Sunday, October 23, 2022

Let's Talk About MONEY!

At many gatherings in the USA, you might find yourself engaging in casual conversation with folks about politics, sex, substance use, religion, and more. But beyond all that potential TMI, folks rarely talk about how much money they make or have.

We've been trained to be secretive about money. In fact, it may be the most secretive part of your life. If you have a lot of it, you're probably very private about just how much you have, in order to protect your wealth, and maybe because you don't necessarily want people to know how you acquired it. If you only have a little money, you're probably very private about it because you've been taught to be ashamed of being monetarily poor, like it's a moral failing.

Capitalism in fact relies on this secrecy. If we have lots of money, capitalism has trained us to hoard it and hide it, and devote ourselves to expanding our monetary wealth. Folks like Donald Trump base their power on a mystique of wealth, while never actually revealing their net worth, or exaggerating it to make themselves seem more powerful and influential. Conspicuous consumption is practiced by folks of all income levels as a pretense of wealth, like the way we're taught to stand tall and raise our arms when we encounter a bear in the wild, to appear larger and more powerful than we actually are.

One of the results of the secrecy around money is that the wealth gap becomes ever larger. The wealthy find ever more ways to extract money, find tax loopholes, and monetize the hell out of everything, including air, water, and health itself. The poor become even more marginalized as prices continually rise, education becomes less and less accessible, and wages stagnate. One of the ways we can shrink the wealth gap is by breaking the taboo of silence over money with open bookkeeping, for businesses and organizations, and by talking openly about money with friends, family, and others we interact with.

What if instead of dollars we had bananas? It would be obvious who had many and who had few. Those with many would feel awkward, to say the least, to be seen hoarding more bananas than could be eaten. Those with few bananas would naturally be given more bananas, because no one wants to see another go hungry. Money is currency: meant to flow. Like water, it finds its level. It seeks horizontality, not verticality. But when secrecy is enforced, we build dams that don't give a chance for money to flow. Instead it stagnates, pools, gets rancid, while some flood and others die in drought.

I've been rich and I've been poor. For the first 50 years of my life, I experienced financial stability and a middle class or upper middle class life. I walked away from 1.5 million dollars of assets when my marriage ended in 2012. The money felt ill-gotten, a huge karmic load I did not feel capable of processing in a healthy and equitable way. In my very bones, capitalism felt irreparably harmful and an extension of inequity, and I wanted no part of it.

Since 2012, I've lived modestly on very little money, doing what I love, in voluntary simplicity. I practice gift economy, barter, and creative exchange. My motto is "If I won't do it for free, I won't do it for money." I live a life of incredible abundance on about $20,000/year. Liberating myself from wealth has proven to be spiritually liberating as well. I grow food, I forage, I skillshare with friends. I belong to cooperatives. I've learned how to make do, do without, or make my own. I reduce, reuse, recycle, and repurpose. I produce less than one small produce bag of garbage every 2-3 weeks. 

I reluctantly live in a capitalist society. My goal is to find cooperative housing, where I can live in community, have access to a garden, and invest in collective liberation. Meanwhile, I pay $1500 in rent every month for a high-rise apartment, owned by a friend who is willing to receive an amount lower than market rate. To keep a roof over my head I must engage in some capitalist practices. But I am continually striving to move beyond these practices. I encourage those who have more to give more, and for those who have less to take more. As a result I have students who pay me very little, and others who compensate by paying more. 

I will not glorify poverty. I recognize that our class structure requires impoverishment of millions of people, who are suffering and dying because of the restrictions imposed on them. I recognize that my relationship with money comes from a position of privilege, as someone who has always lived with generational financial stability, and who has many non-monetary resources to draw from.

As yoga practitioners, we become more and more sensitive to our own bodies. As this sensitivity develops, we become more sensitive to each other, and to the collective and transgenerational body. We also become more sensitive to other non-human beings: the land, the trees, animals, wind, and water. We cannot help but want to be harmonious with all these beings.

