Decolonizing our Relationship to Money
I’m writing this missive just as the full moon lunar eclipse in Taurus is moving through on the afternoon of Saturday October 28th, on an appropriately atmospheric windy desert day.
Two days ago, we marked our tenth year here in the desert. Ten years since Oli and I arrived at the gates of our rural desert home at dawn, straight from LAX, on a jet plane straight from London, with two suitcases of worldly belongings and two big, wide open hearts smiling into the dusty abyss of the unknown, which smiled right back and gathered us into its bosom.
Out in Wonder Valley in 2012, on our first visit to the Mojave desert. Photo by Oli
The two humans who emerge ten years later, blinking into a sunny-windy late autumn lunar eclipse afternoon are a couple of curious specimens, undone and then redone by this-here desert, according to its own wise whims.
(For those of you into astrocartography, I was recently informed by a dear friend that this southern California region is on my Chiron line. Yay. Pretty much since I moved here the theme of my life has been about being taken apart physically, emotionally + mentally and put back together by this desert, transmuting and evolving old wounds + traumas, and eventually, being guided to work with others to do the same. Very on brand with living on my Chiron line. And am I feeling the strength and power of it all a decade later, on this lunar eclipse, which is taking place in my natal Chiron placement in Taurus. Whew.)
If you’re not an astro-head, all that to say is that the cosmic synergies of as above, so below are a thing. When you feel like you’re losing the plot, take a peek at your astrology (which is not your sun sign horoscope in a magazine ;) )
It’ll all make sense. It’s all in alignment. Relax into it and the navigational tools will come.
One of the biggest ruptures that has come under scrutiny here in the desert, and which continues to evolve and transform, is around money wounds - in equal measure inherited from generational traumas, and absorbed from the oppressive, exploitative and extractive systems put in place around money in our dominant culture.
The most important and liberating revelation that has emerged is that the wounds and distorted meanings around money - around my ability to trust myself with money, and to trust money - are not mine.
And they’re not mine to carry anymore.
The scary-excitingness of allowing, embodying and living from that is the ongoing evolutionary practice.
Here's a tip-of-the-iceberg taster of I’ve discovered in my work with myself, with teachers and with clients around the topic of money trauma:
If you’re a sensitive, spiritual, creative person, you’ve probably internalized all sorts of distortions around money, what it means, why it’s bad and wrong, and not something that a person like you should ever care about.
(Spoiler alert: until the current of money can collaborate with you, and until your nervous system can receive, hold, save, spend + invest while remaining grounded, centered + stable, money cannot evolve. Money wants to evolve and support the planet through someone like you.)
If you’re a human in the world, you have most likely internalized narratives around scarcity, shame, suffering and struggle when it comes to money - both from the artificial systems that have been created around the current of resource, and through the inheritance of generational wounds inflicted by these same systems.
Because of both of the reasons stated above, we - individually, collectively - tend not to feel safe when it comes to money, whether we have it or not. Unless we’re doing the work to intentionally resolve this, our nervous systems are usually in a state of fight/flight/freeze when it comes to money - which can show up in myriad ways. When we don’t feel safe around money, we’re not in right relationship with it, which ends up causing all sorts of harm in our own lives, in the collective and most devastatingly to the planet.
There’s a lot more to say about my discoveries which I won’t go into in detail here. Suffice to say that if you have money wounds (which includes the garden variety visceral resentment of money - hi, we used to be such good friends), it’s more than likely not yours.
Your nervous system has never had a chance to form its own meaning and relationship with money. You’ve never had the chance to realize and metabolize the truth that money does not have to be extractive and exploitative; those things belong to the systems of oppression and harm that have been built up around controlling money and resource, and propagating the notion of lack and scarcity as the norm.
These systems have their origins in various harmful agendas, including control through debt (or the lived experience of deficiency/deficit/not enough) which immediately puts nervous systems into threat + survival response. Remaining in this adrenalized state over extended periods of time (millennia, centuries, generations) is anti-evolutionary and unnatural. Yet it’s the most “normal” way to be in our culture when it comes to money.
From this unnatural normalization, the way that money is “used” in the world reflects the threat + survival response that has become codified in our nervous systems: exploitation, extraction, oppression and the systemic feeding of military + medical industrial complexes through war + disease.
I’m no money coach.
What I’m interested in is dismantling the systems of harm and oppression around money in our nervous systems, and consequently in our lives and communities, so that we can develop our own soul-based, collaborative, Earth-human honoring relationships with the current of money and resource.
The great paradox around money is that it’s an abstraction, a symbol imbued with meanings and values by humanity, yet we require it to live and thrive in the world. If there’s one thing about the both/and nature of paradoxes, it’s that there’s some deep and transformative truth to be gleaned from them.
As we practice together to dissolve the systems of harm that have occupied our nervous systems for so very long, we’ll also begin to turn with curious inquiry towards what this truth could be, and towards an embodied visioning of how the symbol of money, when imbued with soul-based values could become Nature’s current of evolutionary change.