TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 13 – Work is Birth
Hi, it’s Megan. Welcome to today’s Notes from Dunfanaghy. Today I am thinking about one of the core underpinnings of all of my work.
So, you know, there are these kind of four main themes that I cover at the retreat in Dunfanaghy. We talk about identity — your own identity, the identity of your work. We talk about the context in which you were formed, so, you know, these kind of major forces of family and culture. We talk about your work. And then we talk about how to ground that whole thing, how to use the insights to begin to move forward in a grounded way.
And within that, there are so many different directions that we go. We quite often talk about story at the retreat, like, I leave enough space that we can have a random session about something that lots of people are interested in. So there’s all of these different directions we can go, and it’s very much in response to the group and who is there.
But there are some core underlying concepts that I’m always holding in my mind. And I guess this is kind of like the context for the retreat, the context for my work. I’m always reminding people, and thinking about, some of these things that I have come to know to be true about work, and about taking an artistic approach to work and expressing ourselves through our work and all of that.
And so the one that I’m thinking about today a lot is: work is birth. Which many of you may have heard me talk about before, but I feel like this is not just some kind of cool intellectual idea. I think about this pretty much every day. It’s so fundamental, and I’m always trying to get it more and more into my body.
And so I’m going to explain what I mean by “work is birth” in a second. How I came to this realization is — I came out of the traditional business world, which does not directly teach that work is war, but that is essentially what is being taught. Like, lots of business strategy is born out of military strategy. And so I had the experience of running a business, going to all of the trainings in the business world, learning all the things you’re supposed to do to build a business, and was able to do some of it and not able to do some other parts. And there are parts of it that just never really sat right with me.
And at some point I realized, oh, that is because it’s being taught as a war paradigm. Right, what we know as the business paradigm is a war paradigm. If you even start to pay attention to the language, it’s about dominating markets and crushing competitors and all of this. It’s very much like own your territory, you know, all of that stuff.
And so it kind of — let me process this in real time, put this together — the thing I have put together before is that I grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, in essentially a war zone. And so that is why I had a sensitivity to the way things were being taught in the business world, and I wasn’t able to articulate it and say, oh, this is a war paradigm, and that’s why it doesn’t quite sit right with me. But I had that experience.
The thing that I’m just now putting together is that — so I grew up in Northern Ireland through the second half of the Troubles, but it wasn’t until I left and moved to London, and was in my 20s, before I really realised that I had grown up in a war zone. Which might sound unbelievable or silly or crazy or whatever, but that is the truth. Like, I did not — it obviously was everywhere, and there were bombs, and things were on fire, and there were places you couldn’t go, and there was, you know, on the news every day someone else had been killed — but that didn’t, I didn’t connect all of that up to “equal war zone” until I was an adult, and until I was completely out of it.
And actually, as I talk, I realised that that was kind of my experience of the business world as well. Like, I didn’t realise what it was when I was in it, even though all of the evidence was there. I wasn’t really able to put my finger on “this is a war paradigm” until after I had begun to shift how I was working, until after I had begun to take an artistic approach to what I was doing.
And also, by the way, these words, business and art, I’m using them because they’re good approximations, but all business does not have to be done in a war paradigm — obviously that’s what I’m trying to do with my work. And also, the art world is a war paradigm too, you know — your kind of standard art world is basically the corporate world, there’s so many similarities between the business world and the established art world. So we hold all of these terms lightly.
But, stick with me — where am I going with this? Oh yeah, so when I had my first child — so I had started, whenever I was pregnant, reading up about — I was just reading women who were writing about motherhood and work, and, you know, kind of bleeding the lines between well, work’s over here, and motherhood is over here as this separate thing. Like, people who were taking their experience of motherhood and applying it to their experience of the work world, and joining everything in their life up, joining up all of the wisdom at the same time.
So I had started exploring that when I was pregnant, and then it was after — I also was obviously learning about what happens during birth, as part of my birth preparation. And so it was that, combined with my experience of birth and early motherhood, that made me realize — oh, holy, this is what work is. Like, I have moved away from the business-as-usual kind of approach, and I was aware that I was trying to take a more creative approach, but I still didn’t have any language for it and I didn’t really know what it was. And so it was after that that I realized: it’s birth. That’s the metaphor that I need here to make my work make sense, and my creative process make sense.
And also, somewhere in the midst of that, I realized, oh, what I had been being taught in the business world was war. It was business is war, it was work is war. And so I started to kind of solidify this idea of work is birth. It’s not war.
