Colonialism, Money + Safety
I’m currently offering a monthly online space called Money + Me.
These sessions have their roots in decolonizing our relationship to money, with a focus on the ongoing practice of cultivating an authentic, felt-sense relationship to money’s numinious energy and spirit.
I’m often asked why I approach decolonial work from a somatic and energetic perspective.
Here’s a short(ish) answer: somatic work is body-based and nervous system based. It disrupts the conditioning of mind over matter, of mind dominating matter, and creates a unification of mind and matter, an interdependent relationship between body and mind.
The colonial and post-colonial condition is created first and foremost in the mind, which then plays out in the domination and exploitation of the body: our own bodies, the bodies of other humans and animals, and ultimately of the larger body to which we all belong, the Earth’s.
The post-colonial condition includes the unmet grief of a shared loss of indigeneity - the shared loss of relating to the Earth, the body, the sensations of the body and all phenomena as animate.
The post-colonial condition is a shared loss of animism.
Animism is a common thread from Indigenous traditions around the world - including from the almost extinct Nature-based, Goddess-based European Indigenous traditions.
Animism is that felt-sense understanding that all phenomena are animate, that they contain a spark and an essence of aliveness. And from there, developing relationality - being in subject-subject reciprocal relationship with all phenomena in the world, including more-than-human phenomena.
Animism sees all life as autonomous and ensouled - with an indwelling soul and consciousness. This includes not only the external world out there, from planets and galaxies, all the way down to animals, plants, soil and the underground networks of mycelium, but also to the world within our psyches and bodies, including our cells, organs, as well as our diverse sensations and psychological complexes/complexities.
It’s an experiential, non-rational, non-linear understanding that our body’s sensations are intimately connected to the Earth’s.
Painting by S H Raza from his Bindu series
As children, we could sense this aliveness as a pulsing and natural truth of this world - until we had to become socialized into the dominant (post) colonial culture and the corseted condition of ‘normality’.
Decolonizing our relationship to money involves bringing an animist, relational lens to our practice by learning to relate to the energy of money through sensation which is the body’s language, and by extension the Earth's.
It begins with learning to feel the ways that we’ve been trained to relate to money - or not relate to it all - through the energies and sensations of the body.
A core aspect of animism and decolonial work involves being in right relationship - which is synonymous with the philosophy of “all my relations”, common to many Indigenous cultures, where the felt-sense (and not simply intellectualized) interdependence and interconnectedness of all beings and all phenomena is held as sacred.
Right relationship invokes the balance of Nature - within and without. Being in right relationship with ourselves calls forth our inherent enoughness, our inherent wholeness.
When we’re operating from a place of feeling deficient, of not enough - which is the foundational commandment of the dominant culture - we’re not in right relationship with ourselves, and we don’t have the capacity to be in right relationship with other beings.
This is also what our current financial systems are built upon: lack, scarcity, deficiency/deficit, not enough.
Being in right relationship with ourselves is feeling and knowing that we are enough, we have enough, there is enough, and that we have the capacity to be conscious stewards of the flowing + shifting enoughness that we are and that we have from moment to moment. We have the capacity to be conscious stewards of this abundance to support the web of interdependence that we’re a part of.
This involves disrupting the dysregulating cultural conditioning of deficiency/scarcity as the baseline of existence, and replacing it enoughness as the baseline of existence - and allowing our systems to slowly relax into that regulated renegotiation.
Under colonialism + post-colonialism, we’re not in right relationship with our bodies, our psyches, ourselves, with other beings and with the Earth - which ripples out into the world, creating our culture and systems.
The most harmful of these systems are the ones that have been built up around money.
Here, money and safety are intimately woven together in our culture and society - because of the systems of harm that have been constructed around it.
But if we’re not working with money from a place of feeling safe and rooted in our bodies, of being in right relationship with our bodies and with our innate wholeness - which most of us are not - we’re most likely in a trauma response, which has most likely been inherited from our forebears having to live and survive within these systems.
We can’t authentically, consciously and creatively collaborate with money if we’re operating from a trauma response around it.
If we’re in a chronic state of fight/flight/freeze with money, we’re either in contraction around it or numbed out and disassociated from it. Either way, we tend not to have a feeling of safety and trust around money - whether we have it or not. And we can’t be in right relationship with anything we don’t trust or feel safe with.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
When we cultivate being in right relationship with our bodies and our natural rhythms, we have more capacity to cultivate safety and right relationship with money.
We get to feel into unhooking the current of money from the systems of harm that it’s been chained to - the very same systems that siphon large amounts of money towards funding war, genocide and environmental degradation.
We begin by unhooking money from those systems in our own bodies and our own lives, and explore co-creating a generative, playful and life + Earth sustaining relationship with money from the inside out - which cannot exist without safety and trust.
These principles form the bedrock of the monthly Money + Me sessions, from which our practice leads us to multidimensional explorations and experiences of the energy and spirit of money, and how it wants to evolve with us and through us.
(And something you'll hear me repeating often is that the paradoxical nature of evolution requires a resourced, rooted turning towards what’s here now. This is also what alchemy is.)
The dominant culture of oppression, exploitation and theft of land - which is inherently traumatic - becomes systemic, in our bodies and in the world.
Discover more about Money + Me here.
p.s. for further reading on this topic in terms of my evolving journey with it, you might be interested in:
An Ancient Future Paradigm of Abundance
Decolonizing our Relationship to Money
Money + Me (the origin story)