Study YOGA

TRANSCRIPT

KATIE ROSE

Amy:

Welcome to the Study Yoga Online Summit. If you are seeking beyond the sea of superficial yoga flooding your feed, yearning for insightful conversations and community, or are a sincere seeker devoted to the depths of studentship, then the Study Yoga Masterclass series is the nectar that you need. Katie Rose is a yoga teacher, Ayurveda guide, doula, mother of five, and an author with over 25 years of experience in the world of wellness, alongside many thousands of teaching hours under her belt. Katie was the manager of the prestigious Tri yoga center in London before moving to Sydney and opening Samadhi Yoga in 2004, followed by Jivamukti Yoga Sydney, which at its peak was a four studio business based in Sydney, Australia. She’s the founder and host of the annual Bhakti Women’s Online Summit and the author of several internationally available books, including her latest release, Trust Life, Trust Yourself, Find Peace. Katie has a keen passion for respecting First Nations wisdom as well as animal rights and the environment. Through her work, she helps women go from feeling stuck and overwhelmed to living a life that is vibrant, creative, and abundant. Katie, it’s always such a pleasure to have a rich conversation with you. Welcome, welcome.

Katie:

Thank you so much for having me, Amy.

Amy:

I have to begin by sharing that whenever someone makes it known to me that they are blown away by what I manage to accomplish with two young kids and a husband that works a lot of hours above average and no immediate family support, I always think of you. And I know we kind of talked about this off air a little, but I’m just in awe of how you managed to have five kids, a thriving business, multiple published books and more. And grabbing something there at the end of introducing, you help women live lives that are abundant, and I’m sure that is abundance on all levels, not just exclusively the typical sense of financial wealth, for example, although that’s surely a part of it. And this leads us perfectly into our conversation today. You are, through your studies and direct life experience, well versed in the householder tradition or stage of life called Grihasta. And part of this, according to the Vedic worldview, is to embrace both dharma and artha, and those two of the four aims of life, called Purusharthas, are really inseparable and I’m sure drive your work. So with this in mind, could you share with the listener your understanding of these two aims of life and their fundamental relationship to one another?

Katie:

Yes, sure. And first of all, I’ll just say that this whole thing of all the kids and kind of juggling all the balls and what have you, I do get plenty of help. And I’m also very blessed that my kids are quite spread out. So my eldest two are teenagers now, and actually very helpful with my younger children as well. So this is one of the advantages. If your family gets big enough, then eventually it goes full circle and the older ones start helping with the little ones. So although it is very busy and full and specifically very noisy in my household, it’s also quite manageable. And we have a pretty well-oiled machine, so, I know many women who are in much more of a challenging situation than I am. So it’s not just about the numbers, but thank you for seeing that and acknowledging that fellow, fellow mama because I feel like we’re all juggling many balls if we’ve got children and we are doing any kind of work in the world and endeavoring to have a spiritual practice.

It’s a lot. Which does segue beautifully into your question. So let’s start with the point around dharma, which it often gets translated as purpose, and we have this sort of burning question as Westerners that so many women ask me, how do I find out what my purpose is? And I have to say I’ve struggled a bit with that word purpose as a translation for dharma and kind of wrangled with it somewhat because we have this problem so often with translation from Sanskrit to English. The Sanskrit language is so poetic and philosophical, and the English language is often so sort of transactional and quite narrow. And so when we translate, we lose, we often lose the nuance of meaning. And I feel like this happens with dharma very commonly. And purpose has, to me a sort of almost a disciplinary type vibration. It’s like what you’re meant to be doing, which might differ from what you want to be doing, and also feels quite oriented around quite goal oriented and quite oriented around productivity.

You know, if something is purposeful, then it has an outcome that we can measure that’s tangible. And so for all of those reasons, I don’t find purpose to be the most beautiful or the most exciting of translations of dharma. And I think that to ponder dharma is one of the richest reflections that we can have in our lives. So recently I came across the idea of translating dharma as your assignment. What is your assignment in this life? And that landed much more for me. I really like that. I also quite like the translation of sacred duty. What is it that you feel that you were put here to do that feels a lot more nourishing to me than purpose, which makes me feel pressured before I’ve even begun.

