As I dig deeper into teaching about the importance and potency of your $Money Story, I always find it illuminating to revisit my own.  This is a story that highlights an aspect of it for me that I want to share with you.

“A Taste of my $Money Story”

My daughter recently wanted to take something to school that represented her heritage.  She had selected a china plate that she knew came from my grandmother, her great grandmother, who had died years before she was born.  I persuaded her to take a silver serving spoon instead, because it wasn’t breakable.

I said to her, “My grandmother was given this set of silver going into her wedding in 1929, just a few months before the crash.”  My mother’s mother came from a wealthy family that had been financially crippled by the fall of Wall Street.

“What crash, Mommy, what do you mean?” she asked with concern in her voice.

“It’s time to go to school, Honey, and that’s a longer story than I have time to explain right now.”

Unsatisfied, she picked up her backpack, threw in the silver serving spoon, and jumped in the car.  As she and her father drove away, I thought, “How am I ever going to explain that to her?”  I knew I had opened the door with my comment, yet the complexity of the situation stumped me.

Not just about explaining about Black Friday, and the economic crash and Great Depression that followed the economic boom of the 1920s.  My wonder and concern also had to do with the power of telling such a story, and its influence on her, knowing the influence of this experience and the stories told about it to my parents, and to me.

Deep roots of my $Money Story go back to this time.  Both of my parents were born in 1932, during the Depression, and their formative years were spent during this era and that of World War II.  They were married during the boom of the 1950s, and I grew up during the profound, explosive and war-filled years of the 1960s and 1970s.

As intelligent and professional as both my parents were, we had very little money while I was growing up.  My mother didn’t work outside the home, believing that her role was to take care of the family, despite the fact that she had a masters degree in library science.  My father chose to teach at the University of Washington in Seattle, a land-grant university that surprisingly paid among the lowest salaries in the nation.  Seattle was not then the mature city it is now, with the wealth that high-tech and coffee brought to it.

I grew up in a working- and lower-middle class African American neighborhood, one of just a few white kids in my elementary school.  I experienced the Civil Rights Movement from the unusual position of being a white minority, the child of professionals who chose to raise me in an environment that could not have been more different than the ones in which they grew up.  Except, except—that the economic conditions oddly mirrored aspects of their own experiences of the Depression.

Instead of stepping forward into the upper-middle class that could have been theirs based on their educations and upbringings, they lived a level of prosperity that more closely aligned with their childhood experiences.

How conscious was this?  Some certainly, but my guess is that some of it was not.  Some came out of their $Money Stories that operated from deep below the surface of their awareness—just like the rest of us.

Because there are also other factors in my family history that influenced this situation—on my father’s side, a suspicion of wealth, business, and people with money that runs deep.  I was brought up to believe that it’s better to be smart and respected than wealthy—not just safer, but more morally correct.  Wealth was seen as dangerous, corrupting, likely to lead to power out of control.  Best avoided.

So my $Money Story is full of paradoxes.  And this is just a taste of it!

Yours probably is, too.  Most people’s are.  Because money has come to mean so many different things for different people and different communities.

Even though money itself is neutral, it is laden in our psyches with many, often contradictory, meanings.

Even though I thought I “knew better,” when I created my first career, as a university professor, I created similar economic conditions for myself that I grew up in.  I did have more prestige than my father, teaching at an Ivy League University.  But I did not make much money, certainly compared to what other people with far less education made working in corporate America or later in high-tech.

It wasn’t until 15 years ago, when I started to really examine my $Money Story, that things began to change.  And it’s been quite an experiment ever since, as an independent business owner, something for which there is no precedent in my family of origin!

The best news is that whatever your upbringing, you need not be at the mercy of it.  Not when you know what it is, and you decide to take command of your situation.

What do you know about the roots of your $Money Story?  What have you come to understand about this?  What have you kept, and what would you like to uplevel to be more in alignment with who and where you are now?

Leave your comment on the below—either about your own story, or about something that  may have been stirred up for you by mine.  I always love to hear from you!

Are you awakened or asleep?

