The practitioner in this story is a composite illustration — a character drawn from common patterns experienced by practitioners who raise rates. She is not a real individual.

The Spiritual Practitioner Who Reconciled Money and Service

Amanda had been doing shamanic energy work and intuitive healing for eight years. She charged $95 per session. She had set the rate in year two, when she had still been building her practice, and had not seriously examined it since. By year eight, her schedule was full, her clients were getting meaningful results, and she was working six days a week to generate an income that did not feel like enough.

She knew, at some level, that her rate was too low. She also held a belief that she had carried from the healing community she had trained in, absorbed from the teachers and peers who had shaped her understanding of the work: that charging well for spiritual service was somehow in tension with genuine service. That the healers who were really in it for the work did not focus on money. That financial aspiration was evidence of ego, not calling.

This belief had never been tested directly. She had simply held it the way she held other beliefs — as obvious, as background, as the water she swam in.

The examination of the belief began not in a coaching session or a retreat but in a conversation with a client who had been working with her for three years. The client was a business owner who had found the work transformative in ways that had affected his professional decisions as well as his personal wellbeing. At a session one afternoon, he said something that landed differently than he probably intended.

“Amanda, I want to say something. I’ve referred three people to you this year, and I’m going to keep doing it. But I need you to know — when I tell people about you, I sometimes feel like I have to defend the rate. Because it’s so low that people assume the work isn’t serious.”

She sat with this for a moment. “You’re telling me the low rate makes people doubt the quality?”

“I’m telling you I have to explain why the work is good despite the low rate. That’s a strange thing to have to do.”

Amanda spent several months examining the belief after that conversation. Not dismantling it — she was not interested in dismantling her values around service — but looking at it from different angles than she had before.

The full context of money beliefs in healing work: the belief that money and genuine service are in tension is not irrational — it comes from real experience of practitioners who have let financial motivation distort their work, who have chased income at the expense of integrity, who have made compromises that damaged client trust in pursuit of financial growth. The concern embedded in the belief is not wrong.

What Amanda began to examine was whether the belief was accurate as a general principle or as a caution against a specific kind of distortion. The practitioners she most admired — the ones whose work she considered most genuinely aligned — did not appear to charge low rates out of spiritual virtue. Several of them charged significantly more than she did. They were not, as far as she could tell, less aligned for it.

The specific beliefs about money and service: the belief she had held was “financial aspiration is evidence of ego.” When she examined it, she found a more nuanced reality: financial aspiration that displaces the work is evidence of a particular kind of ego. Financial aspiration that serves the sustainability of the work — that allows the practitioner to do fewer sessions at greater presence, to invest in their own ongoing development, to have the capacity to give fully rather than from depletion — is something different.

She also examined what the low rate was actually producing. She was working six days a week. She was seeing more clients than she had energy for. The sessions at the end of the week — the Friday afternoon appointments she scheduled because she needed the income — were not the same quality as the sessions she delivered when she was rested and present. The low rate, in its service to accessibility, was producing depletion that affected the quality of the very service it was meant to protect.

This was the realization that shifted something. The low rate was not keeping her more aligned. In some ways, it was producing a form of compromise — the compromise of a practitioner who brought varying levels of presence to her work depending on how exhausted she was from sustaining the volume the low rate required.

She spent six weeks doing the inner work before she considered a rate change. Not strategic preparation — genuine examination of the belief and what it would mean to update it. She was not willing to abandon the value of accessibility. She was not willing to decide that financial aspiration was unrelated to service values. She was trying to find a way to hold both that was more honest than the position she had been in.

What she arrived at: financial sustainability that allowed her to work with fewer clients at greater depth and presence was more aligned with genuine service than a rate so low that it required her to work at volume that depleted her presence. The lower rate, when she examined it honestly, was not serving her clients better. It was just serving more of them, at a lower level of what she had to offer.

What is specific to healing practitioners: the belief about money and service was more specific to healing communities than to coaching or consulting communities. It was not unique to her — it was cultural. The work of examining it was not just personal; it was working against a community narrative that had served as scaffolding for her understanding of her role.

The mindset shift she went through: the shift was not from “money doesn’t matter” to “money matters most.” It was from “charging more means I care less” to “charging sustainably means I can give more fully.” The values around service remained intact. The belief that financial sustainability was in tension with those values had been updated.

She raised her rate to $175. The increase was large — from $95. She did it in stages over eight months: first to $130, then to $175, with full inner preparation at each stage and deliberate communication to existing clients.

At $175, she was seeing 12 clients per week instead of 22. She was earning more. She was working five days instead of six. Her Friday afternoon sessions were as good as her Tuesday morning sessions.

The position she eventually reached: by the time she settled at $175, she had arrived at a position she had not been able to articulate before the process: she was a practitioner who charged what it cost her to do the work well, which was not the same as charging what the work cost her clients to receive. The distinction — between the cost of sustaining the work and the value of the work to those who received it — had become clearer. Both mattered. Neither required the other to be minimized.

The Abundance GPS Skool community supports healing practitioners in examining the beliefs about money and service that shape what they are willing to charge. Join us here.