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Isha 0:01
Welcome to Devotional Anarchy, a podcast about intimacy, attachment, sexuality, spirituality, self expression and other relational themes from a trauma responsive somatic energetic lens, and with a queer polyamorous twist, of course. I’m Isha Vela trauma psychologist somatic intimacy Alchemist shadow doula love at our guest, intuitive channel and sovereignty coach. You’re here because you understand that integrating intimacy wounds build safety and trust within your body. And that safety and trust is what allows you to fully own and direct your erotic and creative lifeforce in your relationships and purposeful work. My intention is for the conversations and tools shared in this podcast, to light a fire in your heart and under your magical ass while supporting you on your kinky human journey to owning all of yourself.

Isha Vela 0:53
Hi, beautiful human, I am so excited to share this episode with you because I am going to outline the fundamental behind the scenes requirements of building a business that is sustainable, ie without the burnout, and in Integrity with your humanity. Right That means honoring cycles of rest, play and creativity. That means honoring your healing process right making room for it. expressing the full spectrum of your personality, ie your shadowy bits get to be part of this too, in a way that is congruent. That is truthful, transparent, vulnerable, right? Just honest. If you follow me for the intimacy work that I do in relationships, you’re gonna want to listen to this episode anyway. Because the nervous system capacity building that I am going to be addressing in this podcast is generalizable across all domains of your life. Right, whether it’s just dealing with life stressors, or dealing with activations in your relationship or being able to hold conflict in your partnerships, nuance, right? All of that boils down to nervous system flexibility, capacity, flexibility, right. Before I get into the five pillars of body based business, I want to let you know that I opened up a brand new Facebook community for healers, coaches, and mission led solopreneurs. And in this community, I’m going to be doing ongoing trainings, classes, workshops about the stuff I’m going to be talking about today. And also about the front end of business, like just this basic business strategy. And it’s all designed to support you in building a sustainable business that sustains you back in body, mind and spirit. So that link is in the show notes. And you know, I, I maybe want to invite friends that you think might benefit from the content, invite them into the group as well. Awesome. So I want you to close your eyes and take a breath into your chest and into your belly. I want you to imagine what it would be like to run a business where you scale with clarity, and trust in your creative vision. While being able to notice and move through the shitty limiting narratives that you notice come up for you that want to keep you stuck, but that ultimately don’t. Right, because you’re able to move them out of the way. I want you to imagine prioritizing your healing as part of your business design. I want you to imagine transforming your intimacy wounds, right your past hurts into leadership superpowers I want you to imagine magnetizing your people by being the most boldly expressed version of yourself and giving as few bucks as possible doing it. Having fun doing

Unknown Speaker 4:19
what you do imagine

Isha Vela 4:22
what it would be like to manage your emotional activations with a sense of responsiveness so that you could show up grounded for the challenging conversations most people tend to avoid. I want you to imagine what it would be like to receive increasing amounts of abundance and when I say abundance, I mean clients attention, money, collaborations. Love with a sense of safety and security in your body.

Isha 4:58
I want you to imagine what wouldn’t be like to enjoy an unshakable connection to your divinity to your intuition. And to use your body like a sacred GPS in your business, like a God guiding light. And I want you to imagine what it would be like to navigate the high sensation landscape of entrepreneurship with responsiveness and flow because it is super high sensation.

Isha Vela 5:27
Yeah, building and running a business, especially one, that is an expression of your mission and your passion will bring up all your shit, right? There’s all of these emotions around, like fears that we have. There’s grief that comes up around, letting go of former versions of ourselves, letting go of smallness of the things that, that we thought would keep us keep us safe, but that actually like, are stopping us from stepping into that vision. There’s rage that comes up that, you know, that can come up in your personal life as you are running a business. There’s shame that dissolves as you step deeper into your visibility and showing the sides of yourself that you tend to keep private. There are the collective intimacy wounds of being too much or not enough or feeling like an impostor or scarcity. Right, victimhood, all of that stuff gets melted down. And you know, what? Nervous system this is, you know, these five pillars are about building nervous system flexibility. And what nervous system flex does for you is help you manage the time between an activation what people call a trigger, I don’t like to call it a trigger, I call it an activation time between the activation and the response, right? How you how you’re able to hold the charge of whatever’s happening in your body. And breathe into it, and hold it not from a place of constricting it, but like owning it as yours and being responsible about it so that you don’t let it out on other people, or have it come come out in a way that is like, you know, janky and incongruent. So, like, how do you respond, right? Either whether how you respond to your own needs, or how do you respond to another person, you know, and how you nervous system flexibility for me is like, really, really at the heart of opening your capacity to receive and hold more abundance. Plus, how you stay grounded for when shit hits the fan. So the capacity piece is about receiving. And the flexibility piece is about like, how you hold yourself in the wobble like when when you when shit happens, right when, when some tech glitch happens, or I don’t know, it can be something bigger, like a bigger wobble, how you hold yourself in that how you’re able to steady yourself in the storms of entrepreneurship. And trauma, like intimacy wounds, big T trauma, makes your nervous system narrow and tight, it makes it like when it’s tight, you operate from a place of scarcity, right? There’s like a pinched, tense way of being in your body. And abundance is a nervous system expansion experience. It is like, Ah, it’s sort of like this spaciousness to receive, right? And you’re also able to, you know, flexible to manage activation other live shit, right? Your you can trust yourself that you can handle it is ultimately what what that communication is.

