Hello Friend!
For the next two weeks, I want to do a deep dive into this concept that we are seeing flooding the social-media landscape right now.
This idea that money is an ‘energy’ and that we attract it to ourselves not through skills, not through figuring out what the market wants and how we can meet those needs, not through business know-how or a good backend strategy - but through ‘aligning with our pleasure’ and ‘being in a state of receptivity.’
This idea that anyone and everyone can have a successful business of their own or can make lots of money doing whatever job they are doing, if they just get themselves into that feminine, flow-state via energetic and pleasure practices.
I want to explore this because I feel it’s really important to look at where people may be taking advantage of our collective vulnerabilities rather than actually offering something of substance, and it’s important to recognize when we are being told something that sounds really good, that we may want to hear, but that is actually going to lead us into a worse situation.
Let’s see if we can explore this from a nuanced perspective - sorting out the fact from fiction - so that we can keep ourselves safe from teachers who may truly believe what they are saying/selling but that may be leading us in the wrong direction.
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Can We Pleasure Our Way Into Financial Abundance?
Here’s your periodic, friendly reminder that anyone on the internet who’s trying to sell you a ‘I can teach you how to scale your online business to be making 7 figures a month via these energetic principals/ways of hacking the selling system’, ‘Money is energy and healing your nervous system will lead to abundance’, ‘anyone can be wealthy and successful beyond their wildest dreams if they just align themselves with their feminine, receptive flow’ or anything to that effect - and their proof that they can teach you how to do this, is the fact that they’ve made that much money selling a course on how to get rich - you’re likely being told something that sounds good on paper, but in real reality isn’t the truth, or at least isn’t the whole truth.
This isn't to say that good marketing teachers don’t exist or that there aren’t tried and true things that need to be in place to set ourselves up for success in an online business space.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t mental and emotional blocks that *can* have a certain impact on our capacity to make a living.
This isn’t to say that there are no energetic principles behind success or that mindset, how our nervous systems are programmed or other more ‘esoteric’ factors don’t play into our experience with work, money and our living conditions.
This is simply to say that a lot of the time what is being sold in these energetic/pleasure/receptivity/feminine business/nervous system healing/manifesting spaces is truly missing the mark on the complexities of what goes into determining our financial situation and the complexities of what it means to have success in business - either personal or in a working environment.
The reality is, we don’t live in a world where anyone can reach financial abundance - and we really don’t live in a world where following your passion/what lights you up/brings you pleasure is a failsafe in terms of creating financial success.
We don’t live in a world where our energetic state is the main contributing factor to our life outcomes.
We don’t live in a market economy that values authenticity, realness, and wholeness or an economy that has some sort of sensor on whether or not someone is following their passion and that automatically rewards that.
We don’t live in a world where every skill, every passion, every expression and everything someone may find themselves enjoying doing is valued in a way where we could make millions.
We don’t live in a world that rewards true quality - we live in a world that has a pretty set and narrow value structure, that rewards very specific ways of being and that makes little to no room for MOST things outside of those core values.
We don’t live in a world of equal opportunity - where everyone's efforts go the same distance, where everyone has the same access to the people, places and resources that are actually required for success or where everyone has the power to move themselves into a state of producing something that will be highly prized by the general population.
We don’t live in a world where the work that is truly valuable in terms of actually serving humanity and making the world a better place is financially lucrative - in fact, in a lot of ways those things that matter most are deeply UNDERvalued, and those things that, in many ways tend to make the world a worse place in terms of overall effect, are highly rewarded.
We live in a world where that which is aligned with our humanity is often a really hard sell, and that which brings quick pleasure, more success for those at the top, that which generates feelings of competition and never having or being enough, that which perpetuates the idea that we are inadequate and that our feelings of discontent are rooted in not consuming or producing enough are the things that take up the most space and get the most financial reward.
To provide you with some evidence for my above statements, let’s consider the people who are the most financially successful in our world.
Are they the people we would consider the most ‘in alignment’ with their purpose?
Are they the people who are most aligned with service to humanity and doing what they can to help?
Are they the people who have healed their nervous systems and are operating from a high level of integrity, groundedness, openness, receptivity and passion?
Are they the people most interested in supporting humanity at large?
Are they the people who are most grounded in their pleasure?
Are they the people we would look up to and say ‘I want to be like them because they are so spiritually aligned, healed, whole and loving?’
I’m going to bet that as you take a look, you’re going to find that the truth is actually much more in the opposite direction.
Success In Our System, Generally Speaking
Those who have the most success in our system are, generally speaking, individuals who started from a place of great access, wealth, privilege and opportunity. They are the ones who are most invested in industries that are causing harm to the earth, that are exploiting their workers, that are fighting against human rights, that are making it challenging for people to unionize or to make a living wage.
