Welcome to our latest podcast episode: “I Don’t Charge for my Worth, I Charge for the Worth of a Movement: A Vision for a Universal Badass Income“
I believe we have what we need to get a universal basic income in the coming years.
…Not through convincing our governments to give it to us, but to generate it ourselves, through the power of ancestor-guided community organizing.
I have been downloading & conjuring a new business model that functions via ancestor-guided principles, and the best parts of spiritual entrepreneurship, artistic crowdfunding & community organizing.
This is for spirit-centered, liberation focused creators who want to see a world full of mass, collective earth stewardship in our lifetime.
Today, let me take you through an introduction to my vision.
In the next while, I’ll be sharing more details so you can better understand how the business model works.
Then, I’m calling in the most brilliant minds, heartfelt souls and good listeners together for an online Ancestral Think Tank and Artist Retreat, where we will workshop my vision and spend 4-months sitting in communion with our Ancestral & Celestial memories of when we lived and died in thriving villages.
We will seek council from our inner Thriving Villages on all aspects of our personal+collective thriving, and how to bring that thriving back into the every day.
Those who go through this process with me will have the opportunity to receive an Ancestral Artist Grant by the end of the year, funded by the principles of the Universal Badass Income.
If you can’t attend the artist retreat, I will be making space to share this vision with community in other ways, too.
For now, listen to the audio recording of the episode, or read the transcript below. Please share widely or with anyone who may be interested!
READ EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Greetings Good Listeners,
Welcome to Otherworldly Giants, the Divination Channel. I’m your host, Storyteller and Spellweaver, Shaunga Tagore.
A couple episodes back, I spoke about the spirit of “We Have Already Won.”
Today, I want to talk about how do we build a path of thriving – during times of genocide, escalating capitalism, fascism and climate disaster, that gets us to the mystery and miracle of those four words – we have already won.
Specifically, how do we fund this life path? How do we generate an income that fully supports our healing journeys, and the growth of our personal and planetary dreams.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast, you know I’ve been on this one for a minute.
Today, I’m going to do something exciting – I’m going to take you through my vision of how we get a Universal Badass Income in the coming years.
Not by convincing our governments or the powers-that-be to give it to us, but to generate it ourselves through the power of ancestor-guided community organizing.
I’ve been incubating this vision for quite some time. I wanted to work through enough of it on my own before I shared it. It’s finally ready and it’s coming out now.
What I’m presenting is a new business model that we can implement this year, the year of our goddess 2025, that combines the best parts of spiritual entrepreneurship, artistic crowdfunding and activist fundraising – but that also solves many problems that currently exist in common and collapsing paradigms of how we generate and share money.
I want to take you into this vision through a conversation about how and why do we charge money for our spiritual and artistic gifts, especially during times of genocide? How do we circulate money in a way that depletes the power that capitalism has over us, and simultaneously builds the world that we want?
What I’m doing here is building a language, a philosophy, and strategic development that champions our spiritual, artistic and financial sovereignty.
I personally want to live and bask in cultures that celebrate our ancestor-guided art, gifts and creation. I want more ease, joy and support for the life path I’m devoted to. I want to remove un-necessary stress, and un-necessary crises – that are so often caused by money.
I want more people to choose this life path, because they can see that it’s so rewarding. I want it to become a strong, sturdy place for more people to enter and stay. And, I want the people who have sacrificed and devoted themselves for this life path to be very well taken care of.
So let’s get into it. Sit back and relax Good Listeners, as I take you on a journey into my vision of the Universal Badass Income.
[music break: “soft glare”]
I’ve been a spiritual entrepeneur, a community organizer, a writer and working artist for over 15 years, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons about money.
I want to share my thinking with you behind how and why I charge money for my offerings.
[music fades out, sounds of water fade in]
I’ll tell you that I don’t charge based on the worth of my offerings.
Meaning, I don’t design my prices based on how much I think my offerings are worth.
What I offer is my Medicine. My Medicine is an ongoing expression of my healing journey.
My communal offerings are made of my Grief, my Heart, my Lungs, my Song.
My offerings are my Grandmothers who died in 2005 and 2012, and now sing through me.
