Every Act of Business Can Be an Act of Love

What if we stop treating our work as separate from spirituality and start treating it as a place where we can make love manifest? In this episode of Beyond Names, Dr. Habib sits down with Mark Silver—founder of Heart of Business, spiritual teacher, and longtime student of Sufism—to explore a radically different vision of work, success, and liberation.

Mark shares his deeply personal spiritual journey through Judaism, queer community, earth-based spirituality, and ultimately into Sufism—revealing how each path opened him more fully to connection, embodiment, and the sacred.

Together, they explore regenerative agriculture, healing from systems of domination, bringing compassion into business and marketing, and what it means to live from oneness in a world that often teaches separation.

This conversation also offers wisdom for navigating difficult times, making space for grief, protecting joy, discovering your gifts, and finding your place in the work of healing the world.

A conversation about spirituality, liberation, business, ecology, and returning again and again to love. 

Transcript

Beyond Names: Spirituality for Anyone and Everyone

YouTube Channel: Beyond Names with Dr. Habib Boerger

YouTube handle: @BeyondNamesPodcast

Episode: 47

Host: Dr. Habib Boerger

Conversation Partner: Mark Silver

Title: Every Act of Business Can Be an Act of Love

Description: What if we stop treating our work as separate from spirituality and start treating it as a place where we can make love manifest? In this episode of Beyond Names, Dr. Habib sits down with Mark Silver—founder of Heart of Business, spiritual teacher, and longtime student of Sufism—to explore a radically different vision of work, success, and liberation.

Mark shares his deeply personal spiritual journey through Judaism, queer community, earth-based spirituality, and ultimately into Sufism—revealing how each path opened him more fully to connection, embodiment, and the sacred.

Together, they explore regenerative agriculture, healing from systems of domination, bringing compassion into business and marketing, and what it means to live from oneness in a world that often teaches separation.

This conversation also offers wisdom for navigating difficult times, making space for grief, protecting joy, discovering your gifts, and finding your place in the work of healing the world.

A conversation about spirituality, liberation, business, ecology, and returning again and again to love.

Transcript:

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Welcome to Beyond Names, I'm Dr. Habib. This is a space for spiritual seekers and soulful misfits, for the curious and the committed, for those grounded in a tradition, and for those who are not sure what they believe.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Whether you're called the Divine God, Yahweh, Allah, Elohim, Hashem, Brahman, Great Spirit, Higher Power, or you're still searching for language that fits, you are welcome here.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Together, we'll explore the intersection of spirituality and daily life, the wisdom of many traditions, and the ways we return to our true selves, to our source, to the light that each of us carry within. I'm so glad you're here, let's begin with introduction of our conversation partner for this episode, Mark Silver.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mark is a fourth-generation entrepreneur who has run a distribution business, turned around a struggling nonprofit magazine, and worked as a paramedic.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mark is the founder of The Heart of Business, and he is the author of Heart-Centered Business: Healing from Toxic Business Culture So Your Small Business Can Thrive.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: As a coach, a consultant, a mentor, and spiritual healer, he has worked with over 4,000 businesses since 1999.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mark is on the board of directors for the Horn Farm Center, which focuses on educating people in the region on regenerative agriculture, and his own home, a 15-acre property, is slowly being turned into a food forest to contribute to the local food shed.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: To learn more about Mark and his work, please visit heartofbusiness.com.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Mark, welcome, thank you for being here.

Mark Silver (he/him): I'm delighted to be here, Habib. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, I've… I've warned you, the first question…if you would please introduce yourself to the listeners by way of telling your spiritual story.

Mark Silver (he/him): It's an interesting question, because I haven't really… I don't think of my life… like, I don't… like, I don't have that as a set answer, so let's see what comes out.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Great.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, I grew up in a Jewish family, in… outside of Washington, D.C, in Maryland, and I always thought I was going to be a rabbi.

Mark Silver (he/him): And I… I had a, you know, I didn't really have a lot of connection to spirit within the synagogue, but I always… I remember at a young age feeling connected.

Mark Silver (he/him): And then, through the process of growing up, as a man, you know, as a boy, and then as a man, there was… I really got shut down.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, bullied, and all that stuff with patriarchy and the way men are treated. I just… I remember just shutting myself off, just closing down emotionally.

Mark Silver (he/him): I started to, I spent time doing, in the punk rock scene out in DC, and I spent time, in a lot of activism.

