We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Krista Xiomara a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Krista , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

My media company is called LightCasting™ and the intention and purpose of the name is twofold. The first is to be a beacon and guidepost for people who are exploring their human and spiritual experience. To give them a place to stabilize themselves on their journey and provide a bit of respite, resources, and rest. The second, is that all the content that is created from LightCasting™ is meant to cast figurative light into the world. As founder of LightCasting™, everything I do is in service of my shared humanity with the world. LightCasting ™ is centered on unity consciousness and oneness. LightCasting™ is place where you can hear people from all over the world, from every walk of life, and various socio-economic statuses unite under one idea: “I want to help create a better Earth through my work as an individual, to impact the collective.”

LightCasting™ is also the middle place or sometimes I think of it as placeholder for humanity while we continue to figure things out for ourselves as we evolve, change, and expand. In the US, where my business resides there is a theocratic way of ruling and governing the citizens. Which I think the US founders, were they to return would find ironic because a main focal point for them was to escape a kings rule, (therefore the church’s rule) and seek refuge in religious freedom, and ultimately live as free and liberated as humans. The founders had an ideal of separation of church and state, one our very young country has yet to see come to fruition.

This is important to keep in mind as the landscape of our connection to a divine source is changing. When I say that LightCasting™ is a placeholder what I mean is, it is a place people can freely explore life outside of Abrahamic religion and cultural. It’s a resting place for a lot of people to come and question, to test their ideas and settle inside themselves on some of the big questions they have about the human experience like:

“What I am doing here?”
“What is the meaning of my life.”
“What is my purpose?”
“Is there a God?”
“What do I know for sure?”

They can ask all these questions and hear every guest featured on LightCasting™, grapple with the same internal deliberation. And they can do it without pressure, dogma, or outside influence. This spaciousness and safe place is what we all need while we figure anything out.

As we evolve as human beings and we get away from the dogmatic binary thinking, we will need more middle places, larger thought spectrums, and a wider view to understand this human experience on both a scientific and mystical level.

LightCasting™ welcomes the convergence of science and spirituality. Constantly asking the question of “why” and hoping to bring about some evidence and understanding to support what one can feel and know. “Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom” by Rick Hanson and “The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and Your World” by Lynne McTaggart and “The Light Between Us: Stories from Heaven, Lessons for Living” by Laura Lynn Jackson are examples of such explorations into the power of science, psychology, spirituality, healing, and human connection.

LightCasting™ strives to leave a blank slate available to the aspirant, seeker, scientist, or even the odd curious person where all these questions and ideas, concepts, and proven scientific theories can sit comfortably together.

Krista , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

In 2018 I released my first podcasting episode, featuring a spiritual teacher that I had met at a Yogic Ashram. At this time, I was in the middle of a spiritual expedition, as I like to call it. A few years earlier I had left my religious experience, that was traumatic, wounding, and stifling. In my expedition and exploration, I educated myself on all religions, philosophies, psychology, science, and literature. Anything I could ingest to understand the human need to organize into religion and to seek connection with a divine source.

In that journey it became increasing clear to me that there had to be another place for humanity to land that didn’t include a church, mosque, or temple. A place where the ambiguity of spiritualty and the divine could exist widely and without walls. So, I created a podcast to honor this invisible space. Where spiritual aspirants, rebels, black sheep, and seekers could coexist and find real examples of living spiritually free. And also, where they could find a place to nourish themselves spiritually and mentally through my guests’ stories, lived experiences, and books they came to speak about.

When I think about incepting this podcast, and the space it created, it is not so much about solving a problem but answering a question about our evolution with religion and spirituality. In a 2023 Pew research study, it noted that 70% of American’s think of themselves as spiritual (even if they align themselves to a specific religion). There is an inter-mingling of ideas that are both traditional and non-traditional that has been taking over for the past few decades and requires us to sit up and take notice of how the every day person is changing in their thinking and believing.

Religion, since its early days has been rooted in control, indoctrination, and centralized power. But we are evolving as a species away from a dogmatic, controlled, unquestioned way of being. We also have science to thank for dispelling many myths and unknowables to our brethren before us. And as our minds expand away from binary thinking, we can hold with ease both the unknown and known.

I am most proud of the community I have built because of the podcast. It has given people the opportunity to curiously investigate their own spiritual experience and humanity, in a supportive, self-led, and educational way. I hand select every single guest that appears on the show with the intention that they have a shared experience that will resonate with the audience. I also carefully choose guests who have created their own tools and methods, to support their own spirituality, healing, and personal development. With the express purpose that when I highlight my guests’ life and works it directly transmits information for how my audience can further their own growth.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

When I started my podcast, the associated costs for hosting a show were relatively small and something I was able to afford from my own. There was not a great deal of financial capital that was needed to invest in the beginning. However, there were various intangible capital investments in terms of self-education and training to ensure that my podcast got in front of as many ears (and eyes as possible). In the first few months of my podcast, as I began creating a rhythm and style to my interviewing, I noticed that my listening audience growth had stagnated.

