Nafasi Ferrell [Starting at 03:17]: I just want to remind us, I am, as I am at this moment, going through some grief, with my family. So if you are experiencing any grief or pain, I just want us, like Kelsey said, we just need to be gentle with ourselves. Notice our bodies. If you need to turn your camera off, if you need to get some tea, if you need to stretch, do whatever you need to do at this moment to take care of yourself. You can always watch the recording later. It’s not going anywhere.

So yes. My name is Nafasi Ferrell. I built Narratives Unbound back in 2019 after the death of my father. After learning all the things I did not know about money, I worked with the Black Panther Party.

I was fighting for racial inequity. And I thought that if I just taught everyone about race, that that was it. That’s all we needed to change the world. And when my father died, I realized there was a whole other layer of knowledge that was stolen, not just from me, but from my community and from my family.

And so I really built Narratives Unbound out of this journey through money. What can I learn today about money, about saving, about investing, about nourishing myself through wealth? To change my family’s narrative and those in my community around me. So through financial coaching, through community workshops and through four cohorts of my wealth redistribution, circle of members, 32 of these amazing human beings, I’ve been building a community where we can save, invest, and redistribute with one another.

We can cry together, we can co-create together a world that we want to live in. We are not just our ancestors’ wildest dreams. We are their dreams. And our dreams are dreams that they couldn’t even imagine. So I just want to invite you as you journey with me and with each other today, that you invite your ancestors into the space to guide you and your thoughts and your words with each other and your way forward as we begin.

So, I’m going to share my screen. I always like to begin with our ancestors. That our history is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are history. And that today, for you to be alive, you need at least two parents that had to come together to birth you, but you also needed over 2,000 great-great grandparents to be here today from 12 previous generations. So you needed over 4,000 ancestors over the last 400 years to go through everything they might have been through for you to exist, for you to breathe today.

So with everything you are going through, know that you are not just their light. You are amazing, you are abundant. And everything that you might believe, all the shame, all the guilt, all the hurt within your heart, everything will be fine. That you are enough to dream forward, to build the things. So take that with you as you move forward into this afternoon with us today.

If you do feel your heart getting heavy, ask your ancestors to uplift your heart. We are flesh because of the bodies that have come before us, bodies that are steeped in great joy. Great love. But also, you know, great violence. So as we begin today, please take care of yourselves.

So to begin, I’d like to ask you all, and please just come off camera, shout it out. What’s the first thing that you think of when you think of the word money? Tell us.

Just think of the first thing. I know there’s many things flowing throughout your mind, and there’s no right or wrong answer.

Money is right. Money is all of those things. But ultimately., without money, humans created money. So money does not exist if human beings do not exist. It’s a belief system.

Our ancestors created money thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, so that we could use resources on this planet to survive. So in front of you is a journey of our resources, of the things that we have built in general, not good or bad, not prescribing good or bad in this moment, but to what we have, in what we’ve built as a species.

Money is anything that holds value over time. It’s anything that can be translated into what we deem today “prices”, and it’s any trade that’s widely accepted. But one of the main things that we forget about money, the main thing we forget, is that it must be scarce. And the way in which our ancestors built money unintentionally, to give and receive goods and services, we accidentally created a tool that creates scarcity, unintentional scarcity.

Since we’ve built civilization, we’ve had many forms of money. Today we use what we call dollars. Would anyone like to share? Does anyone know where the first paper money came from?

Responding to someone in the chat: Was it China? Yes. Woo! You’re the only one that has ever got that right! Yes, you are correct. Yes. 2,000 years ago, paper money was created. The first IOUs in the form of paper were created.

You know, our ancestors have used shells. They used beans. We’ve used animals, we’ve used cows, we’ve used stones. So money has taken many, many, many, many forms over time. But we dedicate our journey of money in our current form throughout our world today to China. In many of our past inventions, we attribute it to the continent of Africa and to the land of China.

Money has been through so much for us through the last 10,000 years and it’s changed, as you all know. It’s continuing to change today as we are living in our first digital era of where money will be, where it is, and will be transformed in front of us. So, money has been many things, but because humans have created money, money comes with everything else that we’ve created.

For the next few minutes, participants joined in small groups to discuss the ways money has impacted our lives. Discussion questions included: 

• What beliefs about money were instilled in you when you were a child?

