Money, Intimacy, Trauma and Your Nervous System

Transcript:

Speaker 1 0:00
Welcome to Devotional Anarchy, a podcast about intimate embodied leadership that is radically human, honest AF and thereby inherently disruptive to systems of disempowerment and disconnection. I’m Isha Vela, trauma psychologist certified somatic intimacy Alchemist, wealth wizard shadow doula love anarchist intuitive channel and sovereign business coach. You’re here because you know intimate self connection is the source of everything you want to create in life. And that building safety and trust in your own body is what allows you to fully own and steward your energy and your relationships. Get ready to explore attachments, sexuality, spirituality, self expression and sovereignty and other relational themes from a trauma responsive somatic energetic lens. The conversations and tools shared in this podcast are designed to offer permission to create the abundant life, love and business that lights your soul on fire. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the devotional anarchy podcast. And this is the first of a series of master classes on intimacy, trauma, money, embodied wealth and the nervous system. And this correlates with my new offer, which is a three month one on one container for spiritual entrepreneurs, wanting to change their money stories like really wanting to shift into their next level of wealth, calibration and embodiment of wealth like really being able to receive hold and manage their finances in a different way. And what’s included in this three month package is our six somatic one on one calls. And in those calls, we dismantle your unconscious money sources, we really get to the source of what’s tripping you up in your finances or in your business finances. And we do that using my five pillar process of nervous system capacitation and resilience. And with that, you also get a free 90 minute financial needs analysis where we calculate all your, your monthly expenses, we gather all your assets and establish you know, what your retirement needs are, how much money do you need to make right to be able to retire, like really breaking it all down. And then after that, you get a 90 minute comprehensive financial strategy based on the financial needs analysis. And basically, that is about creating that roadmap to the life and business that you want. Then, in addition to that, we you also get my mini course flex the five pillars, nervous system capacitation and resilience. So we’re doing that in the sessions. But you also have sort of the theoretical foundations in a course so that you can continue doing the work after you and I have finished, you know, doing our sessions together. So the thing is, you can you can get those last three, the course the financial needs analysis and the comprehensive financial strategy, you can get those for free, just go to my website and access the course and then click the Google Form in the show notes. Or you can access the the clink the link to the Google Form in my IG profile to get on my calendar. So the investment for this three month package is $1,800 Painful, or 600 a month for three months. So what you’re really paying for are the somatic calls and the integration of what we do on the somatic calls with the comprehensive financial strategy I lay out for you. So in this episode, I’m gonna give you sort of a foundation to the transformation you can, you can expect inside of well. So a lot of the stories that we have about money are obviously beliefs that we hold in our mind, things we’ve heard from our parents, like sort of the repetitive scripts, the conditioning, things we absorb from our interactions with society. But what really gets us tripped up are the unconscious and epigenetic transfers we receive from our ancestral lines, right? So I want you to understand that these beliefs, they’re sort of passive, they live, they live like unchallenged assumptions in in the shadow right in your shadow awareness, right. And in sort of this in our nonverbal sort of cellular memory, which makes them harder to detect and sometimes we need that other person to kind of like see it because we don’t see it, right. It’s the designed so that it remains unseen. And one of the ways I help you uncover your money patterns is to look at how your relationship patterns are playing out with your money. So before I get into that, I first want to address some of the socio political realities of money, and how they might impact your capacity to receive, to hold and to move money or to manage money. So obviously, money is correlated with well being, that’s what sort of all the all the research shows. It’s associated with less physical and emotional stress, because obviously, you have more access to resources. Money has been concentrated in whiteness in the elite in maleness. People of color and women have been barred access to money, often violently, money has been corrupted, it’s been used, you know, to to exploit it’s filled with story, right? It’s like, overlaid with all sorts of like, yeah, just, it’s incrusted with, with sort of all of these, these corrupt concepts, right. And, and so I want to say with all that is like money is filled with trauma. You know, the reason why our relationship with money is so charged, because we are actively being traumatized by how money is, is moved in our society, how we relate to money, or how, you know how banks control money, right, through the money system, we are actively being traumatized. So we’ve learned to distrust money, right? We’ve, we’ve learned to distrust how money has been used, but we sort of, instead of looking at the system, we we sort of blame it on money itself, right. And we also like specifically, fear the loss of money, we fear losing money, much in the same way we fear, losing love in our relationships, because it’s connected to safety and security. And of course, like, you know, when you are, you know, pleasing other people at the expense of yourself, you know, what you’re doing, you understand what you’re doing, and you’re telling yourself to stop, but you’re doing it because you’re so afraid of losing those relationships, right? This is this is why it’s important to look at this from the attachment system perspective. And, of course, these fears may be exacerbated through experiences your family might have had around money, like they had it, and then they lost it suddenly, right, they could have lost it to a natural disaster, or they lost it to a regime, like a governmental or a political regime. Or, you know, I don’t know, some some political upheaval, right? Or there were there was mental illness in your family, and there were continual boom and bust cycles that occurred, right, it’s like, oh, we have so much money we can spend and all of a sudden, like, No, we have to tighten our belts, right, it’s sort of like, sort of expansion and contraction, expansion and contraction, sort of, in extreme ways. You may have been exposed to the anxiety of your parents, fearing money running out right in the living in constant fear of it running out, and being like, oh, no, we can spend it, we can do this, we can do that, right, sort of the limitation and the and the contraction around that. Also, you might have been exposed to fights around money arguments, and maybe there was somebody in your family that was spending too much, or someone saving and they had very different ways of dealing with money or relating to money that that created those clashes. And then on the level of sex and gender, think about the the choices, the women in your life had to make because of money. Right? A lot of times women had to be dependent, they had to stay in marriages that were unsatisfied, because they weren’t able to, you know, make it on their own. They weren’t able to, you know, raise children and then also work outside the home. Right, especially,