Mark Silver (he/him): It was Rock Against Reagan in those days, and then eventually doing kind of abortion clinic defense and a lot of pro-feminist kind of activism.

Mark Silver (he/him): And, and my spirituality had always kind of, like, peeped out here and there through, like, high school and college, but not in any kind of formal way or any way that I knew how to even be conscious of.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, there was, I… the fir… the real openings for me beginning-wise, were… I came out as bisexual in 1988, and when I moved to the Bay Area in 1992, my wife Holly, we've been together for 30 years, I met in the Bay Area.

Mark Silver (he/him): But I was also very active in queer community there, and the Radical Fairies, if you know about them at all, were like a… it's like…

Mark Silver (he/him): It was the first time I was starting to melt my emotional-self open, because I was around men that I didn't feel threatened by, that would actually smile, and would… were friendly, and weren't… like, I didn't feel like I was under threat or competition, which is what I felt through my whole childhood. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And there was a lot of earth-based spirituality there, and also intersecting with Jewish community at the same time, queer Jewish community in the Bay Area with Holly, and meeting Holly there.

Mark Silver (he/him): And so there was, like, such an opening with all of that.

Mark Silver (he/him): Like, I, like, felt myself being opened, I felt myself being much more free, you know, we were doing Shabbat regularly, and doing a lot of the singing, and a lot of the praying, and could feel the connection, and it was…

Mark Silver (he/him): But I still was still undoing a lot of the masking that I had done.

Mark Silver (he/him): It was really… there was a lot of unwinding that was needed for me.

Mark Silver (he/him): And Holly had been involved with Starhawk's reclaiming path in the Bay Area, which is kind of, you know, neo-pagan, earth-based, witch camp she was involved with, witch camp, and it was just… it was just so freeing to have so many, ways of expressing a connection to the mystery, you know, to the oneness, to the… to that.

Mark Silver (he/him): And then it was in the process of all of that deepening in our Jewish path, and as we found that we were in a serious and then eventually a lifetime commitment with each other is when we came across Sufism.

Mark Silver (he/him): And it was a very interesting time because we were regular with our Jewish community, and there was a teacher in the Jewish community, and then we were -- I'd also met, you know, we share a Sufi path, you and I, Habib -- and I had met Ibrahim [Jaffe], and Ibrahim was teaching, and so we would.... They were both teaching the exact same thing, week by week.

Mark Silver (he/him): They were, like, it was, like, echoed in this really wild way, and I'm like, that's… that's weird. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And, but I… but something in the transmission, for me, the Sufism was touching me more. Like, I could feel it in a more embodied way. There was something that was being broken open. 

Mark Silver (he/him): For whatever reason, the divine was opening me in that particular way, you know? And… And it was really quite extraordinary. Like, I had all of these abilities opened up -- really kind of wild abilities.

Mark Silver (he/him): I remember we decided to go to the healing, to the Sufi Healing School. 

Mark Silver (he/him): I remember working with this… it was like… I had, like, you know, at the time, I was wor- you know, I was… I had recently quit being a paramedic.

Mark Silver (he/him): I'd been a paramedic in the San Francisco Bay Area for years, and, and so I was still steeped in my medical knowledge, and, like, this medical intuition opened up.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, I was in classes, and I could see people's EKG rhythms, I could see what was going on in their lungs, I could see… I could see, it was… I was like, that's wild. I could see auras. 

Mark Silver (he/him): Anyway, it was, it was really quite extraordinary, and then, it all got taken away. 

Mark Silver (he/him): It's like, well, you don't need that anymore. And so all of that kind of sight was just, you know, just disappeared, but I was connected.

Mark Silver (he/him): I was left connected. It was like, oh, that helped me connect and trust.

Mark Silver (he/him): I think that was part of a gift, the divine gift that I could… oh, I can trust my connection.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah.

Mark Silver (he/him): And then there was a point where I was really struggling between the Judaism and the Islam of Sufism.

Mark Silver (he/him): It was, like, fighting inside me. I remember in the very beginning, bringing my Jewish prayer book to the mosque, and doing my Jewish prayers in the mosque, and just, like, just like…

Mark Silver (he/him): And then I had this quite extraordinary experience in prayer one day, where I heard… I don't normally hear really clear language, like, my knowingness often comes as a knowingness, or a feeling sense, or sometimes I'll get images, but this was, like, language.

Mark Silver (he/him): And I just heard super clearly while I was in prayer, you're loving the path more than you're loving Me.

