Thoughts on Money & Trauma In Advance of Tuesday's "The Art of Embodied Conversation"

Here's what's coming up for me in the lead up to my embodied conversation with David Sauvage

Burnt money art by my friend, Micah Spear

Dear Friends,

On Tuesday evening at 6pm EST, David and I will once again enter the state of truly emergent co-creation and relating we call, “The Art of Embodied Conversation.” In this public ritual, we invoke a subtle state together with a clearly articulated intention. We feel our way into whatever arises seeking wisdom and truth.

Our topic for Tuesday night is MONEY and our intention is to petition altruistic and benevolent higher sources of intelligence, including our own, the ancestors, gods, cosmic beings…to help us find a better way of relating to this primary tools of control, oppression, dominance and fragmentation on the planet right now. Our sincere inquiry right now is this (it may change before Tuesday):

“What do we need to know about money during this time of transition.”

By “we” we mean everyone in attendance Tuesday night and everyone who is interested in this question of liberating ourselves from the grip of money.

By “during this time of transition” we mean this evolutionary moment—revolutionary movement—out of a control paradigm (Game A) to an integral paradigm *(Game B)…in Charles Eisenstein’s words, “the better world our hearts know is possible.” We believe money will be different if not obsolete in this new paradigm. If obsolete is a stretch for you, surely you can agree that the financial systems and beliefs we hold about money now MUST change if we are going to make it through the eye of the needle, a.k.a. survive. We’re interested in getting some help with HOW.

A frustration with and ultimately a rejection of conventional economies has been a shared interest for David and me since we met. We have always been honest with each other about our financial struggles, anxieties, and triumphs. We have supported each other in doing the healing work around the topic and we have even helped each other in small ways materially over the years. David has been an inspiration to me when I have faltered or questioned the extent to which I can stand outside the current system. He has taught me by example and held my hand through a financial detox that has been extremely grueling at times. I have yet to completely access and integrate the intense fear (which presents mostly as a chronic anxiety about money that is out of proportion to my actual financial situation) that lives in the heart of this money wound for me.

The topic of money, abundance and scarcity has been active within me for over a decade. Like so many of us, I am carrying in my genetic memory ancestral pain, fear, and grief resulting from loss of homeland, poverty, and survival. I won’t say more about my own personal journey with these wounds here, I just want to emphasize how much time and energy I have invested (so to speak) in the healing of these wounds. They run very, very deep. And some of that trauma is still with me.

What I have begun to see with David’s help is that I have gone about as far with these wounds as I can ON MY OWN. It dawned on me the other day…this money wound is a collective wound and it must be healed collectively, in community. We have to bring it out of the shadows in order to work with the shame it has attached to it like a parasite, like a leech. We have to pull it into community in order to hold each other as the collective numbness around this topic begins to dissipate and we find ourselves face-to-face with the enormous reservoir of collective anxiety, fear, distrust, alienation and rage. It will be too much for individual nervous systems to handle. We will need each other. What we cannot face alone, we can absolutely face and process together.

Incidentally, all of the “heal your money wound” classes, courses and talks I have subjected myself to over the years have been worthless because they put the pressure on the individual to heal within a toxic culture.

The collective money wound is a wound of unmet needs. For all of us, what that means is different. It also encompasses the huge, free-floating energies of disowned emotions our ancestors weren’t able to feel and integrate for many reasons, including the fact that they were literally fighting for their survival. Money has been a matter of life and death for a long time.

For those who’s ancestors were among the “haves” versus the “have nots” the wounds are different, but no less fundamental. Amassing wealth, hoarding and sitting on resources, worshipping at the altar of money, earning to stave off anxiety, seeking comfort in financial stability and position/status…these behaviors can look deplorable from the outside, but are understandable in context. They also take a massive toll. They are as binding a shackles as poverty in their own way. Look at our out-of-control financial system and you can see the collective wound of profit, productivity, and progress. Just last week, I convened a Cultural Embodiment session about the massive collapse of the cryptomarkets and overnight bankrupcy of FTX.

