Psalm to an Emergent Felt-Sense Physics of Non-Transactional Value
I'm bad at titles, but you love it so it's fine
Stanza One
I scrolled past something a couple weeks ago — I don’t want to pick on the specific example or offering, so I’ll just invent something close to it. It was a post that went something like this:
We all struggle to make time for artistic endeavors, no matter how valuable we know this practice is. So I’m putting together a group for community and accountability, to make time together where we can make art, check in, share, and connect about this part of our lives.
Join this 6-week journey for $245, check this link for the Zoom meeting schedule.
I think a year ago I would have scrolled past it without thinking anything of it. Even a couple months ago, I might not have given it a second thought. But this time, it gave me whiplash, some jarring sense of “what did I just read?”
A bit ago ago, I saw another public invite come through:
We’ll be holding a sacred water ritual at the docks tomorrow. I traveled the world and brought back vessels of water from sacred rivers. We’ll be doing a ritual to respect and connect with the sacred intelligence of water, and then mingling the waters of all these rivers together, in our city.
Buy your tickets at the following link.
Stanza Two
Recently, I realized there’s a lot going on with my voice. Mostly preverbal trauma stuff I won’t bore you with — but I’ve been trying to work through it, in part, by learning to sing and use my voice more skillfully. It’s been fun.
One thing I’ve learned is that there is a youtube niche for everything I could imagine. A hundred different types and styles and attitudes for voice work — and a few dozen people in each niche trying desperately to rule it.
Most of the videos include the usual explicit plea — subscribe, hire me, buy my course, watch my videos — but I’ve increasingly noticed videos where that energy is present in every second, not just in the explicit parts. Even when they talk about singing, or give examples of techniques or exercises, there’s an undertaste that feels to me like please stay, please respond to this, am I doing this the right way? Do you feel like I’m worth your time, attention, and money yet? How about now?
Stanza Three
A lot of meditation retreats no longer make sense to me — or I guess they only make a particular kind of sense to me.
The idea, from where I stand right now, looks very strange:
you gather together people who are interested in meditation, inner work, transformation
you convince them to take significant time out of their busy schedules, and to put their limited personal and financial resources towards this opportunity
You bring all of them together in a space, and… you use that opportunity to have them sit still in a big room together. And/or listen to someone at the front of the room talk for awhile.
That feels… lightly psychotic, to me? Or something? That is extremely not the highest-leverage way to use a situation like that.
Eg- The amount of relational awakening work that can occur in a situation where interested people are gathered together is huge. And it’s work that often can’t happen in other contexts, when the practitioners are alone, or off in daily life needing to hold themselves together, or are mostly interacting with people who can’t (or just haven’t agreed to) hold that type of interaction. Getting these people together makes that work possible, and that work is incredibly high leverage when done right.
Sitting in a room breathing together, on the other hand… there’s value there, above and beyond what you could get out of the same meditation hours at home. For many people, at least. But the difference between the value of doing it at home and the value of doing it on retreat is a smaller gap.
I look at the situation and feel like I’m going a little crazy — until I remember the economics. It’s terribly hard to screen a retreat for people who can handle and be trusted for that type of deep, high-leverage relational inner work. And when you do screen, you by necessity are reducing the number of tickets you can sell.
You know what you don’t have to screen for? What basically anyone off the street who agrees to it can be trusted with? Listening to a talk and sitting still in the dharma hall during meditation hours.
It makes me sad, a little bit — the understandable necessity of watering down what’s possible because the economics don’t support it.
Because — under the reigning physics we’ve chosen to live in — it’s easier for mediocre things to thrive than it is for great things to survive.
Stanza Four
Since last year, I’ve been attending my friend Rosa's retreats. I won’t try to describe them here, and I’ve tried to express parts of them elsewhere. The important part here is that they don’t tend to look like other retreats I’ve been to or heard about. People are invited individually, and are both trusted and expected to hold themselves and others well, even in difficult practice, even in triggers; everyone has meditation experience and a strong inner work practice, but we don’t spend practice time sitting silently together to follow the breath.
And importantly, the retreats are non-transactional. We put together a fund to cover the initial costs of running the retreats. That way, at the end of the retreat, we simply share what everything cost, and invite people to freely give whatever feels right and good to them. (And somehow, this has generally worked out for refilling the coffers and covering expenses — not by efficient pricing, but by letting everyone know all the information.)
The feedback since we started doing this has been pretty consistent — the retreats don’t feel like An Event™ that people have to pay to attend. They feel like an insanely fruitful hangout with friends, old and new, where everyone can contribute to making them happen. We cook together, run practices together, share our 1-on-1 work freely with each other — and at the end, we get to see what we can contribute that would allow this to keep happening in the future, for ourselves and others. And everyone gives what they can.
I’m not sure I can describe the way that it feels like being invited into a different physics around value, friendship on the path, and non-transactionality. It’s really beautiful.
And it seems to have made me increasingly sad about and allergic to things like sacred water ceremonies with a ticket price, or artist accountability groups with a subscription fee.
