Sixty years ago Virginia Woolf wrote: “The public and private worlds are inseparably connected.... The tyrannies and servilities of one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”

The present order of consciousness in business is heavily influenced by aggressiveness, dominance, and competition. These instill fear but are often seen as indispensable to success, which is typically measured in terms of accumulated wealth. If Woolf was right, fear-based tactics and the striving to acquire and display material wealth must exert a significant impact on the personal and family lives of the people who live and work in that atmosphere.

How can the human spirit flourish when mere survival takes so much energy? Is there a role in business for the virtues of compassion, love, and sharing? Many in the business world would, if they could, expel Woolf’s “tyrannies.” Countless entrepreneurs have dreamed of creating a humane atmosphere for their investors, partners, coworkers, clients, and customers. But why have so few attempts succeeded? What’s working against such dramatic transformation?

The past half-century saw an expanding role in the American economy for women, who now own or co-own nine million businesses and make up almost half of the nation’s labor force. Many women play major roles, show strong entrepreneurial drive, and have made great strides toward equality in the workplace. Their perspectives in the business world have also brought new challenges to the fear-based mentality of earlier times. Can compassion and competition coexist?Can love and service form the basis of a profitable business? The feminine propensity to nurture relationships adds a new urgency to earlier efforts at creating wholesome and supportive work environments.

A recent business conference attracted 550 business leaders from 30 countries to explore ways of establishing sustainable market societies, small and large, that would thrive as both human communities and successful business ventures. Why do so many travel so far to confer on spirituality? People do not typically seek a power greater than themselves when life is going well. Their quest shows a thirst for deep and permanent connections with something greater than competitive edges, rising sales, and quarterly profits.

Growing up behind the scenes in the beauty industry, I discovered that outer appearances were not inner reality. Power struggles, manipulation of emotions, and annihilation of personal freedom were common, spilling over to damage the private lives of those connected with these businesses. My family suffered numerous conflicts and addictions originating in the destructive family and business systems that interlocked and reinforced each other. I became part of those soul-numbing systems until painful circumstances led me to seek their root causes.

Recovery programs helped me reclaim parts of myself that were lost or taken away. When I realized what was happening, I could no longer tolerate this environment that limited my freedom and repressed my authentic self. I was ready to call back my spirit. But to do so meant letting go of my idols, of the false self that I had been taught was a reflection of the American Dream. To stay in that game—with my family business, husband, house, jewelry, yacht, and fancy vacations—I had to play by someone else’s rules. That false self also believed that I was unworthy, that I had to settle for something less than my own personal power, freedom, and spiritual inheritance. My heart told me, though, that if I clung to it, my soul would die.

Could I endure the suffering of giving up the familiar, the outer appearances and perceptions, when there was no guarantee of what would replace it? Despite my uncertainty and fear, some inner strength helped me let go. I jumped into the unknown. I renounced those abusive systems that encouraged false dreams and that were failing so many people I loved. And with those systems went the only illusion of security I had ever known.

With only the clothes on my back, nothing in the bank, and a 5-year-old daughter to raise, I pursued my vision. Surprisingly, my lifelong battle with depression lifted. The post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by past traumas evaporated. It was like climbing a mountain and emerging above the clouds to enter a new dimension, to discover that to love one’s self is to love God. The energy that filled me was unexplainable. It was strongest when my actions were based on a unity consciousness and grounded in my heart. For the first time I felt I was my own person, and one of my deepest desires—to make a meaningful contribution to our world—seemed within my reach. Life is a repeating series of letting go of one “reality” for another, deeper one. Now I eagerly sought change, for now I had everything that mattered. I had found myself.

