6.16 | Matriarchy as a Marketing Tool

>> 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 your host, Isha Vela. I’m a licensed financial strategist and psychologist, somatic practitioner, and founder of the Wealth Ecology Institute. And today I want to talk about matriarchy as a marketing tool because I’ve been seeing so many examples of people using both the word matriarchy and this new wave of, feminism that we’re seeing, that we’re calling matriarchy as a way to market their intentional communities or their leadership coaching. And it makes me absolutely bonkers, honestly, because when I take a look, and I mean, it only takes me about 15 seconds to see, of looking to see that what they’ve got going on is not matriarchal and that they actually don’t really have an idea of what matriarchy actually means. I have a lot of conversations in my DMs with people reaching out to me, wanting me to know what they’re doing. And when I start to ask the deeper questions about legal structures and governance, it becomes apparent that what they’re doing is not matriarchal and it’s just another version of the triangle. And, you know, when I, when I first wrote the outline for, this podcast, I was really angry. I was really frustrated because, you know, I care so deeply about this. this is my life’s work. And when, you know, this is such an important movement, it’s, it’s a movement so central to the survival of the human species and of, like, all of it, right? Plants, animals, the critters. And when I see it co opted by capitalism to sell you something, I really want to scream. It’s disgusting and I’m not having it. I call our connection to Earth, to living systems, to moving money and other resources through relationship, is sacred. And I. It will not become another marketing tool, right? Another manipulative marketing tool. Matriarchy is not vibes. It’s not an aesthetic. It’s a blueprint. It’s an actual blueprint for a more common, compassionate and connected way of living, of existing together. And the danger of Matriarchy becoming a marketing tool is obvious, right? It be, it becomes a gimmick in the same way that girl power, like feminism was, you know, co opted as well. And it became girl power that you see put on a T shirt or a hat, right? And you know, when the kids were little, I remember like looking at their, at their clothing and being like, what the is this? Like, it’s just this girl power and it’s pink and sparkly and it’s cute, right? And it just becomes another commodity. And I’m like, hell no. That is how movements slowly erode. That’s how they lose their potency and their meaning and it gets watered down, right? And so the, the meaning dilutes and people don’t know what it is anymore, right? And I’m not letting that happen. So on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what matriarchy actually is. I’m not going to concern myself with, well, I’m to talk a little bit about what it isn’t. But then we’re going to talk about the four pillars of matriarchal infrastructure. In other words, what’s required legally and somatically for matriarchy to become real and established for the long game, right? So let’s talk about what matriarchy actually is by talking about it. What it is, but what it is. Okay? So matriarchy is not feminine energy. It’s not women in power. It is not a value statement on a website. Matriarchy centers the mother, the ongoing force or the original originating force of all life. It centers the mother in our lineages who carry the knowledge, who knew the land, who shared the language, and who survived through conditions designed to erase them. And it centers the maternal principle itself, right? The force that generates, that protects, nourishes, regenerates. That’s the life force, right? The creative life force. The people call it like prana or chi, right? So when we say matriarchy, we are saying that life is the organizing principle, right? Not profit, not power over, not extraction. And a, matriarchal economy asks one question. This keeps it very simple. Does it support life? Does it redistribute what it takes from, does it distribute what it generates? Does it leave the conditions for life more intact than it found them, right? And those questions, right? Or the question that, does it support life or how does it support life? That reorganizes everything, including how we grow food, how we build shelter, how we move money, how we make decisions, how we tend our natural resources and Even manage our bodies, because sometimes we’re extractive of ourselves when we over give, when we push ourselves beyond a certain point, right? We are extracting from ourselves. We are being the colonizers of our own life force, creative life force. So matriarchy is not a political position, it’s an ecological orientation. So when we map financial systems on top of natural ones, it’s very easy to see what needs to happen. Specifically how wealth and power needs to be distributed towards those who have the least of it, right? Versus accumulating at the top or continuing to accumulate at the top. So that’s why I, the Wealth Ecology Institute exists, because it was like, okay, this is actually really simple. If we just kind of like move money in the way that there’s ecological movement, right? Or how, how resources move in an ecological system, right, Then we have our system. It’s