Stepping into my power, healing money wounds, and witchy little risks 51-60
My husband, Andy, and I went grocery shopping the other day, which is usually an activity we enjoy doing together. Now, though, there is an ever-present tension any time we are in a situation where money is being spent, as I do not have a regular paycheck, and he does. When it came time to check out, I was flustered trying to unload the cart by myself and also run to the end to pack the bags, and I said to him, more accusingly than was fair, “can you pick one of these things to do to help?”
He snapped back, and said, “how about I pay for it?” The unspoken tension in our relationship thus reared its ugly head. I was crushed. I have been feeling the guilt and shame of not making a viable income at my fledgling business, and he knew this was exactly the way to hurt me worst in that moment.
In hindsight, I have learned some valuable lessons from this moment, which I will share with you here:
I can own my part: I totally brought this unkind comment on myself. I can’t help but feel the tension surrounding money – this is something I spend a lot of mental energy thinking about or trying not to think about as I build this business. Whether consciously or not, I brought this fear to the grocery store; it comes with me everywhere. I was already feeling vulnerable in a place where money was required, and I think it was this place of vulnerability that caused me to become more easily flustered than usual and snap at Andy. I made him feel like a child because I was feeling like a child myself.
You choose how you tango: We always have a choice in how we respond. In the moment, I was devastated, though I tried to hide this. I became silent, cowed. Andy felt bad about saying it instantly, and he said so. I went home, closed the bathroom door, set a timer for 5 minutes, played Gracie Abrams “Packing It Up,” which has become the song I play when I need some strength and hope, and I cried. Then, after 5 minutes, I went back to Andy, and we talked about what had happened.
Reflect and grow: I think I handled this situation better now than I would have in the past. A previous version of Emily might have stewed in rage or given Andy the silent treatment for a couple of hours, but I held boundaries around my energy. I am grateful for my growth. I do think, though, that I would choose to handle this situation differently next time. I am doing the work of finding my value that is separate from money. This is not easy work, but it’s essential for me and my personal journey. Continuing to know and feel my worth for being is the first action step I take moving forward, and hopefully this will prevent situations like this one from happening in the first place. Meditating, practicing mindfulness, being strong in my body, practicing gratitude, surrounding myself with people and places that lift me up, doing work that fills me with purpose – all of these will help strengthen my sense of self and help me avoid snapping at someone else. These practices will also make it harder for someone else to shake me with an unkind word.
As all of this is a work in progress, however, it may happen again where someone says something that rattles my sense of self-worth. If my husband were to make this comment again, I might say, “yes, thank you for paying; I am grateful for you doing that,” if I can sincerely be grateful and meet him with love and compassion in that moment. Or, if I can’t quite muster sincerity in my gratitude, I might say, “Ouch, that hurt my feelings,” as there is tremendous strength in our vulnerability if we own it.
I have come to see everything in my life as an energetic exchange. There are moments when I feel myself giving my energy away, and moments, upon reflection, when I have taken someone else’s energy. These interactions are always a two-way street; to take requires someone to give up, but that doesn’t change the fact that these types of exchanges don’t feel so good. I have started to check myself in energetic exchanges to see if there is an unwilling or unknowing giving or taking. This is the little test I have for myself to see if I am giving my energy away unwillingly or unknowingly:
Am I feeling emotionally or mentally exhausted?
Do I have little energy to do anything at the end of the day, and find myself mindlessly scrolling on my phone?
Do I avoid silence and have music or videos going on my phone whenever I am alone?
Does the idea of someone else asking me for something fill me with dread?
Am I unable to entertain trying something new, whether it’s an activity, a trip, or a food?
Am I always on edge, snippy, reactive, fearful, resentful, angry, ashamed, guilty, or jealous?
Do I find myself wishing for a different job/retirement, partner, family, or life all together?
Do I go on vacation and find clarity and insight, but then lose momentum to change anything the moment I get home?
