The Trance of Scarcity (a working essay)
I have been wanting to sit down and synthesize these thoughts in writing for a long time.
As I begin, I feel the internal pressure and external responsibility of speaking to something so polarizing. It can be easy for a subject like this to overwhelm the nervous system, causing us to bypass it entirely. Which doesn’t motivate any positive change.
My intention is to approach the tender topics of spiritual materialism, scarcity supremacy, and economic trauma with gentleness, acceptance, and care. Just like we approach the other difficult landscapes we traverse as people committed to growth and healing.
If you are a student of yoga or meditation, you know that on the other side of discomfort is understanding. It is the same when we take an honest look at the systemic injustice that is at the helm in our spiritual communities. So much of the trauma we feel in our bodies and the toxic issues we face in yoga and wellness culture are shaped by the invisible forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism.
As I write this, I am breathing softly. And I hope you will do the same. Call on the courage that led you to your spiritual practice and together, let's water new seeds of understanding in our bodies, minds, and hearts.
What is Scarcity Supremacy?
Scarcity is a belief shaped by capitalism and it emerges in the following thought formations:
I am not enough
I do not do enough
I do not have enough
There is not enough to go around
If we remove the negative from these statements they become:
I am enough
I do enough
I have enough
There is enough to go around
I am going to assume that universally, the second set of statements creates a much more spacious somatic experience. And that is because:
The opposite of scarcity is abundance and the opposite of perfectionism is Love.
In America, our self-improvement is capitalized. Wellness is a billion dollar industry. When scarcity becomes a tool people use to control and dominate others, it becomes supremacy. Supremacy is behavioral superiority related to access to privilege, authority, power, or status. In spiritual spaces, scarcity supremacy is a serious concern because what is often leveraged isn’t just money, it’s also “god” i.e. spiritual teachings (which are often appropriated).
Many of us have internalized the hidden trauma of scarcity supremacy without understanding what it is or how it is working on us.
My Experience With Scarcity Supremacy
I became passionate about this subject matter through direct experience with it; having faced a significant amount of hidden abuse and discrimination for my capacities as a Nuerodivergent Yoga teacher. The effects of this became so serious for me that I chose to exit my Yoga community (where I serve as a leader) for several years to process and heal. During this time, I chose to complete an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Regenerative Culture at The University of New Mexico where I focused my terminal academic research on decoloniality in movement and embodiment spaces.
Assimiliation
My career as a dance artist and educator has been firmly rooted in collaboration; through which I have learned invaluable lessons about the complexities of working in groups.
Something that is often unaddressed regarding community work is how difficult it is for us to talk to each other about uncomfortable things, listen deeply, and practice patience. The trauma response of urgency and a culture of speed and perfection has stiffened our tolerance tendons.
Groups make unconscious agreements within moments of forming. These agreements will mirror an array of cultural and relational values. Fear of making a mistake and being canceled is a viable challenge to creating diverse cultures of healing and belonging.
If all individuals in a group or relationship are not actively engaged with their subconscious material (specifically, if they are not aware of their attractions, aversions, and biases) then the intimacy we crave in community cannot be realized.
Additionally, we are conditioned to find our role within a group and settle into it, narrowing the potential for growth by identifying with non-granular emotional experiences and shapeshifting ourselves to fit in.
Bias is not something we have or don’t have. Bias is something we are aware of or not aware of.
All people have conscious and unconscious discriminatory capacities. Instead of fearing our bias, we might benefit from to cozying up to it. We can practice this in our daily lives when we are out and about in our communities running errands and strolling public spaces.
I will share a personal example:
When I moved to Eagle County Colorado where I have lived for over a decade, I had digested a narrative that the community was dominantly white. By blindly believing this narrative, I had accepted that “this was just they way things were”. But when I used my mindfulness toolkit to look around, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. My awareness of this bias started to work on me and helped me to question the belief that my community was only made up of privileged white individuals and therefore racism “wasn’t a concern for us”.