really that simple. So matriarchy and matriarchal leadership is not defined by who leads, but how the leadership functions, how the power is distributed, and it’s. That is defined by the architecture. And the architecture has four non negotiable pillars. And I want you to get your pens and pencils out. If you’re walking, you’ll need to come back and, and relisten. But yeah, I want you to write this down because I want you to use, use it as your discernment filter whenever you’re looking at anything that says this is a matriarchal community or this is a matriarchal business, right? It needs to fit these four pillars. And the four pillars are ownership, governance, wealth systems and embodiment. Right? So you want to have ownership that is legally protected from extraction. You want to have governance that distributes power rather than concentrating it. You want to have wealth systems that circulate and distribute resources. And finally there’s the internal capacitation, which includes shadow work, decolonial somatic work, and ego identity transformation that makes it possible to sustain all three of those without replicating harmful patriarchal patterns, right? Or extractive patterns that you’re trying to dismantle. And without all four, you just have matriarchal aesthetics, period. okay, so let’s talk about the ownership pillar. Being the conscious owner of a parcel of land, for example, does not make you matriarchal. So I recently saw a post and I did some content about it where I saw a. I don’t know if it was an app or some sort of feature where someone who has land can match up with someone who is looking for land, which is is amazing. Right? That’s so cool. But it was advertising to people who are awake. And the advertisement itself, the videos were of white people. I didn’t see any visible people of color. It was pretty horrifying that it was that unawake when it claims to be awake, by. And they weren’t necessarily advertising as matriarchal, to be fair, but they were advertising as being awake. And like, how awake can you, if you don’t have some sort of, like, racial awareness, that what you’re doing and that how you’re marketing is really off base. So we need to talk about, like, when you’re looking into co housing or co living, be prepared to have conversations about what happens to the land or the living space when the owner passes away, what happens to the land or the housing situation when the vision changes or when the owner has a massive life event that forces them to step away. Right. Because life is lifing consciousness. Consciousness is not a binding commitment. Right. It’s not a legal commitment. It’s a current state of mind. And those current states of mind, they change. They change over time. and so let’s get into the structures that actually protect community ownership. One of them is community land trust. These are legal structures where land is held in trust permanently and they’re never returned to the speculative market, regardless of who the current trustees are. There are lots of things that go along with having a community land trust. I’m not going to get into those. I just want to give you examples. Hey, real quick before we get back to the episode. You keep saying you want an indigenous matriarchy now, and I believe you. And it’s going to require a relationship with money that’s completely outside of the tradfi model and a body that’s mapped to ecological systems. So I made something for that. Flow is a matriarchal money masterclass followed by five emails over five days each providing you an internal shift and a concrete action step to match walks you through the somatic and ancestral patterns running the show and the structures that, let money move through community instead of stagnating in scarcity. By the end of the week, you’ll be moving money like a matriarch. So find the link in the show notes, sign up, and flow will come straight to your inbox. Okay, let’s get back to it then. You have purpose trusts where the mission itself is the legal owner, which is pretty exciting, versus the individual. So the purpose would be something like funding the community garden or keeping the land protected. Whatever the mission Is right? So who makes sure the trustee actually does what they say they’re going to do? That’s where the enforcer comes in. So there’s like layers of protection. Think of them as the mission’s guardian. So their whole job is watching the trustee and making sure the money serves the purpose, not somebody’s personal agenda. And for the matriarchal community, this is really powerful because you can build a trust, right, where a council, not a person, plays the enforcer role. So then you have like an additional distribution of power and decision making where, you know, nobody sits at the top. The mission stays protected and the power stays distributed. It’s really cool. Then you have cooperatives that are member owned, and one member gets one vote. No single person can unilaterally, unilaterally sell or extract. And here’s the part that really matters, right? No single person can walk in and sell the thing out from under everyone, right. Or drain the assets for themselves. The ownership is shared, so the power to make big decisions is also shared. And that’s a cooperative, right? That’s you own it together, you decide together and you protect it