an interview with kiana elikins of a loving practice on how equally emphasizing material and nonmaterial needs can cahnge our relationship with ourselves. interview by Matt birkhold
Matt Birkhold: Personally, what's it mean to you to make our non-material needs for thriving as important as our material needs for survival?
Kiana Elkins: I want to call attention to the emphasis on thriving. I think a lot about how hard it is to be a person in the world. Like every person I know—and so I assume—every person in the world has experienced violence in some capacity. If we're only caring for ourselves, with material needs like housing, food, water, money—mostly money—if that's the only focus, we aren't taking care of our soul. We're not taking care of ourselves as whole people. We deserve care. We deserve love. We know shit is fucked up, and that's true. But we can give something different to ourselves by being with each other, by reaching out to each other and trying to be in deep and considerate relationships. When we come together with the people we have direct access to and help each other satisfy non-material and material needs in equal amounts, that’s the work of liberation. It is the creation of liberation. It's not in the future. It's not out there. We can create freedom for each other in these relationships that we have together.
Matt: Thank you. So tell me about Loving Practice. How do you describe the work that it does?
Kiana Loving Practice is my business. It’s inspired by bell hooks and her work on love and loving. I was introduced to the concept, “a loving practice,” from All About Love. In that book she says that loving practice is not just about self-satisfaction. It's the way that we end domination and oppression. She talks about it throughout the book but I was like,”What does that mean? What is a loving practice? What does that actually look like? So I started talking to people and exploring what it means to engage with love as a practice. I offered a course called Cultivating a Loving Practice, where I break down a theoretical framework around loving practice. I was asking people to do the work to build community and they were like, “Yeah, that sounds good. But it means I have to have a hard conversation with my best friend, and I don't want to do that.” So now a lot of my work focuses on conflict. I identify conflict as a way to practice love. The willingness to be in conflict is an act of love, it's me saying, “I want to be in relationship with you.” “I'm willing to be uncomfortable, to be in relationship with you.” Loving Practice has a membership community and soon I’ll be doing public conflict education in different ways.
Matt: How does a loving practice meet material and non-material needs?
Kiana Loving Practice is heavily rooted in the non-material aspect with a focus on how the non-material might move us towards satisfying material needs in more communal ways. One of the people I work with needed to move, couldn’t find anyone to help, and ended up hiring people. It was expensive. In our work together, we talked about her relationships, the people in her life who she doesn’t feel supported by. We looked at which non-material needs aren't being met. She wasn’t feeling understood, didn’t feel like she belonged, didn’t feel cared for. Then we created a plan to satisfy those needs and to come into relationship with people who might be able to help. Once we start to ask for our needs to be met, other people start to ask, too. So it's a reciprocal community building process.
Matt: How have you seen people transform by making their non-material needs important?
Kiana: I feel like the first thing that happens for people is an awareness of the values that they say they have but have a hard time practicing. There's the initial moment where people who say and believe that they value community are like, “Oh, I have been trying to do all of this stuff in a really individualistic way.” Or, “I have been determining what success looks like by my bank account.” Then they're like, “That's not aligned with my values,” and then they start thinking more about the people and the relationships. It changes your whole orientation to life in a deep way. The biggest thing I've seen is reorientation to time. That is the scarcest resource we have, and I think people start to realize that if they don’t have time for family or friends, that feels terrible. “I don't have time to take care of myself.” That's horrible.
Matt: How has doing this work transformed you? How does doing it feel?
Kiana: For the most part I feel like every day I'm living into a freedom dream. Like I'm experiencing freedom every day. I used to identify as a pervasively lonely person. I'm a survivor of childhood abuse and that made my orientation to the world isolating and defensive. I didn’t allow people to get close to me. Once I started thinking about love as a practice, thinking about the ability to be in conflict with people, I felt more confident. That’s what allowed me to start my business, and that's something I've been dreaming about for 5 years, but never had the confidence to do. There are times where my material needs are not met and there are people in my life who are doing what they can to help me because of the depth of our relationship, which feels incredible as a person who felt pervasively lonely, to have all these people orienting themselves toward me. I've been able to really live into my values, and those are values of liberation. My deepest desire in this world is for me to be free, for you to be free, and for us to be free. But we are not free. But there are these moments where I feel deeply free. The way that I move through this world, the choices I'm able to make are all rooted in my freedom.
This summer, join Kiana and the Loving Practice community in learning how to build conflict resilience, live into your liberatory values, and cultivate care-based community relationships. Learn more and register.