• How have those beliefs influenced your financial behavior?

• How has money shown up in your life, both in positive and negative ways? 

• How does money affect you today? 

Nafasi Ferrell: All of this is money. All of you, all of your stories, they’re not just individual stories, they’re community stories. You are not the only one that has gone through what you’ve gone through. You’re the only one that has gone through the experience that you have gone through that has taught you so much.

I’m grateful for your vulnerability and your shares, and I hope for those of you that got to journal, that these questions invite you to think deeper about your relationship with, your journey with money, and knowing that your childhood does have a lot to do with the way in which you perceive money, knowing that you get to determine what money is for you and what it will do for you at this stage in your life.

As we move along, we’re going to situate ourselves with money, with understanding we are here in the United States. I typically teach from a global perspective, and we’re going to bring some of that into the space in a moment.

But I want to center us on what money has done to us as groups of people, and especially to Black bodies. This quote from Angela Glover Blackwell, has always shook my heart and shook my soul around money: “Racism really has been about the economy and the economy has fueled racism.”

The economy cannot exist without how we use money. Angela Glover Blackwell is the CEO of PolicyLink, and if you don’t know about that organization, it’s a great research and action institute, where they focus on advancing racial and economic equity. So I’d advise you to definitely check them out.

Money was created to keep track of debts. Who owes what to whom, when we began that journey of “you owe me.” It was really the beginning of money. A lot of things were born out of that. A lot of our -isms were born out of [the idea of] “you owe me.”

What do you owe me? When do you owe it to me? All these forms of credit, what we have to today, that all these names come from those ideas, the idea that debt should be repaid. That is an idea. Doesn’t mean it should be, but we’ve lived in a society where if you live in a small village, you need your debt to be paid or your society will die.

We’re going to talk a little bit about trauma and what that does to us. But racism has always been about the economy and the economy has fueled racism. If you are living in the United States of America, we come from a history of slavery, not just in the United States for the past, but for the past 10,000 years, that every civilization that has ever existed, that humans have created, you have had that.

We have always built a slave society based on hierarchy. At one point it was about class and then humans were created. There are other -isms, especially racism, where color becomes the way in which we differentiate between those who have and those who do not have those who should have and those who should not have.

And specifically if we think about the United States, if you think about it, by 1711 there were hundreds of slaves in New York that were learning trades, farming, working homes, working the docks. About 40% of white homes, at the time, had slaves. That slavery was not new.

It was transferred over as humans developed and came and moved to the new world, specifically our white ancestors who came to this land and that until about 1860 or 1870, Black bodies were wealth. We were wealth. We built this nation with our blood, our sweat, our tears, and with those ancestors that did not get to make it across the water.

Between 1525 and about 1866, about 12.5 million Africans were stolen and shipped to the United States or the United States and this land that we call the Caribbean, South America, North America, and only about 10.7 million slaves survived that journey. The slavery did not end by any means and, today, we have about 45 million slaves. Today!

Actually, I think that’s an old number I just looked at yesterday. There’s about 50 million slaves today. Slavery has expanded in ways that some of our ancestors could not imagine. We have domestic servitude, we have sex trafficking, we have forced labor, we have bonded labor, we have child labor, we have forced marriage.

We have all these ways in which money determines how we move goods and services. One of those goods and services has always been the human body. As a human body is the place that we adorn our wealth. If any of us wear jewelry, if we wear clothes, if we wear things that others built, all of that is money.

But in America, Black bodies and other bodies, but Black bodies specifically, were wealth. We were not human. We were an object, we were a commodity. We were put on the same sheet next to cows and sheep and everything else. We were not human, but we made this nation today, in 2018, before the crash to $3 billion of wealth.

So when we say, what do we mean by reparations? Reparations are just cutting the surface of what is due to us and all of us in this day and age of what our ancestors did and had to go through to build everything that we get to be a part of and to witness today. And this was money. More paper money.

Right? We didn’t lose our Chinese ancestors’ tool of money. We’ve expanded on it. Specifically after the Civil War, many people did not have the chance to [thrive financially]. There [weren’t] many options. Sharecropping was still the system that we used in this nation at the time. And so after slavery, slavery never ended.

