The following is a lightly edited transcript from a Train Your Body to Wealth coaching session, which group members get at least twice a month or more.
I’ve done my best to turn this into something useful in this different context; I hope it works!
“When we're working through the money stuff, especially in the beginning, it really hits us in the face. All the negativity and things that we have around money, the way we hate rich people, or the way we feel so much shame related to money. For me, it was like tons of shame. And a strong story I had is I didn't want to be one of “those people.”
When I saw people I perceived as poor, I perceived myself as poor, too, but when I saw people that I perceived as even more poor, like dirt poor, I didn't have compassion for them. I had, like, “ew,” a contempt really for them. I remember when this got clear to me, when it snapped into my awareness, I was at the gas station filling up my 4Runner.
So here comes this car, no muffler, you know, clunky rust spots, every stereotype of white trash that you can imagine comes barreling up to the gas pump. And out piles all these people with like no sleeves and tattoos everywhere. Dirty trash is all over the car: beer cans, McDonald’s bags, and candy wrappers. And to be fair I'm the worst about piling up trash on the floorboard of the passenger side of my car. I keep a trash bag in my car now to put stuff in, but it has been pretty bad in the past if I was commuting a lot.
I had a friend who used to call her car the “dumpster on wheels,” <laugh>, and sometimes mine looks like a dumpster on wheels. Right now, it's full of stuff that's been in the car for a month that needs to go to Goodwill. And I haven't taken it. So, when I pull up to a gas pump, I might look like I’m living in my car.
Anyway, so these people come boiling out and they've got dirty trucker caps on, and mustaches, and scraggly beards, and no makeup. Like just white trash looking people. And I had this visceral like, “Oh, yuck”. Like, “That's ‘those’ people and how gross and ew,” but then it started to hit me - that's my family. That's my dad's side of the family, not all of them, but a lot, especially when I was younger.
They look like that. They drive old vehicles. They don't take care of themselves or the things they own. And at that moment, it was like a lightning strike: “Wait, those are your people.” You are poor, too. You come from that, too. You might have a different car, your hair might look different, and you might have makeup on and a great job, but that's your history. That's your lineage. And here you are like, “Ew, I don't want to be one of those people.” And then, on my biological mom's side, I think that's really emphasized with “I'm poor, but I'm clean. We’re poor, but we’re intelligent, so we aren’t those po’ cracker types.”
In my ignorance at that time, somehow, there's something about me that makes me not one of those people because those people are like the worst. And then, I think, but wait, on my mom's side of the family, there is a very strong arrogant streak, and is that any better? “I'm smarter than them. We are poor, but we're super smart. We're way intelligent. Like, we might not have much, but oh, we're smart.” Like, we are not that. There's a lot of, “We are not that, we're in even the church, like, this church is the best church, and you're only going to heaven if you're in this church and everybody else is somehow trash or they're hell-bound or whatever.”
There's just a strong streak of better than everyone else. So, those two things really got me looking at how much contempt, and I am of course, not proud of that, but there's a strong streak of contempt on one side for the people on the other side.
That's a huge conundrum. We are a mix of all things, even beyond our family. When we have contempt about something that we are or are from, it sets up Shadow. That's where shadow and exiling parts of ourselves happen.
We don't want to think about where we came from if we have even a hint of shame. So, we like to wall that off because we don't want to be those people. Another time prior to this, I was working at the DA's office, the district attorney's office, where it's like extra rigid life. Every attorney, like everyone in suits, you're expected to come in suits, and you're expected to dress really well.
And I didn't wear a suit. I didn't have to; my job was different. But I was expected to dress professionally and do the whole makeup and hair thing. So, I was sitting at this table with three other women eating lunch, and they were talking about how their kids wanted to play with these other kids. But the other kids were the poor kids. And oh, you know, they were talking about them like, “Oh, they have this vehicle or their house is such and such.” “They're renters. Those people, they're renters in the neighborhood. Renters are the worst.”
Of course, I was a renter, and then it struck me again: I actually couldn't finish my meal. I was like, “Oh my God, people could have said that about my daughter.” When I was going through college, we were on food stamps and government assistance and lived in subsidized housing. In Fort Collins, subsidized housing is not at all like other inner-city subsidized housing, but still. Would they have thought of us as “those people” who live in the poor apartments?
