Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Alexander Dunlop, Founder of The Source Cards, located in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

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

We teach the real meaning of the deck of playing cards. The same cards used to play poker, gin rummy, and go fish are an ancient system of knowledge reflecting our life on Earth. Based on our Birth Date, we're each "dealt" 13+ cards to play. These Source Cards reveal who we are and why we're here. They give you a map and a toolkit to live your best life. But the choice is still yours. What will you do with this map? How will you utilize this toolkit? And ahh, now the excitement of your life really begins. Now, if you want, you can consciously choose to play your cards right. When you do, you'll find an inner confidence that arises from knowing you're on the right path. Then, as if by magic, the right people will show up in your life right on time. Doors will open for you. You'll find your flow. And your life will become sweet and satisfying. All because you are now consciously playing the game of your life.

Tell us about yourself

My journey began in earnest at age 17 when I had a surprising spiritual awakening at the hands of a Roman Catholic priest. It was my senior year of Roman Catholic High School in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

And every year, the school offers three-day retreats for seniors called Encounters. It involved staying at a catholic retreat center located across from the beach just north of Miami.

It was three days to get out of school and hang out with friends at the beach with a kindly old Nun who was known to let us kids do whatever we wanted. For instance, couples would sign up for this retreat so that they could sleep together in the same dorm room.

Three days out of school at the beach with friends! Sign me up.

On the last night of this retreat, a priest came to talk to us about walls around our hearts, walls that block out God's love. He led us on a powerful exercise that reduced everyone, I mean everyone, to sobbing floods of tears. Perhaps it especially affected me, though, because, for the first time, someone spoke into the depths of the emotional trauma of my childhood.

Afterward, I ventured to speak with him. It was the first time in my long and dreary Roman Catholic upbringing that I had ever actually wanted to talk to a priest. I sat opposite him on a metal folding chair on a linoleum floor in a large, otherwise empty conference room space, just the two of us, in what is termed "face-to-face confession."

I don't recall what I said to him. But when I was done, he stood up to pray the traditional prayer of Absolution that I had heard umpteen times in my youth. As he did, he put his hands on my forehead. The moment he touched my head, something went wooooosshhh right through my body from head to toe, in a split-second flash of electricity and water all at once, unmistakably flowing from head to toe, from the point of contact of his fingers on my forehead.

And suddenly, inexplicably, I felt washed clean.

In shock and amazement, I also instantly realized that there was something Real behind all the religious mumbo jumbo that had been stuffed into my head.

And it launched me.

I didn't know it at the time.

But it launched me on a quest to find out What Is That Reality that lives behind the words, the rituals, and the practices that aim to reveal That Very Reality.

I couldn't have, would never have imagined or predicted where my quest would lead me... all I can say -- and I knew it subconsciously somehow throughout the whole, almost twenty-year journey -- is that I would know it when I found it...

As a graduating senior, I earned a partial academic scholarship to attend Harvard. So I studied philosophy and psychology there… looking for answers in the words of our great thinkers. And so it came to pass that in the Fall of my sophomore year, I stumbled into an Intro Psych course taught by a young, unknown professor named Jordan B. Peterson. I ended up taking every class he offered. And I thus learned from him as a teenager what tens of millions of people would learn from him twenty-five years later in his YouTube lecture series.

Separately and interestingly, before I returned to school that Fall, over the summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years, I became a born-again Christian. Full-on slain-in-the-spirit, speaking-in-tongues born-again Christian. And when I returned to campus, I was, as the saying goes, on fire! And in my Christian zeal, I became an Evangelical student-minister with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, leading prayer groups and Bible studies on campus.

After graduation and the realization that Evangelical Christianity was a lens too small for me, a paradigm too limiting to encompass the reality I knew, I returned to the tradition of my upbringing. I also contemplated becoming a priest. I enrolled in a Jesuit Seminary but left after two years with a master's degree in Roman Catholic theology.

Then, in a u-turn, I leveraged my Harvard diploma and got a job on Wall Street as a consultant, which transitioned into a job as a Director of Marketing for a wireless software company. Funnily enough, part of my marketing job description in 2001 was to write articles on the benefits of wireless mobile devices (in those days, RIM Blackberries) and why people should buy them. For reference, the first iPhone was released by Apple in 2007.

Meanwhile, living in New York City, I dove deeply into the nightlife and underground rave scene of New York City and tried every recreational and psychedelic drug I could find. It was an itch I needed to scratch. I can't explain it other than that. Something in me was urging me to break the rules of the good-catholic-boy-straight-A-student that I had been.

