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I Quit

by Ash | April 2, 2019 | Discernment, Featured, Mind, My favorites, My Journey, Personal Development, Spirit, Vulnerability-authenticity | 30 Comments

The day I thought would never come has arrived. This the end of In My Sacred Space.

When Was The Last Time You Cried in Front of Someone?

by Ash | March 31, 2019 | My Journey, Vulnerability-authenticity | 3 Comments

I’m actually not as good at vulnerability as you probably think I am. Here’s why.

The Day I Threw My Career In The Trash

by Ash | March 19, 2019 | My Journey, Personal Development | 1 Comment

Eighteen months ago, I abruptly shuttered my business as a marketing, business, and branding consultant for tech startups. Here’s why.

@AshRising on Instagram

Instagram post 2006686980382788493_2925114972

Denial is one of the most powerful internal forces I’ve ever come across as an intuitive.
✳︎
When reading for someone, I can always measure how close to the inconvenient truth I am by the force of their resistance to it.
✳︎
Sometimes it’s because of a lack of awareness—they truly can’t see what lies in their shadow.
✳︎
Other times it’s because they don’t want to see it, so they’ve covered it in glitter to mask the rot that lies beneath.
✳︎
I suppose it’s easy for us to hide from ourselves by refusing to admit the truth.
✳︎
Sometimes it’s easy to hide that truth from the rest of the world by spinning all manner of fairytales and excuses around why we do what we do.
✳︎
Some people are so good at telling stories they even manage to make their dysfunction sound noble, and the ones who are the best at it weave tales so well they fall into delusion, believing their own fantasy about themselves.
✳︎
I often see people surround themselves with others who enable their denial, creating an elaborate coping mechanism to shield themselves from reality, expending massive amounts of energy to keep up the charade.
✳︎
The more deep the denial, the harder the universe throws the Truth back in your face, over and over, each impact, more painful than the last, until you take your hands off of your eyes and allow yourself to truly see.
✳︎
You can fool the masses, you may fool your significant others, and you may even fool yourself, but at the end of the day, the truth is still the Truth. Even, and especially, if you’re not ready to admit it.
✳︎
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. That’s the truth, in any situation.
✳︎
📷: @minkabrooklyn
#denial #truth #shadowwork #shadow #shadowworker #unconscious #shineyourlight #selfawareness #awakening #wakeup #addiction #falseself #deception #lying #selfdeception #delusion #delusional #intuitive #psychicreadings #psychicsofinstagram

Instagram post 2141568563324659780_2925114972

ON MANAGING ANXIETY
✳︎
In my stories earlier this week, I asked what other topics you’d be interested in hearing about from me and someone asked me to touch on how to control feelings of anxiety. ✳︎ First, I want to say that I don’t think you can control anxiety, per se, but you can learn how to manage it and eventually heal it. Anxiety is your body’s physiological response to an external or internal stress trigger. Particularly in the latter case, anxiety is your body’s way of alerting you that there’s an unresolved, internal emotional conflict rooted in fear. It’s a feeling and we can’t control how we feel.
✳︎ As I’ve become more energetically sensitive over the last couple of years, I’ve begun to notice where in my body I physically feel certain emotions. I almost always feel anxiety in my heart or my stomach, or both. ✳︎ From an energetic standpoint, anxiety occurs when your energy becomes ungrounded. That means that, rather than flowing down through your body and connecting with earth, your energy current is stopping or being blocked at the heart chakra or the solar plexus.
✳︎
In order to manage this, you want to get the energy flowing down through your body again. Here’s a few yoga, mindfulness, and energetic tactics I’ve picked up over the years to help with that: ✳︎ 1️⃣ Deep Breathing
Take deep belly breaths with your lower belly. Short breaths from your chest exacerbate the fight or flight fear response that’s happening physiologically. When you take deep breaths from your lower belly, it calms your heart rate and helps draw energy down into your sacral chakra and gets things flowing again.
✳︎
2️⃣ Physical Grounding Take your right hand and ball it into a fist, place it on top of your lower belly, place your left hand over the fist, and then push into your abdomen while bending over slightly. This is another yogic tactic meant to help ground you back into your lower body by bringing physical awareness to it. Bring as much of your awareness to your physical body, particularly the lower extremities, as possible. [continued 👇🏻]