And I think one of the things around this idea of what is your assignment, versus what is your purpose, is that when we consider assignment, it guides us to look at where we find ourselves in our lives already, rather than this sense of seeking. When we get stuck in the idea that we have to find our purpose, there’s a kind of energy behind that that feels quite striving and could almost be quite graspy, which again creates a layer of pressure. Versus, finding ourselves in the assignment of our lives, which really allows us to just sit where we are and flourish in what the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Because so often the lives that we find ourselves in aren’t quite what we had planned. John Lennon famously said, life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. And I tend to agree with that sentiment very often in my own life, even having five children, I mean, people sometimes ask me, did you plan to have a big family?

Was it something you always had in mind? And honestly, the answer is no. I did not ever imagine being mother to five children. But at the same time, I do see that as my sacred assignment, here I find myself, and it’s part of my dharma, part of my calling and my duty to do the very best I can to be a mother to these five incredible holy beings. So yeah, less of the striving energy, less of the finding of the purpose energy and more of the sitting anchored in the life that you’re in right now and looking around and saying, okay, where is my opportunity to be of service? Where is my opportunity to find joy? Where is my opportunity to grow and expand and to nourish and support others? And really checking into that as what our dharma can, the platform or the pathway that our dharma can lay out in front of us if we just drop into it rather than kind of searching for something that’s actually probably already right under our noses.

And I think for me, a big part of that is the constant reminder that dharma isn’t necessarily, as I said before, always connected to productivity, but also that it doesn’t have to be something huge. I mean, you just read out my bio before, which is the highlights of my career over 25 years. There were plenty of just mundane days in amongst all of that where not very much happened and I wasn’t very productive and days where I felt tired or days where I just, nothing much happened. And we forget about those days, or we see those days as being not purposeful. And I’m really interested in what can happen in those days on just a regular Tuesday that can help us to expand into our dharma, expand into the beauty and the magic that this life has to offer us. So that’s a bit on the dharma piece.

Amy:

I have to add, excuse me, Katie, that I think also too often people see dharma as their occupation, rather than seeing how can I serve what is my duty through maybe what I’m already doing. I don’t have to change careers necessarily or change my occupation because again, that’s very transactional and very pressured. I think I just wanted to add that

Katie:

And absolutely. And a lot of people are in occupations that they don’t love. And so then if your identity gets very caught up in that, that creates all kinds of repercussions. I mean, as yogis, we know that our identity is so far beyond any external label that we can place on ourselves, whether it’s gender or race or your profession or your age or anything. We are so much more than those labels. But in our western culture, we do have a tendency to appropriate a lot of weight to those labels. And profession is one of them. It’s one of the first questions we tend to ask people when we meet them for the first time, and we often give it way more weight than it really deserves. So let’s talk about artha as the second pillar that you asked me to reflect on. And again, this is another Sanskrit word that is challenging in translation, but if we think about it as wealth in a very broad term, and wealth manifests in so many different ways in our lives.

I mean, of course we can talk directly about our financial abundance, and I don’t think that’s an irrelevant thing. It’s not that money doesn’t matter because money most definitely does matter and has huge impact in our lives, especially when it’s lacking. But it’s also wealth in all other aspects like our health and our relationships and our capacity to enjoy life and to be in community and to be able to be of service. That’s an incredibly wealthy and privileged position to be in. So I think about all those different aspects of, it’s really very closely linked to a gratitude practice, all those different aspects of how we get to experience abundance and wealth in our lives, and then in turn, what that inspires in us in terms of contribution.

