This is Five and Nine, a podcast newsletter at the intersection of magic, work and economic justice. Welcome to Episode 003.
Listen to the podcast now, or read the transcript below, or both!
Resources
Music
The Gondoliers, composed by Ethelbert Woodbridge Nevin and performed by Georges Barrère and the Barrère Ensemble of Wind Instruments in 1915. Lyrics available here.
Books
Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk
Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe
Podcasts and Articles:
Lessons On Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption by Kaira Jewel Lingo at CIIS Public Programs
Peptoc, by the West Side Union Elementary School District (please donate!)
Tarot Cards:
The Wheel of Fortune
The Devil
The Hierophant
Transcript
Ana: So every full moon, we're pushing out a new podcast, and it's been interesting watching that cadence now that it's been two moons. By the time this comes out, it'll be a third moon, and so much has changed, I think. I remember the first time we recorded, we were thinking about that tsunami alert in the Bay Area, which now feels like such long ago news. So much is changing in the day to day, just month by month.
And when we're thinking about this with relationship to work and career, I think one thing we've all been talking about is, what is the role of career planning in a time like this? When the world is both literally and figuratively burning in such tragic and difficult ways? What does it mean to even be thinking about work and career during these times?
Xiaowei: It's actually something I've been seeing a lot, particularly amongst some of my students and just like younger folks in general. This question of like, everything feels desperate. It's never enough, no matter how many GoFundMes, no matter how many fundraisers, all these things. Like, the world is still crumbling.
And yet, we're still here, typing our emails and like setting our quarterly goals. And so, I think one way that I've thought about it for myself is that oftentimes the things that we want to see happen and change in the world might not happen in our lifetimes, or we might not get to see them in our lifetimes. And that change is slow.
Dorothy: I really appreciate you bringing that up, Xiaowei, this whole idea of timing and how we might not be able to see things happen in our lifetime, or lifetimes — I'm speaking for myself. But it does remind me, it's all the more reason to be present, because that's the only thing that you can really — I don't even like using the word control, but having a mindfulness of the present moment and how to deal with the things that you can deal with right here, where we are.
And I think that's difficult for a lot of people because a lot of people love dwelling in the future, what is to be, or what is the potentiality of a thing? So people get fatalistic or people dwell in nostalgia.
We also dwell in these constructs that we grew up with amongst our families, our parents, what we see in media, what we feel we ought to be. Everything in media becomes almost an aspiration of the thing that we must attain. But the reality is, that has nothing actually to do with this. It has very little to do with our own individual experiences.
Ana: One kind of interpretation of the classic three card spread that has resonated for me at least is instead of thinking of the big past, big present, big future, is: what are the conditions leading up to now? What are the conditions of the present, and what are some conditions to think about in the future?
And in so many ways for me, thinking about time as a series of progressions as moments that influence other moments and effects that we won't fully understand for years and years. It helps me stay in the present in ways that at least are helpful for me personally.
Dorothy: I could not help but think of the Wheel of Fortune. When I read for people and this card shows up, sometimes I notice this big sigh happen with the person.
You know, even if they're not familiar with tarot, I sometimes will ask them, well, what do you see? And, you know, I use a deck that actually says what it is, and then they go, "Well, it says Wheel of Fortune, so it means that there's no answer." And this kind of goes back to being fatalistic or being nostalgic or wishing for something that was good at the time, but is no more, or wishing for something that in your mind is great. But you also don't know the conditions of that vision as well.
I mean, if anyone knows these contentious feelings around making and goal setting, it would be an artist because you always have something in your mind of what something is gonna be.
And then it never turns out exactly the way you wanna be. And a lot of it is because there were conditions and circumstances along the way that you might not have foreseen. And so I oftentimes tell people when the Wheel of Fortune shows up, I always see it as the universe asking you to be more present. It also is reminiscent of the Fates. You know, the spinner, the allotter, the unturnable. So these, these three, you know, entities that are spinning time and, and space and, and story and narrative.
When someone applies to a job or that they know it's a sure thing — “I know the person who's getting me in, this is a sure thing.” And then they don't get it. Or an artist who said, well, this is a long shot. I'm never gonna get this grant, I'm never gonna get this fellowship. I know this feeling very well. But then you get it.
So, how does that change the time space continuum? How does that change what you thought that you couldn't get, that you have all of a sudden, because that affects what you envisioned in your mind.
And I feel the Wheel of Fortune is always a reminder for me of that, those things that I need to consider in the present moment.
Ana: This idea that there would be linear progress, that we could set a goal and could just get there. That there'd always be these constant improvements in society. It seems like that was the illusion. It seems like that was the kind of vision that's set out for so many years is like the thing that we do, if we just set these goals, we're going to meet them.