Speaker 1 9:14
you know, some decades ago, so they might have had to stay in abusive relationships, right? What what aspects of their dreams and desires did they have to let go of in order to feel safe and secure that they were that their basic needs were cared for? Right? And this is, this is important to take into account because, you know, again, safety and security, it all comes back to safety and security. So for now, just notice, you know, from from what I’ve said, notice the things that are coming up that are pinging in your system, maybe write them down or put like a star next to them. You know, and because of the socio political realities of money, women typically don’t have the same capacity, or have not had this The opportunity to develop that same capacity to receive and hold money like men have, like men have had more time to build a healthy entitlement to money, the part of them that says like, yeah, I can have this like that that inherent deserving like, yeah, why not? Why? Why can’t I live well, or why can’t I charge this amount of money? You know, women are still sort of grappling with like, Oh, can I charge that? Is that okay, am I allowed? Right, all of those that internal, that internal sort of rumination we experience. And I know, you know, plenty of men who also struggle in their relationship with money because intimacy wounds really dictate your relationship with money, much more than your gender does make because intimacy wounds are again, unconscious, right? They’re not, they’re socialized, but sort of on a on a more implicit level versus explicit. So we talked a little bit about money and attachment. Often our relationship we have with money is similar to the relationship we have with our parents, right? It’s like anything else. When you think about money, I want you to replace it with the word love and see how that shows up. In your energetic dynamic to it, how you relate to it, right? Do you? Do you are you sort of like avoidant of, of, like, are you an avoidant person in love? Like, do you push intimacy away? And then ask yourself, do you push money away? Right? Or, or do you want like, oh, like, I’m so wanting to be in a relationship, and I love love, and I, you know, see how that if there’s a sort of a grasping aspect to your relationship with money. Um, enough, in your family, for example, you experienced a lot of boom, and bust cycles around money, you know, think about that as maybe having had love, and then losing love, and then having it again, and then losing love, right. So you might not be willing, or as willing to give your heart because you might lose the person, right? So you might that translates into you, maybe not being willing to want money, you may not want to even receive money, because you may fear losing it, right. Or when you get money, you might hang on to it really tight. And the same works in reverse. Like, let’s say you experienced some form of neglect or abandonment in your childhood, you may also neglect taking care of your money, you may neglect creating stability for yourself financially in a variety of ways. You might fear money leaving you in the same way. You felt love left, you’re never kind of never came to you. Or when it came to you, it came to you and like small little drips, right? Not sort of big gulps, right. So it was more of a drip wise, right. And sort of underneath that, there may be like a deep longing to be held to be to be held by by life by the universe by a partner. And then by money as well which, which is then why you may not take care of yourself because you want somebody else to do it, you want somebody else to step in, because you’re exhausted from doing it yourself. Right? There’s this place inside of you this like small self, maybe a young part that is just like, Ah, I don’t want to have to do this anymore. This is so it feels so like taxing, I just want somebody just kind of to wrap themselves around me and just like hold me. So you know, and there’s also like, they can also come up in ways where, you know, like, in sort of in a more avoidant attachment style, you may say something like, oh, I don’t need money. You may have stories about money being corrupt, like you may believe sort of all the how all the ways money has been using my you may sort of blame money for how money has been used. And you’re like, Well, I don’t really need it, I’ll do it. I’ll do it