Instagram post 1996002741916212736_2925114972

#love #instadaily #creativewriting #words #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lovequotes #soul #instagood #wordporn #spilledink #wordsofwisdom #sacredunion #writer #poet #poetsofinstagram #poetry #writersofinstagram #quoteoftheday #reflectingoutloud #writingcommunity #writersofig #poet #poetry #poetsofinstagram

Instagram post 2118627411898408268_2925114972

Back for a quick troll. Post speaks for itself 🤷🏻‍♀️. #hex #hexing #karma #karmaquotes #shitmyspiritguidesays #shitmyspiritguidessay

Instagram post 1997357290547420323_2925114972

I'm realizing that I take serious issue with the commercialization of spirituality.
✳︎
Once the desire for success overtakes the desire for service to the greater good, you cross the border into service of your own ego, and the work loses its integrity.
✳︎
I think this is one of the reasons I've taken a sabbatical from offering paid services. If I'm in a position where I *need* to make my spiritual work support me financially, then I'm inherently driven by a state of lack wherein my primary motivation is to make money, rather than to be of service.
✳︎
If I'm inherently driven by a state of lack wherein my primary motivation is to achieve status and success, rather than be of service, the work also loses its integrity.
✳︎
This concept applies to business, as well as life—when you lose sight of your mission, you find yourself out of alignment with your higher purpose.
✳︎
Spiritual work is sacred work. People are trusting you with their deepest level of vulnerability. You have a responsibility to honor that within your interactions.
✳︎
It's important to periodically check in with ourselves and give our motivations a hard, honest assessment.
✳︎
You might be sitting there thinking, “Well Ash, nobody ever became a millionaire with that attitude.”
✳︎
And you’d be erroneously assuming that I desire to be a millionaire. I don’t. I’ve known a few. They’re rarely happy and are frequently followed by a trail of regrets. The happy ones are the people who followed a passion, the money was just a pleasant side effect.
✳︎
You can be successful and still do what you love. The difference is that if you do what you love, you're more likely to be successful. You can't help but attract that to yourself. If you strive primarily for success and lose sight of what you love, you're just like everybody else at the end of the day, wasting your life, sacrificing real happiness while working your ass off for something that never truly fulfills you.
✳︎
Have you checked your motivations today?
✳︎
#motivation #commercialization #spirituality #bereal #behonestwithyourself #spiritualbusiness #soulpreneur #heartbasedbusiness #growyourlove #fuckthehustle #businesswoman

Instagram post 1998153086230585283_2925114972

The life and times of a clairaudient.
✳︎
#love #instadaily #creativewriting #words #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lovequotes #soul #instagood #wordporn #spilledink #wordsofwisdom #sacredunion #writer #poet #poetsofinstagram #poetry #writersofinstagram #quoteoftheday #reflectingoutloud #writingcommunity #writersofig

Instagram post 2003184493617025351_2925114972

Let me tell you about the day I threw my career in the trash—but first…let’s talk about how I got there.
✳︎
After seven years of working full time in disgustingly toxic work environments, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was working for an ecommerce startup owned by a crack addict, coming home every day to drink an entire bottle of wine just to deal with the stress of being there.
✳︎
My husband at the time pointed out, “You’re not yourself.”
✳︎
At his urging and encouragement, I started my own business. Over the next four years, I grew that business to a level of success I’d never experienced while working for anyone else.
✳︎
Incidentally, I began In My Sacred Space six months after. The two grew side-by-side over the course of the next four years.
✳︎
One day, when I was sitting in a meeting with one of my clients, he looked at me and asked, “Do you want to run this business?”
✳︎
I felt a wave of internal resistance. Not because I was afraid or thought I was incapable.
✳︎
My ego said, “Yes! Do it! You’ll be the CEO of a fashion tech startup at 33.”
✳︎
But my soul said, “This will suck every ounce of life out of you. And for what? You don’t give a single fuck about fashion.”
✳︎
That was when I realized my true passion was not for helping other people grow their businesses. It was for helping other people grow. Period.
✳︎
My longterm goal at the end of 2016 was to put myself on a trajectory to be involved in personal development and spirituality full-time.
✳︎
Then life, as it often does, happened. My largest client went AWOL on the same day that my marriage imploded. Four and a half months later, I packed up my shit, moved to New York City and started fresh with no friends, no job, and no plan.
✳︎
Initially I thought I’d attempt to rebuild my business in a new place, which was certainly ripe with opportunities for someone with my skillset, and I busily set about laying a foundation to do so in my first three months here. (Continued in comments)
📷: @robstamm14