But instead, when you look at a lot of ancient wisdom, it's that time moves in cycles. Time moves in circular fashion and in waves that come and go.
I was listening to this beautiful podcast and talk by the Buddhist teacher and writer, Kaira Jewel Lingo. And she uses this wonderful metaphor of the waves crashing. When I'm in the ocean the waves, they come, they go, some are big, some are small. But the one thing I've learned about the waves is that the more you try to resist them, the harder it is, you just have to ride them, you have to flow with them, you have to anticipate them.
And you don't know what waves are coming. But once it's obvious, once you see it there, and once you're in it, you have to change. And it's gotten me thinking a lot about these old ideas of time, these old ideas of fate, of karma, of the wheel of fortune. And how that's, in many ways, that is the reality is that we just don't know anymore. Certainly didn't before, but now we just don't know what the next full moon will bring. And that's actually how most of humanity has lived for a very long time, and so in some ways we're just adapting to that now.
Dorothy: Damn, Ana, you straight took it to, you took it to the pulpit harder than the Hierophant. You know what I'm saying? That that was fan fricking fantastic. Xiaowei because you know, the water, you know, the wave, so well, as our, our in-house Scorpio--
Xiaowei: I'm going to get hella Californian for a second.
But I actually learned how to swim when I was 30. And it was really difficult as an adult, cuz you're like, here's a substance that is going to kill me. Why am I going into it? I do not trust the fact that you can put your face in it, and I won't drown. But so after learning how to swim, I got. I just fell in love with the ocean.
So, you know, it's been incredible to spend weekends out in the ocean, swimming, boogie boarding, on a surfboard. And it's like that sense of going with a wave or it's like that precipice of both being active and also accepting. There are a lot of threads of New Age thinking or tarot or meditative practice that can veer into turning us into feeling like, oh, we just need to accept everything. You know, this bad thing is a teacher and ha ha everything's all good now. And I also think that's one extreme that I really don't find very helpful for myself.
I think there is this kind of middle path of seeing the waves, knowing that the waves are different, knowing that the waves are always shifting. So actually, especially in the Bay Area, when you're in the ocean, the waves are always gonna be different because they're affected by the way that the sand changes, and that's constantly shifting.
Just being able to accept the difference in reality of each wave, but also not be pounded in the face by it and actually move towards it or move further away or just figuring out how to maneuver and navigate in it — I think that's been this lesson I've learned from the water that I'm trying to apply more broadly.
I think it applies to the goal setting in terms of the ways that we think about movement work as well. It's not just throwing our hands up and saying, “Oh, it's all useless.” But to really say, “No, there is a way navigate through these waves. How do we do it skillfully?”
Dorothy: You know, and I was listening to Laurie Santos's podcast, The Happiness Lab. (No relation. I've had a few people ask me if I'm related to her.)
She teaches psychology, and one of the things that she was talking about was negative thinking. So when you prepare, it's not just this toxic positivity that everything's gonna work out. It's more of, well, what if it doesn't and then what happens when that negative thing that I am preparing for does happen? How will I overcome that? Because nothing, well, most things are not wholly insurmountable, if you prepare.
Shadow Work and the Moon
Ana: There's this tradition of setting intentions with every new moon. And one thing I really appreciated, Xiaowei, is how you, you wanted to shift that a little bit, to shift it into the new moon as an opportunity for us to do shadow work.
Xiaowei: My students can tell you. They're like, “Why do you always relate everything to swimming?” But I will relate it to swimming. When I started to learn how to swim, there were these moments of panic. And so I had to take this adult swim class called Miracle Swim, with this retired firefighter named Richard who was amazing.
He was like, “Take it slow. And the worst thing that you can do is panic.” To the kind of unskillful it's like, “Oh my God, I don't wanna panic. I'm terrified. What if I panic, I'm gonna drown?
And I think there's a way of realizing and recognizing that we have all these shadow emotions, and the point is to not be more anxious about them or try and avoid them or try and eradicate them, but to really work with our shadows, because that's actually like this really complex and endlessly fascinating and super helpful — at least for me — place to be.
Instead of orienting moon work towards, “Oh, what's like, the thing I need to manifest in my life? I need more abundance.” It's actually like, “Let me take a step back and realize I do actually have a lot and then also actually think about the shadows that I might be running away from. And what do I make of these shadows?”
Ana: There's something really poetic also there about doing this during the new moon. Because it's literally the shadow of the moon facing us. And there's a Zen saying that whether it's the shadow side of the moon or the light side of the moon, it's all moon.1
It's all, it's all just part of what Moon-ness is about. And this idea of doing shadow work of engaging in with the kind of these shadow emotions, that's all part of what life is about, right? It's all part of what it means to be a human. Is that there are things that cause stress and strain things that cause us panic, things that uplift us and bring us joy.