Mark Silver (he/him): And… at that point, the internal struggle I had between Judaism and Islam just dissolved. I saw that it was the same thing, you know.

Mark Silver (he/him): And all of my internal struggles around that just kind of melted. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And it was shortly after that, I can't remember the timeline exactly, but it was shortly after that that I… I guess it was a little while after that...

Mark Silver (he/him): Well, I'm getting out of order, because I was going to say I took Shahada [Islamic testimony of faith], but it was before I took Shahada, took, like, a formal conversion to Islam, reversion, or whatever language you want to use -- just the commitment to, like, oh yeah, I'm embracing this.

Mark Silver (he/him): I had been given a Sufi name by the sheikh. In Sufism, there's this, you know, and a lot of spiritual paths, you get given a spiritual name by the teacher that's meant to help open you and help you on your path and help you see things about yourself, and it's the same in our Sufi Tariqah.

Mark Silver (he/him): And, I had originally been given the name Jamil, which means the beauty of God, and I never felt a strong connection with it. It was funny, because other people had gotten the same name. They'd be going, oh yeah, this, this... I'm like, I don't know, that doesn't sound like me.

Mark Silver (he/him): But it… but I had gotten it because I had taken a hand with Ibrahim. I, you know, declared my commitment to the path through Ibrahim.

Mark Silver (he/him): And, he had called up our sheikh, who was in Jerusalem, and gotten names for people who had done that.

Mark Silver (he/him): And then Sidi, our sheikh, came and came to the U.S, as he did once a year, and I visited him at this building, the lake house. It was this… it was a large multi-family house, but it was a relatively small gathering area, and they said, okay, who wants to retake their commitment, you know, we take the promise, the Bayat, their commitment, now that the sheikh is here.

Mark Silver (he/him): And I just felt myself yanked forward, like, as if on a cord. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And... And I was the only one! I was the only one. I took hand with... which is really unusual. Normally, there's a number of people that are in the… in that commitment circle, and I was the only one who took it, and…

Mark Silver (he/him): This is so cute, this is so cute.

Mark Silver (he/him): Because after I finished, he… Sidi [Shaykh Muhammad al-Jamal] looked at me and said, you are Abdul Aziz! He changed my name from Jamil to Abdul Aziz. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And Ibrahim, who's the American teacher who had given me the name, handed… turned to Sidi and said, his name is Jamil, and Sidi says, I know this! He is Abdul Aziz! 

Mark Silver (he/him): And when he said that, when he changed… when he said that name, I don't know how else to describe the feeling I had, but it felt like every cell in my body changed.

Mark Silver (he/him): And I started this long journey. Aziz is an Arabic word which means the divine quality of strength.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, there's different divine qualities, divine quality of love, and mercy and compassion, strength, wisdom, you know, there's 99 of them in our tradition, 72 in the Jewish tradition, you know, I don't know how many in the Hindu tradition. 

Mark Silver (he/him): Anyway, there's… you know, this idea of understanding the qualities of God. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And mine was the divine quality of strength, and so it just started a long journey for me with the divine quality of strength, and what that really means.

Mark Silver (he/him): Yeah, so it's been... It's been a really beautiful journey, you know?

Mark Silver (he/him): I've, I went through 3-year healing school, I went through the teacher training, I was faculty for the teacher training, I got my Masters of Divinity.

Mark Silver (he/him): Spirituality has become kind of an, an organizing… so weird to say it like that. It's just like, you know, just like an awareness of the source of love. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And so… Yeah. There's lots of stories and things from there, but it's, like, there was a… there's, like, a real… like, the journey that ended me onto the path.

Mark Silver (he/him): And I've, you know, I've had lots of struggles with the path, I've had lots of… I get… I know that the divine placed me here, and I don't really have a lot of choice.

Mark Silver (he/him): But I have a deep love for all the different ways that the divine has created the human being.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, as it says in the Quran, I've created you in different communities and different people so that you may know one another.

Mark Silver (he/him): So many different ways to appreciate the mystery and the divine, and they're all carrying messages of oneness.

Mark Silver (he/him): And, and for me, that's been so central.

Mark Silver (he/him): Because right now, the community that I lead, it's a business community, you know, teaching business, but it's spiritually centered, and we have people from all the different paths, and all different kinds of humanity and different countries, different races, different spiritualities, different genders, different orientations, and so, just…

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, my studies in regenerative agriculture and the natural world just, you know, like, diversity is…

Mark Silver (he/him): We find the… we find the oneness in the multiplicity and the multiplicity in the oneness, and there's a… there's so much… so much love to be discovered in all the differences.

