Leading with Genuine Care Sara Avant Stover - Entrepreneurship as a Spiritual Path
Sara Avant Stover is a business strategist, Internal Family Systems practitioner and author based in Boulder, Colorado. She works with female spiritual entrepreneurs to help them with both the spiritual and practical aspects of building a business and pursuing inner transformation. She draws on 25 years as a yoga and meditation practitioner and a teacher, author, and entrepreneur.
Sara is an "overachiever." She started dancing ballet at the age of three and continued until she went to college. She was also an entrepreneur, making and selling candy, T-shirts, and jewelry boxes from a young age. As a young adult, Sara realized the level of competition in ballet was leading to unhealthy behaviors and so she stopped. She graduated from Barnard College Phi Beta Kappa and applied to work in the Peace Corps. That's when things started to change.
While undergoing health exams for the Peace Corps, Sara was told she had early signs of cervical cancer. Because she would need medical exams every three months, she was not able to go to Africa. A meeting with an old high school teacher opened up an alternative: going to teach in Thailand, where she could get the health care she needed. She thought she'd be there a year; she ended up staying for nine years, traveling around the world at intervals while keeping Thailand as her home base. She also became a yoga teacher and started offering teacher trainings as well as writing for magazines in the U.S. on yoga and spirituality.
Sara returned to the U.S. in her 30s and, with the help of her business partner, embarked on building her business online. She wrote and published her first book, The Way of the Happy Woman. She now offers private mentoring to female spiritual entrepreneurs, conducts programs and retreats, and has written two more books. The Handbook for the Heartbroken comes out this month.
Sara is informed by her deep practices in meditation and yoga, but also by Internal Family Systems, a psychological, evidence-based approach that teaches people how to look at different parts of themselves while holding fast to what she calls the "essential self." In doing this people can learn to listen to their fears without allowing them to hold them back.
Sara believes in entrepreneurship as spiritual practice, and is deeply interested in the intersection of money, business, and spirituality. She has learned to peel back the outside messages and tune into her "still small voice." Learning to listen to that voice is a central teaching she uses with the women she mentors to help them break free of barriers and build their spiritual businesses.
Sara will be leading retreats this year at the Drala Mountain Center in Colorado and the Kripalu Center in Massachusetts. For more information go to saraavantstover.com.
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