Spirituality, Capitalism and Motherhood
This is an expanded version of my “About Me” story. Written February 2020, this autobiographical statement was part of my application to my graduate degree program. I’m currently enrolled at the California Institute of Integral Studies, pursuing a MA in Women, Spirituality, Gender and Social Justice. This work is a brief background in how I came to choose this particular degree at this time.
My perspective - I’m a cisgender, white, able-bodied, heterosexual, upper middle class, stay-at-home mom with a husband and three kids living in the Midwest. Which, I realize, seems to make me a perfect candidate for nothing more than a mommy blog. But I am called to apply for this program because of the spiritual inquiry and healing journey I find myself on. Over the last twenty years, my discovery of yoga as a spiritual path, my experiences within capitalism, and my motherhood journey have all contributed to my deep desire to understand more of Women’s Spirituality.
Spirituality vs Religion
“You know you’re going to hell, right?”
Growing up in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, Utah as the only non-Mormon kid on the street, I had a complicated relationship with religion. My father, who had grown up as part of the Mormon church (properly known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) but left as an adult, was determined to raise us without any religion. We grew up contentedly secular, until I hit middle school and the isolation, exclusion and rejection began. On my 10th birthday, instead of receiving lip gloss or hair bows, my friends all gave me a copy of The Book of Mormon with personal inscriptions entreating me to join “the one true church.” In the 8th grade, I was told by a boy that he couldn’t go to a school dance with me because he wasn’t allowed to date girls who weren’t of the same faith. As a senior in high school, after excitedly confessing about my new boyfriend to a friend, an eavesdropper told me I was going to go to hell for my sins.
I left Utah and moved to Arizona when I was 21 years old. I spent my twenties proclaiming myself an Atheist. I didn’t fully understand what that meant, only that it seemed a rejection against the only God I knew at the time, whose religion was soundly rejecting me. It was from this place of vulnerability that I stepped into a yoga class for the first time. While the physical fitness aspect of yoga was what initially drew me in, it was the philosophy that hooked me.
In my initial yoga teacher training, I asked our Sanskrit teacher if yoga was a religion. She decisively pronounced it was not a religion, especially the way it was being practiced in the West, but more a way of understanding our relationship with the divine and a path to enlightenment. It was really more of a spiritual practice. For the first time in my life, I felt a stirring to connect with something divine that wasn’t a source of pain or rejection.
Most of my career as a yoga teacher has been working with women in prenatal yoga and has included training in various yogic paths. During my study of Tantra Yoga, I discovered the Mahavidyas. As I currently understand them, they represent ten aspects of Shakti, or the Divine Mother. I was blown away. A divine MOTHER? Wait a second, isn’t God supposed to be a man? I began to research other cultures that revered a divine feminine presence and the idea of women’s spirituality and devoured books like The Chalice and the Blade, Yoni Shakti, and When the Drummers Were Women.
But as my understanding of yoga, Ayurveda and yogic philosophy has deepened, so has my understanding of the cultural appropriation that has taken place. I attended a Circle of Womanhood Yoga Nidra workshop in 2019 led in part by women of color and was exposed to many uncomfortable realizations about my privileged expectations around my yoga practice. I am, with no exaggeration, a rich, skinny, white woman wearing Lululemon who started practicing yoga because Madonna did. My yoga teachers have been almost exclusively white. I have taught at places that explicitly forbade teachers to chant OM, use Sanskrit, or chant mantra while teaching, in order to make yoga more “comfortable” for a wider (read: Christian and white) audience.
And so I find myself disoriented in my yoga practice and teachings. What is my role as a white yoga teacher? In what ways am I perpetuating colonialism and possibly causing harm with my whiteness? Am I using my yoga practice to spiritually bypass uncomfortable triggers in my own life? As yoga instructor and social activist Susanna Barkataki so elegantly puts it, “How can I authentically honor and respect this practice that means so much to me without appropriating it?”
The Capitalist Trap
“3 kids, a successful career, a loving husband, a beautiful home...I don’t know how you do it all!”
My late twenties found me teaching yoga while finishing my BA in Interior Design. The economy collapsed my senior year at Arizona State University, about the same week that I took a positive pregnancy test. I graduated college pregnant and, without a single interior design firm hiring, unable to find a job in my field. Which in hindsight was a lovely thing, to be able to spend the first few years of motherhood teaching yoga, spending time with my new baby, and meeting friends for cheap coffee while we bemoaned the lack of opportunities. By the time my second child arrived, the economy was shakily recovering and I found a job in sales at a commercial furniture dealer.