together. An irrevocable life insurance trust is a generational funding structure that ensures a member’s death becomes an act of stewardship rather than a point of, ah, financial vulnerability for the community. Right? Like imagine the leader passes away in the community. It’s like, oh my God, they were making this contribution. Now that contribution is no longer there, but with a life insurance policy, that payout, you know, it usually gets counted as part of your estate when you pass away. But in this case it would go into a, into an irrevocable life insurance trust. Right? And so the trust owns it, not an individual person. Right. and when the payout comes, it skips. Well, if you wanted to put a portion of it into your estate, that’s fine. but let’s say you put all of it into a, you know, let’s say you’re super committed. You’re like, my kids live in the community, they’re going to stay in the community. All of the money is going to go into the community. So it goes straight to the people. And the purpose, the trust names and that can be supporting your children within the community. It could be, funding their education, it could be, continuing to support the land. Some of the things that I mentioned earlier as part of purpose trusts. So, irrevocable life insurance trust, or ILIT for short, is often the first real step towards turning a personal safety Net into something that can fund a bigger structure like a community trust or bioregional financing facility down the line. And these aren’t like bureaucratic obstacles to the vision. They are the vision made real in a legal way. Right. So if the values are genuine, the ownership structure will reflect those. And if the ownership structure doesn’t reflect them, the values are aspirational at best, and at worst they’re going to be performative. So let’s talk about the governance pillar now. So shared values, like I mentioned earlier with this example of this, you know, people with land connecting to people without land who are looking for land, those shared values are not a governance structure. This is one of the parts that makes people uncomfortable because governance feels unsexy. It’s kind of like a prenup, right? It feels like administrative when you’re talking about relationships. But governance is totally sexy because it is about leadership and how power is held, how decisions are made. And most communities, in most conscious communities, the governance is either implicit, right, because everybody assumes we’re on the same page, we have the same values, so we don’t really need to write anything down until a disagreement arises and then there’s no process for resolving it, and then things fracture. Right, but. Or another example would be that decision making is concentrated in the founder, in the person like owning the land, for example, or who created the community, or the person who holds the title. Which means that the community’s matriarchal values are entirely dependent on that person’s ongoing willingness to engage those connections, those decisions. Right. And neither one of those alone are matriarchal governance. So matriarchal governance requires documented decision making process, defined membership agreements, clear accountability and repair protocols rotated. Leadership, one member, one vote, regardless of contribution size. Right. And that’s, that’s the whole thing in and of itself, because in our body’s condition to capitalist patriarchy or patriarchal capitalism, we believe that if we contribute more, that we should have more of a say, right? We should have more decision making power. And that’s a perfect example of replicating patterns of ownership and domination. And you want to have explicit exit provisions so that when a member leaves, it doesn’t destabilize the whole community. Right. It’ll probably destabilize it a little bit, but it destabilizes it less. Right. So make sure that people have ways of leaving that aren’t like a rupture. So these documents are the infrastructure that allow communities to survive contact with complexity. Right. Whether, you know, it’s real, life is complex, real Conflict, like any types of conflict, right? Or, or events, life events. And a community without governance documents is, is a community held together entirely by the goodwill of its current members. And we all know that changes, right? If you want to build things that last, that last longer than a trend, you have to create the structures for them to exist. So let’s then talk about the economic structures. This is how wealth actually moves. Whether they circulate, redistribute and feed the collective pool, or whether they pull at the top, regardless of the values that are being stated. And this one is the one that requires the most honesty. Because the economic model is where you can see the most clearly and the most concretely whether something is matriarchal, right? Truly matriarchal. Whether it’s like, is it matriarchal structurally or are you just saying it? Right? Like in Spanish we say the la Bo caparafuera, like from the mouth outward, not embodied and not written into law. So the questions that I want you to be asking here is where does the money actually go, right? Not where the founder intended it to go. Not what does the about page say about values and mission and giving back, but where does it actually go when the