What You Can’t See Makes Everything You Do See
(I spent years trying to fix my relationship with money. Then I discovered I had been solving the wrong problem.)
I
cannot remember a time when I wasn’t trying to change my relationship with money, but I am beginning to realise that for much of that time I may have been trying to solve the wrong problem.
When people talk about your “money story”, the same themes tend to come up again and again. Deservedness. Worthiness. Receivership. Fear. Anger. Somewhere, apparently, there is supposed to be a belief that you do not deserve money, cannot receive money, are frightened of money, resent money, think rich people are terrible, or secretly believe that wealth belongs to everybody except you.
And every time I encountered this language, I was left a little bit wanting because none of it really felt like me.
Do I deserve money? Absolutely. I am a Queen. Give me the money or off with your head!
Do I have a problem receiving? Not remotely. Give it to me. Give me all of it. I will receive it with tremendous enthusiasm.😉
Am I afraid of money? No. I do not believe money is the root of all evil. Quite the opposite. I have often thought that if more people with clean hearts had access to extraordinary amounts of money, the world might be a very different place.
Am I angry with money? No. It is not money’s fault.
Do I believe money is for other people and not for me? Also no. I have never had difficulty imagining myself wealthy. I believe I am worthy of it. I’m sure I can have it. I want it. In fact, I’m so sure that I am supposed to be financially supa-fly, I’ve spent countless hours sitting in bewilderment confused as to why my bank account is not stuffed with positive zeros!
So, whenever I tried to explore my relationship with money through those lenses,
I could understand the theories intellectually, but I could never quite find myself inside them. There was always the sense that something was missing. Meanwhile, the actual experience of money in my life continued to be maddening.
I think about money constantly.
Not occasionally. Not when a bill arrives. Not when I sit down to make a budget. All day. Every day. And this is regardless of how much I actually have.
How much do I have? How much do I need? What is coming in? What is going out? How many hours do I need to work today? Can I afford this? Should I buy that? How much petrol do I need? How much money do I need to make before I can stop? Where is the next money coming from? What if I do not make enough? What could happen that would bring more in? Could the business do it? Could an investment do it? Could something completely unexpected, do it?
Money has been running in the background of my mind like software I cannot close.
And this is made more confusing by the fact that I am very good at creating things.
I have created extraordinary jobs. I have created award-winning businesses. I have created opportunities, friendships, homes, experiences, freedoms and circumstances that I genuinely wanted. I have built a life in which, for the most part, I do not answer to a boss. I have had access to beautiful things and interesting things and improbable things. Again and again, I have managed to create the architecture of a life I wanted.
But never, somehow, the money that would allow me to fully relax into it.
That is the recurring theme.
I do not have a boss, but the cost of not having a boss has often been working all the hours God sends to scrape together the money I need to live.
I have lived in lovely homes, but they have not necessarily been mine, or permanent, or chosen from a place of complete autonomy.
I have created businesses that were exciting, interesting and full of potential, but they did not create the kind of sustained financial security I wanted.
I have had money arrive. I have had debts cleared. I have had periods where things suddenly seemed to improve. I have had opportunities appear that should, logically, have changed the trajectory.
And yet one of the strangest things about those moments is that I did not necessarily feel joy.
Once the initial exhilaration had worn off, very often I felt doom.
This will not last.
Something will happen.
It will disappear.
I will end up back where I started.
It was not even always an anxious thought. Sometimes it felt more like a knowing. A quiet certainty that whatever had improved was temporary and that eventually I would return to what was familiar: robbing Peter to pay Paul, worrying about money, working too hard for too little, trying to figure out how to create enough.
I have had people explain budgeting to me. I understand budgeting. I have had people tell me to spend less than I earn. I understand the mathematics. I have been told to increase my income. I have increased my income. I have been told to look at my accounts, make plans, set goals, become more disciplined. None of this is mysterious information.
Sometimes I have done those things and they have worked, at least for a while.
And then somehow, I have still found myself back inside the same experience.
And this is when I begin to become fascinated. Because I know this experience is just that. An experience. It is not a fixed condition. It’s not true that I AM just bad with money, so if I can ask the right question, it becomes changeable. At some point you have to ask whether the problem is really the tactic.
If I know what a budget is, why am I sipping yet another fancy coffee and avoiding looking at the bank account?
