Risky Business

I don’t believe in taking unnecessary risks, but a life without risk isn’t worth living -Charles Lindbergh

         What is risk to you? Have you ever stopped and thought about risk? To me, I can’t think about risk without thinking about gambling. A casino is a great place to understand risk and reward when it comes to money. It is said by almost every gambling expert, including every casino, don’t gamble or risk what you cannot afford to lose. However, can you lose something that you constantly have enough of?

         Let’s tumble down this rabbit hole together by looking at risk not as something to be afraid of, but rather as a mirror. Something we can use to look into the depths of ourselves and understand more about who we are. Do you like to gamble with your money? If not, why not? Is it because of how hard you worked for it or because you cannot afford to lose it?

         Risk is comical to an abundance master. I will let you in on the joke as we go but for now, understand risk is all about perception and attachment. Let’s play an awareness game and envision you and I entering a casino together. This awareness game is only about becoming aware of your natural tendencies. Meaning you don’t need to share the results of this game with anyone.

         So, in your imagination, we enter a big beautiful casino and I turn to you and ask, “Are you excited to gamble?” How would you honestly respond? Take a second to imagine your response. There are really only two answers you could have to my question. You are either excited to be in a casino with me gambling or not.

         If you are not excited then let’s take a few minutes to investigate why. Is it because you don’t feel you have the excess money you believe you need to be able to afford gambling as entertainment? Is it because you just don’t like casinos or maybe have had a bad experience with them in the past? Is it because you don’t think you are very lucky? Maybe you are not excited to gamble because you think this exercise is stupid. Whatever it is become aware of it because no one will know your results but you.

         Now then, no matter what your emotional state or how you imagined your excitement pay attention to any change with the next question. Imagine we are still in the casino and I say, “Hey, since I missed your last birthday I’m going to give you some of my money to gamble with. If you win, we split the profit 50/50, and if you lose, no worries. It is your birthday present to have fun with.” How would you feel about my proposition?

         If you are excited to gamble with me and my money then most likely in your own way you can neutralize risk. Since it is my money, I’m letting you gamble with and there will be no debt or consequence if you lose it, the downside of gambling should be neutralized. This begs the question, if you still feel negative about gambling with me, then I’m betting risk is not something you are very comfortable with. The only way to be so paralyzed by risk that you cannot even be happy with it in an awareness exercise is because you have had a traumatic financial loss of some kind in your past that you are terrified of repeating.

Financial Ghosts

         I have had more than a handful of financial traumas in my life. I’ve had a business partner stab me in the back and attempt to steal the business right out from under me. I’ve watched an economic collapse destroy a business I spent six years building. I’ve even had ex-employees attempt to sue me to take money they didn’t earn from me. Listing a handful of them makes me realize why I got so burnt out on traditional business.

         To me, what I’m doing now is in no way traditional, and maybe that is why it is so freeing. Anyway, all that said, I’ve had my fair share of financial traumas. Things that broke my heart and made me feel severe financial loss. However, today I have nothing but gratitude in my heart for each one. Each trauma taught me so much about myself and about courage.

         There are two things that always come to mind when I think about risk. Gambling and courage. Courage is a fascinating emotion to examine. You cannot have courage without fear. If you didn’t feel fear when encountering a difficult challenge, you would technically experience fearlessness, not courage. Fearlessness, as the name implies, is the absence of fear. Courage is feeling fear and following your heart anyway.

         Before we go further, what do you believe the absence of courage is? The absence of courage would be self-sabotage. You listen to your fears over your heart and make a decision based in fear. Making decisions based in fear will continue fear’s existence in your life and sabotage the life of your dreams. If you are not following your heart, what are you following? Meaning the only thing left to listen to is fear or ego.