money comes in? So you want to follow the money, right? Who receives it first, who is compensated from it at what rate? And who decides what that process is? What percentage returns to the community that generated the value and what percentage funds the projects building the matriarchal infrastructure on the ground, and what percentage stays with the founder. So if you’re someone, a leader, an entrepreneur, a founder who cares about the matriarchal economy, who is, who says they’re actively building it because they have like a leadership program? Are they actually redistributing that money to the actual movement, to the infrastructure on the ground? Right? So it’s like it has to kind of match. And what is the legal structure that governs all of those flows if there’s no legal structure at all? It’s just intention and goodwill and the founder’s ongoing commitment to do the right thing, right? Because intention is not an economic model and goodwill is not a redistribution strategy. The founders ongoing commitment to doing the right thing is all. It only lasts as long as, you know, as her values. As long as her values, right? And so those are going to change. As we established in the ownership pillar, a genuine matriarchal economic model has three non negotiable characteristics and those are circulation, right? So wealth moves. We know that in a matriarchal economic model, every Unit of currency that enters the ecosystem is trapped not for accumulation, but to movement. And some of that movement can go into a personal account, into building support for you. Right? Saying, not saying that that can’t happen. But it has to be like, it has to be. There has to be awareness of like percentages and things like that. So we have to understand where it comes from, where the money comes from, where is it going, who does it compensate, what does it build, right. And where or how does it return to the community who generated it? This is the law of circulation made operational. So then we have the redistribution piece, right? A matriarchal economic model is not just about how the money moves within the community, but how accumulated wealth then moves back into the ecosystem. Right? Because we always want to be making sure that the, like in sort of thinking about it from an ecological perspective, like who has the least nutrients, we want to be moving that, that in that direction. So that means that people who are in overflow, it could be a founder, an entrepreneur, a professional women who’ve built real financial power. They have a deliberate, legally structured plan for redistributing wealth into the communities, building the matriarchal infrastructure on the ground. This isn’t philanthropy or charity that preserves the power differential between the giver and the receiver. And that’s something that I go to on a previous podcast. This is about like redistribution, circulating value back into the web that generated it. And this can be in the form of redistribution portfolios which I actually help people create. It can be nonprofit distribution or sorry, non profit contribution. It can be direct community investment and legal structures that make the redistribution binding rather than discretionary. And then there’s transparency. So an economic model that says it’s matriarchal needs to be visible, needs to be transparent. The financials are available, the con, the, the compensation structure is documented. And the redistribution plan is real and specific and not dependent again, on the, on the founder’s ongoing generosity and goodwill. Anyone that’s participating in the community can follow the money and see exactly where it goes. And I’m thinking now about like an intentional community where there are, let’s say, entrepreneurs working together. Right? And so we want to make sure that the people in the community can see what each entrepreneur like, how they are moving money so that they can also steward those resources. That transparency is a structural requirement. It’s, it’s ultimately about accountability to the Great Mother, right, To the community, to, to the life of that community. Because if the, if the community can’t see how the resources move, then they can’t govern it. Right. And then the governance piece, right. The community that can’t govern its resources is not a matriarchal economy. And the structures that actually deliver on this, on all of these pieces are non profits, which where like extraction is legally impossible because no individual can profit from the organization’s revenue. And every dollar that comes in has to serve a mission. It’s binding legal reality. That’s why we chose it as the model for Mycelium, our online matriarchal community. So then we also have cooperatives, and this is a structure where profits are distributed to members according to their participation and contribution rather than pooling at the top. Then you have sliding scale and reciprocity models where access is available to people at different, economic levels. And you can do this like in, if you have like a, an offer in, in your business. And we are using this as part of our model in Mycelium as well. Right. You choose your own tier, economic tier, based on your, your personal experience. Then you have community currencies and time banks where the value is exchanged, decoupled from the extractive financial