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You Are Not The Problem

You Are Not The Problem

by | Aug 5, 2023 | Getting Free, patriarchy, Perfectionism, Uncategorized

We live in a world that individualises and otherises systemic problems.

You’re exhausted from working 40+ hours a week, maintaining relationships, cleaning the house, feeding the kids, walking the dog, starting a side hustle or leaning into creative pursuits?  Culture will say that’s you, and you should work on your wellness routine to improve resiliency. 

You’re overwhelmed by the state of the world?  Show up for protests or community events but can’t help but feel anxious and low key terrified of climate change?  Can’t face another day in the news? Yep, culture says another you problem.  You gotta learn better boundaries, or you know, maybe care a little less because you can’t fix everything.

Caught in cycles of perfectionism? Feeling never good enough? Thinking everyone’s soon going to catch on to the fact you don’t know anything and have totally winged your way into this role and OMG #impostersyndrome? That can’t have anything to do with a culture that sells us scarcity and leverages shame for patriarchal power!

(Don’t even get me started on topics like climate change or asylum seeking policies…. individualising and otherising systemic problems is political gaslighting 101)

Now, don’t get me wrong: looking inward is necessary and important, and perfectionism/self-shaming does have roots in trauma, personality & family dynamics. 

My message isn’t to just blame culture, lay back powerless and say “ahh, yes, the problem isn’t here, it’s over there, nothing I can do!”.

It’s to say that our power lays in learning to look both inward AND outward.

To build our sense of agency and resiliency, to know, care & love ourselves, but also to recognise that we’re all products of a toxic system.  

And when we learn that the problem isn’t us, it’s culture, it gives us a wider sphere to work from.

it gives us agency, and the power to hand back the stories that keep us stuck. 

To stop our endless quest to ‘fix’ ourselves, and instead unlearn all the ways the world has said you are not enough, or your actions can’t make a difference. 

Our job as Changemakers is to see the water we live in, so that we can transform it.  

To become free enough to reimagine it. 

Powerful enough that we dare to create it.

Trusting of our intuition and body-knowing to follow our next best step. 

Are you ready?

We live in a world that individualises and otherises systemic problems.

You’re exhausted from working 40+ hours a week, maintaining relationships, cleaning the house, feeding the kids, walking the dog, starting a side hustle or leaning into creative pursuits?  Culture will say that’s you, and you should work on your wellness routine to improve resiliency. 

You’re overwhelmed by the state of the world?  Show up for protests or community events but can’t help but feel anxious and low key terrified of climate change?  Can’t face another day in the news? Yep, culture says another you problem.  You gotta learn better boundaries, or you know, maybe care a little less because you can’t fix everything.

Caught in cycles of perfectionism? Feeling never good enough? Thinking everyone’s soon going to catch on to the fact you don’t know anything and have totally winged your way into this role and OMG #impostersyndrome? That can’t have anything to do with a culture that sells us scarcity and leverages shame for patriarchal power!

(Don’t even get me started on topics like climate change or asylum seeking policies…. individualising and otherising systemic problems is political gaslighting 101)

Now, don’t get me wrong: looking inward is necessary and important, and perfectionism/self-shaming does have roots in trauma, personality & family dynamics. 

My message isn’t to just blame culture, lay back powerless and say “ahh, yes, the problem isn’t here, it’s over there, nothing I can do!”.

It’s to say that our power lays in learning to look both inward AND outward.

To build our sense of agency and resiliency, to know, care & love ourselves, but also to recognise that we’re all products of a toxic system.  

And when we learn that the problem isn’t us, it’s culture, it gives us a wider sphere to work from.

it gives us agency, and the power to hand back the stories that keep us stuck. 

To stop our endless quest to ‘fix’ ourselves, and instead unlearn all the ways the world has said you are not enough, or your actions can’t make a difference. 

Our job as Changemakers is to see the water we live in, so that we can transform it.  

To become free enough to reimagine it. 

Powerful enough that we dare to create it.

Trusting of our intuition and body-knowing to follow our next best step. 

Are you ready?

The Limits of Possibility

The Limits of Possibility

by | Oct 1, 2022 | Capitalism, Uncategorized

I love to read, although keeping up with my list is near impossible.  My to-read wishlist now has over 335 books (which if my math is right, means even if I read one book a week for the next six years, without adding any, I still won’t be finished. Help?!).
 
Recently though I started the short but fascinating read, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century by Erik Olin Wright.
 
The book is full of interesting ideas of how we can move beyond capitalism, but one line stood out to me: “In politics, the limits of possibility are always in part created by beliefs in those limits”.
 