They are my Grandfathers who died in 1993 and in the 70s before I was born and now sing through me.
They are my Dad who died in 2016 and now sings through me – and still makes his bad Bengali Dad jokes through me too.
My offerings are my lineages of healed and healing grandmothers & grandfathers – blood adopted, star, soul lineages, and mutually chosen lineages. They are my genderqueer TRANCESTORS, my queer community aunties and uncles, my niblings, my companions, my familiars, my descendants.
They are the plants, planets, animals, elements, ancient, celestial, primordial and every day Ancestors that walk, rock and roll with me.
They are my brilliant, unbroken child self who is the most powerful ancestor in me.
They are my best self in multiple parallel dimensions. My flawed and ever-un-learning human self right here, right now.
They are Old Woman Shaunga, and every version of myself in between that I will grow into and leave behind.
They are the partners and friends who I will love, who I will lose, who I will keep finding across lifetimes.
[sounds of water fade out]
My offerings are my Dog who was my best friend and the reason I survived my teenage years. Whose death shattered me and throttled a young adult into her first major ancestral initiation in 2003 when I had no clue what was happening to me.
My offerings are quite simply my greatest loves of my lifetimes – namely, Estha and Rahel, my Grief, my Heart, my Lungs, my Arms. My two twin cats who I held as they died in 2022 and 2023.
They are my Arms, like, what it means to embrace life. Like really, really embrace life.
Because you’ve really, really, really embraced death.
My offerings are my Arms, like what it means to hold and be held.
How do you put a price tag on that?
Your Grief? Your Heart? Your Lungs? Your Voice? Your Ancestors? Your Arms?
It costs a thousand million and three three three five three squared to the root of pie exponentialized by a jillion-finity per month.
Or it’s zero.
My offerings are my Life Force.
They are made of the bricks, threads and paint strokes I jumble into some interesting concoction every time I lose my will to live and find my heart beating in a deeper place.
In my current offer, “When We Lived and Died in the Thriving Village” – which is a 4-month Ancestral Think Tank and Artist Retreat, undoubtedly, some people will look at my pricing and judge me for A) charging too much or B) not charging enough.
I’ve been met with that witch hunty white supremacist shit breathing underneath someone’s snarky comments, looking at what I offer with disdain and…loathing (sings: unadulterated loathing!)…like, there’s no way something like that is worth so much, good luck with selling that.
On the other side, I know the contigent of artists and healers who are very committed to not under-charging. Some may look at what I offer and make a judgement that I’m not charging what I’m worth, because they would charge something similar at a much higher price point.
But I don’t turn my pricing up or down, based on how good I think it is.
I do not judge and I have no problem when I see people charging more than I do.
I celebrate and encourage people to self-determine what they want to charge.
I celebrate people who raise their prices to take care of themselves and heal cycles of poverty and injustice in their lineage. I trust they are making the best decision for themselves, and I honour their need to heal on the material level.
Of course there are people who charge in a way that is intentionally exploitative, predatory, or they make decisions around pricing that aren’t aligned with integrity or a deep internal honesty.
The truth is, the people who do that – their own healing journey will eventually bite them in the ass.
I don’t charge based on what I’m worth.
What’s the cost of my life?
What does my life cost?
I charge based on a commitment to my ongoing rigorous financial healing – including many years of confronting my most painful wounds, conditioning, survivorship and complicity.
I charge based on my love affair with the Universe, in a way that translates into my chronic autistic obsession with budgeting.
(There are definitely worse obsessions to have than spreadsheets with numbers on them, I fucking love that shit.)
I love studying my life and organizing numbers into discerning answers to the question – what indeed, does my life cost?
I charge based on what my needs are, not just my basic needs, but my badass needs.
My Badass needs account for the fact that I am not just charging prices for me, I’m charging for a Movement.
I’m charging for the benevolent and blessed Movement of my Ancestors, and for a Movement of full-bodied planetary healing.
I’m not charging to survive my life, and I’m not charging to just float above it either, I’m charging to transform it.
I’m charging to grow. To resource myself as I continue to shatter and bloom.
I’m charging to bring the materialization of prayers that have been cooking in the rice pot for generations.
