Money & Reverence
When I was pregnant with Clara my most fervent wish was that the ancestry of alcoholism, violence, and pain would end with me. That's not to say that my husband and I didn't leave her with other kinds of wounds or hurts, but my intention was that she would not question our love for her, that she would be lifted up by us, and feel a sense of her innate worthiness without having to fight for it. Daily, my intention has been to be the mother she needs me to be.
Being Clara's mother has been the impetus for much of my journey of growth and healing so I could fulfill my intention as a mother to the best of my abilities. The growth and healing I have done have become the foundation of how I serve and how I believe we heal and develop a different kind of relationship to ourselves and to life - including our money.
Though I've been teaching this and supporting clients with these elements for many years, this is the year that I felt compelled to examine the method I teach and so, The Reverence Framework was born.
Over the next few weeks, I'll introduce the different elements of the framework to you. But today, let's talk about why I believe reverence is vital when it comes to healing, especially with money and worthiness.
Reverence and money seem like oil and water.
Our cultural relationship to money and resources is steeped in the violence of scarcity. There is a distinctive push for the individual to be slightly numb and outside the body. This keeps all of us tethered to a system of consumption that pushes us to strive for a level of 'productivity' that provokes exhaustion. Burnout, addiction, and the deterioration of mental wellness are the result.
So yes, in our socially normative relationship to money and resources, reverence seems out of place. However, reverence is the healing balm that slakes our deepest thirst beyond what culture tells us we must do, have, or be to be loved, to be worthy, to be enough.
This is reverence.
Reverence brings us into the present moment and invites us to honor ourselves and life. In doing so, we feel the dissonance - reverence shows us where we, and the world, are asking for healing.
Unlike religious reverence, which may ask for unquestioning fealty, reverence that begins with us and the earth and our aliveness brings us into direct connection with what is beautiful and also what hurts. Reverence helps us come into right relationship with life - including our money and resources.
What might that look like?
When we are seated in reverence for our skills, our energy, and our wisdom we come into right relationship with earning and ask for what we need to live our more than enough life.
When we honor our energy, we create work hours that support our well-being without feeling we must adhere to standards of busyness set out by our culture.
When we are practicing reverence with our money, we create loving financial parameters for ourselves that support peace and decrease a sense of scarcity and attendant anxiety.
When we choose reverence as a practice.
We move deliberately, which in and of itself is revolutionary, with presence and curiosity - do my choices for myself and my resources express respect for myself and for life? Do my actions honor my values and priorities?
This approach by its very nature keeps us current with ourselves and our evolving sense of who we are, our innate power, and our place in the world. It tells us where we are experiencing the tension of scarcity wounding and invites us to tend those wounds. In addition, reverence also naturally brings us into gratitude for the resources, the beauty, the freedom, and the choices we have.
Reverence gives us the courage to see the pain and the beauty and to approach the whole of life with respect. To change what we must and what we can, to create more equity and true abundance for the collective and the individual.
The Reverence Framework is the approach.
In the coming weeks, I'll share more about the six steps of 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.
I would love to hear from you - does bringing reverence to your relationship with money appeal to you? What questions or insights bubbled up for you as you read today's blog?