Are Your Finances Making You sick?
When I found myself facing ‘cancer’, I was painfully aware of the link between my current physical condition and my seemingly never-ending struggle with money. I realized that without the constant, overwhelming stress over finances, my naturally healthy and fit body would still be healthy and fit. But the struggle was wearing me down … and fast!
I grew up as a healthy, fit athlete. I was a highly accomplished figure skater with a body that was not only incredibly strong, agile and flexible, but was really healthy to boot. Anything I wanted to do … fly through the air, spin like a top, climb the tallest tree, jump over hurdles or a high bar, swim to the bottom of the lake … this body could do it all! I never even gave it a second thought.
Flash forward 20 years: my body was no longer fit or flexible and had become drastically overweight.
What happened?
How had things taken such a dramatic downward turn?
While I was growing up, skating was my ‘career’. By the time I was 9, skating had become an all-consuming passion. It was my soul focus … my unpaid ‘career’ so to speak. When I wasn’t being made to sit in a classroom or do homework, I was skating.
Being born awake, and clearly seeing the grave injustices in the world, but not being able to do anything about them … made it so that I never really fit in socially, as I always saw things very differently from others around me.
On the ice was the only place where I really felt at home. While skating, I could just be ME and freely express myself. So I chose to become as masterful a skater as possible. I achieved US figure Skating Gold Medals in both figures and freestyle at age 16, at which point I was told that now I needed to go out and get a job and start earning money.
And so it began. My passion got replaced by a ‘job’ … for the sole purpose of getting ‘money’.
‘Making money’ is the driving force behind almost all human behavior.
Here we are, Divine Beings living on a lush, abundant planet that provides everything we need for food, heat, clothing and shelter FOR FREE … yet somehow it’s been set up so that we have to get MONEY in order to BUY the things that, if we were living in harmony WITH the Earth, we could have for free. Why has MONEY been placed between US and NATURE?
It was obvious to me from the time I was three years old that my freedom to PLAY was coming to a quick end as soon as school started, and that school was simply training us for 40-hour WORK weeks. How could it be that our lives have to be consumed by money? Why is Life almost all WORK with so little PLAY?
From as far back as I can remember, I couldn’t understand why humans were working their lives away, often without ever getting out and exploring the wonders of this incredible planet. It’s not natural, and it’s definitely not healthy.
Native peoples never lived this way. They lived in harmony with the Natural world, being provided for by Mother Nature herself. Fruit that grows on trees, vegetables and herbs that grow out of the soil, mushrooms and berries that grow in the wild. Fallen trees for firewood to give us heat and fuel. Fresh water to drink. And all kinds of other resources for us to use. Yet here we are … slaving away indoors in …search of the almighty dollar, almost completely disconnected from the source of our true sustenance.
Needless to say, my relationship with money was not a healthy one. In fact, it was incredibly unhealthy. My struggle to ‘make money’ and ‘get ahead’ was a never-ending battle. I resented that money was the driving force behind my life, and that I wasn’t free to just BE ME and do the things I loved. I resented the fact that I had to have a ‘job’ (usually more than one!) and just work all the time. Work became all-consuming, and it was consuming ME!
My life force energy was being drained by my struggle with money. The more I struggled, the more un-fit and un-healthy my body became.
When I finally found myself facing ‘cancer’, it was CLEAR to me what had caused it. Somehow, I was going to have to resolve this perpetual state of struggle I was in. And it was clear to me that chemo, radiation or radical surgery were not going to help me to address my struggle, and I highly doubted that they would help my body, either. So instead of trying to ‘fix my body’ … I decided to address the ACTUAL problem, instead.
I decided to become Masterful with My LIFE.
To heal my Self, I would have to heal my relationship with both money and this crazy, dystopian world that worships it.
Next month: Part 2: Sacred Economy