As such, accruing material wealth is counterintuitive and counterproductive. We recognize that the consumption that capitalism requires has been destroying life all around us. We yearn to live in greater balance with other beings, human, and more-than-human.

The same way yogāsana trains me to be in uncertain and uncomfortable positions with calmness and confidence, I have been practicing being comfortable with a low financial threshold. Somehow I always have enough to travel, study, grow, and thrive. Ironically I experienced more scarcity when I had lots of money than I do now, because of the socially conditioned drive to continually protect my assets, and the time and energy this required. Besides, it's all relative. I try to keep about $10k in savings for any needs that may arise, while knowing that for so many, this is an impossibly high threshold, and for others, it's such a pittance it's hardly worth it. 

I renounced almost all my assets when I left my marriage: 2 houses, retirement funds, stocks and bonds.... I could not justify holding onto anything contributing to the bloated militaristic, capitalist, racist patriarchy. Also, I instinctively knew that to be in solidarity with my community, I had to expose myself to the same risks. Water seeks its level. I knew that to build community, I could only be trusted if I allowed currency to flow like water. I also knew that coming into a community with a disproportional level of assets would inevitably create a disproportional, imbalanced level of power and responsibility. I would be perceived as the de facto leader if I held the purse strings, and as a non-Black newcomer to Detroit, where I moved in 2013, I knew this would be deeply problematic. I yearned to contribute to the fabric of community already there, and not to displace anyone or anything. 

This is why cooperatives have not become the dominant organizational structure. Those with material wealth have been deeply conditioned to guard it with their life, to hide it, and to continually grow it, not share it. Those with less material wealth have been conditioned to feel ashamed, and not recognize the value of their largely uncompensated skills.

The opposite of scarcity is not wealth. It's relationships. It's community. I'm wealthy because I have good neighbors. I share my resources with them. I help with dog walks and Costco runs and other errands. Together, we held a grieving ceremony after the Uvalde shooting. I invited them to my Chuseok potluck. I ask them to help me with rides to the airport, borrowing tools, and sharing internet. I'm wealthy because I have flexibility in my schedule that allows me to spend ample time with my children and grandchildren, and to cook and share food. I'm wealthy because I have developed valuable skills as a healer and teacher. 

I'm wealthy because I have experienced material wealth and rejected it. I recognize that it takes a tremendous inner safety net to be able to walk away from money. I also recognize that it's the ultimate power move, because it means you cannot be bought nor sold, and that you exist and thrive beyond the limits of money. I know that I had to experience wealth before I could reject it, and I completely understand why others do not have this relationship with money. I support those who have been intergenerationally and systemically impoverished in accumulating wealth. I had to go through the entire cycle of rich to poor to experience both the creative and destructive power of money.

I am not unique by any means in choosing a life not based on material wealth. I know lots of folks in Detroit who lead revolutionary lives, and have long rejected the trappings of capitalism. They live on cash, have multiple hustles, live in multigenerational households, grow food, look out for their neighbors, belong to co-ops, and share, share share. The way I live has always been the indigenous way, but our lives have been corrupted by the individualistic demands of capitalism.

To be materially poor does not necessarily lead to scarcity and suffering. Finding alternatives to consumerism and capitalism can be incredibly inspiring and empowering. Yes, let's talk about money, whether you have it, and want to use it to disrupt the destructive status quo, or whether you don't have it, but want to live abundantly and joyfully. Stop hiding your bananas. Let the water flow.



Sunday, October 9, 2022

Orland Bishop, Collective Trauma Summit 2022 in conversation with Thomas Hübl

I first came across Orland Bishop when my children were small, at a Waldorf education conference. He embodied a resonance that contained deep wisdom and important messages that penetrated deep into my soul. Ever since then, he has continued to amaze me and take me to new levels of understanding and possibility. This interview moved me so deeply I listened to it several times, and finally sat down with it to take detailed notes. The notes are a way of taking the reflections into my body, to allow them to keep moving and evolving.
 