It looked, I mean, relative to the continuum, like a really nice apartment complex. But in my head, I was like, “Ohhh, if people knew how poor I was, then if they’d seen my battered Nissan Sentra with a bungee cord holding the hood down, they could have been talking about my kid that way. Did my daughter miss out on friendships due to where we lived? What I drove? How I paid for food? What if I had been seen at the food bank?”
And then my mind took me further back in time. “Oh wow, I bet you people talked about me that way because I was the poor kid living in the trailer park and wearing the same two outfits alternating.” I was struck with, “I wonder if that is why I lost friendships and never understood why they were lost so suddenly. Was it because someone's mom dropped them off at my trailer house, and then suddenly we weren't allowed to be friends anymore?”
As a kid, I always took that as something wrong with me. One day, I had a best friend. She came to my house to play. The next day, we weren’t allowed to be friends. This happened more than once, and at that lunch table, it hit me hard that, as a child, I had been seen as “those people.”
Anyway, I wanted to share all these things that make us develop negative money stories because we have to face those parts and find these stories. We have to, first of all, as uncomfortable as it is, own how arrogant and contemptuous we can be about people who are what we would call “less than.”
“Those people” is what we usually say. “Oh, ooh, those people, ooh, those renters, ooh, those white trash down the street.” Or I don't know what other people call them, but white trash is the slur around here. Or po’ crackers is an older term for white trash.
So, when we're uncomfortable with all this, we don't want to be those people; and that pushing against makes us those people. We are an energetic match to what we revile and disparage. The more we hate it, the more we’re stuck to it, like Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. It makes us still struggle with money because the thought of becoming that is so repellent and so mean-spirited, and we have those parts in us like it or not. If we don't own those parts of us, those Shadow parts perpetuate our struggles with money.
We may be better off than those people, but we're still struggling with money. So, I think I shared with some people that I started keeping a running list of the parts of me. The part of me who wants to make sure, the part of me that does things I don't like. But for that part, there's a valid reason for it.
The part of me that wants to make sure we are fed all the time drives this eating when I'm not hungry. And even when I don't act on it, it's still there. The desire to eat to the point of discomfort, the desire to eat all the time remains.
I don't act on it, but it's still present. I'm still wrestling with it. The part who feels desperate for attention. That's the part where, when I don't feel good, I'm going back to my posts and looking to see if anybody has liked them. It's really a needy, victim energy type of part of me. That part that's desperate for attention. Well, the drive for that part is when you don't get enough attention, you are driven to get attention. It's a life need.
That part needs some tapping or validating from me something to be like, “Attention doesn't come from out there.” “We're not two years old anymore. We can give ourselves the attention.” We heal these parts by awareness and validation that their needs make sense to them, and they are actual needs.
The part who buffers in the evening. In the evening when you know the day is over and all this stuff you ignored all day comes crashing in and so I'll buffer. I'll buffer by watching too much tv. I'll doomscroll, too. I'll watch TV and scroll TikTok <laugh> or I'll read and have the TV on. Anything I can do to not have to feel all the stuff I avoided all day.
The part of me who buffers in the evening, that's a protective mechanism. That part doesn't want to feel the pain of that part, the other parts. And that part doesn't get it. That by not facing and feeling the pain in the evenings, it goes on and on and on and on. That part thinks it's protecting; it's acting in a protective way. That's actually a very destructive way because the pain never gets faced, then it goes on and on, and the behavior never resolves it, nothing ever resolves.
As I've been going through this level of self-observation, I've just been labeling those parts. I'm noticing that's really helpful, talking all about myself. But the way you apply that to yourself, as you're going through the day, even if you don't make a list. Although it's helpful to make a list because these are the parts we forget about. They're driving a whole lot of our life experience. We don't want to look at them, so we forget.
So you can write them down. You may have, “The part of me that refuses to take action.” “The part of me that sneak spends money in the middle of the night.” “The part of me that gossips.”
We can just label them and then ask the part of me that hates that type of person, the part of me who is disgusted by that type of person. We can ask, “Okay, so how is that protective?” The part of me that was disgusted by those people was trying to protect me from that life. And that is a life I’m well aware of and I don't want.
So, sometimes, we will resist looking at this because we think, “Well, if I accept it, then I'll become it.”
Or, “If I don't push against it, then I'm going to be that because that's what my family was, and I'll become that, and that would be horrible.”
Well, first of all, that's a terrible way to think about people who are struggling. Like, it's really mean and steeped in fear. But it's not the case at all. The more you accept and have compassion for people who are struggling like that, and the more you try to have empathy and put yourself in their position, the less likely you are to become what you previously pushed against.