Amy:

Yeah, I love that. And I think it’s very important also to see the relationship between financial wealth and that sense of wealth in daily life because of the society we live in, and particularly for those of us, majority of people, probably everybody listening to this, we’re all part of the householder tradition, even if you have children or not. And there is a degree of financial wealth that is required to feel like our life is bountiful and abundant, and to be able to give back to other communities in need often requires contributing financially. And so we need to get our finances in order and to be at a level of financial abundance and wealth and security that we can give back financially to others. And I think, I remember reading some study or something, I’m sure many people will know what I’m talking about, but there’s a certain income level, and when you get to that income level, it sort of peak happiness because you’ve got that security comfortability, but then any income level above that, the happiness level, it doesn’t go any higher, or even in some sense, it diminishes. And of course, that’s going to vary per person and individual of course, and circumstances and what country you live in and so forth. But yeah, and I think we often in spiritual circles have a lot of resistance to the conversation, and yet it’s literally there in the yoga tradition highlighting that it is part of our duty to cultivate a degree of wealth. And so how do you see these two concepts in relationship to one another?

Katie:

Yeah. Well, I think the first piece is, it’s exactly as you just highlighted, Amy, that when we have more material abundance, money, we are able to show up in service in different ways because I mean, it could be something very simple. If you are genuinely struggling financially, that has a huge impact on your nervous system. If you’re not sure if you’re going to be able to support yourself and your family in a way that allows basic things like food and shelter and what have you, then the nervous system undergoes a huge amount of stress. And so many of us, particularly at the moment, because there’s such a lot of narrative around the cost of living and interest rates rising, and we’re in a challenging financial time, that burden of financial responsibility and scarcity gets really held in the body. So that’s one element that causes huge stress and anxiety and all kinds of ripple effects.

But as you say, in the scriptures, we’re directly instructed that for the householder in this stage of life, it’s not only suggested, but also almost required that we establish and cultivate the skill within ourselves to be able to generate enough wealth that we can be comfortable, that we can live in a steady and sustainable way. And I’m interested in this idea that generating money, generating financial abundance is a skillset that can be learned because I think that there’s often a narrative that says, it’s almost like the luck of the draw. Some people are wealthy, some people aren’t. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, and you get what you get, kind of thing. And actually, I don’t see it in that way at all. And I think of myself as an entrepreneur, and I feel like I always have been from a very young age, had that kind of interest in business and a sort of entrepreneurial way of looking at the world.

And I think one of the things that’s quite specific to that entrepreneurial way of looking at the world is the idea that we get to choose our abundance, our wealth, how we generate our income, and even how much income we generate. And that there is a certain, of course, there’s some karma attached to that. It’s not all in our control, but so many things in life, a lot more of it is than we realize. And that generating income is quite literally a skillset that you can apply yourself to and get better at regardless of what you do for a profession, regardless of what other skills you have and how they’re monetized. And just that change in perception could be enough to really transform the way that we think about the life of the householder, especially for people that are stuck in a job or in work that feels monotonous or repetitive or not in alignment with their higher values. That reframing that most of us, not all, but most of us in our privileged lives, certainly most people having the opportunity to listen to this summit have a lot more choice and a lot more leverage than we might give ourselves credit for.

Amy:

Yes. It’s so easy to allow ourselves to fall into stories or excuses or just stay in that same conditioning. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think that to some degree as well that there’s got to be a recognition that if we are pursuing our dharma, then dharma, then the wealth will align. There’s a degree of abundance that will come in with that, will be in relationship with that. And I think again, it comes back to that idea of I don’t need to be in a specific occupation necessarily to feel like I’m in alignment with my dharma. What is the greater service? And I also think it’s really important to focus on being wholly responsible for your own, let’s say immediate unit, whether that’s you and your partner or you, partner, children, et cetera. How are you taking care and bringing care and service to your own immediate world? And how does that therefore have a ripple effect? And how can you then expand that out? Because I think it’s all good and well to really almost stress ourselves out about I need to do something out there, and that’s important, but if we haven’t also got our own lives in order, there’s always going to be a little bit of a, I don’t know if a disconnect is the right word, but a challenge there. What’s your thoughts on that?