Mark Silver (he/him): And, yeah. Probably a good place to end.

Mark Silver (he/him): Could keep going on and on, but that's… I'll stop there.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Well, it's a good place to stop. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, talking about the multiplicity leading us to oneness, and multiply being a reflection of oneness, and...

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Honestly, it makes me think about… the situation I've been right now in my… in my neighborhood, where there's not necessarily a real appreciation of multiplicity or diversity.

Mark Silver (he/him): Oh, dear.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: That's certainly what it seems like based on some of the interactions I've witnessed, some of the things that I have heard said.

Mark Silver (he/him): Mmm…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Some specific situations that I won't go into now, so…

Mark Silver (he/him): Sorry.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So I appreciate that that's a part of your path.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And… and I'm curious around regenerative agriculture. Would you be willing to speak more to, kind of, that… how your spirituality, your spiritual journey… spiritual journey intersects with regenerative agriculture, and maybe…

Mark Silver (he/him): Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Let's start with what regenerative agriculture is.

Mark Silver (he/him): Yeah, so there is this understanding that nature, which humans are a part of and not separate from, has… is, like, a wondrous interdependent system… systems that all feed each other. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And what humanity has done is we've made the mistake to think that we're separate.

Mark Silver (he/him): And we've made the mistake to think that we can control, and we made the mistake to think that we can do it better than, you know, the millions of years of…hundreds of millions of years, billions of years of divine guidance in the evolution of the living systems of our planet. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And... And so regenerative agriculture leans into… the way things work, if you will, you know?

Mark Silver (he/him): So, for instance, instead of trying to, you know, like, if you go into a forest, into a healthy forest, which there's not that many examples of because there's been so much damage done, but if you go into a healthy forest, there's a diversity of plants, and they communicate with each other, and they support one another. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And so, for instance, when you plant a fruit tree, the way that… the non-regenerative way is, of course, to, like, rows of trees, one single kind of tree, and rows to have an orchard.

Mark Silver (he/him): But a more regenerative way is to plant a tree, and then surround it with other plants that support it, and plant a different tree, and then surround it with, you know, called guilds, and kind of recreate the living system, not even recreate, just allow, for the living system of, of the forest, to, you know… to be there.

Mark Silver (he/him): So that's… that's an example of food forestry. 

Mark Silver (he/him): But, you know, regenerative agriculture, another example is, you know, someone not taking out more than you put in, so that if you're growing things, that, again, you're not mono… doing a mono crop, but you know, maybe 55% or 60% of what's being grown goes back into compost, goes back into the land, and you're only harvesting, you're harvesting less than half so that it can regenerate, so that, you know, it's like, when you put a seed in the ground, it's not… the plant that grows isn't coming from nothing, it's pulling nutrients from the soil.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Mark Silver (he/him): And if you just keep harvesting without replenishing, you know, eventually it gets… it becomes empty. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And replacing the fullness of a rich ecosystem with very specific scientific fertilizers, many of which are dependent on petroleum, just… you're not going to… you're not going to have the same health. 

Mark Silver (he/him): Healthy plants resist damage from bugs, healthy plants, healthy systems of plants, you know, resist, you know, resist predators. 

Mark Silver (he/him): Of course, some get eaten, but I… you know, it's…. I'm not… I'm not finding myself particularly articulate in the moment. 

Mark Silver (he/him): I'm…I'm a teacher of business, I'm not a teacher of regenerative agriculture. I like engaging with it, so I'm not always so articulate in teaching it.

Mark Silver (he/him): But it's, because I don't, I participate and I learn, and I support the Horn Farm in the ways that I can. 

Mark Silver (he/him): But, but yeah, but it's like, oh, you know, it doesn't have to be so hard. We don't… 

Mark Silver (he/him): It takes a tremendous amount of energy. Systems of control take a tremendous amount of energy, whether it's colonialism and white supremacy and sexism and homophobia, or if it's fascism, or if it's, monocropping agriculture. 

Mark Silver (he/him): Takes tremendous amounts of inputs to get outputs, whereas you can have a natural diversity of humanity, a natural diversity of people, a natural diversity of plants and we support each other, and it's all much easier, more joyful and more supportive.