Unknown Speaker 9:09
And you need

Isha Vela 9:13
Yeah, you need a strong nervous system to run a business you just do because it is. It’s a high charge and Hyack highly activated experience. And in this podcast, I’m gonna, this episode, I’m gonna be sharing a little bit about my experience. You know, and I say in order to be successful, it will require that you dissolve any of all parts of you that that believes you can’t do this, right? Because we have to be able to hold audacious self belief. And you’re not required to dissolve everything because it’s an ongoing process. And there’s plenty of people who have incredible businesses without doing any of this identity healing work. But I mean, no, my argument is that it has a lot more spiritually satisfying, you know, I’m into entrepreneurship as a spiritual journey. So, if you’re listening, and that’s you, then yes, we’re in this together. My experience has been a lot like an onion. Like when I started out, I was aware of, you know, I had a level of awareness where I was, you know, noticing some of the collective intimacy wounds that were coming in and really having to move through some layers of fear around like visibility and stepping into that responsibility of holding a business. And I did, you know, peel those off over time. But as I got deeper into my visibility deeper into sharing my truth, and speaking to the heart of my message, and doing it in a way that was very different from how other people were doing it, that was a lot more activating for me so, and much closer to like, the fear of being a disruptor. Like what happens to disruptors, disruptors get killed and disruptors get canceled. So there’s a lot of like, like ancestral fear that comes up and and, like, my nervous system is really wanting to protect me from that. And yet, I’m saying, I’m going to do this every day, I show up and that disrupter energy in that heretic, because I really believe in it. So the vision, the My mission is bigger than my fear. Right? And sometimes that’s that’s sort of what the path looks like. Right? So this year? Well, let me just back up and say that, that a lot of a lot of entrepreneurship work is Shadow Work. And the shadow work that has come up this year has been very intense for me. It’s dovetailed with menopause and relationship ruptures. Like it’s sort of all come together into this big messy soup. Of being. And it’s really hard to describe in words, honestly, I think a lot of the times that I when I don’t share my process, it’s not that I don’t want to share it, I really do. The thing is that it is such a felt experience. It’s not I don’t even have necessarily thoughts. There’s just things that happen in my body that are really hard to describe with words. I have had intrusive like obsessive thoughts come up that I absolutely know are not mine, because I’m not an obsessive person. And then I just had this like ticker tape of ticket, they gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta gotta get there have been a bit happening. And I know that it’s something that is about to be released, like something that’s coming in, that is like, cellular and it’s almost like bubbling up to the surface. And, and the ticker tape, the obsessive thinking is the right, just this thing about to be released, and I just observe it, and I just watch it and I’m like, I watch the ticker tape go by, and it’s like, gotta gotta, gotta gotta gotta get to get there. And it can be some can be narratives around, you’re never gonna, you’re never gonna get to your goal. This isn’t going to happen to you in this lifetime, you’re gonna die, and nobody’s ever gonna bite, you’re not going to realize your dream, right? It can be stuff like stuff like that has been coming up, like where I’ve just like, wow, I’m having this real big existential fear that I’m never going to reach my goal. And I’ve had to like watch that, let it go by not because I’m not believing it I’m noticing it coming up as an experience. It feels like not necessarily again, not a thought, but a felt experience in my body so I know that it’s it’s a deeper body based belief system that is getting shaken out little by little