I’m charging to account for the fact that if I do not embrace the gift of EXPERIENCING my dreams, there will be a hole in the world, and a hole in my self that I will continually try to fill with addictions and bad habits to numb the pain of the void.
I charge so we can better position ourselves to make bigger moves when it comes to divesting from capitalism, genocide, and protecting ourselves from fascism and climate catastrophe.
I always try and find a number as low as possible while still meeting my badass needs, and my current protocols that my Ancestors are holding me accountable to.
I don’t charge based on my worth. That’s priceless. But I do charge based on the worth of a Movement.
When I say “Movement” I mean a movement moved forward by Spirit-Centered, Liberation-Focused artists, writers, creators, storytellers, entrepreneurs, oracles, visionaries, ancestrally gifted good listeners and humans who are here to see a world full of mass collective earth stewardship, in our lifetime.
Our Movement is WORTH reciprocity, recognition and protection.
Our movement is WORTH stability and security in our collective and personal Root Chakras.
Some things I’ve learned from being a spiritual entrepreneur and working artist over the last 15 years…
We, as communities, need to stop expecting healers and artists to individually cover the balance of what is a communal problem and requires communal solutions. And, we need to stop doing that to ourselves, internally.
What do I mean by this: I come from communities where we organize for everything that is important to us.
During the first wave of Covid, people ORGANIZED to rent winter cottages and make sure everyone had access to testing, so they could spend a weekend together in person, and hug each other after months and months of no touch.
They ORGANIZED to make sure everyone found a way to get floor tickets to the Beyonce concert whichI heard were like $2K each I heard.
They ORGANIZE for bail fund to get friends out of jail for protesting for Palestine.
We are a community of scrappy, savvy organizers who know how to pool our resources together, and we don’t need a lot to make beautiful things happen.
These kinds of organizing are wonderful and necessary, I’m happy that we do this and we should continue.
But, when we see a healer or an artist offer something, it’s not our first inclination to turn to our circles and say: I really want to work with this person. I really want to pay them what they’re worth, because they deserve that. AND, I want to raise a little extra for myself so that I have the spaciousness to go through this process with them, AND give them an extra tip, because they always go the extra mile. How can we collectively make this happen?
To do this, your circle would not only be advocating for me as a teacher, but also for YOU as someone who needs and deserves healing and support for your ongoing personal, spiritual and creative development.
We would have to be immersed in cultures where we applauded and supported our choices to self invest, and not see this as an individualized, selfish, personal thing to do that is outside of a liberation movement.
Not only do we not organize for us, my biggest problem is that so often the same people who value organizing for everything else, look to the people who are creators, business owners, artists, visionaries, and they say: you’re selling out by charging for your work. Look at them, they’re not about the people. Look at them promoting their shit during xyz crisis. How disrespectful and greedy. If they really cared, they would do this for free.
Let’s get real, we already do boat loads of shit for free! We charge for some things to account for the fact that we do not live in cultures where a village is collectively taking care of our material needs.
We charge because in our memories of the thriving village – we always offered something tangible to those we received gifts from that would directly support their basic and badass needs.
People raise their prices really high to survive the fact that we live in a healing-phobic society with very little culture that champions collective organizing for this life path.
I have learned the hard way many times: I cannot individually cover the balance of what is a collective responsibility.
In other words, I can’t keep my prices so low for the sake of “accessibility”, to the point of my dehumanization, to try and cover the fact that we don’t collectively organize for that accessibility.
This causes major personal and ancestral depletion, burn out, despair and resentment.
Not to mention it bolsters a wounded, conditioned saviour complex.
Not to mention it’s is a great way to wipe healers and artists out of a liberation movement, as a way to wipe out the movement entirely.
As healers and creators, it’s our commitment to our personal transformation that fuels the transformation of the whole – otherwise our liberation would only continue to loop around in circles, searching and longing for what it’s missing.
Another reason why we charge higher prices for individual offers, when we otherwise might not need to, points to a problem of the same nature in an internal landscape.
We are seeking to individually cover the balance for what is an INTERNAL collective responsibility.
Offerings are only one part of your Medicine. They are the outpour. Your Medicine is the entire process of creation and healing, that every once in a while translates into tangible offerings.