less, I’m fine. Right? And you don’t ever allow yourself to feel the longing of like a something bigger, right? Or, or like you’re having this level or or you’re having this levels are sort of atrophied. And it’s like, going and only this much is good. And you know, I don’t need I don’t need right and so you’re denying your need, you’re you’re denying the part of you that has a desire for something more. And you know, that might cause you to underprice your offers you end up, you know, creating a business that’s maybe not sustainable for you, right where you’re extracting from yourself, because the system has been extractive right. And so you’re not going to be extractive to other people. You’re gonna be like, Well, I’m gonna I’m not going to charge a rate that’s like it feels like too much, but then you’re extracting from yourself instead. So it’s not balanced. So all of these experiences with personal collective generational trauma, limit our capacity to receive abundance, we have capacity for different things, right? Some have a really big capacity for to be able to manage stress, right? And like, what what feels like a lot for one person is different for another, right? For example, yeah, like a big a big amount of money, let’s say, I don’t know, $20,000, in your savings account might be like, Oh, my God, I have so much money in my savings account. Another person would be like, yeah, yeah, it’s kind of like regular, right? It all depends on on some of the experiences you had growing up what you’re, again, these sort of these implicit expectations, these assumptions that we have about what a lot is what a little is, right? So it’s really different. And childhood experiences do matter. So what happens when you receive more than what you’ve been then what you’re capable of holding, right? What happens when your capacity is the size of this measuring cup, and you get sort of this bucket full, right? So it’s going to overflow that it’s going to overflow the cup, right? We’ve you might overspend it, you might miss manage it, we’ve all heard about, like lottery winners who have squandered their winnings, right? Because it’s like, their cup of their container for holding just, it just can’t, it’s not big enough, right. And by spending, your nervous system is doing something very wise, right? It’s making sure that the amount is receiving matches its capacity, right? So that’s equal, right? And so it’s like, it’s like the water flowing out of this measuring cup. Eventually, it’ll top off, the water will have just sort of fallen away. And then it’ll be like, okay, yeah, well, this is this is the size of my container, this is the amount of money I can hold. And, you know, thinking again, of the nervous system, right, like you all know about fight flight, on freeze free. You know, I want to make it even more basic, though. Because, you know, we’re talking about fear, right? We’re talking about at the at the very basis of our relationship with money at the very basis of safety and security is fear, right? So we have to talk about fucking fear. And when you think about fear, like bodies do two different things. They either go into hyper hyper arousal, or they go into hyper arousal, right? So hyper arousal is a little bit of a shutdown state, a little bit of a free state where the fear activates the freeze. And sometimes fear activates anxiety, which is hyper arousal, right? Sometimes in hyper arousal, you’ll have unclear thoughts, you’ll experience confusion, maybe distress, right? The fear response is activated, sort of in a in an acceleration kind of way. In hypo, hypo arousal, your fear sort of activates more of a, like, a numbing effect, right? So it’s like, there’s more neglect, there’s more avoidance, there’s more like, pushing away, right? So when you think about your relationship with money, do you lean more into hyper arousal, or hypo arousal, sort of look and see sort of where you fall on maybe it’s in different situations, you go into hyper or maybe different situations to go into hypo right, but just, it’s a nice way to sort of like, it’s just two options, like where do you go? All right. So I want to talk about attachment, right? These, these really fundamental, five intimacy archetypes and how they relate to money. This is like the juiciest work ever. And then I’m going to finish up with you know, some of the things that I want you to be tracking