Dorothy: Recently I read one of the chapters from Sarah Ahmed's book Complaint! You know, she investigates what it means to actually be on record complaining of injustice. What happens when we are thrown unintentionally into the shadow work, because shadow work is not just about ourselves.
I think obviously we confront different modalities that we operate in, um, feeling anxiety, frustration, disappointment, anger, rage. This kind of goes to, Xiaowei, what you were saying about movement work and what you've always said, actually that sometimes it really is just about, you know, sometimes it's a few people and it's incremental. It's not all at once. Even though sometimes media tells us that because of the images that we are shown.
But I think one of the reasons why I bring up Ahmed's book is because one of the things I found so compelling and so resonant is the fact that when you complain, the textual nature of it and the documentation that ensues after a grievance has been “filed,” you actually start to allow other people to complain as well.
And what does it mean to have that buildup, that someone felt that they couldn't actually express, that they felt the need to suppress it? That's actually revisiting a trauma so that it proves itself to be a catalyst for something new and different. I feel the reason why that's adjacent or related to shadow work is because when you see injustice, the complaint is not always welcomed. And what I've been thinking about as I've been reading Sarah Jaffe’s book, Work Won't Love You Back.
And a video surfaced from a journalist, or two journalists, I believe, in the UK about the abusive nature of game studios. There are video game makers or founders of studios that wanna promote accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, their games are so beautiful yet the conditions at which these beautiful games that I have played myself were abusive environments.
It's like, how do you grapple with that? How as a consumer or as a community, or as someone who is invested in these artistic and creative practices do we reconcile all of that? And some of these people that were harmed were my mentors and collaborators, artists that I do deeply admire. I had no idea this was going on.
So these are the types of things that I think about with shadow work. How do you reconcile? How do you reconcile the injustice of someone's lived experience that they feel that they can't talk about, that they can't even complain about? And then much later on after all of the muck and the mire of having to deal with the emotional abuse and the difficulties and challenges of making something so beautiful.
Xiaowei: I love what you brought up about shadow work, not just being for ourselves. Cause I think very broadly, New Age and tarot stuff can be very neoliberal, like the burden is on the individual, right? To like manifest or look in our shadows and all these things, but you're right.
So many of the structures that we live under, like the social processes, the cultural processes, all these things down to the ways that in a workplace we understand, or make sense of feedback. It's a very taken for granted process. It's very easy to just keep going with the way that we've been conditioned, and as much as we say, I'm anti-capitalist or I'm feminist or all these things, yet at the same time we live in society. and we've been conditioned in so many ways.
In terms of collective shadow work, this is also part of our conditioning. I look back upon even just conversations with friends or coworkers, where how many times has someone expressed their pain or something bad has happened to them? And my immediate thought is not, I am seeing their pain and sitting with it.
But instead it's like reactionary. I'm like, “Oh my God, we need to do something. We immediately need to fix it. Blah, blah, blah.” To be so reactionary, it's not sitting with the shadow and first fully being with it. And I think there really is a power to be with someone else's pain in that way.
Ana: What I'm finding both in readings that are read for me and readings that I do for others is that sometimes simply having that space to sit and be present with emotions, to just let them be there without reacting or trying to fix them right away are sometimes the kind of most powerful moments in a reading.
Because we have so few spaces in our culture right now. Where simply sitting and being is considered acceptable or encouraged. There's just so much anxiety in the world right now. And at the same time, there's this kind of growth of as a practice of listening to one's intuition, trusting your gut. How do we, how do we sit with all these emotions in a way that is at least in some way helpful for us?
Dorothy: I feel a lot of people, and I'll speak for myself, we are in our heads a lot. And I was at, um, you know, very small gathering this past week, uh, outside lunch, honoring still the, that we're, we're still in a pandemic, and someone I deeply admire Mimi Lok, who is an ED for a Voice of Witness, which is an incredible organization. (This was not a plug. This literally is just cuz I adore Mimi.)
She said, “Oh, you're you're not eating,” and I said, “Yeah, I know the food looks really good, but I actually got so hungry that I just needed to get a bagel.” And then she looks at me and says, “Oh, so you really attuned yourself to your needs. That's great. Don't feel bad.” And she said, “Continue doing that.”
