Naming a new business is a delicate dance of personal branding while sidestepping brands already in existence, especially when the hope is to provide virtual services nationwide. Within the life coaching field, best practice for new coaches is generally to simply put your last name in front of “Coaching” or “Mentoring” and call it a day because it tells people who you are and what you do.
I am in the unique position of having a last name that is already known worldwide for one particular thing…and it is not life coaching – holistic, spiritual, or otherwise. I needed to find an alternative or when people tried to search my business online, it would get lost in the search results behind the international corporate results for a security and investigation firm.
Why Enduring Flame and not any of a thousand other possibilities?
Keeping a flame, even a tiny spark, lit for others is my vocation – in the spiritual sense of the word.
Many religious philosophers from different spiritual traditions have written about the dark night of the soul.
This is the time in a person’s life that they are at their lowest point: lost, alone, wandering, feeling hopeless and in despair, questioning their faith, sometimes even questioning their will to live. This dark night of the soul is a jagged precipice on a rocky cliff’s edge where the individual has choices to make.
Most religious philosophers who write about the dark night of the soul from direct experience with it describe sudden spiritual awakening like a fire is kindled anew inside them. Sometimes this occurs through a vision and sometimes this comes through interaction with another person who causes that fire to blossom. However the spark starts, the fire inside the lost one blooms up and suddenly their darkness is illuminated from within, their faith – in Deity, the Universe, or in humankind – is restored, and they discover their purpose in life.
The previously lost one takes that fire of purpose and goes out into the world around them to share it with others and try to bring more light into an otherwise dark world. The more inner fires they can light in other people – who then go on to spread their light to others –, the more light is brought to the world and the more the dark recedes from the world. It is like the Olympic torch run – the fire passes from one to another, except the previous torch never goes out.
My priestess, Beckie, wrote a beautiful ceremony piece for setting sacred space decades ago, that uses the lines “reflections of eternal light” and “spark of living light that dwells within the heart of each of us”. This is the Enduring Flame – it is a measure of the Divine within each of us that lives there eternally. We may forget its existence in our dark night of the soul, to the point that it is barest embers that seem cold, but never extinguishes.
Sometimes it takes a helping hand to blow the embers back up to full flame again. Enduring Flame Wellness has the torch prepared to pass the light and remind your spirit of its own greatness.
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