Katie:

Yes, I agree with you completely. And I would say that connected to that is also the idea of living within our means. There’s a beautiful expression that Śrīla Prabhupāda used so often to describe this, which was simple living, higher thinking. And one of the things that I’ve found enormously useful in my own life is to live within the means that I have and to not get too caught up in material culture because it’s such a bottomless pit. The capitalist dream is such a bottomless pit. So if we get too sucked into that vortex, what can happen is we really lose sight of what the value of money is and what the purpose of money is and what the purpose of abundance and wealth, what’s behind the energy of money. And it becomes a constant striving for bigger house, newer car, whatever it might be that you’re into.

And it can happen not just in, I mean, what we think of as the classic sort of materialism, but there’s also such a thing as spiritual materialism, which is it is very easy to spend money even in an alternative lifestyle, let’s say. I mean, I always remember my teacher who you had on your podcast, Maya Tiwari, talking about how expensive it is to walk into an organic health food shop, and you can easily spend hundreds of dollars before you know it. And she would talk very often about why not just pick a few veggies from the garden, cook some rice, cook some chickpeas and add some spices? There’s your meal and it’s the most frugal way of eating, but also the most healthful in many ways. So I’m very attracted to this idea of what does it mean to live within our means and what do we need versus what we think we want?

And it can be such silly things, Amy, like my phone, I’ve got an older phone and it’s got a few little niggles. It’s starting to be a bit on its last legs, and I’m just not going to replace it until I really have to. It would be so easy to just call up the phone company and get another payment plan for a fancy shiny phone that will arrive in the post and give me a little bit of excitement for a few days until it becomes normal again. And I’m intrigued to experiment with, well, what would it be like to just use this phone until it dies and see how that works for me? Recently, I’ve never been much of a crafter. I’ve never been much of a sort of knitter or any of those things. But recently I have learned how to darn and mend clothing more skillfully than I was able to before.

Anyway, I’m never going to be amazing at it. But again, I love this idea of instead of just buying new school uniform for my kids, let’s stitch up some holes. Let’s put a new button on. And it has nothing to do with whether my financial means stretch to being able to afford new school uniform. It’s more just this idea of wealth and abundance doesn’t need to mean brand new or designer or about consumption. There’s another type of wealth that has to do with living in a way that just feels a little more sustainable. And there’s something so refreshing about using something secondhand or making something last a little bit longer.

Amy:

It feels really wholesome, actually. Reminds you of your grandparents or something. And I love that, and I can totally relate to it as well. And it’s so funny because every time you and I talk, we always talk about how we’re doing similar things at the same time or whatever. And it’s so funny you talked about your phone because mine is dying. It’s a super old iPhone, and I think I have to replace it soon, but I’ve been doing what you said. I’m just waiting and waiting. But it’s, I think a lot of the apps aren’t working anymore, and it’s starting to overheat, and my actual case is broken. It keeps falling out of the case. And I think, well, I don’t want to buy a new case because eventually I will have to get a new phone, so I don’t want to go out and buy a new case.

Then I’ll have this case that won’t fit the new phone. And I think the word frugal gets, not a bad rap, but it seems really extreme. But I think that our consumption in the world now is extreme. So I think most of us would really benefit from being a little bit more frugal in day-to-day life. And you’ve given such wonderful examples and really wholesome examples that are so easy to embrace for sure, and don’t take a lot of effort either. But look, I’d love to pivot this topic of conversation a little here, and I’d love for you to share some insights around the goddess of Lakshmi Devi, who’s very pertinent to the householder teachings. How is she an archetype for us in daily life? Could you reveal some of her symbolism or perhaps ways that we can begin to form a more intimate relationship with her?

Katie:

Yeah, thank you for asking me about this. So I feel very drawn to Lakshmi as a deity. That really resonates in my life at this time, particularly because she’s very much the embodiment of the householder phase. Also, obviously a manifestation of divine feminine, which really appeals to me in this stage of my life. I work with a lot of women and also as we’ve discussed as a mother, and actually it links very beautifully to what we were just talking about because one of the ways I think about Lakshmi manifesting in my life is in the abundance that’s already here. And again, it goes back to this idea of what we could call frugal, which is to just look at what you already have. So it’s like, okay, this is how I think about Lakshmi in manifestation in my life. It’s like, okay, it’s dinner time.

