No More Taboo on the Woo-Woo
I have not been exempt from our culture that corrals, controls, devalues, and makes taboo any work that is spiritual, healing, creative, or generally has to do with real human bodies. But no más.
When Nicole Ayres at Jumpsuit put out the invitation to “make LinkedIn weird” and declare the work we’re _actually_ doing in this space, I had no idea the domino effect that would have. Over the past two months I’ve had incredible connections with new clients and colleagues that have blown my mind, and internally I experienced a huge wave of unsilo-ing my work.
When I had my spiritual awakening (read: hella breakdown) in 2011-2012, left my W-2 gig, and started setting up a website, it represented my bifurcated identity as a consultant and as an artist. Literally on the home page you would click to go into one of two paths. These two identities were always at war for my attention, refusing to take one another seriously, let alone admit that they were integral to one another. In my consulting and coaching work, my work as an artist and poet was a footnote. In my artistic projects, I used my identity as a consultant to try and elevate value within systems that pay artists pennies per hour for their work.
Meeting founders, creatives, and consultants who own and embody their spiritually and healing gifts as major assets has opened the passageway this Spring for massive integration. Today, I added the mini documentaries that have been made about my interactive art installations to my website. It seems so obvious in retrospect that all of these conversations are of a piece. But integration takes time.
And thus I share with you my updated body of work. You can now see two of the wild, wonderful, immersive installations I created in the “Interviews” section on this site.
Of course, none of this is just about me. It's about you, too. And it's about the millions of people who are sick of bifurcating themselves in jobs that refuse to let all of them show up and play. It's about the operations person who would never tell anyone she's taking yoga teacher training. It's about the marketing executive who would be mortified if anyone found out about their psychic gifts or the ways they can communicate with plants. It's about the mid-level manager who gets the side eye from coworkers every time they walk to the meditation room at Google as the end of Q3 looms large. The offerings don’t need to change. The culture needs to change.
It's messy the way we integrate and I'm grateful that I have space to let it happen in its own timing. And I know I’ll have the honor of seeing many of you becoming courageous enough to be all of who you are, out loud, at work. These conversations aren't for the companies. They're for the people in the companies. And that's how companies become truly great.
