Rekindling Capacity for Rest and Receiving
Welcome to a Rekindling, my love,
pairing and re-airing two of the most popular,
most impactful episodes of Mind Witchery.
Rekindling Capacity for Rest and Receiving features
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Mentioned:
Brigid Schulte’s book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time
Barack Obama’s 2012 Campaign Rally Speech in Roanoke
Transcript: Rekindling Capacity for Rest and Receiving
Natalie Miller: Welcome to Mind Witchery. I’m your host Natalie Miller, and I’m so glad you’re here.
Natalie Miller: Hello, my love, welcome, and welcome to something a little different, something that we are calling Rekindling episodes. So I am taking a little break. I am taking a couple of weeks off, to travel and to do some different kinds of work. I'm doing a little bit of extra resting and relaxing with my family, and I am taking a break from creating new spells and new Mind Witchery episodes.
In the meantime, I didn't want to just go on hiatus. I didn't want to leave you with nothing to listen to, because one of the things I hear the most often from you, when you write to me or you message me, is that my spells arrive right on time. And I trust that magic. I want to feed and support that magic. And I wanna keep that co-creative synchronicity and connection that we have going.
So this new thing, this Rekindling, is going to be a re-airing and a pairing up of some of the spells that you have loved the most. And this too is explicitly co-created. I asked Mind Witchery listeners to let me know, hey, which spells have been most impactful for you and why? And so in these Rekindling episodes, you are going to hear some voices and some contributions from some of our Mind Witchery listeners.
I super hope that you will join me in trusting that these re-airings are arriving to your ears in just the right moment, and that even if you've listened once, that listening again, listening in light of what one of your fellow witches says, maybe even listening from now, as opposed to listening way back when, that you are going to hear something differently, or you're gonna hear something for the first time, you are gonna get a message that is right on time for you. If you are new to Mind Witchery, if you're a new listener here, well, then you get a little tour of some of the most popular, most impactful episodes that we've released.
So thank you so much for being here. I hope you enjoy these pairings and I will be back all extra charged up and ready with more magic for you.
Natalie Miller: So here is your first pairing, Re-Kindling Capacity for Rest and Receiving. Here in the Northern hemisphere, it is the end of the summer. In the Southern hemisphere, it's the end of the winter. And, my goodness, we are often tired and actually willing to feel how tired we are. So today's pair of spells - a Spell for Allowing Rest and a Spell for Receiving Support - are all about really deeply honoring this place, expanding our capacity to honor this place.
You know what we often do, as the Indigo Girls sing, is we hurtle ourselves through every inch of time and space. And maybe, just maybe, in this moment, life is sluggish enough, or we are tired enough that we are in a place that we're willing to really expand our capacity for rest and receiving.
So a dear listener, Susan, wrote in. She lives near Washington, DC. I happen to know her. I've seen her actual face. And she wrote that she loves the Spell for Allowing Rest because it's helped her to acknowledge (and these are her words) that “growing takes energy and changing takes energy, and being in this hard world at this hard time takes energy.”
She writes, “I can conjure the energy I need, but only if I respect my body and its deep need for rest. Honoring that trusting in the ebb and flow of energy and rest has been deeply healing for me. I no longer feel the need to push through when I'm tired. Rather, I move toward the quiet and peace and stillness I need, trusting that my energy will return.”
I really love this, Susan shares, “when I'm tired, I rest. And knowing that I will get tired during my workday, I actually schedule breaks.” She shares, “I put them on my calendar in orange because orange is radiant and it makes me happy, and it signals that this appointment is something real. This appointment with rest is something real.” She writes, “the resulting energy makes me better able to attend to my work and my play. A job that might have taken an hour when I was dragging takes 30 minutes when I'm refreshed and ready.”
That is for real y'all. That is just how that works.
So here is Susan's favorite spell, a Spell for Allowing Rest. I hope you love it. And I hope that you use your favorite color to mark real breaks, real rest, and relaxation in your calendar as well.
Mind Witchery Episode 28: A Spell for Allowing Rest
Natalie Miller: Hello, my friend. Welcome. So happy that you are here.
So, how are you? You know, I often love to begin these episodes by asking you to just really take a moment. You could even press the pause button to answer this question. [laugh] How are you? Just checking in with your body, how’s body? How’s your body feeling? To check in with your vibe, your emotional tone and tenor, what is your vibe like right now? And how’s your mind space these days? How’s the weather up there? Is it clear? Is it cloudy? How’s your headspace feeling?
And just really taking a moment to answer those questions is key for what we’re talking about today, which is a spell for allowing rest—a spell for allowing rest. So, what I’m finding lately for myself and for my friends, for my clients, I’m hearing a lot of people talking about being tired, being overwhelmed.