Speaker 1 19:13
with your money. So the five intimacy archetypes The first one is the creative archetype. This is maybe you know, someone who experienced like, if you’ve experienced neglect in your childhood, or you feel sort of like this, I want you to think of this as like,

Unknown Speaker 19:31
you know, like in your Vedic medicine, you know, you have your different your I forget what they’re called. They’re all these different, the different body types, right.

Speaker 1 19:46
So the creative is sort of like experienced neglect is sort of like a sort of hypersensitive and we all have like, we all have aspects of each archetype, right? We aren’t just one archetype, we are combinations, but we do dominate in one or two. So in the creative archetype, you might neglect money, you might minimize its importance in your life, you might deny yourself, like luxury experiences. And you really need to learn that it’s safe to care for money, and that money can care for you. And that when you care for money, you are caring for yourself. So this is sort of a more hypo response to money, there’s a little bit more of a shutdown a little bit more of avoidance, right. And it’s like, you know, maybe, in that creative archetype, you’re more sort of in the spiritual realm of things, versus like the concrete nuts and bolts of investing, it’s kind of like I get so turned off with with that part. So the lover archetype is maybe someone who didn’t receive enough attention, love, maybe didn’t get their needs met fully, tends to merge in relationships, right, there’s sort of a little bit of an anxious attachment. So it’s a little bit of a hyper arousal can sometimes hoard money maybe grasps maybe is feeling like it’s never enough. And I have to scramble for there’s this energy of desperation. And it can also flip in the opposite direction where, you know, there may be overindulgence, or like, maybe like, you know, accumulating debt, right, and then having sort of leaks in your cash flow. So, the work for the lover archetype is to embrace enoughness, to really understand from a body sense that Abundance flows from sufficiency, that there’s there’s usually always enough, right? And that, you know, like, letting yourself like saving for the things that really matter to you, like letting yourself have it letting, letting yourself like if you tend to be sort of a scarce person, letting yourself really enjoy having and holding it without necessarily spending. So in the endure archetype, the third archetype, this was someone who was over controlled in their childhood, they had to sort of deny pretty fundamental parts of who they were, they had to deny their assertiveness. So there’s there may be like this hyper arousal around working hard for money, because they had to learn to like, they’re hard workers. And so they’re hyper arousal is like, I have to, I have to make money, I have to survive, I have to like, I have to do hard things, let’s get to work, right. But they have a Hypo arousal experiences of experience around enjoying it, they don’t experience a lot of pleasure around having money, they don’t really feel like it could come easy to them. Right? So it’s like, they have to feel like they feel like they have to work really hard. And they don’t enjoy when they have it, because it’s just like, well, I just need to go get more because I just need to like, they’re a little bit in that hamster wheel kind of mentality. And then the fourth archetype is the Challenger archetype. This is someone who may have experienced manipulation in their childhood may have have had sort of hot and cold parents. There were power and control dynamics, maybe around money, maybe around love. Right? So there’s this like, hypo in terms of receiving like, yeah, I can receive like, there’s no, there’s no issue receiving. But when it comes to, hey, let’s let’s give to this charity, or let’s do this or let’s move it around, there’s a little bit of a, of a hyper arousal response. So there’s like a difficulty surrendering, letting go trusting it’s gonna come back to you, right? This person might equate money with power. They make money pretty easily, but they tend not to share it as much because that activates the fear, the anxiety that it won’t come back. And obviously, this person has to learn that it’s safe to share it to redistributed that it’ll come back to you, right? That that fundamental trust, that safety that it’s like, yeah, I can give it away. And it’s just there’s enough, right, there’s enough to go around for everyone I can share my power, I don’t have to hoard my power. And finally, for the fifth archetype, it is the rigid archetype. This is where you know, a situation where attention and love was focused more on performance than on simply being maybe there was a betrayal of the heart, right? Maybe you may have difficulty receiving you feel like you need to be good. In order to receive there’s quite a bit of shame attached to who you are, versus who you think you need to be in order to make money. So there’s like this hyper arousal experience around making money So, again, it’s really all about safe, ultimately about safety and trust right with all of the archetypes. And notice what’s coming up for you, as I go through each of these, notice, which resonate more, which don’t, right, how some of these dynamics are showing up with your money. Now, here’s the fun part. I want you to think of money as your lover, as your ideal partner, I want you to imagine your partner, as you know, like, I want you to imagine the spirit of money as your partner. And you know, you can imagine them however you want, you can imagine them as an angelic being, or as a human figure, it doesn’t matter, whatever works for you, whatever makes it like fun, whatever makes it exciting for you, because we want to get excited about receiving because where there’s pleasure is sort of like dissipates and softens the fear. So, if you want to imagine them as a hunky metrosexual or, you know, a gorgeous non binary got x, right, like, you know, a spiritual type, you know, like a long haired Dude, I don’t know, whatever. If you want to just imagine them however you want, and really flesh it out, whatever whatever it is for you really flesh it out, really get into the details.

