Embodied Business: A guide to grounding and aligning your business chakras for empathpreneurs

By Tara Jackson

Embodied Business is for empath entrepreneurs, to support them with grounding and aligning their businesses with the seven main chakras in the body, with the earth star and soul star as anchor points. It looks at some of the principles, blocks and issues that can come up on the entrepreneurial journey, as each can correspond to a dif

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Unbound Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913590086

Tara Jackson

Tara is an intuitive business mentor, holistic wellbeing coach, artist and author who supports empathpreneurs with releasing, healing and letting go of all that is stopping them from fully claiming their magic and co-creating the business (and life) of their dreams that considers all and our home. She is the author of Embodied - A self-care guide for sensitive souls and Embodied Business - A guide to grounding and aligning your business chakras for empathpreneurs, and the Embodied Wisdom oracle card deck, all published with The Unbound Press.Find her at www.empathpreneurs.org.

Book preview

A little bit about my entrepreneurial journey

My entrepreneurial journey began when I was nine years old, one summer, on a Greek island with my family. We had found a smaller beach with fewer tourists. The beach was covered in pumice stones – the ones that are great for getting rid of dead skin cells and buffing. So, along with my younger siblings, we collected as many of the stones as we could carry and took them back to the main beach where we sold them for a few drachmas each to tourists. We did this for a good part of the summer and made quite a bit of money, especially for those days!

As a child, I always found ways to make extra money in my school holidays. I’d collect all my old toys and books and sell them by the side of the road; I helped out in a café; I baked for cake sales; and I would offer to help people with tasks in exchange for pocket money. Even if there wasn’t money involved, I’d find ways to be ‘running my own business’, one of which was playing ‘offices’ with my younger siblings (I really did rope them into my endeavours!) and having pretend meetings.

Years later, when I began working in an office after University, I knew that I was going to have my own business one day. My best friend, Lulu, (who also has the entrepreneurial gene) and I would have conversations about it together, neither of us knew what we’d each be doing, but we did know that it was going to happen. I’m so grateful I had that support and like-minded friend from the beginning.

Over the next ten years I did everything to learn as much as I could to help me figure out what I wanted to do and feel confident enough to have my own business. I began working for my cool older cousin in London who had a PR company, climbing up the career ladder to account manager level, but then deciding that was enough for me. I had got far enough and now needed to try something else. Then I became a PA and office/business manager so I could learn the ins and outs of a small business, working closely with the Directors. Within that role I got to manage and plan events as well as learn all about the behind the scenes parts of a business: from finances, HR, and business administration, to new business development and marketing. I am incredibly grateful for that experience as it taught me so much.

However, I got weary of being full-time and doing the same thing over and over for one company. In all honesty, I didn’t like being told what to do all the time, so I bit the freelance bullet and went off on my own, taking the first tentative step in working for myself. I still didn’t really know what I wanted to have my own business in, so freelancing was a good option: it meant I could use my experience to support others, pay the bills, and have a bit more control over who I worked for and what hours I worked.

The freelancing was definitely up and down, totally rewarding in terms of time for myself, but also super hard at times as it certainly wasn’t consistent, and I had many months where I was struggling to pay rent. It was also quite lonely in the beginning as I didn’t know many others on this path, and it was quite an adjustment from working in an office filled with people. But I knew it would all be worth it someday and the freedom I felt at being more in control of my own time far outweighed any salary I had ever received. During that time, I also got to work for a huge number of businesses that I believed in: a pioneer in ethical and sustainable hospitality, food businesses, coaches, an energy healer, an ethical café, and a number of charities.

I was getting closer to knowing what I wanted to have my own business in but knew I wanted it to also include personal growth and health as I had always devoured books on the subjects. I began studying nutrition and health and wellness coaching on the side with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in New York and The School of Natural Health Sciences in the UK. These trainings also supported, and in many ways kick-started, my own healing journey, which included a lot of work around my own self-worth and issues from my past, which you can read about in my first book ‘Embodied – A self-care guide for sensitive souls’.

I finally officially opened up my own health and wellness coaching business in January 2016. I knew I wanted to focus on workplace wellness, having come from that environment and recognising a real need for change there. At this point I was still doing a tiny bit of freelancing in business administration and PR but I was all ready to start coaching and working full-time for myself. I began by researching over 200 small businesses in London that I could target with my services and sent out a marketing email to each offering them a free lunchtime workshop. They could choose one on energy levels or stress management. I was quite excited to be doing my own thing at last but, after sending out that email, I heard nothing back from any of them apart from one which thanked me and said they’d keep my details on file. I know that getting no response is not uncommon, but it certainly threw me as I thought I had a really good offer – it was free, so who wouldn’t want it? I had expected to be fully booked and quitting the last bit of freelance work I was doing by the end of the month. But it didn’t happen that way for me. I also didn’t want to follow up with a phone call, which I knew was needed. So I left my workshop idea and moved on to PR’ing myself with the media. This was an area that felt safe to me: I could sit behind my laptop and draft wellness articles in response to stories the media were writing, and not have to speak or be seen.

I knew I had underlying confidence issues around speaking and sharing what I was doing. Even the thought of running a workshop in person petrified me at the time. There was an inner conflict going on of wanting to have my own business but being in fear of what that actually meant and what I would have to do. So I kept doing what felt good and what I knew how to do, which was developing media relationships via email with a number of wellness outlets and writing and sending them posts and articles. As a result, I got featured in a large number of print and online media during this