Started in allopathic medicine at MLK Hospital, the most recognized trauma center in LA in 1980s
- primarily gun violence, looking at physical trauma, not so much psychological
- did fellowship at Franz Fanon Center at hospital, which centered accumulated transgenerational trauma 
    - working on resilience, inner life - what does human being do in face of trauma? 
    - consciousness field which becomes active when something unknown happens - what is soul response to mind/body experience?
 
The inner dialogue makes me a host for my wound
The outer dialogue allows me to engage with someone else who helps to orient me toward a sense of the future
The future is the space between 2 or more human beings that allows us to evolve, a reasoning process for what ails me 
- it wakes me up to my wound, which awakes me to feel a resolve to search something
    - the resolve doesn't close the wound, it's an expansion of the healing consciousness that the wound leads to
The self requires a dialogue with other beings - the genesis pathway
- children who have been exposed to violence, damaged sense of trust which never closes because it is within the "I"- essential being of the self
    - if I can presence my I with theirs, a superconscious dialogue begins

As a child, beginning age 5, I chose to maintain a space beyond my cultural boundaries, beyond what was normal in cultural reality, to stay awake more than usual, because I wanted to see things happening beyond my control, and had an insight about how to live beyond these events
By age 11, I had a way to integrate it into my csns
- how to prepare myself for things others might not be aware of
- what is normal, what is a bit beyond normal that we can go to and come back from

Resilience is an expanding of soul forces into the "perfecting realm" 
- the soul forces come back to rebuild the mind/body relationship
Worked with children - without the expectation that I had to do something with their wounds
- create another kind of attention around them as protection - to protect them from others telling them what to do
    - then the mind will grow into a space, which is freedom
    - this creative act brings them back into a sense of beginning 
        - this gap is not inherited - it's a choice that the human being always carries
            - I work within that choice - eg working with gangs, peacemaking - to 
            - for cellular memory, this epigenetic space is there

How to create environment for own healing to take place?
Africa-gnosis - this gap is an initiation threshold
- between the mind and body is a purpose field in which energy and information accumulate, a feeling for other possibilities
    - separates person from what they know, put them into an experience in which energy gets released, in touch with archetypal/ancestral/prophetic world
    - releases body into a quantum development
    - indigenous knowledge puts person outside of time and body
        - cellular memory/mitochondria carries this knowledge
        - when I don't know what's happening, I contract - must trust the elder, who holds the string for maturation for forward development     
    - in western tradition we protect what we know - I only know my body, I really don't know my mind
        - my body memory tells me I am here, who I am, why I'm here - this is how we operate
            - this can be traumatic, when I don't know what else to do, because my knowledge doesn't give me this threshold
My work has been to go to indigenous traditions to know how this threshold works, and be able to guide others - to go a little bit beyond the normal range of what we know
    - we know this as the transition from waking to sleeping, at point of death etc
 
 At age 7, fell into a hole into water - body suspended breathing and something else awoke - observing self in water but no water in lungs
    - realized this was part of African tradition
    - sense perception expanded, intuitional space awakened, became clairvoyant
    - an initiation without a guide, except ancestors
    - later invited to South Africa with _______ to practice Indaba 
        - learned about me through other dimensions
    - then in Burkina Faso with Malidoma and Sonbofu Somé in Dagara tradition for ritual work
         
Deep dialogue work - With whom do you need to speak in order for your story to become true?
Indaba tradition - first level is to tell the story (personal or initiatory) 
- wakes up the energy that reveals what is to be known 
- awakens archetypal forces
- what is it to be known? what is my body to become? to ask the other or to ask self
    - this is what's most important in the tradition of dialogue
- we've forgotten that the mind is the witnessing space for dialogue
    - we have come to depend on intellect instead
    - we need to know not just the content of our lives but the purpose of our interaction - by giving attention to the energy to be reminded that there is something I don't know I know
        - this phenomena activates the 5 generations of ancestral memory which is in the body
            - 2 peoples' stories are trying to break out of the pattern that will keep me in my historical inheritances, and create a chemistry for a more self-conscious effect
            - dialogue not based on intellect but on energy
This energy catalyzes profound inspiration and aspiration of the will to move to the intuitive level, and this is where true dialogue begins
- I can ask a question about the future which is not in the content of my own life
    - put into my own energy processes higher forces of creativity to move to the prophetic realm, beyond the inspirational level
        - so you and I can go somewhere together if we build the energy field appropriate for a superconscious realm to emerge

