Your Emotional Currency by Kate Levinson, PhD

You’re not alone in your struggles with money, you just don’t know how others are struggling. And most of us imagine there’s a get rich fix that will take all our troubles away. But money is not a panacea. Mitigating our misbeliefs and unbeneficial behaviors around money is an inside job. And this inner relationship is our most impactful force in healing our money challenges — the one that will have the most influence over how with think and feel about money, no matter our net worth.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Your relationship with money involves an intimate relationship with yourself — often overshadowed by societal, cultural, and familial imprints
• Why money is NOT something external to be mastered and controlled
• How to slow down and be curious around your thoughts and feelings about money — without judgment
• That knowing yourself better can help you to understand your beliefs and actions around money (and around how you live your life) AND help you better see which are in alignment with who you truly are
• Cultivating a practice of moving inward is as important to shifting your relationship with money as it is to shifting your consciousness in general

Money is legal tender and emotional currency — meaning our emotions connected with money also hold a value for us. The benefits of our emotional responses to money, however, are often underappreciated, even conceived as toxic when it comes to money management. The financial industry teaches us that if we have feelings about money, we should push them aside when making money decisions. Yet, we use money to express and suppress our feelings all the time — think shopping therapy.

We’ll further explore our feelings around money — our emotional currency — including fear, greed, and guilt, as well as pleasure, opportunity, and sufficiency. We’ll also look at the forces outside ourselves that influence our relationship with money and financial circumstances, including: race, age, gender, culture, religion, and financial background.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Emotional responses to money that influence your behavior whether or not you acknowledge them — you’re NOT doing it wrong because you have feelings
• Your feelings about money are complex, unavoidable, and sometime conflicted
• Your financial state is not all your doing — there are many societal, historical, and cultural forces that influence how much you have and how you deal with what you have
• How to get unstuck from limiting money beliefs and open to new creativity and endeavors
• How to pay attention to your thoughts, associations, and feelings when you deal with money — to see how specific situations and exchanges can provide starting points for exploring your relationship to money

We all have money stories — big dramatic ones and the smallest of incidents — that lodge in our psyches. Remembering these stories gives us an opportunity to see what we think and feel about money without the added interpretation and commentary from our thinking mind.

By telling our money stories, through writing and/or conversation, we’re led in unexpected directions. Things we’d forgotten or didn’t appreciate before are revealed, and new understandings emerge. Through the very act of telling our stories, healing takes place.

In this module, you’ll explore what you learned about money from your family as you were growing up, to help reveal strengths, resiliencies, confusions, or traumas around money you may still be affected by. Our narratives about money show us what money means and holds for us.

In this session, you’ll:

• Tell your money stories to come to new understandings and insights about what contributes to how your currently deal with money
• Discover that through telling your money story, you heal and have more access to resources from the past that can support you now
• See how stories help you bypass your thinking mind — which analyzes and interprets — to better see your intimate connections with money
• Learn how your family is your first money teacher, and how exploring your money stories from childhood can help reveal your early perceptions about money
• Discover that by paying attention to your present feelings, you can become more aware of the money views you carry from your past

Self-worth is an issue for many women, and our perceptions around money are usually intertwined with our self-worth. It’s no wonder… we’ve historically been, and continue to be, treated as less worthy than men in most all cultures, with money linked to one of the most consistent ways we’ve been devalued — being paid less than men for doing the same job.

Men are also still considered the financial experts and dominate most aspects of the industry. And with this comes an underestimating of our competencies around money, which has been consciously or unconsciously imprinted in our psyches as being true.

Shifting this misperception is essential to healing ourselves and our relationship with money — and one of the key ways to start is through internally valuing the Feminine — creating a place of honor for it to reside alongside the masculine ways.

When we embrace the Feminine, we can untangle our self-worth from our net worth and place it in other valued areas of our life, which weakens the hold money can have on our ego and allows our life decisions to be more holistic and nourishing.

