MY SHOCKING JOURNEY TO ALIGNMENT

BY RAQUEL REYNA

It’s Friday night at 6:18 pm and I’m on the 405 freeway. If you know LA, then you know what kind of hell realm I’m in.

It’s not pretty and I had already been at my juice bar since before sunrise this morning, so I’m freakin’ frazzled, with every single nerve sizzled.

My stress level is at 11 on the 1-10 stressometer, yet, the texts from my employees do not stop coming. One after another, the 17 twenty-something employees, who are running my store, are texting me in various states of emergency. Here are just some examples of the types of texts I am receiving from them (not all of them during this particular car ride obviously, but this is what I’m accustomed to hearing):

“Someone mugged me with the money bags.”

“Another employee kicked me when I was leaning over and then started poisoning my water” (this was a real text).

“The sewage pipes broke and there is literally shit in the lobby.”

“The blenders have broken, and the juicers have crashed…not just one but the whole store is now closed.”

“The manager stole over $4K”

There’s a sort of cumulative trauma effect, every time I receive a text from them. I’ve invested my entire life savings into this juice bar project and it’s going down in flames. I’m scrambling to keep up with the bills, the invoices, the payroll, the vendors. It is so excruciating, and on top of it, I have absolutely no energy to fix it, or go back to the store for even one more day.

I’m so F’ing over it!

And right now, Friday night, in bumper to bumper traffic, it is simply too much for me to bear and I’m breaking down and crying right there in my car, parked on the 405, with tons of onlookers sighing, perhaps praying for me, or just plain gawking at the frazzled girl, ugly crying behind the wheel.

I am at a complete and utter loss.

For goodness sake, after all my years of entrepreneurship, of study, of spiritual growth and personal development, of living with enlightened teachers, of having read an ever-growing fat stack of self-help books, of my having run several businesses,, of having invested tens of thousands in business/life coaches, and invested tens of thousands in business/life coaches, or Master’s Degree in Spiritual Psychology, …how did I get myself into this mess?

How the heck did I end up in this place?

This is definitely not right for me and I can feel that with every molecule in my body. I’m not only scared that I am close to losing everything financially, I fear losing my sanity along with it. This is not at all how I pictured my life going at this stage… cracking along every seam, watching it all about to crumble…, my condo, my money gone, my career up in smoke… it’s over… all spinning down down down, along with all the pulp into my raw juice bar sink hole.

Now this is the point, in most people’s books, where they share an epiphany or talk about a life-changing phone call, or the appearance from an angel. Nothing so glamorous here, I’m afraid, but something did happen right there on the 405, post-breakdown. Right there through my wails, the “I hate my life”, the F everything screams…something very subtle happened…I had, what would end up being, a life-changing thought. The thought was something my new BF, Davidian (and still my BF) had told me about myself…that I was a Projector in a system called Human Design and I wasn’t designed to work these type of 12-hour days or like that day, which was closer to 15 by the time I got home. I wasn’t designed to work in a traditional sense and that thought led me to think “OK, If I am not designed to work like that, what do I do?”

In Human Design, they say that if you follow your Strategy and Authority, you will be naturally led to right action, right livelihood, and have enough money to live your purpose… and for a Projector, that means being led to a life full of success. We’re all here to actualize our piece in this universal puzzle. We all have a unique part to play and we are here to actually manifest our uniquely designed purpose.

I had this thought running over and over in my mind, so it had to mean something, because whatever I was experiencing, and after doing hours and hours of meditation, being trained by a shamanic guide, and everything else I had mentioned earlier, nothing seemed to be directing my life to any of the ease, grace or abundance, that was virtually promised at the other end of it, so initially I felt truly lost and on the wrong path.

All I had in that moment was stress, pain, fear, and the total bitterness about my juice bar investment. It was possible I could lose my home, all of my life savings, pretty much everything, so I was terrified, but even more so because I knew deep in my heart that I absolutely could not go to my juice bar ever again, even if I friggin’ lose my ass. I absolutely had to surrender this one, step away, and discover a NEW way to live…because this one most definitely was not working.

I was willing to do whatever it took, as long as it wasn’t this.

So, that day, I committed to trying the experiment; the Human Design experiment of living my Strategy and Authority. I was going to commit to the full seven years. Now that’s a big commitment. They say it takes a full 7 years to decondition the mind from living as the Not-self and fully embrace living as my true self.