And I bring up this story because I felt in that moment, when she asked me, I felt like I was brought back to my auntie or uncle's house. And you know, when you're in a Filipino household, if you don't eat, that's rude. So there's all these kind of cultural constructs in your mind of what you ought to do or how you ought to act when you're with other people. And I kind of let my anxiety get to me because I thought, “Oh my gosh, I better eat something, even though I'm very full.”
Part of the reason why I'm bringing this up is because it serves as such a metaphor to how people function. But because it's not a somatic response, people think that, well, I can overload myself with work. I can do one more hour. I have these 10 emails I need to respond to and I didn't get to it during the day, but I could do it. I really can. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. And it's not fine at all.
And when I think about the difference between following one's intuition and anxiety. I think the intuition has more to do with it's very holistic. It's very much an embodied thing. It's not just your mind thinking this is gonna be a great idea. That's not it.
It's like the magician wielding all of the elements. You can't do that without practice. So you pay attention to your body. You pay attention to your mind. You pay attention to your heart. Anxiety is not about that. Anxiety is based on — Xiaowei brought up this neoliberal aspect of our times and notions of free enterprise, bootstrapping everything.
Well, you could just manifest. No, you can't. How can you manifest when you're hungry? How can you manifest when you are thinking about your aging parent that's thousands of miles away from you? You can't manifest when your body is not all right. And not to be, you know, woo woo here — I mean all for goodness sake, I'm the director of magic for Christ or for Goddess sake — see, that's my recovering Catholic there. Sorry.
I guess what I'm trying to say is to me, that is the difference. Intuition and anxiety. Anxiety is a thing that capitalism feeds on. It's a thing that says, “Oh, Dorothy's real anxious right now. I’m gonna put something on that algorithm that makes her feel even more anxious or, you know, she's about to play the radio.”
I think of the Screwtape Letters. And I know some people might feel a little bit weird cuz C.S. Lewis is more of like — a lot of Christian underpinnings in that. But as someone who's born and raised in Catholicism, I'm a recovering Catholic. I'm spiritual, not religious, to put that on record.
I think of some of his writing, but in particular Screwtape, like the devil — there's a lot of archetypes coming up today, but how's the Devil seizing those opportunities of play with your shadow to test you, to make you feel anxious, but to not make you feel that you actually can trust your intuition almost as if you're gaslighting yourself.
Xiaowei: I feel like it's related to the shadow work cuz it's like, your intuition is like, okay, how do I work with these shadows? And then anxiety is like, I am a shadow. I can't do anything.
And I feel like, especially in these ever increasingly wild times that we live under, I always think of my intuition as like the voice in me that says, this is what I need to survive. And it's affirmative. It’s I need rest. I need good food. I need my loved ones. Whereas my anxiety is like, oh my God, like I'm gonna lose everything if I don't do this thing. It’s much less out of that affirmative I will survive voice.
Trauma and Joy
Ana: One of the advantages of a podcast newsletter is we can complement the audio format of the podcast with the written resources and notes, especially about all the books that we're referencing here.
And speaking of, actually, Dorothy and Xiaowei, what have you been looking at and listening to that you'd like to share with the audience?
Xiaowei: I guess one resource that, especially for folks during this time, this was actually a book that Yindi Pei from Logic School recommended, and it's called Trauma Stewardship. I highly recommend it for folks, especially if you're doing movement work or any sort of work out in the world, and it feels like it's not enough right now or not happening fast enough. I feel like that book has a lot of wisdom in terms of making space to have more compassion for yourself.
Dorothy: Thank you so much, Xiaowei, for sharing that resource because I need to delve into the depths of that, especially at this time. I, on the other hand wanted to mention the kindergartners hotline if that's okay.
Ana: Please. What is the kindergartners hotline, Dorothy?
Dorothy: The kindergartners hotline is a hotline that I feel a few teachers came up with this idea where they asked their kindergartners to provide affirmation. So you call and it's literally from the mouth of the children saying things like “You can do it.”
Peptoc: You can do it!2
Dorothy: “You are great.”
Peptoc: Keep trying! Don't give up!
Dorothy: You know, our younger previous selves can also be ancestors, but I feel people don't tap into those younger versions of ourselves because we always think that, well, that was an unwise or juvenile side of me or a younger version that didn't know anything, but we can still tap into that.
Ana: For those listening in, you can see a link to this in our newsletter, thisisfiveandnine.com or you can just give a call to Peptoc. And give them a ring at +1-707-998-8410.
Dorothy: There's projects like this out in the world that remind us to be a little less tense about what's happening. Even though it does deserve our attention, that even for two minutes, we can and allow ourselves some joy.
One early reference comes from the poet Izumi Shikibu, highlighted by Joan Sutherland in Buddhadharma.
Audio republished with permission from the West Side Union Elementary School District (please donate!)
