6.11 | 4 Practices That Break The Scarcity Cycle

>> 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 strategies to guide you in building wealth that’s aligned, ethical and empowering. Let’s wake up to the true meaning of wealth together. Welcome to the Waking Up Wealthy podcast. I’m Isha Vela, psychologist, licensed financial strategist, somatic practitioner, and founder of the Wealth Ecology Institute, where the inner and outer work of matriarchal economics meets ecological regeneration. In. And today I want to share the four practices that have healed me and continue to heal me from inherited scarcity. And I want to talk about why I keep circling back around to scarcity so much. You know, I really think of it as the foundation of everything because the energy that drives the matriarchal economy is generosity. And no, it’s not the performative generosity. It’s not like a one off giving, donation type of thing. When the spirit moves you, I’m really talking about the embodied, structural, consistent, assumptive generosity of someone who moves money through community. And I often think about how abundant and generous nature is, right? The sun shines indiscriminately on all of us and on everything. You know, I think about the times that I’ve tended my garden and you know, you give a little bit, you, you show up, you give the plants water and then it gives back so much, right? There’s this like overflowing generosity that you see in nature. And when I think about sort of humans and the current economy we live in, like the, the generosity that I don’t see is because our internalized scarcity, like, it dams it up, right? It holds this natural flow like a, like a dam. And it doesn’t matter how aligned, your values are, it doesn’t matter how much you believe in the matriarchal economy or in generosity itself. If your nervous system, if your internal ecosystem is running a scarcity program, underneath those beliefs, you will, you will not circulate consistency consistently. You will hoard in ways that feel like sensible, rational choices. And it’ll make your giving and your generosity very sporadic. And you know, maybe it’s not necessarily from guilt, but maybe sometimes, but ultimately there will be a contraction, right? A holding back. It will stop you from being your true generous self. and then you’ll keep waiting for you to have more, to then begin giving consistently. Right. And that, that, that benchmark or that threshold is always going to keep moving. So dissolving internalized scarcity, for me is the real work. It’s at the foundation of a matriarchal economy, alongside dismantling our hyper individualism, which I’ll talk about on another episode, because it really deserves its own time. Yeah. And patriarchal capitalism requires two things. For it to function, it needs your isolation and it needs your scarcity. Right. It needs you to believe that there isn’t enough so that you compete rather than cooperate. Right. That you sort of, like, tend to your own pile. And it needs you to believe that you have to manage alone so that you never discover what becomes possible when you pull your resources, your knowledge, your labor and your leverage together. Right. Because we become so much more powerful when we are doing things together. Right. Like light hands do, you know, much work. I don’t even know how that, expression goes, but it really is about, like, lightening the work with many hands. And as you might already know, I grew up with some unique experiences around scarcity. you know, my dad tells me about literally fighting his brothers with wire coat hangers when they were like, you know, fighting for the last pork chop. And he lived in urban Puerto Rican poverty. My mother grew up in post World War Germany, post World War II Germany. they had a garden, right. So they had abundance, but, you know, she took showers once a week. There was, there was scarcity in sort of the interaction of the family as well. Like the, how they expressed love was very scarce, so there was always enough food. They never had to go through, that kind of material scarcity. But they didn’t have a lot of money either. so on both sides of my lineage, there’s this fear of not knowing if there would be enough tomorrow or just experiencing some, some level of not enoughness. But, you know, by the time I, I was born, we had enough. My family had enough. My father had a government job. My mother started working in the travel industry when I started kindergarten. And my education was, you know, it was military grade. It was hyper colonial. Right. So there’s a lot to unpack there, but it was top notch compared to what was available on the island. And yet we had two refrigerators in our home. Both were filled to the brim. and I, you know, I originally thought it was just because of the heat and the ants, because we couldn’t leave anything outside in Puerto Rico. But, you know, food was the one standard my Parents wouldn’t compromise on because it was like the evidence, it was the visual and felt evidence that there wasn’t any scarcity or that scarcity was over. But it wasn’t over, at least not in the behavior. Right. Like there was still like abundance was in our fridges, but inside of their bodies without them realizing it, they were, they were holding on to scarcity. Like I wasn’t allowed to leave food on my plate. And as a consequence I learned how to, you know, I, I ate past the point of fullness because wasting food was disrespectful. And you know, at school I would clear all the kids plates in my school cafeteria because I couldn’t see, I didn’t like seeing that kids would leave their food. And I had this like, oh my God, I need to finish the food. We can’t waste the food. And by the time I was in high school I was like binging several times a week, right. And I, I talk more in detail about healing scarcity through, through my experience with food in season five. I believe the title is food is your money mirror. And if you’re interested in that, give it a listen. it’s pretty powerful, but I want to back up and name that scarcity is not a natural condition. Right? Scarcity is not a law of nature. It’s not an inevitable future of the feature of the human experience. Scarcity is a manufactured condition. It’s deliberately produced, like I mentioned earlier, carefully maintained and continuously fed to