Our obsession with ‘ease’ is actually making everything *harder*
It’s 2:30 p.m., and I’m about to hop on a session with a new private client. I just finished downing my iced coffee; I lit the incense; and I’m about to slap that “start meeting” button on Zoom.
At this very moment—even without the gift of psychic intuition—I’d put down money betting this phrase (or a derivative of it) will come from the mouth of my client the moment I hit “record.”
“I JUST WANT MONEY TO BE EASY.”
And I usually sit here thinking to myself…of course, you do! That makes total sense.
Of course we all want making money to be easy. I mean, who wouldn’t? There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a desire for more ease, joy, pleasure, and spaciousness in your life. In fact, I consider it a very healthy desire to have and a reflect of your self-regard that you don’t want to stay trapped in cycles of suffering, toxicity, abuse, exploitation, exhaustion, etc.
So, before we dive in, let me be clear on this: Wanting a more easeful experience with money is a wonderful thing and often the beginning of a powerful, miraculous journey.
The part I take issue with are the mindset, methods, and *ahem* marketing that get employed in the pursuit of said ‘ease’, and this is what today’s blog post is all about:
The top misconceptions about an “easeful” money relationship.
MISCONCEPTION NO. 1 | EASE = NO EFFORT
Look, I get it. People are tired. People are tired of working hard, outpouring time, labor, and energy, and not receiving enough money in relation to the degree of work they’re putting in to make it. This is a totally valid and (unfortunately) common way to feel, and it’s one of the main reasons people reach out to work with me.
That being said, this overexhaustion (be it of the body, mind, heart, spirit, and often all of the above) can also lead to some over-corrective instincts on our part. For example, we can become so vehemently labor-averse that we ultimately impede our own progress.
When we feel like life, work, or our spirituality is asking anything of us (e.g., our time, energy, focus, labor, etc.), we are so hyper-protective of our energy levels that we refuse to take the required steps to get where we need to go. The fear of burnout immobilizes us from taking action and showing up for ourselves—whether that work be in our business, job search, or (more often than not) inwardly and spiritually.
If it was possible to make massive amounts of money with literally zero effort (mentally or physically), the world would look very different than it does now, which isn’t to dismiss the realities of systemic oppression and privilege. But I’ve worked with trust fund babies, and yes, even they have challenging relationships with money.
No one is immune from feeling tension and difficulties with money because our money issues are all reflections of our inner wounding surrounding safety, security, love, worthiness, belonging, freedom, autonomy, control, etc. And these are all aspects of human suffering and pain that need to be worked through; they transcend the number in the bank.
When it comes to the literal aspect of making money, it takes work to build a business. It takes work to change careers. It takes work to complete a mobile deposit for a check you received in the mail. There are actions required of you to get the job done.
And when it comes to the ways you experience your relationship with money, it takes work to heal, realign, confront your maladaptive coping mechanisms and fragility, and it takes work to show up with money against your learned instincts and in healthy, expansive ways.
The reality is that there is no way to have a one-hundred percent “effortless” relationship with money because there is no way to have a one-hundred percent effortless relationship with anyone. Relationships of all kinds require some degree of effort, attention, energy, and work. So, if you’re getting down on yourself because you still have to output a degree of energy for money to come through for you, you’re not doing anything wrong. In the words of my favorite tricker prince…
MISCONCEPTION NO. 2 | IT’S “EASY” TO DEVELOP AN EASEFUL MONEY RELATIONSHIP
After I got divorced in 2020, I decided to move from Denver, Colorado to Los Angeles, California. I still lived in the apartment I shared with my ex, so the process of packing was as much about what I was letting go of as much as what I was taking with me. I carted multiple carloads of all sorts of stuff to the dumpster, thrift store, people on Facebook marketplace, etc.
(And I did it walking up four flights of stairs each way. My calves had never looked so good.)
The point of this anecdote is to say that to get where you want to go, sometimes you have to put in some serious legwork, and shit’s just gonna look even messier for a hot second. Expecting instantaneous results from any transformation usually sets you up to be frustrated and to burnout.
If you truly want to transform your relationship with money, you’re going to have to:
Examine your unhealthy, maladaptive, and even toxic coping mechanisms and behaviors
Take ownership for your part in creating the experience you’re currently having and the ways you’re complicit in your own harm
Confront your fragility and the ways you’re overly precious with yourself, averse to responsibility, and resistant to being corrected
Witness, support, and provide love to the parts of you who feel unworthy, unloveable, abandoned, forgotten, misunderstood, etc.