Building different, higher levels of resonance together
Sau bona - we see you - the intelligences emerging from our agreement becomes a shared reality - the prophetic realm - beyond the ancestral world to the archetypal and higher worlds of creation

When I look at you, you live in me and I live in you - because we are happening in each other's nervous systems - intraconnected
- if we can pay attention to that resonance, we are pulling in a mutual future that exceeds what we know separately - new space being created

What if I can't see you? cannot resonate with you?
- our sensitivity forces are conditioned by csns of mind - which is mostly sympathy and antipathy
    - we learn preferences which become prejudices - we push back on things we don't understand
        - initiation requires going into unknown - if we knew what our initiation would look like, we would reject it - we resist transformation, we like the forming of knowledge that meets my self-interest and self-feeling
            - we protect ourselves from change, including allowing someone else's cognizable mind to come into me

The heart forces create empathy, another kind of feeling - a feeling for the other more so than self
-  RW Emerson: "There's a power in love to divine another's destiny, better than that other can, and with heroic encouragements, hold him to his task."
    - when my heart forces recognizes another's energy field, I become a host for the future that is trying to live into their own being
- this feeling of empathy substitutes their own feeling of antipathy, because it goes beyond the choice point of my sense perception
            - cognitive free forces go to another's without any judgment
            - catalytic memory starts to grow - creating sanctuary for the other - freedom from judgment of any kind, including needing to know their story
- the story I am interested in is the future story - need shared purpose for the memory, just hearing about their wounds does nothing for either of us
     - the future contextualizes the past
     - this kind of attention generates freedom for the other
 
An open free space that can invite transformation which has the power to overcome separation and to alchemize a new mutual space
We become together, incarnate into the self, a maturing of the will
The other person is protected from losing touch with their security - must enhance their security by telling them they are free
- most people cannot feel it just out of the mind - they need someone else to host a level of their own freedom
    - we can tell when we are in a nonjudgmental space through our sense perception

An immense struggle to fill in the space with the heart forces
- worked with young man diagnosed with schizophrenia after drug-induced psychosis
    - spent 20 hours/day for 2 weeks, only witnessing, not diagnosing, until he could recognize me
    - communicated an agreement to leave "here" - to move into another state where extrasensory perception could be normalized, and a new chemistry of boundaries could be created
        - took 2 months to bring chemistry back into range of mutual reality
            - when psychiatrists would come into the room, he would re-enter psychosis - that projection of knowledge transferred again
                    - when they left, he would engage in normal range
            - invited him to choose which reality he preferred - he chose reality in which he could converse with me
Our minds are always trying to figure out who is the host for the reality in which more freedom can come 
- instead of battling, we liberate the creative forces and allow the soul to choose, because soul knows more than the mind what and when a purpose should be fulfilled
    - we don't choose the place to be but we choose the time to be
        - boundaries of other realities close when we choose
        - we are continually choosing our futures - we just don't believe in them strong enough for them to fulfill the other states of being
 
Quality, fluidity of our inner space spacious enough to hold societal issues
- if we can hold this space it can have a big transformational impact - how is this done?
The space of our relationships - depends on timing
- timing is the first element for transmutation of personality and trauma so that body generates a new beginning
- how to get the mind to surrender to its beginning?
    - eg child speaks in third person because they don't yet have sense of self, body is not yet connected to I 
        - soul force needed to mature child to incarnate into own body
- our truth is hidden in language, grammar, perception, and cognitive stages such that I choose which time-body to live in
    - I could choose to live in the ancestral/inherited realm, or I could choose to live in a state of transmutation
        - have to be willing to change my personality - I have to become another conscious being in order to allow my energy to evolve into creativity

