In every moment of downtime, our brain starts its own quiet deliberation, day dreaming thousands of times about our purpose of being. It’s the great human question:

Who am I and how do I relate me to the universe? What will be my legacy?

Each night, your subconscious translates daily experiences, embedded memories and ethereal aspirations into a visual code that only you can decipher. You are your own healer. Each morning, you awake with a metaphysical translation of your purpose. If you choose to ignore your ambitions, you will be met with dissonance echoed in every cell of your body.

When we bare our souls to a stranger, communicating from the space between dreams and realities, we begin to tell our story through Spiritual Marketing. The return on investment is immeasurable. Alignment between your intentions and your message will result in daily renewal. Those that love what they do, never have to work a day in their life. Those that are what they do can only smile when someone asks, “What is it that you do?”

We’re getting deeper and deeper in our interpersonal communications. Our networks have not only expanded, but they’ve been reinforced by our ability to keep tabs on thousands of people from our past. We’re able to meet people online and engage in powerful, concentrated discussion before ever knowing their scent, height or even their face.

We’re All Healers

We must first recognize the healing power in our own nature and profession. At the very core of each of our nature, we know this to be true. The modern mythos is that of a new self-centered generation, Millennials, who pine for careers infused with passion and meaning. As if we had a monopoly in finding meaning in our careers! As if there is something to shun in laying to waste generations of Keeping Up With the Joneses!

Our current structure has devised a system to limit the supply of healers and drive up the demand for healing. While few would argue that a brain surgeon or psychiatrist should lack credentialing, this dynamic has created a power vacuum. We have become passive consumers of the maintenance of our mind and body, turning to a small pool of individuals and corporations to heal a wide array of problems with an endless cycle of appointments, pills and check-ups.

You might easily acknowledge a teacher, a nanny or a preacher as a healer. But can you also see the ways in which a financial planner or insurance salesman is a healer? The dire effects caused by financial insecurity and the fastidiousness of these experts provide a real, tangible sense of psychic relief. The day-to-days of estate planning, family law or information technology all contain within them necessary finesse to improve human systems and shed light in transitioning clients from a world of ignorance to light.

More so, it’s not just in our careers that we devise our identity. Questions about religious identity, daily practices and hobbies, and especially family life all lead to conversations that activate the understanding of how we bring healing to our community. A handyman repairs an elder neighbors plumbing. A couple adopts the child of a deceased sibling. Incredible acts of graciousness happen daily, if we can only learn to recognize them, to amplify the story.

Perhaps most important is the secret methodology of self-healing. How do we treat and broadcast our own daily ailments? Do we have in ourselves the innate knowledge to persevere through our own demons? The individual battle against depression or the quest to leave a meaningful legacy is essential to understanding Spiritual Marketing.

Has someone ever told you, years after the fact, that one small thing that you had said, insignificant as it may have felt at the time to you, made such a lasting impact that their life was changed forever? Spiritual Marketing is the conversations we have with other human beings that access the deep individual expressions of purpose and desires. When we transcend, viewing strangers as a potential opportunity for self-improvement, we begin to serve the purpose of our lives and our business interests.

Connecting for Positivity

We have reached a point in the design of human experience that each and every element of our life can be A/B tested. We create in our heads a sort-of algorithmic “what’s the deal” with each and every person and object we encounter. A-Trak, a DJ from Montréal, wrote that the disappearance of MySpace has left a void in our ability to understand a musician’s entire image, the true purpose behind their art.

“The same way that producers were suddenly able to make their own music at home on affordable software, artists were more than ever in control of their image and branding. Before branding was even a buzzword, we were all recruiting our friends to help us learn basic HTML to design our MySpace pages.”

I was one of those recruited friends that learned HTML and CSS to help friends design MySpace, LiveJournal and other web layouts. From an early age, I’ve known that I derived a deep joy from helping artists present their artistic identity in an easily digestible package.

The visually sterilized environments of Twitter and Facebook have provided relief from animated backgrounds and other distracting design faux-pas, while complicating the process by which we can quickly demonstrate our personal brand.

No more accurately has the line from High Fidelity been truer than on Facebook: “It’s not what you’re like, it’s what you like.”

With employers, the government, potential lovers, former lovers, possible business partners, and the entire universe peaking at you, it has never been more necessary to carefully control your digital reputation. The best way to advertise the best of you is to communicate from the Spirit, portraying groundedness and positivity in your digital and in-person interactions.

Spiritual Efficiency

Spiritual Efficiency is the absence of friction and a boost in external productivity you feel when surrounded by individuals that amplify your creative energy. Spiritual inefficiency is a the tangible loss in your sense of self when surrounded by “energetic vampires.”

We often try to fix other people’s problems by talking, reflecting on our own experiences to derive some sort of wisdom to offer. In a spiritual network, we create a space in which a person can arrive at his or her own solutions. Truly, the only useful advice is that which we arrive at ourselves, it is the only kind that will stick.