Unexpected changes can also arise from this shift to valuing the “softer” sides of our relationship with money, including an increased sense of care, interconnection, and holding.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How to recognize that as women, we are prone to having issues around self-doubt and self-worth, and can often underestimate our competency
• Increasing your self-worth is an inside job, and making or accumulating more money does not automatically bring positive self-regard or a sense of wholeness
• Healing a wounded self-esteem comes from valuing the Feminine: being, connection, emotion, and experience
• It’s important not to let self-doubt stop you from taking on new challenges or possibilities for your life — even if you don’t feel 100% certain or secure
• You can shift your sense of self-worth by attending to your own needs — as well as the needs of others — rather than ignoring or putting your needs last

How we acquire and use money, what values we express with it, and what it means to us constitute our spiritual relationship with it. However, our relationship with money is often not aligned with our spiritual beliefs. We tend to keep money and spirit separate, sometimes perceiving money as “dirty” and not to be intertwined with our spiritual life. Yet, from a non-dualistic point of view, money and spirit are not separate, they are intimately intertwined.

In this module, we’ll explore the spiritual properties money can hold, our obligation to take care of our own wellbeing as well as that of others, what constitutes an ethical relationship with money, and where gratitude, generosity, tithing, and compassion fit in our money lives.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• Money and spirit are not separate — money involves how we relate to ourselves, others, and all of life
• How Intertwining your spiritual practices with money brings guidance to your money dealings as well as opportunities for spiritual growth
• That working through money challenges can offer rich ground for spiritual growth
• That having compassion for others helps you to develop compassion for yourself
• How you can use your financial resources — no matter what they are — for the greater good

We imagine that others don’t have blocks to dealing with money, but this is only because most of us hide our struggles. Almost all of us have difficulties with money. Even the wealthy have habitual thoughts and behaviors around money that contribute to their suffering.

In a culture of scarcity and income inequality, fear is near the top of the list of negative money blocks for many. Many of our decisions are based on it, as well as on guilt, regret, self-doubt, anger, resentment, disappointment, or shame.

The way to move through our blocks around money is to identify them by observing our habitual behaviors and listening to what they’re saying to us. They are generally trying to protect us and take care of us, but in ways that don’t serve us. When we get to the root of the block we can see our deeper, underlying needs and figure out a way to truly take care of them.

In this session, you’ll discover:

• How we hide our money struggles from each other
• That we can look like we “have it all” and yet still have feelings of guilt, anger, and resentment around money
• Negative, undigested feelings around money can paralyze you from handling your money issues
• Psychological dynamics drive much of your money behavior
• The way to move through your blocks around money is to identify them, listen to what they’re saying, and figure out how to best take care of them

Healing your relationship with money can support you in living your best life possible. And making this shift is not about denying your painful experiences around money, but in feeling your pain and holding it with new understanding, compassion, and love. Some pain remains, but in a digested form that can become a generative life force within you, allowing for greater wisdom and guidance to emerge. (Undigested past pain, including that of your ancestors, race, and culture can keep you stuck in the past and numb to the present.)

The healing process is about discovering new — often unexpected — paths to your aliveness. It involves finding the right life affirming mantras to replace limiting, undermining ones you may have been telling yourself. It’s in discerning which of your feelings and behaviors truly fit and which actually belong to someone else. And, it has to do with making your money your own by putting your mark on it as it passes through your hands.

During this last session, you’ll explore the following questions: What kind of life am I investing my financial resources in? Are my feelings and values aligned with the ways I make and use money? What am I investing in — at a deeper level, including financial investments, if I have them? Who and what am I supporting? Am I using money to contribute to the kind of world I want to see?

You’ll discover:

• That healing your relationship with money supports you in living your best life possible
• Undigested pain around money keeps you stuck in the past and numbs you to the present — and how to approach this pain with understanding and compassion to use it in a generative, self-empowering way
• How to discern which of your feelings and behaviors around money truly fit and which actually belong to someone else
• How to create new mantras around money to help you to deal with it in healthier ways
• A sense of empowerment that comes from making your money your own by using it to invest in yourself and to benefit others and the world you would like to see