This is my mom, at one of my creativity workshops, SIXTEEN YEARS AGO(!)

I remember this workshop, I put it on as a fundraiser. There were maybe 25 people there who paid $20 each so we raised $500.

I had been doing my workshops for a little while, and what I mostly remember about this one is that I felt more free and sure of myself by putting this on a fundraiser.

Like - if I'm not making money from it, then it's ok for me to do this work that lights me up. And it did light me up! I loved this workshop - and look at the smile on my mom's face!

That was 16 years ago.

I have been making my living from the work that lights me up for the last 12.5 years.

It took a lot of little baby steps to get here. But also it took really being with that part of me who felt I didn't deserve to make money in this way and figuring out how to believe in more.

For a long time, I felt like this was on me. My own self doubt. My own limiting beliefs. My own failure to heal.

As I worked my way through it I was excited to help others do the same and that’s where I focused… But after all these years of doing this work I see it more clearly now.

It was never on me.

And your “limiting beliefs” and self doubt are not on you.

It’s dominant culture.

We literally have to be so afraid of dying of poverty that we will take any job we can get, in order for our current economic system to work.

We have to be willing to work at jobs we don’t like in order to support our families and pay for our lives.

We doubt our inner truth because the world is telling us things we know aren't true, and inviting they are.

We feel wrong inside because the world is telling us to live in a way that doesn't feel right inside.

And it’s from within that system that we dream of something better.

So of course the system impacts HOW we dream.

Another facet of this system is the meritocracy. The idea that we all have what we deserve. 

When one person amasses enough money to actually care for and feed the whole planet but chooses to hoard it for themselves, the system says this person is a success and deserves to just suck that much money out of the economy so it’s not available for anyone else, it’s no longer in circulation. And when another person dies of exposure on the streets, the system says that person made poor choices and deserved what they got.

And individualism. The focus on YOU as the source of your success but also as the source of your problems.

The system holds so many values that are at odds with reality and are largely unquestioned because they live in the subconscious of our culture, and in each of our minds.

When I feel doubt about my ability to make money doing what lights me up - IE when I feel that I do not DESERVE to be my actual self and live my life in a way that feels true for me - I am drawing on all of this.

This is how the system wants me to feel, because otherwise I wouldn’t participate in it and it needs our participation.

The system is white supremacist colonialist capitalism.

I’m looking back on this photo and remembering this creativity workshop I did 16 years ago and how it felt to offer my work in a way that felt fulfilling to me and how it felt like I had no way to do that as my way of living, that it could only ever be this side thing….

I’m thinking of how far I’ve come, how much freedom and space I have been able to create for myself to live my life in a way that feels true for me.

But it feels like I have just carved out this little bubble somewhere within the system, I'm still participating in it enough to support my life.

I am not actually outside the system.

So now I am thinking: what does it look like to dream from outside of the system?

To deeply understand ALL of the values of dominant culture* that have been engrained in me, to clear space to think and dream and create not at all connected to any of that.

This is very much inspired by the conversations we’ve been having in Co-Dreaming (these are the free classes I do on Mondays), and last week’s call speaking of transcendence - not just ignoring and pretending away the problems with spiritual bypass but seeing them clearly while seeing through them to the REAL truth of what human life is…

And then dreaming up new ways of living, from that place.

 

*This is not just about racism and capitalism. It includes the patriarchy, ableism (in terms of physical and mental health and neurodivergance and fat phobia), heteronormativity, anti-trans, and classist anti-poor values. It’s a way of not seeing all humans as human in order to justify greed and land and power grabs.

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