6.14 | Starving the Machine, Matriarchally

>> 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. 

Hi, welcome to the Waking Up Wealthy podcast. I’m Isha Vela, your host. I’m a psychologist, matriarchal wealth activist and strategist, somatic practitioner, and founder of the Wealth Ecology Institute. And I want to speak directly to the precise political moment we’re in on the timeline. We are entering eclipse season. There is a war on women. And it’s probably the most literal definition of the word war. It’s unfortunately not hyperbolic. women are being hunted down and arrested for aborting fetuses, while men get absolutely nothing for destroying the bodies, minds and spirits of children who have landed Earthside. There’s a systematic dismantling of every protection that has taken generations of women’s labor, suffering and sacrifice to build. And it’s so much bigger than that. You know, the war is not actually on women. It’s a war on humanity. And I’ve been thinking about a question that a big name hypnotherapist asked in her reels yesterday about how to starve the machine under martial law. Right? Because that is sort of the direction that we’re going in with all of the surveillance and all of that. And she threw the question out there as an invitation for her audience to post ideas in the comments. And I started to wonder, okay, so what does it look like to starve the machine from a matriarchal perspective? Because I absolutely mean it when I say making the patriarchy obsolete. Right? Because we’re not just withdrawing from it, we’re also creating systems outside of it. Right. So the question of how to withdraw from it strategically, structurally, collectively is really one of the most practically urgent questions available right now. So that’s what we’re talking about today. And then offering this as a synthesis of structures and movements that have already existed and continue to exist. I’m just organizing it as a map, and it’s not something that I’ve fully implemented myself. I want to be clear about that. I’ve only practiced some of these and mostly on a more personal level, so I want to be clear about that. So when most People think about resisting an oppressive system. When they think about starving the machine, they think about reactive resistance. And that includes protests, boycotts, legal challenges, electoral politics, social media pressure campaigns. And those are all good. I love them. well, let me be honest. I’m not a fan of all of them. I’m not a fan of so much the protesting. and I think it does a lot for the morale of the people, much more than it does actually messing with the system. And reactive resistance is precisely reactivity. it operates in response to the machine’s moves, right? So it’s organized around the. What the machine does, which means the machine sets the tempo. the machine decides what we’re responding to, and the machine determines the terrain, right? The, the space we’re fighting on. And so reactive resistance can slow the machine. It can block specific moves. I think it is absolutely important for, women to be in politics. I absolutely believe that those fights need to be fought on a legislative level. Absolutely right. It’s just the protesting thing that I, I just don’t feel called, to do. all of these, some of those reactive responses protect specific people in specific moments. But what it doesn’t do on its own is make the machinery’s or the machine’s primary weapons lose their leverage. Right? Because we know that the reason why. Well, let me just name the primary weapons first. The primary weapons are financial precarity, social isolation, manufactured scarcity, and the threat of individual ruin. Right? and the reason why we don’t see more action is because those weapons work, right? Most of us are still dependent on the machine for our survival, right? We need our jobs, to make money for the things that allow us to exist. We depend on currency. We depend on healthcare systems, the food supply chains, and the housing markets, right? So as long as that dependency is there, as long as withdrawing from the machine means that our survival is immediately threatened, I. E. Like if we were to quit our jobs tomorrow, our survival would be immediately threatened, right? As long as that dependency is there, the machine has leverage, right? So the mach. The. The matriarchal alternative is not just resistance. There is the simultaneous building of parallel infrastructure that reduces our dependency structurally, not just symbolically, so that the machine’s weapons lose their power over the people who are building something different. And this is what I mean by starving the machine matriarchally. So you’re withdrawing supply from a narcissistic machine in the same way you withdraw supplied from a narcissistic partner. When you withdraw the supply, it needs to function While building the structures that still allow you to survive. Right. So, yeah, so I’m just thinking about, like, on an individual level, what that looks like. Right. So you want to be, you know, you want to have like your apartment set up or. Right. It’s truly the systemic equivalent of leaving an abusive relationship. You want to know where you’re going as you’re leaving. Right. You want to sort of be building a new life, a new structure, new system. So in matriarchal economics, we work with the four forms of capital, and these are financial capital, physical capital, social capital, and natural capital. Patriarchal capitalism only counts one, financial capital, and the other ones are made invisible or treated as free. Right. This is what. Why we call it invisible labor, because it’s been made invisible. And starving the machine matriarchally means withdrawing all four simultaneously. So let’s talk about each of them. So let’s start with financial capital. So you stop feeding the extractive economy with your money. You know, we’ve talked about boycotts before, right? So this is a little bit in that. In that vein. So the first thing would be to move your money. If your money is sitting in a bank that funds fossil fuel extraction, private prisons, or weapons manufacturing, it is funding the machine you are trying to starve. So you want to move it into a credit union, a, community bank, or a cooperative financial institution. This is not a symbolic gesture. Banks