5.7 | The Death of Nuclear Family
or
Why I Left the U.S.

> Isha Vela: Welcome to Waking Up Wealthy, the podcast for visionaries and rebels who are ready to revolutionize their relationship with money and create powerful collective ripples with the money they make. I’m your host, Isha Vela, trauma psychologist, somatic practitioner, financial professional, and minimalist, bringing you practical money tools, unconventional wealth perspectives, and Aquarian era business strategy to guide you in building wealth that’s aligned, ethical, and empowering. Let’s wake up to the true meaning of wealth together.

Hello and welcome to episode seven of season five of the Waking Up Wealthy podcast. And today I’m going to spill all the tea on why I left the United States and how it all ties into the death of the nuclear family. And I know those may seem like weird things to put together, but that’s what was downloading for this episode. So where do I begin? So let’s start with where I am right now, and I’m going to work my way backwards from there. I’ve been in Indonesia, Bali specifically, for about five weeks, and I am still calibrating energetically to this new environment. this new environment being one where there is constant spiritual practice. I’ve only been here five weeks and they’ve already, I’ve already witnessed like three different holidays. Everywhere you look, you will see, you know, little blessings on sidewalks or in front of homes or in front of businesses. They are everywhere, you know, so it has a very strong, spiritual life here. the people who work in our mini hotel are, you know, they’re constantly talking about, know, things, holidays that they need to prepare for and things like that. So, lots of spiritual practice. And this is also an environment where people are incredibly respectful and polite. People do not yell at each other. There are no, there isn’t aggression. even when they’re, when somebody is haggling with you, they do it in a way that’s very polite. when you send back food at a restaurant, there’a way to do that. so just describing an environment where people are like, incredibly kind, incredibly generous, welcoming, you know, being American, I don’t assume to be welcomed everywhere. we don’t have a reputation, a good reputation in lots of parts of the world. And yet here I have felt incredibly welcome. And so I really appreciate that. I don’t take that as a given. So let’s just start there. just those two things really incredible. Like, no road rage. Even though there’s tons of people. All the honks are not like aggression honks. They are, hey, I’m coming or I’m right behind you. Honks you know, so again, like, energetically, it just feels like a very safe environment where, like, my. My nervous system isn’t, like, jacked up because somebody’s yelling at somebody or I’m being called a bitch, which has happened quite frequently in the United States. so, yeah, so let’s just start there. So it’s from what you know from your trauma training, if you’re trauma trained, and what I know from my experience and my trauma training, it’s only when. Often, it’s only when you remove an obstacle or a toxin or h trau. That is when you begin to feel the lifting of the weight. Right. You only recognize that it was there when you take it away and you’re like, oh, where is that? my shoulders used to feel heby before. Now they feel lighter. And I’m realizing now how much I was caring. Right. You’ve probably had that experience yourself. And that’s been the case for me here, that only by having removed myself from a situation in a more permanent way, meaning that I removed myself from the United States and removed the United States as my home, that, that I’ve been able to feel the toxicity of where I was living and how I was living. And of course, I was aware of that before I left. But again, my body is now settling into the new reality of this new context and this new home. yeah, and I received confirmation of that, like, once I landed here. And it’s different. Different. When you’re on vacation, you feel that for a little while, but your body knows it’s going to be going back into the old context. So it doesn’t quite fully release in the way that I’m experiencing here. I’ve been on vacation for two or more weeks, and that hasn’t quite happened because you’re kind of like, your body knows, right. It’s like, already, ah, way ahead of the game. So, yeah, so coming here and having sold all of my stuff and just coming with, like, two suitcases, you know, that’s a different reality. My body is like, oh, yeah, we’re not going back. Like, that’s not a thing. So in the last several years of living in the United States, I have fel that I have felt like I’m poisoning my children. I’ve had thoughts and intuitive kind of knowings of I’m poisoning my children by feeding them this food or having them drink this water. of being an environment that was violent in lots of ways. Violent even economically violent. the consumerist culture, like, it’s another way that My children were being poisoned just by the saturation of the markets and all of the media and marketing. You see everywhere billboards, but also like television or screens everywhere saying buy this and here’s this offer and here’s this advertisement, culture of misogyny and anti blackness. And I’ll even say, and you can hate on me for this all you want. The culture of stupidity. And when I say that, it’s the culture of non nuanced thinking, the culture of polar. Right, the polar opposites. If you