Do I find myself reaching for something to fill me up or numb me out, like sweets, alcohol, cannabis, shopping, or another drug of choice?
Do I feel discomfort in my body, like tension in my head, pressure in my chest, or a clenched feeling in my belly?
If you are feeling or experiencing any of the above, love yourself and your body for its incredible alert system – these cues are gifts! And if you want to, reclaim your boundaries, know that you are an incredible human, and kindly but firmly protect yourself and your time. You and you alone get to choose what is right for you and your time and energy, and you help maintain a healthy flow of energy throughout the whole of society in protecting your own energy.
The other side of this equation is you taking someone else’s energy. There are many ways in which we may try to take another person’s energy from them, whether consciously or not. Some of these exchanges may be apparent, like if we choose to belittle or gaslight someone, but sometimes it’s less obvious that we are taking someone else’s power from them. Recently, I went to a restaurant with my husband, and the hostess was extremely cheerful. Once we were seated, I searched my body for how I was feeling, and I realized that despite her friendliness, I wasn’t feeling good. Though she was overtly cheerful, I felt an underlying insecurity, an inauthenticity to her approach that resulted in me feeling like I had to fill her up, to give my energy away. This was a powerful lesson for me because I find myself entering this overly cheery place from time to time, and the way I felt about her showed me how others might be perceiving me. I decided in that moment that I would do my best to fill my own cup and not have to depend on others giving me their positive attention or approval to be whole. There is a way to be secure and confident from within that can still present as friendly and kind, but without the need for validation from others. If you are not sure if you are taking someone’s energy, here is the little test I use for myself:
Do I feel I need to justify to people around me what I want or what I’ve said or done?
Do I feel I will be disappointed if I don’t get a particular response from someone else?
Do I feel an earnest need to apologize for something I’ve said or done?
Do I feel discomfort anywhere in my body?
Do I feel shame, guilt, regret, insecurity, inadequacy?
Am I seeking approval or validation from others?
Am I judging others rather than being curious about them?
Am I being kind because I want or need something from someone else or because I simply want to be kind?
In a conversation, have I taken more than a fair share of the air time?
Can I see or feel that someone else is uncomfortable in the exchange we are having?
If you feel you are taking energy from others, please be kind to yourself – we are all doing this, whether we are aware of it or not; it’s the system we’ve built working just the way it was meant to work. These little tests are by no means meant to make you feel guilty or ashamed or powerless; on the contrary! I am hopeful that as we understand the flow of our own energy, we can be more mindful of how we choose to strengthen and channel it and bring healing to the energy flow through ourselves, our communities, and beyond.
There are several action steps we can take to foster a healthy flow of energy within our own lives:
Invest a little to save a lot – money is just another form of energy, so many of the same principles that apply to money apply to our own energy. We can invest a little energy up front to save more later. As an example, exercise, though in the short term requires us to expend energy, in the long term, it increases the efficiency of our energetic system. We spend more of the budget now, but after training and recovery, the heart rate decreases, and we need less energy to circulate oxygenated blood through our bodies. This principle applies to mental energy as well - if you dissolve the ego or at least reduce the egoic defenses, the amount of energy that gets freed up is substantial. Imagine not spending energy worrying about what other people think of you! Again, this may take some investment in the form of meditation, mindfulness, and self-reflection up front, but in the long term it can result in tremendous energy savings as we become better able to respond in the face of stress. Hopefully next time I am at the grocery store, I won’t immediately give my energy away to stress, worry, and inadequacy because I am investing in a healthy mindset now.
Release blockages – because we are humans, we sometimes block our energy up in emotions or stored fuel from our food, but energy wants to move. Emotions are just energy in motion, and when we cling to them and feed them more attention, they take our limited energy away from something else. If I had continued to stew over my pain at my husband’s comment in the store, I may not have had the energy to write this blog post. I processed the hurt and let it go, and then I freed myself up to do some writing as the pain flowed out of me. As you look for your own energetic blockages, I encourage you to ask yourself the question, “do I love enough?” – in trying to answer this question, you may find exactly where you could love a little more and allow that energy to flow.