I do know a handful of people we might say have a “healthy” relationship with money. By this I mean they live comfortably and even well, but don’t seem to be overly attached to their possessions and holdings, or overly shamed or averse to them. But, these people are still participating in a system of oppression, a system that does not work for everyone (there may be rare examples where this is not the case and I’d be interested to hear about them). Generally, they are operating with unconscious beliefs that keep the system in place; beliefs like:

• This money is mine. I earned it.

• I am earning to provide for the future of my children.

• I am earning to give it away (effective altruism, e.g.)

• I am entitled to what I have because ______.

• I give to charity so I feel good about my own position of relative comfort.

• I’m not so bad. I don’t have as much as so-and-so.

I do not stand in judgment. I have been staring my own prejudice, paranoia, and entitlement in the face for a long time and I can tell you, it is hard to release.

Just the other day, I was sitting with David in a busy restaurant upstate where we live. We were talking about money and David said, “Look around this room. How many of these people do you think are actively experiencing financial insecurity, anxiety and distress in their lives right now?” He paused as I took in the room of social, chatty, bubbly people having a nice meal out, looking pretty care-free. However, as I examined their faces and body language more closely, I saw so many of the hallmarks of unconscious trauma and anxiety. I was beginning to come to the conclusion that nearly all of them fit his description as he said, “And how many of them are openly talking about it right now?” None.

It’s just something we don’t do. We don’t express our financial insecurity publicly or openly. This thought experiment put me almost immediately in touch with the amount of disowned financial anxiety, fear, and grief we have hovering in the space between and around us all the time: at the grocery store, at the bank, at work, in class, on a train, in a crowded restaurant. The next day, on a busy train into NYC, I was meditating and then did the same thought experiment. I wrote to David:

Meditating on the train. Had a distinct realization as I felt into the chronic tension in my own body and then did that thought experiment you offered at the restaurant…I felt how thoroughly the social numbness around money is keeping us comfortably numb and subduing the masses; how this blanket of civility and shame keeps the oppressive elite in power. People are literally unable to feel what’s happening. I realized: if we truly felt it, if we began talking and feeling and sharing about this, it would awaken people to the absurdity of the situation. Awareness would come, then outrage, fury, complete chaos. Rage. Grief. I felt the tsunami under the numbness. And saw how people would be in the streets rioting…

Healing the money wound is a big job. We each need to start by looking at how it lives within our own system. But, we also need to consider and create spaces where we can look at it together. Just this week, David convened a “debtor’s circle” that I attended with about eight others. We found it extremely cathartic to share openly.

At this point, our trauma field has rendered money as an accounting or symbol for value so corrupt and delusional it’s a joke. It’s basically exposing itself as the charade it is. People are losing faith quickly, as well they should. And while this is scary and triggers the financial fear many of us are holding and that is free-floating in the culture as collective trauma, we are actually onto something, We have to see it to change it. We need to witness the old system dying, hospics it. Seeing it for what it is, is going to be scary and the emotions will be big. We need each other to hold them. We need to tear down the walls.

Join me and David on Tuesday as we work through the fog of trauma and try to access a higher intelligence and truth about how to move through this precarious moment on the planet, exposing money for what it is and finding a way to hold each other through this process of detoxing from the MONEY we have known and making space for something better and beyond!

Paid subscribers to The Art of Emergence will receive a recording of the event.

Why We Build the Wall (from the musical, Hadestown)
Anaïs Mitchell

HADES
Why do we build the wall?
My children, my children
Why do we build the wall?

CERBERUS
Why do we build the wall?
We build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

HADES
How does the wall keep us free?
My children, my children
How does the wall keep us free?

CERBERUS
How does the wall keep us free?
The wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

HADES
Who do we call the enemy?
My children, my children
Who do we call the enemy?

CERBERUS
Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

HADES
Because we have and they have not!
My children, my children
Because they want what we have got!

CERBERUS
Because we have and they have not!
Because they want what we have got!
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free

HADES
What do we have that they should want?
My children, my children
What do we have that they should want?

CERBERUS
What do we have that they should want?
We have a wall to work upon!
We have work and they have none
And our work is never done
My children, my children
And the war is never won
The enemy is poverty
And the wall keeps out the enemy
And we build the wall to keep us free
That’s why we build the wall
We build the wall to keep us free
We build the wall to keep us free