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Money

Everyone's interested in money issues because everyone has money issues.

It looks like one seems to have an issue about money, whether you have it or you don't. And it's one of those issues that creates a very strong identity. Money is kind of our exchange with the world— it’s how we interact with the world on a certain level. It’s very natural to create an identity that goes with it.

I'm rich, I'm poor, I'm struggling. I'm the provider. It's a very loaded issue. I’ve noticed that workshops about abundance are always successful. There are many levels of abundance. Financially, there's such a sense of lack. The interesting thing about a money issue is you can look at a hundred different people, and the issue will show up in a hundred different ways. 

When I was young and I had no money, I was living very hand to mouth. Money was a survival issue. Sure, I was never out on the street, but I wasn't sure where my next meal would come from. There were some shaky days. 

Then I got older and then suddenly I had kids. I wasn't worried about where my next meal was coming from, but then there's a whole different level of money issue. And I realized I never really had money issues until we were worrying about how to pay for that school. Or is it the same? It looked completely different, but it was still an issue about money.

If you want to know about a person, track how they spend their money.

What are their priorities? It's not good or bad. It's not a judgment. It's just a lot of information. Do you spend your money on self care? Do you send it to charities? What is the priority? Do you donate to the school that gave you so much? It's really very telling we — we bring that exchange back to what we care about in a particular way. 

Often, if someone is younger and they don't have a lot of money, that's not judged so much by society. For me, it was even kind of romantic because I was an actress. There was an identity in the starving young actress for me.

That novelty started to wear off in my thirties. There's an expectation that you should have a little stability in your life. Maybe you're looking for a partner if you don't have one, and you want to be able to bring something to the table. You're thinking about having children.

In your forties, then there's a sense of, you really need a sense of stability. Maybe you have a family to provide for. Money is stressful in a very different way than it was in your twenties.

In your fifties and sixties, you're starting to think about what your life is going to look like when you stop working. Will your money outlive you? At every stage of life, it's something we need to look at. 

We think of money issues as being about people who don't have money, and their issues. But I've also witnessed issues presenting in people who do have money. They carry a different kind of burden.

There's a lot of responsibility that comes with money.

People judge other people who have money. People I've known who come from wealthy families with trust funds, don't tend to put that out there because of the judgment. They receive judgement from people who think they must be lucky and don’t have any problems, which is unfair. So they feel they need to hide what they have.

If you lost your abundance tomorrow, would that mean that God doesn't love you? No. But a lot of people might view it as a punishment. That's another way this issue shows up. The idea that God rewards: “If I'm doing the work that I’m meant to do that I'm going to get paid for it.” Money becomes a way that we judge our worthiness.

That can be very hard because it can point to deeper issues of trust in the divine.

“Am I really on my life's purpose? Well, how can I be if I'm not earning a living? If I’m not earning, then the divine is telling me that this isn't right.”

Money also keeps us in social circles. People who have the same amount of money like to hang out together. Not exclusively, but it's been an observation, and a generalization of course. When I was living hand to mouth, and I had some friends who had more money, and they would want to go to a nicer restaurant. They said, “don't worry about it. I'll take care of you.” I’d say, “I really appreciate that. But I'd rather go to the cheap place and pay for myself. It was not their issue, it was mine. It sort of works on all levels. 

When I was first married, my husband made a lot more money than I did. He was fine. He didn't have money issues. I had money issues. I was feeling insecure about what I was bringing into the relationship. Am I really an equal partner? Because for some people, money is power. Not my beautiful husband, but for some people it is. For me, it was that kind of insecurity, a kind of shame. It was a way that I was trying to compensate for something that I was feeling.

It was really an issue about shame masquerading as a money issue, but that's where it was showing up. It took me a long time to relax and realize that it doesn't have to be that way. It doesn't have to be something that separates us 

Sometimes it’s about how we support each other, or demonstrates a lack of support.

