Because if you won’t, someone else will.
Someone always does.
If there is one thing selling online in the last ten years has taught me(five for other businesses, and five for mine), it’s the word ‘shameless’.
Shamelessly sell.
Shamelessly promote.
Shamelessly connect
Shamelessly express.
Shamelessly live the way you want to, girl.
Because the moment shame creeps in, you would want to hide and withdraw and say goodbye to all the dreams you weaved through months and years. You would not even take a hot second to abandon your little cherished dream for what — for that goddamn shame.
Selling online is not for everyone, I agree. It’s a public platform. To stand with shame tugging you from beneath could destroy you on a public platform. It almost destroyed me.
But then, how different is living too?
The biggest shadow work I was asked to do through my business was on shame. With an eighth house Venus, there has been a lot of shame work I was assigned to work with by my cosmic blueprint. You see Venus is not just money but love, not just love but also money. I would be lying if I said my not-self mind doesn’t often play ping-pong between the two. I noticed this sometime last year how it would always take on one of the two as a problem to be solved.
But love, or money, is not a problem to be solved by the mind.
It is a desire.
Venus is desire.
Desire to be seen, to be received, to be loved, to be admired, to be celebrated.
Desire to create and express.
And desires, in our sacral, hold shame.
So then the question for me was no more about love or money - it became about shame.
Deep shame on sharing my gift,
deep shame on quoting a price for some of those gifts,
deep shame on being seen as a creator
Deep shame on sharing my creations
deep shame on letting my dripping passion be witnessed by one and all -
Just deep f*cking shame.
The kind of shame that makes you wipe your makeup off, throw your tripod in the air, take off your stupid pants, and crawl under the blanket sobbing. The kind of shame that makes you speak to yourself in a deep condescending tone “How did you ever think you could do this? You’re so stupid. This is where you belong, in your hole of shame.”
When someone says they struggle with selling, which many creatives do, they don’t struggle with selling. They struggle with shame.
They struggle with - How dare I?
What would they think of me?
Am I greedy?
Am I needy?
They struggle with paralyzing, spirralling, soul-sucking thoughts of how disappointed and embarrassed their friends and family would be of them. They struggle with coming off as too much, or too less, and the ultimate rejection. They struggle wondering if people often gossip behind their backs saying “What does she think of herself”?
And for god’s sake, creatives or not creatives, humans hate being boycotted or being treated differently from their own. We are coming from a 2500-year age of planning where there were rewards for being similar and doing similar things. We were constructing a livable society together - we needed assembly line skills. Now we are entering a new paradigm, the age of individuality. Coming to terms with it is unsettling, to say the least. This is why understanding your (human) design is so crucial right now for operating out of your strategy and your authority - because no one can tell you the correct aligned truth for you but you.
Talking of Human Design, this conversation would be left incomplete if I didn’t talk about Gate 26, the gate of sacred salesman. I have this gate as my north node and I felt the same cringe-ey effect as you might right now with the word ‘salesman’. Because when I give you the word salesman, you don’t think of a man who sells, you think of a sleazy car salesman chasing you and manipulating you into just signing up the deal. I think of cold calls from NGOs emotionally blackmailing me and getting me to pay for their cause. I did it once as an innocent 22-year-old fresh out of college working earning woman and a decade later, they still got my name on their records and they still call me with that same icky script!
Ofcourse, the Gods wouldn’t be that unkind to make this my destiny with Gate 26, right?
So then I think what has indeed happened is that we have completely been stripped of the core and essence of a salesman who sells with integrity.
Yes, Selling and integrity in one breath.
Gate 26 - Gate of Sacred Salesman
Official name: The Taming Power of the Great – The Egoist
In the bodygraph: will/heart/ego center connecting to the spleen center with gate 44
Sign: Sagittarius
When in its higher frequency, this is the energy of making sales with honesty and integrity. It is the energy to trust in the abundance of the Universe.
In its lower frequency, this is the energy of not trusting the abundance and hence falling for gimmicks and strategies to extract, control, and manipulate - precisely what we have known selling as up until now.
(If you have this gate defined and want to dig deeper into this gate, hop here on Tan’s Astrology youtube channel which has been a great source of learning and contemplating for me.)
When we trust in the abundance of the Universe, we deeply realize that no one can take away our leads or sales from us. We relax in the awareness that there is an abundance of clients, customers, or job providers. We give up chasing and embrace receiving. We don’t sweat trying to imitate another. We simply slip into living our authentic truth because we deeply recognize that there is always a giver to a receiver and vice-versa. We see the law of nature. And we flow with it.
We don’t have to knit stories of manipulation. We have to simply share our truths. We don’t have to convince or fool someone to call a knight a king. We have to simply be willing to be seen in our transparency and let that be our best marketing strategy. Yes, transparency - an unusual word in the world of sales, and marketing. But ain’t time we change it?
I heard a spiritual mystic once share that a true business person is not someone who is selling comb to a bald man, that’s a trickster.
And yet, this is the definition we associate sales and marketing with.
I have seen the best of people change their hearts to make a living or a sale because their not-self mind has been convinced to believe that this is how it works in the business paradigm. Like an obvious truth that
Of course, you have to sell your soul and integrity to make a living.
As a virgo rising, the most practical sign of the zodiac, I refuse to buy this as pragmatic truth.
It’s not practical nor, truth.
And I don’t need to dig research papers for something that feels so off in my body like I wanna puke.
