, and for the author it helps to build their audience and offers them the much needed and appreciated motivation to keep write and giving their all. Thanks for reading! I’m a nonbinary certified life coach & peer-counselor, course developer & leader, Reiki master, published author and award-winning speaker with over a decade of experience guiding people to become empowered to create the amazing life that is truly possible. I especially focus on helping people on their Hero’s Journey to fulfill their life purpose. Come visit my website at henryhello.com. I am that star not because it over-shines dimmer spheres – and in so doing, earns a special place in the celestial hierarchies – but because it emits a constant and enduring light making visible the heavenly bodies that spin on miraculous orbits through time and space. Now all the objects shine and we do not ask “Which was the first light?” Instead, we ooh and ahh from our collective brilliance ©Henry India Holden  |
Henry India HoldenI post here about all things divine.
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