Consulting with companies on the future of the office space was a fascinating and fun career and I was really, really good at it. Sales can be lucrative and I easily surpassed my friends and even my husband in terms of income. I had my third child but returned to work at 3 weeks postpartum, eager to escape the humdrum life of diapers and sleepless nights for flirtatious cocktail parties and huge commission checks. My yoga practice faltered and eventually stopped.
Of all the faults within the systems of patriarchy and capitalism, the one I find the most insidious is the complete devaluation of motherhood beyond that of simply reproducing more little soldiers and homemakers. I was raising three children but there was no praise, no recognition. There’s no acknowledgement, “Hey, great job mothering.” Instead, as a white, neoliberal woman I was encouraged to “lean in” at my job, demand a seat at the table, and if it all got too much? Well, just pour yourself a big glass of wine and call it “self care.”
I woke up one morning and looked around to see my marriage was in crisis, I was a burgeoning alcoholic, my children were displaying anger and anxiety issues, and I was in a deep depression. Putting my career above all else, in order to “win” at capitalism, had chipped away at my core values. I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, began medication and therapy and tentatively stepped on my yoga mat once again to resume a spiritual practice.
When my husband’s company offered him a position across the country we decided this might be the fresh start that our family needed. The low cost of living in Fort Wayne, Indiana meant I could take a break from my career, focus on raising our children, and resume my yoga teaching and studies.
But becoming a stay at home mother in a capitalist culture has been a tremendous shock to my identity and ego. Now I struggle with feeling disempowered, invisible, with no social status of my own. I went from feeling so clear about my value to the world to questioning every aspect of my life, and it is simply because I am doing something so fundamentally female as raising my children. I ask myself constantly, if I quit my career to support my husband and stay home with the kids, how can I continue to call myself a feminist? What gives me the right to desire more out of my life, when so many lack even the basic necessities? What kind of example am I setting for my children in recreating the restrictive gender role my grandmother fought so hard to escape?
Motherhood As A Spiritual Path
“He just keeps pushing me to my edges!” It was while pregnant with my first child that I first began to have an inkling of how the path of motherhood and the path to consciousness were perhaps the same path, or at least crossed over frequently. What else calls us to become the highest version of ourselves, if not motherhood? I was being given a beautiful opportunity to mold a little human into a fully conscious being.
We have, readily available in the form of our children, a clear path to enlightenment, and it’s something I am constantly practicing. How I choose to parent consciously, using every interaction with my three children as a chance to reveal my true Self and shed the Ego. How I see each of my children as whole, complete individuals already, not little versions of me that I get to rule to do my bidding. How I believe my role as mother is not to reward or punish behaviors, but to guide them to understand their physical, energetic and emotional bodies and how to find balance within themselves. However, this is not the traditional, mainstream way to approach parenting and I’ve discovered this often makes for awkward conversation on the park bench.
Because here is the true calling - my children are not here to fulfill my egoic fantasies. My children are here to challenge ME, over and over and over again, into releasing MY ego. I am called into the deepest level of Self-Awareness as I navigate interactions with each child. In addition to offering me the opportunity to evolve in my consciousness, I believe that my work as mothering three small children in a compassionate and spiritual way could actually be a radical form of feminism itself.
The Next Steps
This is the path that has brought me here, in my application to CIIS. I find myself now in a position to pull together the background of my life into a meaningful career. I have been exposed to so many new ideas, and yet I have so many questions.
Can I be a spiritual atheist? How would an understanding of a divine feminine alter the way I approach religion and spirituality, especially in my yoga practice? How do I continue to teach yoga and fight for social justice while acknowledging my whiteness and being open to the discomfort of my privilege?
If I’m in such a position of wealth and privilege, shouldn’t I be spending time volunteering and doing charitable work? What gives me the right to pursue knowledge and higher education while so many are barely able to scrape by? Can I create a meaningful career out of women’s spirituality without making it a capitalist commodity?
How would the reclamation of a divine feminine change my perspective of motherhood? If feminine values such as compassion, creativity and intuition were honored, what would our society look like? What would my role in this new society be, and could I possibly be in a position to help usher it in?
I’m a cisgender, white, able-bodied, heterosexual, upper middle class, stay-at-home mom with a husband and three kids living in the Midwest. But I’m also a women’s circle facilitator, spiritual seeker, feminist mother and social activist with energy and enthusiasm who is in search of a strong community of intelligent women to help me discover the answers to the questions of my soul. While I still have much to learn and discover about myself and the world, I cheerfully believe that there is more that I can contribute.