Hello there witches,
Wow, there has again been quite a wave of interest in MONEY… and in my friend Dave Burns’s singular take on this most delicate and painfully misunderstood of topics.
(I promise that shortly I’ll be replying to as many of the emails yinz have been sending as I can! Patience please, there’s just one of me and thousands of you ;) )
Today we’ll be hearing more about Dave’s personal journey with the medicinal spirit of money…
As well as discussing your first simple practice for getting started working with her directly.
And so… drum roll please… here’s Dave again, with his tale of mercurial adventure:
My personal reason for going down the rabbit hole of money magic was quite simple:
I had a gnarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrly relationship to money.
I’m not just talking about being broke. (Though I’ve been broke a lot.)
I’m talking:
-getting fired from a job for stealing petty cash
-being over a year late on multi-thousand-dollar personal loan repayments
-dealing with sub-500 credit score
-eating out of actual trash cans while living in the red for weeks at a time
-getting harassed daily by PayDay loan collectors
All the good stuff.
So my exploration of deep money work wasn’t an interesting hobby or accidental pastime. It was something I was sucked down into whether I liked it or not.
You may identify with this experience… or you may not. For some people, magical money work is optional (though still wonderfully benefit)—for others (like me), the universe makes it pretty damn cosmically mandatory.
I’m incredibly grateful for the almost criminally clueless, irresponsible and irreverent attitude I had for years towards money…
…Because it ultimately led to some of the most profound magical experiences I could imagine, and an ease with spontaneously making large sums of money that now allows for a beautiful life in Santa Monica with my wife Carolyn. (Not that Carolyn—the other one.)
But holy mammon, was it a ride to get here.
And it started, like any good money story…with being insanely, spectacularly broke.
The Trash Panda Phase
I was making about $500 a month when I first began to work on money magic.
I had just moved into a cramped apartment with 9 other people, and survived mostly by eating food that my housemates forgot to label in the fridge.
(They eventually caught on, began labeling everything religiously, and started referring to me as “trash panda.”)
But the shame of being a Trash Panda didn’t actually inspire me to start practicing money magic. What inspired me was the spontaneous desire to purchase a $24,000 personal development course.
Now, this course had absolutely nothing to do with money and had zero possible financial ROI. I simply wanted to do it.
Like, really, really wanted to do it.
And so I decided I would. Which was clearly impossible based on the ordinary rules of how money worked… so some kind of magic would obviously be necessary.
I’m not going to dive too deeply here into the kinds of money magic that I began practicing, but they worked well enough to pay for the course in full—and, to have some of the most heartbreaking and world-reorienting experiences I’d had to date.
This experience had quite an impact on me… and though it didn’t change the fact that my personal finances were still an absolute mess, it opened up a window of possibility that things might work very differently than I’d been taught.
The Wild Money Miracle Phase
Fast-forward a little over a year. I’d experimented with creating a few small businesses, and had met an incredible woman – who did not enjoy my money instability at all.
So—inspired by one specific conversation where she broke down and sobbed with me in the kitchen, telling me exactly what it was like for her to live with the unpredictability…
…and so helping me to finally start to feel the impact on the people around me of my constant financial rollercoasters…
I made a decision to finally master this “money” thing once and for all, and thereby put an end to the perpetual instability that was terrorizing my beloved’s nervous system.
And thus, somewhat ironically, began the most insane and unstable period of my financial life.
I studied, and I took wealth seminars, and I hired coaches on money manifestation—and each one did have some useful practices or insights (though I always felt a bit suspicious of what seemed like over-simplifications).
But perhaps most importantly… every week I began to put myself into situations in which some sort of wild money magic would be required.
We had our humble savings in an investment account that was quite difficult to liquidate, and allowed our checking account to hit almost zero.
And from there, I began to do things like:
-head to the airport in a Lyft with my fiancée while making sales calls, close a sale just before arriving at the airport, take the payment and use Square Instant Deposit to put the funds immediately onto my debit card, buy tickets at the counter and fly to a different city to make an in-person meeting there
-show up at fancy hotels with our suitcases, tell them we’d be checking in soon, and have them hold onto our suitcases while I went outside to make sales calls until I closed a sale, instant deposited, and checked us in for the weekend
-commit to hiring a new mentor for $20,000 with $150 in the bank, tell them I’d be sending the wire the following week, and make well over $20,000 before the payment was due
Needless to say, not all of these “miracle” practices worked out on a perfect timeline.
One time we ended up sleeping on the floor in Oakland airport while I desperately worked to make enough money for us to fly home.
And through all of this, more and more bizarre and inexplicable money-related events began to occur in the background.
One time $8,118 spontaneously appeared in my bank account and vanished the next day.
Another time PayPal’s deposit feature refused to work, with both PayPal and my banks claiming that it was the other party’s fault… the issue finally resolving inexplicably only when I paid off a debt I’d been avoiding.