[music fades in: “clockmaker’s dream”]
Let me paint a picture. Say there’s a sacred space, a home, and 4 people are responsible for taking care of the household. 3 people stay at home and do the ongoing, every day, internal work of sustaining its life force.
1 person goes out and shares the harvest with the community.
But, only that one external person gets paid and is responsible for making enough money to cover the balance of everyone’s labour.
You can think of these 4 different people as 4 different parts of your process, or 4 different ancestors within you or 4 different seasons of life.
We can understand the domestic labour here as the YIN part of the process – it’s receptive, cultivating, nurturing, shedding, sustaining, listening, resting, releasing, conjuring, incubating, transitioning, daily tending.
All seasons are equally important to the thriving of the home.
Is this a good arrangement?
Is everyone happy with this?
How do the people doing the domestic labour feel about it?
Are they cool with being financially dependent on one part of the process?
My internal voices say – why aren’t we good enough to just get paid?
Why are we the last ones that people want to invest in, when we’re actually the parts of life that everyone holds most dear?
What happens when person A is struggling to make enough money to provide for the whole house?
This is how the Spiritual Biz model has taught us to respond to this concern:
First, person A trains their nervous system to charge more money for their offerings, but person B, C, and D who do the domestic labour are still left unpaid.
Then we put pressure on person A to come up with the MOST AMAZING, ALIGNED, INCREDIBLE OFFERS ALL THE TIME and the ENTIRE HOUSE HAS TO STAY IN ALIGNMENT WITH ALWAYS EXPRESSING THEIR VOICE IN COMPLETE SOUL CONGRUENCE AND CONSISENTLY STAY IN A SEASON OF BLOOMING AND HARVEST.
We put so much pressure on A to produce an ongoing abundant harvest, and so much pressure on B, C and D to warp and contort their creative process to sustain this mode of production.
I want to make a few notes on this process.
1 – Look at what time it is on Earth’s clock. We are being called to commit to deep individual healing journeys in order to protect the health and longevity of our planet. I am just exiting a 7-9 year Spiritual Winter. We are going to have to get more okay with the fact that our seasons of shedding, unlearning, and unravelling may last this long or longer. We need these periods resourced, and we need to find peace and enjoyment when we’re in them.
2 – The healing work required to allow yourself to receive more money and hold capacity to maintain more money is wonderful and necessary, but this is social, spiritual, somatic, lineage healing work. It’s about strengthening our capacity to receive the true nature of wealth: wealth of relationships, the wealth of being ourselves, of sharing our gifts, and getting to have amazing experiences in community.
Again, we need to free ourselves to spend as much time as we need in the PROCESS of this, rather than speeding toward outcomes.
[background music ends]
3 – When we’re struggling to make enough money, a lot of spiritual business coaching will tell you that it’s because you’re not in alignment – and there are good teachers that will help you understand with accuracy and empowerment, where you are misaligned, and how to create your most powerful offerings.
But the thing is, it might actually be in your alignment to go through a process and learn your lessons slowly.
It might not be in alignment to figure out those wounds and blocks as quickly as possible in order to cash in.
Some people will tell you to just keep a 9-5 job while you do the part of your healing journey that is unfunded.
Sometimes that’s fine and it works. However, sometimes our healing journey requires and deserves our full attention. Moreso, I would like to build a culture where we acknowledge this labour as worthy of reciprocity.
Plus, so many people feel depleted and exploited in their 9-5, they want to divest from dependency on colonial institutions and they just want to focus on what matters.
Finally, we’re trying so hard to make passive income when there is nothing passive about the labour of our YIN seasons. The fact that we’re calling it passive income, in and of itself, creates spiritual incongruence.
We think it’s our individual shortcoming if we’re not aligned all the time to create offers that pop and sustain our business.
When so often, we ARE in alignment, we just need support for the process that we’re in.
I want people to have what they need to meet their badass goals.
[sounds of water fade in]
Not just to survive this economy. Not to float above it. But to transform it.
To neutralize the power that money has over us.
To return, re-member and recover our memories of when we lived and died in thriving villages.
I am blessed to be in regular communion with my Inner Thriving Village.
What I know is that their commitment to widespread planetary balance is everlasting. It’s stronger than any antagonizing force, it’s gonna win – it has already won.