And I’m tempted but I’m not going to go into all the reasons that makes complete and total sense. [laugh] It’s everything from like seasonal change to how intense our world is right now—lots and lots of reasons. But you know what? Part of today’s episode is actually saying we don’t really need to know the reason. What we need to do is to honor the tiredness, to honor the overwhelm, to honor the sense that, for many of us, there’s a feeling of being overextended and under-rested.
Now, here’s something I know to be true for most of the people in my circles, which certainly includes me, and may very well include you, is that the resting mode, that is, the place where I am receiving, where I am being, where there’s no objective, there’s no goal, there’s no deliverable, this mode of enjoying and self-sustaining and resting is very uncomfortable. [laugh] And it makes sense because so many of us hinge our worthiness on what we do, what we accomplish.
The dominant culture on this planet—the exploitative, dominant culture on this planet—posits rest as a reward. Oh, you get to retire and enjoy your life after you’ve put in decades of work. Oh, you earn—in many places—you earn your vacation time by working. That culture says, OK, what’s most important is that you do, and then your success in doing is what might allow you to take a break. And that’s not actually the way humans work, the way nature works, the way anything in this universe works. So, let’s get into it. Let’s get into this different way of thinking that I hope will unlock for you the ability to allow rest.
I want to laugh at myself because what I’m about to say is very sweeping. But [laugh] everything in the universe pulses—everything. Everything has a vibration. Everything has a pulse—meaning your heart beats. It squeezes and it expands. It squeezes and it expands. The ocean moves in waves, and the tides ebb and they flow. And the sun rises and falls. And your belly, when you breathe, rises and falls. Everything pulses. Light waves pulse.
There’s vibration in everything. Look at the stillest, steadiest thing you can find. It’s vibrating. Everything is. Everything has a frequency—an up and a down, an up and a down. And, so, the nature of being, the nature of everything, is to pulse, is to ebb and flow, is to give and receive, is to expand and contract, everything, including you. It is not possible to sustain flow, to sustain output, to sustain expansion. We ebb and we flow. We expand. We contract. That’s how this whole thing works.
So, oftentimes, when we have been in a state of expansion, of flow, of output, we will encounter a drawing back in. I almost—I want you to imagine it like the tide. There is wave after wave of creativity coming through you—to you and through you—and coming in and flowing and flowing. But, eventually, there will be a moment where there’s a receding, where the tide begins to move back out. And when that happens, oftentimes our response is to resist it, deny it, ignore it, fight it. [laugh] That’s what we do. Right?
Here I am. I’ve been in this great flow state. I started off the week. I’m like flying through my to-do list. I’m feeling great. And then Wednesday mid-morning, I hit a wall, and my impulse—because doing over being—is to climb the wall, break down the wall, right, rather than to just turn around, and lean against it, and rest. OK. Now, I’m mixing metaphors. Now, you have walls [laugh] in addition to waves. But I think you see what I mean.
Yes, it’s beautiful, and it feels really good when everything energetically is flowing for us, when we can write and give care, when we can flow, because our culture loves flow, loves output, loves and honors and reveres and rewards that state. And, so, of course, it feels really good. But the other part of that cycle—the ebb, the drawing back, the resting—it is a natural and an essential part of the cycle, right? It’s how being works. Of course, there will be a contraction. Of course, there will be a drawing back.
And when we can honor that, and go with it, the flow state will arrive again with less drama, with more ease. Right? The goal actually is to get into a place where we don’t overextend ourselves, where we don’t hit a wall, so that we can move with the energy of our creativity, of our caregiving love, where we can sustain it in a balanced cycle of giving and receiving, of input and output, of ebb and flow.
So, last week, I had this, and a couple of my clients had this. It’s always interesting to me when there’s a little trend. We got into a place that I’m going to—if we continue with the title metaphor—I’m going to call it a rip current—a rip current—where not only was there an ebbing of our energy but because the flow had been so powerful—I mean, I had clients who were making these huge shifts and changes, clients who were feeling really creative and were finally making a lot of headway on a project that they were really excited about—the ebb sort of came, and it came on really strongly, right, which makes sense to balance out.
Like, there’s this huge growth spurt. Of course, there’s going to be a need for more replenishing. If any of you have animals or children or even plants that have a huge growth spurt, they need more. They need more sleep. They need more food. They need new clothes, right? [laugh] They require more resources because they’re in this growth place.
But upon feeling that ebb, feeling that drawing back, the response of my clients and, dear listener, of myself too—I had this too—was, like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right? And a making that feeling of I don’t, I don’t want to. I don’t want to write this morning. I don’t want to strategize today. [sigh] I made this plan that I was really excited about yesterday, and, today, I just want to crumple it up and throw it in the trash. Right?
