WHEN CHASING YOUR DREAM PUSHES YOU TO YOUR LIMIT

Like so many businesses, it was a real struggle to figure out what to do during the pandemic. This is especially challenging when your business revolves around people traveling and being together in groups. When the lockdowns started I was in Bali and lost money on a retreat that took me a year to plan.

I was also furloughed from my other source of income, a yoga teaching and personal training gig. Month by month I watched my savings whittle down to nothing. Then came the decision to cash out my entire life savings to keep my dream alive, or head back to a 9-5 job. 

Leading up to the pandemic SoCal Wellness Retreats was really thriving. A company that started with me bringing small groups out to a leaky, mice-filled ranch in the middle of nowhere, had come a long way in the few short years I lived in San Diego. We went from four retreats in 2017 to six in 2018 and by 2019 we were running one a month. We had moved to a 9,000 square foot estate in the hills of Ramona and we were getting attention around town and around the country as people began flying across the US to come to San Diego for a retreat.

I decided to cash out my life savings and by 2022 as things started to open back up I had taught enough backyard yoga and delivered enough Uber Eats meals to keep the lights on and get retreats cranked back up. I received a call from a woman who was managing an even bigger and more beautiful property than the one we were at and it was just up the road from the 9,000 square foot estate. 

It checked all of the boxes of what I dreamed for our guests to experience on a retreat. It was also about triple the price of our current home base but I decided to take a risk and put deposits out for six dates. I had decided already to cash out my savings to keep SoCal Wellness Retreats going once, so it felt like now I was doubling down on that bet as things had picked back up.

The first two retreats went well, although our numbers began to fall with the increased price tag. At the same time, my assistant at the time told me about her friends who were running a digital marketing company and building websites for people. I loved and trusted my assistant, so I took a meeting with them. Our zoom call felt like a match made in heaven, they were believers in what I was doing and convinced that SoCal Wellness Retreats could charge more for retreats and that they were the ones who could take us there and drive sales.

I got excited and subsequently decided to pay them a retainer and fly them out to Southern California to capture our next event at this beautiful new property. I ended up running this retreat at a net loss for the first time in my life. I was looking at it as a cost of doing business to take my company and elevate the guest experience where I wanted it to go. I put my faith in this property and this company that we were headed in the right direction. 

The team came out, shot photos and videos, recorded my meditations, and by the end of a powerful retreat we were all pretty convinced that we were onto something big. For the first time I felt like I really had help. When I began SoCal Wellness Retreats I did almost everything. I made beds, cleaned up mouse poop, cooked, set up tents, carried loads of garbage in my car, it was truly a labor of love. 

But three months after the retreat had ended, and after several deadlines had passed, I had no new website and the deposits that I had paid for this new property were now effectively going to waste as spots weren’t selling. 

The owner of the digital marketing company told me he had prioritized other projects that were making him more money and the manager of the new property was unwilling to move the dates on any of my reservations despite the fact that I had spent around $50,000 on renting the property to that point. I subsequently found out that the person who was in charge of these bookings was embezzling money from the owners of the property. She effectively took my money and ran. A couple months later I saw her on facebook putting up pictures of her brand new BMW SUV. That one took me a few meditations to work through. 

In a span of three months, everything I had worked for in the four years prior building SoCal Wellness Retreats was gone. My savings was also gone. I was literally out of money. 

I learned some really big lessons about agreements, contracts, boundaries and scaling a business during that year. I truly believe we have the power to reframe all of our “mistakes” into opportunities to learn. Isn't this what the human experience is all about after all, learning and growth? 

Fast forward to present day and after lots of hard work, SoCal Wellness Retreats is once again thriving. We've hit eight straight months of running sold out retreats and some of those months have even run multiple retreats because of the waitlist for our first retreat in that month. It feels again like time to try to take us to the next level. 

While I learned from past experiences and remember them well, I'm really challenging myself to not allow those experiences to dictate my current actions. The entrepreneurship journey, much like the spiritual journey, is filled with highs and lows, ups and downs. We can’t tether ourselves to either. I truly believe that the only mistake we will ever make is a failure to not try. Failure to let fear win over love. 

There was a saying in the Roman Empire, Memento Mori. Which means, remember that you will die. It was a reminder to take advantage and live each day fully. I truly love what I’ve dealt with in my time building SoCal Wellness Retreats and I wouldn't trade one chapter of it for anything. I believe in what it is and I believe in what it could be. I'm grateful to have found something worth fighting for and something that challenges me in so many ways. 

I've also recognized that both on my spiritual and entrepreneurship journey, that we really only truly receive what we feel worthy to receive. When I took the plunge with that first failed property and partnership, I was thinking about what other people were telling me / promising me and not tuning into how I felt about it.

Everything rides energy, everything responds to energy, frequency, and vibration. To experience love, you must become love. To experience abundance, you must become abundance. To experience joy, you must become joy. The universe doesn’t give us what we want, it gives us who we are. I simply wasn’t that guy (yet)

I teach this to people all the time on retreats, and the feedback is that it's changing people's lives. I really love that. Sometimes we just need to follow our own advice. 

There's so much to be said about things that make us nervous. We can all recount a time where we were scared or intimidated to take that next step or try that new thing but so often some of our greatest triumphs, our greatest breakthroughs, those moments that we know that are special, so many of those moments come from great challenge, great resiliency, and the power of the will. 

What an amazing thing it is, what a testament to the human spirit that things can make us so nervous, so frayed, so scared and then we can leap anyway. I always share with our retreat guests that I have no idea who's going to show up or what the dynamic of the group is going to be or if everything is going to "work” the way that I've built it to be in my mind. But what I do share with people is that by having a clear intention, and marrying that with knowing how we want to feel and then checking in with how we feel along the way, life more feels like getting out of the way and allowing things to unfold the way that they need to than pushing towards an outcome. 

It’s never let me down that at every retreat, the perfect people ALWAYS seem to show up right on time. People ask me if I plan it that way to which I say, “sort of.”

So often we want to know how the story ends, will everything work out? Will everything be OK? But all creation comes from the unknown. The unknown is filled with limitless potential and opportunity. Joe Dispenza often says that the unknown has never let him down, but the known lets him down all the time. I always loved that. It reminds me to win each day, and even each little moment. 

When those pockets of doubt arise (which they will because our beautiful brain is just trying to keep us safe from danger) I just like to see how quickly I can bring myself back to the emotions of joy, abundance, and love. How often can I stay in the feeling of that which I want to attract?

The level of trust it takes to follow your dreams can sometimes feel unbearable. This is a true superpower. 

It's so easy to excuse yourself from your best life and what's possible for you. It’s easy to compare ourselves to others, listen to other people's opinions of us and doubt what we know with our hearts to be true. This is your invitation to trust in the unknown and do the work through things like yoga, meditation and breathwork to get there. Do something that scares you a little bit. You might as well make your mistakes doing something that you love and learn something along the way.