Women, the Etheric, and Emotional Labor

[kimberlysteele]

 

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

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Good article! I've noticed this about food too.

[kimberlysteele]

Thanks! Yes, food is a big one. I forgot to mention that one can really impact the etheric quality of food by presenting it well. A sprinkle of parsley as garnish or cleaning up the sides of a bowl help the food to appreciate in etheric value. Japanese and French cuisines are known for their presentation and attention to craftsmanship and detail -- this is a large part of why Japanese and French people don't have as much obesity. Food with a high etheric value is more satiating in smaller amounts than its etherically-poor equivalent.

[methylethyl]

This is magnificent! Thank you!

I have so many little decorative projects I've been not-quite-getting-around-to... this makes me want to go work on them right now!

[kimberlysteele]

Yay! I need to practice what I preach and clean up part of my space within the next few days... LOL. I might do it at my Studio, though my house also has messy corners that could use some attention!

[methylethyl]

How's the book coming along, btw?

[kimberlysteele]

Very well! I'm excited about it.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, this post must have been aimed at me! I have always been a sloppy creature. Not to the extent of hoarding, thank the gods/goddesses, but definitely I’m a clutter bug. Even when I was a child, I had trouble keeping things straight and neat. I got into trouble in the second grade because I had so much stuff crammed in my desk my books were falling out. If I were in school now days I suppose they would diagnose me as ADHD or even with a touch of Asperger’s (I was also a shy child) and pump me full of pills to “fix” me. Glad that didn’t happen! I’m also not much into cooking. As a youngster I associated it with “women’s work” and rebelled against that. Canning, freezing, and cooking food from scratch was for my mom, not me! I still take advantage of modern food products, not so much for my youthful assumptions, but because I’ve not found spending time cooking enjoyable. If I do cook, it has to be simple and fairly quick, which is why I prefer baking. Mix a few things up, pop it in the oven, and you are free to do something else until the timer rings. And as for your comments on being overweight indicating etheric starvation…oof; I have a lot of work to do. Your experiment sounds similar to an exercise of the will, like JMG had posted about, and which I followed. So this will be my exercise to clean up my etheric. Now to decide where to start!

Joy Marie

[kimberlysteele]

I'll never be tidy by nature, at least not in this incarnation. I have to try pretty hard to be neat (especially with my car!) and it is only in the past five years that I have become a great deal tidier. So I totally feel you there. Treating stuff as if it had a soul truly helps because suddenly there is a dimension to it. Places have spirits. So do things. Recognizing them makes them "visible", though not to our usual sense of eyesight.

A suggestion -- always clean as you go when you cook. Meaning, if you are making cookies and there are two bowls involved and you have to dump one bowl into the other, clean Bowl One as soon as it is empty, dry it, and put it away. Do this in a relaxed fashion, have a glass of wine, turn on some good music or a podcast. Cooking can be demoralizing because of the mess it creates or because it is done in a hurry. I have low blood sugar issues: not eating results in light-headedness, dizziness, and grumpiness. Fasting is NOT for me and I will never do it on purpose. Having a snack before cooking dinner usually solves that. I also believe in the old adage "Breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, dinner like a pauper". I don't eat breakfast because it makes me sick to eat a big meal within three hours of being awake, so my lunch is technically breakfast and it is the largest meal of the day. Lunch is more modest but still substantial. Dinner is not as hearty, for instance a decent-sized bowl of cut up fruit or a big salad (basically double the portion size of the average restaurant side salad). If I have leftover soup, I'll just eat a small bowl of it about three hours before going to bed.

The spirits all around us want so badly to be acknowledged and recognized! Our gratitude means a lot to them.

[(Anonymous)]

I can see how recognizing things have spirits will change how I treat them. Usually, a thing is just a thing. Since I started reading JMG, the thought of spirits everywhere has been growing on me. First I recognized it in natural items, trees and such. But if the earth is full of gods/spirits/powers, everything is within the influence of some force. Recognizing this will lead to treading things with respect, order and simplicity.

It reminds me of some stories I read as a child. We had a storybook with tales from around the world. If I remember correctly, one was from Scotland and was about kitchen brownies. They disliked a messy kitchen! They also enjoyed bowls of milk put out for them by the fireplace. Can't remember details of the story though. Another story from Mexico had little beings/spirits (I can't remember the Spanish title for them) helping a little boy with his lazy mother. Mama didn't mend his clothes, have supper ready thus forcing him to scrounge up food himself, etc. The little beings would follow her and do things like stick a spoon in her hand when she passed through the kitchen. She'd think "Why do I have a spoon?" Then she would notice other items laid out on the table, and not knowing the little beings put them there, thought she had done it earlier. "Well, I might as well finish supper!" she'd think, and then do it. When Mama would pick up her book and go to sit down, the little beings would snatch the book out of her hands and replace it with a threaded needle. She'd sit down, look with astonishment at the needle, and then notice her son's torn pants laying on her lap (placed there by you-know-who). "Oh, I meant to fix Pedro's pants!" and she would do so, thinking all along that it was her original idea.

