Dec 2023. Pondering on the nature of a woman's need. I’ve been very interested in the energetics of exchange for the past few years. I think that it’s a really significant part of what I came to unravel in my own life and then share with others.
As a woman, I had repeatedly lived experiences of wanting to give, but ultimately feeling depleted in relationships, struggling to understand what conscious exchange dynamics really look like beyond patriarchal programming. It led me to thinking differently about feminine energy and resources, which is a lot of what you’ll see me writing about.
I have regularly contemplated things like resource exchange, extraction, sovereignty, reciprocity, and so on, and looked into the work of others for inspiration.
One person I really have come to admire is Ms. Genevieve Vaughan and her work on the Maternal Gift Economy. In a salon conversation she recently hosted, my ears perked up differently when I heard someone speak about need.
It was a Sacred Remembering feeling of, “There’s something here for you, pay attention.”
In the Maternal Gift Economy, a gift is given in response to a need. If a baby needs to be fed, it receives the mother’s breast. If a woman needs food, it can be brought to her.
I have been so focused for so long on all of the energetics of all of these different sorts of exchanges, but something is stirring in me about the word, the concept, the primordial beauty of need.
The need is, in some sense, a gift that precipitates the giving. It allows the gift to be given. It allows the giver to be received.
THE MOTHER RELATIONSHIP & RECEIVING:
I believe I was breast-fed for the first six months of my life. Knowing my mother, I truly cannot imagine this. We've never been very close or bonded. And I don't remember that receptivity from her was ever easy.
Throughout my life, I mostly remember that I tried hard to receive her acceptance through performance and achieving in the status quo. It wasn't clear how to get my needs met, let alone my wants.
I learned from her to not admit needs at all. That to have needs was shameful and was an indication of failure. I realize I stopped admitting them very early on.
Lately I’ve been practicing naming needs with her as I'm practicing having acceptance for my own needs. It's liberating.
I think about how our mothers and grandmothers got their needs met, if they did. I try to have compassion for what she wasn't able to give. My therapist calls my mother's behavior "transactional" and I witness that I have a lot of issues, personally, reconciling transactional energy, so I appreciate the therapist's reflection, and I keep up the practice of honoring my own needs.
TRYING NOT TO NEED:
In my journal this morning, I was taking stock of my own personal responses to my own personal needs. I encourage the reader to mosey into this contemplation for themselves.
Mostly, I try to figure out the solutions to my needs on my own. An independence that aches, that doesn’t truly serve me. An old and painful habit.
And, contemplating the flow of energy and the flow of gifts, trying to figure it out or do it all on my own truly can’t meet my needs.
Consider - there is a need, and there is a giver. The two are required.
A wise human and friend of mine said to me not long ago, “Sarah, you need to name your needs. You’ll never go without, you’ll never be alone, but if you don’t name it, and I try to guess what it is that you need, then I would be imposing on you.”
Ask and receive, right? How many times have we heard those words? But also, how many times in our lives has that also not been our experience?
What needs have you stopped asking for?
In a healthy way, I believe the giver also needs the ask. I think we need to keep practicing the act of needing.
Needs are beginning to feel to me like such gifts!
PRIMORDIAL NEED:
I spend a lot of time contemplating and experiencing the Earth, Nature and the flow of energy through the Earth - about all of the metaphors for the feminine the Earth teaches us.
Late last night, when I couldn’t sleep because there was something I needed to see, I traveled to a liminal space of being feminine earth, a feeling, in my body as her body, the need for sun and seed, how primordial and how natural that is.
Try it.
How a need, truly felt, is such an invitation into a sacred cycle. How this primordial need is such a sacred invitation to receive. And how, when I felt this deep essence, I’m pretty sure it’s something I had forgotten long ago. Maybe since being a babe at the breast, but maybe even before that. Perhaps it’s an ancient feminine remembrance inviting us all to imagine, now, the felt sense not of lack or needing because of lack, but actually being the need that is the primordial spark that sets Nature’s reciprocity in motion.
ASK FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
This is becoming my new slogan. I mean, I don’t actually have a slogan, but I’m repeating this more and more lately when people approach me to work with me. These words are on my website: “You are welcome to ask for what you need.”
“Sarah, can we do three sessions on earth grid awakening?” Yes.
“Sarah, can we do an in-person workshop with my partner?” Yes.
We think, in “business,” that there has to be explicitly defined offers and services, but does there? If the breadth of my experience ranges from educational consulting to leadership development to couples coaching to energetic intuition (and it does cover this range and more), then I want to be recognized for the experience and expertise I can share and be asked to help. I’m also a Projector in Human Design and this is our strategy. In this case, I am a giver who needs to give. After years of branding myself, I can tell you it’s authentically heartbreaking to feel not needed. But I experience that using traditional business models also get in the way of that.
Is giving the service the most important part? Or is making the sale? When sales goes before service, then we’re in a transaction-based model instead of a need/giver model.
Traditional sales says that the seller is supposed to convince the buyer that they have a need, so that they can extract the resources from the buyer in a transaction. I want no part of this ethos.
I am consciously moving beyond transaction-based exchanges in my service-based offerings. For example, I’m moving from “sales” to suggested or required “donations.” I’m welcoming income-based sliding scales. As long as I have the time for it, I’ll customize to meet requests for service packages.
While I need to also receive from the perspective of I have bills to pay, I believe that the giver can receive when the focus is on healthy agreements rather than transactions.
I am a woman and a mother. I love giving. This is the basis of the Maternal Gift Economy which helps me to not be as defensive as I used to be about my feminine energy.
Because while the MGE helps us to understand the true nature of the Gift, we don’t live in a world that understands the value of feminine energy. So women, who are inclined to give, will also be inclined toward depletion if we don’t redefine feminine resources. Enter my work. Stick around for much more on this.
GETTING OUR NEEDS MET:
I know we have a long way to go before we are healed in the realms of feminine/masculine and man/woman exchange, healthy sacred commerce, and really feeling comfortable sharing our needs - both as the one who has the need, and the one who has the need to give.
And, I believe we can get there.
Ask for what you need. If the giver has it to give, then you may receive.
Consider this. Your need, shameless and true, is a spark of future abundance and flow, for all.
How comforting. How restorative.
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