It started with a pile of cash on the kitchen table, and a family wondering what on earth had just happened.
Stephanie Malo, author and founder of Stopping to Smell the Flowers: A Healing & Resource Centre in Thamesford, hadn’t set out to build a business. She’d just written a book.
“I started it in 2012 when my book came out,” Stephanie said of the first title in her Stopping to Smell the Flowers series — a collection of short stories about slowing down and noticing the moments, aptly subtitled “Extraordinary Observations of Everyday Life.” She brought it to the Thamesford library, and then to the library’s writing group, half unsure what came next.
“I came home with a pile of cash. My kids are like, Mom, what did you just go do? I’m like, I’m not sure. But I’ll take it.”
Two more Stopping to Smell the Flowers books followed — Everything’s Coming Up Roses and The Space In Between — all now carried across the Oxford County library system. But the business didn’t fully take shape until a counsellor, hearing Stephanie describe her nightly habit of lighting a candle and watching her thoughts pass by, offered a simple observation: that’s meditation.
“She referred me to somebody, a free website. I started following this person’s short little meditations, and my life started to change,” Stephanie said. Her kids noticed before she did. “It was such a pivotal moment when my kids said to me, Mom, you’ve changed.”
Convinced that what helped her could help others, Stephanie started a meditation group roughly a decade ago. It began in the Thamesford library’s aptly named Lion’s Den, outgrew the room, moved into an Anglican church, then a rented space above what used to be Nook’s and Granny’s — until she finally built a meditation hut of her own rather than keep hauling battery-operated candles from venue to venue. Somewhere along the way, she brought copies of her book to a session almost as an afterthought. “I said to them, I wrote a book — are you guys interested in seeing it? And they’re like, what? Bring more copies in. Then they were buying the book. I’m like, there’s something going on here. There’s some value here.”
Today, that value shows up as group sessions and one-to-one work built around a single idea: that people carry stored, stuck energy as emotion in the body, and moving it through allows what they want in their lives to actually come forward. Guided meditation remains her longest-running offering, alongside a newer session called the Light Circle — “a spiritual book club” built around her third book — and a growing menu that now includes a self-paced online journalling course and, new this year, a membership program and an “Immersion” Series workshop teaching manifestation, drawing on her background in science alongside the energetics of her writing.
What Stephanie is proudest of isn’t the books, though — it’s what happens after people leave a session. “I’ve had people leave the meditation hut and go, does everything look different to you?” she said. One recent member’s decades-long friend noticed the same shift from the outside. “That’s just such an honour.”
Running a healing-centred business has taught Stephanie a harder lesson than she expected: vulnerability. “You have people come and go, and they come and go because of their own lives,” she said. Letting go of that — along with learning not to internalize judgment from strangers on social media — surprised her more than any of the practical side of entrepreneurship. “So that was the most surprising part, because I think I probably pictured just building — more and more and more. But it’s more like, you have to trust that the right people will find you. There’s a trust factor there.”
That perspective shapes the advice she’d give someone just starting out: a business plan needs more than financial projections. “To include a summary or an analysis of the energy it’s going to take to do that, to prevent burnout,” Stephanie said. “We have to look at money and energy, because they’re both a currency.”
Growth is very much underway. Stephanie is expanding into event speaking, with her first major booking landing at the end of September with the leadership team at Hospice Wellington — a connection that traced back to a chance meeting at a book signing in Guelph. A fourth book series is in the editing process, and she’s just launched a podcast and TV segment called The Energy Files by Forest and Flower, produced with a fellow entrepreneur who left a corporate science career to open a nature-based centre in Cambridge. The show airs on Rogers TV under its community programming mandate. “I really believe that to succeed in business moving forward in today’s world, we need to collaborate,” Stephanie said. “It has to be co-creation and collaboration.”
For Stephanie, that collaborative spirit is exactly what makes Rural Oxford feel different. “It’s just so magical,” she said. She described heading out to play pickleball with no intention of talking business, only to have someone in the group mention her sessions to a newcomer — who then became a client. “That’s Rural Oxford. It could happen in a bigger city, but it just feels so natural and so joyful and smooth to make connections.”
Even after years in business, Stephanie says she sometimes forgets how many pieces make up what she offers — including her newest addition this year, a series blending her science background with manifestation practice, born the same way most of her offerings start: as a trial run people simply didn’t want to end.
“Sign up for my newsletter,” she said with a laugh, “because I’ll say what’s next.”
Stopping to Smell the Flowers: A Healing & Resource Centre
Stephanie Malo
130 Stanley St S, Thamesford, ON
Zorra Township
Established 2012
stoppingtosmelltheflowers.com
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