Break your addiction to control, surrender your egoic insistence that getting your way is the only way you’ll be okay, and truly see you who are when you don’t get what you want
Stop worshipping money and making it your god and removing your resistance between you and your Creator
None of this shit is easy work. In fact, it’s some of the hardest you’ll ever do in your life if you’re truly showing up for it.
However, the dividends pay abundantly over the course of a lifetime, and resistance to money is always a mask for resistance to yourself (and your inner wounding) and resistance to God. When you devote yourself to this work, it will touch every aspect of your life, and you will prosper in ways your ego couldn’t even fathom for you because of how much it’s confined to the limitations of fear and doubt.
But it’s through developing profound trust in ourselves and abundant faith in the Divine that we can not only make more money and not only have a better relationship with it, but we FREE ourselves from the illusion that money is our savior, parent, or source of good, power, and well-being.
Money is a human-made construct used to standardize value and facilitate exchange. It’s not money who provides for us, protects us, and cares for us; it’s God. It’s in giving credit back to our Maker that we can stop begging money to notice us, and we can receive the redemption and deliverance our hearts, nervous systems, and souls truly seek.
Everyone shows up to sessions with me to have an easier money relationship, but very few are actually willing to put in the work required to create it.
And the work always, always, always begins spiritually and not strategically.
MISCONCEPTION NO. 3 | HEALING YOUR MONEY RELATIONSHIP MEANS CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT MONEY
Have you ever thought a “scarcity thought” then freaked out because you thought the scarcity thought and then spiraled into panic because your scarcity mindset is showing and now that means you've got so much to heal and you also might still be manifesting the worst case scenario because your vibration isn’t high enough and how the hell do you match the frequency of money? Do you even know her? What is her phone number?
Or is that just me and, well, every client I’ve ever worked with?
Welcome to the impact of the abundance purity mindset, one of the most damaging, pervasive teachings I see across the industry.
Scarcity is not the boogeyman we’ve made it out to be. In fact, your “scarcity” is here to be one of your greatest teachers. It’s showing you the parts of you who are afraid they will be left behind, forgotten, abandoned, and left in the cold. It’s bringing to you the parts of your heart who feel like they are unworthy of care, love, and belonging unless they exploit, over-exert, and sacrifice themselves to conform. It’s highlighting where you lack trust in your follow-through and faith in your Creator.
Our scarcity should not be vilified but humanized and supported.
The truth is that money does not care about your scarcity mindset. It is indifferent to your level of consciousness because money, as mentioned before, is a human-made construct to standardize value and facilitate exchange. If money actually cared about your heart, intentions, and integrity as a requirement to be with you, the current wealth distribution of the world would look radically different than it does right now.
If money needed you to be healed, conscious, and integrous to be with you, the richest people in the world would not be able to rely on the exploitative, harmful, and unholy practices they do to generate money.
Money does not care.
But God does.
So, if we would like to shift the paradigm of wealth across the world, we must stop glorifying money and worshiping it. Because you’ll never find salvation, deliverance, and relief from suffering by chasing after more and more and more money, or again the richest people in the world would be showing up in very different ways than they are now.
Only the Divine can redeem you.
And They will take you so much farther than your grit, determination, and forcefulness ever would. Your relationship with the Divine must always supersede your relationship with money if you wish to prosper in the land of milk and honey. We must worship God over money always to be in true receivership and faith.
Money does not provide for you. God does. Money does not heal you. God does. And no amount of money will ever save you, fix you, or elevate you. That responsibility lies within us whether we claim it or not.
MISCONCEPTION NO. 4 | THAT 7-FIG COACH ON SOCIAL MEDIA “CRACKED THE CODE” TO ABUNDANCE
I don’t care what they promise, if they’re making it out like they have the one foolproof system or that they’ve never felt nervous about money ever again, they’re fucking lying to you.
More and more coaches are getting exposed for their harmful and manipulative practices. And I can attest first hand having written copy for some of these seven-figure coaches in the industry, they’re lying about living their “dream life”.
I’d log on at the beginning of the workday to see they were leaving Google Doc stress comments at midnight (ones that were rarely thoughtfully and kindly worded). They’d be pushing everyone on their team so hard, deadlines were frantic or impossible, and people hated being employed or contracted by them; many have received threats from clients to sue. At the time, I had better work boundaries than most of these assholes, and I was barely scraping by as a recently divorced freelance writer in the middle of a pandemic.
