The Golden Tapestry: Building Business Beyond the Matrix
Beyond either-or binaries.
Length: 8:35
This voice note was taken from a pop up audio salon I hosted in 2025.
There are two ways to build a business. One leaves you depleted, splintered, and operating in constant scarcity. The other is regenerative, organic, and refuses the either-or game entirely.
Most of us have been taught to build from the first model without realizing there's an alternative that's been working for most of human history.
In this transmission, I name both systems - what I call matrix business and golden tapestry business - and show you how to recognize which one you're operating from. I also share the questions I ask myself when I catch myself slipping back into extractive thinking.
If your business feels like a zero-sum game where you have to choose between sustainability and ethics, between your wellbeing and your income, this transmission will show you what's possible when you step outside that programming.
Transcript
Good morning, if you are listening to this in the morning, and good whatever time of day. I didn't need to do all that, but I just did all that. I hope you guys are doing well.
I want to talk a little bit about what I like to call the golden tapestry, which is what this is all about—this whole methodology of business that I champion, what we do at the House, which is gonna get a rebrand potentially. I'm sitting on it. We'll see.
And yeah, what it means tangibly.
So for many of you, you likely know the term "matrix," and we talk about matrix, and that word really gained popularity from The Matrix movies specifically. So when we talk about matrix anything—matrix business, matrix love—we're talking about the world system that is extractive, that is often hierarchical, that is just not working for us as humanity. And that is really the prevalent system.
In Christian spaces, which I used to be a part of, we would use a term like "the world"—"be in the world but not of the world"—and what they were referring to was this matrix system. And I'm not a student of every faith, but I'm sure there is terminology in every faith for the kind of fallen architecture that we're currently plugged into.
By the way, this includes patriarchy, racism, xenophobia—all these isms and -ies are all a part of the matrix, which its sole purpose is to divide, to create and generate negative emotions, and just to extract.
So anyways, when we do business plugged into the matrix—which is essentially trying to do business in the prevalent way that business is done—when we try to do business and make money in the way that the world promotes it, we will feel depleted. We will feel unenergized. We will often feel like we are splintered, that we have to give up parts of ourselves to achieve and attain what we want.
And there's so many—I'm sure people have so many different names for what is opposite of the matrix. I like to call it the golden tapestry.
And the golden tapestry is this organic, natural way of doing life, and really I think it's matriarchal. And don't get me on that soapbox because matriarchal—I will get on the soapbox for a minute just to be clear—matriarchal is not patriarchy but with women on top.
Matriarchal societies centered moms and kids, and in doing so built these concentric circles of support around the most vulnerable people in society. And it was not about consolidating power at the top, which is also inherent to patriarchy. Even if you took men out of the equation, patriarchy is a structure where the goal is to concentrate power at the top, and so energy is extracted. I mean, look at our financial systems and how the wealth divide is increasing—that is a result of patriarchy. Again, just take men out of it, though they matter in that. But the structure itself is about concentrating, extracting, etc.
Matriarchy is about diffuse power. It's a more egalitarian society. It's a society inherently that values the more intuitive and quote-unquote feminine elements of life—so the spirituality. The priestesses were revered. The priests and priestesses were revered. People who worked with the earth, who were in rhythms with the earth, were revered and were important. And so it wasn't just cerebral activities. It's not just the engineers and the lawyers and the doctors who are revered and who are paid well—it's everybody who would contribute to society. Everybody had their place.
So when I think about the matrix and I think about the golden tapestry, it is in a lot of ways this shift to a more matriarchal way of life, a more earth-based, rhythmic, egalitarian way of life.
Anyways, so when we look at the golden tapestry in business, what we see is this return to and recreation of an understanding that business does not have to come at the expense of anybody, including ourselves.
In the matrix way of business, there is a zero-sum game, right? I don't know if I actually used that correctly—if you know me, you know my idioms. I struggle with idioms. But with matrix business, we are stepping on other people to get to a place. There is a lot of scarcity. "If they are getting clients, those are clients I don't have."
And there has been a lot more talk in conversation around abundance and community in business, and that is the golden tapestry coming through, right? Nothing is ever purely one thing or the other, so we'll often operate in a mixture of these. But I want to highlight the golden tapestry so we can be more aware of it and call it out and invite more of that.
And so in this golden tapestry of business, we can work less than 40 hours and be sustained. We can rise with the sun and sleep with the sun and follow our energy movements and still have enough and still get everything done we need to get done. We can charge prices that are ethical and accessible to the people we want them to be accessible to and still make enough to support ourselves.
The golden tapestry invites us out of this either-or game. Oftentimes when we're doing business in the matrix, it feels like an either-or game. So when you get to a place where like, "I can either charge exorbitant sums of money or I can charge less but burn myself out working with so many people"—congratulations, you have plugged into the matrix way of doing business in this very specific place.
And the beautiful thing is that we can breathe, take a step back, and attune ourselves to the golden tapestry. And we can ask ourselves, "Okay, where have I limited my vision? Where am I saying this is either-or and there are other opportunities?"
We can say, "What lesson does nature have for me that I can apply to this?" That's a big part of the golden tapestry. It's organic. It is from nature, right?
Other questions I love to ask: putting myself outside of it. If I was a consultant or a spokesperson for golden tapestry business, what would I tell myself?
And then on a very granular, practical level, when we're in these micro moments of impasse, of frustration, of feeling like, "Oh, this is the way it has to be done"—taking time out to get in nature, get your feet in the grass. Honestly, I hate the feel of grass on my feet unless it's very manicured, which I know is very not green-witchy of me, so I struggle with that. But I love getting in the sun. I like voice-noting a friend who is also trying to plug into this golden tapestry and eliminate more of that matrix programming.
All of these different things can help us recalibrate and orient our system—recalibrate, I don't think calibrate is a word—calibrate our system and orient ourselves again to the real reality that there is not one right way to do business.
And honestly, the golden tapestry way of engaging with life is so much more ancient, is so much more—has so much more lasting power and has only fallen out of favor in the small swath of human history. But it's been what we've operated in for so long. And I want to study more about this anthropologically, etc., but this is what I know from the little I've studied.
So that was perhaps a little pie in the sky, a little nebulous. But as always, I welcome comments. I welcome questions. I'm happy to elaborate further. And as I get more clarity on how to really talk about this, I'll come back in here with more of that.
But today I would love to hear, as you go about your day, moments where you recognize, "Okay, here is this golden tapestry, this golden way of doing business," and where you see even the matrix way of business that is not regenerative and is extractive.
Member discussion