For some of us, it's survival issue. For most of us, it's a combination of things and it's not so cut and dry, which is why it's hard to know what we're dealing with. 

Often, the person who makes more money has more power in a relationship. Not always, that's another generalization.

What is money? What are we really talking about here? We're not really talking about money as a currency, although that's how money shows up. We're really talking about money as exchange. And whenever you have interpersonal exchange, you have issues. It's just where our issues show up. 

We think of money as the, as the bill, or the Bitcoin, or even the service that goes back and forth. But what we're really talking about is an exchange. What is that power issue? What is that insecurity issue? What is that identity as someone who has money or someone who doesn't have money? Or the identity as someone who should be earning more money or someone who uses that money as a definition of how successful they are. 

How do you make sense of that? I think you just do the same you do with other issues: you bring awareness and unconditional love to it. You just see it for what it is. How does it show up in my life? Where, and how does it keep me separate from the world around me? 

Ideally money can be a tool.

It can be a tool to connect to the world. It can be a tool to help create, to bring a vision to life. It can be a tool to support. An exchange is a beautiful thing if it's not loaded down by our issues.

What happens in that exchange? Where are the points where I get separated, the moments that I get isolated? That story I told with my husband— in that exchange, I was in a separate place from him. Can you look at that?Can you break that down? Do you have the willingness to let that go?

Looking at money issues, very often we feel like we need to be a certain someone. We need to earn enough. Our value feels conditional on what we can provide. Not that that support isn't welcome and important, but it's also limiting. It keeps that separation going on. And that identity becomes a problem.

A lot of it comes back to shame. Money is a great way to try to prove to ourselves in the world that we are okay. “See, I must be okay: I have a lot of money, I'm generating money. I must be okay on some level.”

For me, giving feels safer. I'm a giver because in order to receive, you have to admit that you're vulnerable. There's a courage to the willingness to allow yourself to be helped, that you have something to learn that you actually need support. It requires much more vulnerability to receive in that way. And that can be much harder for a lot of people. So if you have a real, genuine exchange, that's going on all the time. People have their strengths and their weaknesses and all of that.

I think a key to abundance is the willingness to receive.

You have to be relaxed and feel safe enough to be open. That courage opens the door to gratitude. And I think gratitude is the key. If we don't acknowledge what we have in our lives, we can't be grateful for it. And how can we have happiness without gratitude? Without it, we're just coming from a place of lack. 

If there wasn’t money, what would we do with ourselves?

It's hard to imagine, because everything we're talking about today really isn't about the currency. It's about the exchange and the issues that come up around that exchange.

If we went to a system of bartering, I would suggest that then we'd have the same kinds of issues show up, although they would probably look different. We would have values on different services and judgments about that. 

I suspect that we would still have those fundamental issues and they would find new and creative ways of expressing themselves. I think the fact that we are always experiencing ourselves in separations means that we need to identify ourselves in different ways. What is our value? What is our worth? 

What am I? And what are you? Where are we separate? And what is the standing of that? Money is a very easy way that we can do that, but it's certainly not the only way. 

If you track how you feel about whatever your money issue is- that you have it and you don't deserve it, or that you don't have it. If you track that, you're going to find something much deeper. We look to that in healing- we look to bring that to the light to it. 

It's hard to imagine life without money, because we've put so much emphasis on money, and money as a means for how we value ourselves.

But even if we used a bartering system, we would have a lot of the same problems wouldn't we? We would say, “my service is of more value,” or, “that's not a fair exchange because your service only does that.”

If it's not the cost of this or that, then the exchange will be represented in a different way. We can't live without exchange, nor do we want to. Currencies and banking are just some of the different ways of structuring that exchange. And the moment you organize something, it's just going to have its own set of problems, right?

But you know, the issues are fundamental. I suggest that the provider issue would exist whether or not you have currency. Without currency, then you have to go out and hunt. And bring home enough food. The issue of survival will still be there. 

