When words hold deep power.
The story of how two words unlocked the missing piece of my career.
I promised you this post back in February. It’s the first day of July. Make of that what you will.
I’ve never been great at naming businesses. I’ve hosted plenty of naming strategy workshops in my day, and I can definitely steer a client in the best direction, but when it comes to my own business… it’s hard. My first foray into entrepreneurship was named after myself (Jessica Sutton Graphic Design, later shortened to JSGD, whose acronyms were forever mispronounced by clients and friends). So when it came to business number two, the approach was entirely –and unintentionally– different.
And in case you're new here, before I dive into the story of naming this business: Terre~Prana is a brand strategy and embodiment practice for founders.
My work lives at the intersection of somatics, energetics, and brand strategy, built on the premise that what you're transmitting underneath your brand matters just as much as what you're saying on top of it.
The words
It was 3am, I was half asleep, and for lack of any other term, I work up to a legit download. Two words simply arrived in my head: terre prana.
With them came a phrase, that kept repeating: “connecting the space between thought + action + body + earth.”
I memorized it, wrote it down, and attempted to go back to sleep.
I didn’t know what it was. I genuinely didn’t have a category for it. But I knew it was something I’d build (and yes, I bought the domain name immediately). Maybe a skincare line? I’d spent years helping brands in that space launch and find their footing, and I loved that world. Maybe a curated shop, with handmade finds from artisans I’d discover in different corners of the world? I held the name loosely and genuinely wasn’t pushing it into a shape.
And honestly? It didn’t dawn on me that it would become this. Not for three more years.
What eventually emerged as Terre~Prana wasn’t something I designed or engineered from a strategy session. It arrived the same way the name did: through a kind of internal listening that, once I finally named it, turned out to be the whole point of the work. The name wasn’t waiting for a business to attach itself to. It was waiting for me to catch up to what it already knew.
The Meaning
Terre.
French for earth, ground... but extended in concept to matter, weight, stability, and roots.
Prana.
Sanskrit for life force, breath... the current moving through everything alive. Not just the air you inhale, but the animating intelligence powering life.
Put them together and you get: breath of the earth. The life force of matter itself.
And the tilde between them isn’t a stylistic choice. A hyphen connects. A slash separates. A tilde moves. It’s a wave, a vibration, a bridge between two things that belong together but aren’t the same thing. It’s a breath between. It’s the whole essay, actually, in a single piece of punctuation.
When I finally started unpacking what the name held, I realized it had arrived complete. Everything I eventually built into this work (the body, the earth, the energy, the space between) was already in those two words and that little wave.
The space we live in
Here’s something that tends to land differently when you really sit with it: we don’t live on the earth or in the sky, but in the thin, charged layer between them.
That atmosphere (the biosphere, technically) is the only place where life as we know it exists. Ground below, space above, and us suspended in this breathing envelope in between.
It’s where your business lives too.
Not in the strategy deck. Not in the spreadsheet. Not in the content calendar or the launch plan or the perfectly worded offer. Your business lives in that in-between space where your internal state meets the outside world and becomes something other people can actually feel.
Think about the founders you’ve encountered who seem to have everything dialed in from the outside: the tight messaging, the consistent aesthetic, the smart positioning. And yet something about them doesn’t quite land. You can’t articulate why. You just feel it.
And then think about the ones who maybe aren’t doing everything “right” by the conventional metrics but their presence still stops you mid-scroll. You feel them before you’ve processed a single word.
That difference isn’t strategy, it’s the field they’re holding. The energetic texture of that in-between space, between what they know internally and what they’re putting into the world. When those two things are coherent, people feel it. And when they’re not, people feel that too.
Terre~Prana is named after that space. The charged layer between ground and breath. Between earth and air. Between who you are inside, what you’re creating, and how it’s felt.
We’re transmitters
Most of us were taught to think about our businesses as something we build outward. We produce content, craft offers, refine our messaging, optimize our positioning. The focus is too often put on more, better, and faster output.
