When thinking of the world’s most renowned entrepreneurs and innovators, names like Steve Jobs of Apple fame to Elon Musk in his early PayPal and Tesla days may spring to mind.
Meanwhile, building on a different track, you’ll find an emergent group of “spiritual” entrepreneurs – folks like John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, who pursued a dream of bringing high quality food to everyday Americans with relentless passion, or Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, whose unique apparel company has championed the production of high quality, durable garments that challenge long-held assumptions about consumerism.
These are people who embrace business whilst embedding in their mission something deeper than pure profit.
It’s an idea that Fleur Chambers, the founder of The Happy Habit, can resonate with. The Melbourne-based meditation teacher and business owner has built a successful enterprise offering meditation, mindfulness, and wholehearted confidence to customers through apps like Insight Timer, her unique publishing arm, and other online teachings. Fitting with her ethos of giving back, she donates fifty per cent of her profits to help funded clean water projects for Bangladeshis in need.
Like any good journey, the making of The Happy Habit hasn’t been an overnight success. Fleur started the business in 2005, with the business evolving steadily alongside changing cultural needs and technological change.
“I’m very, very expanded – and that’s the beauty of a meditation practice. Right now in my business, I have all my structures in place, and those structures create safety and freedom. I’m very pleased to have laid an intellectual, structural, and financial framework that then means I can be really creative in all those aspects of the business,” Fleur Chambers muses.
The making of a meditation influencer
The confluence of spirituality and commerce can be a vexed topic, with people holding different views about how much money teachers and practitioners should earn from teaching yoga, meditation, and dispensing wisdom.
It’s worth noting (somewhat cheekily) that even the Buddha was a prince before becoming enlightened – a fact that perhaps lends itself to the interpretation that material comfort is key in order to pursue higher order spiritual questions. And for those with a positive view towards commerce, Fleur Chambers’ business journey to date is a marked success.
In The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes To Succeed, authors Ash Ali and Hassan Kubba contend that all entrepreneurs have a set of unique advantages, from intelligence, to where they were born, to connections that set them up for success. When asked to reflect on hers, Fleur highlights having the capital on hand to initially create her own Happy Habit app combined with her deeply spiritual worldview rooted in connection with nature, a sense of shared humanity, and a wild sense of curiosity.
“That combination means I can touch people in relevant and meaningful ways, and that my thirst continues so that I don’t run out of ideas or burnout when it comes to producing content because of that curiosity and that ability to feel into the shared experience of being human,” Fleur says.
On Insight Timer, Fleur is in the top 1 per cent of all instructors, with over 3 million global downloads. From a content perspective, she was able to test and learn in real time what meditation types were resonating among users thanks to a rise in the data-fication of content. A meditation inspiring app users to connect to the wisdom of trees, for example? A total flop. Meanwhile, the themes of “letting go of thoughts”, “morning meditations”, and “sleep meditations” to promote better rest? Definitive bops.
Over time, Fleur used the revenue generated through her success as a creator on Insight Timer to reinvest back into different aspects of The Happy Habit business, from adorably illustrated self-help and development books to online Zoom sessions for students.
The darker side of health, wellness, and spirituality
The pursuit of greater calm, wholeheartedness, and happiness are noble pursuits, but the health, wellness, and spiritual influencer territory isn’t without its darkness. A 2024 Netflix series called Apple Cider Vinegar revisited the story of an Australian woman called Belle Gibson, an early social media influencer who persistently lied about having cancer, raised money through her platform for charity, and convinced hundreds of thousands of followers that they too could cure or reverse hard to treat terminal illnesses through lifestyle fixes alone.
In the present day US, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr’s fringe views – that range from strange quirks to actively damaging like planting seeds of doubt around the use of life-saving vaccines – are tragically gaining a greater platform after the former environmental lawyer was installed as the US health secretary. Given that the US health secretary is a role intended to set the tone for important matters pertaining to American public health, his appointment has been widely criticised, but this doesn’t change the reality that once marginal, non-evidence based views about health and wellness will be propagated to millions during his tenure.
Even meditation itself has come under scrutiny. In January 2024, Financial Times journalist Maddison Marriage explored the dark side of increasingly popular 10-day silent meditation Vipassana retreats through Untold: The Retreat — an investigative podcast into the perils of meditation. Throughout her investigations, Maddison found that a subset of participants, who booked in to these retreats hoping to leave with a greater sense of equanimity and improved mental health, have instead left with symptoms including intensified suicidal ideation and psychotic breaks.
On the pointier end of this topic, Fleur Chambers expresses mixed feelings about the growing prominence of the health, wellness, and spiritual marketplace. Mindfulness, breathwork and inner child healing can be a major unlock for people – but there are questions as to who is well positioned to teach these ideas and in what context.
“The market is really saturated. Part of me thinks it’s wonderful, part of me thinks that’s great to shift consciousness,” she reflects. “And the other part of me is concerned about deep wisdom being chunked down into 30-second reels. There is probably a level of duty of care there that might be being missed.”
She adds that in 2025, many people have built up trauma from the past few years – a global pandemic, rapidly changing economic structures, and now, the uncertainty around generative AI. Fleur cautions people to be careful when navigating the industry, and to tune into their “inner knowing” over what any teacher tells them to do.
“I feel torn… The mainstreaming of ‘wellness’ does mean that more people are accessing support that normally wouldn’t,” she says. “But there is no quick fix. It’s definitely a journey, not a destination. And people should always trust their own inner knowing. For example, if you’re in a breathwork class and you feel panicked… pause. There’s a power dynamic between teacher and student that people need to be aware of and careful of.”
For those wanting to dip their toe in the meditation world guided by experienced practitioners, Fleur recommends fellow creator Sarah Blondin on Insight Timer (a peak choice for a dreamy, calming voice) and Jac Lewis from The Broad Place in Byron Bay.
An virtuous, energising cycle
Despite the need for increased discernment as a growing cohort of people navigate the mainstreaming of ‘wellness’, there’s no doubt that through her content, from Insight Timer to her book Wholehearted Confidence: A New Way To Live, Love, and Contribute, a sweet and gentle reader journey that traverses the field from mindfulness, shadow work, to positive affirmations, Fleur is onto something pretty special.
“I have this delight, motivation and thrill that I get to use my mind and heart to create content, that people listen to it and learn from it, and then others can drink clean water,” she says.
Indeed, this virtuous cycle captures something that goes to the very heart of spiritual entrepreneurship. And perhaps, a little more of that, and a little less of Jobs and Musk, is exactly what the next generation of innovators needs right now.