Instagram post 2006686980382788493_2925114972

Denial is one of the most powerful internal forces I’ve ever come across as an intuitive.
✳︎
When reading for someone, I can always measure how close to the inconvenient truth I am by the force of their resistance to it.
✳︎
Sometimes it’s because of a lack of awareness—they truly can’t see what lies in their shadow.
✳︎
Other times it’s because they don’t want to see it, so they’ve covered it in glitter to mask the rot that lies beneath.
✳︎
I suppose it’s easy for us to hide from ourselves by refusing to admit the truth.
✳︎
Sometimes it’s easy to hide that truth from the rest of the world by spinning all manner of fairytales and excuses around why we do what we do.
✳︎
Some people are so good at telling stories they even manage to make their dysfunction sound noble, and the ones who are the best at it weave tales so well they fall into delusion, believing their own fantasy about themselves.
✳︎
I often see people surround themselves with others who enable their denial, creating an elaborate coping mechanism to shield themselves from reality, expending massive amounts of energy to keep up the charade.
✳︎
The more deep the denial, the harder the universe throws the Truth back in your face, over and over, each impact, more painful than the last, until you take your hands off of your eyes and allow yourself to truly see.
✳︎
You can fool the masses, you may fool your significant others, and you may even fool yourself, but at the end of the day, the truth is still the Truth. Even, and especially, if you’re not ready to admit it.
✳︎
The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem. That’s the truth, in any situation.
✳︎
📷: @minkabrooklyn
#denial #truth #shadowwork #shadow #shadowworker #unconscious #shineyourlight #selfawareness #awakening #wakeup #addiction #falseself #deception #lying #selfdeception #delusion #delusional #intuitive #psychicreadings #psychicsofinstagram

Instagram post 2141568563324659780_2925114972

ON MANAGING ANXIETY
✳︎
In my stories earlier this week, I asked what other topics you’d be interested in hearing about from me and someone asked me to touch on how to control feelings of anxiety. ✳︎ First, I want to say that I don’t think you can control anxiety, per se, but you can learn how to manage it and eventually heal it. Anxiety is your body’s physiological response to an external or internal stress trigger. Particularly in the latter case, anxiety is your body’s way of alerting you that there’s an unresolved, internal emotional conflict rooted in fear. It’s a feeling and we can’t control how we feel.
✳︎ As I’ve become more energetically sensitive over the last couple of years, I’ve begun to notice where in my body I physically feel certain emotions. I almost always feel anxiety in my heart or my stomach, or both. ✳︎ From an energetic standpoint, anxiety occurs when your energy becomes ungrounded. That means that, rather than flowing down through your body and connecting with earth, your energy current is stopping or being blocked at the heart chakra or the solar plexus.
✳︎
In order to manage this, you want to get the energy flowing down through your body again. Here’s a few yoga, mindfulness, and energetic tactics I’ve picked up over the years to help with that: ✳︎ 1️⃣ Deep Breathing
Take deep belly breaths with your lower belly. Short breaths from your chest exacerbate the fight or flight fear response that’s happening physiologically. When you take deep breaths from your lower belly, it calms your heart rate and helps draw energy down into your sacral chakra and gets things flowing again.
✳︎
2️⃣ Physical Grounding Take your right hand and ball it into a fist, place it on top of your lower belly, place your left hand over the fist, and then push into your abdomen while bending over slightly. This is another yogic tactic meant to help ground you back into your lower body by bringing physical awareness to it. Bring as much of your awareness to your physical body, particularly the lower extremities, as possible. [continued 👇🏻]

Instagram post 1996002741916212736_2925114972

#love #instadaily #creativewriting #words #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lovequotes #soul #instagood #wordporn #spilledink #wordsofwisdom #sacredunion #writer #poet #poetsofinstagram #poetry #writersofinstagram #quoteoftheday #reflectingoutloud #writingcommunity #writersofig #poet #poetry #poetsofinstagram

