Sex, Money, Power & Justice Go Hand In Hand.
Over a decade ago when I started my second and current business, as my 9-year relationship was ending and I was setting out to figure out what it would mean to truly stand on my own two feet again, I started a powerful process of my own financial empowerment.
- It meant getting past the feelings of resentment and frustration that I still had not cracked the code on this part of my life.
- It meant getting messy with myself about all the ways I had gotten in my own way and the messages I had believed about my ability to create true financial well-being and liberation from my past.
- It meant acknowledging the deep patterns I had been playing out sexually in my relationship that were also screaming at me in my financial life. Patterns of scarcity, entitlement, deprivation, blame and not taking responsibility for myself and my life.
My mentors had powerfully taken me to new places as a sexual person, but I kept hitting walls around finances and money.
I knew I had to make a big change. I knew I needed other mentors who understood money to help me get out of the long, deep rut I was in.
I sought out new mentors and began to dig in deep. I worked with one mentor for 5 years to break through it all and see how I was getting in my own way. I wanted help seeing what I just couldn’t see from where I was standing.
I knew there was more and I was not getting it.
When I started that work, I decided I would put aside everything I thought I knew and go ALL IN. I decided that I wanted to go as deep as I could and understand money from a new perspective and that meant suspending what I thought I knew.
I grew my business and started to make more money than I’d ever made in my life. I got the book deal of a lifetime and I got it because of my track record with a previous best seller, and also because of how I stood for myself in the negotiation process.
I truly began to see how much more was possible for me.
Yet there was something that was still nagging at me and I began to look for the next level of this conversation and the work around money and wealth.
See, as an activist, I had been in so many activist communities where scarcity was a central theme. I saw it in grassroots work and I saw it in the non-profit organizations I worked with.
There was an idea that if you make money you are not “down with the cause” or somehow suspect. In those communities, everything came down to oppressive systems and little was said about personal responsibility, willpower and freedom.
Yet, as I had dug into the personal growth world, all of the coaches and leaders boiled everything down to personal responsibility—this idea that if you were not creating something you wanted, you were the cause. There was no critical analysis of the systems that individuals actually exist in with all their personal responsibility.
So I started asking people about this, seeking a new conversation that included all of the nuance of both personal responsibility and power and an analysis of the systems we exist in that make it so that some people profit and others suffer in myriad ways.
Few people found themselves able to have this deeper conversation. I saw people actually run from the conversation because it was too much to talk about the reality of it all.
During that time, I had begun to teach about the connections between sex and money and taught my Sex, Money and Power women’s weekends 2-3 times a year. They were intimate, powerful retreats that helped women dig into the patterns that were holding them back.
I have wanted to offer this work again for awhile, and yet I knew there was another element that was missing: Justice.
How do we include justice in this web of personal power rooted both in our sexuality—that tender, rich, juicy, abundant part of ourselves that wants to be in full expression, pleasure and joy—and money, that energetic thing we use every day to create our lives and experience joy through knowing we are provided for?
I believe this is the next level of this conversation. I will go there with those who are ready to have the nuanced conversations, to create a world that is based in justice, and to know that there truly is enough for all of us to have our needs met and our joys expressed.