My spiritual journey of restoring my personal power and freedom coincided with my adventure into small business ownership. No longer controlled by fear—of disapproval, of failure, of being alone—I was convinced that recovery can happen within businesses as well as in individuals. Entering the entrepreneurial arena to challenge existing systems, I founded and pioneered the first holistic spa and beauty center in the Midwest, focusing on healing and a holistic approach to business. Working with my financial backers, colleagues, and employees, I combined two traditions—the sacred and the marketplace. We strove to create an internal synergy of business, family, and personal transformation. In the first year we saw nearly a million dollars in sales and grew from 3 to 35 employees. We became an icon in the beauty-and-wellness industry.

My reputation as a pioneer and visionary was gratifying; but working one-on-one with thousands of clients, I heard in their stories a need not unlike my own experiences. This gave me another goal: to connect stories (mine and others’) of family, self-purification, and business ownership with the larger cultural issues at the root of the moral, ethical, and spiritual diseases in our nation. It is in the stories that we see the only true sin in the world: not loving enough. Leaders who long to navigate the business world by their internal compasses—in quest of integrity, ethical behavior, and even love—need to hear realistic stories about others who have put spiritual principles into practice, with all the results from those experiments. What works; and just as importantly, what doesn’t?

I became a motivational speaker and spiritual teacher to bring business and spirituality together in the service of healing. Then I decided to write, to reach a wider world of readers, particularly women entrepreneurs, and show them a choice they may not have known was theirs—businesses based in love rather than fear. I want to show how women in business have integrated compassion, love, and healing, and what happened when they did. How money, seen as an energy source, can work in harmony with a love-based service mentality. How the sacred can emerge and flourish among those who treat others in the workplace with respect.

Many authors writing about spiritual paths and transformation, typically focus on and feel the need to confront the shadow side of our nature that interferes with successful transformation. Though this may be necessary, my goal is to develop the light side more fully. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. Through stories I have demonstrated how difficult it is for others to discover and admit to its powerful existence, but also how powerful leaders resist such disclosures.

At the same time, the opposite occurs, leaders who reveal their humanity often find that others no longer accept them as leaders, because they can no longer idealize them. Entrepreneurship carries courageous and creative leaders through excruciating trials. The shadow side and the light must be faced if individuals, families, or business communities are ever to heal. Otherwise, we cannot fully reclaim the personal freedom and power taken from us. If leaders fear such revelations, then that fear is the control mechanism by which destructive practices continue to manipulate them. Genuinely humane communities become possible within businesses only when we can openly embrace and nurture all aspects of ourselves and others, our strengths and our weaknesses. There are visionary leaders out there who are suffering alone because established business systems demand that one maintain a sense of mystery, hiding or denying parts of one’s true nature. I know; I suffered alone.

When the spirit enters, transformation happens; old beliefs battle new ones, and the familiar is threatened. Until a new system of beliefs and behaviors is established, leaders must cope with anxieties rising from a fear of the unknown. How can they offer this different approach to business in a way the renders their people eager to try it? It is not easy.

In Temporary Temples of Beauty: The Sacred and the Marketplace, I guide the reader how to directly apply that which is sacred within all of us, out into the world. I teach others how to work and live a life out of joy by bringing together spirituality and business in the service of healing. “Making transformation our business.” Through stories, the reader is guided through the journey in this difficult task with inspiration from women who have gone before us as well as sharing my own contemporary spiritual journey, as an artist, a single mother, and a small business owner.

My personal and professional stories weaved throughout the book share the continual process of leaving one reality for a deeper one. With courage and compassion I answers questions with my own convictions through chapters such as:

- Surrendering to the Arms of the Creative

- Creativity Takes and Economic Stand

- Voice of Creation

- Beauty that Borders all Chaos

- Making Transformation Your Business

- My Body is No Longer a Temple

I challenge women to connect to their natural rhythm and to find their center alone, their own truth and look into their hearts, listen to themselves and confront their difficulties as women, in a healthy and creative way. In the end, I believe, we must all find our own medicine, and our own true path in life, and that our spiritual health is our wealth.

Dedicated to all those who seek understanding beyond book knowledge and mastery over the mind to attain purity of the heart.

 ~ Darla Murray Loomis