As always, we’re starting with the numbers because they are the least important thing. Even when I eat sushi, I eat the least delicious pieces first. 😂
February revenue:
Returning client: $2,000
One new monthly Substack subscriber: $8
Three returning monthly Substack subscribers: $24
Five founding members of The Opener: $500
Total: $2,532
The biggest reason I do these monthly reports is that it is interesting to see what is actually happening behind these numbers to examine how we build and sustain businesses on our own terms.
This month, what felt most interesting to me was going even deeper into how I am showing up for love. The specific question I was asking myself was: how am I practicing care effectively - for others and for myself?
That meant that I was a hawk about detecting any sort of expectation or judgment when I showed up to relating to others or when I showed up for myself.
That doesn’t mean I say that I stop judging. It just means that I detect it and find out what it is trying to tell me.
For example, I had a judgment about someone making an assumption about how I decide to have sex with people. My judgment was that I didn’t like it. So I stopped talking to them. 😂
Often times, it’s as simple as that. We are allowed to not like people and things. Sure, there may be a “lesson” in my own judgment, but I don’t have to be available for every lesson. I get curious about what I want to learn, when I want to learn, and how I want to learn on my own terms. And that is typically in an ecosystem of love and support from my own community.
And when I am not judging, I show up to the conversation with the default setting of suspending any judgment. I am here, talking to you, wanting to know more about you, and wanting to be known more by you. That is all.
So when I am in a place of practicing curiosity and care, I notice myself following my desires rather than obligations. Doing things because I “have” to is no longer interesting to me because I can’t be curious when I am doing things out of duty. And when I am not curious, I am not learning effectively or experiencing my aliveness effectively.
Which is how I arrived at the following desires:
1- I want to teach people how to open up their marriage without losing everything.
That is why I am stewarding the community called The Opener.
This has been such an incredible experience so far. We just “get” each other. Although I talk about opening up the marriage, the people in this container know that opening up the marriage is not at the core of our work. We don’t care so much about opening up our marriage as much as we care about opening our hearts.
I am invested in all of us being in a marriage where we feel so safe that we feel comfortable talking about some of the most charged topics, like opening up a marriage.
Which is why, in The Opener, we talk about how we can actually feel comfortable being vulnerable, carrying the load of emotional labor in our marriages, and having difficult conversations that we actually look forward to.
I will shout until the cows come home that the way we relate in the home informs the way we relate outside the home.
And here’s the paradox: there are days where we feel so uncomfortable and unsafe in our marriages, and there are days where our marriage cannot get any better. We hang onto those amazing days and delude ourselves into thinking that we don’t need to expand our relating skills.
Which is why my own delusion came to a head when it was time to talk about opening up our marriage. I realized just how much I was hiding and keeping from him that fueled those unsafe and uncomfortable days.
I advocate for the kind of world where we no longer operate under the lack of awareness of where we can be even more loving to the people we love in our lives. Without feeling like it’s work.
A more loving and kind world is made up of our individual family units. “World peace” starts with us.
And we are doing this exact thing in The Opener!!!
God I love my work.
2- I am exploring virtual sex work.
I am protesting the culture of brain supremacy where I am supposed to use only my brain for my livelihood and my aliveness. No, thank you. I will use my body as well as I please.
I have been sharing more of my body and sex life on Instagram (@itsangelahan), and I have gotten a good amount of attention for it. (Of course, there will always be a handful of people who report me or otherwise drop out of my community because they somehow find a woman’s body so repulsive 😂)
If I am commanding attention, it only must mean I am offering something that merits attention. It’s so wild that I’ve let oppressive systems tell me that I would be a whore for transacting with my body.
But the reality is that human interactions are inherently transactional. We are always exchanging resources. The question is whether the exchange is actually and completely transactional.
We all have resources that we want to give and receive. Things like: sexual resources, financial resources, emotional resources, and so much more. Capitalistic systems have pedestalized financial resources when, in fact, the resource that is the most important is the one that we are interested in exchanging at the moment.
Sometimes I want to offer my sexual resources in exchange for the other’s sexual resources. Sometimes I want to offer my sexual resources in exchange for emotional resources. Sometimes I want to exchange emotional resources.
What is important is what is important to me at the moment. That is the only thing that informs my wholeness.
Financial resources are not the “most important” resource that we need to steward the most carefully to the point where other resources like sexual resources and emotional resources are less valued. This kind of supremacy culture around money is why we are shamed for exchanging sexual resources for financial resources. Unhelpful constructs such as these produce experiences of shame.
I am not interested in shame.
I am interested in what I want at the moment. Which can change at any time.
When I embody this, I am able to see that I am a vast ocean of all kinds of resources I can offer. So is everybody else. And now we have endless possibilities on how we make exchanges on our own terms.
This is the ultimate form of community care.
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This is what it looks like to build my business on my own terms. Existing against the current of what oppressive capitalistic systems and supremacy culture have said I need to be and do in order to exist. Nope. I am existing even though I am doing none of those things that I’m supposed to do.
What feels like an oppressive rule that you find yourself following at the moment?
Let’s flick that right off this planet. It has no place here.