You just became a worker. Workers are still slaves today. We have an idea that slavery ended when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but none of that ever ended for anyone. Slavery just changed forms. It has never ended, as many of us, over 80% of Americans, are in debt slavery.

Over 80% of Americans cannot pay, have over $5,000 worth of credit card debt, and cannot pay it off. They don’t have the means to pay it off. And so what we think was in the 1800s, the behaviors of that have been expounded upon today where our slave society has been. It’s not as, you know, clear and in your face if you’re not working within a pure slave system, if you’re not a servant or if you’re not a sex worker or things like that. Knowing that sex work can be a choice for some and not a choice for others, the slavery has continued to exist and money has been the driving force around that.

I want to ask you all again, just one quick question. Does anyone know where tipping came from? Some of you might know. Would anyone like to take a guess or be willing to take a guess?

Can’t see the chat, but if anyone, if anyone does know, we have a guess: “from Europe, probably racism.” Somebody else said Europe did have a form of this, but what we deem is tipping how we still tip in America. When I lived in Europe, you cannot tip, people are paid, they’re waged, they’re paid accordingly.

But here in the United States, most places that Blacks and Latinos and Chinese and others could work, were in jobs that were previous slaves jobs. So restaurant workers, which still has not changed. Porters, railroad porters. So you would not be paid a wage. The customers would be required to give you a tip instead, and that would be your wage.

So the culture of tipping in that way began. I, as an employer, don’t need to pay you. The customer will pay you and you’ll be tipped. And today many restaurant owners do not pay their employees. They require our customers to raise their tipping prices to tip at 50%, 20%, 25%. How crazy are our tipping practices today?

All this instead of paying someone a livable wage. So these ways in which we still use today have not gone away. They’re still here alive and well. Right? And our wage disparities, and our wealth disparities, and they come from our former slave era.

I want to show you this because many people don’t really understand the wealth disparity.  There’s a resource in your resource list that you are going to be receiving at the end of this. And a great resource that, if we had more time, I would be sharing with you all.

Number one is Race: The Power of Illusion And the second is a Netflix series on the racial wealth gap. And in that it really shares with you the true gap of wealth: The ability of what it means to compound over time. And so when we look at what it means for the Black folks, our ancestors that built this nation, how much wealth Black people do not have.

There’s very little compared to everyone else. This is a work from the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization in DC. Definitely look at some of their surveys on consumer finances. The images tell you a different story than what we typically believe sometimes and typically than what social media will tell us is the truth versus what’s not the truth.

Because we know that there’s a lot of money in the world. I don’t know if you all know, but in 2020 we had 5.2 million people that became millionaires, 5.2 million more millionaires. There’s money. We have lots of it. It’s abundant. There’s no scarcity of wealth. None. None. There’s much of it. This myth of a lack of resources is what is driving the force behind many of our policies, many of our practices.

And I don’t know if you all know, but 8% of those millionaires are under the age of 30. We have a lot of young millionaires. A lot, there is tons of wealth, much wealth. None of that tends to flow into the Black community. The Black community in America makes about a trillion dollars a year, but none of it comes back to us.

It goes away from us as it always has since slavery, but it does not come back to us in our communities. But there is so much wealth. So I want, in this moment, for us to really let this idea that wealth is scarce to float away, to melt away. The distribution of wealth is what we are trying to redefine, to have at the center of our discussion, as we continue to build immense wealth, especially in this new age of AI.

And so I want to bring us back a little bit to our ancestors and to the things that we’ve had to face as slaves, as former slaves, slave ancestors of slaves, or family members that are slaves that we don’t know about, 2 or 3 generations removed. All of that creates trauma, that if you are a living human being today, you come from an ancestor that has experienced trauma and that you as a living being, have experienced trauma, whether it is a little bit of trauma or a lot of trauma. And I want to specifically center this work on the work that we do in Trauma of Money. And Kelsey’s going to drop that in the chat and you all will be able to look at that more as well in the future. But when we talk about healing our relationship with money, everybody typically says, well, if I just figure out how to save in a 401k, then everything’s fine.

That’s far from it, very far from it. If we don’t understand how the world and the life that we’ve lived and our ancestors live has impacted us today, we cannot make the best decisions for ourselves and for our loved ones because we’re far removed from what the real reality is.

