I was out walking in the woods the other day, here on the West Coast of BC, navigating the November trails. You may know how it is here - with water everywhere! I was doing my best to dodge the huge puddles that had completely taken over my path, and that got me thinking about money. (Weird?)
Here's the thing about money: we've all got our own wacky relationship with it, right? Most of us are stuck in a mindset of, "If only I had more". That might look like dreaming about that vacation we think we can't take, or wishing we could buy better presents for our friends, or finally starting that retirement savings account that we keep putting off. Some folks get very serious about it, using phrases like, "I've got all this money, so I'd better manage it properly!" It is a rare few who just allow money to come and go without getting all worked up about it. Let's be honest - they are definitely in the minority.
I find it kind of wild when I look at my family of origin and reflect on how we all grew up in the same house, with (one might presume) the same benefits, the same challenges, the same everything - yet all the siblings ended up with different ideas about money! In my family's case, money was all about control. You may know the type of deal, where there are transactions that take place using language like, "I'll give you money, but you had better do what I say, then". Everyone in my family handled that sort of interaction differently. Some of my siblings had a, "Nope; not having it - I'm going to make my own money so nobody can tell me what to do", reaction. Others went the opposite way by just deciding to find a way to live with less. There's got to be a sweet spot in there somewhere, though, right? Surely there is a place of balance between holding onto every penny for dear life or pushing money away.
I hit a point in my life where I was so fed up with the whole money thing that I wanted nothing to do with it. Wouldn't you know it - I ended up 'broke'. That was a time when I went ‘shopping’ at the food bank instead of the grocery store, and I had to make those awful calls to creditors where I wound up begging for more time to pay up. I even got to the point of declaring bankruptcy. Here's the crazy part, however - declaring bankruptcy turned out to be the most freeing thing I have ever done! It was like getting a clean slate. Suddenly, I had a fresh chance to build a whole new relationship with money - on MY terms, rather than basing it on all that old baggage that I had been hauling around with me since childhood.
Social activist, Lynne Twist, who authored the book, The Soul of Money, wrote, “Money is like water - it needs to flow.” And man, do we have water around here! Looking at the November trails I mentioned at the start of this blog, I noticed that not only was there water flooding everywhere, but that it was on a mission to find its flow - through every crack, every dip and every little channel. Some of the water sat in stagnant pools, but most of the water I encountered as I walked along was moving - it was going somewhere. That was what had made me think about my own money situation. "Am I holding on too tight", I wondered, "or am I letting my money flow where it needs to go?"
Here's another contemplation really 'gets' me fired up: what IS money, anyway, when you really think about it? By itself, money is nothing. It's just paper, or metal, or numbers on a screen. We're the ones who make it into this big, scary thing. Through all my ups and downs with money - having it, losing it, finding my balance - I've learned that 'something bigger' is at work here in the world than our small viewpoints allow us to see. Now my relationship with money is governed by a faith in that something that is so much bigger. I now lean into my faith that The Universe will provide what is good for me. Sometimes that gift of Good comes in the form of money, but it also manifests through instances like a friend showing up at just the right moment, or in innumerable other ways we might never expect.
Do you understand my meaning here? Like when we are out on a forest trail in November, sometimes we are slogging through mud, sometimes we find the perfect path, but always we keep moving forward. The path may get rough, but we keep our eyes and hearts open and the support we need shows up - even if it's not in the form we might have been expecting.
What is really amazing to me is that, once we start looking at our lives this way, money stops being a huge, overwhelming thing. Like the water in the woods, it's just part of the Flow. We don't need to stress about controlling every drop - we can simply trust the process and keep our eyes open for the best path forward.
In closing, I am thrilled to share that, over the last 3 months, some of my colleagues and I have been pouring our hearts into an online class that has already helped hundreds of people to shift their lives in amazing ways. We didn’t want to hoard this valuable information, so we have made it accessible to everyone, with really inclusive pricing. I am super stoked to finally be reaching our launch date of November 29th, 2024! This course uses your consciousness around money as a doorway to positively transforming pretty much everything in your whole life experience. If this speaks to you, please follow the link to check out Change to Abundance. We'd love to have you along for the ride!
Article written by Jill Brocklehurst-Booth, with edits by Claude.AI and Missy Christensen