Divine Connection makes Your Business Sacred
Kristoffer Carter (’KC’) | Divine Connection | June 21st, 2025
Give yourself, and your business permission to glow.
If starting or growing your own Sacred Business inspires you, we need to talk about the “Sacred” part. I’m guessing if you’re reading this, spiritual matters don’t make you uncomfortable. You are my people. For me, sacred implies having a soul. There is of course, a tension between our timeless, spiritual core, and the daily demands of our business.
Can business be a spiritual pursuit? Can we build a business that brings us closer our own divinity?
There are endless ways to make money. But how many business missions feel sacred to you? Is there a mission that feels deep and meaningful, that only you and your team could deliver? When I work with start-up to midsized companies, we always start with mission. I don’t believe your mission are clever words on the wall. I’ve come to know that purpose, and your team’s culture to carry it out are spiritual in nature. “The spirit of a business” can be felt as its culture, and certainly in its mission. Spend your time coaching enough founders, you’ll sense something much deeper than the drive to sell stuff. They bring outsized soul to their work, and that is sacred.
The Spicy Truth
I didn’t sleep very well before my keynote at the Mindful Leader conference. It was 2022, and my book had just come out: Permission to Glow— A Spiritual Guide to Epic Leadership. Adding the word ‘spiritual’ to the subtitle felt like my flag in the ground. My clients are largely corporate leaders and teams. Would they think my take on conscious leadership was too New-Agey? Or, that I was going to draft them into some religious doctrine?
As my time to take the stage got closer, I’d feel my usual tension: “Do I speak my truth? Can they handle it?”
For every event I was asked to speak on my book, I’d have this separate talk with myself. I’d think about the pressure we feel to keep the soul out of corporate spaces. To divorce mindfulness, or meditation from its spiritual roots. Hearing too many speakers take the safe, boring route by making another “science-backed business case for meditation as stress-reduction.” Zzz zzz. Or even creepier: “meditation as a hack for trading Bitcoin or selling more stocks!” This always felt gross, seeing ancient practices appropriated, and then marketed as hacks to make more money.
Mindful Leader was the host for my talk. Their organizers have been vocal about something they call secular mindfulness. Secular mindfulness is “…a practice that focuses on cultivating attention and awareness, without relying on religious or spiritual beliefs.” That feels coldly distant from the Buddhist roots of mindfulness, or from Patanjali’s higher branches of yoga. As a yogi, I think the meaning of the word yoga gives us the answer. Yoga means yoke, or union. Yoke means to join or unite. To unite with what? Union with what, exactly? Less stress? More money? Yogis who care more about their sadhana (spiritual discipline) then they do about the clothes, mats, or lifestyle will tell you: yoga means union with God, full stop. Those of us with baggage around “the G word” might say “union with our divinity.”
As a business owner, I understand the allure of playing it safe to land corporate clients. As a practitioner of yoga-based meditation and teacher for the last 12 years, it feels irresponsible to stop short of the most powerful benefits of the practice. In 2013, after two years of deep home study and practice, I took vows as a Kriyaban yogi in Self-Realization Fellowship. This global organization was founded by Paramahansa Yogananda, author of the spiritual classic Autobiography of a Yogi.
I left my corporate career almost ten years ago. I’m blessed to have found meditation and Yogananda’s path a few years before that. The more I practice each, the more I feel like I’m just getting started. But rather than the overwhelm or insecurity of feeling like a noob, I’m more excited than ever to be a entrepreneur, and a yogi. Divine connection shows us over and over that life is a set of practices. I feel lucky to practice coaching, parenting, songwriting, and business building. And at the deepest core of it all, I love practicing yoga and meditation.
The Ghost in Your Machine
I was excited to find the room packed as I walked out to speak. I could feel the crowd were mostly people like me— soul warriors for meditation in modern business. On this day, instead of preaching to the choir, I started out spicy:
“Who here ever describes themselves, or your work as ‘Woo-Woo’? Hands went up. “If you do, you are part of the problem. Knock that crap off. Don’t minimize the impact of your work by implying you’re too fringe for corporate spaces. These are crazy times. There are executive leaders who need your medicine. When you imply it’s too weird for them, or the companies they lead, you forget they are spiritual beings. Every bit as spiritual as you. Possibly more.”
Crickets. I had their attention. They were self-reflecting, which is all I wanted. I took the rest of the hour to activate each of the 4 Permissions™ of Epic Leadership from my book. These have become the operating system for my life and my business, and as a coach of senior leaders.
On a side note, I’m typing this on a plane to facilitate a C-Level leadership team of 12, who run a billion-dollar business that was recently required by a $15 billion dollar holding company. There are new levels of volatility in their market. I received a bat signal from their CEO four days ago. I share this because if I didn’t guide my business, and my life by the 4 Permissions, I wouldn’t have the courage to take the gig, let alone show up and reconnect the team to its core. Giving ourselves the 4 Permissions connects us from the inside out and gives everyone around us access to divine power. My clients may purchase coaching, speaking, or facilitation. But what they get is yoga in its most potent, purest form. When it comes to connecting people to their power, I take my job extremely seriously. I will plug us back in like Doc Brown climbing the clock tower in a lightning storm. My clients don’t even need to believe in the power of their own soul, or God. They just feel the weather shift.
Your outer impact is directly tied to your personal connection— and dedication to practice.
The Permissions are four ascending gates of claiming our power. Divine power, which I believe includes entrepreneurship as one expression, also takes surrender. It’s a paradox, right? Years of hustle and grind culture, only to realize our biggest impact happens when we humbly surrender into working our asses off in ways we never thought possible. The Permissions were a direct download in my Kriya yoga sadhana, which Yogananda was sent to America in 1920 to spread in the West. The guru taught we are all waves on an ocean of Divinity, and that we can dissolve our smaller, finite selves into becoming that Ocean of Infinity. That Ocean of Light. This is yoga, and the 4 Permissions have proved themselves as direct path of reclaiming our power. Not only in my life, but in the lives of countless clients:
Permission to Chill: to be at peace with what shows up in the moment to test us. Absolute stillness, which gives us discernment.
Permission to Feel All the Feels: to be at peace with what wells up in our hearts to guide us. Intuition.
Permission to Glow in the Dark: to be at peace with what the world is asking of us— our Divine Purpose.
Permission to Glow in the Light: to be at peace with what our Creator expects of us. Collaboration over competition. Service to all.
Everything is practice.
Picture the solutions your business offers as a signal in the static. Of all the options your customers have, they need you. We start with clearing the static ourselves. As we do, our signal becomes louder. It arrives as a crystal-clear mission, purpose, and a passionate team who lives to serve. Creating a daily meditation habit (minimum 15 minutes a day, no excuses) is the best way to make your work, and your business more sacred. The more your work becomes sacred to you, the more it will become valuable it will become to your clients.
This essay was published as part of our monthly collection of articles on Divine Connection: The Sacred Thread That Binds. Read the Full Publication
Kristoffer Carter (’KC’) is a contributing writer for The Sacred Business Writer’s Collective focused on helping guide and mentor Fortune 500 C-Level leaders with his 4 Permissions Framework. You can follow him on Substack here.
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