believe in this, then I don’t like you and you can’t be my friend. Right, the polar thinking, yeah, the culture of just like blaming somebody else for your problems and not taking responsibility or not having. Not being insightful or thoughtful. I’ve also, in that time, you know, the last, I would say, like, let’s just say since COVID right? Just feeling the crush of capitalism, feeling what it’s been like feeling in my body, the feeling literally like crushed, pressed down upon by capitalism and like the fall of capitalism, the collapse of economic structures. I often felt, and again, when I describe this, it’s like it’s not a thought that I had, but an experience in my body that was intuitively very clear. Like I would have imagery tied to the feeling in my body. So I’m describing in words what I was feeling. So I’m describing in words, feeling the crush, being pressed down upon by the collapse of capitalism, current economic structures. I often felt like I was being abused by our economic system, by consumerism and by a consumerist system, and by the system specifically of having lots of things removed from like having things that were like natural to being human and living in communities removed and then having it inserted as a service, for example. And this is not applicable to me necessarily, but an example of this, a good example is creating the nuclear family structure versus living in groups of larger people and then having to insert a daycare service or nanny babysittting service. Right? So you remove the healthy structures of community, and then you insert a service and so that you have to pay for. Right? so that could be like the way that we live. Removing sort of the natural way of being able to walk everywhere and then inserting the gym membership. So that would be another example. So again the abuse of that kind of structure, having everything as a service and then you get hit with this payment of having to pay for that service and that service and that service and feeling kind of like every time it would feel like Bang, another hit. Bang, another hit. And then also feeling the pressure of doing it all as a solo parent. Being a breadwinner, the soul bread winner, it’s all hanging on me. I’m also the activity organizer. I’m also the academic consultant to the children’s school. I am the chef and nutritional advisor. I am the life coach and psychologist. I am the house cleaner and the laundry washer and folder. I am the accountant and economic manager of the family as well. Right. So. And in all of those roles, I found myself often in situations where there was an expectation that there would be a second parent or somebody else involved in the care for my children. And that seemed really like there were situations where I felt like I would have had to split myself in two. Like if, one child wanted to take a class somewhere at one time and, and there was another child that wanted to take a class on another day or on the same day at a similar time. Right. I would have to like, arrange for something, but even in a simpler way. I was in a situation once for my oldest birthday where there were younger children that couldn’t participate in the activity that I had to take care of. But then I was also expected to be with the older children in the activity because they needed a chaperone. So that was a mess. You know, that was one of those situations where I felt I was being put in an impossible situation and I couldn’t replicate myself. I didn’t have another partner to step in and I had to ask one of the other parents to step in, which is what was fine. But you know what I mean, it’s like as a solo parent, you’re having to constantly arrange for that because you don’t have community, you’re living alone, and you’re having to ask another friend or family member to kind of like make time from their schedule to help you with something. It doesn’t feel like we were just all in it together already. Right. I had to ask for a favor. So this feeling of being put in situations that felt kind of impossible or having expectations that felt hard was happening on a grander scale as well. So there in the United States. And this again is an intuitive feeling that I’m describing to you in words now. Setting a standard of excellence, of performance, of achievement, and then creating the conditions that make it impossible to reach that standard. So imagine that someone said to you, I want you to run this 30 mile marathon, but before you do, I’m going to break your foot with this hammer. I’m going to break your right foot with this hammer. Okay, Go right. That’s often what it felt like that we were expected to get to, I don’t know, whatever. Expected to purchase the home, expected to create the American dream. expect it to, right? Like, yes, the home, the children, the lifestyle, right? All of the things that encompass the American Dream. And then the structure that we live in, where all of the healthy things of society and humanity are removed and then added as a service, and then you’re expected to pay for that, right? So we’re sold this thing, right? This American Dream as something that anyone can do, anyone in this land of opportunity. But that’s simply not true because the conditions are not set up for that. And it’s not set up for everyone equally. Obviously, right now, I’m not saying anything new to you today. so this idea of going to school, getting, good grades, getting a job, those things do not get you to whatever house, children, and specifically