Want to know a hard truth about me? Something I really don’t like about myself?
Deep breath.
Here goes: I’m often out of integrity when it comes to my relationship with money.
As a woman who is constantly growing in my understanding of myself as a spiritual being, I’m finding that more and more, I experience the world through the lens of love, non-judgment, generosity, and trust. While I’m far from perfect, I’m increasingly familiar with how incredible this open-hearted approach to life feels (it’s divine – in more than one sense of the word 😊).
But….
Bring money into the equation, add a smattering of scarcity-based thoughts, and my perspective quickly shifts from light and free to tight and controlled.
It’s not pretty. Coming to terms with this part of my shadow-side is something I’m still working on, because our societal conditioning around money is S-T-R-O-N-G.
As Lynn Twist writes in her brilliant book The Soul of Money:
Can you relate? Do you have days where you’re walking around happy and free, open and trusting, days where it feels like all is right with the world – and then an unexpected bill comes, or you find out that someone makes more than you do, or a homeless person asks if you can spare a dollar – and just like that, your heart closes?
This disconnect is what I mean by being out of integrity with money. When I make money decisions from a closed heart, I’m not operating from my core values. I’m not bringing consciousness to how I spend, save, earn, or give. I’m not trusting in the universe – or in myself.
Further complicating the matter is the often-promoted spiritual practice of seeking abundance. The law of attraction is a popular concept in new-agey circles. It’s an idea I bought into for a while, because of its undeniable appeal. Just align your vibration with that of abundance, and abundance will arrive. And yet: what if abundance is not what we think it is?
For example, this summer the United States experienced an abundance of wildfires.
I’m grateful that right now, I do not have an abundance of hemorrhoids.
It’s clear that if we really want to dig deep into our relationship with money, we have to look beyond simplistic ideas that are really ego concepts in spiritual clothing. And we also have to go deeper than budgets, financial planning, or minimalism.
If we’re ready to transform our relationship with money, we must look at our conditioning around it.
We must examine the immense meaning and power our society has given money, and choose which beliefs actually feel true for us and which ones we’d like to let go of.
We must figure out how to consciously approach money – a distinctly human invention – even as we deepen in our understanding of ourselves as spiritual beings.