Set limits – We probably can’t avoid every person, situation, and place that makes us feel depleted of our energy, but we can set boundaries. In most cases, we have three choices for how to limit our energy: we can walk away, we can change our circumstances, or we can change our mindset. I know there are certain people in my life who require a lot of energy; they may not have practices in place to fill their own cups, and that’s ok – we’re all at different stages in the journey. If my cup is not full enough to let love flow freely out to them, I give myself permission to limit my energy. People who don’t understand my vision and work and meet me with skepticism? I may try to change my mindset to one of curiosity and allow information (energy) to flow in from them rather than feeling myself lose energy in the form of defensiveness. If I can’t seem to change my mindset to one of curiosity, I may change my circumstances and find another topic of shared interest to talk about in a neutral energetic exchange, or, as a last resort, I may just excuse myself and leave before I feel myself getting depleted.
There are places, too, where I benefit from limiting my energy. I went to Sephora the other day because I ran out of moisturizer. As soon as I walked in, I felt my energy pulled to all the pretty things I might try and buy. I didn’t need anything else, but without boundaries on my time, energy, and money, it would be easy to have all of these taken from me without my realizing it. Marketing is powerful, and it is designed to do just that. Fortunately, I had a more powerful motivator – getting back to and writing my book, and I got out of there unscathed with only my moisturizer in hand.
When you have a little extra, share it as love – There are moments when my cup is so full, I know I can let some energy spill out in the form of love. This usually happens when I am in nature (she shares some pretty incredible energy with us) and doing some kind of physical activity. As an example, when I am on the bike trail with my husband, I am so full of the good stuff that I have an intentional practice of smiling at everyone I pass. I have no expectations of anyone returning the smile – this is key – but I am so at peace, that I can afford to share my loving attention in the form of a smile with everyone I see and also not be wounded if someone does not return my smile. Or, when I am out with my girlfriends, I am often so full of love that I can let it spill out to people around me by paying sincere compliments to strangers. Again, I have no expectation for how the compliment is received; it is just my way of sharing the love I feel with another person. It feels so good.
When you need a little extra, receive it in gratitude – this may be the most challenging practice for me. It would be more convenient to be a self-contained energy system with no need for anything coming in from outside, but this just isn’t reality, and that wouldn’t be any fun anyway! Just as there are moments when we have abundance to share, we all have moments when we may be in a position to receive. We can receive all forms of energy in gratitude, whether it’s someone’s attention, time, love, or money. I can choose to receive my husband’s support in the form of money at the grocery store with gratitude and not allow my ego to make it something shameful.
I think that right now, we have the opportunity to make a collective mindset shift to get us away from the idea that money is at the top of some energetic hierarchy. We’ve long held that money is the most valuable currency – we built our country on this principle, prioritizing capital over human lives again and again – and as a result, we are now processing centuries of trauma and wounds of self-love and self-worth. People work in soul-crushing jobs, exchanging their precious time, energy, and lives for money, which, in the end doesn’t always seem like a fair or beneficial exchange.
We can choose to heal this collective money trauma, to allow money to flow in ways that we believe in; money, like all energy, just wants to flow. We can work to honor the other energies that have been neglected but are just as important. We can choose to believe that our time, our attention, our love, and our gratitude are just as powerful as money; we just have to remember this and not be cowed when someone tries to make us feel otherwise.