What a beautiful truth, right? That – at least in part – the limits of what we are able to create or experience are only bound by what we believe to be possible.  

I think this truth extends beyond politics, to our lives, our change-work, and our collective future for humanity.

The limits of our possibility are shaped by our beliefs about our limitations. (read that again).
 
How often do we find ourselves unhappy with an element of life, but withstanding it anyway because “we have to”, “there’s no other options”, “it’s just a few weeks/months/years” etc (note: this doesn’t apply to grief, anger or other healing processes we have – which do come with the requirement to sit in the muck – but our every day life choices).
 
How often do we find ourselves disillusioned with our world? Instead of actively remaking it, feeling passive, stuck or angry at those in power, but who won’t change.   That this is just the way the world is.
 
Where might we limit our very dreams, afraid that disappointment might lurk if we dare to challenge our beliefs about what is possible?
 
Possible is an expansive phrase. It doesn’t ask what is realistic or actual.
 
It doesn’t ask what has happened before, or what is predicted to happen in the future.

it asks what is possible.
 
And possibilities are endless – lest our beliefs say otherwise.
 
It’s not just Erik Olin Wright who refuses to dwell in the boundaries of our limitations, but some of the beautiful thinkers of history.
 
Mahatma Ghandi said “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.”
 
Emily Dickinson, “I dwell in possibility…”.
 
John O’Donohue, “Where the imagination is alive, possibility is awake because imagination is the great friend of possibility. Possibilities are always more interesting than facts. We shouldn’t frown on fact, but our world is congested with them. Facts are retarded possibilities, they are possibilities that have already been actualised. But for every fact that becomes a fact, there are seven, eight, maybe five hundred possibilities hanging around in the background that didn’t make it in to the place where they could be elected and realised as the actual fact. It is very interesting to look at what you consider real and to think that it is always peopled by a background presence of unrealised possibilities.”
 
To shift our limitations of what is possible requires a shift in our willingness.
 
We must be willing to believe there’s possibilities & opportunities that we can’t currently conceive of.
 
We must be willing to be vulnerable, as our (mental) limitations were often put in place to protect us from risk, failure, rejection and the like. 
 
We must be willing to be wrong.
 
To not know it all.
 
To practice humility.
 
What possibilities are still waiting to be realised in your life? In our world? In our collective relationship together?

What would be different if you had infinite possibilities ahead of you?  If your belief in the limitations did not exist?

Love & power,

Laura

On Queerness & Pride

On Queerness & Pride

by | Jun 21, 2022 | Activism, Anger, Uncategorized

Queer is a word I didn’t always feel comfortable using.  Sometimes I still don’t, its other meaning being ‘strange’.  

Growing up, it seemed that queerness was something okay for other people, but less so for myself.  It took a long time to accept and embrace my queerness – to see it as a gift.

Pride Month started as a way to commemorate the US Stonewall riots, which occurred at the end of June 1969.  (How often we celebrate or remember protests of the past, while rejecting movements of the present…).

Pride is born out of rebellion and rage.  It’s born out a refusal to conform, to ignore the truth of our experiences and feelings. A refusal to lay down in the face of injustice.  It is a commitment to radical and inclusive joy, an honour to the wholeness of our experiences, and a refusal to diminish them in the presence of others.

Queerness, beyond my sexuality, is my ability to orient to a world that I cannot see yet. Toward wholeness, toward truth, and away from what culture has conditioned in us.  To see beyond who and what I am supposed to be or do, to who and what I am actually called. 

Queer – and particularly trans – activists have a long history of envisioning a new, more imaginative world, before it is born to reality. 

This month, as we celebrate queerness in our communities, friends, children, *ourselves*, let us also honour this through playing and discovering new ways of orienting to a more beautiful world.  Orienting toward wholeness. 

And of course, let us support and celebrate the LGBTQ+ activists who continue to fight for liberation in the many parts of the world where queerness is not yet celebrated. 

What does queerness mean for you?


Laura x
Own Your Power

Own Your Power

by | Jun 21, 2022 | change making, Uncategorized

“Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.” –Winona LaDuke

I’ve been writing power this week as Business for the Revolution comes together (more coming soon!), but it’s also been front of mind as I’ve made some big decisions, grappling with fear, doubt & what it means to own my power.  

One of the struggles we hold with power is often the idea that power means power over or power under.  

We equate power with domination and control.

We hold stories that power is dirty, that power needs money, or that people power is fine but it’s not something we can wield individually.