If I know I need to open the letter, why am I leaving it unopened? Even my own intuitive powers benefit from confirmation.
If I know I want more money, why does having more money not necessarily make me feel safer? Why the impending feeling of doom whenever good fortune comes my way.
If I understand perfectly well that blowing the budget today and saying “fuck it, I’ll make more tomorrow” is not an intelligent financial strategy, why can that still feel so seductive in the moment?
If I want financial success so badly, why have I spent so much of my life exhausted by the pursuit of it?
This is where something shifted for me.
Recently, I did an Akashic reading on myself and the block that came up was a karmic belief, “money makes the world go round”, driven by the energy of overwhelm.
Overwhelm.
That word has been driving me to maddened distraction ever since because the truth of it landed like a punch in the gut from a portly wrestler and suddenly I can see my relationship with money in an entirely different way.
It is not that I do not want money.
It is not that I do not believe I deserve it.
It is not that I think wealth is immoral.
It is not that I cannot receive.
It is that the energy of ‘money’ itself is overwhelming.
That distinction is precision in action and makes all the difference.
Overwhelm.
How does this play out in real time…
Money is something that must constantly be dealt with. Watched. Earned. Managed. Planned for. Protected. Replaced. Thought about. Worried about. Used correctly. Not wasted. Not lost. Not mishandled. Not allowed to run out.
Money has become something I am always in relationship with and almost never at rest around.
In my world ‘money’ dances in and out of my life only and always with the energy of overwhelm. Like two lobsters destined forever to be joined at the hip.
That knowing changes everything.
Because suddenly behaviours that had always appeared random, irresponsible or contradictory begin to look like different expressions of the same thing.
Avoiding opening a piece of post is overwhelm.
Not wanting to look at the account is overwhelm.
Working myself into exhaustion because I am frightened I do not have enough is overwhelm.
Saying “fuck it, I’ll make more tomorrow” can also be overwhelm because for one glorious moment I do not want to have to be responsible for the bloody stuff.
Wanting an enormous amount of money is not inconsistent with being overwhelmed by money either. In fact, perhaps some of the fantasy of great wealth has been the fantasy of finally escaping the subject altogether.
If I had enough, I would not have to think about it.
If I had enough, I could relax.
If I had enough, I could participate in life properly.
If I had enough, I could stop calculating.
If I had enough, I could stop proving.
If I had enough, I could live.
That last part feels especially important because the energetic statement itself is “money makes the world go round.”
And no figure real or imagined occurs as enough. As soon as I get money even when dreaming, I am immediately concocting ways of giving it away. Like WTF!
If you hold as your truth THAT money makes the world go round, what happens if you do not have enough of it?
You do not get to participate.
And I can see how deeply that idea has infiltrated my life.
Money has not simply represented buying power. It has represented permission.
I will start living when.
I will travel when.
I will relax when.
I will feel successful when.
I will be taken seriously when.
I will become fully credible in my own work when.
I will feel like a legitimate businesswoman when.
I will stop feeling like somebody who is merely trying to make something happen when.
I will stop treating my business like a hobby when.
I will call my friend back when!
Money has become the receipt that proves I am allowed to believe in myself.
This has been especially confronting because the work I do involves helping other people see what they cannot see. It’s work I love and (according to my clients – OK and to me too) am great at.
I work with the Akashic Records. Practically, that means I use them as an intuitive information source to look beneath the obvious story and identify the patterns, influences and possibilities affecting what someone is experiencing.
I can often see the thing somebody else cannot see because they are standing inside it.
I recently worked with somebody who believed, completely, that the rules of the world worked in a particular way. She believed she could not present her work in the way she wanted to because it would not be accepted. This was not a theory to her. It was simply reality.
But the irony was that by refusing to take the chance she believed she was not allowed to take, she was about to guarantee the outcome she was most afraid of. The opportunity would disappear anyway. Not because the world had conspired against her as she was convinced it had, but because she was obeying a rule she could not see was a rule and an illusion at that.
Once I pointed it out, she could see it.
And once she could see it, she had choice again.
That is the part I now find so interesting in myself.
For years I could see the consequences of my relationship with money.
I could see the anxiety.
I could see the avoidance.
I could see the hard work.
I could see the exhaustion.
I could see the boom and bust.