Henrietta Lacks - blood was transmuted, cell became immortal - her life is distributed into other forms, every lab, for future of human medicine
- transmuted self in ways that don't make sense in biological time, only in spiritual time
    - what it means to vacate memory from the body that allows it to become a host for time-forces, where it's always NOW
        - a constant pure life field in the cell, maintaining pure equilibrium free of trauma

Sacred hospitality - in this time, a phenomena is trying to enter our lives
- if we could choose an agreement that is energetically appropriate for trust, this event will happen
    - metamorphosis of the given - the given is anything I carry in my perception or cognition to which I give attention
        - my attention is a spiritual activity that creates a space between you and me to go through a metamorphosis
            - I give my attention because it heals me when I give it, and heals you when you receive it
                - it can move between us to higher levels of creativity - can go into the unconscious, superconscious 
 - the movement of energy without any content, to ask what are you willing to be if freedom is given?
      - to give attention without asking for anything back, so that the person can choose what they give back
      - if they reciprocate with attention, becomes a communion of soul forces that allows the mind to receive something
 
We become the future download for each other
- healing alchemical quality which affects trauma stored in us, eg fragmented past or storage of information that is frozen
    - a mutual anchoring in the future which allows us to move into a new version of ourselves
 
To put energy and cognitive feeling of truth into words - coming from heart as creative force, prioritizing other's future
- a vessel for what is trying to begin in pure attentiveness - stepping out of the past into the present phenomena of feeling of trust - this space is between us
 
A traumatic event creates a chunk of the past which is shut down and held in nervous system, and creates a mirror future in nervous system, which is an escape of the real future
- healing allows for a reintegration which allows us to move into the real future
    - we open the space for one another
         - we don't want to be in the future by ourselves! the dialogue space/language structure allows us to ask who else agrees with what I know to be true
            - we can expand what we know to include levels of agreement we have not yet lived
Indaba - cognitive steps toward higher agreement possible in superconscious, not yet mapped
- civilization has to choose what has to be transformed in our ways of life
    - eg climate change requires different choices about environment
        - initiation requires we need to give up something - content of our csns - we don't want to do this because we think we will lose ourself
            - healing is most profound when I choose to be the knower but not the knowledge

Collective csns field has reached its limit of what knowledge through the intellect can do
- collective trauma body in the world and its fear is the result of our knowledge
    - we need to choose now to leave it - our knowledge cannot complete the next step going into the superconscious field
- our astral body has an electromagnetic force that unites us as a global csns being
    - our belief structures are held in common, esp regarding money
    - we hold the threshold for an initiation into the superconscious phenomena, which includes our environment at a much higher level
 - when we sleep our environment is different - we give up our csns field that limits us, through our chemistry, that our waking life elicits from us
    - sense perception is feeling, and so is our environment
        - our fears are resonating in a field that is causing storms - we were asleep to the phenomena of our own human psyche
            - our psyche has to choose another level of integrity through soul force, not the mind
            - we must choose a true genesis power, through love, in which something new can happen
            - it starts with each other - we cannot change the environment without changing how we relate to each other
            - we are the progenitors for integrity within environment - an initiatory threshold

Environment is reflective of the inner calm and choices we can make
- nature is so intelligent that it will reveal more of itself if we can resolve the inner conflict
    - ie we don't want to share the world - collective trauma and the world future is the same

Sharing world, not just resources - shared space becomes fuel for liberation
Leading edge is climate change - light forces in our astral csns get to be homolumous state - cognitive social memory, a psychic space to go into deeper dreaming
    - wake up from sleep into a new reality, a new chemistry
        - this sleeping/waking rhythm is important for the evolution of csns to the collective super conscious
        - witness insights and intuitions not projections for what can come into the world