Let me take you somewhere you might not expect.
The word “worship.”
Most people hear that word and immediately picture churches, temples, incense, praise songs, maybe bowing. Submission. Ritual. Something you do on Sundays or don’t do at all.
But that’s not what the word actually means. And the difference matters, especially if you’re building something, leading something, or trying to figure out why your life keeps organizing around things you say you don’t care about.
The Etymology
Worship comes from Old English: weorþscipe. Pronounced roughly “worth-ship.”
Break that apart. Weorþ means worth, value, honor, dignity. The suffix -scipe means a state or condition (like friendship, lordship, craftsmanship.)
So worship, at root, meant the condition of ascribing worth.
Not groveling. Not subservience. Not singing praise songs or performing religious ritual.
It means: to recognize and attribute worth.
And if you go one layer deeper, “worth” itself comes from Proto-Germanic werthaz – meaning “toward, in relation to value.” Tied to concepts of becoming and turning toward.
So embedded in the very word is the idea of turning toward what you value.
That’s it. Worship is orientation. Not submission. Orientation.
Why This Matters Right Now
I spent years studying with gurus, exploring Vedic sciences, mystery schools, alchemy, Catholicism, you name it. I chased enlightenment across traditions. I detailed all of that in my Lionheart series.
And one of the things that kept tripping me up and trips up a lot of founders and high-agency entrepreneurs I work with is a confusion between what we say we value and what we actually orient toward.
You say you value family, but your calendar is 90% work. You say you value health, but you haven’t moved your body in weeks. You say you value building something real, but you spend hours a day consuming content about other people who built something real.
That’s not a judgment. That’s a diagnostic. Your calendar reveals your worship.
If worship is worth-ship (the condition of ascribing worth) then you worship what you repeatedly give attention to. You worship what you sacrifice time for. You worship what you organize your life around. You worship what you emotionally elevate.
No incense required.
The Psychological Layer
Modern religious usage narrowed worship into ritualized praise, devotional singing, hierarchical submission. And there’s a place for rituals…they work. I’ve experienced them firsthand.
But etymologically, worship is about recognition of value.
So the real question isn’t “Do you worship?”, worship is inevitable. The question is: What are you worshiping? What are you treating as worthy in your life that you want to orient to?
Money? Stability? Family? Power? Truth? Comfort? Tesla Stock? Crypto? The Philadelphia Eagles? Captain America?
Whatever you consistently orient toward…that is your worship. And there’s a subtle but important distinction here. Adoration is not worship. Submission is not worship. Ritual is not worship.
Worship equals valuation plus orientation. You must value it AND orient your life around it.
The suffix “-ship” implies a state of being, a condition of relationship. Worship is not a moment, it’s not a ritual, it’s not a “when I need it”. It’s an ongoing, sustained relationship with what you deem worth-y.
And that doesn’t have to be anything spiritual or religious.
So take a moment and think…what is the thing you value that you have an ongoing relationship with that you orient yourself around?
Now Let’s Apply It Spiritually
[Note: I am not advocating adopting a foreign religious practice nor trying to diminish or make commentary on anyone’s beliefs. I’m describing how archetypal frameworks work to reorganize behavior and identity and my experience with it.]
If worship means “to ascribe highest worth and orient toward,” then worshipping a deity or spiritual figure is not primitive superstition. It’s psychological and archetypal alignment to better yourself in whatever way that deity or spiritual figure represents.
Every deity or spiritual figure across every tradition has a personified cluster of values. They represent and symbolize something greater than who/what they are objectively. And so the value in the worship is with what they represent to hopefully imbue some of those qualities within yourself.
Let me walk you through a few so you see what I mean.
Ganesha represents removal of obstacles, beginnings, intelligence, grounded wisdom, playful strength. To worship Ganesha in the worth-ship sense is to ascribe highest worth to wisdom before action. To value preparation before initiation. To honor humility over ego. When someone invokes Ganesha before launching a project, they’re saying: I value clarity and obstacle removal more than impulsive action. They are orienting their nervous system toward steady beginnings.
Lakshmi represents prosperity, abundance, harmony, flow. To worship Lakshmi is to ascribe worth to balance between material and spiritual life. To value generosity. To cultivate gratitude. It’s not “money magic.” Your budget you create each month, your gratitude practice you do daily, your hospitality…those are Lakshmi worship.
Jesus: historically and psychologically representing sacrificial love, forgiveness, truth under pressure, surrender to higher will, moral courage, son of God. To worship Jesus is to ascribe highest worth to love over power. To value forgiveness over revenge. To orient toward self-sacrifice for truth.