us by systems that require you to feel not enough in order to function. So a person who feels general genuinely enough, right, doesn’t over consume. They have no need to consume anything. They don’t have the insecurities required to drive them to purchase something in order to make them feel better. There’s no grasping outside of themselves to feel any different than what they already feel. They’re satisfied and sufficient. a person who feels genuinely enough doesn’t work past the point of depletion because they’re not trying to compensate for something. A person who feels genuinely enough doesn’t make fear based financial decisions, like just doing whatever her, her financial advisor says she should do. That ultimately keeps her manageable and predictable and dependent on systems that weren’t designed for her. Someone who feels like enough is going to follow their own intuition. They’re gonna do, you m know, they’re gonna, they’re gonna do the research and tune into their own values. So a woman who genuinely feels like enough, and I mean this in the most profound possible sense is ungovernable. She is not manipulatable. She is self sourced. Right. She is sovereign. And an ungovernable woman is like the patriarchal economy’s real threat. Like it’s the only real threat. Like there’s zero supply. Right. The narcissist supply has, has been eliminated. Right. So let’s talk about how the system manufactures scarcity. this is not about some powerful white dudes sitting around a table deciding how to make women feel bad about themselves. Although sometimes in my mind that’s low key how I’m imagining it happening. but for real, this is just embedded in the architecture of daily life. Through the media telling you that your body is wrong and then selling you a remedy for it. through the economic system that makes basic survival expensive. And then tell you, then tells you that if you’re poor it’s a personal failure. Right. through the wellness industry that tells you your, you know, the problem is your mindset and then sells you, you know, the upgrade, keeping you sort of in this endless loop of self improvement while simultaneously making sure that you never quite arrive. Right? Because then you would stop buying their programs. Right. And then it also shows up through the cultural brainwashing of individualism that convinces you that your safety lives in what you can accumulate rather than in the web of relationship that actually sustains life. So all of that is scarcity, manufacturing and marketing. And it works. and it works when you’re, you actually have enough and you’re on vacation, for example, and you’re lying in bed at night feeling worried about spending money on another activity for your kids because you know the money’s going to run out. And it works when you’ve done years of healing and you still find yourself hesitating when you see a, GoFundMe or when somebody’s asking for a donation. It works when you believe in the matriarchal economy with every cell in your body and you still move money in a protective way with your, with your orientation to your own security. Because, scarcity isn’t a belief. If it were just a belief, then, you know, then none of us would, would behave like, like, like it’s real. You know, scarcity is a freeze response in the body. There’s lineage to it. You know, I want to honor that. Your ancestors probably experienced real devastating life threatening material deprivation. And however they learn to survive those real behaviors, those experiences are going to be coded into your cells. Right? This is, this is scientifically proven. and I want you to just kind of keep in mind that, that the egg that you came from, right? That you were. That that produced you, was inside of your mother, inside of your grandmother. Right? So, so I want to again honor that. This is your body’s attempt to be intelligent. This is an adaptive response. And then when you come out into the world, into your, into your body, you also absorb some of this scarcity condition from the behaviors of the people who raise you and obviously from the general consensus culture. And, you know, of course, these freeze responses that you come to the earth with, they don’t dissolve just through talking or through understanding. They actually require a behavioral practice. Right? The behavioral practice codes a new reality into the lineage that then gets passed down. And it’s. I think it’s kind of brilliant. Right? So today I want to offer you the four practices that have helped me heal scarcity and that continue to support me in flow. so the first practice, I want you to think about it starting close and starting with the personal. So every day, list the specific ways that you’re already supported. This is not a generic, generic gratitude practice. I want you to be very specific and very detailed when you do this. It can be as simple as, I am supported by my breath. I am supported by this bed. Assuming that you’re doing this as you’re waking up in the morning. maybe you had a friend who showed up for you without being asked to, or a client whose payment arrived exactly when you needed it to. Maybe a child, Maybe your child bought you like, a glass of water when you felt thirsty. or they brought your, your dog, brought your house shoes or something like that. your body digested a meal, or your brain supported you through this really creative process or challenging work task. Your intuition guided you through a decision. You get the idea here, right? And you, you know, you want to get specific. And as you’re naming these specific ways that you’re supported, I want you to imagine them as happening in the moment. Right? I want you to visualize them and to let the emotion of each one of those move through you. Don’t just make a list, but, like, let it land in your body as evidence in real time, because you’re actually experiencing the emotions in real time of how you are held. Okay. And you know, when I talk about visualizing, this is not positive thinking so much as it is retraining and remembering, coding the evidence and replacing the lie of scarcity that’s not currently present. Right? It’s sort of like the abundance overtakes the lie of scarcity. And you’re teaching your body slowly and consistently through this repeated experience that the ecosystem you exist in is trustworthy. And that