The Revelation
Throughout these various adventures and happenings, I began to develop a real, reliable sense of what magical principles actually worked in the land of money, and which not so much;
What were the strengths and limitations of different magical techniques;
What manifestation principles had legitimacy, and which were just recycled over-simplifications.
But my poor fiancée, whose dislike of financial instability was my initial motivation for the entire endeavor, got dragged along for an exponentially more intense money ride than anything she’d dreamed of previously.
And through it all, the inner emotional experiences often felt much, much more intense than even the most extreme external financial swings.
Some days I had experiences of radical non-dual awareness, sensing beautiful matrices of interlocking paradoxes within the fabric of reality and feeling as if I had absolute choice over the flow of money through psycho-musical interactions with those paradoxes.
Some days I was literally curled up on the floor, feeling utterly powerless, hopeless, and humiliated.
(As it happens, Carolyn Elliott’s practice of Existential Kink was one of the most useful and profound tools I utilized to keep things moving throughout this whole period.)
The most challenging and soul-wringing period lasted for over a month….
At the end of which I signed the first 7-figure contract in my business.
And it was after that experience that I finally got a retroactive glimpse into what had been happening the entire time.
…
In the months that followed that contract—through digesting its impact, and having some synchronistic conversations about traditional “medicine carrier” initiations in the Peruvian jungle—I began to see a clear and bizarre picture of what was going on.
The whole time I had been immersed in my extremely hands-on study of money magic, my real teacher wasn’t any of the mentors or authors I had been learning from.
My teacher was Money herself—and she had been teaching, healing, and initiating me through experiences of both beautiful transcendence and utter ego annihilation every step of the way.
In fact, smaller versions of these experiences had been happening in some way for my entire adult life.
I just hadn’t been paying attention, because I’d never thought of Money as a legitimate entity with a spirit and intention of her own.
As soon as I recognized this, my entire view toward Money shifted. All, simultaneously… all of the money magic I’d been developing clicked into place with a kind of “k-thunk” sound, as it finally had a unifying context to sink into.
I began speaking with Money regularly, meditating with her, developing a ritualistic relationship with her. I began communing with her, and having the experience of learning from her directly—specific spells, ceremonies, and principles.
And, ultimately, I began developing a genuine friendship with her—sometimes a difficult one, of course, as with any friendship. But one of depth and beauty, and almost unspeakable richness.
…
Today Money has become one of my greatest teachers and friends—in some ways second only to the woman who traveled with me on all those wild and magical adventures, who is now my wife (and whose name is—interestingly—also Carolyn.
Fun fact: Carolyn Elliott’s husband, Taia Kepher, was named David at birth. This means that we’re a twin set of “Carolyn and David”s who are now dear friends (weird, huh? such is witch life).
For a while, I tended not to talk about my relationship to Money publicly, and held only small private events and secretive group programs for a handful of people to share what I’d learned from her.
But about a year ago, various signs made it clear that it was time to open the doors and begin sharing the treasures of Money medicine more widely.
And so Carolyn Elliott—the baddest witch in the game, and the woman who invented the magical practice (Existential Kink) that helped me so much in my money journey—joined forces with me to co-create the MONEY course, which launched for the first time at the beginning of 2019.
And going through the 160+ exit surveys of the students who completed that first round, I am sure glad that we did. Over 50% of the surveys reported magical increases in income over the timeframe of the course itself (a completely unheard of proportion, and speed, in the world of money magic).
But more importantly—the internal shifts reported in ease, joy, bliss, pleasure, and gratitude connected to the Spirit of Money are truly breathtaking. We’ll be sharing some of the testimonials next week.
A Simple Practice with the Spirit of Money
Whether or not you feel called to enter into the full range of practices of the medicinal money path by registering for MONEY when it opens for registration next week, you can begin developing your relationship with the spirit of Money immediately.
As with any practice, it’s best to begin simple. Try starting with the following:
Close your eyes, and visualize the spirit of Money in front of you.
Notice how she looks to you. She will reveal herself to you in a way that no one else quite sees her.
Introduce yourself.
And now, ask her what she wants to give to you next.
Then ask what she wants from you next in return.
Reciprocity is an energy near and dear to Money’s heart. Write down what she says. Commit to doing what she asks of you, and receiving what she wants to give.
Rinse, and repeat, as often as you like. (Weekly is recommended, but there’s no harm in doing it daily.)
And see what happens.
Hi – Carolyn again. Whoah, do I love that story. The “trash panda” bit tickles me every time. Stay tuned to hear more from me & Dave about the strange mysteries of working with the spirit of money!
love and villainy,
Carolyn Elliott
founder of WITCH
P.S. Why not ponder all that while listening to one of the greatest money anthems of recent memory, Cardi B’s Bodak Yellow? Give in. You know you want to.
P.P.S. MONEY: the baddest money magic course around (and the ONLY online course on working with the medicinal teacher spirit of money) will be open for registration from Wednesday, November 13th – Wednesday, November 20th at midnight Eastern time. The cost will be 5 payments of $199, a lifetime’s worth of wild money magic (including spreadsheet magic) for less than the price of a weekend getaway.