the time, freedom and the leisure time that is promised as the American Dream. So all of that to say that living in the United States has felt to me like living in an abusive relationship and that I needed to get myself out for myself and also for my children, because I didn’t want them to experience what they were experiencing as normal, that they would go to school and have active shooter drills and expect that, have the expectation that that’s normal, that that’s everyday life, or having this experience of polarity around vaccinations, around immigration, around whatever, having that be normal. So, again, and I’m coming from the perspective of not having grown up in the United States. So I’m coming in and saying all of this to you, with an outsider’s perspective, right? Yes. I grew up in, as a U.S. citizen in Puerto Rico, and I didn’t move to the United States, to the contiguous United States until I was 18 years old. And that was a culture shock for me. So there is a difference between how I grew up. Even though we are Puerto Rico’s very much a capitalistic, consumeristic system, there are other communal structures and cultural pieces that just did not apply and that I didn’t grow up with and that I had to get used to. And of course, in the time that I’ve lived in the United States, from the age of 18, I was gone for a couple of years in Germany, but from the age of 18 pretty much on to now, I’ve lived most of my life in the United States. And I’ve been wanting to leave for over A decade. and to be perfectly honest with you, over the last 20 years, there have been know, only a few moments where I felt, o, ah, this is. I feel at home here. I haven’t felt that a lot over the last 10 or 20 years. And Covid especially reduced the lives of so many people. It really shrunk our existences. friends who were acquaintances, a lot of those friendships fell away. They just became irrelevant and we just reduced our lives to those like, I don’t know, five people or five families. a lot of us experience acute isolation and separation. Geographical restrictions, social disconnection, mental health issues became more prominent because of that social disconnection. And so I experienced that as well. I feel like I lost a ton of community, even just from how my business changed because of COVID Moving from in person to online and also shifting from private practice to entrepreneurship and then being cut off from community and going through a divorce and feeling like that created separation too. Like my life got very, very, very small. And I fantasized, especially in the winterime on the regular, about moving to somewhere warmer where I could grow food. And with my young children when they were younger, I remember just because I felt alone caring for them. I often wished for, like, I wish I could live with another family. I wish that I could live with another mom, you know, another single mom. And for us to share, just tasks, childcare, washing clothes together or cleaning together. I just felt the need for the togetherness because I felt the nuclear model was just like, not my thing. So. There are also so many things that I appreciate about the United States, and I won’t go into them right now here, but just believe me that there are so many of them. And this is in no way. I, do not want to. This is not to hate on the United States or denigrate. I feel like I need to speak my truth. I believe, I truly believe a lot of it will resonate with you. so this is not about being hateful or denigrating. I mean to honestly and lovingly critique, what we’re living through and to acknowledge it and to, to speak to the experience of it. Because a lot of people aren’t acknowledging it to themselves, to each other. And I think that there’s something very, very powerful about that, about acknowledging this experience. and I also wonder, like, how many of you listening right now or watching on YouTube feel that the United States isn’t really their home, but that you live here by default, even if you were born here? That you live here. And this just doesn’t feel like it’s your thing or it’s your culture or it’s the way that you want to live. for a long time I believe the propaganda that this was the best place to live, best place in the world. And I just. Over the last five years, that’s another illusion that has completely collapsed. and then like I said, I’ve been wanting to leave for a really long time and not being able to because of co parenting or because of COVID or all of these different circumstances. And then when I received the opportunity to take over the lease of this small hotel in Bali In April of 2024, I just immediately said yes because it was a divine doorway that opened. I didn’t care if it was Bali. It could have been in India, it could have been in, Australia, it could have been in Turkey, anywhere. I would have said yes to it. It could have been in Ghana. I would have said yes to it because I was really like looking for an opportunity and it presented itself. And not only have I been wanting to leave, but like I said, I’ve been wanting to live with another family. I’ve been wanting to just live in community in some way, even if in the smallest way, like not needing it to be like 10 people, but just like one other family. And you know, just in full disclosure, like, I’m not interested in living with a partner. Even if I would meet this incredible person, I might not want to live just, Well, I know for sure I wouldn’t want to live just with them. Maybe