is huge. That’s the foundation of everything else. The second practice is to stop judging your experiences and let life penetrate you fully. So, you know, the second practice has two pieces that go together. The first is to stop judging your experiences as good or bad, as favorable or unfavorable. Most of us are in a continuous, largely unconscious process of sorting our experiences into acceptable and unacceptable, pleasant and unpleasant, right? The sensations and emotions and circumstances we welcome, right? And then the emotions that we resist, suppress, push away, manage and numb, right? And what happens is a few things. First, there’s energy that’s going to be, pushing away, right? You know, pushing away that resistance of pushing away an experience takes quite a bit of effort. And I think about it as like pushing a. An inflatable ball under the water, right? Like, it takes energy and eventually your arms get tired. And that energy that you’re using to suppress or push away is energy that could be used for, creativity, for presence, for the quality of attention that that genuine relationship requires and that actually allows you to open to receiving. This is really important when you stop fighting the experience you’re having and instead get curious, like, leaning in, like, even about things like tightening in your chest. Instead of trying to make it stop, get curious about it. And that kind of opens you up to, like, oh, what’s here? And allows you to lean into it. And that changes everything because when you get curious, the sensation actually moves and the energy that was, like, locked inside the resistance becomes available. There’s an opening. And this leads directly into the second step, letting life fully penetrate you. And yes, I’m using the word penetrate on purpose. This is from Carolyn Elliott’s teachings, of existential kink. And it’s perfect because it actually ties into the sensuality of life inhabiting your full senses and slowing down enough to actually feel the texture of the moment that you’re in. The color and quality of the light coming through the window, the taste of the food you’re eating, the smoothness of the texture and the flavors dancing on your tongue. The temperature of the air on your skin, the weight of your body in the chair, the sound of whatever is present, the wind, the traffic, the silence, your air conditioner, the particular quality of quiet or noise in a room where someone you love is sleeping. Right? Noticing those things and letting them in fully is very grounding and cannot coexist with scarcity. Not because it bypasses the real material conditions in your life, but because you can’t feel impoverished when you are completely alive to the richness of what is already here in the moment. And scarcity requires like a particular kind of numbness. it’s a kind of, again, free state in which there’s a narrowing of perception to the transactional and quantifiable. Right. So it kind of like scarcity just kind of focuses on, say, money. Like it hyper fixates and it’s becomes very, it takes you out of the, the magic of the moment. and this was a, this was a practice. I’m, you know, I’m sharing this from real experience. This was a practice that was, that saved my sanity when I was experiencing financial abuse in my divorce. And it was something safe that I could come back to that would open me to receiving and moving with how life, how circumstances were shaping me. So even when I hated that these things were happening in my life, I said, like, okay, universe, like, do with me what you will, because I knew that these experiences were shaping me. And I said, okay, well it, take me, let’s, let’s do this. Shape me and mold me. Because there was some part of me that understood that there was an alchemical, process happening and that I was being transformed in some way that I didn’t know what the outcome would be of yet. But I said okay. I said, I said yes to it. And it was also really important during that time in my life to allow my heart to stay open instead of closing it, instead of getting angry and frustrated with what was happening because I could see how staying in my frustration was going to destroy my physical and mental health. And because I had already been through burnout, I could not take that risk. So this practice helped me stay in touch with. It helped me stay connected with the universe, but it also helped me stay in touch with the magical realms, and stay in touch with the trust that I was being guided through some, you know, trial by fire that was forging me in some way. And, you know, this isn’t about inhabiting a permanent state of bliss. It’s just a practice that helps you return to the truth long enough to make choices from that place. And like I said earlier, it’s a political practice because extractive systems need you to be stressed and, and oriented to the fear of what’s going to happen next. So it definitely doesn’t want us keep you, it, doesn’t want to have you fully alive and tuned in. So the third practice is plant a vegetable garden. And I Mean this literally. If you don’t currently have a vegetable garden right now, find, you know, until you find a piece of land to steward, spend as much time in nature as possible. Because it is genuinely difficult, so difficult to believe in scarcity when you have a relationship with a particular plot of land or with a special place, especially in the context of this garden, where the land is giving back to you and you are then, like, ingesting this abundance into your body. Like, that is so powerful. And I mean, working in my community garden that I had back in the United States, I was absolutely stunned by the tomatoes and the kale that kept giving even as we moved into the fall. I was like, how is it possible that it’s October and there are still tomatoes on the vines? Like, it was just incredible. And I just felt so blessed by the giving. you know, that the giving that kept on giving after the harvest season was over. And, you know, the natural, the living world experiences cycles of overflow and dormancy, of growth and composting. Inhale and exhale, winter and spring. And a garden teaches your body what extractive systems have spent centuries trying to get you to forget. And it’s that the earth generates more than enough when it’s tended to properly rather than extracted