Unknown Speaker 26:30
And I want you to ask yourself, when you imagine the spirit of money or relating to the spirit of money,

Speaker 1 26:39
what is your underlying need in this relationship? What is your underlying need, like your deep need? Like not when you say like, oh, I need this person to do this in order for me to be okay, now? What is your underlying need the profound soul level need? Right? Is it connection? Is it communion like spiritual communion? Oneness? love, acceptance, belonging, safety? Are you able to let this person the spirit of money? Love you? Like, what would it be like to let the spirit of money, really love you and just shower you with attention? Just like, be so attentive and loving and checking in with you? And asking, What do you need from me? How can I support you? And I want you to imagine yourself responding to those questions, imagining the spirit of money in front of you. Can you receive their love and their, you know, undying devotion? Can you receive them? Is there any part of you that kind of where you feel a little bit of that little bit of a jerk back? In your system, my nervous system going right, like contracting a little bit?

Unknown Speaker 28:08
Is there a part of you that wants to push them away? And if this were your ideal partner, what would you create together? What would you create? With the spirit of money? Right? If the spirit of money is this going to be like showering you with, with just abundance?

Unknown Speaker 28:30
What would you create with that? So when I think about the manifestation process, it’s a process of becoming right, this is what what we’d be doing together on the somatic calls is,

Speaker 1 28:48
is really like an unfolding, right or opening, you’re becoming process accelerating, you’re becoming process by bringing awareness to these parts. Because in order for you to receive money and hold money, and manage money, you have to be someone who is available, to have a relationship with it, to receive it right to to like to let it in. And there are parts of us that don’t allow it in and we’re not aware of those parts. This is what the uncovering is all about. So, as you move forward, in your business, I want you to be tracking some of what I talked about today. I want you to think about I want you to track some of the those fundamental beliefs about money, I call them tribal beliefs and I say tribal. From a family of origin, right, like your your group, your group of origin, that can also be your community, right? It can be church, community, religious community, it could be a cultural or racial group, right. What are the what are the beliefs? It’s about money. And because oftentimes when you explore those you will run into social contracts. What does it mean for you, as a black woman to have lots of money in from the perspective of your family of origin? Right? What social contracts? Would you be breaking with your community? If you were to acquire a big bag of cash, right? What would it mean? Like what what expectations would family have of you? What would they say about you, right? All of those things I