Women, the Etheric, and Emotional Labor

 

Whether you call it the etheric, the ethereal plane, prana, chi, or the Force, there is a kind of energy all around us that refuses to be denied, regardless of materialist-rationalist dismissals of it as woo. As John Michael Greer often says, anyone who can sense the vibe of a crowded room is sensing the etheric plane. I think of the etheric as one degree more subtle than smell.

Even if you are an occultist, on the physical plane, men are male and women are female. This is to say that men impregnate and women are impregnated in the obvious biological sense. On the etheric, however, the roles are reversed. Biological females are typically etherically male and males are etherically female. This means that women fertilize the etheric plane, whereas men receive and grow the seed.

As Dion Fortune cryptically hints in her book The Cosmic Doctrine, "this is the key to much."

What Is Emotional Labor?

Emotional labor is the work that keeps a household running smoothly: it is housekeeping in the form of chores; office work such as scheduling, filing, and payment of bills; and management. Emotional labor also involves imagination, which is to say it involves the astral plane, as the higher forms of emotional labor involve creativity, such as making things by hand, decorating, or making music, an activity that composer Kim Carcone describes as "decorating your environment with wave forms".  Anyone can do emotional labor, but traditionally it has been women's work.

Emotional labor such as picking up and putting the house in order has a positive emotional impact first and foremost.  It reaches up through the planes, and like a bolt of lightning, connects them.  As an example, let's analyze the emotional impact of putting a favorite toy in its designated place.  If a favorite toy has been put in its designated spot, there is no upset or disruption when it comes to finding the toy. If the dishes are clean and put away, it is easy and a tiny fraction more joyful to make a snack when one is struck by hunger in the evening. If the decor of the sleeping area is thoughful and soothing, restfulness will ripple through the consciousness of all who sleep there.

Making a home involves a million small actions to balance the energy that flows through a space.  Each action on its own is meaningless and insignificant, but when you combine smaller actions and channel them through a filter of generosity, reverence, and humility, a home becomes a fruitful, holy bed of spiritual development.  Understanding the importance of the etheric begins with the recognition of the "little stuff" that most of us were born and raised to take for granted.  God is in the details.

Homemade food from the stovetop of a clean and well-organized kitchen is -- and I am convinced one day science will actually prove me right -- more nourishing than food made out of the same ingredients out of a plastic pouch heated in the microwave. Emotional labor creates beneficial etheric energy. It sublimates everyday objects, releasing their benefits and sequestering their detriments.

Cooking Is Emotional Labor

When a capable cook creates a dish, it is imbued with their etheric energy. The same is true for the not-so-capable cook. If you've ever had that aunt or friend who could ruin the taste of water if they boiled it, you've experienced a cook who etherically spoils any food they touch. I have a friend like this: she enjoys cooking, but something always tastes off about her creations. She follows recipes to the letter. She doesn't notice the off-taste of her food. I have noticed this is usually the case with people who etherically spoil food.  Contrastingly, I patronize a local hole-in-the-wall restaurant run by an extremely capable cook. She makes a salsa that consists of four or five ingredients, none of which are exotic or difficult to attain. Like everything else she cooks, it tastes like the nectar of the gods.

Cooking is a form of alchemy.  European Medieval and Renaissance mages knew more about alchemy than us modernites, but when we look at the process, the basics are identical.  Cooking, like alchemy and chemistry, gathers up a set of ingredients and processes them into a new form.  The new form represents certain properties that are stripped away as part of the alchemical process and also bonuses that are a result of the melded ingredients: solve et coagula.  The hidden ingredient in alchemy and cooking is the etheric energy of the alchemist/cook.  Etheric energy is the element that gets skipped over and ignored by modern chemistry and treated as if it does not exist.  

The Underestimation and Dismissal of Emotional Labor

Wikipedia defines emotional labor as "the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. More specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, co-workers, and superiors."

In other words, emotional labor (as interpreted by Wikipedia) is a figment of the imagination. It's all in your head! Can't you control your sloppy human emotions and subsist as a happy, obedient worker drone in a soul-killing office, you know the kind with the drop ceilings and a water cooler? Shame on you!  You deserve to be replaced by a robot...

Urban Dictionary defines emotional labor as "a feminist notion that emotions are somehow hard work, and that they should be financially compensated for them. Men don't seem to have a problem being nice to people, and are rightfully perplexed when women use this term."

In other words, there's only one dimension of existence: Meatworld! Once again, it's all in your head! Everything in Meatworld (love, marriage, children, the meaning of existence) can be reduced to a single point of value: the Almighty Dollar. Also, I'm a nice guy. Why won't anyone date me?