from. And that regeneration isn’t exceptional, it isn’t special. It is the default state of a living system that is, you know, that’s in right relationship with what sustains it, you know, and it’s like a single zucchini plant. When tended with basic care, it will produce more zucchinis than you can handle, right? You’ll have. You’ll be making zucchini bread and pasta sauce forever. it’s like nature is like some type of overachiever, right? It’s a giving game. and you need to feel this in your body. It’s not something that you understand conceptually. You want to be putting your hands in the soil. You want to be feeling the seeds. You want to drop them in the holes. You want to, you know, watch. Watch this seed grow and then eat what you grow. I think that there is something truly, truly magical about that. And if you’re excited about tending something alive and that, like, walking in nature is not going to be enough for you. you can start with an herb garden that you put up on your windowsill or a single tomato plant on your balcony. The point is to have the relationship and really notice this. This, reciprocity that you have with. With the plant that you’re growing. Okay, here’s the fourth and final practice, the one that most people in the healing space completely miss. You want to be building the structures that make scarcity impossible for your community. So individual healing inside a system designed to manufacture scarcity is absolutely necessary, but incomplete. So you can tend your internal ego system beautifully, you can tend your garden devotedly, you can practice gratitude with genuine depth and inhabit your experience with full somatic presence and still be living inside an economy that is continually trying to reopen the wound you are working so hard to heal. Right? So the fourth practice is, let’s say, a saving circle. I talk about the saving circle in another episode in this season. we were the original bank, I believe it’s called. You, want to be practicing the, you know, creating a community trust with people that you are in intentional relationship with. you want to be participating in a mutual aid network that reroutes resources to where they are needed before there is a cris. This kind of support isn’t optional and it’s not something to do after you’ve healed enough. It really addresses the condition at the level of system rather. Rather than just at the level of the individual inside of the system. So you’re creating a genuine web of interdependence that means you never have to face a financial or medical emergency alone because you are held inside of a web. And that has already decided. We do not let each other fall. Right? And I remember that when I had m. had my uterus removed because I had a. A fibroid, I contacted bunch. A bunch of my local friends and I made a WhatsApp group. And and I said, hey guys, I’m going to be. You know, I was a solo parent, right? And I, I’m still a solo parent, but I was used to doing things on my own from day to day, like strong, hyper independent streak. I grew up having to do things by myself a lot. So I know how to do that. But for the surgery, I made sure I made an effort to mobilize everyone I knew and create this group chat. and getting people, you know, I, I said I wanted to get people prepared to support me because I’d been sick on my own when I went through burnout. And I, I promised myself after that experience that I would never. I was never going to repeat that over and again over again because that was me kind of recreating this wound of having to do things alone. And I was like, I’m not about that anymore. I’m going to actually create a web of support and Whoever doesn’t want to support me or is too busy to support me, they have the option not to. But I wanted to give that gift to myself. I wanted to be held. And oh my God, it was so amazing. It was actually necessary. It turned out to be necessary because I got this whole infection. I had shingles. It was like a hot mess after the surgery. And people brought me food, people picked up medicine for me. I went on walks with people when I, you know, had to get moving again. And I can take myself back to those moments where I was held. I can, I can feel like tears coming up for me because it felt like an enormous group hug. Huh? It was so, so important and, and supporting other people and being supported by community. It’s going to shift your internal ecosystem in ways that years of individual somatic work and practice won’t produce. Like, it’s just going to accelerate it. So we are collective beings and our bodies respond to collective interventions. And yeah, when you know that, and when you can fully trust that you’re not going to face a financial or a medical crisis alone, or when you know that there’s a rotating savings circle that’s going to be coming your way in a number of months, or when you know that there’s a community trust that’s been formed that are, that’s going to feed your children and your children’s children and their grandchildren and their, you know, and then. And the nature, like the nature that they will inherit or the land that they will inherit. Your internal ecosystem relaxes in a way that gratitude and somatic practices practice in isolation can’t really touch. yeah, so, so here’s what I want to leave you with. absolutely. Do the inner ecosystem work, right? Plant the garden, tend the land. Immerse yourself in the truth of abundance. Right? stop judging your experiences and surrender to them fully and simultaneously build the structure. It’s, it’s, it’s a holistic, ecological, ecologically sound and politically powerful response to the manufactured scarcity that you’re sort of like inundated with on a daily basis. And if this episode landed somewhere real in you, if you felt the ping inside of you somewhere, if you recognize yourself as someone who has done so much healing and still feels like you’re chasing that feeling of enough. I created something for you. It’s called Flow. Move Money Like a Matriarch. It’s a free five part email series that walks you through the foundational framework of matriarchal economics. The somatic, the structural, the ancestral, the ecological and I. The link is in the show Notes. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Remember to hit the 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.