Mark Silver (he/him): I'm not saying there aren't challenges. I'm not saying it's, you know, a second Garden of Eden, but it's…but it can be so much easier than we make it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So it sounds like taking the model from how nature works in a… in a healthy system, and then seeking to follow that example, basically, of what you'd find in a healthy forest, and… Yeah.

Mark Silver (he/him): Exactly.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Okay.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, since you did say that what you teach is business, let's talk about the intersection of spirituality and business.

Mark Silver (he/him): Yes.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. Tell… tell me more.

Mark Silver (he/him): Well, there's… So… I think the first thing to understand, there's a lot, I mean, tell me more.... Good book...[gesturing at a bookcase full of books].

Mark Silver (he/him): There's a lot to… we could go on for a while, but I… 

Mark Silver (he/him): The first thing I'd like to say is that capitalism is not the same as business.

Mark Silver (he/him): The propaganda around capitalism, it likes to say that it's kind of like, oh yeah, it's natural, and this is how it's always been. 

Mark Silver (he/him): But the truth is that human beings have been doing trade and commerce as long as we've been around. There's evidence that's thousands, tens of thousands of years old of, like, trade that happened between, you know, far-flung settlements of human beings, you know, finding things from the coast, you know, hundreds or, you know, hundreds of miles inland. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And, and there's many, many, many different forms of trade and commerce that human beings have indulged in, and capitalism, which is the concentration of wealth and capital, the ownership, the private ownership of the means of production, if you will, into very few hands, has only been around for a few hundred years. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And, and it has ushered in a devastatingly toxic and destructive way of being on the planet, which we are… reaping… the, harvesting the toxic harvest from, you know?

Mark Silver (he/him): Environmental degradation, colonialism, you know, cultural destruction.

Mark Silver (he/him): Human beings have done terrible things for a very long time, but it's been so accelerated in such a terrible way, and capitalism, this extraction of wealth without any awareness of what… where it's being taken from, and no care for where it's being taken from is a primary cause.

Mark Silver (he/him): I won't say that it's the primary cause, because colonialism and white supremacy and sexism are all kind of intertwined with capitalism.

Mark Silver (he/him): It's all kind of like this, these domination, these systems of domination that crush our souls and break our hearts and separate us one from the other, instead of us recognizing that we're all one and we all need each other, we all need to care for each other, and care for the most vulnerable out of obligation to the… to our Creator.

Mark Silver (he/him): And so, business, when I think about healing business and changing, you know, and working in business, it's not about bringing the divine or bringing love to business, it's about recognizing that it's already there, and we have to stop covering it up.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, in Sufism, we talk about how the only power that the self has is the power to cover over the truth.

Mark Silver (he/him): And so we just have to stop ourselves from covering over the truth that there is love in everything. 

Mark Silver (he/him): At the heart of business, in my business, we like to say, “Every act of business can be an act of love.”

Mark Silver (he/him): And that's… that's what we're… that's what we're bringing out. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And so instead of… A lot of approaches to spirituality and business are what I call the gas tank approach, where you go fill up on spirituality, and then you go do business. And then when you get empty, you go fill up on spirituality again.

Mark Silver (he/him): And instead, one of the things that happened for me in the healing school is I was being shown, I was seeing, how these esoteric spiritual teachings were embedded in some business practices and not in others.

Mark Silver (he/him): And so, the very practice of business can be a spiritual practice, can… 

Mark Silver (he/him): We can be nourished in the act of doing business, in the act of expressing love and allowing ourselves to be filled with love.

Mark Silver (he/him): Letting it be another place where we can, be in praise of the mystery, and of the source of love, and of Allah, and be in appreciation and care of the divine creation, and the divine creatures, and be caring for one another in that way.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So how is it that you support businesses and business owners and business executives and so forth -- how is it that you support them to do that?

Mark Silver (he/him): We beat them over the head until they get it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, somehow I don't think that's the answer.

Mark Silver (he/him): No… So we do a lot of… we do a lot of… I mean, we're an education company. We do coaching, and we do healing.

Mark Silver (he/him): And at the heart of it, a lot of it is education. And so… and so we teach a different way of underst… like a reframing. 

Mark Silver (he/him): So, like, for instance, one of my favorite examples, you know, when you… we work a lot with marketing, because that's a big place where people struggle. 

Mark Silver (he/him): It's not the only place we work, but it's, you know, it's one of the main things that we look at.