We can take that moment, and we can make it mean, ugh, I guess I’m not cut out for this. We can take that moment, and we can make it mean, ugh, I guess this isn’t the right direction to go after all. Right? We can take that moment, and we can make it mean that something is wrong, rather than take that moment—that feeling of, like, you know what, I don’t have it. I can’t do it today. I really don’t want to do it today—and make it mean what it much more likely means, which is that, oh, it’s time to rest. It’s time to receive.
Oh, I’ve been doing, doing, doing, and, in order to do more, I’ve got to let myself shift into being mode. I need to receive. So, I was about to say “happily,” but I’m not [laugh]—I actually—I don’t think it’s “happily.” I was going to say, “Happily, that’s what we did.” But, no, we didn’t happily do it.
In fact, we—all three of us—resisted it a bit. And then what happened is a rip current appeared. So, a rip current, if you know, is where there’s a very strong kind of pulling back from the shore into the ocean. It’s like an anti-tide, and there are lots and lots of reasons for it. But, for the sake of this metaphor, this idea of our energy flowing and ebbing like the tide, I’m going to say the rip current appears when we are denying the natural ebb. The rip current will appear, and it will pull us out of flow mode.
And what does that look like? Well, a lot of it looks like upper-limiting, actually, which I’ve talking about before; upper-limiting meaning self-sabotage, meaning illness. That rip current pulling us out of flow mode can look like addiction. And when I say “addiction,” I’m talking even things like the doomscrolling that we do, the endless kind of push, push, push through the Instagram feed.
Oh, my gosh, everybody, for me, lately, it’s been this game that one of my girls had on her phone, this game where you, like, match cupcakes. [laugh] I’m not going to tell you the title of it because you should not go look for it because it’s very addictive. There must be some insane dopamine stratagem at the heart of this game. But when I notice, oh, look, there I go, there I go to match up cupcakes again, I’m in a rip current. I am being dragged against my will away from the doing state and into the being state.
You’re in a rip current when Netflix asks you, “Um, are you still watching?” [laugh] Do you know that moment where you’ve been streaming television so long that the television is like, “Are you OK?” [laugh] It’s that moment, my friends. And I’m laughing about it and joking about it because I don’t want us to feel any shame around it. It’s not a shameful thing. It makes complete and total sense.
Of course we self-sabotage. Of course we get debilitating headaches. Of course body and mind rebel when it is time to ebb, and we are pushing, pushing, pushing to flow.
So, I did a little research on rip currents. What do you do when you’re caught in a rip current? So, there’s two kind of streams of thought, and I think both of them could be helpful for us. The official recommendation is that when you’re caught—when a swimmer is caught in a rip current, is being dragged away from the shore, the official recommendation is to, (a) stay calm—stay calm.
So, no catastrophizing, no crumbling up of your plan, no throwing in the towel, no intense self-judgment. Stay calm. Recognize and honor, ah, OK, I am in an energetic rip current. And the worst thing I could possibly do is fight it, so I’m not going to fight it. I’m not going to fight it.
When a swimmer fights a rip current—when a swimmer says, “No, no, no, I want to flow into the shore. I want my creativity back. I want to execute this plan. I want to move forward. I want to do, do, do”—when we fight the rip current, we exhaust ourselves. The swimmer exhausts herself. And I will tell you from lots of experience that exhaustion also comes with an exacerbation of whatever little imbalances or little problems there are.
So, if you have a little thing going on with your health, it becomes a much bigger thing when you’re stuck in doing mode. If you have a little thing going on in your relationship, it becomes a much bigger thing. Right? Those smaller issues become bigger when we fight the natural ebb, the natural receding of energy.
OK. So, I really love this as a metaphor. By the way, I was lighting up to read more about rip currents. Actually, that’s how I fueled myself to come and record this episode. I’m like, you know what, let me go learn about rip currents, and see if that’s inspiring—and indeed it was.
So, next official recommendation after remain calm is wave your arms, and ask for help. Ask for help. Book a massage. Hire a sitter. Delegate. Ask for help. Loved that.
OK. So, let’s say that, no, you’re not going to ask for help because [laugh] that’s a whole other episode. There are two recommendations from here. The official one is swim parallel to the shore. So, let me translate this in the metaphor as, OK, so you’re not going to move forward on your big creative plan to finish this chapter of your book today. But what’s something that you could do that feels fairly easy?
This is actually what I did yesterday. I had a plan to finish up some pieces of a curriculum that I’m building, and I just did not have it in me. And, so, I went through, and I just took care of a bunch of small tasks, like getting my kid’s physical forms ready so she can do cross-country running, right? Just what can I do?
