The Divine as the Source of Prosperity
"I'm a recovering overachiever," Sara Avant Stover confessed in a recent episode of Leading With Genuine Care.
A ballerina throughout her youth, Sara developed eating disorders as a teen and realized that her competitive nature was having a debilitating effect on her health. Sara went to Barnard College, where she graduated with high honors. She applied for and was accepted into the Peace Corps, but was unable to join because she was diagnosed with early stage cervical cancer. Through a chance meeting with a former teacher, Sara found out about an opportunity to teach English in Thailand, and she took it.There, she began the transformation into the person she is today, a successful entrepreneur, author, and yoga teacher who mentors other women entrepreneurs. She has also published three books: The Way of the Happy Woman, The Book of SHE, and the recently published Handbook for the Heartbroken.
Looking back, Sara says: "I just know from my own journey there was so much piled on that wasn't me. . . . until I reached a point where I realized that was harming me. . . . I had to find a way to peel those layers back to find a voice of truth that is mine." While she acknowledges that some external messages have been harmful, she believes that the self-discipline she cultivated has served her well once she learned how to better care for herself too.
Becoming an Entrepreneur
Sara's journey as an entrepreneur began when she became a yoga teacher and then later a yoga teacher trainer. She also worked as a freelance writer for magazines. After 9 years traveling the world while based in Thailand, Sara returned to the United States, where she wrote her first book and began an online business.
Sara reflects that even as a child she had an interest in entrepreneurship, making and selling things like candy, T-shirts, and jewelry boxes. She has been working for herself ever since she stopped teaching at the school in Thailand. "I love the freedom and the creativity," she says.
Internal Family Systems
With an interest in counseling, Sara has trained in Internal Family Systems, a psycho-therapeutic approach that helps people become aware of and make sense of internal conflicts while holding on to their "essential" selves. She defines that essential self as "our Buddha nature," the part of ourselves that "can never be damaged or destroyed." We all have various parts of ourselves; it's when one part becomes overwhelming or extreme that we might need to seek help. "The biggest thing that holds us back is the internal stuff," Sara observes.
The Morning Reset
Sara starts each day with a morning routine that helps set her up for the day. This is one way entrepreneurs can use a spiritual practice to help them from getting too mired in daily challenges. She practices meditation and yoga, then reads from one of her favorite books about financial abundance. She follows that with some journaling, where she connects with a higher source to help guide her and set a course for the day. She acknowledges that by the end of the day she could be in a completely different place, but every morning she has a chance to reset.
Sara says she's still an overachiever, but the impetus for her actions comes from within, from listening to her own voice, rather than from external motivators. Taking care of herself and doing her morning practices help her in this way.
Sara also finds opportunities to practice her lifelong love of dance, participating in local classes. She loves how dance helps her "get out of her head." It helps to relieve stress, provides a break from her daily work and is a source of joy.
Money and Business as a Spiritual Path
One of Sara's primary goals in her coaching and teaching is to help women heal their relationship with money. She gears her coaching specifically to women who are "spiritual entrepreneurs." Rather than seeing money and business as antithetical to a spiritual life, Sara believes that business can be a conduit for deepening the relationship with the self and cultivating a deeper spiritual practice.
"Part of our spiritual path is expressed through business. If we look back at ancient India, we can see that business and spirituality are interwoven," she explains. Further, "the source of our prosperity is the divine."
Sara loves to help spiritual entrepreneurs navigate challenges on a spiritual level as well as the more nuts and bolts issues of running a business. She explains that there is really nothing that's "external." "I get excited about bridging that inner listening and the service and all the know-how that's needed to create a business," she says.
Sara teaches the Profit First approach, which offers a framework for allocating any money coming into different areas. It's essential to have some systems in place, she explains. This "creates a sense of order . . . that helps our nervous systems." Sara emphasizes understanding money as flow, explaining, "in currency we have the word current, you know like water flowing in and out … It's like the energy of existence."
One aspect of money that cultivates spiritual growth is that it often directly confronts us to acknowledge our desires."Desires are messengers from the soul," she says. "Part of life is living in the material realm." Learning to manage money to allow for both stability and flow can be empowering. She teaches these skills alongside practices to foster internal growth that help women entrepreneurs share their gifts as a service to the world.
Handbook for the Heartbroken
Sara's latest book, The Handbook for the Heartbroken: A Woman's Path from Devastation to Rebirth, comes out of more recent challenges she faced over four years that she describes as a series of heartbreaks. Heartbreaks can be not only about love, they can also be about losing a loved one or facing financial difficulty, fertility, or a natural disaster.
Heartbreak can also have an effect on how we show up for our work. Using her training in Internal Family Systems and different wisdom traditions, in this book Sara offers guidance, lessons and practices to help women navigate difficult times. The book is also testimony to Sara's commitment to her own growth as well as her clients'. As she's come to new insights, she has evolved her teaching as well.
Sara also leads workshops and retreats to provide safe spaces for women entrepreneurs "to be real about our challenges and learn to find deeper resources" in order to build resilience. "Moving through different seasons of womanhood, there are different lessons and challenges and opportunities," she explains when reflecting on her own journey.
"I think this is a really exciting time to be a spiritual entrepreneur. . . . The world is so much more ready and open and available," says Sara, adding that entrepreneurship is a "really potent way we can influence the world positively."
The conversation with Sara Avant Stover continues on the Leading with Genuine Care podcast, where we talk more about spirituality, money and entrepreneurship. Connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn and keep up with my company imageOne. Check out my website or some of my other work here.