Why every entrepreneur needs a "Spiritual Business" and clairsalence™ if they actually want to thrive in uncertain times
- Apr 10
- 9 min read
Updated: May 7
My purpose in this essay is to argue two fundamental ideas. One, that a spiritual business is defined not by what it sells, or by the personal practices of its founder, but by the posture from which it is operated. Two, a spiritual business is the only model genuinely capable of delivering the “dream of entrepreneurship,” substantially increased revenue, meaningfully reduced working hours, work of genuine significance, and a business that contributes to the world rather than extracting from it.
In this essay:
I - Defining a Spiritual Business
The phrase "spiritual business" usually functions primarily as a marketing category rather than a meaningful description of how the business is actually run. In its most prevalent contemporary usage, it signals a particular aesthetic, sacred geometry in the branding, a vocabulary liberally borrowed from spiritual (and even quasi-scientific) traditions, while the underlying operational logic remains indistinguishable from any other anxiety-driven, scarcity based, extractive commercial enterprise.
However, a spiritual business, properly understood, is one in which the CEO operates in a conscious co-creative relationship with Source: orienting toward Destiny and not solely market demand, and toward service rather than extraction. The conventional model promises these outcomes and delivers them to almost no one, because it is built on a logic of scarcity, sacrifice, and perpetual expansion that systematically makes the promised outcomes impossible to attain. You cannot work your way to freedom within a model whose requirements demand your perpetual captivity.
I want to be clear that I know what I describe here is a high bar. It is an aspiration, a north star to orient toward, not a standard against which to judge yourself at every moment. There will always be seasons of misalignment. The invitation is not to perfection but to direction, to the consistent, compassionate reorientation toward a way of doing business that I believe, and have seen demonstrated, is both more humane and more effective than what convention offers.
Another clarification. Nothing in what follows is a case against strategy, structure, analytical rigour, or commercial ambition. A spiritual business has all of these things. It has coherent offers, a functional pricing architecture, a considered marketing approach, and a business model that works. What differentiates it is not the presence or absence of these elements but the place from which they are built. Strategy sourced from Destiny alignment is a categorically different thing from strategy sourced from competitive anxiety. It is, in other words, a question of origin.
II -Destiny Alignment and Its Expression In Business
A spiritual business originates in a sustained, honest, and frequently uncomfortable inquiry into whether what you are building is genuinely yours to build. It does not begin with a business plan. This is the foundational work of Destiny Alignment: the comprehensive reorientation of every dimension of the business toward the entrepreneur's specific and irreducible purpose. A purpose we decided on before we even incarnated. Destiny Alignment is the animating question that must remain alive beneath every strategic decision, every offer, every client relationship, every structural choice the business makes.
I distinguish three expressions of Destiny Alignment as it manifests within a business.
The first expression is Offer Alignment, the degree to which your products, services, and offers are genuine articulations of your Destiny rather than responses to perceived market demand. The Destiny Offer™, as I use the term, is a metaphysical construct: the offer that could only emerge through this particular entrepreneur, in this particular form, for these particular people, at this particular time.
The second expression is Client Alignment, the recognition that your clients are not a demographic to be targeted but a specific group of people you were, in some meaningful sense, designated to serve. This specificity is consistently resisted by CEOs who have absorbed the conventional imperative to maximise market size, because niching from Destiny operates by an entirely different logic than niching from strategy. Strategic niching narrows your addressable market based on efficacy; Destiny-oriented niching clarifies your relationships, often dramatically expanding both the depth of impact and the ease of connection.
The third expression is Business Model Alignment, the congruence between the structural demands of your business and your actual energetic constitution. A business model that is fundamentally at odds with your nature will, regardless of its financial performance in the short term, produce progressive deterioration: of creative capacity, of physical health, of the quality of service you can offer.
When all three expressions are simultaneously active and in genuine coherence, the business becomes something I would describe as a vessel: a form through which Destiny-aligned work can move with minimal friction. When any one is substantially out of alignment, a persistent leak develops, of energy, of appropriate clients, of meaning, that cannot be fixed through strategic intervention alone, because its origin is not strategic but ontological.
Destiny Alignment constitutes one pillar of the methodology I have developed called Frequency First Business™, a complete and integrated framework for building a spiritual business as I have defined it. The other two pillars are Vibrational Alignment, which will form the subject of a forthcoming essay and Clairsalence™ (Intuitive Business Strategy) which I will outline in further detail later in this piece.
III - Observing The Business as A Living Entity
Among the most consistently overlooked propositions of this framework, even amongst spiritual practitioners, is that the business itself is a living entity. One that is possessed of its own intelligence, its own desires and its own Destiny, which is related to but not reducible to the Destiny of its founder.
This is something I have observed repeatedly across years of working at the intersection of business strategy and esoterica. There is a quote I love, attributed to Carl Jung, that conveys some of my meaning and says, “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people.”
The entrepreneur who understands her business as a living entity does not merely manage it. She develops a relationship with it and becomes attuned to its needs. This attunement has practical implications for how decisions get made. When the business is understood as possessing its own intelligence, the CEO becomes appropriately sceptical of the impulse to impose upon it, structures that belong to a different entity's nature. The framework that works brilliantly for an industry peer or the business model that produces extraordinary results for a competitor won't necessarily work for your business.