I’m not going to fight the ebb. I’m just going to do some small tasks. I’m going to swim parallel to the shore. Oh, you know what? I don’t have it in me to do this big creative work, but I could go to the grocery store. I could go to the post office. I could do some favors for my future self, and schedule a massage, or research the personal trainer I’ve been wanting to work with.
I wonder if, right now, you’re noticing, oh, I already do that actually? [laugh] Sometimes, when I don’t have the wherewithal to do my big creative output work, I do actually turn to these little tasks, right? And maybe you’ve even been judging that as like, oh, I just get busy with busy work. But what if that’s natural? What if that’s swimming parallel to the shore, so that you can still be doing but you’re not fighting against the current? You’re doing things that are a little easier.
All right. So, there’s another recommendation too, and this is the one I love, of course. So, researchers of rip currents say that the thing to do is to just float until the current lets you go. They say it’s about three minutes. It’s about three minutes. Just float. Don’t fight it. Don’t swim. Float until the rip current lets you go, because it will. It won’t pull you under, and it won’t pull you all the way out to sea. So, you can float until the current releases you.
This is what I aspire to, my friends, that when I feel like I just can’t, that I just don’t, then I rest. And, occasionally, I’m able to do this. This is something, oh, this is something I’ve been working on. That when I don’t have the wherewithal to show up for other people or to work on my deliverables that I just shift into reception mode.
I’m not much of a napper, so that’s not what it looks like for me. For me, it definitely looks more like just engaging in very pleasurable activities. OK, you know what? I’m just going to read today. All right. Looks like I’m going to go out to the garden. I’m just going to receive. I’m not going to work on anything. I’m just going to enjoy, and I’m going to trust—and this is the key, everybody—I’m going to trust that the cycle of ebb and flow, that the pulsation, the expansion and contraction inherent in all things, will not let me down.
I’m going to trust that the rip current will let me go, and that I will have then the strength, the wherewithal to catch the next waves in, to be there bright and fueled and inspired and well, to be able to go with the flow in a big and beautiful way.
All right, my friend, a spell for allowing rest. Rest is requisite. It’s essential. It is part of the cycle. It’s not a reward, and it does not have to be earned. Rest is requisite. Everything in our universe ebbs and flows, expands and contracts, and so do we. Of course we do.
Just like we breathe in and out, so do we need to receive in order to give. Just as our heart expands and contracts, so does our creativity. And then, finally, it makes total sense that in our doing- and deliverables-obsessed culture, that it is uncomfortable to let go of the doing state in favor of the being state.
So, that resistance we feel to pausing, it makes all the sense in the world. And, yet, our ability to rest, and to rest well, to learn—to invoke our metaphor just one more time—to learn how to ride the waves of energy that move in and out, to learn how to spot a rip current, that scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll rip current, and to avoid it altogether, and, more than anything, to know that when we are doing this, it’s not just for us.
Yes, it’s for us, absolutely, and also it’s for everyone. It’s for all humanity. The more we can acknowledge our need, our family’s need, our children’s need, our team’s need, our planet’s need, to rest, to receive, to replenish, the more we can honor that, the better we evolve. And that sounds so lofty, but I really believe that our humanity depends on it.
All right, my love. Rest is requisite. When you feel that energetic ebb pulling you, go with it. Go with it. Let’s—you and I, both—let’s learn how to ride these waves together, and let’s build a world that respects and accommodates this reality. Thank you for listening. Bye for now.
Natalie Miller: All right, my love. That's inspiring, right? Allowing rest, and slash but, I know, and you know, we live on planet Earth and we have so many responsibilities. Many of us are over responsible. We are overextended. We are doing too much. And so the necessary complement to a Spell for Allowing Rest is a Spell for Receiving Support.
A lovely listener, Kim, took a moment to share how that spell and that approach to everyday life has shifted things for her. Take a listen.
Kim: Hi, Natalie. It's Kim from Fort Worth, Texas. I just wanted to let you know I loved your Spell for Receiving Support. Where are you sick and tired, literally sick and tired of doing it alone? Wow. That got me. I am literally sick and tired. I also come from a mindset of scarcity. I found myself saying things like “I should clean my own house, even though I'm a wife, a mother, and a fabulous boss bitch with a very stressful job.”
I have since hired a housekeeper, the best money I have ever spent.She was thrilled when I gave her a raise without her asking for it. It was the right thing to do. Inflation is hitting us all and she works her ass off cleaning my house. I also joined stretch lab and hired a nutritionist. I also regularly receive facials and massages. I may have gone a little overboard here.