*This is a good place to pause and notice your somatic response…
Where We Speak From
We all, speak from, think from, feel from, and respond from our unique personal, cultural, and environmental conditioning. Acknowledging the forces that have shaped us, including capitalism, is helpful for building deeper community kinship. Here are some key things to consider:
Our racial, physical, and financial privilege
Our religious/spiritual upbringing and how it shaped us
Our family system and formative community connections
Our abilities, capacities, limitations, disabilities
Our education and ability to succeed within it
Our exposure to cultures vastly different than our own
How much time we spend with communities and people who are different from us
The unconscious traumas and wounds that we seek to get met through other people
What we feel we are entitled to or owed by other people
Our ancestral, biological and inhereted resources
Where I Speak From
My paternal grandfather was a second generation immigrant from Italy and my grandmother a first generation immigrant from Bohemia. Through them and through my parents, I have witnessed relational entanglement; the sometimes distorted ways in which the unseen tries to make itself seen. I also witnessed how assimilation, culture, and political fear can transmigrate in the body through intergenerational trauma. My family has contended with complex mental health issues and Nuerodivergence which continue to survive in my body. It is not surprising then, that I landed in dance studios and meditation halls. Places where I could sift through difficult things, quietly.
My grandmother, Millie Dobrecky, immigrated with her family to upstate New York from Bohemia as a child between World War I and World War II. Many Czechs were skilled in craft, education, and business, so they assimilated quickly and quietly. Bringing with them the cultural values of industry, familial love, and naturalism.
Violinist and Scholar Natalie Hodges speaks to assimilation as Self-Erasement in her book Uncommon Measure:
Moving across the world in order to begin life anew necessitates undergoing a monumental translation in space and language and time, a transcontinental shift from there to here, then to now. You are required to change yourself, to break symmetry with the past and with the person you used to be; in many cases, perhaps, the desire for such a break motivates immigration itself. But what it’s hard to appreciate until you’ve arrived in your new country, until it’s too late, is that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work or how successful you become, it doesn’t really change how others see you because the harder you try to transform yourself in order to fit in, the more you reveal yourself to be the outsider you always were. (103)
As an American, you are likely the child, grandchild, or great great grandchild of an immigrant. America is a country built on assimilation. Decoloniality requires us to look deeply at the ways in which we have learned to belong or not belong. We can look to our ancestors for the medicine we need to understand why we are who we are and why we carry what we carry. Charles Eisenstein writes the following in his book Sacred Economics:
Today we live in a world that has been shorn of its sacredness, so that very few things indeed give us the feeling of living in a sacred world. Mass-produced, standardized commodities, cookie-cutter houses, identical packages of food, and anonymous relationships with institutional functionaries all deny the uniqueness of the world. The distant origins of our things, the anonymity of our relationships, and the lack of visible consequences in the production and disposal of our commodities all deny relatedness. Thus we live without the experience of sacredness. Of course, of all things that deny uniqueness and relatedness, money is foremost. The very idea of a coin originated in the goal of standardization, so that each drachma, each stater, each shekel, and each yuan would be functionally identical. (XVII)
Cultural Appropriation And Decoloniality In Yoga And Why It Really Does Matter.
Cultural appropriation is a form of coloniality in that it is a process of adopting and essentializing elements from another culture’s identity and commodifying them out of context, often for our own self-interest, and under the disguise of spiritual, artistic, or personal progress.
The intersectional struggle regarding cultural appropriation in the microculture of American Yoga is complicated by the fact that we are at a point in time in our Psychosomatic evolution where we cannot detangle Vedic Ontologies from American ones. And this, once again, is because of coloniality. Britain sought trade through India during the British Raj. India’s goods, resources, and ideas were exported.
Many of America’s white, male, literary giants who wrote on the subject of self-inquiry through nature and the metaphysical were deeply influenced by Vedic mythology including but not limited to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau.
And perhaps more importantly than the American literary giants are the Psychologists that pioneered what we understand as Western Psychology today. Jung, Adler, and Freud were all at one time or another, students of Vedic thought. Jungian Psychology in particular, is deeply influenced by Yogic and Buddhist Psychology, Psychosomatics, and Psychospirituality.
One can also trace most Eastern Holistic Medicinal practices back to Ayurveda and India including Chinese Medicine, Tibetan Medicine, and the Medicine of Hippocrates.
So it might be a bit too late to try to detangle Vedic thought from American thought when it comes to any kind of Psychosomatic or holistic theory and practice. That said, it is never too late to detangle and heal the trauma of coloniality in our own bodies.
To begin, we can gently reflect on why it is that we seek something from another culture, and observe how we have been educated to consume. Often this inquiry will lead to us addressing our own intergenerational and ancestral trauma; the assimilation or oppression our ancestors experienced and how they may have had to abandon their own indigenous histories in pursuit of safety and freedom.
Often our quest for meaning as students of yoga & self-improvement is sincere while at the same time being rooted in a sense of scarcity. And like a trauma bond, we might ignore our codependence with yoga because it is in our self-interest to do so. The medicine can be found in reconnecting with our own indigenous roots (because we all have them).
*this essay is still in progress…