Once or twice, someone has asked me, “how could you possibly charge to teach this healing modality? It doesn't come from any of us. It comes from the divine. So how can you charge for sessions?”

 It's a valid question, but I can only answer, “if I didn't charge to do it, then I couldn't do it full time.” I'm not independently wealthy. I need to have a way to travel, to bring it to people. I have to charge, as part of the exchange set up. 

Behavior can look the same on the outside, but come from a very different place. You can serve from a place of unconditional love, volunteer, and take action. That's a beautiful thing. Someone else could take the exact same action, but come from a place of insecurity, trying to make themselves feel better because they have their own shame. The action may look the same and it may help. It has value. Where we come from when we're doing that is worth looking at regardless of the action, and that's much harder. 

Service can be a path to awakening, but it depends on how you look at it. Many people are thinking, “what can I do? What can I do?” The real service is comes from a place of asking, “what needs to be done?” 

Many people do the wonderful thing because it makes them feel better about themselves. That's not bad. I don't mean to put it down, but it is something worth looking. When you really give something freely, it means that you have to be free from where you're giving it.

These issues, especially money issues, point to the places where we don't feel free.

Are you donating all that money to the hospital so that you can have your name on the building? I think for most of us though, it's a mixture. We have that genuine love, and then of course, as human beings, we have our issues. It gets a little muddled, but it's worth looking at. 

If you’re someone who has money and you want to show the world that you're really a good person, volunteering is a great way to demonstrate to the world how generous you are. That's not giving freely. If you feel guilty about having money, and I think there are a number of people who have money and feel they don't deserve it, a good way to address that and behavior could be volunteering.

I realized that there is very often a difference between old money and new money. The attitudes come with families that have been in status for generations, that's loaded with identity. There's this innate feeling they're above everyone else, that they're more educated. And society supports these ideas.

How does one find a sense of security and freedom, no matter where they are?

I don't know that there’s a particular right answer to this question, I think it just speaks to freedom and what that is. Where we can recognize it and how we can find it in our lives.

Step one is seeing an issue for what it is, whether you're a “have” or a “have not”. Whatever that money issue is, how does it reflect in that deeper place? What is the identity it's creating? And are you willing to give that up? Are you willing to be free of that identity, which is not so easy because even if the identity is uncomfortable, it's still familiar. When we let an identity or an issue go, we don't necessarily know what it's going to look like going forward. That's the scary part of transformation, healing and awakening. We have this idea we're going to let go of our money issues, our identity issues, or shame issues, and we're going to be a better version of ourselves. But really, how we experience ourselves is  a compilation of all these other things.

So the real freedom is to recognize issues for what they are. Bring love to them, bring healing to that, awaken them energetically and in consciousness, and then be curious and courageous enough to see what's there. Then the freedom isn't just being free from what it was once attached to.

The thing about issues is that they're distracting. We put a lot of time and energy and thought, worry, stress and tension into a money issue. It keeps us in this whole experience.

When we put that down, well then what do we have left? What we do without that issue? Then we stop and take a look at what we really are, which is not a person in an experience of separation, it’s really more divinity in form. That's the awakening, and that's really what VortexHealing® is about. It's a lineage about awakening. It functions like a healing modality. We target issues. We bring energy and consciousness to them, but the real healing is waking up out of these identities, letting that go bit by bit, issue by issue. Over time we recognize “I'm not my money issues,” and “I'm not my shame issue.” 

And then you kind of clear the decks in a way from all these distractions. And then what do you have left? What you have is that pure freedom. The thing that's untouched by all of that, which is really unconditional presence.

When we work with VortexHealing®, it's very functional to target the issues as we've discussed. And that's why I love the issue series because it's a great way of defining those and looking at them. But every healing becomes an awakening.

And then it's a recognition of that true self. That true self with a capital S- not the personal self and struggle, but that divinity that brings itself out of the experience of separation. That's the awakening process. And so that's where we're going. The world is waking up. The world is moving towards a place where it's recognizing its stuff and wants to be free.