And sure, that framework made sense for a while... but we’re in a different moment now.
The HeartMath Institute has been studying the electromagnetic field generated by the human heart for decades. That field is real, measurable, and it extends beyond the body (up to 8 feet!). What you’re feeling and what’s happening in your nervous system is literal broadcasting.
So when I say you’re a transmitter, I don’t mean it as a metaphor. I mean that your internal state (your regulation, your clarity, your coherence, the stories running underneath your surface) is being felt by the people around you, including the people who read your words, listen to your voice, or step into your offers. Whether you’ve consciously chosen what to transmit or not.
This is what I call the Resonance Economy. We’ve moved through the industrial economy (what you make), the knowledge economy (what you know), and now we’re somewhere else entirely. And this somewhere rewards how deeply you’re felt. Think: your presence, your coherence, your frequency. These are the new differentiators. And they can’t be manufactured by AI, by an app, or by an agency.
Which means all the surface-level brand work in the world won’t save you if what’s underneath it is misaligned. The caption won’t land if the nervous system writing it is contracted. The offer won’t convert if the energy behind it is desperate. The positioning won’t stick if the founder hasn’t yet embodied what they’re claiming to stand for.
The transmission is the brand.
The symbology
If you’ve looked closely at the logo I designed for Terre~Prana logo, you’ve seen it.
Two circles, same size, each one passing through the other’s center point. Where they overlap, an almond-shaped space appears. That shape has a name: the vesica pisces. And it’s one of the oldest sacred geometry symbols we have access to. It has always shown up, across traditions and cultures and centuries, as a natural expression of how creation works.
The geometry is specific. Each circle must pass through the other’s exact center, resulting in the inevitable product of two things fully meeting.
That overlap is creation.
This is a perfect example of where of two things becomes a third, without compromise.
It’s also one of the oldest symbols of the divine feminine for this reason. Not because it’s soft or passive or decorative, but because it’s generative. It’s literally the geometry of a womb-space and inception.
I could argue that it could be viewed as the geometry of magnetism. Not necessarily the mechanics of attraction (the pushing, convincing, or optimized funnel), but the actual physics of it. Two fields with real coherence, meeting in the middle, generating something neither one could produce alone. That’s the overlap, the charge.
And that’s what Terre~Prana is trying to point at: the meeting place. Where your internal truth meets your external expression. Where your ground meets your breath. Where the seen meets the felt. Where magnetism lives. No, not because you built a better strategy, but because two true things finally met in the middle.
Brand Somatics™ enters the chat
So the name arrived before the work… and the work spent three years catching up to it.
Brand Somatics™ is the methodology that makes all of this livable.
Not just philosophical, but practical. Because here’s the thing: you can totally understand everything I’ve just written and still be broadcasting misalignment. Understanding it isn’t the same as embodying it. We all know the body keeps its own ledger.
Just like traditional business concepts, traditional brand strategy focuses outward: messaging, positioning, identity systems, visual language. And those things do matter. Hell, I built a twenty-plus-year career in that space and I still care deeply about the craft of it. But they’re the outer ring. They express what’s already true inside, and when the inside and outside are out of sync, the gap is palpable.
Brand Somatics™ works from the inside out. It asks: what does your brand feel like right now? Where is it holding tension? What’s your nervous system doing when you write your content, price your offers, show up in a sales conversation? What are you actually transmitting underneath the words, underneath the visuals, underneath the strategy you’ve spent months refining?
Because when your nervous system is regulated, your message lands. When your body is grounded, your community feels it. When you’re in coherence (genuinely, not performatively) you stop having to push your brand toward people and start becoming something they’re drawn toward.
That’s the work. That’s what Terre~Prana was always pointing at. The name was the instruction. I just needed time to understand what it was instructing.
If any part of this landed, I want to ask you something: It’s not what you’re posting, what you’re building, or what you have planned for Q3. But...
What are you transmitting right now?
Because that’s what this whole space is built around.
Thanks for being here,
~Jess
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