Lesson 1: Transforming Scarcity into Abundance

🌾 teaching 3 — Transforming Scarcity and Ownership into Abundance and Belonging

💧 What Is Scarcity?
Scarcity is the grasping that arises when our true needs have not been met—personally, ancestrally, or collectively.
It is unprocessed fear and grief that lives in the nervous system.
It tightens our muscles, our hearts, and our choices, closing us off from the natural flow of giving and receiving.

Scarcity whispers:
There isn’t enough. You aren’t enough. Protect what’s yours.
It convinces us that survival requires isolation and control.
In that contraction, we forget that life itself is generous.

Scarcity is different from shame, but the two are siblings.
Scarcity is born from deprivation and creates grasping—the trauma of not having our needs met.
Shame comes from being harmed or causing harm and avoiding the feeling of that harm.
Both are inherited through ancestral and intergenerational trauma, and both can be released through the body.

⚡ Scarcity in the Body
Scarcity operates at every level of our lives: money, relationships, love, creativity, sexuality, spirituality.
It is not only an economic condition—it is a biological state of fear.

When scarcity rules us, the body stays in fight, flight, or freeze.
The breath shortens, the chest closes, and generosity feels impossible.
We clutch at control instead of trusting the living web that sustains us.

Physiologically, scarcity keeps us from feeling abundance even when it’s right here.
Healing scarcity is a somatic process.
When we allow ourselves to grieve, shake, and soften, the nervous system begins to trust again.
As safety returns, the heart reopens to flow.

🏛️ Ownership — Scarcity’s Twin
Ownership is scarcity wearing armor.
It tries to control what it fears losing—land, people, even our children.
Ownership says, If I possess you, I will not have to feel my loss.

This pattern creates domination and colonization because unprocessed scarcity always reaches to dominate.
When we believe we “own” the Earth, we step out of relationship with her.
The Earth does not want to be owned.
She wants to be loved, tended, and listened to.

Ownership also shows up in parenting, when fear makes us cling to our children instead of letting them differentiate.
It shows up in love and friendship when we grasp instead of trust.
Every place ownership appears, it points to an unmet emotional need.

Ownership and scarcity are both inherited distortions—like shame—that entered the human story long ago.
They are not the natural state of the world.
The Earth’s design is reciprocity.

Here is a 5-minute artistic video FSSL created on Scarcity-Ownership:
Scarcity—Ownership

🌱 From Ownership to Relationship
When we live from scarcity and ownership, we relate to the land, each other, and even ourselves through control.
When we release those patterns, relationship becomes possible again.
Relationship is what the land has been waiting for—mutual care instead of possession.

If we are living in white neighborhoods on stolen land, and not able to share our wealth and housing with Indigenous relatives, then we are living the pattern of scarcity and ownership (as well as shame).
Recreation, gardening, or “living off the land” can replicate ownership if the deeper relationship isn’t restored.

Real relationship means listening, differentiating, sharing, and knowing when to relinquish control.

🌈 Belonging and Abundance — Our Natural State
Scarcity and ownership sever our experience of belonging.
They make us perform and conform to fit in, instead of resting in the truth that we already belong.

Belonging is the natural condition of life.
Look at an old-growth forest: every being belongs, every nutrient circulates, no one hoards.
That is abundance.

It’s not wealth as accumulation; it’s wealth as flow.
When our bodies remember this rhythm, gratitude replaces fear.
We start to feel abundance as the pulse of connection itself.

💰 Redefining Wealth
There is tremendous wealth in the lower classes and in queer and BIPOC communities—wealth born of sharing, humor, healing, creativity, and endurance.
These are cultures that remember how to distribute resources because survival required cooperation.
That is real abundance: the joy of sharing born from necessity and love.

The version of “wealth” modeled by the white upper and middle class—comfort built on extraction and harm—is not wealth.
It is exploitation dressed as success.
No one in this system truly knows what abundance feels like, because abundance requires integration, reparations, and reciprocity.

To experience abundance, we must redistribute what has been hoarded and honor the cultural wealth that has been preserved by others even while being exploited.

🔁 Reciprocity — The Medicine
Reciprocity is what transforms scarcity into belonging.
It honors the natural give-and-take of life, recognizing labor, lineage, and impact.
It’s the exchange that keeps energy moving so everyone can thrive.

Imagine all bodies—across race and class—sharing food, money, wisdom, and care with clear boundaries and mutual respect.
We can create new systems of exchange that allow for everyone to experience a felt sense of belonging.
That is the experience of true abundance.

Reciprocity feels good.
It might make us cry, because our hearts will break open with love—and that breaking is sacred.
It is the body remembering how to belong again.

🌅 Closing Reflection
Scarcity and ownership are root systems of domination; abundance and belonging are root systems of life.
When we begin to transform one into the other, we remember that the Earth is not scarce, and neither are we.

We are plenty and we have plenty.
The practice is simple: grieve, breathe, share, trust, repeat.
Every act of generosity is a small revolution.
Every moment of gratitude is abundance returning home.

🌾 Scarcity — A Story of Trust and Repair

I gotta tell y’all—writing these teachings and telling these stories has brought up a lot.
Scarcity still feels close to me.

I have never personally experienced having enough resources as an adult. Even while writing these teachings, I don’t have enough right now. My bills are overdue, I barely have enough food, and I have no money. I don’t know for sure if or how I will physically survive—and that makes me feel a little scared.

I also know I can’t keep participating in the system that created this reality. I’m working without reciprocity right now, in hopes of creating a new one—a system where care replaces control, and where we learn to honor one another again.

I’ve always felt the harms of this system, ever since I was a child.
Most of my coaches and mentors have been BIPOC and grew up in deep poverty. Their wisdom showed me a kind of wealth that doesn’t depend on dollars.

Other than the sexual abuse, the military, and the Catholic schools—growing up, I always had food, and I always knew I would have a roof over my head. There was trauma, but there was also great privilege I was unaware of.

When I joined the caravan in South America, I began to learn how to trust something deeper—a living intelligence that provides, day by day.
My friend Duende Juan Camillo taught me that.
I learned how to live on almost nothing and still feel abundance.
We shared what we had. We cared for each other. We trusted the flow of the day.

Later, in my early thirties, I had reached the lower middle class—close to stability, maybe even a career—and then my body began to process intergenerational shame.
That process stripped everything away.

I had to quit my jobs, drive around, and eventually live on land that some folks let me stay on. One of them was my lover.
I slept in a teepee one winter, alone, when it dropped below 20 degrees.
I faced hunger and extreme discomfort for several years.
I also met truth.

Eventually, I received some inheritance money that allowed me to leave that land seven years ago. It was then that I had the vision for Free System–Sistema Libre, and I used that money to live on a lower-class wage while I raised funds, studied, and produced an aspirationally decolonial album—alongside comedy and drag.

That money ran out in 2020, and I have been living completely on my own, creating all my own work with no inheritance.
I have experienced food and housing insecurity during this time.

In the past few months, as I’ve deepened into the healing of race, I’ve seen something even harder:
even when I’ve had little, I’ve still been standing on the backs of my siblings of color.
It’s so unconscious, so systemic.

And I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.

My deepest prayer is repair.
To my siblings, I bow, in gratitude, in reverence, and in love.

I do feel this experience has shown me a glimpse of what bodies have endured, and I feel a deeper understanding of the whole.
This is why reparations matter deeply for us all.
This is why creating new systems matters.

When we begin, it will feel like relief.
It feels fulfilling to redistribute, to repair.
It heals our ancestors—forward and back.

That’s where abundance begins—
in belonging with one another.