use your deposits, use your savings as the basis for lending. Right? Where your money sits determines what gets funded. The second is that you want to automate your redistribution so you don’t wait until you feel generous. Right. We’ve talked about this before. Set a percentage, even a small one, that moves money automatically every, every month to mutual aid networks, solidarity funding, community organizations that are building the parallel infrastructure right now. The automation just makes it just, you know, makes it a structural commitment versus, you know, you having to decide what, you know, to make decisions every month. And, and that just activates the. The scarcity alarm. If it’s happening automatically, it just kind of takes you by surprise, and then you’re like, oh, it’s done. Third, you want to be building a. Or building or joining a rotating saving circle. So this is the most immediately accessible way to begin routing financial capital through community rather than through extractive institutions. So you want to start with a small group and keep it small. M. It just makes sense. it makes more sense to have multiple rotating saving circles rather than one big one. Right? Because then money can be routed in lots of different ways, depending on what the saving circle decides, you know, what their values are and whether it’s a fixed contribution, right, of like $100 a month or $200 a month or a, give what you can where some people pay 50 and some people pay 200. Do whatever feels less complicated for the group, right? Because every, every rotating saving circle has its own little culture based on the people who are inside of it. 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 equal ecological systems. So I made something for that. Flow is a matriarchal money master class 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 matrix arc. 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. So maybe you have six women and you have a fixed contribution and there’s a rotating pot. So there’s no bank taking a cut. There’s no interest, no extraction. It’s, it’s just trust and structure and the understanding that your financial flourishing and your, your community’s financial flourishing are the same thing. Right? They’re not in competition with one another. So the fourth here would be tracking the thread of the money you spent. So you want to be supporting local businesses versus a national chain. You want to fund the woman owned business or the Latino owned business versus the delivery platform. That takes 30%. Right. Talking here about, Instacart or something like that, you want to support community supported agriculture versus an, industrial grocery store. And I recognize that, you know, depending on where you live, that may be easier or more uncomfortable to do. So do what’s within your reach and be willing, be willing to be less uncomfortable, or less, less comfortable in some of those choices. Because our entire culture has been built around convenience, right? So those initial steps will feel uncomfortable. Every dollar that you spend locally recirculates through the community multiple times before it leaves. But every dollar that you spend at a chain leaves immediately. And that’s what’s called the local multiplier effect. And that’s totally real. Research shows that for every $100 spent at a locally owned business, approximately $52 stays in the local economy, right? And for that same hundred dollars spent at a chain, it’s approximately 14. So that’s a huge difference, right? Where you spend is almost as important as how much you spend. All right, so then let’s go into physical capital, right? This is control. Control of your land and resources. If you have access to land, even if it’s a small plot, even a shared community garden, you want to be building food sovereignty at whatever scale is available to you. Every calorie that you produce outside of the industrial food system is a withdrawal from the machine. And every seed that you save. I have my seeds right here, actually. it’s a refusal of, like the. The intellectual property regime that wants to own the genetic code of the food supply. That’s super, super dangerous, right? Every meal that’s cooked from ingredients that have been grown in relationship with the area that you inhabit is an act of bioregional sovereignty. And if you have land or access to land, begin the process of moving it into a community or a community trust, or a land trust or a purpose trust. And this removes it permanently from the speculative market. Right? It prevents it from being bought up by corporations. And the machine can’t monetize what. What it doesn’t own. So the land held in collective stewardship is land that the extractive economy can’t touch. You’ll also want to deliberately reduce your consumption. And this isn’t about austerity. It’s an act of resistance around. Around consumption. Your relationship with. Enough. I’ve talked about this on previous podcasts. It’s a big theme in my work because it’s around sustainability. Enough is the real embodied sense of what sufficiency feels like. Right? And abundance flows from the sense of sufficiency because the not enoughness is like the hungry ghost, right? I want, I need more. I need more, I need more. It’s really what extraction is, what’s behind it. And so enoughness is the most subversive thing that you can cultivate in your body. and I. If you want to listen to that podcast, it’s in season five. It’s called Minimalism. Integrating need and the Art of Enough. So someone who knows what enough feels like in her body can’t be controlled through manufactured desires or manufactured unworthiness or manufactured scarcity. Right? So we know that the, I’ve, spoken about how the beauty industry would completely collapse if we all decided that our bodies, just as they are, were Enough, Right? So let’s move on to social capital. So social capital is rebuilding the community piece of the infrastructure that the machine dismantled. So this one is the one that matters the most. And this is, you know, this is where like the machine functions through isolation, right? It even, it functions through isolation, even sort of in the way that the nuclear family has been set up and all of that. It replaced the nuke, the village with the nuclear family, and it