system altogether. And the community creates its own economy of circulation. Then you have rotating savings circles, which I talked about before as well. and these are formalized into investment pools that then become community financial institutions. Right. The full graduation arc where community capital builds community infrastructure rather than individual wealth. So let’s now talk about the capacitation layer now that we’ve talked about, like governance and financials and ownership. This is the one that gets left out most often because it’s the hardest to build from the inside. So you can have all of the things I just mentioned locked into place and you can still replicate every patriarchal pattern I just mentioned, or no, sorry, you could re, replicate every patriarchal pattern you’re trying to dismantle. Because the people inside the arch, architecture have not done the internal work to hold it. Right. And holding it is what makes it last. Right? That’s the glue. There has to be a match between holding who you say you are and who you actually are. Right? That’s what we call coherent leadership. Right. The words match, the actions match, the energy. We’ve all experienced people who say that they value something or that they believe in something, but that they don’t live it through their actions or their behavior. And that’s like, that’s unsafe. And that’s the gap that the ongoing internal capacitation work seeks to close. Right. Because we all have these Values. We all say like, oh my God, that sounds so great. But showing up for it is a totally different story. Dismantling individual and scarcity. Individualism and scarcity, which I mentioned earlier, is what I call like the primo aspect of identity. Meaning they are primordial. They are like deeply cemented to who we are and how we move through the world. So dismantling those pieces involves very deep levels of shadow alchemy, somatic integration and ego dissolution. You have to have the internal regulating skills that make it possible to sustain those collective agreements and to deal with the interpersonal challenges of living with other people and operating more communally. Like, yeah, it’s a thing. It’s a daily practice of catching yourself operating from well grooved narratives and ways of being. Ownership, scarcity, exit, accumulation, dominance. Noticing when you do, like when those stories come up and having enough spaciousness to observe it, notice it, and then choose differently instead of reacting from, from that place. And here we’re talking about like, these are like these, these, this internal work is not separate from the external structural work, right? We talk like internal structures. External structures. It’s like I said, the glue that makes it hold together, right? They, they operate simultaneously. So let’s talk about the markers of integrity. So here are the markers of integrity with matriarchal values. Okay? So you have the legal ownership structure that makes extraction legally impossible. Then you have the governance that distributes power. And this is documented, practiced, revised regularly with real accountability and repair built into the culture. Then you have economic models that circulate. You have transparent, you have transparency. You have, the economic models show the receipts openly. and there should be available to anyone who asks. Then you have. Okay, yes, just making sure I have all the pieces here that I’m talking about, you know, bringing it all back together. Then you have the capacitation, which is, like I said, the internal work happening alongside the structural work. And that’s where the shadow work, somatic practice and the ego transformation, the identity transformation comes in. And then the longevity. Right, that’s another piece that I didn’t talk about, but that I do want to name because you know, this, the transformational work, the identity work takes time. So when somebody claims to be matriarchal and to have a matriarchal business, does the body of work predate the brand? Were they doing this before matriarchy was actually trending? Because it doesn’t happen overnight. And the most important marker of it all, does the leader’s financial life reflect the value that she’s teaching does it? Is it consistent? Is it honest? Is it, you know, are they willing to name where they are still building it? And it hasn’t gotten there yet. Right. so my invitation to you is the gap between the intention and the desire and the vision and the actual architecture that match the knowledge and the vision and the dire. Sometimes that gap is structural. Sometimes that gap is a capacitation gap. Right. So sometimes it’s both. But hopefully after listening to this episode or watching it, you have a better sense of what your gaps are and how you’re wanting to close them. I’m in the process of closing and tightening some of these myself with Mycelium. This is the global matriarchal community that teaches you the relational skills and the structural knowledge to do the exact thing we’re talking about during this episode. Okay. Because the matriarchal economy does not m. You know, it doesn’t need more people talking about the vision. It needs the people who are building all four pillars simultaneously. That is the work. Thank you so much for listening. 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.