Mark Silver (he/him): And, you know, when we talk about marketing, a lot of… if you… if you study marketing at all, everybody talks about, like, speak to the pain points, speak to the problems, speak to, like, where people are struggling.

Mark Silver (he/him): And the way that it's done currently, they… it's done in a re-traumatizing way. 

Mark Silver (he/him): It's like, push on the pain until someone is so activated that they are desperate to relieve that, and the best way to relieve it is to purchase.

Mark Silver (he/him): This is what is done in our current economic system, in our current marketplace.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, it's… it's pokes at our unfulfilled needs and desires, and says, like, oh, you know, if you want love, if you want sweetness, if you want beauty, you got to buy this car, or you got to drink this alcohol, or you got to… whatever, whatever it is.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Right.

Mark Silver (he/him): These false promises, you know? It's like trying to quench thirst with a glass of sand.

Mark Silver (he/him): But the answer is not to not talk about problems, because people struggle. Like, that's usually what happens, is people are so grossed out by this toxic form of marketing and sales that they go to a different extreme and say, okay, I'm not going to talk about problems, I just want to inspire people. I just want to speak to the beauty that's evident.

Mark Silver (he/him): But the challenge is, is that there's a lot of things people are struggling with, and when we're struggling with something, we can't take our attention off of that.

Mark Silver (he/him): The response is usually like, “oh, what you're saying sounds really nice, I'll get to that as soon as I handle whatever problem I'm facing.”

Mark Silver (he/him): There's a… there's a… there's a hadith qudsi, which is a quote from the Prophet Muhammad that… and the hadith qudsi is one that's attributed directly to Allah, as if the Divine had said it. And the quote is, “I was a hidden treasure, and I yearn to be known. And so I created the creation in order to be known.”

Mark Silver (he/him): And so, because we are expressions of divine presence, we carry that yearning to be known inside ourselves as well. Being witnessed, being seen, being known is such a deep source of healing for us.

Mark Silver (he/him): And this is at all the different levels. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And so, if we can speak to something that somebody is struggling with while seeing them as a perfect human being, who is, you know, a divine creation, but they're struggling.

Mark Silver (he/him): People can feel seen in a way that allows them to take a breath, that doesn't activate them but helps them actually take a breath and slow down and feel cared for.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, you can say, you know, like, if someone's a chiropractor, let's say, and someone has a back injury.

Mark Silver (he/him): You can say, like, “if you've had a back injury, and if you don't get this fixed, you will never pick up your kids again, and, you know, and it'll be terrible, and you'll be bedridden, and, you know, it'll be a terrible life for you.” 

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, you can say versions of that, I'm hyperbolizing, but people, you know, go there. And so it's like, “oh my god, I'll never pick up my kid again, I better get help.”

Mark Silver (he/him): Or you can say, you know, “when you hurt your back, it really… it's really painful. A lot of things feel out of reach. And you probably have the sense that your body can heal. And you know what? It can. There's so many different ways to heal. And I'm one of those people who likes to help people heal from this, because I want you to be able to access your life again.”

Mark Silver (he/him): You can see, like, there's a witnessing there that isn't a poking. There's a witnessing there that lets them know that you're not, like, the only answer, that there's… that there is a natural ability to heal. But it's recognizing, like, yeah, a back injury is debilitating, it's devastating.

Mark Silver (he/him): And that… but that care allows someone to take a breath and feel some sense of healing, whether or not they buy from you.

Mark Silver (he/him): If we do this in all the different aspects of business, bring that sense of care, and it's, you know, like, there's different teachings and different things, whether it's in sales, or whether it's, like, your invoicing, or whether it's creating a system, like, there's so many different, different teachings that come out in different aspects of business that help us to recognize, like, oh, the divine is present here, too.

Mark Silver (he/him): Oh, love is available here, too, even in the invoicing, even in the system, even in the website, even in a difficult client interaction. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And…And we can let go of control, and we can be in a place of surrender and connection and love, and the business can… can be successful in this way.

Mark Silver (he/him): I'm hoping that was clear.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, it's a great way of thinking about it, and one that I haven't thought about in that way before, so it's great to hear that approach.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If only we all… If only all of us would approach all of our lives, not just business, not just marketing and sales and systems and websites, but if we would approach all of our lives with that, with love and care based on this recognition of the sacredness in each of us, and based on this commonality of, of the desire to be known.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, is that also… does that also inform your activism? 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I… you mentioned earlier, activism. Are you… is… I know that I… In your story, it seemed as if that was part of your youthful days.

