Re-Imagining a Gift Based Economy
Doing work as a way to see and being seen
Seeing, and being seen. Very often I hear people saying, the most important thing for us as humans is to be seen. And for me appreciation — appreciating somebody and being appreciated — is an important way of seeing and being seen.
Also, for many people — especially for artists — their work allows them to feel seen and appreciated as they express themselves.
When I think about expressing myself through my work and making a living by offering my gifts to the world… when I think about showing up in the best way I can by trying to be as present as possible with every person I encounter and calling that “my work”… I think that there is no better feeling than that.
Simply being present. Sitting in front of a person and listening to their life story, their wishes, desires, struggles, and dreams in a one-on-one session… or watching people laugh with each other and discover their souls in our small group clowning sessions… to me, that is appreciation at its best: seeing and being seen.
So when I set out to do the work I love there was something else I also had to figure out. I had to think about how I was going to ‘get paid.’
The business coaches tell you: You need a business plan! How is the money coming in? This was never a comfortable feeling for me. How do I price my work!? How do I price what I offer when the work I do is not so tangible?!! It never felt right: I was always coming up with numbers either too low or too high. And yet, I still need “to get paid” like all of us, I need an income to sustain myself so that I can continue offering this much-needed work to the world.
So I posed this question to the universe: How might it be possible for me to contribute to the world and also create the conditions for sustainability for everybody involved?
With a question like that, I usually tend to go meta on the situation and look at it from a broader perspective. And then this other question usually comes up: What kind of world do I want to live in? I want to live in a world where we appreciate each other. Where we see each other and feel seen. I want to live in a world where what we call “paying” is actually an “exchanging of appreciation.”. Actually, a way to see each other.
In my quest to find my answers, I found a book, a marketing book by Seth Godin, “This is Marketing”. What stayed with me from this book were the words: “heart exchange”, and that started to make a lot of sense for me. As I continued to explore something else came up, this time it was called the “Gift Economy”. A man called Nipun Mehta is dedicating his life to spreading this concept. I kept reading and watching videos. This time I stumbled upon Charles Eisenstein’s book, “Sacred Economics”. And he went on to speak about similar things, basically a more fair and sustainable way to do business, and I went, Yes! Yes, this is starting to make sense to me!
Another meaningful resource I came across was a video from Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Non-Violent Communication. Someone asked him about how to make money doing what you love and how one goes about getting paid for it? And he said my philosophy is to never pay for anything and never charge for anything. As soon as he said that, I thought, “That’s it! That is exactly how I feel!” Rosenberg went on to say — and I’m paraphrasing here — when you do the work you love, you are giving love to people and love has no price, therefore there is no point in charging people for doing the work you love. You do it because you just cannot not do it. On the other hand, when you receive the gift of love from somebody, never pay for that, Instead, offer the other person a gift that will allow them to continue offering their gifts to others (yourself included). In this way, you are basically expanding love into the world with your gifts of love and appreciation.
So with all this research, I came to the conclusion that Instead of paying or charging, I like to think of what we do as “exchanging appreciation”.
On Not Paying for Anything
When I hear the word “payment” I hear a sense of obligation: this costs $100 so if you want it then you must pay $100.
Another way of thinking about payment could be giving from a place of: I am offering this money because I want this work to continue… because I want this work to be sustainable… because I want this work to exist for my benefit, and for the benefit of other people. In this way, payment is based on the benefit that one receives through the gift that has been given.
Payment then becomes an exchange from the heart. The gift that we give back, whether it is money, or something else, the gift we give results from the feeling of the experience and from having the opportunity to reflect on how it made us feel when we were in the experience.
When you are in gift culture the exchange happens usually after you had the experience. Then, you can stop and ask yourself — how am I feeling now?- and then from that feeling, you place your gift. Whereas in the transactional consumer capitalist culture, you have to pay for the thing first before you ever get a chance to experience it, and therefore there is no way for you to determine what you’d like to give back or from what place you’d like to give back (money or whatever it may be). Both the experience and the reflection has to happen before the payment.
Gift Culture invites the “buyer” to be generous, compassionate, and reciprocal because after receiving a service or experience they have the chance to reciprocate, to give what their hearts are telling them to give. In my experience, if you give them a chance, humans are — by nature — very generous.
There’s something else that happens here, we give because we have the intention of continuing the work, we want to be part of the good that is happening. There is a feeling of togetherness, a feeling of we are actually making this moment together. In the gift culture, we are not really buying; we are co-creating something that doesn’t end with us, it goes far beyond us. This generosity may take us to places we could not foresee or ever have imagined. And this is interconnectedness.
On Not Charging for Anything
“Charging” has a feeling of imposition, expectation, and a sense of righteousness. For me, what is called for here is trust: trust in the universe and a relinquishing of control.
When we put a price on something, we are excluding — we are not allowing some people to come in. We are closing the door on somebody’s face because, if they do not have what is being asked for, they cannot participate. This has happened to me many times. I have been in situations where I did not have the money to pay for an experience I wanted to explore, but since I wanted to do it anyway, I would offer something else in exchange (i.e support with set-up, volunteering my time, or some knowledge that might serve the people who were offering what I could not buy).
In and of itself, this is not a problem, this is what Nipun Mehta calls “alternative ways of paying.” And they work as long as these alternative ways of paying are offered and received on equal terms. Many times it does not feel equal. Many times, the feeling is because I have less I feel inferior. In order for the work to really get done or the learning to take root, the person needs to feel like an equal contributor. Then this is genuine reciprocity.