you know, and embodying the CEO making CEO decisions every day, right? When you when you when you step into aligned action, right when you can hear the fear, move it aside, or hear the stories, not believe the stories and any way, step forward with your like in alignment with your vision. Right, like as you’re holding whatever sensations experiences in your body, like embodying the CEO, can be very intense, right? Because your nervous system is having sort of all sorts of responses. There have been freezers answers that have come up just a week ago, I was in one where like, my whole body was just a ball of fear. And I was just like, I just gotta get through this day. And I had to coach and I coached and I did all the things I got on the call that I needed to get on to. And now and I shared with the people, like I’m in a freeze response right now I’m like moving through, like ancestral level, fear, it feels so old, right? Because I can tap into my intuition, I can tap into ancestral knowledge. I know how old it is. And I know that it didn’t start with me, and all I need to do is just hold it gently, right with that nervous system capacity, hold it gently, and allow it to move through, right, I’m not going to push it away, I’m not going to deny it, I’m not going to hide it, I’m going to hold it really gently. So there’s a lot of stuff as you as you take aligned action, there is this whole unraveling process that happens, right. And, and I recognize other people’s processes aren’t as intense as mine, you know,

Unknown Speaker 16:02
I,

Isha Vela 16:03
I have become more sensitive in my, in my intuition, and my channeling, as I’ve, as I’ve done this, this process of being in business. So if you’re a mystic, if you’re an intuitive channel, or an energy sensitive, this is kind of what it might look like, it doesn’t look like this for everyone. But for the really sensitive folks out there who have made some sort of karmic commitment to have their their journey and business be a spiritual one as well, then you’re my people. And, you know, and I also want to say that, and you can fight me on this, I’m, I really feel a collective need for more depth in business for more truth for more fucking reality checks and less fantasy. And when I say less fantasy, I mean, like, there’s a nuanced piece here of when you are in the mindset of like holding that vision. There, you have to hold audacious belief, you have to hold audacious belief you have to hold, like, limitless possibility of what you can do. And there is also a way where that is promoted online, in a very superficial way without the human in peace, without the moments where you want to fucking kick and scream, or you’re having terror moves through your system. Right? I don’t want any business. That doesn’t include that. I want to be in my in the healthy delusion of my greatness, right? Like, I want to be in the liberation of my personal and collective intimacy wounds. And when I mean liberation, I don’t mean getting rid of I mean, holding, I mean, working with I mean, expanding into superpowers, right, versus the BS ungrounded delusion without discernment. Right? I don’t want to be in the fake realm of everything, and tuition and pussy, and then it doesn’t look messy in the background, because my life certainly looks plenty messy. And it’s beautiful. And I love it. So another reason, another argument for embodied entrepreneurship.

Isha 18:32
All right, so anyway, holding yourself through that process is critical as you manage the daily devotional work of managing your business. So it’s a becoming process, right, a metamorphosis you’re gonna go through multiple chrysalis is, I don’t know if that’s the right plural word,

Isha Vela 18:54
as you transform yourself into that CEO, and here are finally the five pillars of body based business and bullet point form. So the first one is mindset. This is the one that you know, exists is what most coaches talk about. And what it means to me is, is holding a mindset that prioritizes your body’s experience, right? That prioritizes sensation, over a mental figuring out. So it is a mindset that prioritizes intuition, a mindset that prioritize that prioritize a self connection, a mindset that prioritizes what is it that I want to do? What is it that I need right now. So that that is the the guide that you use to to move you forward? It also means to meet curating your thoughts and nurturing the thoughts moving from the thoughts that are in alignment with them. Your mission and values and audacious self self belief period, right? You’re you’re curating your thoughts to reflect empowered narratives, while moving aside the the shitty stories that are attached to your past your hurts your intimacy wounds, your fears, right? So yeah, so that’s, I want you to, I want you to think of mindset as like a clothing hanger. So the mindset is the clothing hanger. And the, whatever’s hanging off the hanger is the emotional fluency. And like, you can shake the hanger on the rack, but the hanger still hangs the clothing, right? And so the clothing will move the clothing will be sort of flexible and fluid and flowy. But the but the hang of remain sort of this, this structure, right. So the mindset holds the structure for the embodiment process for the emotional fluency, which is the second pillar of body based business. So emotional fluency. And I did a whole season two episode eight episode,

Isha 21:17
podcast episode about emotional fluency. So if you want to go back and listen to that, it’ll be helpful to kind of flesh this out a little bit. So emotional fluency is really about becoming a ninja at tracking your intimacy fears, and nervous system activations with responsive listening. And I, when I work with clients, I use embodied relational presencing, which is an ifs related, but I’ve sort of put my own spin on it.