they have a room in the hotel m that we then all share together. but yeah, I’ve done marriage. I know that that’marriage is not for me. That type of, living situation isn’t for me. That type of. Yeah, that type of relationship isn’t for me. I don’t enjoy or believe in monogamy for myself. I don’t even believe in romantic partnership for myself. So living with another family, sharing resources, sharing the responsibilityibility of the household, and even of like rearing each other’s children, having influence over each other’s children, and sharing the love made that makes the most sense to me in terms of like, how I want to live. And even though cutting costs wasn’t necessarily at the top of my list of reasons why I wanted to live collectively, living collectively does save you a ton of money. Because, you know, when you think about it like, the nuclear model only serves to make money for banks, businesses, and those service providers that are Added in by removing all the good shit of society. Right? When you think about it, like, you know, imagine you. You take a community that is living together and you divide everybody into, like, little units of, like, mother, father, child, right? Or parents and children. And you sell a home to each of them, and you multiply each home by Internet services, by the cost of utilities, by appliances, by kitchen stuff, toys, beds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All the stuff that doesn’t feel sustainable to me at all. Neither environmentally. Right. In terms of, like, impact on the environment, nor does it feel sustainable on a mental health level. Like, most people are isolated. They’re, like, lonely as fuck and living month to month. And I honestly don’t think that we were meant to live that way. Yeah. And, you know, again, going back to when I was, raising my children, they were young, you know, like, it just felt so artificial to create playdates in social time and having to organize all that. Everything felt so orchestrated. it just felt like a big effort for people to come together because everyone’s so busy trying to survive and that by the time you have some leisure time, you’re exhausted, you want to just shut your brain off with Netflix, you just want to have a quiet moment. You don’t necessarily want to reach out to another person and have some sort of social contact, even though it would probably feel good, within the right social contact. But this is what is quietly crushing people, destroying our emotional health, destroying our physical health. Right, because our emotions drive our physical health. They’re a huge component of how we feel in our bodies. And again, it makes zero sense that we’re living this way. I believe, and I’m sure you believe, we were meant to live in groups of people, in small bands and communities. And I believe that we’re going back to. And some of us are going back by force or by utility, meaning that, you know, maybe we can’t afford to live by ourselves, with the costs of rent going up and the cost of, like, just existing. And so maybe in that case, it makes just economic sense to come together and share resources. You see this a lot in immigrant families. Like, it’s normal to see, you know, two or three families living together, one family per room. Although, you know, those are extreme cases where people really don’t have the material resources to live together. But I think that, you know, you’ll see more of that in the future. And some of us are going back living in groups because it’s what we desire, because it feels right, because it’s like, it fulfills a longing that we have, or because we are defining family in more expansive ways, or we are exploring how we can be in relationship with people in more expansive ways. And, I love this, that we are thinking. It’s funny because we’re so much going back to the old ways, to the ancient ways, to. When I say the old ways, I mean that in a very sacred way of, like, we’re going back. We’re going back to, like, indigenous wisdom. We’re going back to indigenous ways of living. We’re going back to, like, what is true to our nature and our spirit. And so when I say, like, we’re thinking outside of the box, it feels so, like, well, because we’re just going back. We’re just going back home, outside or away from what’s been sold to us as freedom and liberation, or what’s been prescribed to us or presented to us as the standard template of what you need to be doing. And in my new living situation, there have been times where we do things together. There have been times where we do things separately. Like last night, we spontaneously watched a movie together. Sometimes we eat separately. Sometimes we order food together. And we are working on our agreements about how we are to be together and how we clean up our common spaces and sort of finding our rhythm right now. And another thing that I wanted to add, and this is just just because I live in Bali now, and it is customary to have paid support around cleaning and laundry and cooking. I haven’t cleaned or washed clothes since I’ve been here, and I’ve only cooked minimally because we don’t have a sink in our kitchen yet. we have a sink downstairs, but not upstairs. And so I end up. I end up not cooking very much. I have, like, some crock pot with lentils going on right now. But I cook minimally. And those are three things that have created, like, extra hours of additional leisure and rest per week. And that alone has given me more mental space. I’ve had more