Baal: historically represented storm power, fertility, dominance, control over forces of nature. To worship Baal was to ascribe worth to power and productivity. To orient toward strength and dominance. Every modern corporation that worships growth at all costs is, archetypally, Baal-oriented. No altar required.
You see the pattern? Deities and spiritual figures have personified clusters of values. Worship is naming a value, personifying it, ritualizing your orientation toward it, and reinforcing identity through repetition.
And I’ll say this directly: if you claim worship but do not orient behavior toward those qualities, it is not worship. It is ritual. I grew up Christian. I took my Bible to quiet corners of USC’s campus and read Psalms and the New Testament and journaled how I could be more like Jesus while everyone else was at frat parties my Freshman year. There’s a difference between stated worship and lived worship. They are not the same. Case in point: showing up for Church service checking your latest fantasy football lineup before going back to watch back to back NFL games…
Kalabhairava & Me
Now we get into the one that hit close to home.
Kalabhairava is a fierce form of Shiva. Break the name: Kala means time, death, dissolution. Bhairava means the terrifying, the awe-inspiring, the remover of fear through confrontation.
So Kalabhairava is the keeper of Time who devours illusion.
He represents time as destroyer, ego death, ruthless clarity, protection through severity, cutting through delusion, boundaries that cannot be negotiated, karmic consequence.
He is not soft. He is not comforting. He is not abundance-oriented. He is uncompromising awareness.
To worship Kalabhairava in the worth-ship sense is to ascribe highest worth to truth over comfort. To value discipline over indulgence. To honor time as sacred and limited. To accept destruction as purification. To orient toward fear and walk into it rather than around it. To allow ego structures to die when they’re outdated.
It is saying: I value what is real more than what is pleasant.
Psychologically, this looks like radical self-honesty. No spiritual bypass. No inflation. No fantasy identity. No negotiation with procrastination. Respect for mortality.
And I can tell you because I lived it, that this is the energy that finally broke my cycle. Not Lakshmi’s flow. Not Ganesha’s gentle beginnings. It was the ruthless, time-bound, no-more-excuses energy of facing what I had been wasting.
I detailed in my Lionheart series how I spent years chasing mystical experiences, altered states, spiritual exceptionalism while my finances deteriorated, my body withered, my relationships eroded. I was living in cosmic bliss while I couldn’t afford groceries. I was accessing the Akashic Record while maxing out credit cards.
And through that journey (and archetypally), Kalabhairava asks one question: Where are you wasting time?
Not cosmically. Not philosophically. Right now. Today. In your calendar. In your habits. In the conversations you keep having that go nowhere. In the identity you keep propping up that can’t carry what you’re building.
The Fierce Compassion Layer
Despite the terrifying imagery, Kalabhairava’s purpose is protection through clarity. He removes self-deception, ego inflation, wasted years, indulgent fantasy. Not because he is cruel. Because time and your life is finite.
And that maps directly to the work Victoria and I do. We’re here to ask: can you carry what you’re trying to build? And if you can’t…if your identity, your nervous system, your operational systems aren’t built to hold the weight of your ambition, then we build structure before we create scale so that we avoid the wasted time of struggle, collapse and eventual rebuild.
That’s Kalabhairava energy translated into Capacity Architecture. Ruthless truth. Accountability. Discipline. Cutting excess. Honoring thresholds.
For me, this ruthless truth ultimately brought me back to a deeper understanding of what it means to follow Christ – not ritual allegiance, but lived alignment. For it’s not just the rigid fierceness and clarity needed in life, it’s also the grace bestowed upon me and forgiveness of my misaligned actions that were essential in helping me regain my footing as I move forward and stumble in life.
The Real Question
Given all of this: the etymology, the archetypes and the pattern…the question I ask of you isn’t theoretical:
What do you actually worship in life as evidenced by your behavior and what you orient around?
Not what you say in public. Not what’s on your vision board. Not the tradition you were raised in.
What does your daily orientation and prioritization of actions reveal?
Stability? Activations? Being special? Truth? Prosperity? Love? Power? Control? Comfort? Distraction? Physical looks?
What you worship is revealed by your daily orientation. Not your stated belief. And if there’s a gap between the two (between what you say you value and where your time, energy, attention, and money actually go), then that gap is the exact location of where your capacity ceiling is.
You don’t need to change religions. You don’t need a new guru. You need to get honest about what you’re currently ascribing worth to….and who/what you’re actually worshipping.
And then decide: is it worthy of you doing so? Does it help you build capacity? Is it supporting you build the structure?
Because…Capacity determines leadership. Structure determines destiny. Worship wisely.