July 22nd, 2013

I am slowly starting to feel better.  I threw up for what I hope is the last time just after 6am.  Yuck.

On Thursday I get the very clear directive to go on this pilgrimage, and by Saturday night I am flat out, throwing up, and feeling miserable.  It was all centered in my stomach.  What can I or am not willing to stomach?  And, as my friend, Sharon, pointed out on the phone this morning, stomach is the seat of action.  Where am I out of right relationship with action?  What actions have I been taking - or not taking - that are not aligned with my higher purpose and intentions?

I felt fine all day Friday and Saturday, physically anyway.  On Saturday morning, I talked with my wise friend, Ingrid, who also was a major catalyst in my going on the journey to reconnect with my taproot.  She played the catalyst role very powerfully again on Saturday morning.  When I shared with her what I was up to with this journey with Money, she challenged me.  Threw the gauntlet down and upset my neat package.

  Sarah, money is not your nemesis or even your challenge.  It is your default and your addiction.  You honor yourself with these amazing and courageous pilgrimages, and then you come home and try to fit yourself back into a box, into being at home with your family and all of its responsibilities, and you default to money.  Money is not your challenge.  Telling yourself the truth of who you are and what you really want is your challenge.  

Gulp.  

Interesting that I just used the word "gulp."  A very descriptive word that uses the digestive system to swallow, and here I've been - throwing up everything I had swallowed and could not stomach.

There is most certainly truth to what Ingrid shared with me.  By the way, Ingrid has my permission to speak so directly to me, and what I typed here is the synopsis of our much longer conversation.  I trust her implicitly and know that she deeply loves and cares for me.  It is out of this trust and love that she knows she can cut through the chaff and go straight to the heart of the matter.  I just saw a great quote on Facebook:

"...it is not what I am saying that is hurting you; it is that you have wounds that I have touched by what I have said."   ~Don Miguel Ruiz

What Ingrid said to me touched something very deep and repressed in me.  

I do not remember giving myself permission to be myself since I was a very young girl.  I quickly developed habits to look outside of myself to know what I wanted, what I should wear, how I should act, what I should do.  Somehow, I told myself it was not okay, I was not okay, to be truthful about my dreams, desires and feelings, and I developed a finely tuned, externally based system to figure out how I should look, act, feel and think.   I believe I said this somewhere before in my blog, but I gave away my connection to my core so that I would be loved, so that I could and would belong to my parent, my family, my friends, my peers, and now again, my immediate family.  I have a very strong will and have used it to make sure that I always do the "right" thing, or at least just enough of it to get by.

Truth is, I am terrified by what I want, what I long for, and who I am.  I am terrified because I have made up a very convincing story that if I honor who I am, be myself, be truthful about what I want, that I will be all alone, and nobody will love me or include me.  I will not belong anywhere or with anyone.  I will be all alone.  

So, to belong and to be loved, I have been willing to not be truthful with myself and to be my authentic self.  

And instead of taking responsibility for this, I have always found someone, or something else to blame - my mother, my upbringing, my environments, and yes, Money.

I have used Money as my scapegoat, bully and saboteur rather than confront this truth that was lovingly and directly reflected to me this past Saturday.  

I would rather have been "poor me" and the victim than take responsibility for my lies and deceit, and become the heroine of my own journey and my life.

Big deep breath.

Yuck.  As I write that, it feels like what I have been throwing up for the past 36 hours.  YUCK.

So what if what I have been projecting onto Money is actually the aspects of me that are the bully and the tormentor?

What if I take those words I wrote the other day and retrieve them, and own them for myself?

  It is a masculine energy, that looks down at me, with his finger pointing at me, and with a very condescending voice tells me that "You will never be one of us.  No matter how much money you have, you will never belong.  Ha!  You will never be enough, have enough, know enough.  Who do you think you are?"


     I am a menacing energy that looks down on myself, and with my finger pointing directly at me, and a very condescending, ridiculing and loveless voice I tell myself that "I will never be one of them.  No matter how much money I have, or what I do, or how I dress, or how well I do, or what I choose, I will never belong.  I will never be enough, have enough, know enough, to be loved and to be okay, and belong.  Ha!  Who do I think I am?

I feel like throwing up again.  My stomach hurts.  My throat is choking.  I feel sick to my stomach.  

So this is what I do…every time I have a desire, thought of my own - I judge it, and myself, very harshly. And I say these mean and horrible things to myself, and then I take that desire and put it through my "outer acceptability filter"  and rework and morph my desire until it becomes acceptable, until I become acceptable, and know that I will belong.

I am my own saboteur and bully.  And, I have projected all of this meanness, bullying, unlovingness onto Money, and made him wrong, bad, uncaring, unloving, and so of course, have not wanted it really.  Made just enough to still play victim, "poor me", I can't do what I really want, I'm stuck, I'm unsuccessful, I'm worthless, I am not enough.

And Money has accepted this, and allowed me to project all of this negativity onto him.  Because Money is Love.  Money was willing to play any role that I chose to project onto him, because ultimately, he - it - knew that I would recognize that despite all my best efforts to make him the bad guy, that he was always here for me, patiently waiting for me to take ownership of what I do to myself, so that he could show up in his essence and in his truth.  This is the ultimate of being in service, isn't it?  That we are willing to play the dark and maligned roles in someone's life so that they can actually come back full circle into the truth of love.  Because the truth always is Love.  

Over the weekend, as I was being with all that Ingrid and I had talked about, I wondered about the possibility of the words I had "heard" from Money and the condescending and unloving tone that I had imagined him to use.  What if I had turned and manipulated the tone of this voice to fit my story about being excluded, unloved and not belonging?  What if he actually said those same words but with a loving tone?  What if it was his way of reminding me that I am not here to belong to anyone else but myself?  I am going to take those same words and interject them with other words that I may have cut out with my own internal editing.  What if he was actually trying to tell me exactly the opposite of what I heard?