And so as a being, financial literacy is the last thing you need to be financially well. You cannot be financially well if you are in a trauma triggered state, it’s not possible. Your nervous system is overworking and your frontal lobes and your brain are not actually working as well. You’re not in a cognitive state, and that can happen in many ways.

We have relational trauma that we experience that’s between two individuals. We have societal trauma, which we deem as different terms of oppression. We have a systemic trauma that comes from institutions and systems. That’s what we really put slavery into. That’s the slave systems that, in the last 10,000 years, we have not broken through. That’s systemic trauma that kind of bleeds and bleeds through each generation going forward. And that generational trauma, if you are from a family that experienced a natural disaster and you lost everything, you have to re-navigate your nervous system to wellness.

And so all of these things our families have faced are within us. Resmaa Menekem’s work teaches us that you have about 14 generations of memories in your DNA. So when your stomach hurts or you’re feeling jittery, that might not be you. That might be an ancestor in you coming out from something they’ve experienced. That’s in your body; that might not be you.

So you are more than just you. You are of way more than just of the experiences that you’ve had. And so becoming well in understanding your nervous system and understanding how your nervous system works is the first key to understanding how to use your resources. One of those resources is money.

How you behave with money is how you behave with a lot of other things. It’s just a reflection of how we use our resources. So in Trauma of Money, we really talk about financial literacy as being last. That really situating in this idea of the laws of nature is that nature is a great teacher.

How does nature navigate through change? How does nature navigate through disruption? And that there’s many ways that our societies have done things in ways to react against, to move against the systemic forms of trauma that we have had to embody to survive. Right? As a species, we’ve had to do so much, so much to survive, through our natural disasters, living on a planet through the systemic trauma that the communities build without us.

And then through those systemic traumas, through the individual traumas that people have placed on one another because of the things that we’ve been through that are out of our control. And in Trauma of Money, we really talk about increasing shame and increasing discernment. For those of us of color. shame tends to cloak everything that we do because our ancestors were killed if they had money.

Right? Tulsa was very real, but Tulsa was one of 21 massacres that happened that year. Just one. So if you had money, you were murdered. So why don’t you want to budget? Your nervous system doesn’t feel well when you make a budget. It’s telling you there’s something wrong if you make a budget, if you have [money], if you want more, it’s telling you, “I don’t deserve this.”

But all of that is not true. Those narratives are not true. The narrative is that you were abundant and your ancestors survived and thrived to push you here today, to where we are today. So if your body is feeling a little tight, a little tense, lower your shoulders. Take a deep breath in, take a deep inhale, exhale that breath, and know that this is a collective human journey that we are on, that there is no shame.

Shame does not belong to you. It belongs to the society. And that each of us are doing the best we can each day to move through that trauma, to move through the things that we’ve been through. And it really comes to the fact that we don’t understand that we’re a living organism. We are an animal.

So as animals, we will behave in certain ways that we don’t have control over. We have a sympathetic nervous system, and we have a parasympathetic nervous system. Some parts of our body are involuntary. Do you have to think about every time you breathe? Do you have to think every time your heart beats?

No, you cannot. So as beings, when we experience trauma, our body does certain things. We have fight, flight, freeze, and fawn responses. And for those of us who are lovers, who are caregivers, we love to fawn, we love to people please, especially for those of us of color, if we did not please the master, we were what? Beaten or worse.

So the ways in which we experience the world around us, our body reacts to that. Sometimes we say, well, why did that person do that? Their frontal lobe shut off and their body did the rest. Trauma is an embodied experience. It is not a mental experience.

The memories are less. Trauma is less about our memories and what our body remembers. So when we talk about healing our relationship, we’re talking about healing our bodies. Getting in touch with our bodies, with how our bodies feel. What does it feel to be nourished? What does it feel like to rest?

Which is what a lot of Black bodies and brown bodies never got to experience. So it’s something that we actually have to learn, leaning into learning our bodies, our nervous systems, how it works, how it functions, how it nourishes us, how it keeps us safe. Because this vessel we’re in, it’s wired for survival.

So the first thing it’s going to do is to act in survival. We have consciousness; that consciousness allows us to reflect on the things that our body is doing and engaging with. And that’s really what that first step is, because trauma can be many, many, many, many, many, many, many things. You get into a car accident, your body remembers it.