I may need some assistance from the little beings! I wonder if putting out a bowl of milk like in the Scottish story might help, though kitchen brownies can be rather mischievous to have around, and I have no fireplace! I'd have to put the milk on the stove.

Joy Marie

[methylethyl]

Don't beat yourself up about it, though. There are an awful lot of us in the same boat! Definitely on the aspie side here, and it shows when it comes to the executive function required in housekeeping. Ten thousand things that need doing, and so hard to prioritize. Which so often results in not starting to begin with.

What I've had to do, so often, to compensate, is when a task is so large, and so irksome, that I look at it and instantly want to go check my email or eat peanut butter, I have to tell myself "I don't have to wash the dishes right now. I'll just scrape and stack them." and then, "I don't have to wash *all* the dishes right now: I'll just wash the plates." More often than not, once I've begun the task, the rest follows, and there the dishes are, all clean! Once in a while, it really is too much, I leave them stacked, and I wash them in the morning. As long as I started the task, no judgement! It's wonderful how just getting the chaotic, gross heap into a neat stack gives one just enough of a boost to keep going. It looks nicer. The world is less ugly. We have a little positive reinforcement to coast on...

[(Anonymous)]

I've done that before. Just start doing a task, so at least a little bit gets done! So long as I don't keep on saying "I don't have to..." It is rather discouraging to realize that you've put a task off all week, when it could be done and over with in an hour or two. Then you think "Gee, I could of had this done a week ago!" The important thing is, like you said, don't beat yourself up over it.

The other thing I have to watch out for is, once I do finish a task (clearing the clutter from the study, or cleaning out a closet) is then ignoring the area completely because "It's done!" Then the clutter returns, and the closet fills up again. I think I need to develop a regular schedule to handle things, not wait until it get out of hand to address the problem and then feel overwhelmed about it. Plus, really review my habits: what I'm buying, what I'm bringing into the house. I have been better at this the past year, but still have stuff from the past to deal with.

Joy Marie

[hearthspirit]

well said.

The thing I had to fight (still have to) is how much we've been programmed to see emotional labour - etheric labour - not just as imaginary, but as actually a punishment that should not have to be done by any worthy person.

Cleaning your own house? Cooking your own food? Washing your own dishes? Caring for your own children? If you're doing this as an acknowledged component of your life, or role in life, or gods forbid, a valued part of your life - rather than a shameful thing you grimace and do in the hour before you fall into bed exhausted after your real job, you're the pinnacle of Failure at Life and Useless Eater. As a woman, it means that everything my foremothers fought for with the entire feminist liberatory project (bla bla bla) I've thrown away. It proves that I really had been selfishly taking away space from a (by definition) more worthy man when I got a Masters and had a professional career (which I had kicked butt at). It doesn't really help if you actually get paid for these things either - it just seems to weaponise it with even more classism and sexism. Which is all highly ironic, like most of our cultures mental rules, and explains so much about covid.

[kimberlysteele]

Yes -- and the Professional Managerial Class narrative aggrandizes working class mothers by paying them lip service in the media with depictions of funny or saintly "real" moms. Meanwhile, the PMC quietly supports woke policies such as open-border immigration, the point of which is to create an underclass of low wage service slaves to do all of the etheric and emotional work such as child-rearing, construction, food preparation, and cleaning.

Trouble arrives when the slaves doing all the etheric labor ask to be treated like human beings and not just props or feel-good token characters in the movie where the PMCs are always the star.

[(Anonymous)]

Hearthspirit, I’m having a hard time following your ideas: are you saying being good at your Masters level skill and earning money at it was a bad thing, or merely that you’ve been attacked for it?

I self identified as a feminist by age 12, in 1968. To me that meant me and my siblings of both genders could be and do anything that we wanted, to express ourselves as fully as we wanted. It’s been hard to watch the concepts get oversimplified to petty bickering and shaming crud over the decades. Now when I read derisive comments about feminism from younger women who have benefitted from the actions of my second wave feminist peers, I feel confused. I suppose the misunderstandings are inevitable, being generational, after all.

I’d also like an elaboration on your comment that ( the energy imbalance) explains so much about COVID. That is an intriguing idea!