Isha Vela 21:47
Really about allowing emotions to move through your body without attaching to them, observing them, experiencing them without attaching to them? And yeah, you’re just you’re dodging your emotions to give them radical permission to be felt to flow to be released. Right? And learning to trust the medicine of your emotions working with the whatever activations arise. And yeah, offering it ways to move through the body without attaching to the feeling. Yeah. So the third pillar of body based business is identity. And we talked about this earlier, just unveiling those like when when you go through a healing process, when you heal your trauma in any way, oftentimes, what happens is that we find aspects. We find our resilience in it. Sometimes through shadow alchemy, we’re able to recognize the parts of us that like some gifts that are have that have been unseen, unused. That are like really beautiful parts of us, that have not been appreciated before that by bringing them into your business. Like it’s really like magic and magnetic and really potent. For me, that has been my, my kink my DOM. The part of me that is really like, kind of a bitch, but in a compassionate way.

Isha 23:26
I am, that’s a part of me, I am sort of a controlling bitch. And I can use that part of me in a in service of healing in service of people’s empowerment. So

Isha Vela 23:41
yeah, and the identity piece is also like becoming resolved with your ancestral and cultural lineages. Like, I didn’t grow up poor, poor, but I grew up me, you know, what would be considered lower middle class for the United States. And it’s like, there’s a lot of story that I’ve had to shed around that in order to

heal my relationship with money. Be someone who loves money and loves to create with it, feel safe receiving money. It’s also about the fear of,

Unknown Speaker 24:24
you know, sharing,

Isha Vela 24:25
you know, healing of the witch wound, right. If you’re a mystic, right, I’m certain that you’ve had some form of witch wounding, right where we either we either had to bury our magic hide it or obscure it.

Isha 24:40
And so by coming forward as an intuitive as somebody who can see and feel and sense deeply, that’s also pretty scary for, for the, you know, the ancestral fears that live inside of our bodies. So yeah, and I did and it is also dismantling embodied systems of disempowerment, how you hold white supremacy in your body, right? Like who you are. When I think about that for myself, I think about colonialism, of course, which includes white supremacy, as it underwrites all systems of disempowerment. And thinking about the ways that I use power over, thinking about the ways that I maintain my smallness in order to stay comfortable, or that I don’t engage certain activities or things, or I don’t say certain things, because I’m hiding in some way, you know, so all of those things, it’s really a transformation of who you are at the cellular ancestral level of identity, and also releasing shame.

Isha Vela 25:53
And there’s another piece to this, that is going to be another podcast episode in the future intimacy wounds affecting how you relate to your audience. So your internal schemas for like, who are the people that you’re talking to, how do you see them? How do you believe how do you perceive that they see you? Right? What are your stories about them seeing you? And then how do you show up in your writing or marketing and sales? Right? All of that is involved. So the fourth pillar of body based business is boundaries.

Isha 26:30
Boundaries, I did a whole episode on this as well. Season two, Episode 14, go back and listen to that. For me, it really comes down to being a reliable and consistent steward of your energy.

Isha Vela 26:45
Are you using extractive models?

Unknown Speaker 26:48
Like, are you?

Isha Vela 26:49
Are you using hustle?

Unknown Speaker 26:51
Are you chasing money,

Isha Vela 26:56
right, that betrays your energy that betrays your truth. The other piece is about meeting your body’s emotional, physical and spiritual needs without funding without apologizing for it, right. Hit boundaries is really about taking responsibility, full responsibility for how you steward your energy. That includes what you charge people, because that factors into how much you’re giving versus how much you’re getting in return. And it doesn’t need to be like, it needs to be like an aggressive reciprocal energy exchange, something that feels resentment free to you. Because when you engage in some sort of extractive over giving, You are betraying yourself, you are eroding self trust in your body, and it leads to resentment, and it leads to blocking your heart blocking your love. And being a good steward of your energy absolutely requires an impeccable connection to your needs, like a shame free connection to your needs, like yes, saying yes to your need. This is where a lot of people get stuck because of how deeply needs have been shamed. So a lot of the work that I do is about like, asking, What do you need? What do you need? What do you need over and over and over again, until you get used to like tuning in tuning and tuning in?