It’s no surprise that cultural stories of powerful women tend to fall on a spectrum from the Lolita femme-fatale to the ‘nasty woman’, who perhaps holds power but, you know, lacks connection, friendship & warmth.  

These stories all imply that power is bad – that power is corrupt, and cannot be trusted.  And of course in some cases this is true – when it perverts itself into domination.  

But these stories also all uphold the status quo, they all perpetuate business as usual.  

To pretend the status quo is not deeply invested in our belief in our powerlessness would be naive.  

So this brings us back to the question – what does it mean to own our power? 

The natural world is filled with power – just consider the elements – that wields itself without domination. 

Our power in co-creation is in our unity, not our separation.  

And power – whether we believe it or not – is something we all have more of than we think, because we all have agency.  

So who would you be if you trusted your power? What would you do if you knew yourself to be powerful?

What possibilities would you hold that you now consider to be limited? 

What limitations would you reject? 

What would power look like to you, if it wasn’t over or under anyone else? 

Love & Courage, 

Laura

What even is capitalism?

What even is capitalism?

by | Jun 21, 2022 | Capitalism, Uncategorized

I talk about capitalism a lot. Whether it’s healing internalised capitalism or seeding business beyond capitalism, its transcendance is at the core of this school’s purpose. 

But, what actually is it?

Capitalism is an economic system that has social, cultural & political threads to it.  Its most common definition is a system in which trade and industry are controlled by private owners, rather than by the state. 

 But it’s also based on three, less-talked-about and detrimental principles:

1.    The pursuit of infinite growth on a finite planet.

2.    The artificial production of scarcity (to fuel said growth).

3.    The devaluation of complex, living systems to lifeless resources

 It’s these principles that lead to the climate crisis & inequity we see today (along with other crises), and ask us to imagine a world beyond capitalism. 

But here’s the thing. This system is so ubiquitous – so all encompassing – that it can be hard to imagine a world beyond it. 

We’ve also internalised it to a degree that it shows up in our belief systems, values & habits.  (you can learn more here,)

This means to vision & seed a world beyond capitalism – one with less burnout, stress, hustle, extraction, not-enoughness – we need to look first to the ways the system lives through us and as us.  The ways we unconsciously assume “this is just the way things are”, or “the way the world works”. 

We need to look within, to see how we can untangle it from our minds & hearts, before (and during) we do any work of changing the system ‘out there’.

Otherwise we might transform it, but not transcend it. 

I want to offer you two reflection prompts today:

1 What would a world without scarcity feel like, in your body? What emotions & sensations come up when you imagine this?

2 How might you generate that feeling of aliveness this week? That sense of energy, wonder, possibility & life?  (note: this space is where some magic happens).

4000 weeks

4000 weeks

by | May 21, 2022 | Happiness, Uncategorized

4000 weeks.
 
That’s the average amount of weeks most of us have in a life.   
 
It’s such a startling small number. 
 
When we think in years, the length of each one can feel longer than we actually have.  The average age so distant from where we are now.  
 
As days, the time passes fast, with a large number that feels unrelatable.  
 
But as weeks – 4000 is a beautiful, small & timely number.
 
My question for you today, is how would you like to spend these 4000 weeks?

For me, I would like many of them to be in service to a more beautiful world. 
 
But I also want my experience of them to be pleasurable, meaningful, joyful – a lived experience with awe, wonder, ease (interspersed of course with the less pleasurable experiences, that offer wisdom none-the-less). 
 
Sometimes though, life & changemaking – whatever form we do – feels more like struggle.  In some contexts, the words are even synonymous.
 
For anyone in activism or change-work, the level of crises we face, the injustice that takes place, the inequity around us feels heavy. 
 
For every time we dream of something beautiful, we’ve surely experienced sadness, despair, anger, hopelessness at the world as it is. 
 
Plus – we all live in the world.  There’s jobs, bills, health issues, families – a million things demanding our attention.    
 
This feeling of struggle can be an easy one to spend our 4000 weeks in, dipping our toes in and out. 
 
There’s a beautiful Naropa University commencement speech from Brenda Salgado.  She suggests we are called at this time to release the word struggle from our attitude and vocabulary. 
 
It’s a bold statement, & it doesn’t pretend that there an’t challenges or hardships.   

But our attitude and our vocabulary can also have more power than we realise.  
 
What would it be like for you to release struggle from your attitude and vocabulary this week? 

To face your challenges with an attitude of ease or trust? 
 
And what you like to experience with what remains of your 4000 weeks?

Love & courage,

Laura