We get messages all the time, comments on our posts about how "this" (business, product) is "just business."
The implication is that if it's a business, specifically a successful one, that it somehow can't also be intentional, effective, ethical, etc.
To the women who write, I do wonder if you'd be so offended by a business charging money if the business owner was male... I'm actually curious.
Do you think I'd be working hard, albeit in deep service of women, "just" because I LOVE what I do...?
Do you work for free?
I'm the first to admit that if life was free... I'd be home with my kids, hanging with friends, whatever. Yes, I love what I do, so maybe I'd be doing it "on the side," but this idea that I should be serving women out of the goodness of my heart, for free... otherwise I'm "preying" on women... is straight out misogyny.
I admit that I'm passionate about this because I had a complicated relationship to money with years. As a healer, I did feel that accepting money for my services somehow made my healing less "pure." I worked for a decade, making just enough to pay my babysitters who watched my kids while I worked. And guess what? It wasn't worth it.
It's a scarcity mindset, and the same mindset that is the foundation of capitalism and consumerism, which is the core of the infertility epidemic.
So NO... I don't accept that. I do want this to be a successful business model, where YES TO IT ALL! Yes I can pay myself. Yes, I can fairly pay our employees. YES, I can source sustainable and organic (and so more expensive) herbs, we can use post-consumer recycled materials rather than straight plastic... and we can trust the abundance of it all.
AND we can actually care deeply about the well-being of the women we serve, we can care deeply about the planet, and we can offer products and resources that are effective, and we can be intentional about all of it.
I'm committed to doing business differently than I've seen it done... so $$ is not my bottom line.
But the expectation that we "not" be a business is BS.
I'm curious about your relationship with money? About your feelings of "deservedness"... if that even comes into play. I highly recommend Lynn Twist's book The Soul Of Money...
While the two may feel totally unrelated, the energetics of money are deeply connected to the energetics at play in our experience of fertility, so I'd absolutely love for you to explore more deeply, and report back! I'm so curious... and yes, maybe one day I'll even host a money and fertility workshop.