I could see the defiance.
I could see the constant preoccupation.
I could see myself making money, losing money, recovering, worrying, hoping, hustling, dreaming.
I could see all of the visible evidence.
What I could not see was the architecture underneath it.
I could not see that my organising experience might not be “I cannot have money”.
It might be “money overwhelms me.”
That is a profoundly different problem.
And this is where I think the phrase “your beliefs create your reality” is often made too simplistic.
It is easy to hear that and imagine some cosmic ordering system where you think the correct thought and a cheque appears.
I am interested in something more practical than that.
What you believe affects what you notice.
It affects what you expect.
It affects what you attempt.
It affects what you avoid.
It affects what you interpret as dangerous.
It affects what you believe is possible.
It affects the meaning you assign to what happens.
And then it affects what you do.
If I believe money is overwhelming, I may avoid dealing with something financial. That avoidance creates a bigger problem. The bigger problem creates more overwhelm. And then I point to the overwhelm as evidence that money is, indeed, overwhelming (nuts, right?!)
The belief creates behaviour.
The behaviour creates experience.
The experience appears to prove the belief.
And around we go.
‘Everything that we see is created from something that we don’t see.’
Dr Joe Dispenza
We know about the ‘invisible stuff’ but how deep it goes never fails to astound me. What you cannot see makes everything you do see.
You see the unpaid bill.
You do not see the pattern that made you avoid opening it.
You see the lost opportunity.
You do not see the belief that stopped you taking it.
You see yourself procrastinating.
You do not see what success might require you to risk.
You see yourself doing the same inexplicable thing for the twentieth time and conclude that you are lazy, irresponsible, foolish or incapable.
You see the consequences.
You do not see the structure holding them up.
And until the architecture becomes visible, it is very difficult to change because you are trying to intervene at the level of symptoms.
I have spent years trying to improve my financial behaviour. Read the books. Attended the courses. Listened to the podcasts. From experience, I can tell you that knowing the sensible solution is not always enough to elicit change. Sometimes you need to bang on the door of a problem with a truth so specific that only it holds the key to open it.
What I am now beginning to explore is what happens when I stop treating money as something that overwhelms me.
That does not mean I have suddenly solved it.
This is not one of those stories where I discovered the belief on Monday, cleared it on Tuesday and became a millionaire on Friday.
I am still in the experiment.
My life has not transformed overnight. The numbers are still the numbers. I still have a business to build. I still have financial decisions to make. I still want significantly more money than I currently have.
But something has changed.
I can see the pattern now.
And once I see it, I cannot completely disappear inside it in the same way. That familiar feeling of dread, I’m thrilled to report, that appears to have dissolved. Just evaporated into the ether.
When I do not want to open something, I can ask myself whether I am dealing with a problem or avoiding the feeling of overwhelm.
When I want to work myself into the ground, I can ask whether I am taking useful action or trying to outrun financial anxiety.
When I want to spend money defiantly and tell myself I will make more tomorrow, I can notice that perhaps this is not freedom at all. Perhaps it is another reaction to feeling controlled by money.
When something good happens financially and I immediately begin waiting for it to disappear, I can catch that too.
None of this guarantees that I will make different choices.
But it gives me the chance.
And perhaps that is the real value of discovering an unseen pattern.
Not that awareness magically fixes everything.
But that what was previously operating as truth can finally be recognised as an instruction.
And instructions can be questioned.
Those unseen things underneath the things.
The belief beneath the behaviour.
The assumption beneath the decision.
The old rule beneath the apparently rational explanation.
The piece of information you do not know you are using to organise your world.
Because what if the thing you are trying to fix is not actually the problem? And even worse, you thought you knew what the problem was.
What if the money problem is not really about worthiness?
What if the relationship problem is not really about finding the right person?
What if the career problem is not really about motivation?
What if the procrastination is not really laziness?
What if the thing you keep calling self-sabotage is actually obedience to a rule you cannot yet see?
That is the delicious question I love to sit with.
What am I obeying without knowing I am obeying it?
And if I can see it, what becomes possible that was not possible before?
Because perhaps the first step in changing your life is not always doing something different.
Perhaps sometimes it is finally seeing the thing that has been quietly deciding what “different” was allowed to look like.
✦ ✹ ▶︎ ♡
