The 8 Hour Work Week + How this Relates to Addiction
Hi Community! Here's a little summary of what's below:
The TLDR version
👩🏽💻Thoughts on the 8 hour work week
📴How this relates to addiction (and how addiction relates to connection* seriously you're gonna wanna watch the video below.)
💫Why feeling connected to the divine, expressing your full self + becoming friends with your body are the key to rebuilding the world
😯3 things I just learned that blew my mind new offering!
Work Culture + the Belief System that Supports It
🐣I am seriously astounded by the amount of information I learn on a daily basis that feels like it should be required reading in high school. (For example, did you know the amount of sunlight that gets in your eyes in the morning affects how your hormones are released in your body for the rest of the day?)
I wonder, often, why it is I was not taught these things or why they aren’t front page 📰 news, and over and over again I realize that is because our economy measures value by profitability, and that education that facilitates our remembering that we are powerful compassionate beings makes us much less susceptible to advertising.
Yesterday I saw my friend post this on her Instagram stories: (See image to the right)
When I was in college, I had a job at a 👢 shoe store 3 days a week alongside a full-time course-load. I was trying to learn how to be an adult, and had no idea that my family was paying way too much to house me in a former hotel-turned dorm room on tenth avenue with no air conditioning. (I have a lot of anger at the higher education industry for preying on parents desire to provide for their children.)
All I did was work and go to school. And as a result, I spent lots of my money the second I got off of work. I would walk right out of the store where I worked into another retail shop, spending the day selling expensive shoes and then buying clothes. I also moved to NYC a week before 9/11 so I am sure I was processing a lot more than I was conscious of at the time.
I adapted to this sense of overwhelm, but I was at least surrounded by a community of students who were also beginning their freshmen year, who were equally clueless to the gravity of the events at the World Trade Center and the fear and anxiety that became normalized in its aftermath.
I was incredibly adamant that I did not want a traditional desk job. Part of the reason was that I felt that wearing business clothes would make me feel really strange. (I used to think this was just my entitlement talking, but now I realize it is also partially an instinct not unlike that of my ancestors who resisted giving up pieces of their identity in order to survive.)
And I never did work a traditional 9-5 in any meaningful way.
But what I didn’t realize is that while superficially I was living in rebellion to traditional work culture, I had internalized its oppressive mechanisms.
I worked as hard as possible, no matter how much money I made. (At one point I worked at a coffee shop as a barista + had all of the duties as a night porter too for $8.50/hour plus tips. I never even considered that I wasn’t being paid enough because I was so motivated by people pleasing, fitting in, and doing a “good job”.)
I tried to make everyone like me. I volunteered to do everything that no one else wanted to do to prove myself indispensable, a habit I learned from my mom. (I am a first generation immigrant from the Philippines.) My mom struggled to balance her desire to make sure I didn’t suffer the anxiety of poverty that she experienced in childhood, while also trying to instill a sense of gratitude and awareness of my privilege at the same time.
At some point in my early 30s, I realized all I ever did was blow off steam from work (usually drinking, or buying stuff) or go to a job that I had intended to be a side job, but that always seemed to turn into a full-time management position because I kept going above and beyond my pay grade with my work ethic.
It never occurred to me that I could choose something different because I was so enmeshed with my environment. Meanwhile I was so drained of energy after every shift that I rarely committed to working on the creative projects which were the central reason I avoided getting the stability of a 9-5.
I had all of the burdens of the culture of work and none of the rewards except for being able to work for small businesses, wear whatever I want, and of course, meet lots of amazing people. Somehow I subconsciously associated this suffering with being a “creative” or being rebellious, but everything I did came from reactivity rather than from creativity.
It took me a long time to realize that not only was I addicted to convenient food, and social drinking, I was also addicted to work.
I thought owning my own company would somehow solve this (I ran my own shop/community space for 5 years), but because I was still trying to make everyone else happy and bypassing my own feelings, body and experience, I recreated the same mechanisms of overwork and numbing out, except I was the employee and the boss.
Which leads me to sharing the following video about how addiction and connection are, well, connected.