There’s nothing you can do, but you can become aware of the feeling that your body has. A fall, epigenetics, not feeling love or acceptance when we are young, inherited, just like those who are, who are enslaved, who have been colonized, or if we are in an abusive relationship or an abusive state or in a state that we live in, which are not, I would think of nation states.

If we think of World War II, there are layers and layers of trauma that we, that the body experiences. But once you understand the body, you’re able to make different choices. One of the big things within our body in response that we don’t normally talk about is dopamine. And as you’re on your journey to understanding money deeper and to understanding what you do with your tool of money, understanding dopamine is so, so, so important.

It’s only one, just one of our neurotransmitters in our brain that tells us what our rewards are. So if you wonder, why does that person keep shopping? Why can’t they just stop shopping and buying things? Well, because their brain has deemed that shopping feels good to the body.

It’s dopamine. You’re getting hit with that thing that gives you joy and pleasure. But there’s also many, many other things too, that you can do. But dopamine does many things. It’s involved in our movement, our memory, our pleasure, our behavior, what we pay attention to, how we sleep, what our mood is, how we learn.

So your vessel dictates a lot. And the more you are well aware of your vessel and how it behaves, you’re able to make better choices for yourself cognitively. We’re the only species that can do that. We’re the only species that can take a thought and make it reality. We’re it. So each of you are manifesters.

Each of you, you get to create what you manifest, period. But you can only do that well if you know and understand what triggers your pleasure and your reward motivation. What you give your attention to. Does that make sense? Everyone good with me on that? Okay.

So I really want to hone in on these symptoms. Symptoms of trauma. Because many of us feel it. Most of us feel shame and worthlessness: oh, I spent too much money this month. I’m a bad person. I’m doing bad things with my life.

But sometimes it shows up in other ways. It shows up as depression. It shows up as decreased concentration. It shows up as an emotional overwhelm. So something might have happened to you 10, 15 years ago and your symptoms might come back and trigger something else.

Note that is not you. That’s an experience that your body is reliving, not the memory. Your body is reliving that experience

So the more that you understand that, the more that you can reposition your mind to tell yourself that that is not you. That is the experience that you had. So there’s no shame, there is no guilt. There’s none of that for you to hold within yourself. All right?  Because economics is a study of scarcity and how people use resources and respond to incentives.

Right? We are all doing the best we can with the resources that we are given at the time we are given them. There’s nothing you can do about that. You are doing the best you can. You have done the best you can. Right?  I know we, some people, mentioned scarcity a couple of times. I want to talk about what scarcity does to anyone.

When y’all have time, there’s also another resource that you’re going to get, from Eldar Shafir who’s a Princeton University psychologist. And he did a study with a group of people about what it means when you put a human body in scarcity. What they found is that no matter what age, race, gender, or how much money you have, it does not matter.

Our human bodies react the same, if you put it in a certain situation. So if you are experiencing scarcity, you’re going to soothe yourself in specific ways. That might be drinking, that might be drugs, that might be walking, that might be other ways. You’re going to have tunnel vision and you’re only going to be able to focus on certain things.

You’re going to have a trade-off thinking: this or that. Should I choose this or should I choose that? You’re not going to have a lot of bandwidth, so your body and your mind is going to feel taxed. And you’re going to be tempted. There’s a myth that poor people don’t know how to manage money.

Poor people definitely know how to manage money, way better than a lot of others. But it’s the use of the brain and that energy that makes it so that you can’t make the best decision that you could if you weren’t in scarcity. So no matter who you are, if you have a suitcase and your suitcase is small, and you have a lot to put it in, and you have to choose, you’re not going to be able to make the best decisions.

You have a suitcase and it’s large. You can put all the things in it that you want, that you desire, you’re going to feel at ease. So scarcity is not an individual experience. It is a group experience And the more that we understand that, the more that we can forgive ourselves from what we’ve done for the things that we have gone through, for the things that we are going through.

And we can take steps, make different decisions on how to move out of scarcity, especially when it’s within our power. I work with many clients who have a ton of money, but because of the history of scarcity, they can’t see what they have and take the time to reevaluate because of trauma and because of other things.

