Money + Me
Towards the end of last year, I co-created a workshop with my friend and collaborator, Hopi, called Decolonizing our Relationship with Money + Becoming Stewards of Abundance.
I’ve written about how the creation and offering of that workshop was the result of an extended (and continuing) initiation with money: never did I think I’d be speaking, teaching and facilitating about money in public. (Cue turning towards deep, generative, discomfort and all the evolutionary medicine that brings.)
Well, it turns out that money isn’t done with transmitting through me yet.
(If you’re an astro head: Pluto’s epoch-defining move into Aquarius lands in my 2nd house, which is also where my moon is, so all this is on point and evidently only just beginning. Also, yes Mars, Mercury and Venus currently having a house party in Aquarius with Pluto…)
Since that workshop, the main “practical” takeaway for me was that it’s far too big of a topic to explore with true depth, space and impact in one 2 hour session - especially when we’re engaging in trauma-informed somatic practice, as well as digesting some fairly big concepts and principles.
We definitely dived in but it was essentially an amuse bouche.
I’ve let that simmer in my system for a while, not feeling drawn to do another workshop in a similar format + feeling that there’s more that wants to come through. I haven’t forced my system into making something during this processing phase of creation. Because if I know one thing, it’s that participating in this work of healing our collective colonial trauma around money, work, worth + resource, and creating natural, soul-based relationships with it, is moving through me whether my ego likes it or not - so best not force it to be what I think it “should” be or get in its way.
In the space that’s been created, the spirit of money has been consistently sending me downloads that have me scribbling away in my journal. Reading back on them, I’ve shed some tears at the ways in which we have been forced to participate in and feed harm + control-based systems that degrade and exploit the life-affirming, loving + playful (yes!) essence and spirit of money.
Image conceived by me, and made by Canva's AI
There are so many layers to what’s been communicated - some of it intended directly for me and my own personal initiations with money - and some for those of us who can sense and feel that it doesn’t have to be this way. That individual + collective thriving does not have to be mutually exclusive - that it in fact flies against the face of Nature's interdependence when this is the case. In short, it’s time to evolve out of and away from the traumatic + artificial systems of scarcity that have been constructed around money - systems which have colonized culture, our lives, our psyches and our bodies.
Money wants to evolve - through us, with us, and for us. It wants to be imprinted with the signature of our soul-based values, which are intimately entwined with Nature’s. It wants to support us in dissolving the cultural and generational traumas around it that live in our nervous systems so we can collaborate with it from a place of authenticity, openness and playfulness.
As I’ve made space for and paid attention to these downloads, some interesting and wonderful synchronicities have been popping up. One of them is becoming aware of others who have been receiving messages of a similar tone from the spirit of money - none of whom I personally know yet, some living in different parts of the world - so there is a sea-change, a collective (r)evolutionary movement a’brewing in our money systems.
What’s important as we navigate these new ways of co-creating with money - and bringing an Indigenous, Nature-based, animist way of relating to it - is that we don’t bring our old colonial woundings (most of which are not even ours) with us.
Eventually, the spirit of money gave me the practical next step following on from the workshop last year - a step that I don’t think I would be open to considering if I hadn’t consented to that initial, ego-squirmy discomfort of teaching and facilitating about money in public.
What’s the next step?
A monthly online trauma-informed space to cultivate freedom from the wounded money stories living in our bodies, our psyches and nervous systems.
I agreed but had no idea what to call it. I waited, knowing the answer would come:
We’ll be focusing on somatic practice + energy work to loosen and dissolve the harm-based systems that have colonized our bodies and nervous systems, as well the inter-generational ickiness we’re carrying around (caused by these colonial systems).
In the space that’s created, we’ll seed, vision + cultivate our own generative, soul-based meanings and relationships with money - and start leaning into the art of embodying and allowing this into our lives and communities.
Abundance in practice.
Concepts, principles and teachings around decoloniality and the numinous, playful mythos + spirit of money will be woven in each month. The intention is for each session to be a place of sustainable integration + digestion - because this is a vast and nuanced topic.
Because much of it is going to be trauma-informed practice, and to encourage people to feel comfortable to go deep, share, heal and integrate, these sessions will not be recorded.
Find out more about Money + Me here.