         Let’s circle back to risk. Could you experience risk without fear? No. Without fear, there is no risk. What this means is that to truly experience risk and the fear that comes along with it you had to experience financial trauma or financial loss in your past. Think of a child or teenager who first learns about gambling. They have a beautiful naivety and are oblivious to some degree to the loss that comes along with risk because they have never experienced it before. Oh but after a loss or financial trauma, then risk becomes really interesting.

         Do you remember the financial traumas that make you resistant to risk? Maybe you didn’t experience them yourself, maybe a parent, relative, or friend in your life struck out and chased the life of their dreams only to fail. Maybe they taught you to be aware of risk by indoctrinating you with their fears. Maybe you are avoiding risk to avoid someone else’s mistakes. But if you are avoiding risk, do you also see that you are avoiding the growth that comes with it?

         To be afraid of loss means you are playing the money game using Accumulation Theory. Accumulation Theory makes you believe that the people who have the most money stockpiled or accumulated have won the game of money. Some people even believe this means you have won the game of life as well. The Accumulation Theory also states that if you lose money, you are losing the game. This means that the financially destitute or people in poverty are losers. You may even hear people call those with very little money ‘losers.’

         What if all those losses were meant to be there? What if every one of them taught you to let go of Accumulation Theory? What if evolution was teaching you not to attach to things or money so you never feel loss again?

         A financial trauma has no power to affect decisions in the present moment unless you give it that power. If you are afraid of loss, you give power to the ghosts in your past. If you don’t believe you came to his planet to stockpile money, then you can’t really experience loss. You would only experience evolution playing itself out beautifully teaching you whatever it needs to teach you.

         The Cooperation Theory of money says not to stockpile anything or attach to it as if a lot of money is security itself. It says to let go of accumulation and focus on finding what you were put on this Earth to do. When you focus on your purpose, the thing that created you and your purpose will support you with all the money you need to accomplish mastery of your calling. What if every single financial trauma or loss in the past was like God slamming a door in your face with a sign on it that says, “This is not your path. Keep searching. Seek and you shall find.”

Your Shadow is a dark omen, a powerful teacher that reveals to you the places in your life where you’re energetically blocked. When you continue to ignore these signs, you perpetuate the cycle of your suffering   -Mateo Sol

Vacuum Of Growth

         How do you know that every loss you have experienced won’t eventually lead to massive abundance? How do you know that experiencing financial trauma isn’t what is needed to become successful? What if I told you that the more risk, fear, and courage you experience will lead you to wealth? What if I told you that the more you fail the more you become a master? Would that make you more eager to take risks?

         I’ve spent thirty years of life mapping scarcity and poverty by experiencing them. You cannot study scarcity without studying vacuums. The same as you cannot study broken hearts without studying loneliness. Scarcity is a vacuum of abundance. Loneliness is a vacuum of heart-to-heart connections. Disease is a vacuum of health.

         Having spent much of my life studying vacuums while stuck in a vacuum of wisdom, what I have come to understand is that a vacuum cannot stop evolution. Something must always come to fill the vacuum. You can learn a lot about love when you are alone. You can learn a lot about love while in a relationship but typically you learn about codependent love. When you study love while being alone you learn about self-love and interdependence. When it comes to a vacuum of money, what you learn about is your own self-worth.

         In my opinion, those experiencing poverty do not think very highly of themselves. Of course, this wisdom excludes narcissists who think only of themselves. Anyone who is not a narcissist but is in poverty doesn’t think highly of themselves or their skills to serve humanity. They typically gravitate toward jobs that ‘anyone’ can do and therefore don’t pay very much. If they do have an elite skill, they typically destroy the money they make so they can stay in poverty and stay unworthy.

         Scarcity and the not good enough story are eternally tied together. When you perceive not enough outside of you it is a direct reflection that you believe you are not enough inside. Your relationship with money is a mirror to your own self-worth. Worthiness is the not good enough story. Said differently, your worth is how much you judge yourself as good enough or not good enough. Worthiness is determined by your perception alone.