In doing all of these things, I have chosen to support businesses owned by women, people of color, and other marginalized groups in our society, such as LGBTQ. I also love the quote by Barack Obama, “you didn't build these roads.” Finally, It led me to the book “Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time.” I'm reading this now and I love it.
I find myself applying little bits of your wisdom frequently in my everyday life. You have a gift and I am so thankful you are sharing that coaching gift with us in your Mind Witchery podcast. Thanks.
Natalie Miller: I love how Kim is actually living her values even more fully when she is receiving support. I think in our culture, because it's so individualistic, we're often thinking about receiving support as being very selfish and self-centered, when actually what it is is self-centering. It allows us to have the energy and the time and the resources that we need to show up in the world the way that we really want to show up. Right? So if you can acknowledge that, yes, you are doing too much, and yes, you too need more support. Listen on.
Mind Witchery Episode 65: A Spell for Receiving Support
Natalie Miller: Hello, my love. I’m so happy that you are here and listening to this episode today, a spell for receiving support. Whew. This is something that is very, very alive in my own life right now. I have some new experience, some new perspective on this, and I’m so excited to talk to you about it.
So, I want to give you one heads-up. My professorial identity is going to come out a bit [laugh] in this episode. Did you know that once upon a time, that’s what I wanted to do? I wanted to be an English professor. But it turned out that the academic circles were not my circles, so I’m here. But I love to see how all of my previous work experiences do sort of show up in the work that I do now.
And, as I was preparing today’s episode, taking some notes, I thought, “Oh, my gosh, totally professorial Natalie is coming out today.” And why is that? It’s because in order to understand our deep reluctance to receive support, in order to understand why it is frightening and hard to allow ourselves to receive support, we have to look pretty intensely, I think, at the dominant cultural narrative around work.
So, here we go. Where I want to begin is in the 2012 presidential campaign in the United States. So, this is Barack Obama going for re-election against Mitt Romney. And Barack Obama gives a speech where he famously, and bizarrely controversially, says, “You didn’t build that.”
He was talking about business owners who don’t want to pay taxes, and he was saying, “Hey, you know, the roads and the bridges that you use to transport your goods, you didn’t build that, meaning, you benefit from our society having shared resources, and you didn’t build those.” So, why was this so controversial?
Well (a) it’s because Barack Obama said it, right? [laugh] We’re not far from the days where Barack and Michelle sharing a fist bump was hyperbolized into evidence of some kind of radical, you know, takeover of the United States. So, for sure, that’s one part of it.
But why else was it controversial? It was controversial because it flew in the face of the dominant idea in United States capitalist society, and this dominant idea has been present since the very beginning, and what it is, is the Protestant work ethic. So, the Protestant work ethic emphasizes three things: diligence, discipline, and frugality. Hmm? Think about that for a moment.
Our culture has a relationship with diligence, unceasing work, discipline, head-down adherence to the rules, and frugality, no extra spending—diligence, discipline, frugality. And, for a moment, let’s look at where that came from. So, the roots of that Protestant work ethic are in Calvinism, and Calvinism is a Christian doctrine that says, “Listen, very, very few of us are saved, meaning, going to heaven. Most of us are damned. And the saved can prove their salvation—to themselves and to one another—through working, through showing up and working to thank God for being saved.”
Now, the saved are not actually sure they’re saved. [laugh] They hope they’re saved. And, so, they must work as hard as possible. Like, you could not work enough to prove and to believe in your salvation because there’s always that little doubt that it might not have been enough; that you might not be one of the saved ones.
So, what comes out of the Calvinist ideology is a deep individualism; an individualism that says each of us is in this alone. You have a deal between you and salvation, between you and God, and probably most of your neighbors are damned [laugh], right, because almost everyone is. You might be saved, and so you have got to be focused on your own work, be diligent and disciplined, and be very frugal. No extras for you.
We’ve talked about this on the podcast before. When do you get to enjoy? When do you get to relax? After the work is done. Now, with Calvinism, that meant maybe, maybe, maybe when you go to heaven. Here in the dominant culture in the world in the 21st century, it means you get to enjoy after the work is done.
Diligently, disciplinedly do a full day of work. Then you can enjoy the evening. Diligently, disciplinedly do a full week of work. Then you can enjoy the weekend. Diligently, disciplinedly do a full lifetime of work. Then you can enjoy retirement.
It’s even built into lots of time off policies that employers offer, right? You earn your vacation through days worked. So, we have this idea that the enjoyment comes after the work. First, you have to work so, so hard and so, so individually.