I know more and more people are feeling this and no longer aligning with the way we have learned to market and sell. I am seeing this right now. Online and offline, both. Unfortunately, a large sum of these people, including me at times, want to throw in the towel at selling itself, to get a sigh of relief from this icky feeling.
However, in the last year, my business made the ground reality of how it works very clear to me.
It doesn’t matter how nice I think I am being or how much people like me for not being pushy or inconvenient, the matter of fact remains, if I am not paid, I cannot continue this work.
Gods were clear to ask me -
would you rather keep your creative and financial freedom,
or spirals of shame,
pangs of guilt, and
quivering fear of what they might think of me?
I am sorry to report but none of the likes, opinions, and validation of others have ever paid my bills, not once. Nor have they come very handy when I needed emotional support. Nope, none at all!
The truth remains, If I don’t sell, I don’t make a living from my gifts and creativity. If I don’t make a living, I don’t get to do what I am doing and have to contribute my time, energy and resources to causes I may or may not fully support in exchange for money. I may have to retire my creative expression for good, or maybe keep them for the weekends when I’d probably be too tired to lift a finger after a five-day workweek. Most importantly, the knowledge and gifts I am sitting on would be left unshared and, all the lives my work has, could and, would have impacted would remain untouched.
Oof, multiply that ripple effect by 7 billion.
That’s an impact that capitalism is making.
If I don’t sell, someone else will.
Someone sold me the idea that I should not sell, and I bought it.
Someone sold me the idea that my expression was inconvenient, and I bought it.
Someone sold me the idea that I am too much, and I bought it.
So when everyone is anyway selling, why don’t you sell?
Sell your product, sell your story, sell your journey, sell your art - or let me rephrase for some of you who still cannot shake that ickiness with selling -
why don’t you share?
share your product, share your story, share your art,
Why don’t you sell, as often as you’d like and in whatever ways you’d want to?
The thing is, if we don’t sell, someone else will. Some of us sell truth, while some of us sell lies. And, someone is always buying.
As I reflect on these last few years of showing up online right now, there is an intuitive awareness coming through my Mercury in Pisces. The awareness that I indeed stopped selling (or sharing!) online at one point when some people left negative reviews or when someone asked me for a refund. I indeed stopped selling when there were rumors of me charging too much or when someone questioned my legitimacy as a guide - I actually bought their lies.
Not just that, I let people buy their lies too as I started diminishing my light eventually. I questioned if I should even be enthusiastically talking and sharing about myself and my services anymore. Am I even worth the big talk? (I am a Gemini midheaven, and know that when a Gemini midheaven stops talking about their work, something has terribly gone wrong!)
My reputation was hurt - and for a long time, I said and did nothing to save it.
I didn’t realize the value of my truth up until now.
My heart was true. My intention was sacred. My value was honest. My deliverables were over-reaching. Yet, I kept on providing unrequited value almost to overcompensate for the doubts and blame - only to be drained, financially, mentally, emotionally, and physically.
In many ways, I feel my substack is how I am reclaiming my voice and reputation. This time at the moment feels like my reputation era.
One of the stories my scarcity mindset would often weave while selling in these last few years would be - but they need their money and why should they spend it on my silly program? What if I am tricking them indeed? What if I am indeed not good enough?
Umm, to that I’d now say - maybe, and maybe not. I suppose in the abundant world of trust, we trust that people are intelligent enough to know where and how to spend their money and that there is something bigger than me who can micromanage this karmic game?
The difference between people who have sold (often magnanimously) and people who haven’t is simply one word: shame.
People who sell often and have sold often, have integrated shame. They don’t feel shame for asking for what is theirs (or even someone else’s, bah!). They can be even borderline arrogant and selfish, I mean some of them are?! They don’t care. They don’t care if them making money selling something toxic, crappy, or even poisonous will harm someone. But you, you care.
And in this world which has forgotten its soul, it’s beautiful. It’s rare. Thank you for caring. I would never tell you how naive you are for caring. Your care matters. It’s taking our world to a place where philosophies like mindfulness, consciousness, intentional living, sustainability, and ethics, are translating into real tangible things. So thank you.
But always remember, if a beautiful caring soul like you doesn’t sell - someone else will. Someone always does.
What are you still ashamed of?
Where does shame keep you small?
Where is shame keeping this world small?
Why would you let shame deprive the world of your offering, gifts and resourcefulness?
Stand up, speak, share, whisper on some days, and then roar on some other - but let the throat chakra spin its magic, love.
I have removed paywall at the moment here, but writing this newsletter is still selling . It is a place I sell - inspite of the silent tugging of shame whispering don’t, you’re spoiling the reader’s experience, don’t make it salesy, shh, ahem, inconvenient, can you not?, I still do. I have categorically chosen this newsletter to be a channel of my writing, story and also my selling because this is where I connect you as me. Some days I am selling you a product and on some days when I talk about myself and my journey, I am selling you my perspective and my heart, even when you and I are unaware of it.
Because, deep down I know, if I don’t sell you my truth, someone will sell you their lies.
Alright, I have a sacred calling tugging me for a while. Today, I am excited to share that 🌞 I am open 🌞 to taking on a web design+/copy project for a creative who’s aspiring to build a home for their gifts. Needless to say this is branding in tune with your unique astrology and human design energetics. I am delighted to marry my two worlds of marketing and coaching in one thread and if you feel ooooh I wanna know more, come chat with me to share your vision and see if we can co-create magic together :)
For others,
my live 1:1 sessions and Human Design/Astrology readings can be booked here.
30mins HD + Astro for work, love, money, expression, healing, health recordings here.