This is the first post in my shiny new blog. I'm excited! This blog is all about the emotions that come up around money.
When I say money, I mean absolutely anything related to money. Making money. Losing money. Not having enough money. Having too much money. Giving away money. Being given money. Spending money. Saving money.
If it has anything to do with money, and it stimulates an emotion for you, then this blog aims to cover it!
My goal is to shine the light of awareness on what's happening to us when we feel emotions related to money. I want to not only identify the exact feelings involved (which might be different for each of us) but also to dig in deeper and figure out why those emotions are coming up.
Having awareness of these things not only helps us navigate the emotions with more wisdom, but it might even stimulate some sort of healing if we're intentional.
Money has been a particularly hot topic for me dating all the way back to my childhood. When I was growing up, I oriented myself toward "performing". I had the perception that I would only be worthy of appreciation if I performed well.
Maybe it was because of the way my parents or society influenced me. Or maybe it was something else. But either way, I felt the need to do well at everything I did.
In school, my performance was measured by grades. So I got straight As. That was what I thought I needed to do to "earn" appreciation and love.
Once I was out of school and in the real world, money was the measure of how I was performing. And I worked incredibly hard to try to earn as much of it as I could.
There's a lot more to my story, and I'm in a much different place now, but that gives you an idea of how big a factor money has been in my life historically. Essentially, I spent many years equating my self worth to how much money I had.
And because of that, I have a lot of emotions associated with money!
Lucky for me, I latched on to mindfulness several years ago (and joined a mindfulness-based support group in my area). Doing this helped me gain an awareness of what was happening inside of me and why certain tough emotions were coming up. It also helped me heal some of the inner wounds that were causing those emotions.
I am going to bring up a lot of the same topics in this blog that I went through in my emotional learning and healing process. I think it's so helpful to consider them.
Even after all these years, I still feel emotions around money. But it's a lot different now! I catch my old "automatic" tendencies pretty quickly nowadays and I have internal resources that help me choose how I want to respond when tough emotions come up.
It's a work in progress still and an ongoing journey, so I'm blogging about it! To help me and to help you. We can support each other!
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.