What am I going to make for food? I’m going to open up the fridge, or I’m going to open up the pantry and see what I already have and what magic can I create with that? Or I’m getting dressed in the morning instead of feeling like, oh, I’ve got nothing to wear. I need to buy myself some new clothes. Or I’m sick of all these old clothes, whatever. It’s like looking in my wardrobe in a different way and feeling like, oh, I have so much here. And there’s that old thing I haven’t worn forever that I actually really love, that I can pull out from the back of my cupboard and enjoying in a whole new way, or looking at my bookshelf and seeing how many books I have that I haven’t read yet that I’m excited to read that I purchased because I knew I wanted to read them, but I just haven’t got round to yet.

And that even just in my own home without going anywhere or doing anything, there’s already so much abundance. There’s already so much fullness. I think many of us tapped into this energy, which is a very Lakshmi energy during the lockdowns because all of a sudden it was just the four walls and people started making bread and doing home renovations and learning new hobbies. And there’s something, I’m not saying I’m not glorifying lockdown because I know it’s very hard for so many of us, but there was something so beautiful in that discovery of the goddess, discovery of beauty, discovery of intellectual stimulation, sensory stimulation that’s already present for us. And so often when we think of Lakshmi, we think about wealth and abundance, and people get very into this idea of asking, it’s all about manifestation. I want more. What am I going to ask for next?

What can I manifest? And although there’s great power in that, I’m also really interested in where can I sit in what I already have and before I sign up for another online course, complete the ones I’ve already signed up for, do the things I already, enjoy the things I already have, instead of grasping, grasping, grasping. Another thing I love about Lakshmi is that her, one of her symbols, or I think of it as a spirit animal, I’m sure that’s not quite the right way of expressing it classically in Hinduism, but Lakshmi is very closely connected to the owl. And I’m always joking to my children that I have eyes in the back of my head. So I love this idea of the owl that can see beyond and see around and see differently. My teacher, Sharon Gannon, founder of Jivamukti to Yoga, she says, magic is a shift in perception.

And I really believe this to be true, that it’s so often not about changing the arrangement of our external lives, but rather changing the way we’re perceiving what we already have and what’s already going on, whether it’s in our relationships, in our material abundance, in our work, whatever it might be. And Lakshmi to me, is the real embodiment of not manifesting more, but rather dropping into perceiving what we already have with an extra sprinkle of magic. And also from that different perspective of I can see around a corner, I can see behind me, I can see from above maybe. And these different perceptions give us a different way. I’ll give you a funny little example of a practice that I quite often do in my everyday life, which is when my house is particularly chaotic, and I mentioned before, noisy, my children are very loud.

I mean, four of them are boys and the girl is two years old and has a fair set of lungs on her. So there’s a lot of noise all the time. People playing different music, singing to themselves, shouting to each other from different rooms. I mean, it’s pretty full on. And I love the idea of a quiet, tranquil environment, and it’s something I feel often, it’s a lot. And when those moments happen where it’s particularly chaotic and there’s a lot of noise and hubbub, I sometimes do this practice where I literally imagine almost like a drone image of looking over the top of my house, almost like perhaps it could be the opening scene of a movie or a novel or something like that of all these different people in their different spaces doing their different things and making all of their loud noises. And then me kind of as the matriarch in the center of that. Somehow that image, that shift in perspective really soothes my nervous system because I am able to remember this is just a beautiful, busy household full of loving humans that are all expressing themselves in different ways rather than feeling frazzled and overwhelmed. And I feel that that’s very much the energy of the goddess is to be able to hold in heart and mind that shift in perception.

