still holding the money piece

 I want to explicate to this team a little more of the thinking I used to hold the money for ES3.  We did not do some of the work that I believe is essential to the money piece of this kind of work.  We should have had long conversations about the money up front.  Each person should have struggled in this putatively conscious collective to really, really understand what it is they would like to be paid for doing this work.  We should have worked together, throughout the process, to affirm that each of us would be paid something, that building an event or a movement on unpaid labor is old-paradigm thinking that does not serve human evolution.  We should have been almost like a t-group where the money is concerned, holding it very consciously throughout our work together.

 I actually believe, completely, that if we had spent all of our time sensing into the money energy, we would have done an even better job of organizing ES3.  The time has come to do money differently, right here, right now.

There is a saying on the edge of my thoughts, something about how doing things the way you have always done them will continue to yield the same results.  Launching a movement on free labor is not evolutionary.


I know this is not customary.  I know most of you have worked a lot in your careers doing unpaid labors of love, launching movements, sacrificing your financial wellbeing, telling yourselves that the cause is more important than, maybe, paying the grocer or the IRS.  This is not sustainable.  Just because every movement we can think of was birthed in an atmosphere of lack does not mean this movement could or should be birthed in an atmosophere of lack.  I believe that most of you would happily go on working for free, struggling personally with your finances and just hope that the better world we all dream of is coming.  I know that many of you don't think talking about money should have a central place in the work of the movement, that you think talking about the money is enervating.

I regret having lost the opportunity to work consciously with this dynamic:  some of us definitely wanted to get paid, some of us definitely did not want to get paid and some of us were genuinely in inquiry about wanting to be paid.  I think if we had had probing dialogues about money, as a central part of our work, we would have been building a very special foundation for this embryonic evolutionary movement.  We all believe that a group of people can transform consciousness on behalf of the whole.  There is every reason to believe we could have done more conscious work around money and transformed the field.  There were all kinds of things I would have liked us to do and I kept waiting for the right moment to bring them up and, well, I never did what I would have liked.  I am struggling with regret.

If I were ever to take on a similar role, which I do not see myself doing in this context, I would have to build some collectively conscious assumptions about money into the entire conference design.  I would require that the team consider working on the money energy (not the money detail but the money energy) as central to the work of being evolutionary.  Many people doing the salon work seem to think they can go on doing money the way it has been done all along and, somehow, we'll get something completely different.  I believe the way to change money energy is to change it integrally, from conception to implementation.  I believe it would be very possible to have 'generic' salon gatherings like the May salon, in an ongoing way, creating a for-profit enterprise whose profits could then be used to seed other branches of salon work and to fund deep scholarships.  I see that most of you come from a model where you think we have to sacrifice awhile and then, hopefully, we'll magically attract what we need.  I think it would be very possible to build a different kind of for-profit, to generate capital for ourselves and, all along the way, sustain our life needs AND have money to fund a movement.