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My Money Maven

I used to scratch my head when I saw how terrific my partner was with money, compared to me.

His approach to money seemed like magic.  As we worked through our money differences, and I became more aware of my behavior, I noticed 4 differences between him and me. Keep Reading

I keep telling you about how my childhood caused me to experience a poverty mindset.

I’m not blaming my parents. My parents are good, loving people who try hard.

When I compare my childhood to theirs, my childhood was a huge improvement.

The Poverty Mindset is Ancestral

Women Cultivating a Field in France in 1917. Image Courtesy of U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

For most of us, our parents were confronting the ghosts of their parents’ childhoods.

When my grandparents were children, they dealt with food scarcity on a regular basis. The vast majority of their food came out of their gardens and from their livestock. And if they had a bad season, they didn’t eat. If the cow died, where did they go for milk?

If my tomatoes don’t make it, I’m annoyed. But I can go down to my grocery and buy heirloom tomatoes all summer long. My grandparents couldn’t.

Our Grandparents and great-grandparents lived at a time when most families had children that didn’t live to adulthood. Many of them grew up missing a mother that died in childbirth or a dad that died at the mill.

Death was common. Hunger was common. Loss was common.

We Carry These Losses

We carry these losses in the stories and sayings that we learned growing up.

My dad always told me not to Get My Hopes Up.

My mother would say, Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket.

My grandmother would come to us after dinner, our plates in her hands. If we wasted a speck of a vegetable or a teaspoon of ketchup, she made us eat it.

The fear and scarcity thinking can be hard to shake.

We Carry These Stories in Our Spirits.

Even more deeply, we carry these ancestral stories in our spirits.

The 1st chakra is where we carry our stories and feelings about money. It’s also where we carry the stories of our ancestors. You don’t even have to know what happened to your family. It’s in your spiritual DNA.

It’s the 1st chakra that makes us feel safe and secure. When it is dormant, we feel vulnerable, insecure, at the whim of a precarious world.

Our world is suffering from 1st chakra troubles, even though (for the vast majority), things are so much safer and easier than even 20 years ago.

The Good News

The fact that you are alive means that every one of your ancestors lived long enough to reproduce. You have control over what you carry, and what you believe about the world. You can change your conscious beliefs, and in time, you can change your unconscious ones.

You can change how your 1st chakra works. There are so many ways to impact it, to root down and connect to our source.

We have so much power to change our lives. We just have to be willing to use it!

My mother likes to tell the story about how, as a three year old, I would run into my parent’s room saying “It’s a sunny day! It’s a sunny day!”
I did this every day, whether it was raining or sunny or snowing.

Most of us are born abundant and then life talks us out of it.

Why is this?

We come into the world with our spirits fully formed. We’re spiritually intelligent. Our spirits are stronger and more mature than our bodies and minds.

It’s why Jesus told his followers to have the faith of children.

Our spirits are where we feel our emotions. Our spirits are our intuitive spots.

Because we are fully-formed spiritually, we feel more deeply than our bodies and brains can handle.

It’s difficult for our bodies and brains to handle the level of emotions that our spirits feel. Instead of being taught how to cope with our emotions, most of us are taught to bury them.

Were you ever told, Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about?

Do you know why you were told that? (We’re going to explore that in the next post, The Ancestry of Poverty.)

I’d love it if you’d finish reading this post first.

Born Empathic, We Handle the Pain of Others.

As children, we’re born empathic. We believe we can handle the pain of others more than our bodies can take, or our brains can comprehend.

Were you the kind of kid who told a crying mom that everything was going to be okay?

Did she ever tell you that it wasn’t going to be okay?

How do you think that affected you?

Did it teach you to not trust what you came into the world knowing about abundance?

What Did You Learn About Your Emotions As A Child?

Did you learn not to feel? How can you be abundant if you’re not present enough to feel anymore?

If you had a childhood that effectively shut down your emotions, you’re not here.

You’re not feeling. You’re scared to feel. You don’t want life to hurt.

In order to be abundant, you have to be here.

Abundance starts with a willingness to feel. You can’t be abundant without presence and connection.

The Good News

You can get back to the abundant person you were. You can learn this. You can re-pattern how you think and feel and live.

It is not easy, but it is not nearly as hard as you imagine. I know this to be true because I have lived it.

It takes courage and love. You already have those qualities.

It can feel very difficult, in a poverty mindset, to believe that you can feel and live differently. I’m not asking you to believe that right now. I’m asking you to imagine who you’d be if you weren’t shut down by the stories of your childhood. That person is still in you.

You Were Born Abundant is available as a desktop wallpaper. Download it here.

Poverty isn’t Just Brain-Deep, It’s in Your Body Too!

Much of the poverty mindset isn’t in your brain. If it was as simple as changing how you think about things, abundance would be a cakewalk.

The poverty mindset permeates your conscious and your subconcious reactions.

You respond to stimuli differently than a person who grew up getting their needs met.

And as a result of that, there are things that you do that cause you to remain poor.