And if you’re in scarcity, you’re really not given the space to do that. So scarcity is something that we all experience. It’s built into the very fabric of what our ancestors built when they created money, when we decided to move around resources. But understanding that helps us create different ways so that we can actually enter what, like I shared earlier, that abundance that we have, because there’s more than enough.

We know that the earth is more than enough, has more than enough for us to survive and live on. We just haven’t built a system that tells us that that lets us operate within that. Being within financial scarcity reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going over one full night without sleep. Period.

You cannot thrive. No human being can thrive in scarcity. So it’s not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals, rather that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth. So our journey as humans is to create a society where scarcity is not at the center. We created money, we get to create it however we want.

It’s that discussion that we’re not having as much. I want to share a little bit with you all as we won’t have a ton of time to talk about money specifically and other things, that there are many ways in which money might show up in your life and you can just jot these down, research them further later.

There are avoidance disruptions. The ones that I deal with the most with my clients are one, denial. I’m not bad with [money], I don’t have [a money problem], I could pay my bills, but I’m not going to look, I don’t have capacity to look. I’m going to reject looking at my money or staying within a financial comfort zone.

That makes you feel good. But that in actuality is actually producing negative results in your life. Underspending: You have money in the bank, but you’re scared to use any of it. Because it might all be taken away from you at any moment.

Or excessive risk aversion. “I don’t want to invest because it’s for white people.” “I don’t want to invest because I’ll lose it all.”

All these types of things are ways in which financial avoidance might disrupt our life. There’s also financial soothing disruptions. If you have had family members who are gamblers or others, they don’t do it because they really want to, they do it because it’s soothing their nervous system. It’s soothing their bodies and telling them that things are going to be okay. I come from a family of hoarding.

For the first time in 10 years, my mother has a bed to sleep on. She hasn’t had a bed to sleep on. The way she has navigated through her trauma is by keeping everything, because when I left, that’s how she filled the void.

I’m a workaholic. When I get stressed, the first thing I do is work a little bit harder to soothe myself. And also, as we see, many of us overspend. “I don’t have it, but I need it because it makes my body feel good.” Or compulsive buying. Why did you buy five of the same things? Your nervous system told you to.

It’s not you, it’s your body reacting. There are also relational money disorders, financial infidelity, which might be hiding bank accounts or hiding money from your partner. And in many cases we say financial infidelity is very, very, very important. And if you are in a domestic violence situation, we highly, highly suggest that you open up a separate bank account so that you can take care of yourself. That’s really the only time we think financial infidelity is very, very important for your safety.

There’s financial enmeshment, or financial dependence, but dependence meaning that person has control over you and that you do not feel well, that’s when dependence becomes negative. We are all multicellular organisms, so we need each other to survive.

We cannot survive with one, without one another. But if we are not, if we do it in a way that has been right historically, we’ve used slavery to create more financial dependence on one another that creates negativity and the one that many of us engage in, especially if we’re givers, we want to see other people well, we do a lot of enabling and fawning. A lot of what we call people pleasing.

“I want you to be well at the expense of myself.” “I don’t have enough money to give you, but you need it. So I’m going to give it to you anyway.” So many of these ways in which we relate around money can cause money disruptions in our lives.

But they are not permanent. They are forever changing as we change. So one way which you’re behaving with money today, might not and will not be the way that you behave with money five or six years from now. Your relationship with money can always change. Your relationship with your resources can and will always change.

And the more that you are aware of it, the faster that you are able to then cognitively make better decisions for yourself.

So now we’re going to get into some good parts around your body. Things that you can do that are good for yourself as you’re trying to reevaluate, or if you want to reevaluate your relationship with not just money, but with your resources in general. So in Trauma of Money, we talk about your window of resilience.

When we think about trauma, we can be in a hypo state of arousal, or we can be in a hyper state of arousal. Hypo state of arousal is when we’re kind of depressed. We’re slowish, we’re sluggish. We don’t want to start, we don’t want to do much.

Hyper arousal is maybe when we are having anxiety. Things feel very overwhelming and we feel like things are going to burst.

And the middle ground for that is in this middle area where your nervous system feels well, where you feel like things are, will be caught and clear. I can see the field clearly. There’s not too many things in my view of what I can see.

