When someone asks me on a podcast how my understanding of money consciousness has evolved over the years, I usually take a breath before I answer — because the honest version of that story is not a straight line, and the people asking it have usually been studying this material long enough to spot a sanitised answer from a mile away.
So I’ll give you the real version. It moved in stages. And every stage felt, at the time, like the final one.
Stage one: money as belief
The first version of money consciousness I ever held — and I held it for years — was that money was a belief problem. If you believed in scarcity, you got scarcity. If you believed in abundance, you got abundance. Change the belief, change the result.
I want to be careful here, because that frame isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. Belief is one piece. And when I wrote A Happy Pocket Full of Money in my early twenties, I was writing from inside that one piece with everything I had. It was true for me at the time. Beliefs about money were the wall I was hitting, and when I started softening them, things did move.
But here’s what I didn’t know yet: belief change works beautifully until you reach the edge of what your nervous system can hold. And then it stops, no matter how many affirmations you repeat. That edge is where stage two began for me.
Stage two: money as nervous system
For years I watched something strange happen — in my own life and in the people I worked with. Someone would shift a belief, genuinely shift it, and a bigger opportunity would show up. And then they’d quietly sabotage it. Or under-charge it. Or get sick the week of the launch. Or pick a fight with the partner who’d been cheering them on.
That’s when I started paying attention to the body.
What I learned, slowly and not always gracefully, is that money isn’t just a belief — it’s a felt experience. Receiving a large sum of money is a nervous system event. So is being seen. So is being praised. So is being trusted with someone else’s resources. If those events were dangerous in your childhood — if attention came with criticism, if being praised meant being singled out, if having something good meant someone might take it away — then your body learned to associate “more” with “threat.”
You can’t affirmation your way out of that. The body has its own memory, and it doesn’t care what you believe on paper. This is the layer I missed for years, and it’s the layer I see most often in conscious entrepreneurs with adverse childhood experiences who have read everything and still can’t seem to hold a bigger number without flinching.
Stage three: money as relationship
The third shift came when I stopped treating money as a thing and started treating it as a relationship.
This is harder to explain, so let me try with a small example. A few years ago I worked with a healer — I’ll call her Priya — who had been giving away most of her sessions for over a decade. She knew she should charge more. She’d done belief work. She’d done somatic work. She could feel safe receiving in practice rituals. But the moment a real client tried to pay her real money, something in her would go cold and she’d discount the price on the spot.
What we eventually found wasn’t a belief or a body memory. It was an unspoken contract she’d made with money itself when she was about nine years old, watching her parents fight about it every night. She’d decided, in the way a child decides things, that money was the enemy of love. And every time someone tried to give her money, the child in her felt like she was being asked to betray love itself.
That’s not a belief. That’s a relationship. And relationships can be repaired — but not by arguing with them. Only by sitting down with them and listening to what they’ve been trying to protect.
Stage four: money as feedback from the field
The most recent shift is the hardest one to put into language, and I’ll only gesture at it.
These days I experience money less as something I’m trying to attract and more as information the field is giving me about alignment. When money flows easily into a project, that’s data. When it doesn’t, that’s also data. Not a verdict — data. It’s telling me something about whether the offer is shaped right, whether the audience is right, whether my own readiness is matching the work I’m asking the world to receive.
This is part of what I mean when I talk about the Spirit & Flow pillar — money becomes one of several feedback channels, alongside synchronicity, energy, and ease. Not the only channel. Not even the most important one. But not separate from the spiritual life either.
What I’d tell my younger self
If I could send a note back to the version of me who was writing about money consciousness twenty years ago, it would say this: you were right that beliefs matter. You were also working with one piece of a much larger picture, and you were going to spend the next two decades finding the other pieces.
The belief piece is real. The nervous system piece is real. The relational piece is real. The field-feedback piece is real. They’re all real, and they all matter, and most of the suffering I see in this work comes from people having been handed one piece and told it was the whole map.
That’s why we work with money across all three pillars now, instead of treating it as a mindset problem. If you’re curious about how the Three Pillars hold money differently than a single-track approach, that’s a good place to keep reading. And if you’ve been wondering whether what you’re hitting is a belief, a body memory, or something else entirely, the 6-Layer Block Model is the diagnostic I wish I’d had thirty years ago.
None of this is something you have to figure out alone. If any of this is landing — if you’ve been carrying the suspicion that your understanding of money has more layers waiting underneath it — you’re warmly welcome to come sit with us inside the Miracles For Me community, where this conversation continues at a pace your nervous system can actually hold.
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