If you grew up poor, your biochemistry is different.

As you grew up, you faced more anxiety and fear than a typical kid did. You faced more feelings of loss and scarcity and vulnerability. Your nervous system was bathed in cortisol, making you more sensitive, more easily alarmed and less likely to feel grounded.

You have the biochemistry of Chicken Little.

If you grew up poor, your body is different.

If you grew up with lack, if you didn’t get your needs met, your habits are likely to make you fat and out of shape.

Cheap energy is made up of fat, starch and sugar.

If you grew up eating the food of the poor, you are less likely to eat better food as an adult. You are more likely to just eat more expensive versions of the food you ate as a child.

I grew up on lots of spaghetti, rice and potatoes.

That translates into frozen pizza, food from our local Chinese restaurant and french fries.

Food Isn’t Just Fuel, It’s Survival

If you grew up with food scarcity, food has a different meaning to you.

The memory of being the youngest child, dishing up last, and feeling like I didn’t get enough is deeply ingrained in my brain. So I serve far more food than my family could eat.

I am always asking my children if they are hungry. If my college kid comes home, the first thing I ask is Did you eat?

When I go home, the first thing my mother asks is Are you hungry?

Having enough to eat feels safe. As adults, we don’t know what enough is. We’re eating to try to resolve hungers that are 20, 30, 50 years old.

Little habits add up. Until last year, I was a member of the clean plate club. If food was put on my plate, I ate it, even if I was full.

If one of my children left a bite of food on their plate, instead of tossing it in compost, I’d eat it. My grandmother’s voice was in the back of my head, Are you going to waste that?

Food should be part of life. Food should connect you. You should eat to respond to who you are now, not to what you needed then.

If you can afford quality food, you should eat quality food. In this day and age, food is considerably cheaper than it was when I was a kid (and I am only 42).

Odds are good that you can afford vegetables.

Food is more than Fuel, It’s Comfort

If you experienced emotional scarcity as a child, and you learned to eat to comfort yourself, that becomes a deeply ingrained habit as well.

You shouldn’t eat to take your mind off your life. Or to deal with emotions you’re too scared to feel. You shouldn’t turn to food when you really just need to become conscious and connected.

This is something that I have to still remind myself to do. I’m not an emotional eater anymore, but it’s because I choose to break the pattern every day. And it gets easier.

And Then There’s Exercise

If you grew up poor, you are less likely to exercise.

Remember, the prevailing beliefs of the poverty mindset? Stay Small: I can’t go to a gym. People will look at me. or Escape the Pain: Exercise is so much work.

Or, for a minority, you’re over on the other extreme. You exercise like you do everything else, to exhaustion (Work to the Bone). You keep yourself on a really tight leash when it comes to food.

You don’t do these things because you love yourself. You do these things to control and punish yourself.

Did I Mention Constipation?

People with a poverty mindset hold onto things. They don’t eat enough fiber. They don’t move enough. And they put off the need to poop because they are too busy, life feels to urgent to stop and take care of that. And then they completely stop feeling that signal.

And What About Sleeping?

People with a poverty mindset don’t sleep enough, for many reasons. If you look at the prevailing beliefs you can see why.

When they do sleep, they have more anxiety, so they don’t sleep deeply.

Why Do These Behaviors Keep People Poor?

A lack of a healthy body means that you don’t have the energy that healthy people have. Without nutritious food as an adult, you have brain fog.

If you are a control freak about food and exercise, you bring a level of anxiety to your life that will defeat you. There’s no room for growth if you’re controlling yourself like that.

If you are not pooping enough and sleeping enough, you feel sluggish and awful!

The Root

All of these behaviors are automatic responses. They are what we do instead of consciously living our lives. They’re what we do instead, because as children we were taught that life is hard, and painful, and capricious, and we’ve taken what feels like an easier path.

It feels easier to eat food that appeals to our childhood emotions. It’s easier to sit on the couch. It’s easier to avoid going to the bathroom when you feel too busy to stop. It feels better (in the moment) to stay up watching TV than to go to bed.

We stop paying attention to what our body is asking for. And our body is the prisoner of our habits.

Changing the Poverty Mindset Takes More than Thinking Differently

You have to treat your body differently. You must consider why you eat and how you eat and what you eat.

It’s about loving yourself through good food, and through taking care of the emotions that you’ve trained yourself to eat through.

It’s about exercising. It’s about understanding why you don’t want to move, and figuring out ways to talk yourself into doing it.

(This exercise thing, it’s something I struggle with. It has to do with the immediate gratification problem. We’ll talk more about that soon).

It’s about pooping (really!).

And it’s about sleeping.

All these things that you did great when you were two, you need to get better at now!

I want this for you.

I want to help you move towards this. I want to help you change how you eat and how you use your body. I know that this has been the most difficult part of my journey, and I have a ton of ideas for how you can approach this with ease.

This isn’t a sales pitch. I’m not selling you anything here. I just want you to know that your body needs to support your abundance, and it can only do that with the right attitude, food and movement.