Now mind you, I am no novice to self-help, living consciously on purpose, spiritual development, meditation, shamanism, Release Technique, Spiral Dynamics, working with crystals, various healing modalities, etc.—if it’s a little woo, you name it, I’ve tried it, but I was still unable up until that point, of living a spiritual, conscious, profitable, fulfilling life (you know at least one that pays the bills doing something I enjoy). So really I was willing to try anything to get me into a new reality.

Deciding to take the Human Design experiment and merge it with all my spiritual teachings, felt like I was putting the final piece together in a long complicated puzzle.

So, the following day, after my “traffic therapy”, I had my manager run the store and I never went back. I managed to sell the store fairly soon after and took a year off, dedicated to studying Human Design…and well yes, everything changed rather quickly. A new business took shape, one that felt completely aligned with who I am. A business connecting with and serving like-minded entrepreneurs, helping them grow their businesses. It was a business that I could do from anywhere, and one that I could do at home with my partner, with my dog on my lap. It was a divine, heavenly joyous life and the juice bar hell realm became a distant memory. AHHH.

Now, in full disclosure, I am painting this transition with some broad simple strokes. There were indeed a few more dark night of the soul cries, emotional breakdowns, spread out of the bathroom tile, during this time…but I was lead in the right direction with each passing day.
Learning about my design was a long and deep AHA moment that really explained all the friggin life experiences I pretty much ever had. Yeah, it was eerie…it was tears, crying, feeling seen and understood for the very first time. Now, all my clients agree that learning this stuff creates the deepest level insights on who they are that they have ever had.

So, now I help other people who, like myself, thought they knew it all, tried it all, and yet something in their life was still just not quite right.
Our coaching is a smorgasbord, from a 21st century real-life perspective of how to create your life of purpose on purpose…having the charmed life of your dreams, making money, but without sacrificing who you are to do so. Being creative, but not living as a starving artist. Allowing your unique genius to shine and create a joyful purpose-driven existence.

I believe this work will heal the world. OK, that may be a little overly ambitious (ha)! I mean to say…well, think about it. If you loved what you did, how would you treat others, and then how may they in turn pay it forward? Now this is a completely gross, over-simplification, however, I’ve been exploring Spiral Dynamics and the journey to awakening and I will say, that this particular journey of living a purpose driven life in your business/career, not only steps you up a rung, it catapults you into a personal awakening like no other path, meditation or workshop has done, certainly for me. It’s not about intellectualizing, it’s all about experiencing.

I also believe, and it’s shown in the study of Human Design (as well as in many other spiritual teachings), that over the next ten years, the need for this self-knowledge is only going to increase, because the way people will be operating is going to change dramatically and people will need to know themselves in a new, more intimate way.

How to work and how to live as one’s self, will prove to be essential to leading a peaceful existence, because that promised easy living retirement plan, that is supposedly going to take care of you for the remainder of your days, that you spent 65 years of 9-5 hours per day building is fading away fast. The cookie cutter one-size fits all approach to life is literally crumbling (pun intended – LOL). The institutions that supposedly had our backs have lost our trust. There are fewer and fewer safety nets for retirees and all of them are either on shaky ground or risky business like gambling your future in the stock market. We’re becoming less secure financially as we enter old age and as that American Dream fades further, and this reality intensifies, people will only become more and more stressed and anxious. We are finding, sometimes the hard way, that there is really ONLY one thing that we can rely on…OURSELVES! The problem with that, is that most people do not truly know themselves – only their overly TV/parent/societal-conditioned, homogenized, utterly burnt out, Not-Self.

You are not who you THINK you are and that illusion keeps us living unfulfilling lives.

Finding your TRUE self is a journey you have to be willing to take, and that requires seeing your life with fresh eyes, which is not often an attractive option for those feeling stuck and powerless, but what you’ll find at the end of that journey is FREEDOM… freedom from the rat race, freedom from the pain of the mind, freedom from fear, freedom from overworking only to find empty rewards…freedom to be yourself.

The first thing to acknowledge is that if something isn’t going well in your life, there’s a reason why. If you’ve been having difficulty finding a purpose-driven career, launching your unique expression online, then you really need to look at yourself first, because it’s not just written in the stars. It’s also written in your DNA.
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More on that soon, but first, we’d love to know what burning questions you have about Human Design and creating a business that reflects YOUR true nature?