However, when the dot-com bubble burst in 2002, and I was laid off along with everyone else at my firm, my recreational drug use became not-so-recreational anymore. T'was not good. People who knew me were worried. So, needing a change and needing to get out, I bought a one-way ticket to India. And the only reason I went to India was that my ex-girlfriend was there and invited me to visit.

After staying with her briefly in Delhi, however, I traveled to the Osho Center in Pune. There, I meditated eight hours a day and took initiation as a Swami.

After leaving the Osho Center, I lived on Anjuna beach in Goa for another couple of months, smoking hash and playing chess all day. I even considered staying there and adopting the Hippie, New Age, beach-bum lifestyle permanently.

Instead, after almost six months in India, I felt drawn to come back to America, to New York City.
Upon my return, I briefly considered applying for jobs in corporate America. I had a stellar resume. But I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Something in me had changed, and I couldn't go back.

Penniless and homeless at the age of 30, I slept on a mattress on the floor in the back room of a grimy construction office in Long Island City where I worked for $10 an hour. I worked other odd jobs, too, like bartending and as a temporary secretary. It was a depressing place to live and a depressing time in my life, to say the least. But again, something in me would not allow me to go backward. So, I held fast and stayed the course.

Pivotally and importantly in my journey, at this time, I started doing juice cleanses, which transformed my health and healed me of several supposedly incurable, and for me, debilitating auto-immune diseases like Psoriasis, Eczema, Crohn's Disease, and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. This process of intensive self-healing took many years and eventually led me out of the allopathic paradigm of medicine completely.

I went back to school for nutrition and co-founded a successful holistic health center in New York City.

I did extensive Ayahuasca ceremonies and apprenticed to Shamans.

I traveled to festivals like Burning Man.

I read every spiritual book and met with every spiritual teacher I could find. Any time anyone was in town or giving a talk, or hosting an event, I would go and meet them and find out what they had to say.

Meanwhile, I also got married and got divorced. And I have two children from my first marriage.

Over the years, I've studied every system of esoteric knowledge I could find. I know my Vedic Chart, my Western Chart, my Sidereal Chart, my Mayan Chart, my Palm Lines, my Animal Totems, my Human Design, my Gene Keys...

I've done Reiki, Colonics, Acupuncture, Biofeedback, Breath Work, Core Energetics, Craniosacral Therapy, Crystal Healing, Cupping, Chelation, Hypnosis, Theta Healing, Urine Therapy (yup, I drank my own urine for six months), became Raw Vegan (I'm now Paleo) and I've been Rolfed…
And there's still a lot I'm not sharing here, a lot of things that happened in between these bullet points...

You name it, and I've probably done it, all in search of finding The Answer to my driving question.

And then, it happened. Unexpectedly. At a party in Brooklyn.

And it came when someone casually introduced me to the deeper, hidden meaning of the Deck of 52 Playing Cards. It was another woooosssshhh in my life. The air got thick around me, and my knees buckled for a moment.

The year was 2009. I was 36 years old. It was the day after my son's second birthday.

And still, it didn't make sense all at once. Plus, I was very skeptical. I couldn't wrap my Harvard brain around the fact that the answer to the meaning of life was found in an ordinary deck of playing cards.

In fact, it took several years for me to unpack the real meaning of these Cards and come to trust them completely as the guiding truth of my own life. And that came through my own meditations, and in the ceremonial Ayahuasca work I was still doing at the time. I brought a deck of cards into the ceremonies, set them in front of me, and set my intention to ask what they meant, what they were all about, how to work with them, and why they were just now peaking back through the veil of our collective consciousness.

From those direct downloads of information, I wrote my book and started a non-profit organization to share this ancient, hidden knowledge. Then, luckily, gratefully, I found my life partner who is here to work with me in partnership. I couldn't do it alone. And I wouldn't want to.

And so, finally, together, in my 48th year, we have launched The Source Cards.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

The biggest reward for me is seeing how this work transforms people's lives. I love seeing the miracles that happen for people when they start consciously playing their cards right.

One woman, for example, had all of her health ailments go away. Nothing else had worked. Then, when she started playing her cards right, she relaxed into herself, and all her health ailments simply disappeared.

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

Wearing so many hats all at once.

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

  1. Focus on playing your cards right.
  2. Do what excites you.
  3. Do what is authentic to you.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.thesourcecards.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thesourcecards
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thesourcecards/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/theSourceCards
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderhamiltondunlop/

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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