Sam talks about the opportunities for growth that come when we have a negative response to something in our business.
SHOW NOTES:
Interview with Dr. Carolyn Elliott
https://thedirtyalchemy.simplecast.com/episodes/interview-with-carolyn-elliott
LET'S STAY IN TOUCH!
Instagram: @thedirtyalchemy
Facebook: http://facebook.com/thedirtyalchemy
Web:
TRANSCRIPT:
Hi guys. Today we’re talking about something that’s a little counterintuitive… doing things that don’t feel good for the success of your business.
It happens to be a few days before Halloween, so it feels appropriate to have today’s topic be Poison. And it also happens to be Scorpio season, so it feels particularly appropriate to have today’s topic be Poison as Medicine.
If you’re a business owner you probably already know that doing things you don’t want to do is apart of building & growing a profitable business. Because there will always be parts of your business you’re resistant to because you’re scared. Maybe you’re really nervous about increasing your prices because part of you thinks you still don’t deserve to get paid. Or you hate posting on social media because you’re nervous about opening yourself up to negative comments (or maybe worse… crickets on the other end in response to all the hard work you put on or creative artistry you feel you created). Or any number of other things.
But these things you’re resisting doing in your business… they’re about so much more than just “I don’t feel like it.” They’re about deep insecurities and worries you have. And when you ignore that when they come up… you’re going to stay trapped in the patterns that are limiting you and preventing you from the goals you set.
In spiritual communities, there’s a lot of people who talk about the importance of feeling good. Being high vibe all the time, thinking positive thoughts. Because if you don’t, you’re going to attract bad things into your life. In this mindset, one second of negative thoughts can derail all the work you’ve been putting in for years on yourself and your business.
“Oh no! You just thought about the debt that you currently have. Quick, start thinking about making millions of dollars, because even a second of thinking about your debt will attract more of it.”
So… this is obviously bullshit. On a very practical level, we need to face our problems in order to move through them, resolve them, and come to a resolution. I mean, if you refuse to think about your debt, you’re probably not taking any steps to pay it off, either.
And on a spiritual level, if we just Band-Aid our problems with affirmations about “positivity” and “good vibes only” (which we might not actually feel on a deep level, and so magically we are not putting our full energy behind it anyway), then we’re pretty much standing in a pile of shit, staring up at the sun and wondering why everything smells bad. That negative thing is going to stick around because we never took care of it, we just pretended it wasn’t happening.
Okay I’m being a little black or white here. Maybe the shit you’re standing in would wash away with the rain or be eaten by a bunch of small dogs, but a much much faster way, is to just clean it up yourself. Or feed it to your garden. Or at least take a few steps to the side.
This is where the concept of poison as medicine comes in.
At the right dosage, any poison can become medicine. And at the wrong dosage, any medicine can become poison. That’s why you can overdose on medicine that’s supposed to help you.
The ancient Greeks had a word for this: Pharmakon. Plato used it to talk about things that could be used as a cure or as poison… the answer, of course, is how we choose to use it. But if this idea stretches far enough back that Plato had something to say about it… you better believe there’s some real magical energy behind it.
For many of us, when it comes to the growth of our business and ourselves, Pharmakon plays out like this: our biggest traumas can actually become our biggest assets. In other words, our wounds can become our wealth (as the lovely Dr. Carolyn Elliott says. Which if you haven’t listened to our interview with her on the podcast, I’ll link it in the show notes).
This might be hard to believe at first, and it might even seem shocking to say out loud. Wait, what?? We’re supposed to acknowledge those scary and painful things that we hate thinking about?? But this is actually the only way to solve them. The same way that if you don’t talk about something in therapy that is deeply troubling you, you’re never going to figure out how to learn from it and stop letting it screw up your life. Or in soul reintegration sessions you go back to the root memory of something to re-experience it & heal it. Because the things that seem like poison have so much to teach us.
There are many who believe that this is why we incarnate. Before we were ever born, our souls choose the incarnation path that we come into, including the fucked up shit we have to go through in our childhood so that we can resolve our traumas. So that we can learn from them. So that we can master them. So that we can teach others about it. That mental shift into thinking about the challenges we face as gifts is the first big step to reframing how we think about them... (and eventually moving past them)
Princess Bride was one of my favorite movies growing up, one I’ve seen so many times. In the movie, Westley, the hunky long lost lover of our main heroine Buttercup is under the guise of Dread Pirate Roberts, and comes against Buttercup’s captor, Vizzini…
To try and get Buttercup back, Westley gives Vizzini a mental challenge: He sets two glasses of wine on a table in front of them & tells Vizzini that there’s poison in one of them. Vizzini has to figure out which one has the poison in it… And he guesses wrong. But not for the reason we think. The reason was that both glasses had poison in it, and Westley had just microdosed on the poison for years and built up his tolerance to the poison so that it didn’t matter how much he drank of it.
As business owners, this is a lot of life. In order to grow, we have to do uncomfortable things. Like microdose on a poison so that it can’t defeat us, and it actually becomes a strength.
Yes, we should be focusing on things that bring us into flow, that bring us joy, that feel like a part of our divine path... But to avoid all the other uncomfortable shit that comes with life is folly. Because that is where our growth lies.
Showing up live, posting every day, going on a sales call… These things that we might want to avoid or put on the backburner because they don’t feel good. They don’t feel in the flow... To avoid these things is to brush off our invitation to turn poison into medicine and poison into an asset. We lose our invitation to build resilience and to come out stronger.
A common form of “poison” is people saying mean things about you on the internet.
The worse version of this is you thinking that people will someday maybe say mean things about you so you never do anything or show up or share your truth or new direction. Because you’re scared. Of an future you don’t even know would come to pass.
But people saying mean things about you is a great example of poison as medicine.
Because. You only interpret things as mean and terrible and hurtful if some part of you believes it to be true. If you know, right off the bat, that the criticism is wrong, you won’t take offense to it, you’ll just brush it off. If someone told you that your boyfriend is a total asshole — when you’re single — or that the froyo chain you own is the scourge of humanity, when you don’t own a froyo place… you’re gonna think they’re crazy or don’t know who you are or they’re mistaken or whatever. It’ll roll off you.
But if someone comments on a post that you’re a scammer, when some part of you still feels weird about accepting money and being compensated for things that bring you joy… or if you’ve finally overcome your fear of appearing in front of the camera and then someone comments something rude about how you look or talk, you’re going to take that to heart. It will sting, and you might even regress a little bit and lose that courage that got you to where you are in your business.
So, being upset with what someone says about you says much more about you and your insecurities than whatever the actual comment said.
The pain and self-doubt that come are the poison. And what you choose to do with them — unpack and sort through them and work on integrating those parts of your shadow — can be the medicine.
Because now you have the antidote… you have the opportunity to work through it. And that’s when it’s time to step back and think deeply about why that wound hurts. Accept it. Embrace it. Or debunk it.
This is growth. This is using your business to grow on a soul level. And you can’t do that without a little poison.
Music: Gaena by Blue Dot Sessions is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License.