Compassion And Capitalism (and, hi again)

The waters are moving, my people, and I’m moving with them.

Here’s hoping your own flow is at a pace that harmonizes growth and steadiness. (If that’s what your soul wants, of course.)

I went to a San Francisco Dharma Collective event tonight. (https://sfdharmacollective.org/) Part of their Secular Ethics series. Tonight’s topic was Compassion and Capitalism. My head was spinning and I was about to write in my journal but then my dear Shen Weiss (https://www.sculpturaleveryday.com/) planted the seed that I might consider weaving something for public consumption. So here we are. (PS I bet many of you inspired someone else today to take action, and you might not even realize it. Vice versa, maybe you inspired someone and THEY don’t even realize it. Just like Beyonce says onstage sometimes, I see you. I see you.)

I was telling my Goddess of a website designer today (https://kojolapower.com/website-design-portfolio/) that I am SO over hard lines and right angles at this moment in my life. And that is saying a lot for someone who has a prior lifetime of worshipping a spreadsheet and a rule and a consequence. But there are undeniable forces encouraging me to, for example, have the surfer dude turtles from Finding Nemo as my spirit guide lately. Ride the currents. Why judge the up or the down. I can choose to integrate mind/body/soul/energy, flowing in and out of these different awarenesses.

Ever since I’ve had this business (I see you, 2010), I’ve experienced a struggle with the seeming split between….

*the folks who find safety in technical information and are put off by my or another financial professional’s spiritual side. And/or space being made for emotions. The bias seems to come across that if I’m “touchy feely” or “woo woo” then I must not be smart enough to handle money guidance. AND some bias that processing the feels is somewhat a waste of time and therefore money, while engaged in a professional process.

and

*the folks who have experience with processing feelings and are connected with Divine Awareness sometimes seem to bristle when I bring in the facts of the numbers. I perceive they feel the bottom line calculations and/or the bookkeeping software are some sort of authority or controlling or judgmental force. That the facts of the situation, or clarity as referred to in Debtors Anonymous (https://debtorsanonymous.org/), are the waste of time that is perhaps somehow beneath the softer aspects of working on finances professionally.

I am fully willing to own that these could also just be my own projections showing up. I heard in a meeting the other day, “We don’t see the world as it is. We see the world where we are.”

Now, to reveal some of my own process…the perfectionism arose for me and felt thorny in my brain and of course at that point I couldn’t type one more word because it hurt. There’s so much fear sometimes in talking directly about this taboo topic. Fears that you’ll find “me” too much just based on my words on these pages. Fears that it will limit my own earning if I share too much of how short the wizard behind the curtain is. Fears that I should know MUCH more about capitalism before throwing my 2 cents out in this newsletter.

So I left a kind friend a message. And I remembered my friend Maja’s work (https://www.maja.love/)…it just floated in and soothed the hot fear boiling. 

All of this sharing is to say

I don’t know everything, and I’ve learned a good amount. Perhaps enough to have some thoughts to share with people who already get a ton of email and are perhaps fatigued with growth and/or opinions and/or the potential of another fresh start in this area.

I don’t know what else we would do other than Capitalism. AND I totally acknowledge that Capitalism could potentially be performed and serve as a societal support, verrrry differently than what is happening now.

I know that there are parts in me, “self states” as Internal Family Systems (https://ifs-institute.com/) sometimes refers to them, that could fight to the death about that previous statement about not knowing what we would do other than Capitalism. Parts me think, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, and equally vocal parts of me think, how in the blasted hell can we do another minute where there are such inequities and atrocities happening every second just because of the way people who existed long before us decided to do “money” and “business”.

I don’t yet know how to separate out my critiques of human behavior with money and resources to know what is inherently a system design flaw due to the inherent underpinnings of Capitalism itself, versus what is just lower human nature vibrating roughly. How do we know and *can* we actually know if and when those two are separate from one another?

When I go about things with more respect for interconnection as a value, I often get overwhelmed at how much physically longer everything seems to take. Honestly at some point when I critique choices of consuming and producing and spending and saving, I have not ever gotten to a point in my mind where it seems possible to include the entirety of interconnectedness. It seems that to exist is to hurt and take away from others on a regular basis.

When I go about life and I imagine that what I felt when I was hit by the car while walking across Market St circa 2004 and passed out…and everything felt like total Love saturation…and for that time I had no doubt that the only truly real thing is Love itself to the point where the word existing is delightfully redundant AS IF there is anything other than that!!…remembering that and imagining that as true seems to fill in very many blanks as to why on Earth we would exist and sometimes existence can be so cruel and unfair and beleaguered and horrible and unimaginable. And then other times it’s the unbearable lightness of being, and babies make really cute noises, and so many things feel amazing, and there’s like this net of goodness that it seems hard-to-impossible to fall out of. 

I got the nudge to tell you something really vulnerable next.

This lovely Title 9 model who I assume models for a living in that someone pays her money to stay very fit, has the image of the “perfect body” that I feel I am constantly falling short of. I stare at this picture more often than I’d like you to know, wishing this body looked like that body.

I am 47 years old. I do not step foot in a gym and I won’t work out on my own. Genetically I don’t know anyone near me who has anything like washboard abs or Michelle Obama arms. Also, hello, I have a long history of eating disorders in this life so it’s kind of running with scissors to stare at this picture. But I still do.

I work at balancing between not just spending to try and make up for how I fall short of this ideal AND also not just giving up on taking great care of the bod that this soul gets to travel around in. 

The older I get, the more I lean on others to talk this stuff through…to exchange accountability…to help update my thoughts and beliefs…THIS is the space I enjoy providing for people professionally. The Financial Guide work is a combination of project management, education, therapy, comedy, and space for intuitive guidance to come through.

Please do let me know if I can be of service to your path.

Just sharing one of the best parts of my week. This Instagram post had me at hello. Thank you @CatConWorldwide!!