Posts Tagged ‘enoughness’

Cosmic jokes, hot sex, relationships, money…and sufficiency

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

 

I feel quite sure that the God’s are laughing right now. There is a cosmic joke and I am at the centre of it. Thankfully I have some levity around the subject as well, no matter how painful the journey to get to this point.

I am maintained that the four really sticky lessons for every human is money, sex, health and relationships. All of us have the one or two trouble areas from these four, and one or two that we are pretty clean about. Most people I have met have one of these that is a real biggie…the one aspect that seems to be a constant place of learning through a lifetime. Two of these we have agreed by silent consent are open to being discussed, and the other two are like some dirty secret that no one must talk about in public. Ever. Or if they do, only if they are a stand up comedian or they wrap it in humor.

My health is outrageously good, through a combination of fabulous gene’s (thank you mum and dad) and placing health as my number one value. It was not always like this,  and for the first part of my life my health was the area that I struggled with. Borderline anorexic, I lived for 17 years with a constant inner story about my body and my weight. Not a minute of a hour of my waking day would go by when I would not think about food, my body, my weight, what I would eat, what I would not eat. It was exhausting. It was also an extremely repetitive, boring, narcissistic inner conversation. One day I had had enough, and I simply refused to participate in this inner conversation ever again. (It was that simple, and it wasn’t, the work I did on the inside to get myself to that place was very significant and happened over years with great commitment). Although there are days where I have vague thoughts of being a few kilo’s lighter, or running faster, I really am at a place where I have sufficiency in my fitness, my health, my weight.

Sex, well we will save that for another story. I have spent years in abstinence, not because I don’t like sex, I just really am not interested in average sex and I am not that interested in a numbers game to get great, masterful, mind blowing sex. I do however think we need to talk about sex a lot more, and talk about becoming masters in being sexual partners. I would definitely like to see schools for learning how to pleasure others as a normal part of life. Really great sex is as much about mastery as any other skill in life, and I seriously don’t think many people view it that way. I do get to express my creativity by having supra sex, as Barbara Marx Hubbard calls it. (the massive high you get when you create incredible things with others..) As well, my sport is a great physical outlet. So with sex I feel I have sufficiency, even though most people may be inclined to say I am in lack. Give me excellence or naught.

Relationships, well I have amazing, great relationships with incredible people around the world. I love my friends, and the richness they bring to my life. An intimate partner, this has eluded me. For the most part, it has not been an issue. I am not someone who feels less than for being single. Maybe because I have an incredible relationship with my 20 year old daughter. Also because I get so much value from the relationships I have. I have a very different view on long term relationships than most people. (See my recent post on the Future of Marriage.) I feel a sufficiency around my relationships. Well nourished, in deep gratitude to my friends and family. Enoughness.

So that leaves the last one…money. This is my biggie. This is the one aspect of my life that rattles my bones. Well, it hasn’t always…while I was obsessing about my weight and body image I didn’t have time to think much about my relationship with money. (It just goes to show that the stories that rule our lives can be so massively noisy that nothing else can penetrate, including common sense.)

The cosmic joke…well just before I dropped the body issue story, I began to explore the money story. This was in my mid 20’s. There was something about this subject of money that really bamboozled me, and I am not comfortable with feeling like I do not understand something. So the search to understand money and my relationship to money began 25 years ago, and has continued to this day. Now however, it has ramped up a gizzillion notches. I have made a personal commitment to create full healing around my relationship to money, to value exchange, to the expression of my value in the world, to being acknowledged in multiple forms including money for that expression. I am not talking about superficial healing…I am talking about a deep ‘knowing’ type healing. For I have intuitively known for a very long time that my relationship to money is clouded because I get that our current system is broken, and I have been seeking/longing/feeling towards an alternate and it is this that has eluded me. I have also made a commitment to supporting as many other people in the world heal their own money/value illusions. And to support people in really understanding the very system we live in, and how to engage in a parallel system that allows true recognition of value where value is expressed, and not some superficial recognition that says the person with the most stuff, or fame, or is able to manipulate and spell cast better than anyone else is the one that gets the biggest goodie bag, while a teacher in whom we trust the education of our child, gets scraps. Our current system is a dud. There is no tweaking that will fix it. Its very core DNA is corrupt, and has been from its original design. The time is now for a new value expression that takes into account and honours all players, all contributors, past, present and future.

So..the cosmic joke is that my journey as a single parent, and with a ‘story’ going on and on in my head for the last 20 years about not enough..never enough…and my struggle with my relationship with money taking me to a very precarious place where I have way too much debt and have not valued myself enough to ask for what I am really worth…this has all lead me to a deep and getting deeper dive into really understanding our current system, and really building a bridge to a healthy future system, and really being able to support others in the same journey…and in the process will heal me, and others…and that now looking back over this last 25 years, I see the road has been a perfectly designed launch pad, fitted with trials, suffering and all the usual difficulties that bring us, humbled, to our knee’s, open and willing to explore the very core of our brokenness. As to the nauseating story of not enough, I am seriously over that. Over, over, over…broken record, ruled my life for way too long over… The exploration now is sufficiency, no matter what my earning or my bank account or my debt situation is.