         What is interesting about this wisdom is that I may never have learned it if I had been born with a silver spoon in my mouth. If at any time a previous business endeavor would have been massively successful giving me plenty of money I would have had to learn self-worth through some other means, or not at all. But money is the absolute best mirror I have found to reflect your not good enough story. I grew up in poverty wishing I had been born a rich kid, but if I had I may have never healed the not good enough story.

         I see so many rich people striving to save the world or needing to be seen giving to charities. What they are really doing is striving to feel good enough. Struggling to make sense of why they were given so much while others were given so little. I’ve witnessed many fortunes destroyed so the person can fit in with everyone else. All so they can be accepted as good enough.

         If you currently find yourself in a vacuum of love, health, or money, can you stay in it long enough to evolve beyond it? Can you learn what the vacuum is teaching you before you leave? To fully know anything in this world you must understand its opposite completely. You cannot fully experience freedom unless you have experienced a cage or a vacuum.

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less -Marie Curie

I Don’t Want…

         Many students come to me wanting my help to find their heart’s calling, to utilize Cooperation Theory, or to unblock wealth for themselves. They come to me with wants but what they don’t realize is they also come to me with “Don’t Wants.” Everything has a shadow in this reality. When you want something, typically you also don’t want something.

         Here is what it sounds like to me when students ask for help. “I want to become an entrepreneur, I’m ready to leave my job right now, but I don’t want to become homeless or destitute on the way there. I want the life of my dreams, but I don’t want to sacrifice the creature comforts I’ve stockpiled for myself.”

         “Don’t Wants” are fears. To align with abundance, you must become fearless. To become fearless, you must first be afraid and use courage to overcome your fears. Using courage and facing fear means you follow your inner guidance despite the fear. Essentially, you have something you want to happen and something you don’t want to happen to utilize courage, just like gambling.

         Here we are back at risk. What I love about this game of gambling with your future is no one seems to see the downside of not playing the game at all. You cannot win a game you don’t play. To ensure you never get what you want, never try to go toward it. Many people consider that ‘playing it safe’ while I see it as a certain disaster.

         To me, the definition of tragedy is when a calling or inspiration is revealed to someone, and they are too afraid to move toward it. They die with regret always wondering what might have been if they moved forward with courage. Courage is not trusting the Universe to help you or to protect you. Courage is trusting in yourself to grow, learn, adapt, and evolve no matter what the Universe throws at you.

         To be afraid of a vacuum is to be afraid of evolution. To be afraid of a loss of money is to be afraid of the lesson within the loss. To be afraid of risk is to be afraid of your own power. Said differently, you give your power to fear and believe it is stronger than you are.

         When I first began my journey of going against what everyone else was doing, I told myself a mantra. I used to say, “I would rather die than live in a Universe that doesn’t have my back.” If I were starting out again today, I would change that mantra to, “I would rather die than live a life where I don’t trust myself.”

         If you want to bring your fear to its knees examine what you don’t want to happen. Laugh at it. Ask yourself, “Why is it such a big deal if I experience this thing I don’t want?” Imagine yourself experiencing what you don’t want and find how you could evolve. If you are afraid of being homeless, for example, then sit with that in the imagination, realize you won’t die from it, and search for how you would grow from that experience. Find so much growth that you shift to wanting it because you want the evolution from it.

         A vacuum cannot stop evolution but fear can if you let it. People avoid things they don’t want and gravitate toward things they do want. But when you realize that you may have to experience things you don’t want in order to get what you do want we are right back to gambling again. How you perceive risk is a direct reflection of your attachment to what you have and the fear of experiencing what you don’t want.

         If you see risk in following your heart then there are some things in your past that need love, attention, and healing. Risk is an invitation by the Universe to employ courage and see through your fear. Remember, the next time you face a leap of faith you are not leaping over what you don’t want and having faith in God to pull you through it but rather leaping in order to regain faith in yourself.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold -Helen Keller