"You will never be one of us.  You don't want to be…that is not your purpose.  If you keep trying to be one of us, or one of them, you will never just be yourself.  No matter how much money you have, you will never belong.  Because it's just not about the money.  It's never about the money.  It's actually all about you and how much you can love and accept yourself - all of who you are, all of your dreams, desires, impulses, passion, sexuality - all of it.  Ha!  You will never be enough, have enough, know enough.  Because you are already enough, just as you are, for who you are and what you came into this body and this life to create and accomplish, to be on your soul's path.   Who do you think you are?  Just a mere human being that wants to be like everybody else?  No…who you truly are is the most magnificent unique spiritual being having a human experience whose only "job" is to be fully yourself in this beautiful human body and to love yourself, and to be love, embrace love, be love wherever you go.  In this, all else is simple and clear."

Because Money is Love. 

In Barbara Wilder's words from her book, Money is Love, 

Today, money carries with it all the fear, anger, and greed that every individual has felt about it as it passed through their hands. Money is dirty, filled with disgusting, mean-spirited, terrified energy of the human beings whose thoughts direct...Money is energy that should flow freely though our lives and throughout the world.  But fear blocks the flow…if we humans have infused money with all this negative baggage, it only stands to reason that we should also be able to clean and infuse it with positive power. 

I mentioned the work Financial Alchemy™ in a previous blog.  Financial Alchemy is a coaching process that has you get very clear about your relationship with money through personifying "who" money is for you, and to give you the opportunity to create a new relationship.  In my experience, the shortfall of this process is that once we identify our "Money Monster", we are told to just get rid of our it/him/her through breaking up with or firing him, and that just never worked for me.  The habitual monster bully just kept coming back into the picture, and reluctantly, that's who I've been in relationship with, despite all the inner work, the workshops, and positive affirmations.   That's like telling someone to breakup with an abusive partner and to now, just like that, get into relationship with someone who's truly loving and respectful without the inner work to make the changes.   Also, it missed the deeper piece of recognition and compassion that this negative being has actually served a very great purpose.  In my more enlightened moments, I can recognize that the even most challenging people or presences in my life are actually there to serve me and my spiritual and emotional growth and transformation.  Without them, I would have no grist for the mill, nothing to work with or push against.  In this instance, Money has deeply served me by allowing me to project the saboteur and bully onto him, knowing that ultimately, I would take responsibility and own these feelings and projections.  This then allows for the possibility for me to fully accept, and love myself.  Without Money, I wouldn't have some "one" to help me to recognize the beliefs, patterns and behaviors.  I actually feel much gratitude and compassion for money in its willingness to carry all of our fears, angers and greed.  What an enormous gift and generous role it has played for all of us for all of these thousands of years.  

In the work I have done in Financial Alchemy™, I created a new Money that resonated with my core and my purpose.  He is Green Man, the timeless archetype of the wild man who lives in the natural green and wooded world.  He is fully masculine, embodied, sensual and passionate.  He loves unconditionally and he is very rooted in the natural world, trusting in the abundance and beauty of Nature.   Trouble is, I have kept him at arms' length and have been unable to fully relate to him for these past five years.  I have known that he is there, waiting patiently for me to come around to the truth of who he is, rather that always relating to him as the monster perpetrator villain in my "woe is me" life story.  Even more, he is patiently waiting for me to come to the truth of WHO I AM.  I now feel ready to invite Green Man to walk with me.  

Green Man is the embodiment and expression of money that I want to walk with and journey with.  He is my mirror and my guide.  He is the bridge for me between the spiritual and material worlds.  He is who I walk with on this journey of coming to fully love and accept myself.  So why don't I just walk by myself, with my essence?  

If this journey is really about me and my self-worth, self-expression and self-esteem, why am I walking with Money?  

Because for whatever reasons, Money is the direct reflection of my willingness and capacity to love and accept myself, and to create my life from within, nourished by my gifts, dreams and desires, guided by my soul's purpose and path.  I am here to contribute and serve, and my willingness to step over the stile and fully onto my soul's path of contribution is the key to unlock the blocks and fears that stop the flow of financial prosperity.  As I allow myself to receive my Self, Money as Green Man shows up to guide me, call me forth, and support me to shine my brightest light.  

Today is St. Mary Magdalene's Feast Day - July 22nd.  And I am clear that I will not waste what I initiated and received from this journey I have walked by myself on the Mary Michael Pilgrims Way. Mary and St. Michael are within my heart, guiding, providing and protecting every step of the way - even now as I am home in the US, with my family and re-entering to integrate and receive all from my experience.  Today, I read a quote from a group that experienced St. Michael up on Brentor, which is on the Mary Michael Way in Dorset.  The quote from the Bible that was opened to this page at the St. Michael Church that day gave them a message about the following:

We learned to not be afraid of our light inside of ourselves and that when we let this light out all the way, for our communities to see, we will be quickly accepted and recognized. Also when we allow our true selves to BE present in this world, we become the calm in the storm.

Just as St. Michael guides, provides and protects me along the path bearing his name, so too does Green Man.  Perhaps somehow they are connected and are reflections of each other.  More on that another time.  I trust him and know him to always reflect the truth to me.  As we journey together, we heal each other and serve to reconnect the material to the divine, and also the divine to the material, and to shine our lights brightly and boldly, and be the bridges to create Heaven on Earth.

Matter matters, the divine matters. It is all the same thing, just different sides of the same coin, after all.

Solvitur Ambulando!