I am only blessed to be here, now, and live in it.
I am blessed to give my Arms to this planet.
I don’t charge for Myself. I charge for a Movement…
I charge to say, this is worth it. Yeah, it’s worthy.
Since this prayer is going to live and thrive no matter what…what I re-mind myself today is that I am worthy to co-create with it.
I am worthy to experience the full orbit of my life.
I know that we have exactly what we need to create a Universal Badass Income in the coming years.
The only question is…will we choose it?
[pause while we listen to the water]
Alright, so let’s talk practical strategies.
The name of my vision, model, blueprint, is called the SPIDERWOMAN TECHNOLOGY.
[sounds of water fade out, tabla drum starts]
You may remember that SPIDERWOMAN is an Ancestor I work with. She is one of my Ancestral Grandmothers. And she makes a few appearances in previous podcast episodes…
…and she is also the main Ancestor guiding the technology behind the Universal Badass Income.
It’s made of two basic components:
1) A commitment to specific ancestral principles and;
2) A new kind of business model that brings together the best parts of spiritual entrepreneurship, artistic crowdfunding, and activist community organizing
In order to implement this business model, we need to first and foremost be available to the principles. Second, we need a certain level of courage, skill-building and community buy in.
With this technology, we train ourselves to recognize each other as fellow Planetary Altar Carriers.
[tabla drumming builds into a new rhythm]
We learn to recognize what we are going through in our personal healing journey at any given moment is weaved in to a greater collective ancestral organizing for liberation.
We understand our personal weaving as wholly and totally necessary to the whole. We understand ourselves as one body, and that if one part of our body isn’t able to do what they need to do, then the whole web falls apart.
We develop the skill and courage to advocate for the truth and sincerity of what is on our plate, and what’s on our heart. What is the call to spirit that I need to answer right now?
If I don’t answer this call – there would be a hole in the world, and a hole in my self. There would be a hole in other people who need me.
We prioritize the need to advocate for ourselves.
We build relationships and networks where it’s safe and encouraged for you to self-advocate. Where the people are committed to recognizing you, honouring your self-determination, and holding you accountable to your deepest sincerity.
That means we create communities where we do not vilify people for investing in themselves. However, we DO hold people accountable to investing in an ancestral sincerity that is in solidarity with the healing of the entire globe.
[tabla drumming builds on a new rhythm]
We hold ourselves accountable to one of the biggest planetary directives, which is the widespread call for every single one of us to remove anti-blackness from our lineages.
This means we’re also removing whorephobia, religious violence, queer and transphobia, ableism, rape culture, witch hunting, anti-mysticism and white supremacy from the lineage.
We are repairing and enlivening our relationship to the otherworldly and the small things in the every day.
The SPIDERWOMAN technology holds us accountable to this level of listening, action, and decision.
It holds you accountable to wherever you are in your process, because wherever you are is worthy.
What do you need to sincerely move forward in your healing, today? We fund that part of the process.
[table drumming stops]
Once we are in resonance with these principles, we then implement strategies that are ancestor guided and a blend of the best parts of spiritual entrepreneurship, artistic crowdfunding and community organizing.
This is what government arts grants do. This is what rich, white, straight men producers in hollywood do, it’s what corporate studios do – they look at the entire process of someone’s creation and they put money on it.
If they’re using this model, why can’t we?
In this model, we solve the major problems we have with crowdfunding including:
-everyone is tapped out
-nobody has any money
-we don’t know enough rich people
-people will only give us money if we can prove our suffering
-it’s too hard and exhausting
-it feels like pulling teeth
All of these problems are not a problem in the SPIDERWOMAN technology.
I have practical, doable, exciting ideas to share that I’ve developed from rigorously studying different kinds of fundraising models, and grounding into planetary, ancestor-guided principles.
My next job is to take you through some examples. While I’ll do in another episode, I might even put it in youtube. We’ll look at specific case studies so I can help you see what I see.
Solving the more practical problems is the easy part.
The real question is – are we available for the principles? How bad do we want this? because that’s the deciding factor for whether or not this works.
So, we’re on board with the principles, we understand the vision and the strategy, which you will once I share my next video.