Amy:

That’s beautiful. I love the mention of the owl too, because an owl we see as being very still, but when it’s awake, it’s very aware and very alert. And I think there’s also some interesting consideration there that owls are nocturnal, and so it’s like they’re awake. While we’re sleeping, and that’s often what is taught with the goddess as well. The goddess is there and present and awake whilst our mundane consciousness is sleeping. So I love that parallel, and I really appreciate the clarity on the tendency, and you even see this in India and worshiping Lakshmi to get more and give me money and give me wealth and give me fortune and riches! And I think that’s a real misperception as to the deeper essence and teachings of Lakshmi.

Katie:

I think another thing to just say, Amy, that you just reminded me of is not, it’s about, yes, asking for what we need, and that’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. But also taking the pause to being gratitude for receiving what it was that we asked for recently, I was in India and we visited a Kali temple, and there was a long line to get into the temple, really hours of waiting. And along the side of the line, there were people that were doing full body prostrations leading into towards the actual temple itself, which was really arduous and quite intense to watch because it would literally be like a footstep, full body prostration come up, right footstep, full body prostration come up. And it was a workout, like watching people really physically go through this rigorous devotional practice. And I remember asking a friend of mine who had been to the temple many times and knew more about the nuance of what was going on, saying to her, I said to her, wow, these people are really serious about asking for what they want.

They’re really putting their all into this request, whatever it might be that they’re asking for. And she said, no, no, no. They’re not asking. They have come to give thanks, because what they asked for was already given. So this particular lineup of people that were doing the prostration mostly around health, they had come to say, thank you because whatever health condition I had is now gone. It’s now passed. And it struck me so much because I felt like that’s something we are not very good at in our culture, is the pause and acknowledge what I’ve already got, or pause and give gratitude for what I’ve already manifested, rather than just moving on to the next thing. What’s next? What’s next? What’s next?

Amy:

There’s a lack of reverence. And even toward oneself too, we are very slow, well, we are very lacking in even pausing and celebrating our own successes and achievements and things. It’s always, again, the next thing that, all right, I’ve done that. What’s the next thing? But yeah, there is a lack of reverence there, for sure, generally speaking, that is so prevalent in India. Absolutely. And really, really beautiful. And I think that when we’re in a relationship with any of the deities, generally speaking, I think it’s also very important to recognize that we might desire something. We might be trying to call forth something, but we also have to recognize whether or not we’re ready for that in our life. And we could be seeking something or really committing ourselves to some kind of discipline or practice or so forth. But we also have to ask ourselves, is our life set up in a way that, have we taken the steps to hold these things? Are we going to be offered this abundance and fortune, whether financial or otherwise? Are we ready to hold that?

Katie:

With more abundance comes more responsibility. I am at a really interesting stage in my own business at the moment. I mean, I’ve been running businesses on and off for many years, but the particular iteration of my business right now is an online space. And I’ve been running it for four years, and I’m just at the point now where I’m really starting to expand and think about investing in more staff and more resource. And it’s kind of right. I can feel this stretch, this tipping point. And I’m very, very aware that with that expansion and that growth, which is beautiful, also comes more responsibility. So it’s like, okay, if I hire staff, then I’m suddenly I’m responsible for people’s wages and people’s livelihoods and for being a good guide and a good boss and a good communicator, and all of those things. And yeah, same with parenting, same with so many things that when the more wealth that we have in all different ways very commonly comes with responsibility. And we may not be ready for that responsibility if we don’t apply ourselves carefully to first of all, acknowledging that responsibility and then being good custodians of it, actually being able to do well with that expansion and that need for greater capacity

Amy:

To be a real steward of that wealth. For sure. That resonates a lot. I’d love to just go into one final area with you, Katie, and you work with many business owners, not just limited to yoga teachers, but you do work with a lot of yoga teachers. No doubt, most of us involved with the yoga traditions have had a resistance to wealth, either at present and it’s ongoing or certainly at some point in time. So this is often a narrative that even sincere spiritual practitioners and teachers, they think that you cannot, or that you should not be financially wealthy or therefore you cannot have to some degree an amount of material wealth. We’ve already kind of addressed this, but what do you think is the key reframe here, in your opinion? What do you feel are some of those significant steps or shifts we can make to create a new story? I mean, your point about responsibility is definitely one of them, but is there anything else you want to add there?

