Hello witches,
You may have noticed that there are a few very challenging aspects to incarnating in this universe at this time.
One of those particularly challenging aspects is…
Money.
Dealing with that nasty green stuff (or its absence) can produce some of the gnarliest psycho-emotional experiences available.
So for this reason, I figured I’d take a moment to stop and clarify some reasons why the “money” stuff can be so painful, and to open some breathing room around that pain.
1) Money is deeply, subtly tied to moral notions of “worth”
It takes about two seconds of reflection to see that plenty of morally suspect people have oodles of money, and plenty of virtuous ones don’t.
And yet. Because we live in a capitalist society which grew out of a Protestant / Puritan worldview, there’s some shadowy cultural way in which having money seems to connote having God’s favor, being #blessed, being worthy—
—whereas lacking it connotes some kind of shameful fall from grace. As if a low bank account were a sure sign of a shifty character.
This is obviously total bullshit… so, smart people with spiritual and magical inclinations tend to rebel in the opposite direction—towards claiming the saintliness of poverty, giving away their labor for free or for cheap or for barter, and trying in general to distance themselves from the filthy, filthy stain of cash.
The irony of this, of course, is that it’s also quite a Puritanical move, one that often comes with heavy doses of judgmentalism and an eagerness to decry the sins of the luxurious rich.
What’s the solution? Well, it’s not a simplistic one… but it seems to have something to do with recognizing that Money is a trickster spirit, and a living intelligence, interested in galvanizing the non-dual perception of the world—not in enforcing moral paradigms in any direction.
Interestingly, Tibetan Buddhism makes a distinction between “relative truth,” which is realized through living out a compassionate morality, and “absolute truth,” which is simply the awareness of the nondual empty fluidity of subject & object.
I think we could all relax a lot more if we stopped trying to wrest moral meaning from money’s mystery, and got a lot more interested in its weird, poison / medicine nondual essence.
Speaking of which…
2) Money is weird – literally
The English term “weird’ comes from the Norse term “wyrd” – referring to the way that the future strangely influences the past, a phenomenon that modern physicists recognize as retro-causation.
Money has plenty to do with wyrd, with fate and with strange reverberations from the future because it’s an underworld spirit, in other words, it’s a spirit that operates largely in the unconscious realms.
There’s plenty more that could be unpacked about this, but I figured I’d mention that money has a weird, slippery, daemonic quality that simultaneously makes it very amenable to shadow work magic and which also causes it to show up as a force that so often eludes our rational, conscious intentions—
—i.e., we humans often tend to spend more than we mean to, earn less than we want to, end up having our emotions pulled mercilessly in various directions by the vicissitudes of our finances.
The slipperiness of money, the way it frequently escapes our rational plans and notions, can be very frustrating—but when we get willing to become intimate with its wyrd, fateful, underworld nature—we open a door to befriending the spirit itself.
Stay tuned for more about this from Dave tomorrow :)
love and villainy,
Carolyn Elliott
P.S.
Registration will open for the MONEY course I’m teaching with my friend & former business coach, Dave Burns, on Wednesday, November 13th, which is when we’ll send out the link to the sales page. Registration for MONEY will be open from November 13th – 20th.
MONEY is a course all about – you guessed it – money magic. The kind that will flip your world inside-out in the best possible way.
MONEY will include 7 in-depth text and audio Lessons, live webinar community meetings, and will run from December through March.
The price of the course is 5 payments of $199 — much less than the cost of a weekend-long vacation, and an investment that is certain to revolutionize your experience of wealth forever.