After that, what’s the next step?
I need a group of people to come together and workshop this vision with me.
The model I’ve come up with really cool, solid and badass.
But it’s not enough for me to just think it up, and then we all start doing it.
It needs to be workshopped. Multiple minds need to come together, so we can look at it from all kinds of angles that I can’t see on my own. We need to fine tune it, take it apart and look at the inner workings. I want to hear all the reasons why it might not work for you, so that we can work it out.
Plus, I know there are a lot of people who have been doing their own work on this topic. A lot of Ancestors have been talking to many of us, and we each have puzzle pieces for each other. I want a space where we can put our heads together.
This is part of what we’ll be doing in this 4-month Ancestral Think Tank and Artist Retreat.
One to two of our sessions will be devoted specifically at looking at the SPIDERWOMAN technology and workshopping my vision for the Universal Badass Income.
The whole process in 4-months will energetically set us up for material success, because we are spending our time dedicated to sitting in communion with our Ancestral and Celestial memories of when we lived and died in thriving villages.
We are seeking council on mulitple layers of what it means to thrive and we’re bringing that wisdom into our every day.
By the time we go through the process, we will have built ourselves energetically to do the first experiment with this technology. Everyone who goes through the process with me will get the chance to receive money through this technology.
Our success is basically guaranteed because we have workshopped it thoroughly, according to each person’s needs and situation.
What does that success look like?
Right now I’m visioning that we go through this 4-month Think Tank from February to May. We take a little pause in the summer.
Then in Fall 2025, we will set up a container where people can self-select to receive an Ancestral Artist Grant.
This is a rapid-fire, community generated arts grant that you will put toward your sincere Planetary Calling, that you self-determine.
You decide how much money you want and what it’s going to cover, based on your badass needs and your ancestral guidance.
Together, the community makes it happen. Rapid Fire means we do not wait months on end for a grant, we generate them efficiently.
I’m not just talking about 200 dollars. I’m talking about 5K in 5 Days. 10K in 10 Days. With the right strategy, getting into 6-figures in a short period of time is easefully doable.
There IS enough money to go around. You don’t need to have a huge platform. We just need appropriate ancestor-guided strategies for each case, and we need communal support.
When you receive an Ancestral Artist Grant, the community is not just funding your personal and artistic mission, they are funding a movement.
[background music: “soft glare”]
The community buys in: people fund you because we know that every single one of us gets to benefit and thrive from the movement that we pour into. We each get a turn to have a community pour into us.
And we repeat, as a way of living.
SPIDERWOMAN teaches us to put money on our thriving again and again and again.
We don’t have to hustle or stress about money. We can focus truly on what Spirit is asking us to do. We don’t have to rely on offers alone. We are not dependent on colonial institutions or anyone else’s rules but our sincere ancestral guidance. We move money easefully, efficiently and in alignment with our spirit, mind, soul, body.
This is for everyone who aches for cultures that celebrate the art of self-investment, communal recognition and reciprocity.
Eventually this weaving, spiralling practise of giving and receiving these artist grants turn into a Universal Badass Income, because it snowballs.
This way of exchanging becomes commonplace, instinctive. It spreads through interconnected hoops, circles and villages. We want to do this for each other because it’s so easy, joyful, juicy, spiritually and creatively rewarding.
We do not give out of guilt, charity, donations, or desperation. This isn’t about “saving” anyone.
It’s about understanding on a bone-deep level, the reality of what it’ll take for us to live in true planetary communion with one another.
This is about re-balancing our lives and our lineages.
We don’t make money to survive capitalism. We don’t make money to float above it, either.
We seek to NEUTRALIZE the power that money has over us, entirely – because we are exchanging money from a place that isn’t about the money, at all.
We honour ourselves for choosing to be here, now.
We fight for ourselves, but most of all, for her.
For the World, and her Birth Right, to live out her full orbit.
[pause to listen to the music]
For those who want to workshop this experiment with me and receive an Ancestral Artist Grant by the end of the year, click the link to my 4-month Ancestral Think Tank and Artist Retreat to learn more. Doors are open, and we begin on February 8 2025. All the links are in the shownotes. Until next time – Be Brave! Be a Giant <3