replaced the saving circle with individual banking and the neighborhood with the suburb design side that you never know who your neighbors are. And every community structure you build or that you strengthen is a direct withdrawal of the social capital the machine depends on. So you can set up time banks, which are essentially trades. You can exchange a skill for a skill with a specific unit of time. Like usually an hour, like an hour of my time holding space is the hour somebody is building a cabinet for me. Or if I were, a masseuse, right? I can provide an hour of massage for an hour of chopping wood, something like that. Something that I can’t do or that I don’t want to do or that I don’t do. Well, then you can set up things like skill shares, which is, you know, an event. You can do it in person or online where you showcase how to do a specific skill. It’s, it’s basically like a, like ed. It’s just education. It’s just showing like a how to based on your expertise. You can set up mutual aid networks, you can set up child care cooperatives where people take turns, you know, like taking care of the children while the adults are either working on their businesses or working on some other infrastructure type thing. Then you have elder care circles, right, where the, the elders are taken to a specific place, people are assigned to take care of them on a rotating basis. Community kitchens, intentional communities. These are, you know, these are informal at first. and then you can later set them up with more legal and governance structures. And I think the intentional community piece is especially resonant because two, two reasons, because living in our own little boxes. And this is, you know, where I am right now, like live in my own little box with my kids. And it makes it really easy for us to isolate ourselves and not do anything of the things I’m, I’m suggesting on this podcast. but so we all live in our little boxes and it keeps us isolated. But, gosh, there was another piece I was going to say about that. Oh, the other piece that I was going to say about it is that because the cost of living is increasing so quickly, like inflation. And all of that is. Is driving up the. The pricing of the real estate market and the rental market. That out of, out of sheer necessity and just to kind of pool resources, that makes sense for us to move together. I think that if I would have stayed in the States, and I’ve mentioned this before on another podcast, I would have moved in with a friend of mine because she had extra space. I like her, I like her kids. We have the same values. We get along well. And I would have just moved in with her somewhat out of necessity, right? Because it was just. It would have relieved kind of like pressure to continue making more money, but it also would have been like out of pleasure. And I’d have been like, oh my God, let’s share everything, right? Let’s pool our resources. So I’m gonna. I feel like this is gonna happen more informally like that before it happens on a more intentional level. And of course, there’s many intentional communities being built all over the world. But I’m just kind of m just saying kind of like things are going to be happening at the same time and at different levels. And we saw how quickly all of the things I just described could be set up, you know, during occupation in Minneapolis. Like, it just kind of like it happened really quickly. Like it just. People stepped in. and I’m going to be. I’m going to be including an article on how to host a skillshare in the show Notes. Okay? And if you don’t know how to start any of these things, a mutual aid network, just do an Internet search, people, and look it up on YouTube. There’s no shortage of knowledge. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. I’m just synthesizing it and like, you know, putting a different name on it, describing it differently. So we already have the parallel infrastructure. I just want to be clear about that. It’s just a matter of implementing it and implementing it systematically and on a larger scale, right? Like the critical mass piece. We have to think. We have to think collectively because we don’t. We. We don’t think collectively because we, we’re holding our individualism in our bodies, right? So that’s part of the, the internal work that needs to happen. But you know, doing, implementing it is sort of a daily basis thing. Like doing the reps, going to the gym. Just go, just do the thing. And this is what makes communities resilient enough to withstand the pressure the machine will apply when it feels that withdrawal. Right? Because every Woman who’s been in an abusive relationship knows what happens when you withdraw supply. The rage rises, it intensifies so that you, you need to make sure that you have enough padding of community resilience when that happens, right. When the pressure gets intensified. And I want to say something else about doing the reps. It isn’t just about resource sharing. It’s about actually practicing governance like leadership. When you start making decisions with other people, you’re practicing distributing authority, distributing power. You’re navigating conflict together. And those relational skills are the skills that are required. Right. It’s, you’re flexing your governance muscle. the matriarchal economy requires that level of leadership. So you are training yourself as a leader as you are building these infrastructures. I can’t stress this enough because the truth is that our, our phones and the way we live in isolation have weakened our relationship capacity. Like we’re actually worse, so much worse relationally, and we lack the maturity there that we really need to sort of step up and in. So use all of the above as an opportunity to practice. So let’s talk about natural capital and restoring your relationship with the living world. I know that a lot of you who are listening are land loving people. and you know that ecological regeneration is a form of political resistance. And in the context of all of these fires, droughts, et cetera, we know that more deeply than before, the indigenous land stewardship models are the most sophisticated frameworks for living in genuine relationship with the specific place you inhabit. Right. To, to have it localized in an area. You do want to be practicing