Mark Silver (he/him): Well, I don't…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Does that continue to be a part of your journey, and a part of your spirituality?

Mark Silver (he/him): So, I think it's important to understand that in the doing the work of liberation, doing the work of undoing systems of supremacy and domination, and trying to help a more beautiful, sacred world come forth in the many different forms that it can take, activism is… activist is one role. There are many different roles we can play.

Mark Silver (he/him): I am no longer 20, or 30, or 40 years old. I'm getting closer to 60 than... 

Mark Silver (he/him): And I'm, you know, I'm happy to go out to a protest, but I'm, like, frontline activist isn't my main identifier in liberation work, you know?

Mark Silver (he/him): But understanding liberation work and understanding how we care for one another is, is deeply woven into the heart of business and into regenerative agriculture and into our lives, because it's… without… yeah, because none of us are free until we're all free.

Mark Silver (he/him): We all get free together.

Mark Silver (he/him): And… there's, you know, the divine has created all of us, every single last one of us.

Mark Silver (he/him): And if anyone is left out, if anyone is shut down, if anyone is enslaved or harmed, you know, or kept from expressing the fullness of who they are, we're not honoring the sacred.

Mark Silver (he/him): We're not really seeing Allah, we're not really knowing the divine. You know, if women are, you know, like the Prophet said, take half your religion from Aisha. 

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, it's like if women aren't held in complete equality with men in all ways, if we don't recognize the diversity of gender that we've seen, if we don't recognize the diversity of sexual expression and the way that love is expressed, if we don't recognize, the commonality of human beings and the differences between all the different cultures that Allah has created and the different ways of knowing the divine that have been birthed in different places, and, you know, I… I forget the number, what is it, like, 160,000 prophets, and to the… every human culture and every time.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, with the… you know, it's like all of those have created different ways of connecting to the divine, but almost any path that I've looked at has the five pillars in it, you know, connecting to the divine multiple times in a day, understanding, you know, that there is a oneness that we're all a part of.

Mark Silver (he/him): Giving, you know, alms, giving, you know, giving to care for the people, you know, having some kind of fast, some kind of practice of deprivation that allows us to remember how dependent we are on Allah, how much people who have less, you know, to bring out compassion and empathy for them.

Mark Silver (he/him): And there's, you know, what path… what spirituality and path doesn't have some kind of a pilgrimage, some kind of a spiritual journey that allows our hearts to unfold in beautiful ways? 

Mark Silver (he/him): Islam has its own version of that that I follow, but you know, there were many different versions of it, and it all helps us come back to the oneness. 

Mark Silver (he/him): And so understanding that is, I think, for me, at the heart of my embrace of the work of liberation, you know, of freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the ego of human beings who have decided that they should have sway and domination over other human beings and over the world, and, you know, it's not right.

Mark Silver (he/him): The divine is the just, and we're meant to receive and fill up with and express that quality as well as the others.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Hmm.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: When you talk about liberation and these systems of domination … it goes without saying, we're living in a time where the struggle between the light and the dark is especially strong. It's especially intense.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And we're seeing a lot of that, what you talked about earlier, those systems of oppression, the systems of domination, you talked about the interlinking of those with capitalism, and… 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Do you have any advice for how to navigate the… like, what to do to care for yourself and care for others in these…in these times that we find ourselves living in?

Mark Silver (he/him): There's… there's a few things that rise up for me in response to that. 

Mark Silver (he/him): One is grief work. We have to grieve. There's so much to grieve. There's so much pain.

Mark Silver (he/him): And grief is something that Western culture is kind of phobic, you know? It's, like, afraid of grief. It's one of the things I love about the Quran, it's like, you're only here for a minute, you're going to die, you know, contemplate on death. 

Mark Silver (he/him): It's like understanding grief, and I don't just mean the death, but that, like, all of the losses. You know, the losses of biodiversity, the losses of species, the losses of, you know, the losses of…of joy, the losses of freedom.

Mark Silver (he/him): People, you know, here in our country, in the United States, you know, are watching immigration, kidnap people off the streets and kill them, and it's like, that's a… that's a grief work, you know, not only grief work, but it's… it's part of it.

Mark Silver (he/him): And then related to that is… is joy.