time, freedom than I’ve ever had before. And the reaction that I’ve had in my body is like. My body is like, oh, my God, am I suddenly. Am I accident? Did I accidentally retire? So, I’ve had more time to be present with my kids. I, like, with life with my children. I’ve let my mind be sort of, like, let it. Let it be kind of stupid. Like, not. I’ve allowed myself to not think about a lot of things and just kind of like, look at a plant or look at some bugs or pet a dog or you know, like let myself be unoccupied. so this is an incredible privilege to be able to do that. And I recognize that just this is a kind of side note, but like the fact that married white men or couples, because there are some men who do this for the family as well, who wash the clothes and clean and do all the things, take care of the kids and then their partner, whether it’s male, male, female, non binary benefit from that. and the standard has been that heterosexual, you know, married heterosexual men have been the main benefittiters of this, when they have wives who will cook and clean and organize the home and manage the day to day lives of their children. Oh my God, that is such an incredible privilege. And the fact that this invisible labor is unpaid because I pay for it now and I appreciate it so much. Like I give her money, I’m just like, yes, be blessed with this money. Thank you for your service. Like this is so incredibly valuable to my functioning. And the fact that we overlook this as an incredible service is like holy wow, Holy wow. I had no idea until now how valuable that service is. So want to let you know if you are that person in your family who does that, holy shit, that is an incredible service. So all of this to say that I think that both from an economic standpoint, like the unsustainability of how the service industry like everything is a paid service now, how the structure of that and the structure of like living in like nuclear little pods, that is dying, that is not sustainable, that cannot continue on, we won’t be able to afford that, or few will be able to afford that. And most of us will be shifting towards collective living spaces or structures. So from that end, from the economic direction, that’s the death of the nuclear family. And the death of the nuclear family is also happening because we have a desire, we have a knowing, we have an understanding that we are going back to the old ways, to the aligned ways, to the ways that are aligned with nature. So that is what’s bringing on this death, this beautiful death, this death that needed to happen and how we are shifting towards ways of being together that feel better. And of course when you do live together, a lot of the reasons why these conscious communities, they fail is because we lack the skill to communicate, to take responsibility, to really practice nonviolent communication, for example, or trauma informed communication or speaking, like including your body and the conversation and including the nervous system in relating, those are skills that we still need to learn in order for those communities to be effective and long lasting and profound. So that’s another podcast episode for another day, but I will stop here with this chapter or episode. just needed to name some of these things for myself and in a way come clean with how I’ve been feeling over the last five years, especially as I’ve been creating this new reality for myself. Right. Like the creation process sometimes takes a while. We have this goal of I wa wantna do this or I want toa live this way or I have this desire and I’m gonna manifest it. And sometimes it doesn’t happen immediately. It takes 5, 6, 7, 10 years to create. And that’s okay. But the important part is that you’re taking steps towards it. And, I have so many people that come to me for my complimentary financial strategies who as part of their goals and dreams, they want land, they wantn build community. a lot of people that are on my team, on my finance team, they have a desire to live collectively. And if you’re one of those people and if you want to, if you want to be my business partner and work on my team and co create that reality for yourself and maybe we co create it together. You know, sign up for get into my DMs and let’s talk about that. or make a comment on this video if you’re watching on YouTube. Because I am really looking for that community as well. And I’m in the process of co creating it. And this is just the first step of this bigger vision that we’re all holding. I think that we’re holding it collectively, we’re holding it individually, but as long as we’re holding it, it is kind of like we are kind of like we’re holding it somewhere in space. And that is already like the initial step to manifestation m so to creating the reality of it. So I hope this episode like, touched your heart, that it sparked something in your spirit, that it sparked a sense of like a. Yes. Or a fire inside of you. because I’m really passionate about this as well. So let me know, share this episode with a friend, and see how we can spread this fire and it make it more of reality for the people who want it. All right, bye. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the Subs subscribe button to get notified of new episodes dropping on the new and full moons of each month. And if you haven’t already, leave us a five star review on itunes to make sure that everyone who needs this transmission receives it. Until the next episode, I’m sending you fierce, fierce love.