So, in 2012, when Barack Obama says to Republican businesspeople who consider themselves disciplined and diligent, very hard-working, and who consider themselves frugal in not wanting to pay taxes, and Barack Obama points to obvious material proof of our co-creative, sharing society, and he says, “You didn’t build that,” it profoundly disturbs the whole idea of the Protestant work ethic with its Calvinist roots.
It also disturbs a prevalent theory that we have about capitalism, and capitalistic success, and work. And this, my friends, is thanks to a German sociologist—he didn’t think of himself as a sociologist but he’s one of the first sociologists—Max Weber. And Max Weber writes in the late 19th century that, basically, capitalism is enabled by this Protestant work ethic; that it’s through the Protestant work ethic that capitalist success arises. Right?
And you know this [laugh] somewhere in the deep, deep cultural knowings, because we have all been taught this. We’ve been immersed in a culture that prizes diligence and discipline and frugality; that not only prizes it but also equates it to moral worth, right?
The dominant culture says, if you work so hard, individually, all on your own, if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you are unceasing, unwavering in your dedication, then you are good. Then you deserve to spend your money on whatever you want—maybe even an entire social media company, right? [laugh]
Our culture says, work hard, then play. Work, work, work, earn, earn, earn, and only when you have achieved—on your own, we imagine—success, then you can do as you like with your money. This whole narrative depends on us imagining that each of us individually through hard work creates success—on our own, by ourselves.
When Obama says, “You didn’t build that,” he makes visible what this whole way of seeing the world really wants to forget and deny and ignore, which is that we are actually all in this together. We are co-creating. We are sharing. No person is doing anything alone ever. We are never alone. We are always, always connected.
Now, am I sitting here recording a podcast by myself? Apparently, yes. But I’m using tools designed and made and packaged and mailed and delivered and set up by other people. Other people are taking this recording, and bringing it to you. And without you, there’s no podcast.
Just like without all of the books and articles that I’ve read, there’s no historical background. Without the language that I’ve learned and you’ve also learned, the language that we share, there is no podcast. We are all in this together.
This is something that Martin Luther King Jr. points out in his criticism of Weber, and it is like so deliciously succinct, I want to share it with you here. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. says. “We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of Black slaves, and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both Black and white, here and abroad.”
Um, yes, and—little feminist addition—capitalism also depends on the invisibility of caregiving work. Capitalism is built on having certain kinds of labors not count: caregiving labors, householding labors, domestic labors, basically. Capitalism depends on all of those just somehow magically being taken care of so that the various labors our culture has decided count, right, the ones that are paid, the ones that contribute to the GDP, so that those can continue.
I remember hearing once a woman say, “Yeah, my husband said, ‘I make the money, and you spend it.’” She was a work-at-home mom. I love to say “work-at-home” because “stay-at-home” is just like [laugh]—it’s not really “staying” when you are caring for children, and you are caring for a home and all that goes into householding, right?
But that idea—“I make the money because my labor counts because there’s a dollar amount associated to it, and you spend it”—there is a deeply fucked up, deeply erroneous, deeply exploitative logic present here. And, again, it is one that is very individualistic, and denies the co-creativity, right?
The roads and bridges do not repair themselves. The toilets and showers don’t clean themselves. The meals don’t cook themselves. The children don’t raise themselves. The fields do not maintain themselves. The cotton never picked itself.
But Calvinist-Protestant work ethic would pretend that it was so and/or would conscript all of these exploited people into the same logic, right, saying, “Hey, you might be saved, enslaved person, woman, but the way we know is that you are diligent, disciplined, and frugal.” Right?
And, so, my friends, please see how those values—individual diligence; discipline; following the rules; sticking to the system; and frugality, spending as little as possible—please see how those actually support a status quo in which people with privilege, people for whom it is easy to pretend that they are doing it alone, right [laugh], because those labors that don’t count are so hidden, and because they are so convinced of their own worthiness of salvation, see how those values, that ethic that is so deeply ingrained in us, supports the worst version of capitalism.
OK. Let’s make really clear now, what does all of this have to do with you and I opening up to receive support? And I do want to pause here for a co-creative moment to say that my understanding of these relationships was so profoundly enabled by a book written by Brigid Schulte. It came out several years ago. It’s called Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play when no one has the time.
I super, super recommend this book to you. Apparently, she’s working on another book about gender equity and overwork, overwhelm, burnout. I’m super excited for that.
OK. So, with that said, let’s look at why is it so difficult, so scary to open up to receiving support? So, number one, because of this deeply ingrained ethic of diligence and discipline, we imagine that easing up, choosing something easier is profoundly dangerous, and not only dangerous but it’s like unethical.
Again, this is so twisted around when you understand the origins of it. But it’s this idea that, like, you should be able to do this yourself. And if you can’t figure out how to do it yourself, meaning, if you can’t work hard enough or work smart enough—P.S. thank you, Benjamin Franklin for adding that to the culture [laugh], right?