Witchy little risks 51-60
#51 – Attend an event in support of MA ballot question #4 in favor of regulated therapeutic access to psychedelics – This year, there was a ballot initiative in MA to allow a 2-year planning period culminating in regulated therapeutic access to psychedelics for conditions like PTSD, end of life anxiety, and other forms of suffering. I heard that one of my favorite authors, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, of The Body Keeps the Score, was going to be speaking in front of the State House in favor of this initiative, so I felt I should go. I was moved by van der Kolk’s address and by the conversations I had with other folks in attendance. I voted yes on the initiative, not just because of the data that suggests these medicines can help people heal, but also because approving access to these medicines could represent a shift in health care as a whole. The way these substances work is often through inducing mystical experiences, spiritual experiences that allow people to get in touch with not just their minds and bodies, but also their sense of interconnectedness to the world. We’ve long separated mental and physical health in the western model, and we’ve left out spirituality from this space entirely. When the initiative didn’t pass, I was not terribly surprised. MA is a state where we have doubled down on the traditional western medical model – if we are going to open the door to a radical shake up of the system we’ve built, it’s going to take a whole lot of energy to do it. Bring it on!
#52 – Reach out to contacts to try to advertise retreat – I took a leap and booked a retreat space for 12/6-12/8 to host a retreat for women who wanted to get in touch with their creative spark. Then it was time to start advertising it. It is a risk to believe my time, knowledge, and compassion are worth money; I am fighting not just my self-doubt, but centuries of doubt over a woman’s inherent value. Fortunately, every time I choose to acknowledge my worth and take a step to feel it, I chip away at this doubt. For this risk, I reached out to a couple of people in my network to let them know I was hosting this retreat. That step alone was a victory for me. In the end, I did not have the interest in my retreat that I was hoping for, but every step of this process provided opportunities to learn and grow. Next time I have something to advertise, I won’t be intimidated by failure – I failed already! And here I am safe and whole and ready to try again.
#53 – Choose to feel like I belong at a table of brilliant, impressive, humans rather than an imposter – At the Benson Henry Institute course in mind Body Medicine, I was surrounded by brilliant researchers, health care professionals, seasoned coaches, and authors. It was a collection of people I aspire to be. When I found myself at a table with the keynote speaker, a Columbia University professor researching energy flow through mitochondria, at cocktail hour, I might have excused myself, believing that other people were more deserving of his time. Instead, I owned my right to be there. I embraced the fact that my attention, my curiosity, and my time are a gift just like anyone else’s. It was one of the best nights of my life. As Dr. Martin Picard said, my energy is forever changed by my time with him, just as his energy is forever changed by his time with me.
#54 – Share copies of Happy Hedgehog with people at conference – I received a box of my children’s book in the mail the day before the last day of the Mind Body Medicine conference, and I felt this was a nudge from the Universe to share them with people at the conference. I brought 5 copies with me that day with the intention to give them all out. I had an extraordinary lunch that day with a midwife from Maryland, a mindset coach, a tech savvy inventor, and an occupational therapist. I fully stepped into my witch at this lunch, owning the word, and an amazing thing happened, my midwife friend acknowledged her sympathies with the word, and my OT friend owned her inner mermaid witch. We shared this act of revealing our spiritual truths over that lunch, and it was the freest I have ever felt. I gave 4 copies of my book away right then. I don’t know why, but it felt like a risk to share this little book – was it because I didn’t believe in it for some reason? Was it because it’s scary to share a piece of your soul in a way that you give up control over it? I suspect it was the latter. After lunch, my OT mermaid friend and I ended up in conversation with Martin Picard again, another life-changing conversation. He saw my mermaid friend’s copy of my book and inquired about it. I had learned he had a 5 year old son, and I offered him my last copy, which he graciously received.
#55 – Leave behind need to be liked and stand in power knowing what I do is valuable – one of the lecturers at the Mind Body Medicine conference was Dr. Susan Biali Haas, a physician turned career coach and lecturer on burnout. Her talk, which was all about burnout for health care professionals, resonated with me profoundly. One of the moments she talked about from her own story was when she was early in her career, and an older male colleague told her she smiled too much. She said her first response was to be offended and think he was off-base and jaded. She described how her mindset has changed over time, though. She sees his point now; she was spending a great deal of energy trying to be liked. I also find myself spending considerable energy trying to be liked, trying to win people over. While I don’t think there is any harm in making friends, I am now working on striking a better balance between saving the energy I need for myself to feel whole and giving my energy to others. I will be better at what I do if I take care of myself first.
