Ideal Spiritual Business Practice

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In this post, I’d like to share my current idea of how spiritual services are best offered. I know some of you are in the same industry and yet others of you are interested in obtaining such services. So your feedback is appreciated.

Here are three points I consider to be critical:

1. The fee and the scope of the service is clearly posted and available to all upfront.
2. The provider promotes the clients to own their power and responsibility of their lives rather than promoting fear and manipulating them to purchase more services.
3. The service is offered with good business sense to keep it sustainable.

Let’s examine each point into details…

The issue of money

Being clear and upfront about the money issue is basic to any businesses. Who wants to be surprised by a bill that lists low entry fee with dozens of additional hidden charges?

But I’m afraid this is the case with many psychic services. Here is a story.

The other day, I decided to have my palms read. I have the basic understanding of palm reading (quite popular in Asia) but wanted to see what an American palmist had to say. There aren’t many palmists around to begin with, but I found one in Portland area.

Her fee was $20 and she said it would take about 30 minutes. She started to explain by pointing out some of the lines.

Palmist (P): It’s good overall. But in love life, you are still dragging your past pains. Have you been married or in a long-term relationship before?

Me: Yes. (It would be rather unusual if I never had a relationship at this age — of 49. And because I am not wearing a ring, it’s obvious I am not married.)

P: I see there is a man who likes you but you are putting up a wall around yourself. Would you be interested in learning how to remove it?

Me: No. I’m happy to be single right now.

P: But there is a man . . . (realizes she failed to push my button and moves on) Are you worried about your work? You work long hours, I guess?

Me: Not really. And I love what I do. I work for myself.

P: . . Oh, here is the thing. Someone is cursing you. Someone is burning candles against you. You need to clear this.

Me: . .

P: The clearing is $400. Would you like to do it today?

Me: No.

P: Why not? Do you realize someone is . . .

Me: Who is that?

P: I don’t know.

She looked quite tired at this point. No wonder. How can she make a living by charging $20 for 30 minutes? And obviously, her day is not filled — no one was waiting after me. So her real income source is the additional clearing work.

I looked around and there was no posting about the fees, regular or additional work. Later, I checked her website, too. Again, no mention of fee structure.

Should spiritual service be free?

I’ve often heard people say, “Spiritual services should be offered free. Or at least really cheap.”

If the service is free or really cheap, the service provider needs another reliable source of income obviously. There are several ways to do this:

1. By charging high hidden fees, like the palmist above
2. By having passive income source, like reliable rental properties or a supportive spouse
3. By having another job (so-called “day job”)

Option 1 is out of the question for the reason we will discuss further. Option 2 is nice if you can secure it.

Option 3 is tricky. If I had a full-time job, I will have much less time to do my spiritual work. This doesn’t just mean I can fill fewer number of orders. It will affect the quality of my work.

Any reasonably-good professional knows there is a significant difference between a professional work and even a high-quality amateur work. Quantity yields quality.

By doing hundreds of readings a year, I accumulate knowledge, insights, and experiences that I can utilize for the new clients. This is also how I got to write the Starseeds series.

If I had a full-time job and had to do the Akashic Record Reading on the side, this flow is interrupted. The difference may be subtle and I hope I can maintain the level of quality I like, but it will be difficult. So I choose to charge a fair fee for my service. Of course, there is no hidden fees, so the upfront fee is reasonable high. (Just to let you know — I occasionally introduce my clients to other services I offer, but I also explain the first reading is complete by itself. Often, I even talk them out from getting additional readings too soon.)

For those of you considering to have spiritual services, I suggest to be very cautious with free or cheap services. They may cost you a lot. (The aforementioned palmist is likely to introduce yet another of her hidden service after getting $400 from you.)

The objective is self-empowerment

Another issue I had with this palmist is that she was promoting fear and trying to get me reliant on her. That is darkwork.

A good spiritual service provider helps you to empower yourself. In other words, they graduate their clients. They offer different perspective to look at your problems, they suggest new ways to handle them, but they make it clear that it’s YOU who deals with your problem.

