The Meaning of Money

What does money mean to you?

Outside of the artificial, centralized and exploitative systems that have been constructed around money, outside of any generational trauma and childhood imprints received from family and culture about money - what does money mean to you?

(This is not a rhetorical question. I would genuinely like to know so feel free to hit reply to this email and tell me.)

In case you hadn’t noticed - life, the world, ‘reality’ has been getting pretty rambunctious over the last few years. Chaotic, you might say.

Yes, the Aquarian age, set to sweep in some trippy changes, sitting alongside the Nature-aligned truth that periods of evolutionary change are preceded by a good measure of - ultimately creative but often dysregulating + disruptive - chaos.

For us humans breathing + being on planet mama Gaia at this time, money is going to be a fundamental player in these chaotic currents of evolution.

And during all periods of great transition, the thing that differentiates those who grip on for dear life to some semblance of ‘normality’ (Nature doesn’t grok normal, by the way), from those who imperfectly surf the waves of change, fall off their boards, hurt themselves, repair, recalibrate and jump back on again in the process of becoming the heart-based, embodied visionary architects of the new dawning is: meaning + meaning making.

(As you’re on this email list, I’m taking the educated guess that you’re of the tenacious surfer variety.)

If you identify as the above, and specifically to living according to the felt-sense truth of the meanings you make from the world (which is your soul’s birthright), you are implicitly adhering to what’s known as the Hermeneutic Responsibility - which is a potent, beautiful and magickal act.

The Hermeneutic Responsibility is named after Hermes, the Greek god and archetype of language + meaning, magick + alchemy and commerce - that tricksterish embodiment of both/and, with the ability to travel freely between worlds + dimensions.

The ancient Egyptian ibis-headed Thoth was the archetypal ancestor of Hermes.

Thoth-Hermes in the transcendent alchemical graphic  novel series, Promethea by the genius Alan Moore

The Hermeneutic Responsibility is, in a nutshell, the art and practice of meaning-making.

This freedom-bestowing responsibility involves taking a brave leap into weaving our own meanings about who we are, what the world is, and what the events in our lives mean - instead of taking the dreary old meanings force-fed to us from the dominant (and dying) culture, society and from our families + friends as true for us.

Why is the Hermeneutic Responsibility a magickal act?

Because magick (and the process of alchemy it entails) is, in its essence, the art and practice of taking responsibility for the meanings we assign to the phenomena of our lives and the world. Our meanings inform our beliefs, and our beliefs are the building blocks of (our) experience and reality, pointing to the psychedelic truth that the collective agreement of objective, consensus reality is in fact wholly subjective - and has the potential to change on a dime if brave folks like you decided to take responsibility for making your own meanings according to what feels true for you.

Whew.

Clearly, this requires no small amount of courage because oftentimes, it involves saying non merci to the normative shoulds of dominant systems that just don’t feel true for us - regardless of how much data we’re presented with as immutable ‘fact’. (Immutability flies in the face of Nature because everything changes.)

“There’s a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth.”

Maya Angelou

(I’d go so far as to say that often, ‘facts’ are pedestalized with the pointed intention of obscuring the truth, consequently curtailing our capacity to make meaning, but I digress...)

During periods of change-precipitating chaos, this finger-wagging shoulding can intensify, as we’re seeing now with things like censorship/weaponization of legacy media and cancel (non) culture.

And it’s during these periods that it’s essential to root down, take your directions from the earth + sky of your soul-body’s wisdom and remain firm yet flexible and resilient through softening and opening. By doing just this, you’re serving an agent of evolutionary change.

If you want to take it one step further, you can decide to exercise your Hermeneutic Responsibility when it comes to money (and the spirit of money is impatiently waiting for you to do this so it can evolve through you). As mentioned earlier, this time of Aquarian transition is radically going to involve money - specifically breaking it free from the centralized shackles built on scarcity, greed, corruption + competition, and the feeding of the war + disease industrial complexes.

An effective starting point for this is an uncompromising alignment of how you work with the energy of money (however ‘much’ ∞ ‘little’ you have) with your core values, which is to say your soul’s values, your Dharma.

Before we can do this however, it’s necessary to dissolve and compost those externally imposed meanings around money that are still living in our neurology and biology: what we experience as money wounds or traumas.

This creates the space and cultivates the soil for our own values-based meanings around money to take root so we can embody and integrate them.

This is what we do in the monthly Money + Me sessions.