Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Chen.
Hi Paul, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
As the owner and publisher of Atlanta’s Natural Awakenings magazine, I’d say there are a couple of throughlines from my youth to now. The first is a love of writing from a very young age. One of my earliest memories is as a third grader, delighting in a story I wrote about a dragon lifting the roof off the Catholic church that I grew up attending.
Fast forward many years, and I served on the staff of my high school and college newspapers. I held editor positions for both, and for a while, I wanted to be a journalist. However, as my time in college drew to a close, my perspective changed. I saw reporting as writing about what other people did, and I wanted to be more on the action side of things. So, in my first job out of college, I ended up as a public relations director for an educational lobby organization.
But the one thing that stuck with me after giving up the idea of becoming a journalist is that I always felt I would be good at directing the overall content of a publication, which is definitely one of the most enjoyable aspects of publishing Natural Awakenings.
Another through line is pushing against our common culture. This probably had its beginnings in the fact that, as a Chinese kid, I was an object of prejudiced treatment throughout my childhood, so the culture I was immersed in was already awful from my perspective.
In college, I took a Marx-Engels course, and Marx’s theory on the alienation of labor profoundly affected me. You know, most Americans who criticize socialism by and large don’t know how to define it, much less have ever studied it, but I believe the majority of working Americans are personally alienated from their work, and if they were familiar with Marx’s concept, would agree with his analysis. I have certainly felt that alienation, with which has led me to own my own business.
There are many other aspects of common culture that I push against, and two significant expressions of that pushback can be found in where I live and where we send our kids to school.
I’m a founding member of East Lake Commons. It’s a cohousing community, which is a place where residents want to be connected to their neighbors versus hardly knowing them at all, which happens in most neighborhoods.
My former wife and I sent our boys to the Waldorf School of Atlanta. Waldorf is so different in so many ways, and one of the most salient differences is that the school recommends not exposing your children to the digital world until ninth grade. Our media policy, which was in effect through the eighth grade, was two hours a week, which only could be used during the weekends. And it covered TV shows, movies, video games, and computer time; two hours tops! We had so many parents stare at us like we were aliens: How do you babysit them without TV and video games? That question comes from people who abide in American culture, like fish in water, and don’t question how things could be better. Our kids built endlessly with Legos, created their own comic books, played outside a lot with their neighbors, which was much easier to do given cohousing, and they actually read books!
Finally, Natural Awakenings itself is a very niche publication. I describe it as Atlanta’s only magazine focused on holistic health and conscious evolution. Both those topics go against the grain of common American culture, which largely accepts what’s promulgated by the medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, and food industries and which focuses on material life versus our emotional and spiritual dimensions.
We’ve been impressed with Natural Awakenings magazine, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Natural Awakenings magazine is Atlanta’s only publication focused on holistic health and conscious evolution. We’re a free monthly publication that can be found in hundreds of locations throughout the metro area. I’m the fourth publisher and I bought the magazine in 2017, but the Atlanta franchise was established in the early 2000s, so our readers know us very well.
We’re a franchise operation, and corporate provides the bulk of our editorial in departments such as Healing Ways, Conscious Eating, Fit Body, Healthy Kids, and Natural Pet. However, the Atlanta staff creates a ton of content, and the Yoga and Conscious Evolution departments are our own. Indeed, my primary motivation in acquiring Natural Awakenings is that I want to publish content that encourages people to seriously think about and pursue conscious evolution, whether that manifests as efforts to increase one’s capacity for loving relationships, compassionate action, or spiritual depth.
One of the limits of the magazine format is that it doesn’t encourage much depth in articles. We like depth, so the way we get around the magazine format is to publish multiple articles on a topic, either all in one issue or spread across several issues. For example, we’ve gone deep on energy healing, life coaching, health coaching, the Enneagram, and Ayurveda.
We are also committed to supporting the Black holistic community and have published several in-depth projects in that area: Black & Vegan, Healing the Trauma of Slavery, and Black & Natural. The first package was wildly popular on social media, well, for us anyway; it racked up several thousand likes. The second package was the hardest thing we’ve ever done, by like a factor of 20. It’s also probably the best thing we’ve ever done, which is saying a lot because I really do feel that among the 45 Natural Awakenings franchises, we produce the best editorial. On the occasion of the very first issue under my tenure, the national editor said that the issue represented, in terms of both quantity and quality, the best single issue she’d ever seen outside that of the company’s founder. Guess what? We’ve only gotten better!
I think the two other things I want your readers to know is that if they read Natural Awakenings, we’d love to hear from them! Tell us what you like and don’t like, what you’d like to see more of and less of. My email address is publisher@naatlanta.com. Feel free to contact me!
The other thing I’d like them to know is that my customers, the magazine’s advertisers, are wonderful! One thing I knew about this business before it was mine is that I would be meeting really great people, both from the editorial side, people we interview, and from the sales side, people we sell ads to. My customers’ hearts are so in the right place. They have special talents and truly want to help others live better lives, whether what they offer is health products or services, coaching services, therapeutics, workshops and retreats, and on and on. And almost all of them are incredibly authentic, sincere and kind, and I consider many of them friends. So, even though this is self-serving, I say, “Check out our advertisers! You’ll be glad you did.”
How do you think about luck?
I’m a longtime student of Buddhism, so I believe in karma, not luck. Good karma produces what might appear as good luck and bad karma produces what might appear as bad luck.
But hey, let’s just use the word luck here. In which case, I have to say I feel incredibly lucky. First, I’m alive! My father’s side of the family has significant heart issues, and I’ve already outlived him, so yes, just being alive feels “lucky.” I’m enormously lucky in my relationships: my former wife, my kids, my friends, and my colleagues… all smart and loving people.
And I will say that being able to acquire Natural Awakenings was “lucky” in that it was one of my sons who pointed out that a certain asset I owned was worth far more than I ever imagined. Selling it enabled me to buy the franchise.
We’ve been lucky to interview some incredible people like the Indian spiritual master Sadhguru, acclaimed author Dr. Shefali Tsabary, and author and speaker Bruce Lipton. Lipton, as some of your readers may know, is one of “Three Amigos,” the other two being Joe Dispenza and Gregg Braden. Gregg actually wrote an article for us, and we covered Joe’s appearance at the Attune conference at Serenbe in 2019.
Pricing:
- Enhanced Business Listing: $75/month, 12-month minimum
- Display Ads: List Prices range from $126 for 1/12-pg and $1,050 for a full-page ad, non-premium page.
- Discounts on Display Ads: 10% for six-month campaigns and 25% for 12-month campaigns.
Contact Info:
- Website: naAtlanta.com
