Money Difficulties
Apr 28, 2021
We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve -Stephen Chbosky
Most of us have experienced money difficulties in our lives. Whether it that’s being short when a bill comes due, putting more groceries in the cart than you have cash on you, or having an unexpected charge hit your account that overextends you. This triggers a feeling of inadequacy, loneliness, unworthiness, and shame, among many others. Often financial professionals attribute this to poor money management as if it was just simply an accounting error. That all we need is more education on arithmetic and budgeting to avoid this recurring nightmare that so many of us face. But I believe that these patterns are far more than incorrect mathematics.
I feel that subconsciously we believe money is supposed to be difficult, and so we experience it that way. You may read that and think it is an oversimplification but just wait to see the big picture. A subconscious belief has to be right for the human being to function. Beliefs govern perception, and so perception is how we experience the world around us. Two almost identical people could look at a glass of water filled to the middle and see half full or half empty. Both would be right in their perception. They would then experience the emotions of lack or abundance depending on that perception and make decisions from those feelings. Now, what if you believed the Universe you lived in was hostile? Then your perception would drive you to look for threats around every corner. You would have constant anxiety and fear for even the most mundane of life experiences, like traffic for instance. You would look for evidence of a hostile Universe or a half-empty glass, all so the belief could be right. You would constantly be searching for the peace that is already within you when you let go of this belief.
To continue down this rabbit hole, what if you believed that you couldn’t get ahead with money? That you couldn’t figure money out, or you were bad with finances? What if you believed there was never enough money or that money is always a struggle? It would stand to reason that you would look for evidence everywhere so that this belief could be right. Here’s where it gets interesting. If this belief was false, would you then sabotage yourself in order for it to be right?
Have you ever done something and then said to yourself, “why did I do that? I know better than that.” Or asked yourself, “why do I keep making the same mistake when I’ve already learned this lesson?” This is because your conscious mind recognizes that the subconscious mind made a decision on your behalf. That decision might not have served you as the individual, but it served itself by delivering the finished product of the programming. This is where I diverge from the mainstream financial thinking because I recognize that if we teach financial strategies without clearing out the subconscious beliefs that cause this sabotage, then we are attempting to ski uphill. If you keep having similar money problems each month, then be glad you are reading this.
Love
These days I’m very indirect when telling people they are the cause of all their problems. To most people, the responsibility it takes to overcome the challenges with life, or in this case finance, that lay before them is too much to bear. They would rather play the blame game and be a victim pointing fingers everywhere else but to the person in the mirror. To be fair, I did this for years too. My favorite blame target was our education system that I for years touted as the source of our financial illiteracy and subsequent personal economic woes. Then it was my parents for handing me all their broken concepts that slowed me down from cultivating wealth. Though finally, as most dare to do, I only had one person left to blame. When we take the plunge into the depths of our unconscious patterns, there is a tidal wave of shame for all the pain we have caused ourselves. The reason most choose victimhood and blame over responsibility and empowerment is to escape this lowest vibration of self-punishment.
When we look at love to see the pattern with money, it seems to me that we can temporarily avoid both the blame and the shame long enough to see our own unique perceptions caused by the limiting beliefs. Love is by far the highest vibration and the best thing we do as human beings. To understand love is to understand humanity, nature, and the Universe in which we reside. No human being, regardless of how they were conceived, would be alive today without love. A human baby cannot survive infancy without love. Or maybe better said, we would rather die than live without it from the start. So why then is love so difficult for so many of us. Why are romantic relationships or even deep loving family or friend relationships so painful? Why does love often feel like walking a tight rope where one misstep will cause extreme heartache and loss? My opinion on this is the same with money; it is because we believe that love is supposed to be difficult.
When I say that, what immediately comes into my conscious awareness as a man is an old adage of rescuing the princess from the dragon. Boys are taught to be a hero they must go off to war, battle some extreme danger, and save the fair maiden from the evil wizard. Meaning at a young age, we are made to believe that there must be some extreme barrier to get through to win love as the prize. Most women will tell you that men want the chase. Give love too easily, and they are bored, make it too difficult, and they will go elsewhere. But why is this? Why would we put up barriers to love? Why on earth would we make love difficult?
The bottom line is because we think we don’t deserve love. We believe that there is no gain without pain, that anything worth value must be earned, which means to be suffered for. That the good things in life don’t come easily or free, but this is absolute and complete bullshit! Love was given freely in abundance when we were children. The air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat are given freely in abundance by our Mother Earth. Every human being wants to love and be loved. We must realize that it is us who makes love more difficult than it needs to be. Simply by believing we don’t deserve love, we block it from coming into our lives, push it away, run from it, sabotage and destroy it so that we can be right about not deserving it.
