Entrepreneurship as a Vehicle for Essence Liberation Work

Note: The following content was first delivered as an asynchronous audio teaching in the first iteration of The Vision Society, recorded and delivered by Daje Aloh. Enjoy.

Before I stumbled across Carol Sanford's work and the regenerative paradigm she writes about, I used to call the work I was doing with entrepreneurs "essence liberation work."

It was a kind of code I used to root my soul-self into this strange path of “entrepreneuring” in a coked out western world. Because, for me, entrepreneurship was never about revenue numbers, profit margins, or scaling for scale's sake. To be honest, I actually don’t care about “doing business” that much. I’ve never been interested in building a mega-corporation or in having bragging rights on Instagram about how much I’ve made per month selling “programs”.

That’s never been my thing at heart.

What I care about is healing, cultivating beautiful futures together, and the liberation of the soul’s essence.

I care about the part of you that is irreducible. The part that wants to be expressed in form and contribute to the world through your purpose, your role, or through a body of work, a business, a project, a season of creation.

Essence Liberation is the root of regenerative business for me.

It is the very thing that begins a business that is life-affirming, responsive to a world in polycrisis, and is anchored in something deeper than a trend or an algorithm.

It’s in this way that I see entrepreneurs not just as business owners, but as worldbuilders and futurewriters.

And this worldbuilding, futurewriting capacity is not inherently egoic (in a distorted sense). It comes from a healthy and initiated ego—one that has been matured through soul initiation, thresholdcrossing, and rites of passage.

When I speak of “ego” in our work here in Storywork Studio, I’m speaking about this capacity to create. The will to shape reality. Yes, the ego can miscreate when it’s operating from fear or unmet needs and trauma. But when it matures, when it has moved through death cycles, and when it’s rooted in something real, it becomes an ally in the creative process.

Essence Liberation Work is about taking a look at all of our perceived limitations and asking the ego: Who or what are you protecting? Often, we find that the ego is guarding not just our inner child or our physical body, but our soul essence as well, or what my Qigong teacher calls the Xing, one of the three treasures in Taoist philosophy responsible for that glint in your eye and the expression of your vital life force.

Essence is alive in humans, in land, in objects, in time, in space.

Everything has an essence, and with that essence comes a potential to express something unique and real. But to express that, we need a healthy ego and the capacity within our minds and bodies to move through change states successfully. This is where the Creative Rites and the pancultural wisdom of the Four Directions come in.

How the Four Directions and Wheel of the Creative Rites Helps Us Liberate Essence

Our lives mirror the movement of the seasons.

The rites of spring, summer, autumn, and winter show up symbolically in our creative lives to teach us how to be with creative energy from the level of soul and essence. Each threshold unlocks an aspect of essence. And unless we are living in total stasis, we are always shedding, becoming, evolving through these phases as life ebbs and flows, in and around us.

Let’s explore these thresholds together.

East: Spring – The Season of Emergence

This is the place of beginnings. The East is where the sun rises. Where light enters and asks: Who am I? What am I doing here? We ask questions of ontology and philosophy. And even if the world around us is in another season, our internal dial may be calling us into Spring and new beginnings.

Often, we arrive at this threshold coded with stories. Stories in our epigenetics, our cultural mythos, our environment. These stories shape us. And when we enter a spring after a long winter—a death, a void, a composting—we often come bearing a new seed, a new vision.

But too often, we rush that seed. We try to brand it, name it, fund it, scale it—before it has had a chance to tell us what it even is. Like a parent assigning a child a career before their first breath, we impose form too early. And we break trust with the seed.

What stays constant, however, is our essence. Every turn of the wheel is an effort to give form to essence through vision.

This direction / season is correlated the Visionary Archetype of the Dreamer. Learn more here.

South: Summer – The Season of Sensation and Relating

The South is about the body. It’s about feeling, sensing, and exploring how we relate to the other—not yet how we serve them through a big company or vision, but how we are in relationship.

This is phase is an adolescence. It’s where the ego often takes center stage. Everything becomes about "I, I, I" and “Me, Me, Me” Many entrepreneurs get stuck here. We believe our vision is central to collective liberation, and when people don’t understand it, we collapse and disappear or inflate to pretend we are somewhere that we are not.

This is the initiation into attunement and learning about our belonging through relational service. We begin to realize that our vision isn’t just about our personal process. We start doing market research. We sit down and listen. We begin to see our business not just as an extension of self, but as a relational environment—a garden that grows because it’s rooted in something larger than us.

West: Autumn – The Season of Integration

In the West, we bear fruit. The work begins to speak. There is harvest. But there is also death. Forms fall away. Structures dissolve. Identity fades. We gather seeds.

This is the time to ask: Who have I become? What did I create? What is ready to die, and what seeds do I want to carry forward?

It is a season of maturity. Of letting go of the desire to be forever young. To cling to the golden moment. Here we eat our grief, our failures, our joy, our pleasure—we integrate all of it into wisdom.

North: Winter – The Season of Eldership and Legacy

The North is where we vision new futures. Where we teach. Where we seer out the path ahead. It is not about your age, but about integrated and embodied wisdom. The truth is that some young people are elders in this way. And many adults never make it here. Eldership comes from walking through the fire and living to tell the story.

In the North, your essence has ripened. The ego is no longer obstructing the soul’s expression, but supporting it. You create from legacy, from vision, from systemic awareness.

This is where the seed that began in the East becomes part of a larger system. Your work starts to change lives in ways you may never fully witness. The effects ripple beyond your visibility. You learn to lead with humility, knowing your role is to tend to change, not to control it.

The Cyclical Nature of Liberation

Essence Liberation Work is not linear. It is cyclical and spiralic. We walk the wheel again and again, each time becoming more ourselves. Each time, we express a new layer of essence. Each time, our vision matures.

Entrepreneurship, at its most sacred, is a rite of passage. It is soulwork. It is ego maturation. It is a regenerative practice of becoming.

And it begins with listening.

Listening to the seed. To the seasons. To the soul.

And letting your essence express, mature, and grow.