For years, I have noticed that the way we speak about addiction and drugs is dehumanizing, othering, and judgmental. Many people buy the narrative that drugs are sold by bad people to weak people who then become bad, fed by mainstream media, political pundits or entertainment.
But this study is so compassionate. It is so important. I feel it should be required learning for all of us. (Caveat* having been intimate with people with very serious addictions, I am not advocating for anyone to provide more support for those suffering with addiction than they are able to.)
This idea of connection + addiction + how it relates to our work culture affects all of us; addiction comes in many forms and if it is a form of self-soothing, it makes me wonder, what it is that causing us to feel so unsoothed?
Some questions to think about:
What are you addicted to? (I can tell you now for me it is my phone.)
And what are you longing to be connected to that drives that addiction?
What do you need to self soothe from?
This is why for me, spirituality and connection to nature and to one another are at the foundation of my work. For a while I tried to focus solely on learning about the politics, and all the right best practices, but I noticed that when we try to educate ourselves and solve problems without truly connecting, without examining how to address our own trauma and how it affects our ability to handle conflict, without taking our interactions off of a platform where nuance and holistic narratives are almost impossible to hold, we burn out the fire of our spirits and disconnect from the mainframe of our bodies. And those places of connection are the spaces where actual healing and alchemy happens.
Our bodies connect us to the divine and also to the earth. And right now they are holding hundreds of years worth of our ancestors memories coming up to be acknowledged, held, felt and transmuted.
We have been taught, whether we are trying to show up to work, or trying to build a better world, that it is normal to feel under-resourced, to override your bodily + emotional energy and to go along with whatever everyone else is going along with because our exposure to everyone else doing it makes it seem "normal." In our dominant work culture, It is normal to be thirsty and go without water, to be achy and to go without rest. It has been normal for all of us (some of us more than others) to feel less than human, because we have been separated from our energy bodies, our emotional bodies, our spirits.
When I think about what we need, across the board, it is to rehumanize everything.
Without a sense of our own spirits, our own energy and emotional bodies, our inherent connection to all that is, I don’t think we can really appreciate what it is to be human. And I don't think this is about trying to create a new unified belief system, I think its about inhabiting our lives more fully. Getting to redefine what it looks like when we stop suppressing our ephemeral creative nature is the center of all my work. And in redefining what it means to be human, the first person whose humanity must be outlined in a more expansive, tender, compassionate, magical and holographic way, is our self.
When I try and take care of myself, I am doing that for you too. My wellbeing is connected to the wellbeing of everyone on my collective timeline. We cannot serve the interdependent whole without first honoring our own nature. It is our own nature that has been oppressed out of our ancestors, that has been distracted from by convenience, that has been slowly leaked out by a culture that defines us by our value to the economy. Rugged individualism is not only a myth, it doesn't exist. Inhabiting your life as who you really are on a soul level is far from being fiercely independent, it is acknowledgement of the assignment we have in the tapestry of the whole.
We are different than one another. We are meant to be. The process of learning to love one another has nothing to do with the inorganic process of homogenization our economy + entertainment try to peddle to us; No, the process of learning to love one another is the return to our naturalness as individuals, who live in an interconnected way by design.
It is only as who we truly are that we can actually connect with and harmonize with one another. This is what we learn from our ecosystems where all beings interrelate by being who they truly are.
A few things I recently learned that I should have been taught in school:
🚶🏽♀️Forward motion calms your amygdala (Where your fear response lives).
👉The creation of national parks is tied to the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples of America as well as commercial attraction to potential railroad customers.
😐 Our bodies are comprised of 10x more microbial cells than human eukaryotic cells, mostly bacteria, viruses and protozoa that are part of our natural fauna.
Testing a New Offering
I have a new offering in beta* mode. It is a 10 minute channeled audio message + 1 full page (12 size font) of channeled writing for you; my intention with these is to facilitate a message for the receiver that is aligned for your highest good + the highest good of all those connected to you. You can ask a question, but these message are not literal or prescriptive most of the time (nor are they meant to be!) More like poetry from a healing frequency intended for you to visit as often as you would like.
