Spirituality in Business: An Inner Innovation

Tamsin Smith
7 min readFeb 17, 2019

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In the past, if you mentioned the term ‘spirituality’ in a corporate or business meeting, many of your colleagues or clients might think you were whacky. The term ‘spirituality’ is a loaded one in a business setting, bringing forth images of self-indulgent people, crystals, or chanting around candles. But if you examine spirituality on a deeper level, it’s actually a broad concept with many perspectives.

On a personal note, it includes a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, generally involving a search for meaning in life. Spirituality is about taking an introspective look to try and see things from a different perspective. And I have to say that I’m not a religious person, and my views in this article are ultimately based on my personal and intuitive experiences from silence, group work or being in nature.

There was a lot of resistance on my part in writing this article because I didn’t want to be labelled a certain way for using the term ‘spirituality’. But after experiencing this past year, I truly believe there is an intersection in life where spirituality and business can meet. So I’ve been trying to learn how to talk about spirituality and business without sounding too´woo woo´.

Dying to be Reborn

My work in the Service Design industry has always been about improving the human experience of services, which I call human-centred design consulting. In my own consultancy at Harmonesse, I manage a collective of ten Service Design practitioners where we provide our clients in private, government and not-for-profits with the ‘Power of Caring’, putting people at the center of the experience.

After 15 years in the Service Design industry, I had gone from being a director in consultancies to starting my own business. But something didn’t feel right. It was as if the paradigm of service design I created had become stagnant. Even when providing solutions to clients, many of the organisations would change at an incremental pace, almost in fear of what the radical change may bring. It made me realize I was searching for something more in business, and in life. And it wasn’t until a special project dealing with death services landed in my lap did I realize what I was looking for. To me, the idea of death is a human being’s ‘ultimate service’, in regards to not just the impact a person leaves behind once they’re gone, but also a reflection on how to live our fullest in every moment. When the project finished, it sparked my year of what I call ‘inner innovation’, providing me with a kind of death and rebirth I needed.

“The endings of life give life’s meanings a chance to show…Instead, the world whispers: All we need of you is to be human, now. Our work is to sort out what being human should be in such a time.” — Stephen Jenkinson

As a solution for the stagnation, I hand over projects to my team in a flexible contracting model, leaving me free to focus on the management and leadership of the business and my lifestyle design. Today, exploring consciousness has become a huge passion of mine, and I am working on incorporating this new perspective into the business to see how it can be beneficial for my current and new clients. Ultimately, we are all responsible for designing our own life experiences, and I am constantly metamorphosing, the deeper I explore life and work.

Journeying to the Center of my Consciousness

I wish to share myself as a whole human being, as that’s what I’ve been exploring during my 37th year. The experimentation I’ve done with my mind, body, intuition, heart, spirit, introversion, proprioception alongside my day-to-day business has taught me so much. My spirituality has become an increasingly important calling, especially given the backdrop of our demanding attention economy, threats of singularity and our ecological crisis.

My definitions of ‘spirituality’ and ‘business’ both speak to the human experience on different levels. It feels completely natural to me to be interested in both yet I still feel self-conscious talking about my spiritual adventures to my business audience and even my family, getting labelled as ‘hippie-ish’. Previously, I only felt comfortable talking about both business and spirituality at an Integral Theory group in Vancouver and futurist groups.

In my twenties, one of my first experiences in spirituality occurred after a heartbreak, where I joined a mindfulness meditation course in London, UK. Later, I did a yoga teacher training, and Reiki training from the Zen Centre in Vancouver. My passion for ecological systems led me to study two Permaculture Design courses, one at the University of British Columbia, and the other at the Oregon Eclipse Festival. What I learned was profound. It reminded me that when solving a design problem to always look to nature first. These are incredible ancient and earth-based practices which offer so much in getting out of our busy minds and into a more quiet expansive space of connection.

“From my perspective, I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am, from which I have derived strength in moments of sadness or fear. That’s what I believe, and it is very, very strong in the forest.” — Jane Goodall

This last year my journey exploring spirituality has been inner and outer, but primarily inner. Ironically, the more I let go of my attachment to my day-to-day business (I’ve been living as a digital nomad in Mexico and Europe for the past year), the more it continued to succeed without me, thereby providing me with the freedom to dive deeper into the unknown. And the deeper I explored, the more the layers of pain and confusion were revealed, alongside increased love, connection and a profound sense of meaning. The more I opened my heart, the more love I found within myself and in fact, I found my partner during this process too.

Unifying Spirituality and Business

In business, we constantly question what our ‘why’ is, what the purpose of the service or product is, who we are serving and what the value exchange is. The same goes for spirituality. In exploring spirituality, it has made me a more compassionate leader. There are so many pieces and people to unify. And alongside the compassionate leadership, relationship dynamics and our ‘why’, having the ‘Power of Caring’ means the clients approaching Harmonesse are the ones we want, who are serving a society for the better by improving the service(s) they offer.

And this is why spirituality is important in the business world. If we are not constantly being curious about our situations, challenging ourselves, or following our intuition, there’s a big possibility we’ll get stuck. And by remaining stuck in our ways, by not letting go of things that no longer serve or help us, we will continue to be conditioned to only live within our limits, never reaching beyond to see how far our human consciousness really goes. If we are stuck in a broken system, we need to shift our perspective and change it, to create the impact we want to see. It’s healthy to go through change, and with it comes an exploration of our masks and shadows as part of the process towards a new sense of freedom.

“Each one of us is just a visitor to this planet, a guest, who will only stay for a limited time…and to use our short time here in living a meaningful life, enriched by our sense of connection with others and being of service to them. The ultimate source of happiness is not money and power, but warm-heartedness.” — Dalai Lama

So, what’s the next step with the rise in our collective consciousness, and what does this mean for system design? Today, we are not just facing a social and ecological crisis, but a spiritual crisis as well — the crisis of meaning. Right now in the capitalist west, meaning often comes from consumption and how you present yourself to the world. Why not change it to exploring an existence by living simply and in service to the betterment of yourself, humanity and the earth?

Spirituality is a universal human experience, one that touches us all. Ultimately, it is up to us, to design our own experience.

If it helps you, here are some of the people and experiences that have helped me evolve over the last year:

Overall exploration of consciousness:

  • Zac Feder — Zac helped me to understand the depths of our other systems, how we’re conditioned to be stuck in our minds. His expression of the heart and intuition system (aptly named the human operating manual), helps you identify the hidden, unconscious and often overlooked barriers standing in the way of your health, wellbeing and success.
  • Sacred Purpose Course — Jeff Brown

Meditation and energy based (Osho Meditation Centre):

  • Primal conditioning work — looking and meeting our childhood conditioning
  • Conscious touch — learning about our bodies through feel and intrigue, not just anatomy
  • Nature painting — expression of consciousness coming through you in colour

Yoga and ritual:

  • Temascal and yoga retreats at Haramara
  • Yoga teacher training — Karma Teachers
  • Consciousness 101 training — Turi Yoga
  • 13 Moons Group (a year long journey for women who want to deepen their connection to lunar & seasonal wisdom) — Natalie Rousseau

Body based:

Earth and Culture based:

I’d love to hear about your journey on connecting spirituality in your business, and how you’ve bridged the gap. What resources did you find helpful? Leave a comment below as I always enjoy reading and learning about other people’s experiences.

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Tamsin Smith

Ecological Systems & Service Designer. Hopes for a just regenerative future. Elevating consciousnesses, restoring trauma for harmony & wholeness. Non dualist :)