Hello and welcome back to the Tiny Pod.
This week I want to talk about money.
Humans are the only species on Earth that turn survival into a
commodity. We commodified shelter, housing,
water, care, support, belonging, even rest.
We have made life transactional. Every other species meets its
needs directly. Only humans invented a middle of
money between themselves and survival, and that middleman is
now more powerful than the need itself.
Which is why money dysregulates the nervous system.
It interrupts our primal relationship with life and
nothing pulls us out of alignment, out of regulation
faster. The reason all my work focuses
on alignment is because alignment is power.
It is sovereignty, clarity, truth and peace.
Money either pulls you forward out of alignment into the big I
am of look how much I have look at my car, or backwards into
collapse. I am not enough because I don't
have enough money. Both are symptoms of the same
thing, dysregulation in our body and our nervous system.
In survival mode of fight, flight or freeze, we can't think
clearly when we are in survival, we can't digest ideas and we
literally can't digest food. Money conversations feel so
charged because they land in our body first.
If money is out of alignment in our lives, the answer isn't to
hassle harder to force. It is to regulate deeper because
the real currencies a time, energy, presence, and your
ability to stay in your body even when the world tries to
pull you out of it. Scientifically, this is known as
polyvagal theory. When the nervous system feels
unsafe, every system in the body feels this threat.
And when we regulate our nervous system, creative problem solving
increases, intuition strengthens, and we access
what's called the social engagement system, where
opportunities, collaboration, generosity, and solutions live
spiritually. Money is just energy.
It flows where there is openness, clarity and alignment.
So when our nervous system is braced, tense, or in fear, the
flow tightens. But when our nervous system is
relaxed, regulated, and connected to purpose, the flow
expands. I was raised by wealthy people
living in suffocating scarcity. My family were financially
wealthy and spiritually bankrupt, protecting piles of
money while starved of purpose, intimacy, and truth.
The richest people I know are the most impoverished
internally. No peace, no connection, no
meaning, no alignment, and no internal safety.
Society teaches us to want money, but it's really what we
think money will give us. Security, safety, freedom, rest,
dignity, choice, beauty, belonging.
But the truth is, you cannot buy a feeling you do not already
hold. If you feel unworthy, no amount
of money will ever feel like enough.
If you feel unsafe, you will hoard money and live
defensively. And if you feel empty, you'll
spend money to fill holes that were never created by money in
the 1st place. Some people with almost nothing
live in abundance. I have found this to be so true.
Having been raised in financial wealth and spiritual scarcity,
raising my children with less but more time, more energy, more
freshly baked sourdough, more trips together has been so
abundant. Because when you feel abundant,
you're resourceful, relaxed, generous, creative, whether you
have a little or have a lot. So clearly, money is not the
thing that buys safety, peace, relaxation.
It is how you relate to it. Real abundance comes from self
value, from how deeply you honour your most valuable
currencies, your time, your energy, your presence, your life
force. Money is only one expression of
value, it is not the source of it.
When you know you're worth, money becomes a tool.
When you doubt you're worth, money becomes a mirror.
Money isn't power, your relationship to yourself is and
we can see how money maps directly onto relational trauma.
People who avoidant in their attachment style hoard and are
hyper independent. People who are anxious in their
attachment overspend and under charge for their time.
People with disorganised attachment have cycles of
financial wealth and bankruptcy. Boom and bust and people with
secure attachment create sustainable wealth and live in
generosity. Money never changes you.
It exposes the inner architecture of your psyche and
amplifies who you already are. So if your baseline is fear,
money magnifies fear. If your truth is love, money
magnifies the generosity of your heart.
The wealthy suppress their guilt and shame of the extractive
methods they've used to cultivate their wealth.
With moral narratives, I worked harder and those with less
suppress the shame of I'm not enough.
Both these shame based survival narratives keep inequality
intact. The truth that the wealthy do
not want society to know is that abundance is our nervous
system's natural state and scarcity is learned and
programmed in. It is biological trauma.
Looping a regulated body automatically feels enough, and
when we shift out of survival, we open to creativity.
We have freedom to choose and agency over ourself.
And this is how people can live with an abundant spirit with
little money, and wealthy people can live in crippling scarcity.
There are two types of wealth. There is soul based wealth which
flows from alignment, integrity, inner coherence, and this wealth
nourishes you and everyone around you.
And then there is system based wealth which is extracted
through dominance, fear manipulation, exploitation and
inherited systems. This wealth depends on other
people's scarcity. Trump, Netanyahu, oligarchs,
tech billionaires. They are wealthy through system
based wealth. And system wealth is not
abundance, it is accumulation fueled by spiritual bankruptcy,
self abandonment, and at the cost of their inner peace.
People who betray themselves to build empires run on chronic
dysregulation. They sacrifice their ability to
experience safety, real intimacy, real love at the altar
of their addiction to power. System wealth is a source of
constant paranoia, fear of loss and a numbness to all that is
truly valuable, and their lives are characterised by outer
riches and inner poverty. Their wealth depends on
destabilising the vulnerable, punishing others and suppressing
truth, which they do by funding the police, armies, media
propaganda, government parties who enforce tax loopholes to
keep them rich. The people who abandoned
themselves and are dysregulated cannot accumulate peace,
longevity, Lovejoy, freedom or a legacy to be proud of.
It is why we see the very wealthy going bankrupt and
wealthy again. Because it is unstable.
Because money that depends on extracting from others
externally has 0 stability internally. 5 Billionaires could
end global poverty and still remain generationally wealthy,
but they don't because for them poverty is their fuel supply.
The system they extracted their wealth from feeds on scarcity.
So they maintain scarcity, use their wealth as a weapon to harm
and oppress. Control is the currency of the
emotionally bankrupt. They don't value love.
They want dependence, power and narrative control.
They need to be needed. Soul wealth, by contrast, does
not need domination, fear or extraction.
It doesn't require lies to maintain it, and it grows
effortlessly because it is built on truth, alignment and
integration, not control and manipulation system.
Wealth builds fast because it is extractive.
Soul wealth grows slowly because it is regenerative.
Exploitation creates instant profit.
Integrity creates sustainable abundance.
Money is a weapon used by the wealthy to distract us from
ourselves, to keep us dependent and disempowered and in service
of a system that takes everything and gives nothing.
When we take our power back and shift our focus from the
currency of money back to the currency of time and energy, and
we consciously choose where we spend our time and energy and
start valuing communion with others over competition, the
system starts to collapse. I have never heard of someone
asking for their money to come and visit them when they are
dying. And sadly for those who devote
their life to creating money at the expense of creating
relationships, money is often all they have.
I'll see you next week.