And so here’s one of the biggest things that made this fall into place for me. Whenever I was preparing for birth, I took some online course, and they were talking about the different hormones involved in labor and birth and all of that. But the thing that jumped out at me was that labor begins — I always just assumed that, well, my body will know when the baby is cooked, and some hormonal signals will be sent, and that is when labor will begin.
But what I learned in this course was that actually labor begins when the baby’s body sends a hormonal signal to the mother’s body — which, of course, makes perfect sense. The baby’s going to know when the baby is cooked, the baby is going to know when it’s ready to emerge. And so it sends a hormonal signal, and then my body would kick into gear, and labor would begin, and contractions would begin, and all of that business.
And so for me, this is my experience of every single piece of work that I have ever created that has been like work that has come from within me — not necessarily work that I’ve done in the business world where I’ve forced it out of me, or I’ve just, you know, made something happen because it’s on my list and it’s on a schedule or whatever. Like, I’m talking about my real work, that has come from somewhere in me, or has come through me, or whatever.
That work does not give even the tiniest shit about my schedule, or my idea of how it should happen, or what it should look like, or when it should happen. The way that that work has always emerged is: it has let me know when it is ready to be born, and then it’s like — you know when labor begins, it’s like, oh, this is happening, I have no choice over this. I can’t say, actually, it’s not really working out for me today, can we come back and do this tomorrow. It’s like, oh no, my body is doing this, this is happening.
And so that’s my experience of creating work as well. Like, it comes when it’s ready. Pardon me — it comes when it’s ready, it can’t be forced if it’s not ready. And when it’s ready to come, it starts coming, and I don’t really have any choice in the matter. It’s very much like fruit that ripens on the tree.
And so whenever I realised that, it made my life so much easier, because just knowing, like, oh, I don’t have to try and force this thing, that’s not my job, that’s not even within my realm of capability. Like, the work will let me know when it is ready, and my job is to pay attention for what is ripe — what is ready to be born in my work, what’s the fruit that’s ready to be plucked off the tree. Now I’m mixing metaphors, but I think you can go with me.
And so, in some ways, I’ll tell you the other experience that I had during pregnancy — because at the beginning I was sick, I was so tired, I had never been more tired in my life. I tried to fight that for a while, I tried to stick to my regular schedule or whatever, and then got to the point where I realised, I can’t do this, I’m just going to have to surrender to my body.
And I think I was able to do this because I believed in the work of pregnancy. I believed, well, if I get to the end of each day, I’m still growing a human, so I’m still doing something productive. That’s how I was able to turn off my programming temporarily. I was like, well, I’m still not a total piece of shit, I’m still doing something productive, even if I don’t get my work done.
And so I just realized, okay, I’m just going to have to sleep whenever I need to sleep, and eat when I need to eat, and I will work when I feel like I have some energy to work — which is what I did. And through the duration of my pregnancy, I got pretty much as much work done as I ordinarily would in that period of time. But the thing that was completely different was there was so much less stress and angst and worry around it.
And so for me, this understanding that work is birth — it doesn’t necessarily make the process of creating the work any easier. There’s still work to be done, and birth is still a brutal, vicious, amazing, terrifying thing. But all of that kind of angst around it, and all of that, like, feeling of I’m trying to shove this massive boulder up a hill — you just get to set all of that aside.
The work is in the kind of emotional labor of surrender. I’ve been able to go, okay, well, how am I going to allow myself to surrender to this, like, what do I need to put in place so that I’m supported to be able to actually surrender to my creative process, to this creative birth, and to not interfere with it, and not get in the way of it, and to allow the work to come out when it’s ready.
And so, in some ways, it looks completely the same on the surface, but my experience of work completely shifted whenever I realized, oh, this is birth, and I can just allow it to be this process, and I’m not in charge of it. I do not get to dictate here’s exactly what is created and when. I can collaborate in the process. I can show up and do my part of the process. I can aspire to certain things. I can follow my curiosity and imagine what I might like to create at some point. But the work has its own pace, and it’s my job to tune into that pace and to allow it to come when it’s ready to come.
So I think I’ll leave it there today. So everything we talk about at the retreat, I’m always holding that idea at the back of my mind. Like, I’m not interested in beating anything into submission, or coming up with grand plans that we then go away and take massive action on until it’s done. It’s much more nuanced than that. It’s much more about becoming attuned to your own creative process and creating the conditions that will allow the work to emerge.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you tomorrow.