Isha 28:21
All right, so the final pillar of body based business is pleasure. And when I talk about pleasure, it means creating safety by soothing yourself through those fear activations and courageous expansions. And for me, like that’s, it’s not about an extravagant lifestyle at all my pleasures are very simple. My pleasures are about this beautiful blue sky outside of my window right now. It’s about this tea. This hibiscus tea I’m sipping as I talked to, it is about being able to have a place to compost and garden, I have a beautiful neighborhood that I walk around, I get to enjoy the moon and the sun. I love time with my children. And I really centered those pleasures, especially when I’m feeling activated, but they’re part of my everyday life. It’s how I stay present.

Isha Vela 29:19
It really is about the sensuality of everyday life, that like holding the sensuality of everyday life so that when shit hits the fan, like, I’m not mad at life, I don’t get mad at life. I’m just kind of like, Yeah, this is the this is the beauty. It’s the beauty and the pain of life is just how it is right? It allows me to be in reality. I appreciate the beauty and the magic in the mundane. And pleasure is also like that practice of really recognizing beauty and beauty in every moment. Even when, like grief For me can be a pleasurable experience, if I move it through my body in a way that you know, like with with movement with dance, then then grief becomes this beautiful sensual process, right. So it’s like, it’s holding the ups and downs in sort of a neutral way. And the other piece around pleasure is embodying embodying abundant models of being, you know, there was a time in my business where I didn’t make a lot of money. And I still showed up every day, my behavior didn’t change, because I love what I fucking do so much, I love what I do. And I would do it for free. And I did it for free, for a while, not for free completely, but I did a lot of it just because I fucking love it. And that is joyful. That is like that is pleasurable to me. And, and when things weren’t so abundant financially, you know, there were other places in my life that were incredibly abundant. I was like meeting people online. I have friendships with coaches, I was being invited on podcast episodes and having amazing conversations. So my life felt very full, and it didn’t feel full in my bank account. But it didn’t matter. Because everything else felt so full. And it mattered. Yes. And sort of like my every day. Like, it doesn’t matter if your bank account is empty, and you don’t have money to pay the rent. And luckily, I always had enough, I always had enough even when shit was low, even when like, people weren’t buying what I was launching. It was okay like it ultimately it was okay, because my definition of success went beyond the money. So to repeat, the five pillars are mindset, emotional fluency, identity, boundaries, and pleasure. Did I say all five, okay. So these five pillars support the embodiment of safety and trust, like, over time practicing these five things, these five pieces pillars,

Isha 32:11
create safety and trust, which is the goal of my coaching, but it’s also a process that deepens and evolves over time, right? I just teach you how to do it. And then you take it beyond our coaching container into your life and keep practicing it and it deepens over time. And so yeah, it’s a repeatable processes streamlined way to come home to yourself and what you know, even though nervous system, expansion is slow, I feel like these pieces help accelerate it. So you can scale your business with integrity with congruence using these tools much faster than you would not using them. That’s what I believe. And you know, what the best part about body based businesses, saving the best for last, such a tease.

Isha Vela 33:01
The best part about body based business is that is your unshakable connection to intuition. When people work with me, what inevitably happens is that they develop their witchiness and their mystical powers through the trauma healing process, right through the intimacy healing process. It’s one of the biggest gifts of embodiment work for me, because I also began to channel I always felt I was always a sensitive kid, but I really began to earnestly channel them in a helpful way when I started healing trauma through my body. And that was in my second or third year of it was when I was doing shadow work. So it was my second year. And, you know, I really see the body as being a gateway for the spiritual. And that all of your ancestral knowledge can be accessed through sensation in the body, like your body holds all of that, like, your body’s a record keeper of all of your ancestry and all of that, that lineage. So my whole business, my whole business runs on intuition, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t have structures in place. I don’t have strategies I absolutely have strategies but the into the strategies have been placed there through an intuitive sense that they needed to be there like, oh, yeah, like I want to, how do I do this? Oh, this feels right. Or this feels like what I want to do it this would feel really juicy. Or, you know, sometimes I asked my guides, like, Oh, what do I how do I do this? Right now? What feels right and I just sometimes, like responses come from outside of me sometimes wrong. responses come from within me based on my needs, but it’s all intuition based. So that’s it. Those are the five pillars. I would love to hear your comments. If you feel inspired in any way to write something on social media. Please do tag me in it. I don’t care if it’s a criticism, a question or an accolade. I’m interested in hearing it. Okay. Sweet, divine human. join my Facebook group. I hope to see you in there because there is some really awesome shit coming down the pipeline and you don’t want to miss it. All right, bye.

Isha 35:20
Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on iTunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode I’m sending you fierce, fierce

Unknown Speaker 35:38
love