Household chores are but one slice of the undervalued emotional labor pie. Women still do the whopping majority of household chores. In America, most women of working age have no choice but to at least have one job to make ends meet. Gone are the days of the male breadwinner/provider who was able to support a modest family on his single paycheck. The result of this predicament are several generations of women who must juggle doing laundry, cooking, dusting, and yard work along with holding down a breadwinner-level job and the majority of child-rearing. It's no wonder that women are exhausted and dissatisfied and that men are demoralized and depressed. Women don't have time to do emotional labor that would enrich their etheric environments and as a result, men and children etherically starve.  

The Real Pandemic of Etheric Starvation

Though I'm no high roller on the material plane, I am the etheric equivalent of a millionaire.  I am physically female and etherically a virile, muscle-bound lumberjack. *cue music about being OK and sleeping all night*  I have more etheric energy than I can possibly use.  Because I spew it out like a toppled fire hydrant on the etheric level, I have no trouble attracting males.  My problem is that to the average etherically-starved person (regardless of their gender) I am an All You Can Eat Buffet in a desert.  This means I attract all forms of desperado and psychic vampire without trying.  Before I took up regular banishing ritual and discursive meditation, my etheric excess made me vulnerable to the etherically starved, who instinctively drained me despite having no conscious intentions of vampirism.  

Just about everyone is etherically starving.  The reason modern people are so plagued by addiction, whether it is to food, sex, shopping, etc. is because addiction to substances and/or bad behaviors replaces the void left by etheric poverty.  

Being overweight in general tends to indicate etheric starvation, but diabetes is the acute version.  The etherically starved person eats and eats and eats but is never truly nourished.  Americans are especially prone to etheric starvation because we live in ugly environments, we spend an unusual amount of time indoors or in a car, and we eat devitalized, over processed food that has been stripped of etheric energy.  

Hyper-processed food mimics etherically rich food by replacing the unseen element of loving care with sugar, fat, and salt.  A homemade birthday cake made by a good cook becomes more nourishing than a Twinkie with the exact same portion size and ingredients by the presence of the unseen element.  Comfort food is far more comforting if it is made by a loving hand.  Etherically-poor food, for instance food that was produced mostly by a machine in a factory, provides calories without sustenance.  It has its own version of fairy glamor in that it tastes pretty good upon eating it, but eat too much for too long and all you can taste is the stale grease or the one-two punch of too much sugar.  When an etherically-starved person has the opportunity to eat a well-crafted, etherically rich dish, they gorge upon it like a zombie who has just discovered brains.

Appreciating Objects

You can instantly enrich your etheric environment by simply acknowledging the objects and places you take for granted.  For instance, I am a much safer, better driver because every night, I thank my car as if she was a person for getting me where I need to go safely.  We can argue for a country mile whether or not I'm crazy or my car is sentient.  The result is what matters: an unusually unblemished driving record.  Saying a silent and secret prayer of gratitude before, during, or after you eat is another way of imbuing your food with etheric force.  Your gaze will begin to fall upon food differently if you take a moment to thank both the visible and invisible forces who brought it to your plate, and this consideration in turn sublimates the food and helps you to digest it more thoroughly.  

Languages that assign genders to nouns reveal the passionate animism of our ancestors.  The materialist-rationalist atheist social justice warrior recoils in horror at the thought of his ancestors associating cups with femininity and chalkboards with masculinity: die Tasse; le tableau.  He uses this as evidence that they were uncouth primitives.  Surely they knew far less than he does in his state of politically correct, post-graduate educated superiority!  

A Magical-Etheric Experiment

As an experiment, try tidying one small portion of a room: maybe it's a bathroom sink, a side table, a desk, or the bed.  How does the space feel?  If you were walking into someone else's home and you saw the exact same space, what would your general impression be?  Take a photo of the space in its messy "before" state, then clean it.  Once it is tidy, add something decorative to the space.  Keep it clean even if it requires giving up other items or throwing it away. For instance, if it is your bed, make the bed every day.  If a particular piece of clothing or paperwork keeps getting left on the bed, be ruthless: give it away or throw it away. Thank the space daily for its cheeriness and its contribution to your life.  Do this every day for three weeks.  At the end of the three week experiment, take another snapshot of the space.  How does the space make you feel?  Is it changed somehow or does it feel exactly the same?  I look forward to hearing from anyone who tries this experiment -- I will do a follow up post in approximately three to four weeks. 

Thank you for refraining from profanity in the comments section.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzR03VyiFss