Thank you,

Annette

[methylethyl]

Ha! That was pretty much my mother's attitude about the household arts. Which was why it was so blindingly obvious to me that if we were going to have kids, we could darn well sacrifice a second income so I could raise them, and make sure our house was a place we could live in, and not just a perpetual campsite.

I still suck at those things, having had no role models, but we try.

[(Anonymous)]

I became convinced years ago that old women cook better and that, while part of it can be explained by practice leading to expertise, it's mostly due to older women being more in tune with the ingredients and more loving towards the diners. When I started that belief, I was trying to figure out how it was that I could follow a recipe from my grandma and do it to the letter and STILL not cook something that tasted as good as her cooking. Now I'm pushing 60 and I'm proving my own theory -- I am complimented on my cooking now more than ever, and if I do say so myself, the compliments have increased steadily over my lifetime. You can also tell it when a home cooking or soul food restaurant has an older cook leave. The young cooks just can't do it like the older ones and the food suffers. The customers just have to wait until the cooks "grow up" into their cooking. I would imagine that the same holds true to other ethnicities, but I don't know because I'm an outsider to those cultures and so I can't taste the difference. Does this make any sense?

Vera Lee

[kimberlysteele]

My cooking has gotten better because I'm out of the experimental phase and into the phase where I know what I'm doing 95% of the time. Meaning, I can cook without measuring because I know what the stages of the food are supposed to look, smell, and taste like. Unfortunately, many of us come from families where the cooking tradition has been lost. My mom initially taught me how to cook, but by the time we kids were out of the house, my parents quickly regressed to eating convenience foods. Back in my youth, their cooking was already heavily augmented with cream of mushroom soup, Velveeta, frozen breaded chicken wings, and box macaroni and cheese. Nowadays the only fresh ingredient they use is yellow onions. When I moved back in for a while about seven years ago, I went through that kitchen like a white tornado -- I threw away the flour with bugs crawling through it, the rusty cans and mice-eaten boxes of heaven knows what in the back of the cupboard, and I turned it into a working kitchen again. I made lunch every weekday for them (and myself, of course) for over two years.

The Boomer generation is plagued by the idea that convenience is better than craftsmanship, especially when it comes to food. They've been utterly hoodwinked by the allure of instant, ready-to-eat products.

[methylethyl]

My mother did. not. cook. I learned it all from scratch as an adult. IMO, still not a great cook, but my kids cannot be induced to eat fast food, because "that's gross". So I guess it's not too bad ;)

It's still incredibly weird to have someone over for dinner, and have them gush over the food. I *know* I'm not that good, so it mostly makes me feel bad for what they must be eating at home!

[(Anonymous)]

Is this an excerpt from your book?

I hope it’s going better than mine are. I made a HUGE mistake in Vol. 2 that means I have to go back and rewrite. For once, I thank God for computers.

—Lady Cutekitten

[kimberlysteele]

Yes, it will show up as part of the book. I feel ya on the editing mistakes... been there and done that, many times.

Now I find myself inspired to nest

[(Anonymous)]

All this talking about emotional labor has inspired me to get going on my digging out and dusting in my bathroom and study. I’m also inspired to hang some artwork and decorations in our shared living space with my husband.

Thanks so much for the spark Kimberly, and all you others in this thread.

I could use a little help from everyone: I’m still tweaking the pantheon I use for my SoP. I’m using a Celtic pantheon, that being my genetic roots. Can anyone suggest a goddess of the hearth for holding the north/earth position?

Thanks,

Annette

[(Anonymous)]

I've been putting off cleaning my room for far too long. I was in school, or tired, or whatever excuse I could think of. After all, cleaning takes effort and staring at the internet takes none.

However, reading this made me get my butt in gear! A couple days ago I cleaned my room, organized things, and dusted. What a difference. My room is small, but now that it's clean, it feels bigger! I had a bag of soil on my bookshelf that was left over from school. Just, like, actual soil! I put it outside where it belongs and can be useful. Certainly not useful on a bookshelf!

You know how Jordon Peterson is vilified for saying don't watch porn? People also can't stand that he says to clean your room. Wow!

Anyway, thanks Kimberly!

[kimberlysteele]

Thank you! You made my day. And I'm quite confident the spirits of your room thank you as well!

[methylethyl]

Sometimes you do just need someone to remind you how *nice* it feels when a job is done.

Today, I got out and did yardwork, installed another shelf in the kitchen, switched the youngest's getting-too-small crib thingy out for a proper toddler bed, and busted out the grill for dinner. Feels good!

[kimberlysteele]

Sounds like many missions accomplished! I love that! As for me, I practiced piano, made dinner, and re-potted some of my houseplants.