I am still someone who does not choose to spend very much time on social media, but at the time it was very clear social media was a vital marketing tool that I was going to have to get a handle on to create some growth and real interest in the show.

I would spend months self-learning social media, marketing strategies, figuring out algorithms and hashtags. I had to learn a little bit about every social media platform in order to tailor my presence and podcast around the different environments. An important game changer in the marketing component was automation. I took classes and tutorials for tools that helped streamline and automate social media channels. The cost around promoting the podcast grew but not to an exorbitant amount that I couldn’t afford to incur those costs as well.

Marketing the podcast, took on a life of its own and eventually I had to expand by creating my own media company LightCasting ™ because I wanted to bring on bigger guests and I needed a credible company to pitch to agencies and public relationship houses. I also needed to understand the inner workings of how to get highly sought after guests and how to build and cultivate relationships with agencies and PR agents. I wanted to build trust and relationships, so they could trust me to give their clients the best platform possible to share their work. All of that culminated in a crash course of legally and financially creating my own media company and this was such a fun and enlightening experience to have!

I also needed to learn the technical side of podcasting. Earlier on I was mentored by a fellow podcaster who sat with me for hours teaching me how to record, edit, and produce my show in Reaper (a production platform). Costs around producing, promoting, and marketing your show can create the largest expense in your podcasting. I am a practical and life longer learner, so there wasn’t a scenario where I would be outsourcing this long term, although in the interim I needed support in this technical area.

I pressed on and my show got better over time. I changed the format several times and emulated the structure of podcasts that I admired and respected, like On Being with Krista Tippett, Super Soul Sunday, with the one and only Oprah (which was originally produced as a television show), and Big Magic, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

A lot of my own financial and human capital has gone into creating my podcast and media company, and I’m deeply grateful for the being able to build something that matters to me and helps humanity.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I did (and do) all of this while having a thriving full time career.

In the last ten years since social media has taken off, we get a singular and usually one-dimensional view of people’s lives. I would underline here the fact that we don’t really need more dimensions, and everyone has a right to keep portions of their lives private and sacred to themselves. But the reason I point out the one-dimensional view–because its deceiving to the consumers of that content and there is a pressurizing undercurrent of creating a side-hustle that is your entire life. And that its easy.

Most of the content we interact with on social media is clipped down to seconds of perfection. No one really wants to see the “sausage being made” per se, and this abbreviated reality says nothing about the time, money, an intangible resources expended to create this end product. We have glorified a side-hustle, which for most people <i>is </i>another full-time job–in all honesty. And I think we should be more honest about this, across the board.

I’ve helped mentor other podcasters and spiritual entrepreneurs. I hear firsthand how much pressure they feel to make their creative and spiritual projects, the only thing they do. As a practicing Buddhist, my life is about finding equanimity in all things. Remembering that there is always a middle way to approach anything. Culturally we have resided in a polarized, bifurcated mindset, that says “this or that.”

But our current society, and the cost of living does not always lend to leaving a secure job with secure benefits behind to side hustle, <i>and that is okay</i>.

I think it’s important for us to make sure people have a place to express who they truly are and contribute to the collective in their unique and beautiful ways without pressure. To not judge them if they keep a full-time job or string together many part-time jobs to support themselves, as they persue their creative and spiritual outlets that make our world more rich and colorful.

What matters is not fracturing ourselves.

That we stay loyal to the things we love and need to create, that help us fully express ourselves, our lived experiences, and what is happening in the world as we see it through our own hearts, minds, and eyes. And that we continue to birth our experiences in any medium we desire reegardless of how slow moving our society is, in embracing the fact that we are multi-faceted human beings.

I do see light in the distance, on this matter. I believe we are beginning to see this shift happening in businesses like CHANI App, Huff Post, Atlassian. Where employees are paid well and given ample time off from work to cultivate work-life balance. To spend the most precious resource all of us have, <i>time</i>. On the things we love, that makes us come alive and bring joy to our very existence.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.iamkristaxiomara.com, ianwpodcast.com
• Instagram: @ianwpodcast @iamkristaxiomara @lightcastingnetwork
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@LightCastingNetwork

Image Credits
Image Credits: Myself for every photo except for Brown shirt, staircase, and book photo are from photographer Chelsea Jeter.