Healing my relationship to money

I recently watched one of Carl Jung's interviews. He said a child is not born with tabula rasa– a blank sheet of paper. Instead just like an acorn will become an oak tree, a human will become who is meant to be. This idea touched deep within me. It made me think, am I supposed to become some sort of rebel? Since I was a little rebel, a communist if you will, growing up because the world around me didn’t make sense and I was against it all. I rejected everything that didn’t resonate with me. I wouldn’t know this would cost a ton at the end. Now, I came to face with this.

How the world works didn’t make sense. All the stories I have heard about money didn’t make sense. In a way, it still doesn’t. I think there is something here that I can not see. Therefore, keep coming back to these thoughts over and over again. And, practically put I kept being challenged by life. First of all, I need money to meet my basic needs. I am accepting now that all that I rejected turned against me. I think there is something that I need to understand about money that I still don’t.

This year for my birthday I got myself a gift. The Wealthy Women Vault 2.0. As a promise to fix my relationship with money, I thought commitment like this would make sense– paying for something online that brings different people together who already achieved building their businesses in the online ‘spiritual’ business world. Let’s see, let's explore the thing that makes me most cringe. ‘To pay to heal’ even writing this I just want to remove myself from it. I don’t want to look at it. As I am writing this, I am acknowledging how hard this is for me.

‘The art of receptivity’

One of the contents in Vault 2.0. that struck me the most was ‘In her resource’ by Qiddist Ashé. I have been thinking a lot about receptivity since last year. I have written a post called ‘The Gift of Receptivity: Hygge’ and coincidentally enough one of the videos here ‘In her resource’ was ‘The Art of Receptivity’.

She was talking about receiving and I think most often we forget about what it is like to receive. What does it mean to receive? pause and take it in. A compliment, an offering, money. How do you receive it? Take it anxiously and quickly put it where it belongs. Get paid and quickly think of paying your rent, bills, or buying groceries. She was saying that this is not what juices our system up. I love this measure. How to get juiced up with what you receive?

She was saying that when we can receive this way we can also give more cleanly. We can give from a place of abundance. Ahh, such wise words, I would love to live this wisdom.

Standing still

In his book ‘She’, Robert Jhonson talks about the feminine capacity to be able to stay still after being knocked out of one’s orbit. In contrast to the male principle of moving through such events, he talks about how it is necessary and even smart to stay still while remaining receptive in such a stage of one's experience. This makes me think of the act of ‘surrender’ as that is also not just a ‘submissive’ way of remaining still but rather a choice that requires receptivity.

When you have been asked to kill a certain part of yourself it is not easy as our society only values ‘moving on’, ‘turning the page’, ‘getting back up right away after a fall’ etc. However, Jhonson, or rather the myths of human history challenges this idea. It is so relieving that it does. I think we all deep down know that death requires grief, it requires staying still for a while. The book also points out the difference in the male experience of moving through such events. You can dive deeper into the whole topic by reading the book, for the sake of the blogpost I will keep going with my story.

As fearful as I am just like anybody else about stillness, in a way it is a little easier to withdraw for me. As Jhonson puts it, being dazzled out of one’s own wits is a disorienting experience, and stillness is needed.

In my experience of some sort of stillness over the past two years was an unsettling experience. In this stage of stillness, I tried to move a couple of times before it was time, but it didn't work. Besides, I didn't have the wisdom of the tasks that Aphrodite gave to Psyche.

I needed to connect to my purpose and values and since everything was torn down I didn’t know who I was anymore. At this stage even though I try to grapple with life it didn’t bear any fruits because at the time I didn’t know why I was doing what I was doing. In between being lost and finding myself, I became obsessed with my inner work because this was the only thing that helped me connect back to my roots, to the questions that I have been asking all along

A pile of seeds to sort

As the story tells, Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul knocked out of her orbit, had to go to Aphrodite, the god of love, for healing. Psyche wounded by love avoided this visit for as long as she could. In the hopes of getting away with it, she went to all the other gods for healing but Aphrodite. At last, with no healing to her wounds, she arrived at the altar of Aphrodite. The story reminds us that what wounded us also holds our healing.

