How to straddle business & spirituality

H Williams
Mar 16
5 min read

Q: How do you straddle business & spiritual life?

A: This is such a rich question.

Here's the way I look at it. There are two circles, and these two circles are your options for how to engage with reality.

Either the world is inside of your spiritual path, or the spiritual path is inside of your world.

For me, the world is inside of my spiritual circle.

My spiritual view, my outlook, my worldview, my path, my practice—that’s the circle that contains everything. Raising a family, running a business, eating food, getting enough exercise, having a dog, going on vacations, going out to restaurants, going to concerts—that all lives inside the spiritual circle. That’s how I choose to structure my relationship with reality.

Now, that’s important to say, but there’s also the reality of navigating the 3-D world of running a physical business while also being a spiritual aspirant.

So when people ask, “How do you straddle your spiritual path with running a business?” I think they’re really asking two things:

Does the business distract you from your spiritual path?
Are business and spirituality actually at odds with each other?

To answer the second one immediately—I don’t think they’re at odds at all, as long as the world is inside of the bigger spiritual circle.

I've noticed that people in America (and probably other places, too) tend to have a romanticized view of the traditional spiritual path. They have lofty ideas about how many people are living as monks and monastics in places like India and Southeast Asia. And obviously I can't speak for the entire subcontinent of India, but culturally, the general view is that you spend the first 60 years of your life becoming a good householder. And THEN, if you live long enough to retire, that’s when you pare things down—maybe go to a monastery, maybe focus exclusively on heightened spiritual awareness as death approaches. The Sri Chakra gets flipped upsidedown to court Shiva as you age. ;)

So when I ask myself, “How do I straddle business with spirituality?”

I honestly feel like I'm just doing what most people on the path do: live my life, run a household, run a business, and weave my spiritual practice through all of it.

When people think of the spiritual path, they think of monks in monasteries, people who renounce everything. And sure—that’s one option. But if you look at the whole world, that’s maybe 2% of aspirants.

Everyone else is in their karma.

Everyone else is dancing with maya.

Everyone else is entangled in the conditions of their lives, or the decisions they’ve made.

Most people don’t have the circumstances to renounce everything, and they never will!

So, what is there to “straddle”?

You do what you have to do—make enough money to survive, market your services, live in the digital town square (as I talked about in Digital Gardening 101). That’s it!

Now, the deeper question is: how do you not let business become a major distraction from the spiritual path?

And that’s real.

I have a very active mind. Not only do I have a defined head, but I’m also a Root-to-Spleen Projector, which basically means I "look like" I have endless energy, but really it’s just adrenaline pummeling me forward. That root definition gives me this constant pressure in my body I can’t ever seem to escape, so yeah, I'm always fiddling with things. I’m very active and involved in my business.

And sure, you could say that’s "distracting."

In traditional spiritual language, they say: if you miss even one breath in forgetfulness of God, you’ve failed as a sādhaka.

But the way I see it, I’m in a lifelong relationship with the path.

Each year passes and I can feel, undeniably, that my perception keeps deepening, my awareness of God keeps growing, and Grace is working on me every single day at Her perfect pace. And my participation alone is what speeds that up or slows it down.

I’ve been walking this path in my tradition for ten years now. Even when I look back on times where I was FOR SURE really distracted—like 2024 was one of those years—I can still see that I’ve changed. I’ve grown. Something is DEFINITELY happening. So I’m not worried!

I think about it the way I think about bodybuilding.

Whenever I see a huge, muscular BEEFY guy, I bow down internally, because that didn’t happen overnight.

That’s YEARS of disciplined work. You’re lucky if you gain five pounds of muscle in a year. It’s a long game!

And I have the same mindset about spirituality. I know that everything I'm doing is cumulative and is working on me. I know I’m committed. I face my own spiritual burdens every single fucking day. The work never ends and I'm here for the whole path.

And me running a business? It’s not really THAT different than someone selling spices in a Turkish marketplace 1,500 years ago. It’s just the 2025 version.

Of course, people have their biases about exchanging money for spiritual services, but if you haven’t already, go listen to my talk about why I charge money for spiritual services on YouTube—that'll clear a lot up.

The last thing I’ll say is this:

I have an extremely regular, disciplined daily practice. And I believe what you do every day tells Reality what your priorities are.

Every single day I sit down for my sādhana and I tell Reality, “this is my priority.”

Over time, your priorities are the sole thing that shape the story of your life.

If I look forward 40 years into the future, in my 70s, I feel confident I’ll see that I spent a huge part of my life in spiritual practice and devotion—and that I was also a super fucking badass entrepreneur. Both! BOTH CAN HAPPEN!

Because why would I do either halfway?

A yogi doesn’t do anything half-assed.

And if I ran my business half-assed, that would actually make me a bad yogi!

And honestly—that’s the main point of this whole ramble.

If you take anything away from this, let it be this:

Commit fully to your life. Don’t be a half-ass about your life. A yogi does everything as well as they can.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.

Check out my substack for business & marketing perspectives:

digitalgardening101.substack.com

🌟 Want to dive deeper into your spirituality? Let's connect:

📧 Email: immanent.divinity@gmail.com

🔗 Website: www.hannawilliams.com