You stop compartmentalizing and start dissolving the boundaries between yourself and others. You start living more often from the Oneness perspective. You start living as the love you are.
When you express empathy for others, you also express empathy for yourself. When we let go of that disgusted ego and move into compassion, we recognize that our instinctual repellent response is correct. That is a toxic lifestyle, right? Those people aren't gross and bad, but the energy of deep poverty is dense and painful, and it's not optimal for anyone.
Now, for them, they're doing their life thing. They're doing their soul thing. We just don't know those kinds of things about them, and ultimately, it’s not our business. But for us in our lives, if we're having an “ew” response, that's our energy saying that's not for you, and I'm going to protect you from it OR you have that in your system stuffed in the far back right corner of a closet in your heart - look at it.
I feel I'm saying contradictory things, but it’s because there are multiple layers of that “ick” response we can explore. So, part of the “ick” is saying, “That's not me.” That's not for me. That's toxic to my system. So, it's natural; I'm going to push against it. The other part is how we interpret that. Like, if those people are gross, not that the energy over there is not for me. But the fact that we see it, it is for us in these other ways. Does that make sense? Because people who don't have a thing around this whole package that I'm talking about don't even see those people. They're not at the gas pump at the same time.
Or those people pull up, and they're busy in their own head doing their own thing or talking to their own people, and they don't even register “those people.” They notice other categories of “those people” based on their Shadow and Judgy McJudgerson parts.
So, let me see if I can clarify it. What you see in the world is for you. If you see it, register it, and start having thoughts and emotions about it, it is for you, for you in the sense that it’s trying to come to consciousness - this Shadow - even though that frequency of energy might not be for you to be hanging out in.
You have the push-against response due to the frequency of energy that you’re not meant to be in and the pull response trying to wake you up to disowned parts and the fact that you are matching that frequency to some degree. So, our natural tendency is to push against that, and then label it “bad,” and then even amplify that “ick” response. But if you noticed it, there's a message in there for you.
Most of the time, it is not to reject it, but to pull it in, and we resist embracing discomfort. But when we pull pain-dirt-gross into an expanded heart, it transforms. Love and radical acceptance are the most powerful alchemical tools available to us.
The common messaging is that you pull it in, and now you're contaminated, and you have to go do this big long cleansing ritual, set up protective spells, and douse yourself in moon water. That's a very disempowered perspective because when you get in your heart and do the things that we do, we get centered, grounded, and connected. Earth, sky, and our hearts are the Grand Central Station of all things. We step into pure power.
When we are in that heart space, our energy will still have an “ick” response because it's a match, but it's not a match. And we can recognize the “ick” response and go toward it. That's the controversial piece. The anti-common-thinking piece of it is you go toward that energy, and you pull all that yuck into your expanded heart. Like, don't do it at the gas pump. You might have to do it later after you get yourself all centered and grounded. But you pull that in with the concept of I'm that, too. “I have this too because I'm one embodied fractal of the Formless, as are we all. When I see anything, I am that.”
“I am connected to that, too. And the fact that it got my attention means I need to pull it in and then allow my connected heart to transform it, to turn poison into medicine.” Like this is nothing new that I'm talking about. This is ancient. We've left ourselves these texts for thousands and thousands of years telling us to pull that in and recognize our own power. To pull that in and then let it transform.
Don’t run from discomfort. Discomfort is the invitation to grow. Metabolizing and alchemizing discomfort makes dreams come true faster than Disneyland ever could.
So, it doesn't mean that you then become one of those people. It means that you stop separating “my people” and “those people.” It stops the division and turns it all into unification. Like I'm a fractal of the Formless, and they're a fractal of the Formless. And then you stop seeing a “them.” You know it's resolved when you stop seeing them. So, where we have to [EFT] tap is, “Even though I am grossed out by those people, I still am going to love and accept myself.” “I'm going to acknowledge and honor, and verbalize, and own that I'm having a response to people who are doing something.” Then, de-shame them and yourself. We don't want to go around telling people how judgy we are!
However, if we de-shame it, then all that power that was kept separate by these divisions of contempt and “ew, I don't want to be that,” those barriers come down, and we have access now to more energy because we're more in the whole, in the all-of-life.