We are both coming in to build something and to contribute to each other. We are not coming with the idea that I am more and you are less; or that I have something that you don’t have and therefore you need to pay me for it. The exchange of appreciation must come from the grounds that we are all here to see each other. To see and be seen and to allow space for Love to be part of our experience, each of us is showing up from our current predicament and from there giving the best of what we have.
With this way of interacting, I don’t feel that, as the provider of the service, I am the one that has to put a dollar amount to the gift people offer to me in this exchange of appreciation. For me, each person is unique, and each person has a unique financial situation. I feel that only that person knows how much they have received from their own experience and understands his or her capacity to give. People decide from their hearts what kind of gift they would like to offer so that the work can continue. They are the only ones that can decide what makes sense for them to contribute.
This brings in Trust again. Trust all around. The clients trust that they will get what they need. The providers of the services trust that they will be taken care of… that what they need will be provided for, by something greater than themselves, simply because they are doing the work that needs to be done.
This is very different from the usual way of thinking about a business model. I have been told that the way to do it is to go through all my expenses and calculate everything that I need to survive and feel good about doing my work. And that after that I will find “my magic number,” let’s say $100 for example. From there, I need to calculate: how many clients do I need to get to these $100… After that, I need to go out and find x amount of clients in order to get to my “magic number.” If that system works for people then, by all means, they should use it. That model never made sense to me.
For me, that model comes from fear: What if I won’t be taken care of? What if I don’t find the x amount of clients I need? What if I don’t get what I need to survive? Well, then I need to take matters into my own hands, to figure it all out by myself and make it happen. I would much rather come from a space of Love, Trust, and Abundance than from a space of scarcity and fear.
I know this is not conventional, but the work that is needed in this world right now is not conventional. As a matter of fact, it is becoming increasingly clear that many of our current conventions are causing more harm than good …
In closing, coming back to my question, I want to live in a world where when we offer the work of Love, there are no payments, and there are no charges. I want to live in a world where I can trust that we will all be taken care of, that I am here to do work that is beyond me. I want to trust that I am being a vehicle for a greater good that is utilizing me as a medium to achieve the work that needs to be done. I want to live in a world where I can trust that this greater good — that which is calling me to do the work — will also take care of me and everybody else involved.
I also understand that In everyday life, when fear sneaks in (as in: “Whoa, what if I cannot make my rent this month!?”), in those times, I try to remember that the work I do is mine and is not mine at the same time. I am here because somebody wants me to do something, and that somebody or that something (however one wants to look at it) is also looking out for me. So, my focus is simply on doing the work, on reaching as many people as I can, and trusting that there will be a deeply rewarding exchange of appreciation when I do.
Lead Author: Mery Miguez
Mery Miguez is a ‘Clownch’, (doing small group coaching using clown techniques), an arts facilitator, and a mindfulness coach. She is also a certified Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner (with NLP Marin in California).
Her passion is to facilitate transformative learning experiences, where groups can get in touch with their highest potential by accessing individual and collaborative creativity. In her experience, she finds that when we are able to tap into the collective awareness and be in the present moment, as an individual, group, and/or society, we are able to sense what wants to emerge in the next moment. The result of this is profound innovation.
Mery loves finding ways to support people to open up to their gifts and be more of who they really are, she helps people become co-creators of the world they want to live in. She is convinced that as each of us finds our place in the puzzle of life, society becomes more whole.
A native of Argentina, Mery moved to New York City in 1997 to pursue her life-long love for acting and theater. In 2002 she encountered meditation and Buddhism for the first time. She continued to develop since that first encounter and now finds herself as a contemplative practitioner, which includes teaching meditation and hosting meditation retreats and workshops in the US and Europe.
In 2007 in Minneapolis she met her first Clowning teacher, Giovanni Fusetti. She fell in love with the form. Since then she had continued taking classes, with different teachers all over the world, and practicing clowning every time she has a chance.
She has also done training in Social Presencing Theater (SPT) and in 2014, she completed her studies of Advanced Social Presencing Theater from the Presencing Institute at MIT with Arawana Hayashi and Otto Scharmer, which certified her as a Social Presencing Theater Teacher. She has taught this methodology around the world, both in-person and online, until September of 2020, when she decided to step away, and become an SPT teacher Emeritus.
Mery Miguez now dedicates her life to support people in becoming friends with themselves, using mainly clown and NLP Marin techniques as her tools. In every encounter, she brings her 30 years of experience in Theater, Mindfulness, and Social Change — blending that in what she now calls ‘Clownching’.
You can learn more about Mery’s offerings on her FB page, Mery Miguez in Conversations. As well as her YouTube channel.
On Tuesday the 24th of November Mery will be offering a virtual introductory session for those of you that are interested in exploring how personal development can be fun. You can learn more, and register, here: Pleasure to meet “me” workshop.
Anchor Author: (in this case transcription from recorded audio to text, editing, and revision) Daniel Rudolph
Daniel Rudolph is interested in exploring alternative, experiential learning opportunities for people of all ages. He is passionate about forming community, and building public spaces for meaningful, transformational gathering. Currently, he is spending a lot of his time learning juggling and facilitating gatherings. He also enjoys writing and sharing poetry. Daniel is a very curious and playful person and is always open for creative collaborations.
Co-editing: Aerin Dunford
Aerin Dunford is a writer, upcycling artist, urban gardener and yoga instructor. She is an independent consultant at Coquixa Consultores using Art of Hosting and other participative approaches as a basis for her work with organizations and groups of all kinds. Aerin is the Chief Basketweaver at The Emergence Network, a translocal community of postactivists posing questions such as: what if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?
If you want to learn more about Aerin and her work: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.