Stanza Five
I’ve been toying with my 1-on-1 work for awhile, especially the payment structure. My mainstay for awhile has been “stewardship-based pricing.” The core question goes “what can you pay that would help you take this work seriously and really Show Up for it?”
It’s felt much better than other payment structures I’ve used before. And for right now, even this one feels like it needs to step back.
For now, I seem to only be doing 1-on-1 work in situations where a couple things are true:
I feel connected not just to them, but to the process that’s unfolding with them; there’s some intuition that it’s right for me to be involved in their process.
I trust that they and I can find some mutual stewardship — I’ll meet them and take care of them as best as I’m able, and they’ll meet me and take care of me as best as they’re able. (In some cases that means a client will feel best agreeing to an hourly fee — in some cases it means they’ll offer to get me a plane ticket I need with some airline miles they have — in some cases it means they let me stay at their apartment while I’m in town — in some cases it means they give me a grant to keep doing my work and my writing — in some cases it means I can call on them for help with some field they have expertise in… whatever it means in the moment)
I want to never feel like I’m in the session primarily because there’s money or help I can get out of it. I want to feel deeply that I’d be there in their process even if I knew I’d never get anything back from it.
I’m not sure this is entirely sustainable. …But I’m also not convinced that it isn’t.
There’s some default attitude around things like this, “that sounds nice, I’m glad you have ideals — it’ll be sad when you inevitably have to come back to reality and make the same tradeoffs as the rest of us.”
Which is maybe correct. I’d say it’s kinda likely. I don’t think one person, or a handful of people can just hold and propagate a different physics of non-transactional care while the rest of the world exists in an incumbent physics that’s actively hostile to it and dismissive of it.
But I also feel a lot of hunger out there for a different money-physics. I think people are absolutely terrified to step into the uncertainty of this type of thing (I know it’s quite scary for me, and I seem to be pretty far on the spectrum of people it’s less terrifying for), but there’s also a gleam in their eye when they hear about it, when they talk about it, when they feel its possibility.
The usual thing we’re doing doesn’t work, is the feeling I get from most people I interact with. It’s a value-physics that eats away at human connection, at the pursuit of excellence, at the enjoyment of what we love, at the pleasure of being alive and following the work we feel called to do.
And everyone seems to feel that it’s inevitable that we stay where we are — like this reigning value-physics is a fact of the universe, rather than something that took over in the past couple centuries and acceleratingly intensified over the past few decades.
But it’s really not inevitable. We can change the physics if and when we need to — it’s more a matter of not Just Waiting for it to Just Happen. You have to feel the world that wants to exist in you, and you have to become it. Even (especially) when doing so is completely impossible.
Stanza Six
In general, it’s better to have a bunch of different bacteria species in your gut biome. Things go better that way, the more diversified it is. There are balances to be kept there, but the more diversity of bacteria you’ve got, the better that balance is able to regulate itself.
It’s similar with plants — monocropping a single plant over and over again destroys the soil, makes for lower quality plants, and destroys the human meaningfulness in growing living things. There’s a lifelessness to it. Mixed plant environments do much better, and are more highly productive — they’re more alive, in just about every sense that matters.
Animals too. When too many species disappear from an environment, the whole thing starts to go downhill. There’s a role for everything, in a world of complex dynamic living processes — and just about everything in the world is complex dynamic living processes.
James Hillman writes a fair bit about how the monotheistic impulse got smuggled into domain after domain in modern culture. Some root-level reductionist impulse, like if we can narrow everything down to the single factor that matters, and hit that button harder and harder, over and over, everything will get better. Our businesses and medical systems and governments and relationships and just about everything else — they’re all, to some degree or other, entangled with that assumption.
I don’t think there’s a non-transactional value-physics that should take over and become the One True Mode. I think it’s something that needs to exist among a diversified field of other value-physics and reality-settings. A thousand different interwoven value-worlds, with a thousand different versions of what feels Right and Obvious — this larger system needs all of it to flourish.
That said — I really like the one I’m carrying. I’d like more people here to play around and experiment in it with. It’s a fruitful little jungle to explore.
Stanza Seven
I get equal measures inspired and terrified when I feel into all this.
I’d like to have a life that feels really good. Part of that does mean I’d like to have the resources to take care of my medical needs, my housing needs, my personal needs — I’d like it to feel easeful to provide for a wife, a family, a community, in whatever ways I can, including personal, financial, and spiritual care. And I’d like to be able to stay in my felt-sense of integrity while making all of that possible.
My gut feeling is that this is possible. That it might not look recognizable, from either the outside or the inside, and that it takes a certain amount of dedication, ferocity, trust, surrender, acuity, and skill. But that it is possible.
I’m drawn to the combination of ferocity and surrender, in that list. Or maybe ferocity and trust feels closer to the marrow. It isn’t “trust but verify,” — it’s a deep, tectonic trust that includes deeply trusting the fire and desire that come through when I’m outside of grasping and craving.
Ungrasping desire is a very strange and powerful animal. Trusting it may not come easy.
I don’t think I need it to be easy.