He had this whole, like, “If you can optimize your life, you can do anything.” Sound familiar? [laugh] Go to the self-help section of a bookstore, and you will find lots and lots of, “If you can optimize your life, you can do anything.” Right?
So, easing up, meaning, getting some help at home, getting some help, some mentoring, some coaching, some guidance, receiving help, an assistant, someone to take some of the stuff that you’re really just not that good at off of your plate, it’s not only dangerous and kind of proof of your badness, your unworthiness [laugh], right, it is also not something you get to do until you have earned it. Right? You cannot have support until you have earned it.
And what does this look like? This looks like, “Well, I’d love to hire a coach to help me grow my business. But I don’t get to hire the coach until I’ve worked on my own, by myself, hard enough to earn the money to then merit hiring the coach.” Right? It’s this idea that I have to do it alone. I have to achieve some kind of success on my own, and only then am I allowed to receive support.
And, again [laugh], there’s also this individualistic streak that says, “Actually, receiving support should not even be necessary. I shouldn’t have to be needing help. I should be able to do it all by myself.” Right? See if any of these sound familiar.
You know, if I could just get a good system going in the household, if I could just parent my kids to help with the chores and clean up after themselves, then I wouldn’t need any help keeping my home clean. Right? Oh, if I could just be disciplined enough to wake up really early to go exercise, then I wouldn’t need to hire a personal trainer to show up for. Right?
We do have this logic deeply embedded in the dominant culture that says, “Yeah, you should totally be able to do this all alone. And, in fact, the more you do alone, the better you are as a person.” It’s like receiving support is evidence of your weakness. Receiving support is selfish to the point of unethical.
And, my friends, just think about this for a moment. Given what we know about the effects of the Protestant work ethic in capitalism over the last handful of centuries, this makes no sense. This logic depends on us looking out only for ourselves, and ignoring and denying that we are never doing anything by ourselves.
So, a spell for receiving support looks like this. We are all in this together. We cannot do it alone. We are all in this together. We cannot do it alone—because what really happens when we acknowledge that is the ease that comes from co-creativity, is a sharing of resources, is a turning away from overwork and individual suffering, and toward co-creativity and sharing of success.
So, I’d love to tell you a very practical way that this has manifested for me recently, and it is in hiring help with my householding. Now, I have been my entire adult life deeply resistant to the idea of getting help cleaning my house. Why? Because I’ve believed all this shit that I’ve been talking about in this episode.
I should be able to do this. I should be able to figure it out. The messiness, the dust bunnies, it’s just proof of my badness, my laziness, right? That’s what the Protestant work ethic wants you to believe. If you can’t do this, there is something wrong with you, right?
And then when we add on the way that our modern capitalism exploits to the point of invisibility labors like housecleaning, and we add that into the mix [laugh], the gender aspects of it, the not-counting of household work as work, it’s no wonder that I wasn’t acknowledging actually how much time it requires and, additionally, how much skill is involved. I cringe a little bit as I say this but, like, I am not an efficient cleaner, and I don’t really know how to clean well. Like, I never learned that.
It is a practiced skill. I remember my friend Emma saying this to me actually. She hired some help with cleaning, and she said, “You know, when these cleaners leave, the house is cleaner than I ever could have imagined. It’s clean in a way that I don’t know how to do.”
And, again, this is part of that exploitative logic, is sort of saying that, like, ugh, anyone can do that work. No, I assure you [laugh], some people are much better at it than other people. Right?
So, finally, I got some help with my housecleaning. I found Maria. She is so incredible, and we have a beautifully co-creative relationship. She has a small business, and I am an ideal client of hers. Right? I love to show up in a way that is very generous and very flexible and very appreciative of the contribution that she makes to my life and my household. I’m a client of her small business, and I want her to succeed.
And, so, I show up in a way that says, “Hey, I honor and value you and your contribution. Thank you so much in co-creating success with me.” Like, I get to contribute to yours, and you are definitely contributing to mine. We are all in this together. We cannot do it alone.”
And that is the world that I want to live in, and I believe that might be the world that you also want to live in, a world in which we acknowledge we’re all in this together, and we can’t do this alone; in a world in which we are working toward a circulating of resources rather than a hoarding of resources; a sharing of success rather than a stepping on the backs and shoulders of people on our way to success. Yeah?
OK. So, that’s one way of opening up to receive support. Here’s the other way I’ve opened up to receive support—in receiving coaching. This has been so important, and what I want you to know—and I’ve said this, I’ve told this story before on the podcast—but what I want you to know is that when I invested in coaching, I had not already accumulated the money. I had to go find it. I had to borrow. I had to take a real chance.