#56 – Teach class with my mom as a student – My mom has been watching my journey in leaving a stable and successful career as a pharmacist to transition to full witch, and she has fairly been skeptical. My wonderful mom told me she wanted to come to one of my classes at the Purple Couch Bookshop, and she said she wanted to pay for it. The class she attended ended up having only one other student, but it was magick. My mom saw the value I was providing to another human, and she even got into the activities! I am so grateful for her time and support.
#57 – Lead magick mirror activity at YWCA – I had met Nicole, the events coordinator at the local YWCA, at a Chamber of Commerce event. We connected right away and later had lunch. She wanted to host an election night watch party for the YWCA community. I volunteered to join her, excited to collaborate to bring community together for this stressful night. We agreed that I would host a magick mirror activity, one of the activities I do in my curriculum for manifesting. I bought the supplies and planned to show up, and then on the day of the event, I realized I didn’t know if I was leading this activity for kids or adults. I might have had a little panic. I have a history of planning work to death before I feel comfortable stepping into it. When I was a teacher, I had almost every word I planned to say typed on a PowerPoint slide, and when I was an ambulatory care pharmacist, I had every bit of my charting done in advance that I could possibly do. This risk of walking into the magick mirror event was a big one, but I proved to myself I can handle a curve ball. The participants were 20-something 6-8 year old girls. I restructured how I typically run the activity on the fly, and we all ended up having a lovely time.
#58 – Start writing a book – After my time at the Mind Body Medicine conference, I was so inspired by the people around me, I knew I needed to channel my energy into something I felt proud of. I started writing a book about my story from being a pharmacist to owning my inner witch. Not only did I undertake the writing of this book, but I also gave myself time off from my other responsibilities for building the business. I knew this book needed my undivided focus, and 2 weeks and 172 pages later, I was finished. I am sitting on the book for now, figuring out what to do next, but the act of writing it was powerful and empowering. I now know I am capable of writing a book!
#59 – Be in a commercial and take up space – One of the most powerful things we have is our physical bodies. As I have undertaken a journey to strengthen and feel more at home in my body, I have felt my confidence grow. I remember at one point in my life being in agonizing pain walking around Disney World or getting sick to my stomach hiking a short hill near my home; my body did not feel like a good home. As I have found ways to love and honor my physical body with movement, nourishing food, water, deep breaths, and mirror affirmations, it has become home again. I am no longer afraid to see myself in pictures. In the past, I never would have agreed to be in a commercial and be seen in this way, but now, I am grateful for this vessel, and I am ok letting others see it too.
#60 – Be kind but firm passing people on bike trail – I absolutely love biking with my husband on the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail, We start in Lowell, MA, bike the 15 miles to West Concord, MA, and then come back home. At one point during our most recent ride, I found myself coming up quickly on a dangerous situation – there were two women walking in front of me side-by-side, and two people coming from the other direction side-by-side – there wasn’t enough room for me to go between them. I rang my bell to give the people in front of me an alert to scootch over or go single file, but they didn’t. I didn’t have enough time to brake, so I squeezed through as best I could and said “excuse me” in a high-pitched little voice. Immediately after the encounter, I didn’t feel good about it. I had a right to feel safe riding my bike and for others to respect the rules of going single-file when someone else is passing, and this right was violated. There was no need for me to make myself feel small in this moment. I reminded myself that I only have control over myself and my own thoughts, feelings, and actions, and I channeled that energy into more loudly and firmly alerting people to my presence the next time this situation happened. My little bell just wasn’t going to cut it; I needed to use my good strong voice to say, “On your left!” And I’m going to keep using this good strong voice of mine, in as fair and compassionate a way as I can.