All that glitters is not gold, and much of the industry is wising up and becoming far more discerning about who we learn from and trust with our journeys. But like teaching and positions of public service, coaching attracts two kinds of people: (1) people who want to serve others and initiate change and (2) people who want power over others and seek out positions of authority in the interest of dominance and ego.
Whether or not the coaches in the latter group are just lying to you or they’re also lying to themselves remains to be seen, and that’s an matter between them and God.
(That being said, a genuine coach should have the ability to be truthful that part of the reason they do this work is also to benefit themselves, too. There is no shame in receiving through the work, and denying that is only another form of manipulation. Every coach who has ever started a coaching practice did so hoping to get something out of it, including myself. Transparency is key.)
There are no shortcuts when it comes to transformation.
There are ways to make the process more efficient. There are ways to lift the burden and weight on your heart and spirit through community and connection. There’s incredible power in gleaning new insights and perspectives from different people of different backgrounds. But there is no magic meditation, affirmation, or manifestation that will fix you, save you, or heal you.
That’s our work with God.
My biggest piece of advice in this area is (1) for people of color not to learn spirituality of any kind from white folks. There’s simply too much dominance, ignorance, and white supremacy woven into many of these practices and regurgitated teachings. And (2) to see this as an ecosystem and not a hierarchy.
Everyone is bringing their own perspective, world lens, and personal history to their body of work. Some will align with certain schools of thought better than others, and just because someone is an excellent marketer and sales person, doesn’t mean they’re a quality, integrous teacher or coach—or that they are qualified to support you specifically (and I’m not talking about coaching certifications, but that’s a whole other blog post on the whiteness of certification practices).
Listen to your body. You can trust its intuition about people’s authenticity, and if people are heavily relying on their image (an illusion; all of social media is curated) or urgency (i.e., getting you in a triggered state to purchase), there’s more likely than not a significant piece of substance missing from the work itself.
Let’s be real, most of these coaches out there need God…and therapy.
MISCONCEPTION NO. 5 | IT’LL NEVER HAPPEN
As I said in Money Muse, life is precious, but it is not fragile, and neither are you. Spiritual work is not about making yourself immune to challenges, hardship, heartbreak, or simply undesirable things ever happening to you again. It’s juvenile and egoic for us to expect that life bending to our will is the height of spiritual mastery (yeah, I’m looking at you, Law of Attraction). So much of modern manifestation teachings are actually manipulation wrapped with a New Age spiritual bow on top.
God is more invested in your growth and development than He is in your results. He’s utterly indifferent to your preferences and the ways your ego says things “should” be in order for you to feel okay, and He is continually presenting us with opportunities and invitations to become closer to Him.
(This is NOT to excuse exploitative or abusive behaviors of other people or to ever say that you, on some spiritual level, ‘asked for it’. Spirituality is never a justification for abuse.)
However, in the context of money, this means looking at your scarcity as an ask from God to be closer to Him. It’s an invitation to see yourself, to understand yourself better, and to do the work that’s necessary to trust yourself and have faith in Him.
Part of the Divine’s promises to you are to bring you into the temple of wealth so you may prosper more abundantly than you ever could have forced by your will alone. God wishes to prosper through you and enact Divine will at the work of your hand, and there is no space to pander to despair, doubt, and fear where you are going.
The difference between money and wealth is that money was created by man, but wealth is a gift from God.
Wealth is your birthright.
Wealth is who you are.
Wealth is eternal, abundant, and unlimited.
Wealth exists within you no matter what your bank balance looks like, and God will provide for you abundantly when you surrender your ego and disbelief to Him. More money, clients, and a bigger team cannot save you from maladaptive coping mechanisms, self-sabotaging behaviors, and an inherent belief that you are not deserving of the blessing you’ve been bestowed.
A renewed connection with Spirit and your own divinity, however, will.
So, yes. It’s entirely possible to create a relationship with money that isn’t reliant on strife, sacrifice, and force. But in order to ascend to that place, you have to get into the practice of examining whether you’re worshiping God or money.
Because if there is even a single part of you who is still chasing money as a means to manage your feelings, access your peace, feel abundant, loved, whole, and free, or save you from your suffering, you have put money on an altar it does not deserve.
And this means there’s glorious, holy work to be done. When you free from yourself from cycles of parentifying and worshiping money, you will astounded at how regulated, trusting, faithful, and consistent you become, which results in a transformation in your outer experience because of how you’re showing up in the world. This work does get easier even if that ease isn’t instantaneous.
All of this to say, keep showing up. Keep devoting yourself to your growth. And keep bringing yourself into deeper, fully alignment with God, so He may do His wonders through you.