But, in that moment, I knew that I couldn’t do it alone. I knew that I needed somebody asking me hard questions, loving me, supporting me, cheering me on in my corner, but also helping me to see some of the assumptions I was making that were holding me back. And, again, this was very, very scary to ask for support because—Calvinist-Protestant work ethic—frugality.
No, no, no, no, that’s not the way it works at all. We don’t spend any funds that aren’t necessary and, P.S., almost no help is necessary because we are all in this alone—is what that ethic says. And, so, to say, “OK, I haven’t, quote, unquote, earned it yet, but I know that for me to be able to step into this next phase fully, and with so much less fear and suffering, I need help.” Right? It’s fascinating, isn’t it, that that makes so many people think, “Oh, this is so selfish. Getting this kind of help, spending money on my support is so selfish.”
But, again, it’s a twist of that logic that’s telling you, “You must defer ease.” Right? Ease comes when you’re dead and in heaven because you’ve worked hard enough. Ease comes when you’re retired because you’ve worked hard enough. Except that we can never ever, ever seem to work hard enough, and so ease never comes, unless we choose it; unless we choose other values.
We choose the values that Barack Obama was pointing toward in 2012: co-creativity; a culture that acknowledges that we’re all in this together; shared resources that benefit everyone; an acknowledgement that the culture we have is exploitative; that it devalues and discounts the work of so many people. And that since we’re all in this together, since none of us can do it alone, we all do better when we take care of one another, when we support one another.
When I invest in support for me, for my household, for my mindset and my business growth, what I am doing is entering into the circulatory flow of resources. I don’t actually need to hoard them, or I don’t need to put them into the places that the status quo prefers that I put them. Right?
Where does the status quo think my money should go? It should go into real estate that largely supports the status quo, into stock markets that largely support the status quo, into sanctioned education that largely supports the status quo. Right?
But when I say, “No, I actually want to invest in health and support and wellness, I want to take my monies, and I want to circulate them in communities that are dedicated to all of us helping one another, I want to acknowledge in investing this money here and now, I am helping to create the world that I want to live in,” what happens when I do this is I do find more abundance—of course I do. I feel better. And, my friend, I want this for you too.
So, take a moment and think about it. Where are you sick and tired—literally sick and tired—of doing it alone? Where are you deferring investing in yourself, thinking, “I have to earn it first, and then I can get the help”? Where are you discounting or denying some of the labors that are rendered invisible in our culture?
And how can you begin to step more fully into what I think is a much more generous and generative reality, the reality in which we declare we are all in this together? We cannot do it alone. Let me step into a circulation of support, a circulation of resources. Let me not wait to see if I’ve ever done enough to deserve to feel good, and let me instead step into goodness right now.
Whew. OK. That was a word and then some. I hope that you found it inspiring. This is where I want to say, how is this episode getting to you? Well, my amazing producer, K.O., is going to sit with it, and he’s going to refine it, and he’s going to make it sound beautiful in your ears.
K.O. then sends the recording to Sara. Sara Baum from Sharp Copy Transcription is the person who transcribes the episodes. I don’t use a bot auto program to transcribe. That’s why they are so beautiful and joyful to read. This creates so much ease in my business, and hopefully for you if you like to read the episodes rather than listen to them.
So, Sara transcribes the episode, and then Sam—my incredible co-creator in all things business—Sam is going to make a beautiful thumbnail. That thumbnail is going to include a picture that has been taken by a talented photographer. It may have been Shannon Acton. It may have been Monique Floyd. It may have been Lesley Whitehead. But you’re going to see a photo that some skilled photographer took.
She’s going to put it all on a website that is created and hosted through Squarespace, which I’m sure has many, many creators there, right, and then comes to you through a device that is also co-created by so many people. That’s the reality of this.
Our culture prefers to say, oh, my gosh, Natalie Miller, she has an amazing podcast. It’s hers. But it’s not mine; it’s ours. It’s ours. Let’s step into that world. Let’s build that world together. Thank you so much for listening. Bye for now.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Mind Witchery. To catch all the magic I’m offering, please subscribe to the show, or if you want a little bit of weekly witchiness in your inbox, sign up for my Sunday Letter at mindwitchery.com. If today’s episode made you think of a friend or loved one, your sister, your neighbor, please tell them about it. We need more magic-makers in this troubled world.
Like all good things, this podcast is co-created by stellar people. Our music is by fabulous DJ, artist, and producer, Shammy Dee. Our gorgeous art is by the sorcerers at New Moon Creative. Mind Witchery is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media, K.O. Myers, executive producer. And I am Natalie Miller. Till next time.
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