We can blast off Facebook posts full of positivity directed to no one and everyone at once in order to let go of our ego-driven need to have an impact on a specific problem. We provide our services fee-free, by donation only, on a sliding scale or through crowdfunded mechanisms to achieve a level of communal permeability. We enable our peers to provide feedback without letting it derail our intentions.

Have you ever observed a massage therapist giving a massage? There is a trance-like state you can perceive in the glaze over their eyes. The therapist might as well see right through you. It is the same look an accountant might have when he or she is deeply concentrating on some figures: the psychic connection between our work and our intention. This state of being is the pinnacle of efficiency: your healing power is needed, and in providing that service, you are reaffirming the subconscious desires with which you awoke. You are no longer a provider, but a conduit for yourself and your community.

Spiritual Marketer, you must be ready and willing to hear the accomplishments and dreams of another. Small talk will no longer be necessary, as you feed on excitement instead of jealousy, provide encouragement instead of warnings, to give the green light instead of red flags.

Red Oxx Gator and a sandwich in the Kootenays, overlooking Okanagan Lake in Summerland, BC

Well, team… 2013 has been a truly incredible year. 12 months ago, you could find me living in Echo Park, working 3 jobs with some 70 hour weeks, and wondering what might be. Inspired by Vandwellers, minimalist travelers —including Tynan and his 2012 gear post— and my own sense of adventure and festival-making, I began to imagine a major life shift. I geared up my Hyundai Santa Fe (now “Panda Fe”) with a futon and a big Thule rack on top. Now I’ve got some 18,000 more miles on my odometer and a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Mexico and Cuba under my belt. I’ve landed in beautiful, almost-quaint Asheville, North Carolina where I’m shacked up for a couple of months of hibernation, skills growth and business development.

It’s not easy running a one-man roadtrip + consulting business on the road. I’ve spent countless hours researching gear, shopping for deals, entering contests and preparing for my many trips and festivals. I’ve learned a lot on the road and I wanted to provide a definitive “Best Of” gear post for the holiday season. Secretly, my hope is that I might inspire you to take a little life detour and experience some sort of adventure in 2014. You don’t have to do it the way I do it, but these gear recommendations really are some of the most flexible, resilient and smart products on the market.

I can’t sit here in New Orleans and not be nostalgic for my time spent in college.

I graduated with my degree from UCLA World Arts and Cultures, after taking on a course load that was … let’s call it non-traditional. Non-traditional in the sense that it came from the tradition of everything is a learning opportunity. There were no lines-to-not-cross, and all modalities of learning were fair game: from the Theatre of the Oppressed to Ballet Folklorico, from Haitian Vodou to Koranic calligraphy.

“So… what are you going to do with that???”

That’s the refrain we often hear when pursuing an education off the beaten path. It seems like an innocuous question, one we often wonder to ourselves. But it plagues the student with the perceived need for an answer to life’s greatest mystery. We learn because we love to learn, for the act of learning, and not to force our will upon the lesson. We never know where or how our education will take us, and the things we learned and forgot years ago live within our DNA beyond the utilitarianism of a skill set.

That’s what New Orleans is teaching me. As a Freshman, I took an Intro to Folklore class and was “forced” to watch All on a Mardi Gras Day, a film about the Black Indians of Louisiana. Didn’t seem relevant to much, but watching movies in class is never a bad thing. Later, I had a chance to take a class with Donald Cosentino, whose expertise is on Haitian Vodou, Santeria and Candomblé (check out this syllabus!). Needless to say, it was an incredible class, filled with spirits and santos, a window into a world that was far away and yet living in the botanicas on our neighboring streets.

Yesterday, I went into a Voodoo shop and finally had a chance to visit some of these old friends that I had learned about years ago. I see and respect the power that these spirits have in many people’s lives. They are a representation of Trickster or Love or Anger. It is very powerful medicine and shares commonality with a number of ancient and new age modalities of connection. Walk into a voodoo botanica and you will find nag champa, intention candles, crystals, beads, tinctures and all the other usual fixtures. But you will also find the embodiment of the spirits of the Lwa, whose unique characteristics allow a Mambo to communicate with the spiritual world with great precision.

Today, I’m sitting at a Voodoo-y coffee shop with a porch view of the fabulous above-the-ground tombs that New Orleans is so famous for. I’m going back through my coursework and I’m just amazed at the stuff I was learning. I had forgotten the impact of these conversations. They were so academic at the time. Cosentino reciting the names and characteristics of Gede or Damballah, my creation of a digital alter for the latter spirit as a final project. Just going about my academic career in the path of the dark and light as a naive little college kid.

As Halloween approaches, one shop will have Mama Lola herself speak. I could actually go see, in person, a woman I had read about years ago as required reading, who has come up twice with my brother-in-law as an example of a spiritual networker.

It’s incredible the synchronicities that are happening around our self-education.

You have an experience for no particular reason, only to find years later that there was a purpose. Do you believe in coincidence? You can choose to believe that your existence is completely random and a simple aberration in statistical probability. Or you could accept the challenge to direct your own film, cast a wide variety of characters, and let the screenplay write itself through your interactions. You might be surprised by who comes to visit you. Set up the joke but don’t write the punchline.