I’ve been asking myself that question for a long time!  So if you’re wondering, you’re not alone.

And when I’m honest with myself, I have to say:  BOTH!

Recently one of my mentors, David Neagle, posted this quotation from Leland Val Van De Wall on Facebook:

“The degree to which a person can grow is directly proportional to the amount of truth he can accept about himself without running away.”

I’ve been hearing about the Time of Awakening since early in my adulthood certainly.  And I’ve wondered what it means, thought I knew what it meant, then realized that even though I had the concept down that actually LIVING in an awakened state is a never-ending process.

Because no matter how awakened I become, there’s always more for me to wake up to.  There are always more places in which I’m sleeping, unconscious to the truth because of my conditioning from this and other lifetimes.

My desire to be safe underlies all of this, cultivated from lifetimes of persecution and violence as a healer, teacher and outspoken woman.  And no doubt I say, no doubt, also playing the role of persecutor as well.  Because my understanding is that we have all been all of it.  In and out of lifetimes, playing this role and that.  We can hope learning, growing and expanding along the way.

~> How much truth can I accept about myself without running away?

It’s a provocative question, isn’t it?

~> How much truth can you accept about yourself without running away?

Okay, I’ll go first.

Here’s a kind of tricky, icky one I’ve become aware of recently.

I’ve had a martyr thing going on.  I’m good at hiding it, so much so that I didn’t even know it was there.  But this is how it shows up:

In ordinary reality, I do this by taking on too much responsibility for other people, whether it’s my family or my students and clients.  I have pretty good boundaries, so it doesn’t show up quite as a lack of boundaries.  Instead it shows up as is doing too much myself that I could have someone else do.  (Of course this dovetails nicely with my desire to be in control, but that’s another story!)

~> My story:  I think I HAVE TO BE THE ONE that does this or that.  It does not even occur to me that I could delegate certain things because I can’t conceive that someone else would or could do it as well or like I do.  This has been so embedded that I have not been able to see it until recently.  Of course being the principal of a small company and a mother potentially feeds this every single day!

How does this affect me?  It’s exhausting, first of all.  It also keeps my life and my business smaller than they could be because too much is dependent on me and I am only one person.  I have unconsciously set it up that way.  So much so, that I’ve had trouble finding or keeping the right support people in certain key positions in my life.  Fascinating, right?  Because this feeds right back into itself.  What I get most frustrated about is something I am creating.

Why?  That I’m not that sure about—but I’m pretty sure it has to do with (1) lack of trust based on past life experiences, and (2) desire to control so that I can feel safe, and (3) need to be needed to prove my worth in some way.

Now I’m awake to all of this.  Has it changed?  Being aware does begin the shift, because until I see it, I don’t have a chance of changing it.   And it’s always an inside job, first.  I’m seeing more and more places where this story plays itself out in my life, and I’m shifting it piece by piece.

• I just hired another person onto my team.
• I’m instituting changes in the way that we do things in my business so that the systems support us rather than my memory and brain.
• We’ve changed our daughter’s school so that she’s getting more there that we were trying to give her outside of school (in progress, stay tuned).
• I’m making my body and health a priority over me getting certain things done—and that is forcing me to delegate or otherwise let go control.

And there’s more.  Once you wake up to conditioning as old and widespread as that it takes awhile to reorganize yourself.  I actually don’t recommend trying to do too much too soon.  That can be super stressful in many ways and in the end not that helpful because there is always a backlash if you can’t integrate a change.

We would see this after our 10 day Clarity Breathwork^® retreats.  Participants would be full of new insights on their lives and patterns and we would caution them:  DO NOT go home get a new job or business, ditch your partner, or move, for at least a few weeks!  Breathe, integrate, then allow your awareness of what to do next to emerge.  You’ll  know, if you listen in. 

So what about you?  What truth can you allow in, with acceptance and compassion, not self judgment?  What can you awaken in yourself that will enable you to be more free?

Because in the end, awakening is all about freedom, isn’t it?

Leave a comment either about what this article meant to you, or to share something you are awakening to.  I always love to hear from you—we’re all in this together, right?