Katie:

Yeah, I mean, I can talk to that. There’s a few different ways to talk to that, but I’d love to speak about it literally in terms of running a business and what that means. And the way, first of all, I think the question you’ve asked is not one that has a clear answer. I think this is something that we could discuss at length and still not necessarily have complete clarity around. Because on the one hand, I genuinely believe that spiritual practice and spiritual life and the teachings of yoga should be accessible to everybody, and that there shouldn’t be any type of hierarchy connected to financial means. So I truly believe that. On the other hand, I also believe that we’re all entitled to generate wealth and make a good living and be compensated for the work that we do. And sometimes those two things, it can be a challenge to find how they can sit together, how they can be reconciled.

I love the idea in business of a bit of a Robinhood approach. I love the idea that those with means can support those with less means. And I see this happening more and more where, for example, you can sign up for something and you can sponsor another person who doesn’t have the means to also be able to enjoy that program or that offering or a meal or a coffee or whatever it might be. And I think that’s a really beautiful way of thinking about economy and thinking about how we can distribute resource fairly. I also love the idea that people can pay according to what they can afford. I think that offerings that have that type of sliding scale and self-reflective opportunity to pay what you feel you’re able to is really lovely. And in my own business, what I do is I run a lot of free programs every year.

I run my summit for free. I have various different live programs that run at no cost, and I genuinely give the best that I have to give in those programs because I know how well resourced I’ve been. I’ve had times in my life where I’ve had very little money, some of them not that long ago. I got divorced six years ago, and I struggled financially for the first two years after divorce. And so I remember even that wasn’t so long ago, utilizing many different free offerings and free programs at that time, and they were so helpful to me and so nourishing. So I really make sure to provide that within the work that I do. But then I also don’t have any hesitation around charging for some of the things that I do and for deeper work with me and time that work that involves more of a time commitment.

People pay me for that, and I’m absolutely happy to receive that exchange of money. It feels very fair and it feels very steady. And so both, there is a space for both. And like I said, as my business continues to grow and expand, which it is doing, I’m very happy to say I think about, well, okay, how can that expansion then in turn be self-generating and contribute more to the communities? Can I, for example, I was able to do a big fundraiser at the beginning of this year for Gaza, which exceeded my expectations enormously in what we were able to raise. But I know that a few years ago, I wouldn’t have had capacity for that because I was too busy surviving. Now that I’m in a place where it’s more thrive than survive, I have capacity to be able to use the resources and the skills that I have to do fundraisers that are quite lucrative for causes that I believe in. That’s just one example,

Amy:

That balanced approach is it’s really admirable, and I appreciate that you’ve also emphasized that it’s not always been that way. We really need to take care of ourselves first so we can set up that stability and security so that we can then spread that goodness and offer more of our time and energy and services in an accessible way. I see a lot of scholarships out there these days as well for certain trainings and courses, and that’s very similar to the opportunities that you mentioned. And I think that that is very, very helpful as well. Definitely. So for those who would like to connect further with Katie or access some of those free resources, you can head to bhaktirose.com.au And particularly if you are in business or you’re a yoga teacher, whether you’re at the beginning of your journey of being self-employed, or you’ve been running a business for a while, Katie actually has a free quiz to find out where the strengths and the challenges are in your work so that you can play to your power and find creative and inexpensive ways of tackling stuff that does not light you up. And to access the quiz, you can go to bhaktibusiness.com.au/quiz. We will pop that on the summit webpage for you also. Thank you for tuning into the conversation. Don’t forget you can upgrade to gain lifetime access to all these wisdom fueled conversations as well. And Katie, you’ve always been a wealth of insight and you uphold so much integrity in all that you do. So thank you again for your time. It’s been such a treat. I really treasure the opportunity to chat with you always.

Katie:

Oh, thank you.