We can tap on, “Even though I'm scared to be a poor person, even though I am disgusted by people who have less than me, even though I have contempt for people who have less than me, even though I'm arrogant.” Or if saying I'm arrogant is too hard, you can say, “Even though I have arrogance, even though I have judgment.” Does that make sense? Yeah.
“Even though I don't want to admit how judgy I am, even though I don't want to own how mean I can be, even though I don't want to even be talking about how I'm so grossed out by those people,” whoever those people are for you. And it can be anyone. And it's especially loaded if you have judgments, and all people do have racial judgments, but we don't want to talk about that. It feels sometimes not safe to talk about that out there in social media land because you can get pounced for it. But we do need to do it in ourselves.
“Even though I have judgment about that group, that culture, that country,” the more we own those parts of us that we don't want to talk about, the parts of us who judge, the more free-flowing our money can get.
And at a minimum, let's say it doesn't translate into actual cash. I do believe it does. But we feel better, and we stop seeing money as a scary thing. We live in our wealthy self-energy; it helps us. So, doing this work helps us move more into the wealthy self, move more into the part of us that's superabundant that may not have a lot of money in the bank but always has money when you need it and often has money when you want it.
To do this practice, you have to trust that you have the power to do it. You have to trust that you are that powerful, that you can breathe in all the disgusting, all the war, all the famine, all the awful things in the world. And your heart is so powerful that it can just turn it all to energy. That you get to breathe that light into the world to everyone who's suffering.
It can be a challenging practice, but it is what this is about. So, the more we incorporate it, the more we drop the walls, all these weird containers, and the walled-off parts of ourselves, the more power we have. The higher our vibration is. If you haven't read Power versus Force, that's where that emotional scale comes from that Abraham Hicks talks about. And it was actual research done by David Hawkins, Power versus Force. So, it talks about measuring those frequencies and developing that scale. So, when people talk about, “Oh, high-frequency emotions are this”, that's based on that research, that's where that comes from.
And it does feel true, and it still doesn't mean that a lower frequency energy is wrong or bad, it's just a lower frequency. The more we own our lower frequencies, the easier it is to come up and stay up because shadowed parts will keep pulling at you. These walled-off parts of you have to become whole with you or it never works long-term. We can force it to work, but we’re always going to be falling back to our lowest energy. So, in convoys or caravans, you can only go as fast as the slowest person or you're going to lose them.
So, the fast-running parts of us are held back by the heavier, lower frequencies, but when we're comfortable with them, when we're not scared of them, when we're not trying to pretend they don't exist, we can be up high. And then something can happen and we can drop down low, but we don't stay down low. We're able to have the full range of human experience when we're comfortable being sad or we're comfortable recognizing, like there's this loneliness in the evenings and I don't want to feel it.
We just go ahead and feel it. As soon as we do, and you've probably experienced this, as soon as you let yourself have the negativity, it doesn't last very long. Abraham Hicks says 17 seconds and then one recording, she said, they just made up that time because people kept saying, “Well, how long, how long does it take?”
And they were like 17 seconds. Whatever it takes, however long it takes. But generally speaking, if it's just like an old thing or a habit or something moving through the collective or whatever it is, if we just face it, we generally pop back up because our normal state is that high frequency. And until we're comfortable taking in those parts, we won't stay there. And we know, because we've talked about it ad nauseum that money runs at that high-frequency state. The higher the frequency you are, the more money you're going to have.
It's just going to be easier for you. You might still have work to do, but money is a fast-flowing frequency. And so, when we do this work, we expose those parts, those parts get louder and that's where our work is. So, my goal for breaking this down was to have us spend the next couple of weeks doing that even more deliberately. We know from this work that it's going to ruffle all our feathers. It's going to stir stuff up, and it's going to be really uncomfortable, especially in the beginning when you're not used to it.
We are deliberately saying things that bring to our consciousness that “anti that” the poverty parts, the parts that you might have loads of money but still be scared you would end up one of those people. Are still scared that something could happen and wipe out your bank account, and then what would you do? Or your partner gets sick or loses their job. What are you going to do? Like even when the money's there, if you can't enjoy it, what's the point?”
OK, end of transcript. Now look at who you are “othering.”
Can you bring them into your Heart?
Can you access the Oneness even for more a moment?
Can you, will you, allow yourself to tell yourself the truth about the not-great things you do and bring these discarded parts of you into consciousness?
Will you accept that these are the ways we stay disempowered and now can choose to release ourselves from this bondage?
Let me know what you think.
XO,
LMW