Balance, for me, means regularly getting back home to Kalbarri and spending time on my favourite sand dune looking over the ocean. While in Fremantle, I try to swim regularly at the local beach and I spend at least half of every weekend in my permaculture garden. I have a deep connection to the earth, love to experiment and can’t stand waste, so I love to live and cook local and seasonal. That means great cook-ups in my kitchen of things I’ve foraged, found as a local bargain or grown. During the shut-down times of Covid-19 earlier this year, I spent a lot of time foraging with my youngest child. We made lilly pilly jelly, salt cured olives, kumquat marmalade, tomato pasta sauce and pizza sauce, quince paste, incense cones from plants in our garden, baskets…. and more.
The drive: What has kept you going?
As I mentioned previously, I believe Ayurveda chose me. There are times in life when everything seems difficult, when it feels like we are swimming upstream, or trudging uphill…and yet, when I relax into my life – with good work balance, plenty of time in the garden, enjoying nature, I work best and that’s also when the most clients come my way.
For better or worse: What are the pros and cons of running your own business?
There are many pros.
My kids see me creating something and taking it to fruition through all the challenges and rewards. They’ve also watched me create a business without funding input.
I am our own health practitioner, ensuring our home is filled with the most natural and organic products, remedies and foods possible. Even better is the knowledge that my children are absorbing my health messages. When Covid-19 related business pressures left me feeling pretty out of sorts, I shared some concerns with my daughter. I went to take a shower, and when I came back to the kitchen, my daughter had popped my herbal remedies for stress and immunity on the kitchen bench where I would see and take them.
I can set my own hours and now that I am a few years in, and have learnt the hard way about burning out, I honour my needs better and set whitespace, catch-up time and exercise into my weekly diary. I also have the ability to block out periods of time to be available for my children, for music lesson runs or orthodontic appointments without taking leave time.
The self-learning is ongoing, deep and profound. Ayurveda is not just a lifestyle – it is a life dedication.
The cons are that working from home means work sits awaiting you ALL THE TIME. Learning to turn off the computer at night and switch off is still a work in progress. It also means the family and household work can intrude and interrupt.
Building a business when people don’t know what you do is also challenging. Ayurveda is becoming quite popular in the US and other countries but is still relatively unknown here. This is why most of my business comes through word of mouth or from my workshops.
Working on your own, you initially don’t have the income to hire anybody to help. That means, you have to do everything and there are certain parts I really don’t like – for instance, formatting a webpage or reconciling the bank accounts or researching advertising. I’d rather be helping people and creating, but it is not until you’ve slogged through a couple of years of no income that you begin to make enough to create your team, so that you can be more effective and more efficient.
Hopes and dreams: What next?
I’m working toward getting my most popular workshops online and I look forward to supporting more new mammas to feel safe, grounded and nourished in their 4th trimester.
I’d really love to have my own healing centre with extensive, beautiful gardens filled with all the herbs I utilise. I’ve recently been brave enough to dream about a centre with more than just Ayurveda practitioners, but other healers as well, and since writing that dream down have been invited to join a team at such a centre.
To find out more about the Ayurveda and the wonderful work Peta does, visit the Zanti Ayurveda website. You can also join her supportive communities on Facebook and Instagram.