Every single human has this in their bodies. Every single animal has it, but everything we built has it too. So a state has an optimal state of functioning. A neighborhood has an optimal state of functioning. All these things that we have in us also reflect into the larger.

That’s when we say, when we change our society changes. Right? Society cannot change unless you change, cuz you are the society. So when we say, I want you to change, we’re actually saying, I want to change. I want to transform.

I think another word that has been very present for this time is transfiguring. That which is transfiguring within us. That is that deeper change. That change, which is, it changes our minds, bodies, and our spirits. And there’s ways that we can evoke that change pretty much anytime we want. And that’s by getting into your window of resilience.

And when we think about our toolkits, I want you to think about what resources you are good at. Usually we say, what can you do around you, with money or not, that brings you joy and connection? When you recenter your body and your nervous system and joy and connection, even when it doesn’t feel like you should, even when you don’t feel like you want to, your subconscious starts to change little by little. If you haven’t read the book, Atomic Habits, I highly suggest it.

It’s a great book. There are many, many, many ways that you can access this for your body before you do something. Usually when I’m working with clients that really have a hard disassociation with finance, they have the avoidance disruption happening very strongly. We say, go do something that nourishes yourself before you engage with the activity.

Because when you do that, your brain actually looks at the activity differently. So, when you look at the activity, you say you’re looking at your budget, you feel high, you’re hyper aroused, and your body, you’re feeling all these types of energy in your body and your anxiety’s high. If you go take a walk or you get on the phone and have tons of laughter with a great friend, or you sniff, you burn a candle, and you do some breathing exercises, or maybe you take some probiotics or maybe you get a massage and nourish yourself and you come back to that activity, you will have a transformed view of that activity.

So doing is the only way to heal your trauma. You cannot read your way out of trauma. You cannot. Society wants to tell us, if you just read this book, everything will be in it and your life will be changed. That’s not true. It never has been. What has been true is if you do one thing to love yourself, on your body today, your body will transform for you for tomorrow.

And even if you can’t see it, if you’re three hundred pounds and you want to be a hundred pounds, the journey to that, you don’t get to fully see, you get to witness transformation over time, and that’s our true journey. Your journey is to get good with the journey up and down the mountain ridges.

What’s in your backpack? It should be more than two things. I have this, I have an experience of mindfulness, which really helped for a while. Breathing really helped. And sometimes it helps me. It makes things worse. So sometimes I need to go for a run. Sometimes I need to put on my favorite song.

Sometimes I need to do absolutely nothing. But all those things, all those behaviors are ways in which you change your body. You change your neural links in your brain, and you have the power to do that. You do. You do not need permission to do that. And the more that you lean into that, the more that you will change without you even noticing.

So I want y’all to just take a moment. If you have your journal with you, I just want you to write down three things. Three things that bring you a feeling, a feeling of joy and connection. Just write down three things, and if you’re driving or something else, just think about three things in your mind. I’m going to do a Warren Buffet on you. And of those three things, you pick one, make a commitment to the one, and do that one thing this week. Maybe today when we’re done, just to do one thing for your body.

And then of those, when you have those three things, know that that’s permission for you to expand upon that list. That list can be as long as you need it to be. Whenever you need it to change, it can change. But always think about ways in which you can access and nourish this part of your nervous system.

One thing that was stolen from us as folks of color, as Black folks, as women, as others in our community, but as humans in general, is that we don’t get to really decide or think about what we want our lives to look and feel like. Sometimes we’re too stressed out.

Life gets really, really hard. But you get to decide what you want your relationship to, money to look and feel like. And I really want to situate within you all a view of money that you might not have heard of. So money is not just currency, money is your skills, it’s your talents, it’s your energy, it’s your time, it’s everything that comes from and through you.

That’s what wealth is. So you are wealthy as it is. Currency just is an addition to that wealth. So as you think about what you want your relationship with money to look and feel like, think about money as an extension of your wealth. And that this is a time, as Kelsey said, to dream.

Everything that you see around you was a dream once before. It could not exist if someone didn’t dream at first. So what do I want my relationship with money to look and feel like?

In the final breakout time of the session, participants discussed the question, “What do I want my relationship with money to look and feel like?”

