The Harvesting of the Sacred
On creativity as divine transmission, and why your unborn ideas need a womb before they need a witness
Help me turn writing into a career, not just something I do on the side. Your paid subscription helps me carve out real time for essays — the deeper, slower pieces that I can take my time to write whilst I sip my Oolong in the morning.
Paid subscribers get early (and full) access to new essays, occasional behind-the-scenes notes on what I’m working through & monthly live guest speaker interviews. I hope you enjoy this article.
Big love,
SB x
If you are new to birthing a business in the spiritual or wellness lexicon, please read this and take my words in, as someone who is experienced with what I am about to share with you, and has played witness to it too many times to register now.
This is how it goes:
You are sitting across from someone — a friend, a collaborator, a stranger at a dinner party who asked one too many curious questions — and you offer them the experience of getting to know you… and oops, you start to share your half-formed creative idea, out of excitement. A project still finding its shape in you. You speak it aloud because speaking is how you midwife your own thinking… and because you have trusted the room, because the idea felt so alive it wanted air.
A month later, sometimes less, you watch that same idea walk back into your life wearing someone else’s name.
They are not necessarily villains when this happens (although, sometimes they are…). Often they don’t even register what occurred. The idea moved through them the way water moves through a container that happened to be standing nearby — no malice, just proximity and the mistake of confusing resonance for origination. But the effect on you is identical either way. Something that was gestating inside your body has been harvested before its time, and you are left holding the strange, disorienting grief of a birth that happened to someone else.
Creativity was never yours to begin with — which is exactly why it needs protecting
Here is the paradox at the centre of this. The reason creative extraction wounds so deeply is not because you own your ideas in some proprietary, ego-bound sense. It’s because you don’t. What moves through you when you create is not manufactured by your intellect — it is received. Every lineage that has taken creativity seriously as a spiritual practice, from the Vedic seers who spoke of sphota (the bursting-forth of meaning from silence) to the Christian mystics who understood inspiration as literally in-spirit — breath of God entering the human vessel — has understood the same thing: creative ideas are not products of the mind. They are visitations. Transmissions. Divine matter that has chosen a particular nervous system, a particular body, a particular life, as its point of entry into form.
This is why theft of a creative idea feels closer to violation than to mere professional misfortune. It isn’t intellectual property being lifted (although sometimes, it is also blatant theft… but that’s not what I am talking about here). It’s a pregnancy being interrupted. Something sacred was entrusted to your body as the vessel of its becoming, and someone reached in and pulled it out before it had cellularly organised into something that could survive outside you.
The imperial pattern hiding inside “collaboration”
Let’s start by naming what sits underneath this, because until it’s named it keeps operating invisibly, dressed up as networking, as generosity, as the entrepreneurial gospel of “ideas are worthless, execution is everything.”
Empires have always worked this way. They just don’t not usually announce itself through conquest anymore — they move through extraction disguised as relationship.
Colonial history is, among other things, a five-hundred-year case study in this exact mechanism: enter a space under the banner of curiosity or exchange, absorb what is valuable, and carry it home to be repackaged, monetised, and credited to the coloniser’s own genius. The intimacy is the delivery mechanism. You would never have opened yourself to a stranger with a contract in hand. You opened because it felt like communion.
The creative economy — especially the entrepreneurial, content-driven, ideas-as-currency economy so many of us now live inside — has quietly rebuilt this same imperial architecture at a smaller scale. Openness is rewarded rhetorically (”share your process! be transparent! build in public!”) while structurally punished, because the same culture has no container, no ethic, and often no conscious awareness around what it means to receive someone else’s still-forming creative material. We are told the marketplace of ideas is a commons. It behaves, far too often, like a colony.
And the people most vulnerable to this harvesting are usually the ones whose gift is most porous — the ones who create from genuine spiritual transmission rather than strategic calculation, whose ideas arrive early and whole because they are tuned to receive them. Sensitivity to source is not a liability to be armoured against with cynicism. It is the very quality that makes the work potent. Which means the answer was never to become less permeable. It is to become more discerning about what you let touch the permeable places.
What a baby knows that the marketplace has forgotten
Gestation feels like the closest metaphotic map for this, because it is the literal architecture of how creation actually works, whether the thing being created is a book, a modality, a business, or a child.
A baby in the womb does not develop through exposure. It develops through enclosure. The uterine wall is not a prison; it is the precondition for organogenesis. Attachment theory tells us the same story continues after birth — that the nervous system of a newborn requires a period of near-total safety and closeness, undisturbed by the intrusion of too many hands, too much noise, too many eyes, before it can develop the internal architecture to eventually meet the world without fragmenting. Premature exposure doesn’t accelerate development. It arrests it, or distorts it, or kills it outright.
Your ideas are asking for the same thing your infant self asked for and, more than likely, did not fully receive. Closeness before display. Darkness before light. A period in which the thing is allowed to be yours and God’s before it needs to be anybody else’s. This is not withholding. This is not scarcity-mindset hoarding, and it is not the same as secrecy born of shame. It is gestational sovereignty — the recognition that some things die the moment they are witnessed too soon, the way certain photographic film is ruined by light before the image has fixed.
Reclaiming the sacred as a practice, not a belief
If you have lived this pattern — and if you are a creative or an entrepreneur, I suspect you have lived it more than once — the invitation is not to become guarded or bitter. Bitterness is just grief that has given up on the sacred altogether, and that is its own kind of theft (but one you’d be performing on yourself).
The invitation here is to build an actual practice around the sanctity of the unborn idea.
That might look like a private, undated notebook that no algorithm and no dinner party ever sees until you decide otherwise. It might look like a small, trusted council — one or two people, chosen with the same care you would choose a birth attendant — who have earned the right to be present during gestation because they have demonstrated, over time, that they know how to hold something without needing to touch it. It might mean noticing, in your body, the specific sensation that arises right before you’re about to speak a still-forming idea into a room that hasn’t earned it — a kind of premature opening, an urge to be witnessed before you’re ready to be — and learning to sit with that impulse rather than obeying it.
Above all, it means returning to the theology underneath all of this: that what moves through you is not yours to prove, defend, or rush into visibility for anyone else’s benefit. It was given to you, specifically, by something larger than the marketplace, and it is answerable first to that source. Your task is not distribution. Your task is devotion — to protect the gestating thing until it is strong enough to meet the world on its own terms, sovereign, formed, and unmistakably its own.
The harvesting of the sacred will keep happening as long as we keep treating creativity as raw material rather than as revelation. The remedy was never vigilance against other people. It is reverence for what has been entrusted to you.
Want to learn more from me around creativity and entrepreneurship?
Learn more from myself and other leading creatives in the space that have turned their creative ideas into success by joining God Built Summit. I will be speaking alongside the likes of Alpha Femme, Carly Rae Beaudry, and other brilliant minds in the space. It is being hosted by a gorgeous friend of mine who is also a brilliant creative, Tia (Sinitia)