So, the clients are expected to do their own footwork. You can’t just expect your problem to evaporate by having a spiritual service. Some people are more than happy to do this, but I also find there are some people who really don’t want to change anything about themselves — so they actually prefer manipulative service providers.

Is the spiritual business there for the long haul?

The third point is something you may not have considered much if you are a consumer. Perhaps you just want one-time service and you don’t care if the provider is there next year. That is fine.

But if you think carefully, you can see the benefits of any business that is structured to be stable on a long term basis. Most importantly, if the service provider doesn’t have to worry excessively about the sustaining nature of her business, she can focus more on what she does.

Unique attributes of spiritual work

And here is a unique aspect of spiritual services. I know there are various types of spiritual services out there, so this may not be true to all, but I guess it’s true to many of them.

And that is, you really cannot work 8 hours a day, not to mention more than 8 hours a day, doing spiritual work. That is suicidal and you will burn out.

When I was a corporate employee, I had no problem working 8 hours a day, and I know many people put in even more hours. Fine.

But I cannot be doing Akashic Record Reading from 8 am to 5 pm. I’ll go crazy and my energy will be so exhausted that I might die soon. Like Edgar Cayce did when he did 8 readings a day. Until the media made a big fuss, he was doing 2 readings a day for many years, which was already quite a workload. He died two years after his media appearance.

I usually do 1 to 2 readings a day. And I use the rest of my day meditating, grounding my energy, reading books related to my work, and writing. I think this is a good work schedule that support my health and the quality of my work.

If you are a spiritual service provider, take good care of yourself. It’s the foundation of our work. (Here is a good article by Steve Pavlina on this.)

Many spiritual service providers are exhausted and sick. We have fallen to the manipulative voice such as “Spiritual workers should sacrifice themselves.” I know quite a few have quit offering their service. This is no good for the potential clients, either.

The future of spiritual service

The spiritual service industry is largely unregulated. So there are under-qualified practitioners. To make things even more complicated, the quality of a spiritual service provider cannot be measured by certification or even by the length of their experience. There are also service providers whose business practices are fraudulent, like that palmist.

This has led the general public to mistrust this industry. I think it’s such a shame because spiritual development is the ultimate personal development. Spiritual work also holds the clue to some missing links in healing and well-being.

I ask the wise readers to be the change of these problems. Here are my suggested action plans:

If you offer spiritual service, such as psychic readings or spiritual healing:

• Be clear about your fee structure.
• Charge a good amount so that you don’t need to rely on hidden fees nor you need to exhaust yourself unreasonably.
• Help the clients to be empowered — it’s okay, you don’t need THAT client to see you regularly because there are many people out there who need your service.
• Be clear about your specialty. Don’t try to be everything. As the spiritual service becomes more popular, people will learn there are specialists in this industry.
• Have the time and energy for yourself. Be the role model of self love by taking care of yourself first.
• Learn business savvy or have a great business coach / adviser to help you be in the business in a sustainable manner.

If you are seeking spiritual service:

• Do some homework and check the reputation, testimonials, and the business practice of the service provider you are considering to hire.
• Don’t be cheap.
• Be willing to own your own power and responsibility. When you go to a doctor, you want to be an informed patient and you do yourself a service if you are willing to improve your lifestyle. Same thing with spiritual service.
• Support the spiritual workers who offer good service in a good business manner by spreading the words about them. Words of mouth is strong.

Did I miss anything? I hope I covered the basics although some points, such as the fee structure issue, is an ongoing concern. (For example, some people asked if I can offer sliding scale fee. I guess I can, but that means I need to review their income tax forms and evaluate it, which is a lot of administrative work for me, which may mean I have to increase the overall fee to compensate. Plus my clients are all over the world and I am not sure how to fairly evaluate the income values in various countries. So, right now, I am not interested in doing this.)

Let’s discuss this in the comment to make it even better!

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