Mark Silver (he/him): Like, we… if we don't preserve our ability to dream, our ability to imagine, the ability to joy… be joyful and celebrate, I don't mean in a way that shuts us down, or putting on rose-colored glasses or pretending what's not happening, but we can't…

Mark Silver (he/him): We have to also see the joy, because that's what… feeds us, you know? 

Mark Silver (he/him): It's, it's a medicine for our hearts, you know, and so, holding on to our joy, I think, is beautiful.

Mark Silver (he/him): And then the third thing… the third thing that arises for me is understanding what your gifts are, and what your skills are.

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, I talked a little… very little bit. There's someone, Deepa Iyer is their name, D-E-E-P-A I-Y-E-R, and they developed this map of, Oh, what do they call that map?

Mark Silver (he/him): It's just a map of the different roles that one can play in liberation work. There's many different roles. You know, there's organizers, there's healers, there's storytellers, there's frontline activists, there's, you know, like, there's a lot of different roles, like, what gifts do you have, and what's the role that you want to play?

Mark Silver (he/him): And then finally, the final thing that arises for me is to not recreate the wheel. 

Mark Silver (he/him): A lot of people, especially white people that maybe haven't been involved, or people that haven't been involved in activism or organizing or liberation work in some way, just may not be aware that there are a lot of organizations and groups that have been doing the work for decades. 

Mark Silver (he/him): You don't have to recreate it, you know? 

Mark Silver (he/him): You can find an organization nearby, and then knowing the role that you want to play, plug in… in that way. 

Mark Silver (he/him): You know, I…I love regenerative agriculture. I'm volunteering on the board there, and I'm bringing my, intersectional understanding of liberation work, as well as spirituality, to that context, you know?

Mark Silver (he/him): So, you know, if you're going to want to do, you know, anti-racism work is something that's deep in my heart, as well as, pro-feminist work and queer liberation, like, bringing that to food security and regenerative agriculture, I mean, it's just, it's like, oh, my heart just gets happy, you know, being present like that. 

Mark Silver (he/him): So I think, you know, grief, joy, find your role, and then find an organization and connect.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah. Great. Good advice.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Good advice. Yeah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I… my… my sort of… As I sit with that same question. Often, after doing an episode, I'll ask myself, well, how would I have asked that… answered that question if I… if someone had posed that question to me, how would I have responded?

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And so it's like, each episode is an opportunity for me to reflect, and…and often, I think that, that we… we must tend to our own hearts, which is what you're saying with the… with doing the grief work, but also recognizing your joy, recognizing your gifts, and then making connections, with others who are doing the work.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: A part of that is also connecting to that which we hold as holy, or that which we hold as sacred, or that which we hold as…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: It's… it's our connection with the oneness that allows us to be present in the multiplicity without getting… without losing our joy, without losing our capacity to care, you know, without losing our ability to… to get up and engage for justice.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: I feel like that that's what strengthens us and feeds our hearts and our minds and bodies, and sustains us and allows us to move forward, so…

Mark Silver (he/him): Inshallah.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, inshallah. 

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And just… and then also the importance of, as you said, the organizations that are doing it, connecting with those. I think it's so important to connect with others. I'm a big proponent of interfaith activism and community activism, and if you can, like, look at the organizations that are doing what you're passionate about, but also look at organizations and individuals that are outside of your identity, and cross over, and engage in the common cause with people, because then that helps us, again, realize our interconnectedness and our oneness, as opposed to the… the illusion of our separation.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: So, thank you for all your ideas, and…you know, have that resonance, so…

Dr. Habīb Boerger: And thank you for the conversation.

Mark Silver (he/him): Yeah, thank you! Thanks for holding such a beautiful space, and thanks for inviting me in, and letting me share my heart in this way.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Yeah, yeah. And thank you to all listeners for joining us on Beyond Names. Before we go, if you would pause briefly, pause just for a moment to reflect on this conversation with Mark, and to see what stays with you from it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May something you heard today help you reconnect with the light in your own heart. May you grow in compassion, clarity, and courage, and joy.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: May you find your way again and again, back home to yourself, back home to the divine, however you name it.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: If today's conversation spoke to you, please like, share, and comment on this episode. Please follow and subscribe to Beyond Names. To make an appointment with me, please visit https://www.habibboerger.com/. To learn more about Mark, it's heartofbusiness.com.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Until next time, may you be light, may you consciously participate in growing your light, and may you share your light.

Dr. Habīb Boerger: Peace be with you.