For the Love of Money

Hi. If you're even looking at my stuff, you're probably curious about Love, Power, Intimacy, and Money like I am! Welcome.

For the Love of Money

They’re not opposites, love and money. People or systems that tell you otherwise are financially benefitting from your internal tension. Both love and money require or show an act of trust. If you’ve looked into the popular “5 love languages,” 3 of the 5 require sharing resources (quality time, acts of service, and gifts.) Each of those 3 love languages begin with a transaction of trust.

Transactions themselves are not a whole love, they are one of many pathways to love because they build trust. We cannot live or thrive alone. Trading resources has been not only a love language since the dawn of humanity, but a life language. We simply cannot live without each other, despite what space-focused, potentially anti-social billionaires might hope for. And we cannot live without the Earth.

The Earth is our first and most constant trade partner. Wars and genocides are committed in the name of insecurity around land and physical resources. There is no need to eradicate another when we have secure attachments to money and resources. (There is enough, remember?) You could say that your secure attachment to money and resource flow could actually save lives. If that’s feeling a little to “Butterfly Effect-y” for you, let me break this down:

• Dysfunctional attachments to resources lead to unnecessary hierarchies and systems of comparison. The value we assign to comparisons breed insecurity. Resource Insecurity leads to violence of the heart, body, and earth. Dysfunctional attachments require us to abandon ourselves to preserve our place in the hierarchy. This often looks like trying to look like a good person instead of just being one - This self-abandonment is the first requirement of all supremacy mindsets, including white supremacy.

• Those hierarchies and systems of comparison become so prevalent they are now cultural norms. Extractive Capitalism is an example of a system that has become as American as apple pie (now for $18.99 this weekend only!). We practice being dysfunctionally attached to resource flow and think it’s normal because we don’t see many examples of anything else. Who benefits from this?

• Dysfunctionally attached cultural norms are then passed on from generation to generation until nobody can remember what it was like beforehand (a very white/western way to look at the world. There are several, often indigenous cultures who remember other ways to live because they still live them!)

• The systems of comparison begin to “eat us alive” by starting to punish even those who they were created to support in the first place - i.e. white men who feel entitled to systemic support who are no longer experiencing it and creating more opportunities for violence in order to “take what’s theirs.”

So what do we do? Extractive Capitalism has a nuclear half life, and it will consume life until it feasts on death alone.

We become secure in our attachments to resources. We break the cycle. And we don’t have to be perfect at it for it to work.

Becoming secure in our attachments to resources doesn’t require us to actually HAVE a lot of resources, in the same way that we don’t have to HAVE a lot of love in our lives to experience self-love or self-worth or feel love reflected back at us in our community. We do, however, have to have the capacity to give and receive all that love and those resources. We have to look for it, see it, be open to it and feel it.

I was conditioned with very little access to love or resources. My dysfunctional attachment to both distorted my sense of self and was unhelpful to me living the life I wanted to live -from living the life I knew I could live. I knew love existed. I knew there was a better way to feel about my resources and I knew there were enough to go around. I had seen examples of both outside myself and wanted them inside me. I set out to become health, wealth, and love.

As I have practiced being my secure attachments to love and money, I have dramatically increased my access to, and sharing of both. By being, I mean the actions I take, examining my belief systems, changing my language & mindset, and how I show up in the world. In doing/being secure, I have easily cultivated community around love and money and had my security reflected back to me by those I’m closest to. I radiate loving, trusting, financial security from within myself (by being and doing it -aka practicing) while also looking for and receiving it from my community. I receive security. I receive freedom. I receive exploration. I receive care. I receive MONEY. I receive love… because I am all of those things. I share each of those things in my own capacity.

Let’s not be mistaken - there is no universal “if-then” equation or formula here, as many other money coaches will tell you. Our attachments inform our systems and vis versa. Our ability to trust informs our ability to receive and vis versa. Our journeys are unique, nuanced, and layered, and I love that!

Secure attachments require practicing, (doing+being,) Trust. Trust is one foundation of love. Love is giving and receiving from the abundance of what is - our truth, our capacity, our joy.

By practicing trust and secure resource and love attachment, we naturally, easily, and joyfully eliminate assigning value to comparison. All of a sudden, we don’t need to be better than anyone else because we have enough and are enough. Giving becomes easier and more fun! Receiving becomes easier and more fun. What’s to lose - Our anxiety about not feeling good enough to EARN our basic needs being met? Yeah.

Even in times of financial boon or famine, secure attachments remind us that enough is available somewhere and can enable us to balance it out - and that only we can decide what’s enough for us. Imagine for a moment, a community of people who know what “enough” means to them and actively align their ins and outs accordingly. Like a bed of oysters, each cleaning their environment by nourishing themselves. I want to live in that world … with you.

So yeah, your secure attachments to money and resource flow can save lives - starting with your own. And watch what happens in your community when you do.

Love transcends transaction (as a way of being) and, in this world as it is, cannot be acted upon without transaction (that’s the doing part). Practice Love & Money, securely folx.

Co-Conspirator Highlights - Ann Marie Utratel

Don’t wanna build your queer co-op or grassroots organization from scratch? Well, Co-op bought is just fine (and free!) Ann Marie is the co-founder of The DisCo Co-op and Guerilla Media and she’s where technomancy and community algorithmic trust meet. I had heard about DisCo a few years before I happened to meet her, and, I have to admit that I fangirled for a minute. Yeah… me. I fangirled. I don’t ever do that. Ann Marie is that cool. I promptly had a little funeral in my heart to let any ideas I had of her die before actually spending time with her so I didn’t put her on a pedestal - and I’m so glad I did because she’s even cooler and more human than I even imagined. I’m proud to call her a friend and global community co-conspirator. Seriously, just look at half the shit she’s been up to and support her work.

Personal Updates

Hysterectomies are no joke. I also fired my HRT specialist because I’m still menopausal 2 months po-op when I wasn’t supposed to be at all. Wish me speedy access to the hormones I need to stop the hot flashes, itchy skin, and fishbrain. (Ya know, like I have the memory of a goldfish - fishbrain).

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What I offer is a new way of being based on pre-capitalist wisdom and post-capitalist pragmatism. This means I’m on the edge of something new. Invest in our collective, easy, joyful, and meaningful future. You’re gonna like how it feels.

Candis Fox is a Money, Power, Intimacy, & Relational Coach and Consultant

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