Money: from slave to soulfilling

When I was nine my stepsisters and I were preoccupied with entrepreneurial pursuits. We made candy to sell to our neighborhood and we offered to do any tasks our parents or neighbors needed in order to make money. The reasons we had to be so voraciously collecting an income eludes me now, but there is one thing that stands out starkly about how this period of my early life shaped what would become my understanding of “reality”, and furthermore, how limited I would allow my perspective to become in maneuvering through adulthood, through life.

Those early years of trying to make money for no other reason than, “just to do it”, verified how life would go in my young mind. This thought pattern created justification for an eagerness to become an adult for no other reason than able to make money just to make money, thereby eroding sensitivity for money as a currency of energy transacted to breathe life more fully into our individual and collective consciousness. That was never talked about in my family. And, it was further embellished as my father began to pay us money for our birthdays and holidays instead of spending time with us. Making money became the only reason to get or give gratitude; and this praise was only reserved for the kind of money you make from scratch: entrepreneurial money, to be exact.

Decades later, the reality that the American culture of “You can be whatever you want to be” which loosely translates into “You can start a business or run one or manage your own financial freedom” for many of us, has caused us to grow deep misunderstandings of why we are doing what we are doing. In fact, since the age of nine, the reiteration of the same idea only grew louder as college came and went with student loans paralyzing any real movement towards soul reviving independence. As a result, I spent ten long, quiet years in my mind trying to unlock, like Houdini, my self-worth from the debt that I believed I would be saddled with the rest of my life. The notion that my own financial freedom was the only way I could experience self-respect inwardly or outwardly, truly became my mantra for life. “When I am making enough….”, “When I am out of debt….” You can fill in the blanks, but this was entirely how my mind oriented throughout my 20’s, thereby cutting off much of my vantage point for fun, exploration, creativity and adventure.

Today, the idea of working with the currency of money is a bit more nuanced for me. I understand the intense power that financial freedom has on a person’s ability to act on behalf of the Divine, day in and day out, however, I also understand that money as an end goal, as the reason why we are choosing our life’s path, is simply the result of a culture that has lost its moral compass. For this reason, I have decided to make amends with my relationship with money. Instead of it being an end-goal that inadvertently harbors fear of loss and manipulation of others to retrieve, I’ve decided that money is like Love, it is something to which we shall freely give with the knowing that enough will find its way back into our Hearts and Lives that we will be satiated. It is in this new relationship with money that I have started to experience my divinely feminine power; the power that allows others to give to her – the power to Receive. In this power, I have found that I am constantly being given opportunities by others and by the universe to expand and become more fully alive in my body, in my mind and in my soul. And, this often means money is offered to me as a measure of the expansion that I am experiencing.

Uncomfortable as it sometimes feels, when I receive money today, I view it as the currency that we communicate gratitude through. In other words, money has become another form of appreciation, of acknowledgement, of surrender to the process of evolution, which continues to remind us that we are all deeply connected to one another, and will forever create tangible systems, like money, that demonstrate this unity.

While money is seen in many places as a crude measure of assimilation and greed, I’ve come to view it as a tool that can allow us to speak our minds, to engage in the conversation. Empowering ourselves about money, the physical human needs that must be purchased with money, and the inequities around how money is distributed globally, is essential if we are going to empower ourselves to lead on issues that will heal our Planet, our Bodies, and protect the Environment.

So, for me, money has become a symbol that each one of us not only has permission but also the duty, to use to express ourselves fully. Giving and receiving money is one tool that we can use to share our voice so that we, humanity, can continue to adapt into the folds of a Life-Friendly, Sustainable, and Integrated species on this Planet. In order to do this, we must acknowledge the currencies that are potently circulating this Planet, and become comfortable with their reason for being, so that we might learn a better way to be.

And so it is. Jai ma.