I have felt this myself in the founding of The Business Priestess. The Business chose its own name, despite me choosing many names for it that it did not like. It developed its own frameworks, it attracted its own clients despite my attempts at steering it in a direction of my own choosing. As a spiritual practitioner, I was able to put language to what I was observing, and part of the work of this business is to help other entrepreneurs do the same.
The business is not a possession. It is a stewardship. And stewardship, the sustained, attentive care of something you did not create and cannot ultimately control, is among the most demanding and most generative forms of spiritual practice available to the contemporary CEO.
IV - Developing Clairsalence™ - An Intuitive Approach To Business Strategy
Steve Jobs is not, by any conventional account, a figure one would associate with spiritual business. He is associated with sleek industrial design, an almost tyrannical insistence on perfection, and a management style that generated as much fear as admiration. He built one of the most commercially dominant companies in human history. He is, in other words, precisely the kind of figure whose example ought to unsettle any assumption that spiritual business is the province of the gentler, the slower, or the less ambitious.
And yet: Jobs built Apple from a sustained posture that is, I would argue, more coherently spiritual in its orientation than that of most businesses that explicitly position themselves as such. His well-documented contempt for market research was grounded in a conviction, one he articulated repeatedly, "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do." He also asked rhetorically: "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the phone?"
Jobs trusted a different form of knowing that operated beneath the threshold of data. He built from an interior signal outward, consistently, across multiple decades, multiple product categories, and multiple reinventions of industries. And the world, repeatedly, organised itself around what he created.
This is what I have termed clairsalence™ and it is available to every entrepreneur willing to cultivate it.
Clairsalence™ is the faculty of intuitive strategic intelligence applied to the realm of business. It is the capacity to perceive with accuracy, the full spectrum of conscious and unconscious human desire and how to uniquely fulfill it whether through products and services or indeed with marketing. It comprises three interlocking capacities.
The first is Destiny Alignment as we have established in a previous section. In the context of intuitive strategy, Destiny Alignment operates as a compass. Every potential direction, every new offer, every collaboration or shift in positioning is tested against the foundational question of whether it is genuinely consonant with your purpose. This is what prevents the spiritual business from drifting, through the accumulation of apparently reasonable individual decisions, into a configuration that is fundamentally at odds with why it exists.
The second is Empathy, understood here not solely as a relational competency but the capacity to access both the conscious and unconscious desires of the collective and your ideal client. The distinction between surface desire and deep desire matters enormously. Surface desire, what people report wanting when asked directly, is shaped by what they already know to be available, by social norms around what is acceptable to want, and by the psychological defences that prevent access to more vulnerable forms of longing. Deep desire operates beneath these filters. The CEO with developed empathic perception works with the full picture of human desire rather than its visible surface.
The third is Imagination, the creative faculty through which genuinely new solutions, offers, and strategies are generated, as distinct from the incremental refinement of what already exists. The suppression of imagination is among the most costly and least acknowledged features of conventional business culture, which consistently conflates caution with wisdom and imitation with strategic rigour. Imagination is how Source communicates new possibilities into your business. Jobs' entire career was a sustained demonstration of imagination deployed as a strategic instrument. For the spiritual entrepreneur, imagination is not a supplement to strategic intelligence, it is core.
In practice, clairsalence™ produces a principled refusal of manipulative conversion tactics, manufactured urgency, artificial scarcity, psychologically coercive framing, because such tactics are incompatible with the empathic orientation from which intuitive strategy proceeds.
V - Operating with Natural Rhythms and in Planetary Harmony
I could not complete this essay without reflecting on sustainability. A spiritual business is one that honours the cyclical nature of human energy, the alternation of creative peaks and necessary fallow periods and the monthly and seasonal rhythms that govern biological and psychological function. It is not “always on” and does not treat humans as if they are machines.
The entrepreneur who is committed to building a spiritual business will not sacrifice her whole life for it. Not her health. Not her primary relationships. Not her capacity for creative play and genuine rest. Not her spiritual practice. Not her ability to be fully present within her own existence. These are not things to be balanced against a successful business, as though success and wholeness were inherently competing claims. They are what makes the business worth building , and they are what makes the work within it genuinely potent rather than merely technically accomplished.
This also extends to the relationship we have with the Earth itself. The Earth's climate, its land masses, its waters, are increasingly registering the accumulated cost of an economic logic premised on infinite extraction from a finite system. A spiritual business that is genuinely oriented toward Source cannot be indifferent to this, and the entrepreneur needs to work through what this means practically for his or her business. The emergence of new technologies and AI present new ethical challenges that CEOs need to grapple with and conclude on, not just once but many times.
VI - Conclusion
I want to close with the acknowledgement I made at the outset: what this essay describes is a high bar. It is not a checklist to be completed or a standard against which to measure yourself and find yourself wanting. There will be seasons, perhaps long ones, in which the alignment is partial. This is the condition of being human and building something within a world that was not designed to support this way of thinking. In a forthcoming essay, I will outline the economic logic that makes this way of doing business possible and financially viable.
To tend your business as a priestess tends a temple is a demanding practice. But it is also, I have found across many years of working at this intersection, the most reliable path to building something that you love and can love you back.
Manifest Results™
If you are a business owner who would like to explore turning your business into a “spiritual business” and scaling your business with the ideas in this essay, my 1:1 programme Manifest Results™ is designed to help you achieve those goals. Find out more here.
Lola Seshat is a Spiritual Teacher and Spiritual Business Strategist (a former management consultant) who helps CEOs and Business Leaders scale their businesses through business metaphysics and spiritual practices. Read more about her here.
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