Reimagining Culture From The Inside Out - feel.focus.flow.

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in wellness but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Lori Glazebrook, Founder of feel.focus.flow., located in Volcano, HI, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

feel.focus.flow. offers education and practices for individuals and groups to cultivate awareness, intention, and discernment while strengthening boundaries and developing a deep sense of place and belonging. This is done through somatic work, mindfulness, trauma resolution, and deconstruction of dominant cultural norms.

feel.focus.flow. is for the rebels, leaders, changemakers, and those who want to become more HUMAN. This framework is for those who see the need for cultural, structural, and ideological change in today's world and want to do something about it.

feel.focus.flow. helps you understand your own nervous system and its nuances so you can show up fully in your family, your community, and your relationships to embrace life with a sense of wholeness and belonging. This is culture-shifting work! We do things a little differently here. feel.focus.flow. is meant to be threaded into our everyday, mundane lives.

Tell us about yourself

Website introductions are hard, I resist putting labels on myself, and I rarely fit into a box. My partner and I joke that I need to be experienced rather than described. I'm in my late 40's; my pronouns are she/they; I have three adult children and a committed relationship with my Jimmy and the land we tend to on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Culturally I grew up in the United States and come from a mixed lineage that reflects thousands of years of diaspora and disconnect. Spiritually I have found my roots in land-based, matrilineal, animist practices. I've always been the proverbial rebel when it comes to social and cultural norms. I have seen the negative effects of dominant culture since I was a child, and as an adult, I've worked to disrupt where I can, simply by being myself.

I taught elementary school and a few semesters of university geography classes before I realized the change I wanted to make couldn't be made within the structures of public education. As Audre Lorde wrote, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." I realized if I wanted to make the impact I felt called to make, I had to find another way. As a long-time yoga and meditation practitioner who has also been on a complex trauma-healing journey, I began to teach what I had embodied.

I've been teaching and facilitating individual and group classes, workshops, and training since 2012. I use my education and additional training in yoga, meditation, somatic experiencing, and internal family systems to help people not only know themselves but also live wholly as they are. I help people move through life with more courage, intention, and self-trust and less perfectionism, fear, and procrastination. When individuals thrive, their families and communities thrive. When families and communities thrive, culture shifts, this is why I do what I do.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

The work I share with people shifts the way they live their lives, and as a result, culture can begin to shift. feel.focus.flow. creates pebble-in-the-pond moments that allow the effect to ripple out from individuals into the world at large. Financially, all proceeds beyond operating costs are redistributed into the community to help create more pebbles in the pond ripples. In 2020 we helped support the building of a birth center in an area that did not have one, and since 2021 all money taken in has been received as crowdfunding for Lawa Pono Forest Farm on the Big Island of Hawai'i. By purchasing feel.focus.flow. sessions and circles, you are contributing to cooperative, community farming, food sovereignty, and land-based learning.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

Navigating the current system while simultaneously building something new. Educating people on how to use a sliding scale or gift economy form of payment in a world accustomed to capitalism is a challenge, as is finding ways to market in a world where we are constantly flooded with quick fixes and things to buy.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

1. Be patient- it takes time, some failure, and curiosity to build anything new.
2. Have fun- You're likely starting a business centered around something you really enjoy, so you should have fun with it! You're doing it!
3. Honor your values and integrity- it may feel tempting to get swept up in ways of doing business that doesn't feel good to you because that's the status quo. Resist that temptation and be courageous enough to follow your values and integrity instead!

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.feelfocusflow.community/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/feelfocusflow/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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