Root & Resource
If you haven't considered having a financial vision and intention (or if your financial desires have felt graspy and have been forgotten at record speed), this week, I am going to share with you how the first step in The Reverence Framework (a trauma-sensitive, embodied, spiritually, psychologically, and energetically-rooted approach to healing and growing into your true potential that leads to joyful right action with your money and all of your resources) is vital as you consider what kind of relationship you want to cultivate with your money and what you want your money to do for you in the coming year.
To Root, We Begin in the Body.
Being in relationship with money has two aspects: the skill of managing money and the emotional responses and narratives that fuel your behavior with money. When trauma or scarcity wounding is active, it negatively impacts the way you experience money (feeling and narrative) and drives the ways that you engage with money on a practical level.
Too often decisions in the moment press on old wounds, activating the nervous system in ways that mean we aren't necessarily responding to what is right here, but we are reacting based on our scarcity wounding. In other words, you aren't truly present or fully in the present moment.
However, to make our best and most aligned choices with money, we need to be in a state of presence and calm - rooted and resourced, which is the first step of The Reverence Framework. To root, you notice the body, take some breaths, and compassionately oneself into the present moment.
This is where your deepest wisdom resides.
Once you've gathered yourSelf into the present, you strengthen your sense of safety and presence by gathering your resources.
The feeling and narrative around money often creates anxiety and activates the nervous system in unhelpful ways. For many women, money represents safety and so the second facet of Root is to Resource - identifying, tuning into, and appreciating the safety and abundance of resources that are right here, right now.
This doesn’t negate the changes we wish to make or the anxiety we may feel, we are just consciously adding information and noticing how it lands in our body psyche. Identifying your resources is vital because one of the most insidious parts of experiencing fear, anxiety, control, or scarcity with your money is that often, that experience results in feeling like life is a barren desert. Gathering your resources to you: identifying them, calling on them, bringing them close, appreciating them gives you conscious access to what is available to you now.
Presence opens you to what is available, now.
Merriam Webster defines resources as, “a stock or supply of materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization in order to function effectively.”
Personally, this feels a bit cold to me. For me, resources are sacred. They are the people, places, things, and activities that support me, comfort me, and fill me up. The importance of recognizing and appreciating the presence of your resources can’t be underestimated: when you gather your resources and consciously name them as sacred and precious to you, you are receiving your resources. You are receiving what you have: what keeps you safe, what supports you, who makes you feel loved and cared for, the places that hold you, the beauty that nourishes you, and the things that inspire you.
To Root and Resource, the first step in The Reverence Framework, allows the body psyche to exhale and experience a sense of enoughness and offers access to a different kind of wisdom when we are making decisions.
As you craft financial intentions for the New Year, I invite you to Root - to bring your energy into the body and into the present moment and then to Resource - actively cultivate awareness of the support, resources, love, and beauty that is available to you. Then, from that space of safety and presence, ask yourself what you would like to shift with your money in the coming year.
As always, I would love to hear from you - do you respond differently when you Root and Resource? Does your financial vision have a different quality when you approach with reverence? Tell me everything.