Instagram post 2118627411898408268_2925114972

Back for a quick troll. Post speaks for itself 🤷🏻‍♀️. #hex #hexing #karma #karmaquotes #shitmyspiritguidesays #shitmyspiritguidessay

Instagram post 1997357290547420323_2925114972

I'm realizing that I take serious issue with the commercialization of spirituality.
✳︎
Once the desire for success overtakes the desire for service to the greater good, you cross the border into service of your own ego, and the work loses its integrity.
✳︎
I think this is one of the reasons I've taken a sabbatical from offering paid services. If I'm in a position where I *need* to make my spiritual work support me financially, then I'm inherently driven by a state of lack wherein my primary motivation is to make money, rather than to be of service.
✳︎
If I'm inherently driven by a state of lack wherein my primary motivation is to achieve status and success, rather than be of service, the work also loses its integrity.
✳︎
This concept applies to business, as well as life—when you lose sight of your mission, you find yourself out of alignment with your higher purpose.
✳︎
Spiritual work is sacred work. People are trusting you with their deepest level of vulnerability. You have a responsibility to honor that within your interactions.
✳︎
It's important to periodically check in with ourselves and give our motivations a hard, honest assessment.
✳︎
You might be sitting there thinking, “Well Ash, nobody ever became a millionaire with that attitude.”
✳︎
And you’d be erroneously assuming that I desire to be a millionaire. I don’t. I’ve known a few. They’re rarely happy and are frequently followed by a trail of regrets. The happy ones are the people who followed a passion, the money was just a pleasant side effect.
✳︎
You can be successful and still do what you love. The difference is that if you do what you love, you're more likely to be successful. You can't help but attract that to yourself. If you strive primarily for success and lose sight of what you love, you're just like everybody else at the end of the day, wasting your life, sacrificing real happiness while working your ass off for something that never truly fulfills you.
✳︎
Have you checked your motivations today?
✳︎
#motivation #commercialization #spirituality #bereal #behonestwithyourself #spiritualbusiness #soulpreneur #heartbasedbusiness #growyourlove #fuckthehustle #businesswoman

Instagram post 1998153086230585283_2925114972

The life and times of a clairaudient.
✳︎
#love #instadaily #creativewriting #words #honestlyworded #thoughtoftheday #lovequotes #soul #instagood #wordporn #spilledink #wordsofwisdom #sacredunion #writer #poet #poetsofinstagram #poetry #writersofinstagram #quoteoftheday #reflectingoutloud #writingcommunity #writersofig

Instagram post 2003184493617025351_2925114972

Let me tell you about the day I threw my career in the trash—but first…let’s talk about how I got there.
✳︎
After seven years of working full time in disgustingly toxic work environments, I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was working for an ecommerce startup owned by a crack addict, coming home every day to drink an entire bottle of wine just to deal with the stress of being there.
✳︎
My husband at the time pointed out, “You’re not yourself.”
✳︎
At his urging and encouragement, I started my own business. Over the next four years, I grew that business to a level of success I’d never experienced while working for anyone else.
✳︎
Incidentally, I began In My Sacred Space six months after. The two grew side-by-side over the course of the next four years.
✳︎
One day, when I was sitting in a meeting with one of my clients, he looked at me and asked, “Do you want to run this business?”
✳︎
I felt a wave of internal resistance. Not because I was afraid or thought I was incapable.
✳︎
My ego said, “Yes! Do it! You’ll be the CEO of a fashion tech startup at 33.”
✳︎
But my soul said, “This will suck every ounce of life out of you. And for what? You don’t give a single fuck about fashion.”
✳︎
That was when I realized my true passion was not for helping other people grow their businesses. It was for helping other people grow. Period.
✳︎
My longterm goal at the end of 2016 was to put myself on a trajectory to be involved in personal development and spirituality full-time.
✳︎
Then life, as it often does, happened. My largest client went AWOL on the same day that my marriage imploded. Four and a half months later, I packed up my shit, moved to New York City and started fresh with no friends, no job, and no plan.
✳︎
Initially I thought I’d attempt to rebuild my business in a new place, which was certainly ripe with opportunities for someone with my skillset, and I busily set about laying a foundation to do so in my first three months here. (Continued in comments)
📷: @robstamm14

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