Someone once said, with great wisdom, we teach what we most need to learn. Touche.

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Posted in Guinea Pig C-personal category, Personal Development, personal sustainability, Unique | 4 Comments »

Drinking the Kool Aid

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

when scarcity IS our operating system

In the past few months I have been attuned to a yearning I feel, both inside me and that I sense in many other people. I would love to hear if what I am experiencing resonates with you at all.

My sense is that many people know, at a deep soul level, without having the right words to be able to explain it, that our way of giving and receiving value in the world is fundamentally and irretrievably flawed. Our model for money, exchange, banking, debt, credit, capital, what has value and what does not have value; the foundations of our economic system, are keeping us stuck in the very broken patterns and system we long to escape from.

Some people/companies feel they have ‘cracked the code’, but on closer examination, all they have done is found a new ‘smart’ path into a system that is already broken.
When I hear people talk about money and success, they speak entirely in the old language, animating once again a system that is designed to do exactly what is now going on. A very wealthy club for the few, and decreasing returns for the majority. Galloping inflation, increasing cost of living, food scarcity…..

We are so blind to this, and have accepted the status quo on this to such an extent that very few people question it. They just keep seeking ways to crack the code, thinking when they have that they have somehow found the keys to the kingdom. All they have done is drunk another version of the kool aid.

The keys to the kingdom are in another room entirely. Most of us have been tapping, banging, trying to break down the wrong door. In fact, very few people I know on this planet actually understand the very system that conducts our life. And that would include me. I have often used the metaphor that if our economic/value/exchange system was a language, most people cannot count to 10. After studying it for several years, I am lucky if I can count to 20. I am sure that the leaders of our governments would have trouble counting to 20. A very few bankers might be able to get to 30. Seriously, how scary is this…decisions are being made by people who really have no clue!! (well are we really surprised?) Our business ‘moguls’ are certainly not fluent in the language, but instead have spent their time becoming fluent in how to have the system work for them, at the cost of others. For indeed, our economic system has as its operating principle, scarcity…which means, in order for someone to win, someone has to lose. And that is the game we have all been playing, day in day out, whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not…although now to not know it means that we have to be in complete denial that the children starving around the world, or being forced into prostitution, has anything to do with us. Sorry people, no pass…it has everything to do with us. Our wealth comes at the price of their hunger.

Scarcity is the root of our work/life. Built with intention into the system that we use every day. How scary is that? Our whole lives are built on a platform of intentional scarcity! It is no wonder the fear factor in human beings is going through the roof, rampant depression, suicide, and all the myriad side effects of stress and rabid fear.

Several years ago, as I increasingly realised that we are the fish in the water and that the water is polluted, yet no one questions the water, I decided to find out who on the planet is fluent in our current system, or at least has a high degree of fluency, and of these people, who ALSO has a high egoless intention to support the creation of a healthy system that supports all of humanity to survive with dignity, and to thrive.

I confess part of my motivation was a yearning to gain understanding of this myself, so I could make different choices in how I work and play. And the other part of my impulse behind this was the sense that many others feel as I do.

You guessed it…I have not found many people. One of these people is now part of The Constellation. David Martin. Please check out his weekly blog. Caution, David is not an easy read. You need to persevere. However, his thinking will challenge you. David has designed an integral accounting platform that considers value in 6 domains. When working with Dave, the practice becomes thinking in at least these 6 domains about pretty much everything. It is a really trippy mind warp. Yep…in the practice you simply have to start seeing things differently. An indeed, for anyone really committed to a new value mechanism, we must begin to recognise just how entangled we are in the tentacles of our current system. The other person I have met is Bernard Lietaer.  Bernard’s expertise is around complementary currency. He and David have different pieces of the puzzle, both important. I will also reference my great teacher, R.Buckminster Fuller. Bucky wrote about our current system extensively. In 1983, he even predicted the coming ‘bail-outs’, using this exact language.

In their own way, these three are mystics. They understand the energetics behind money, and our economic system.

David has also crafted a new model which he calls the Fusion model. When I first saw it, it was like seeing something I already knew but did not have the words to explain. It encompassed everything that was intrinsically right, respectful, honouring, in a way of adding value to the world.

In plain English, what all of this means is the creation of a economic system, able to be used in parallel to our current model, that allows people to create ‘enoughness’ through their own work, and in so doing, allows for the respect, care, and dignity of all of life.

Today as small group of us are working to create ways we can bring all of this knowledge to the people who are yearning for it. Plus to create platforms that allow people from around the world to live and work in a way that embraces what Bucky would call natural design, what Joseph Campbell would call following your bliss, and in so doing create enoughness, and lives that are built on a platform of abundance, respect, care, dignity, and love. Sounds like pie in the sky? Not at all. Nature has been doing this for ever.

But first, we have to get that we are drinking the Kool aid.

Would love to hear your thoughts. And let me know if this exploration is something that interests you? Would you like to really understand our current system so you can make a different choice? Would you be interested in explore the alternatives? Have you felt that the value you have to offer the world is never honoured because you are not a marketing genius, or you don’t know how to work ‘the system’? Ask me questions, tell me what you want to know…

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Posted in Change, Conscious Business, Current Affairs, personal sustainability | 9 Comments »