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Because I would like to run my own project related to spirituality / counselling / inner growth, and I don’t know how to make it happen, and moreover, how to overcome my fear of doing it, I would like to hear from you what has been your personal experience as a ‘heart entrepreneur’. Natalia

How can you keep going back to the heart of your project without losing connection with your own heart?

The magazine is my baby, in effect, and, as a mother yourself, Natalia, you know that you would fight to the death for your child. The mothering instinct and the wild woman that is within each of us is probably one of the strongest forces on this planet, in my opinion. I have never really unleashed my wild woman, but I sense her there. I guess I’m a bit scared of ever totally letting her out, to be honest, but I take comfort in knowing that she is ready to pounce, scream, scratch, claw and bite any aggressor that my children or grandchildren might face. While a man will generally have more brute strength than a woman, female strengths are tenacity and viciousness. We can hang on and keep scratching and clawing when the need arises.

As all parents know, there are many times when it does get really hard to keep going, when we begin to lose heart, and when we wonder how we can keep bouncing back to face yet another day or a sick toddler or a rebellious teenager. Much of the time it is that instinct to protect the offspring that keeps us going, but sometimes even that seems to be hard to find when the need for self-sanity or self-preservation seems stronger.

My husband and I faced such a time when our two daughters – who were beautiful primary school children, creative and talented and just ‘good’ kids, and are now both fine, upstanding young women – were young teenagers. They both went through a punk stage and were just too big for their Doc Martens. Terry and I, meek and mild Virgos, had no idea what to do with these behemoths, who would run away when things were not going the way they wanted.

Image supplied by Orna Ben-Shoshan
www.ben-shoshan.com

At the end of our tethers, we were told about the Hu technique. Hu is a word like Om (or Aum). When chanted, it takes you to a different plane. We’re on the physical, as we surely know, then there is the astral, then mental, causal, and the fifth is the soul plane. Hu takes the singer to the soul plane when it is practised for a while. It can be used by anyone at all, whatever religion you are, although there are two paths that practise it ‘religiously’ – one branch of the Sufis, and people who belong to Eckankar. Being a member of the latter, I incorporated the chant into my morning contemplations, but it had somehow escaped me that it could be used as tool for change.

So, when told how to do this, we set to and used it by chanting the word (mostly inwardly) when we thought about the kids being a problem, and whenever we simply thought about them at all (because we’d got to the point where thinking about them made our stomachs knot up). The first day I did this, I must have chanted it hundreds and hundreds of times. I had no idea how all-consuming my thoughts and worries had become. By the time the second day came, the situation had lessened, but we kept chanting, though the number of times I needed to do so was, oh I don’t know, maybe a twentieth or even a fiftieth of the previous day – dramatically different.

With the dawning of the third day our problems had been lifted miraculously. I’m not telling you that they were so perfect from then on that butter would not melt in their mouths, but that huge angst, terror in fact, was no longer there. People could feel the difference in the house. We were all breathing again and reacting to each other in a normal civil way.

The connection here, with not getting disheartened about the business, is that I have since used the same technique many, many times when faced with problems. It’s perfect for an issue that you can pinpoint and then see vanish. I believe it is the single most important element in my staying power for 21 years now. Yes, it was July, 1989, when we published our first magazine – called Whole Person back then – but same focus, same business, same sorts of stories, and some of the same advertisers still appear on our pages every now and again. It seems like several lifetimes have passed by in that period, and indeed being in business is a very fast way to grow – I feel as though I’m immersed in a big never-ending workshop. Speaking to other people in business in this niche, they have the same experience.

Before finishing on this chanting technique, the most miraculous story I have to share is that a lady in Sydney knew I had used this with my teenagers and, when she found that her 14 year-old daughter was shooting up and would not talk to her at all, she rang me to check out the process. Living at one of the beaches, she went and sat on the sand for the best part of the two days to chant (yes, it takes two days of solid attention to the mind, and catching it, and chanting Hu just once whenever you become aware that you are thinking of the problem). Sure enough, at the end of the two days, her daughter came to her and they were able to have an open communication. This girl’s life changed and she went on to get straight A’s in her HSC year.

My faith in Spirit has strengthened over the years too, and this is no doubt in part because I use Hu in my own meditations, almost every day. Because I have that strong faith, I also have that to draw on when I waver. I have always known that this work was required by the Universe, and so that helps too. I’ve mostly been able to fall back on this knowledge when my self-doubt kicked in, which was often. I’ve had lack of confidence in my own abilities for my whole life – part of my ‘story’, my springboard for growth.

As you know, I’ve been through a torrid time recently, and my self-doubt was very evident then. The worse I was, the worse I became. Interestingly, it’s only when I remembered that I love the magazine, that it is a worthwhile project, that it does lots of good, and projected my love to the publication and the stakeholders (advertisers, shopkeepers and readers) instead of projecting my angst and unworthiness on myself, that I was able to start turning the business around again.

So there we are talking about heart again – I lost heart with myself and my magazine and nearly lost the whole magazine. When I found the heart to believe in myself again, the situation changed – proof to me that we are given our weaknesses and our stories for the opportunity to grow.

My advice is for you to embark on your new business project if you love it enough to do so. Robert Fritz said that we create things and bring them into being through love – if we love a project enough to breathe life into it.

Elizabeth Jewell (previously Stephens) is the editor of LivingNow and the author of ‘Seven Angels Helped Me – They’ll Help You Too’, available for $30 including P&H. Phone 1300 730 326 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it