Healing My Relationship With Wealth

I'm writing my blog with the intention to bring greater awareness to exactly what I am healing from and to transmute it through my writing. I am currently writing scripts to help accelerate the healing of others, yet I find that the scripts are calling me out on the themes I need to pay attention to in my personal life. Until I can't cross those barriers, break those patterns and integrate new beliefs into my own life I can't make breakthrough progress with my clients either. "You can only take your clients as far as you have gone", is what I hear a student from my Breathwork cohort say.

Sunset at Namib Desert Lodge, Gondwana

Every time I bring my clients through a Breathwork journey I realise the theme I'm addressing has much deeper roots. We are not just healing from what has happened in our lives. We are healing from centuries of intergenerational trauma. The last 4-5 years brought the world a lot of hardship, but it has also woke us up to the underlying layers of trauma that is still playing out in our lives. Trauma that imprinted specific neurological pathways causing us to think and behave in a certain way. Even though our ancestors have dealt with different stories, we still respond to similar triggers with the same reactions.

You may have heard many coaches or guru's say:"It's not about what is happening to you; it's about how you react to it that matters." Reactions are triggered by feelings. What you feel sits deeper than what you think and how you behave. It starts with the feeling. Then it transforms into a thought and then it manifests as an action. This is what our parents experienced as children, and what their parents experienced as children. When we are young, we are neuro-plastic and the coping mechanisms we form to deal with life imprints into our nervous system. As we grow up, we unconsciously still respond to similar situations with the same coping mechanisms that has been formed when we were children. Science has now proven that "experience can be passed down through generations due to changes in DNA." Read the full article here.

Another article on the same experiment read:

"Diseases, addictions, depression, they may all originate from us, or perhaps from a great great grandparent. A person’s body shape could be the result of trauma that’s been carried for generations, and not because of their lifestyle choices. We, as well as our ancestors, may have carried a mental or physical pain for hundreds of years, and maybe longer.

I think the biggest takeaway from this is that the idea of being a lone individual is just not tenable anymore. We come into this world carrying the sadness or good fortune of our ancestors."

What I have just uncovered, and what I have been semi-conscious about my whole life, but didn't really pay close enough attention to until now, is how I feel when I find myself amongst others who are wealthier than I.

I had an interesting conversation with my mother this morning where she mentioned how my grandmother (her mother) grew up in a middle-class family, had everything she needed, but because she married into a very wealthy family, she always felt inferior and ended up limiting herself on many levels. This rang a bell for me. I always knew I had it in me to one day achieve great things and create wealth, but I have always felt, and I still do feel, inferior - especially amongst my friends who grew up richer than me. I attended a private school - which was mostly rich kids - and even though we could have passed for middle-class - I always felt way poorer, and on a subconscious level, more inferior than the rest of them. The same feeling perpetuated in college. I attended film school where the majority of kids were, again, super rich. This didn't help shake the underlying, deep-seated feeling, that eventually instilled a belief: "Even though I am capable, I am still not worthy".

It's an important and subtle, yet solid distinction to make. Very often it's the case of not believing in one's abilities. In this case it is possible to set out little goals and build your self-confidence as you achieve them. But for me, it's not about whether I am capable or not, it's about believing whether I am worthy of being capable, worthy of achieving, worthy of shining, or not. It's about whether I am worthy of receiving acknowledgement, and ultimately, remuneration, or not. That is where I falter. That is what causes me to step back, doubt and hide my true self.

This feeling of unworthiness sits so deep that it dictates the way I show up in the world, the decisions I make and to what extent I commit to a project or a relationship. At some point I create a story and expect that the other will reject me because I'm not good enough. And then they do.

Me feeling liberated

This is the perfect opportunity to remind myself of Marianne Williamson's famous words:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves: "Who am I to be brilliant, talented, fabulous?" Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

I remind myself of these words every time I motivate my clients. I motivate them because I believe in them. It makes me wonder: why is it so easy for me to want the best for others and to believe that they deserve the best, yet so hard to want and believe that for myself? The universe has been nudging me to open myself up to receive. I guess it also comes from a lifetime of giving that receiving has become so unfamiliar. Yet, I believe we all have this right. We all deserve to receive... including myself.