bioregional thinking, which is understanding yourself as embedded in a specific soil system or in a specific watershed. Thinking of, thinking of yourself as being a, strand in the web of the living relationships in that space in that bioregion. And I feel that’s a huge antidote to the disconnection and placeless placelessness that makes it okay for us to extract. Right. I could say more about that, but I’ll leave that there because, you know, the point I want to make here is that you can’t extract from something that you recognize as part of you or that you are part of. Right? Because then you’re like, if you throw trash, you’re like you’re trashing yourself. Right? yeah. I can’t stress enough how important it is to cultivate that relationship and to have the actual feeling in your body, to recognize in your body the living world as kin. Right? As, as part of your family. And it’s One of my favorite feelings, and it’s also one of the most revolutionary shifts available to human beings right now. Because I think that is like, sort of like a deeper level of connection is connection to the land. So to close, I want to reiterate that reactive resistance responds to the machine’s moves, but structural withdrawal builds the alternative that makes the machine’s moves less effective. So structural withdrawal changes the terrain the game is played on. Right. It changes the game, as they say. And all of these things are things that can be done and that are effective right now. Right. There’s no reason why we need to wait in order to implement them. And I want to say something else about how our bodies are responding to all of this. Because setting up these alternative structures supports our emotional, mental, energetic, physical wellness. When there’s sustained political and economic pressure without having community infrastructure, our nervous system is in constant fight, flight or freeze. That’s why our mental health is such a horseshit right now. It’s like, it’s like crap, it’s poop. And the individual nervous system facing a, collective threat with no collective nervous system with which to regulate. Like, that’s why, that’s why we are doing so poorly in our mental health or emotional health. We know that the machine’s primary weapons are financial precarity, social isolation, and manufactured scarcity. Right? And they become so much less of a threat when you have the community structures that web in place and you become ungovernable and uncontrollable, like literally. So you can’t manufacture scarcity. For example, for a woman whose community garden, produces food, whose community shares resources, whose relationships are organized around reciprocity, who knows she’s got people to lean on. And all of those alternative structures I described are internal ecosystem regulation structures. When your community catches you, when you know that a financial crisis won’t mean that you’re on your own, that a political threat won’t mean you’re facing it alone, that a web is dense enough to hold you through whatever comes right. Through whatever comes your way. Right. I wanna, I want you to, like, as you’re hearing these words, like m. I want you to visualize that. I’m visualizing it as I’m saying it. That’s why I’m getting tripped up. But I’m just feeling the safety of knowing that I could have, like, some sort of medical issue and feeling like there would be people I could just text or call on that would hold me. And that feels incredibly safe. It’s so important for your internal ecosystem What I call the nervous system internal ecosystem to stay, within a range that is capable of taking strategic action rather than existing in reactive survival. Because no good, no good decisions come from, a place of dysregulation. And no decisions at all come from the freeze response. And having a regulated or regulating nervous system allows you to play the long game. And a regulating internal ecosystem also sustains the kind of creative, strategic, generative resistance that the machine has the most difficulty responding to. Right? It’s, that’s what trips the machine up the most. So building community infrastructure is internal ecosystem work. It’s somatic resilience as much as it is political strategy. And although I don’t know a ton about the specific biological pieces of being in community, like I don’t have like an intellectual background in that, but what I do know is that, you know, women historically have thrived like women. And I think most, again, humanity, I think that most people thrive in collective spaces. That’s how we were originally, that’s how we functioned. That’s how our communities were structured. And so I know in my heart of hearts, right in my cells, that, that there’s a biological alignment there and that’s how we’re meant to be together. It’s just that we’ve, we’ve just been out of that practice for such a long time. So in summary, here’s what starving the machine, actually, the starving the machine matriarchally actually looks like. So it looks like getting your money out of extractive banks and into cooperative financial institutions. It looks like building or joining a rotating savings circle this week. It looks like spending locally, deliberately tracking every thread of every dollar. It looks like building food sovereignty at whatever scale is available to you. It looks like moving into, community stewardship rather than private ownership. It looks like rebuilding community infrastructures like time banking, mutual aid networks, skill sharing, child care cooperatives that the machine spent decades dismantling. And it looks like practicing government, those leadership skills, making decisions together, navigating conflict without, you know, having power over dynamics, building the muscle of distributing power in small circles before you needed to do, before you do it in larger ones. And it looks like restoring relationship with the living world, that specific land that you’re, that you are living on, specific watersheds, specific ecological webs that sustain the place you inhabit. And it looks like doing all of it with people, with your besties. Yeah. So the machine’s greatest weapon is your isolation. And your greatest weapon is each other. 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 it until the next episode. I’m sending you fierce, Fierce Love.