Nafasi Ferrell: All right, so let’s get into the last few things I have for you all here. As we think about money, we talk about a lot, but we know our desires are to close this racial wealth gap and to decolonize our wealth. But we usually think about it as systems doing that work. But we are the systems, you and I.

Systems do not exist unless human beings work in them. If not, they’re just buildings that humans built. So it starts with us. So I just want to remind you of some of the practices of our elders, or with Philanthropy Together, there’s a lot of ways in which our communities have given.

Susus, I know many of you have heard of those things. It has been co-opted in many ways within our society that just that word and that language and many of the things I know that we’ve experienced, but giving has always been at the central practice of our society. Right? I taught you all about slavery, the history of our last 10,000 years.

And there’s always been an economy within an economy, an economy that says we are going to help others when we need it. Right? Who will help me when I need it? Our grandmothers, our last 127 grandmothers for seven generations have always answered that question. And they’ve done it in many, many ways.

And the Romo community, we have Afusha, where people come together. Kind of like in certain types, certain giving circles, people donate a certain amount and then bring that cash and help people. Whether that’s someone with an illness, someone who had a childbirth, if there’s an emergency, they come together.

There’s a savings model in the Somali community called ito, that addresses banking. And helps members. That gives people members loans where they can’t, if they can’t get it in the banking system specifically for those that are facing false terrorism and certain other things within that community.

There’s also something in the Indian community called Chiti, which means, a slip of paper. So what can be put on that slip of paper and be recorded where people receive each month? And this has typically always been driven by the women in our communities. All those keepers in our communities always said, I’m going to make sure that you are well. How do we come together and be well?

One other great example is Hagbad in the Somali community. I don’t know if you all know, but Somali communities are very tribal based, so there can be a lot of conflict and complications at many times. But Hagbad supersedes that. So when someone is in crisis, people will go from tribe to tribe, from city to city, and collect funds to support individuals and groups.

We know how to distribute wealth. We just don’t do it as often as we should. And so I want to leave you all with this, with this tool that I use a lot. This is how my wealth redistribution circle works. Well, my wealth redistribution circles were built off of people coming together, learning about who they are, their traumas and sharing it with one another.

But co-creating that process together, will they get to decide what their beliefs will be in that space, or how they want to share with one another, how they want to build resources with one another, and that there’s no time limit. My community’s been together for three years, and I hope we’ll be together for the next 15 or longer.

One of the ways you start is from you, you are the key to the transformation you want to see in your life. But you cannot do that unless you have a community that supports you. So it’s very, very important for you to be clear on what is your pod, what’s your community for you? Meaning, who is your financial support?

Who can you call today and say, I need a thousand dollars. You don’t have that. You can foster it. You can call that into your life. Who’s your medical support? Who’s your mental support? It doesn’t have to be a therapist. Could be. There’s many ways in which we can receive mental support.

Who’s supporting you physically? Who’s helping you achieve your health goals physically? We need all of these things and these resources to be well, and you cannot be resourced without your community because you can’t do everything, right? Not everyone grows their own food. Not everyone builds the home that they’re in, so we need each other, but we must be clear of what that looks like, and we can do that at different levels.

So we’re at the center. Who are those individuals that are closest to you that you can call on when you need help? Right? This is a moment to take inventory of who that is and, if there’s a gap, asking your ancestors to fill that gap with someone who will bring you the thing that you need. You can do that and the spirit will bring it to you. I’m a living testimony of that, so is my community.

Then there’s people that might be in your outer sphere that you might not want to call in. Who are they? Name them. Think about them. Right? Think about fostering that relationship a little deeper, and then think about what groups and organizations that you’re either a part of or you want to be a part of that can solve some of the challenges that you’re facing. If you don’t know, somebody knows. That has been my last life lesson.

I don’t need to know because I have a community that is rich and abundant and they know so I can ask freely without shame or guilt. Right? You are the designer of your community and the life that you want, so please take that. And use that tool as you move forward, as a way for you to think about how you want to build your life.

You are abundant. You have the power to build whatever you want. We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams, and we are meant to lean on each other without shame, guilt, and fear.

I hope that I was able to share some good nuggets with you all today. I hope that you are gentle with yourselves as you move forward out of this and back into this world of capitalism that we live in, and that you have someone that you can lean on and ask questions.