Psyche received a tyrannical speech and four tasks from Aphrodite. I want to highlight the first task, which is connected to my point. Aphrodite gave Psyche a pile of seeds of many kinds that needed sorting.

Ants came to help Psyche with this sorting process. The story points out we need to find our ant nature to fulfill this task. Which seed to sort first or first find all the different kinds of seeds and start organizing it this way. To fulfill this task we need our intuition so that we can choose one of the million ways to sort a pile of seeds.

Unfortunately, in the modern world, many of us are robbed of our most valuable asset, which is our intuition. No wonder why we feel lost all the time. We can not hear our body’s wisdom. No wonder we can’t seem to figure out which way to go. How to move our bodies? What do we come here to do? Perhaps we have been told ‘You are doing it the wrong way, you can not sort the seeds like that’ and we keep people pleasing as an adaptation to our wounding.

This story reminded me of why I was studying classical archeology (Greek and Roman eras) in the first place. I wanted to uncover the wisdom of mythical stories. Who would’ve guessed I would find this wisdom, the story of gods after being knocked out of my orbit?

After listening to the book, ‘She’ I wanted to pay Aphrodite a visit too. So I went to the Antalya Archeology Museum. I knew I would find her in the halls of many Greek statues that are brought to the museum from different ancient cities around Antalya. I entered the hall and quickly went in between sculptures reading the tags. As I turned the corner here she was Aphrodite, god of love. I looked at her with a big smile as I was to be lectured.

I was ready to move from being too naive in a way that I avoided facing the reality of life. Like I said, I was born to reject all that was being forced upon me. I love how in the book Robert Jhonson explains. ‘Imagine a very feminine woman at the beginning of her life looking at the modern world. She fears that she will be depersonalized by society.’ This was the exact reason why I kept running away from ‘reality’ but to make it through life, sooner or later I had to face this and this is not separate from the feminine ways of moving through life as one can not exist without the other complementary one.

How to harness your magic while being practical

I want to find the balance and understand the practicalities of relating to money.

Something that worked for me when I wanted to sell a story was being radically honest and authentic, first to myself and then to others. Before, I thought I needed to shut down my passion to do any kind of job, but that was not true. There were ways that I could harness my enthusiasm and do practical work.

I had an article series in mind that I wanted to pitch, but I was also very fearful of rejection. When I pitched my idea on a call with colleagues, I could articulate why these articles would be useful in rethinking how to do high-quality journalism in Turkey. During the call, I was bursting with passion because I thought through what was needed for high-quality journalism. So, I sold my pitch.

What if I am uninspired then how will I sustain myself? So I came to realize that this is not sustainable for me. I asked myself what could nourish me so that I could keep creating. Of course, money plays a huge role here.

For some time now I thought these set prices that news media outlets were offering weren't the exact value of my stories and I grew resentful and tired. Besides, in some cases, I felt I wasn’t fully free to say what I wanted to say while writing news stories.

I have written nice stories and I am proud of them but I was craving something deeper. When I started writing for my blog page I realized there was not as much pushback from myself, not much procrastination. I think it was because I wanted to say what I wanted to say. It was coming so naturally and I was in a flow.

One of the conversations that I had with my chica, Shae recently was sobering. She told me ‘ As a writer you know why people need to read your words but people don’t know that yet.’ She added ‘The process involves keeping yourself out there.’

This made me think that this is exactly why it is important to be yourself. Otherwise, you introduce your persona to the world but not the real you, and it shows. Be yourself from the beginning so that you cut the fluff—those people who were not your audience. However, coming back to the intuition piece, many of us don’t know who we are in the first place or that there wasn’t a space for us to explore that.

So for that come back to your body over and over again and keep listening to what she says. My dear chica, Shae has a garage sale right now and I am sure her work would transform your relationship with your body as it did for me.

This conversation will continue.

And don’t forget Aphrodite inspires, but it’s Psyche who transforms.

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