Women and Sacred Economy

11/13/2013

by Chaya Grossberg

I love the book Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein. It is intelligent, forward thinking, heartfelt and wise. The only thing that troubles me is that in a book about the sacred, he has many quotes and few, if any, are quotes from women. All of the people he quotes about sacred economics are men. What does this tell us? Men certainly don’t know more about sacred economics and they likely (in general) know more about Big Money economics. So why would Eisenstein have chosen to only or primarily quote men? Why, of 75 books references in his bibliography were only about six by women? The answer is likely the same as why most men don’t quote women in their articles and books: it simply doesn’t occur to them. They forget human men aren’t the only people/beings on planet earth. It must be very very easy for them to forget, or Eisenstein of all men, writing about sacred economics, would have remembered. The idea that he would have consciously decided women don’t have much important to say about bringing the sacred back into economics and life is unfathomable. But, for whatever reason women weren’t represented, I am representing them here.

Eisenstein does touch on some of the concepts I will mention here. He has taken excellent steps in clarifying many things about sacred economy and gift culture. To go a step farther, we need to ask many many women to speak on this subject, as they hold much of its wisdom in their wombs. Yes, there are less books published by women. Some home and office bookshelves have few or none. Yet there are many books and articles by women, available as great gifts to those who remember to look for them. If we weren’t to look for the less told and untold stories, which are so abundantly available now, out of habit, we would be sitting on a gold mine playing with tinsel.

Women have learned better in most cases how to live a sacred economy. Without being paid directly for their gifts with money, they practiced the gift economy for many years. They took care of homes and children, creating beautiful and useful handmade things, all as gifts. On one hand it is sad that gifts such as homemaking, cooking, foraging, crafting, art making, nurturing one another, healing connection and empathy aren’t highly valued in the world of money much of the time. Of course those with a male social identity are capable of doing these activities, but they (and most of us by now) have been capsized by the non-sacred economics of “efficiency.”

Perhaps some men are jealous. They could be jealous of female bonding and other activities that have evolved from having time to play and work outside the money realm. Women hold these secrets not because we are intrinsically more inclined towards sacred economics (which may be true-we’ll never know for sure), but because the system men created and left women out of is unsustainable for the soul of humanity. Inviting women and the sacred back into warfare-separation-oriented-economics can only take us so far. In order to find sacred orientation again, a shift of focus needs to happen to bring the attention of both men and women back to the gift economy.

Right now, and for the past 50 years or so, the picture has appeared more like women with their sacred gifts looking longingly towards the money realm, jealous, angry, frustrated that they’ve been marginalized. Not only were they marginalized by being excluded from the beginning, but the marginalization was taken further by re-including them in an imbalanced system and saying everything is fair and equal now. You can join us now. The rules have already been made. Sorry you were left out but that was then and this is now. Here are the rules, do your best.

For a woman it was like walking into a country where everyone spoke a different language but being told the language can be learned. Of course it can be learned, but in all that time of learning, not being able to express oneself in ones own language is lonely, even agonizing and maddening.

Luckily the focus is starting to shift back to the gift economy. This means men and women alike need to turn their gazes back to the womb, which has been storing up this knowledge in its cellular memory. Whether this is an intrinsically womb-en trait or culturally evolved hardly matters. It is what has come to pass and all rules have exceptions. Until we transcend gender roles and gender entirely, though, we can use the imperfect and even false, at times, binary, to understand and learn from where we’ve been. As false as the gender binary may seem now, it was more and more gross as we go back in time, and we are coming from history. We are born into this moment with a memory of many stories and paradigms. The gender stories are some of them, ever shifting, ever evolving, ever surprising all of us and certainly holding valuable knowledge about how to turn towards the womb, how to live on the gift.

Women being left out of money for so long led to (socially identified) women preserving the money-less realm and the knowledge/cellular awareness of how to live in this realm.

Living in a sacred economy is of course not an activity of one gender or the other. We all hold stories of it in our memory from the earliest days of humanity. Yet in more recent years women have held the stories of gifting and have occupied more of the money-less economy. So have those living with less money, for any reason. These are the people we need to magnify in our awareness. Exalting the rich and famous is lacking in soul now that extra wealth is of little use without awareness of the sacred, experience living a communal life of sharing, gifting, creating, loving, embracing and making meaning of hardship.

What does this shift of focus look like? To the extent possible, more women (and all people) will be withdrawing their efforts from the non-sacred-money economy. They will be expressing and sharing their stories and perspectives more and more and soul hungry men will be more and more interested. Currently, far more men are being quoted, cited, published and heard and it has been this way for many many years. Perhaps forever. But with the democratization of media via the internet, this has already begun to shift. The shift will continue in the direction of the masses being curious about the hidden stories (those of women, people without money, and others whose struggles made it impossible to be published or heard in the old paradigm). It is only natural as humans greatest drive is to learn (greater than to eat or mate, in fact), that we will want to hear the stories we haven’t heard before. Corporate sponsored same old same old is losing our interest and attention. More and more of us can discern between a story designed to make money and a story given to us as a gift. More and more stories are being given as gifts (I, in fact, devote most of my life to sharing stories as gifts). And since we no longer have to pay money for stories anyway the choice is a no brainer for those seeking to connect.

Connecting via true, heartfelt, non-monetized stories is getting easier and easier, and of course it’s getting much easier for a wider spectrum of women’s stories to be read and heard. One of the biggest current blocks is truly a psychological one. Of course many women (and people without a lot of money) are strapped for the time, energy and resources to create-but social media and blogs don’t require much time. A woman can share pieces of her life, what’s really on her mind and heart, with her extended circle in a minute or two per day. There are also many new ways to save money and therefore time by sharing, swapping, reusing and consuming less. As we become more aware of these money-less systems and more skilled at using them, many of us will be able to cut back on our hours of working for money.

The psychological block of fear, though, is still standing in the way of many women (and others) to divulge their secrets. History has included so much shaming and violence, that sharing their real experiences can run the risk of being called woo-woo or humiliated/shamed in countless other ways. Yet more and more women and others are doing it anyway with fabulous results, reaching their message far beyond their own social network. And each one inspires the next, gives courage for another secret gift to be given, a delicious drink from the shame chalice.

Soon enough we will all have access to these soul feeding stories. We need to remember how nourishing they are, to resist the winds (ever weakening) that have pulled us away from these gifts for so many years and destroyed our true wealth. Our true wealth has only gotten wealthier and all we need is to remember what it is, to seek it out.