Those who have the most success in our system are people who are perpetuating mis and disinformation because it stimulates and captures eyeballs. They are the ones creating products as quickly and cheaply as possible to make sure that we have to rebuy often. They are the ones creating trends and constantly changing markets so that we never feel good enough. They are the ones who are capitalizing on being in a position of controlling resources and thus controlling the kind of working conditions people have to tolerate, are underpaying and undervaluing their workers so that they can take more profit home for themselves, who are cutting corners in all sorts of ways that impact the environment so as to hoard more for themselves.
They are the people who are in a mindset that this is a dog-eat-dog world and that the way to have success is to win, beat others, take others down and to dominate.
They are the ones perpetuating the myth that fast pleasure through the consumption of wildly stimulating, momentarily pleasurable but ultimately empty items will lead to life satisfaction, that who you are is reflected in what you HAVE and that your job denotes your value. They are the ones perpetuating the myth that very ‘low skill labor’ that we depend upon to keep our society functioning is somehow worthy of a paycheck that leaves you scrambling to keep a roof over your head and food on the table and that those who entertain, those who run companies in the interest of their shareholders and those who make the choices that are harming people and the planet deserve to be celebrated and to have so much more than they need.
We are not living in a world where alignment with purpose, value, service, pleasure in the real sense or nervous system regulation = what is valued and celebrated - rather we are living in a world that is very far from it.
So to tell ourselves that all we have to do is be spiritually healed, aligned, settled in our nervous system, receptive, feminine or in any other energetic state in order to manifest/attract/create abundance is to at the very least, be over simplifying reality.
Again it’s not to say that these factors don’t play into our financial situation at all - it’s just to say that if we assume this is the foundation for what it takes to be wealthy or that this is the KEY to wealth and success - we are likely not seeing the systems for how they are.
Purpose, Passion And Capitalism
The next thing to really understand here is that we live in a culture that has conditioned us to believe that purpose, passion and ‘who we really are’ can always be turned into a job that can be successful within our capitalist structure and within the societal values our culture currently holds.
We have been trained to see ourselves through the lens of what we produce and what we consume, and trained to believe that work is the purpose of life in a lot of ways. That what we DO is the be-all-end-all in terms of what will satisfy us and make us feel good about ourselves.
Which means that if we don’t have a ‘thing’ that fits into our system, if we don’t have a ‘passion’ that we can turn into a career, if we feel like work isn’t the thing that drives us or if we struggle to connect ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ in a way that leads to a life where work = us feeling like we are living some grander purpose than just doing what it takes to earn what we need so that we can live a good life outside of work - that we are doing something wrong or failing on some level. That we are missing something.
But the reality is, most of us aren’t going to have that special THING that means we don’t have to market, don’t have to focus on our branding, don’t have to figure out our ideal customer and how to speak to them and so on - and all that is required for success is ‘alignment with our passion’ or ‘alignment with our mission and service’ and success will naturally flow.
Many of us are going to find that we don’t have a passion. That work is never going to be our full purpose or the thing that fulfills us. Rather it will be something that is a means to an end of supporting ourselves enough so that we can live a life outside of work that is fulfilling. Labor will never be a pain part of our ‘identity’ and that’s totally and completely ok.
If we are working online and looking at these coaches teaching alignment/pleasure/energetics as a marketing strategy, are going to come to realize that in real reality in order to generate success, we are going to have to do the unsexy, slow work required to build a name for oneself in the online space. This also isn't to say that what's going on in our personal lives/in our spirituality isn't having any effect on our work. Employee or business owner alike. I'm not trying to say that working on your core beliefs and finding new work life balance doesn't support success.
What I AM saying is that the idea that we can do our energetic work and that this will be the KEY to our financial freedom is, for the most part, B.S.
This IS to say that right now, a LOT of us really want to escape the system. A lot of us really WANT to believe that we can have financial freedom doing something we LOVE or doing something that requires very little of us.
We all want to believe in the dream of location independence, financial freedom and a career that lights our soul on fire or whatever we’re saying nowadays.
And I get it. Working in the system can be really hard and it can feel really soul-sucking. It can require so much and give so little in return. Being in capitalism mostly sucks, and so to think that we can escape is highly motivating.
Many of us who already have online businesses find that it’s really hard to find true success and stability. That sales are slow, and having to wear ALL or most of the hats of a company is HARD. We have anxiety about the constant shifts and new demands that crop up on a daily and weekly basis. We traded the security of the system for the freedom of having to take on all this extra responsibility - and being vulnerable to the volatile marketplace in a way we simply weren't before.
We figure there must be something we’re missing or doing wrong that we’re not making as much as all the boss babes/bro’s out there seem to be making.
Thus, when we’re told that we can easily learn a few tricks that will radically change the way we can generate an income for ourselves - we are primed to believe it.
But the real reality is - most of these people who are selling courses around how to make money online, made their money from selling a course promising that they can help you make money online.
A.k.a - they don’t actually know how to teach YOU how to make money online - unless YOUR BUSINESS is also telling people you can help them learn to sell things online.
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Let’s take a break here and come back next week to finish up this exploration.
<3
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