Boys Only Want Love If It’s Torture -Taylor Swift
Non-Deserving
To believe that love is supposed to be difficult supports this nonsense that we don’t deserve it. Because if love were easy and flowed to us and through us like the air we breathe, we would see the truth plain as day that we absolutely deserve it. That deserving isn’t even a question. Then this belief would have to die, and since beliefs like all living creatures on this planet fight for their own survival, it would rather keep you from love and the truth about this belief than let go of its hold on you. To use the above example, do you believe you deserve the air you breathe? That seems like a silly question, doesn’t it? Of course, you deserve it because you have access to it every second of every day, even when you sleep. I wonder what you would do if you believed you didn’t deserve to breathe. Maybe self-mutilation like removing one lung, or taking tiny shallow breaths, or picking up smoking in the hopes of destroying the capacity to keep breathing easily so you could be right.
Make no mistake that it is the exact same with money. If you have money difficulties, it is because you believe you don’t deserve money, and therefore you reinforce this limitation with the belief that money is supposed to be difficult, just like love, so it is somehow more rewarding when you win it. This is why you sabotage yourself, why no matter how much you make, it seems to disappear, and why you can’t get ahead. We accept the amount of money we think we deserve.
Have you ever seen some amazing, smart, centered, funny, just awesome human being working some menial job? Have you ever been so taken aback that you look at them perplexed and ask, “why on earth are you working here?” Have you ever seen an open-hearted, loving, kind, gracious, fun, intelligent person dating or married to a complete narcissistic abusive asshole? Have you ever been so dumbfounded that your jaw hit the floor, and the words came out involuntarily, “what in the hell are you doing with that person?” Both examples are parallels of the same programming in the subconscious of the person who is diminishing themselves. Meaning that their life situation that doesn’t make sense from the outside is what they honestly feel they deserve. If you have difficulties with money, then there is a part of you that believes you are supposed to struggle because you don’t deserve it. Or that the struggle will somehow help you to feel you finally deserve it when you slay the dragon and “get ahead” one day.
And Why Do You Look At The Speck In Your Brother’s Eye, But Do Not Consider The Plank In Your Own Eye -Jesus Christ
Arrogance
I have encountered the scenarios described above many times, and I have a feeling I’m not the only one. While there is an extreme urge to shake the self-inflicted tortured soul awake and scream at them until they see that they can do so much better than their current circumstances, in my experience that never really seems to work. There are only two ways I have found to get through to someone like that. The first is to remind them of the truth in whatever method that they will listen to. To find that method and to keep reminding them that they deserve more can be a gauntlet that requires extreme patience and diligence. The other way to get through is to lead by example. Yes my friends, you can’t get around taking on the responsibility of examining your own life and letting go of the non-deserving beliefs running in your subconscious mind just as I can’t escape my own. In this way, our relationship struggles or money difficulties become an invitation to go inside.
The hard to swallow truth is when you can see self-limitation in others; it means you are looking in a mirror. If you can spot it, you got it. So if you find a way to unravel the beliefs that cause you to struggle and restrict yourself, you can leave a trail of breadcrumbs for others to follow. Then the next time you spot it, you can say to people in the gentlest way, “when you are ready to let go of these limiting beliefs, let me know because I was there, and I can show you what worked for me.” You are currently reading my breadcrumbs and the fastest way out I found is to take a good hard look at what it means to deserve.
When we judge ourselves, or anyone else, on what is deserved, we are pretending we know what The Universe thinks of us. We are judging through the lens of Source Energy. We mistakenly sit on the throne and look back at ourselves with disdain. This is the hubris of man, to believe we have any understanding of the mind or heart of the Creator of All Things. To say you don’t deserve anything that is given to you is extremely arrogant. If you didn’t deserve it, then it wouldn’t be there, and saying you don’t pushes back against the flow of abundance. We dam the river and divert abundance away from us by telling Source Energy, “no thank you, it doesn’t belong to me. I believe money should be a struggle.” The Universe that gave you the power to choose your experience in this life says back, “as you wish,” and proceeds to give it to those who agree that nothing should be off-limits to them.
What is so fascinatingly backward is that we judge those who believe they deserve everything they want as arrogant, entitled, or spoiled. But in reality, they are masters of magnetism. They are attracting all that the Universe wants to bestow upon them and only blocking what they don’t want to experience. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer because one group believes that money is a struggle and the other treats money like the air they breathe. It never even dawns on them that they don’t deserve it because all things are theirs by birthright.
When You Change The Way You Look At Things, The Things You Look At Change -Wayne Dyer
