In my last post, I promised to talk more about my tendency to judge how other people spend their money, because looking at this habit of mine has been incredibly eye opening.
This habit has been going on for years, but it’s really come into my conscious awareness just in the last few months. So, to recap, the basic pattern is this: I’ll see or hear about someone else spending their money, and if something about the situation subconsciously triggers my issues, then I start judging their spending choices as irresponsible and, interestingly, this feels threatening to me. As if Joe Schmoe maxing out his budget on designer t-shirts in any way, shape, or form affects my ability to pay bills this month. Strange, huh?
Well, what I uncovered in meditation and conversation with a friend is that in these situations, my inner child, who really was dependent on other people’s spending habits, i.e. my parents’, is running the show, and she is judging the hell out of Joe Schmoe’s budgetary indiscretions, because in her mind, if he’s not being responsible with his money, that makes her unsafe.
This is such a great example of how beliefs adopted in childhood can be totally ridiculous–and I say this with love–when we try to hang onto them well into adulthood. Sure, some of them still come in handy–“Don’t high five that hot stove!”–but most of them were created in a time when they made sense, and that time has long since passed.
Money Messages in Dreams
I’ve been working with my dreams quite a bit this month as part of a witchcraft apprenticeship, and a happy synchronicity drew me to a copy of Delicious Living, one of those free mags you’ll often see in health food stores. In it was a little blurb about guayusa tea, which is said to aid in the interpretation of dreams.
I decided to experiment, and I bought a bottle of the tea and saved it for a morning when I knew I’d have time to chillax and do some dream interpretation and journaling. I set the intention that this tea would help me interpret my dreams, and then I took a nice, big gulp. Oh, baby, did the insights start to flow! Whether it was the intention or the tea or both, no matter–it worked.
My dream had an all-too-familiar theme: I was working somewhere, and I hadn’t been trained on the cash register. In the dream, I experienced major stress because I knew I’d be screwing up as I tried to check people out because I had no clue how to use the register, and it felt humiliating and shaming.
Now, this might sound totally obvious to you, but until my guayusa experience, I never made the connection between the cash register and my money issues–duh! I have had many forms of this dream in which I am working at different jobs–restaurants, video stores, etc.–but the tension always stems from the fact that I have not been trained on how to use the cash register.
What’s even more interesting is that in this particular version of the dream I was working in a toy store. This is the first time I have ever had the cash register dream in a toy store, and it’s completely relevant given my recent discoveries connecting my inner child with my money issues. Thank you, subconscious, for painting such a clear picture!
Another interesting exchange happened in the dream: I was suddenly a child having a sleepover with a friend, and her dad in the dream was one of my adult friends whose spending often triggers my fear-based judging. In the dream, he was ordering us pizza, and dream me knew that he “shouldn’t” be spending money on this pizza, that money was tight and pizza was not a smart expenditure.
When the pizza delivery guy arrived, he said, “You know, this is a really nice pizza,” and I understood that he meant this was their top-of-the-line, most expensive pie. This caused dream me even more stress. And then it was time to divvy up the pizza, and whoever did the slicing must have been having a seizure, because the pizza was a mess of crisscrossed lines forming pieces that were either way too big or comically skinny slivers. In short, this was not going to be a fair distribution.
Dream me felt panicky that my friend had just spent all this money on the best pizza money could buy, and yet I knew that the experience wasn’t going to be satisfying, that I wasn’t going to get “my fair share.”
As I wrote down this dream, sipping guayusa the next morning, the thought that kept playing in my mind was, “This is going to cost a lot…and you’re still not going to be satisfied.” As soon as that thought arose in my mind, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that this was one of the false beliefs I have been carrying around for years. It resonated with me on a primally deep level.
Everything you want costs a lot of money and you still end up feeling empty…and now you have less money to show for it.
Wow.
So with this as my metric, spending any money at all is unwise, because if this false belief is my operating system, then I “know” I still won’t be happy once I spend the money, but I will be more broke. It’s a lose-lose situation.
It’s no wonder spending money, no matter how much money I have to spend, is stressful for me and I feel like I’m being irresponsible, even if I’ve double and triple checked my budget. It has nothing to do with facts or logic and everything do with this false belief against which I’m evaluating all of my decisions.
When I asked for guidance on what my next healing step might be, I received the insight that I should do a Reiki healing attunement on this false belief, and so I did.
Expansion.
Relief.
Breathing room.
These are just a few of the feelings that have been introduced into what was formerly a cramped and nervous space in my psyche. I’m excited to explore further and to uncover other false beliefs that might be blocking my experience of abundance and flow!