What’s keeping you back from living the life you want? For most of us, it’s finances. In this episode, I get real with you. Money is the thing that’s blocking most of us from having the freedom, education, wellness, travel experience, mental peace and opportunities we so badly desire. There is nothing “unspiritual” about talking about money– in fact, in order to take care of ourselves and help others, we need it. I share:

1. Why financial self-care needs to be part of our self-care routine
2. Exercise to go back to your oldest memory with money
3. MY oldest memory with money and why I learned young that if you want to choose the ice-cream flavor, you need the dough
4. Why abundance is a mindset
5. The laws of money and the things we are doing that are holding back our flow
6. Why spiritual people need to get more comfortable with thinking about their finances– and how that’s the very thing holding many of us back
7. Why playing small is keeping your impact small
8. The very big thing I did to celebrate my abundance and how it has forever changed my life (and the lives of others)

Take your notepads out– this episode is one you will want to relisten to!

Share your #financialselfcare practices on Instagram and tag @iamsahararose to be featured on my story!

Take the discussion further in the Mind-Body Balancer Private FB community:
www.facebook.com/groups/1213662491998309/

Sponsor a Cambodian child and make a life-changing difference in an entire family’s life with cambodianchildrensfund.org

Discover your Dharma with my free quiz at https://iamsahararose.com/

 

Transcription

Episode 046 – Financial Self-Care – Why Abundance Is A Mindset We Need To Pay Attention To with Sahara Rose

By Sahara Rose

Namaste, it’s Sahara Rose, and welcome back to the “Highest Self” podcast. A place where we discuss what makes you your soul’s highest evolvement. I am so excited, this is my first episode in a month that I’m recording. I just got back from my month-long trip to India, where I was shooting photography for my upcoming book, “Eat Feel Fresh,” which is a contemporary plant-based Ayurvedic cookbook. India was insane. If you’ve been following along on my Instagram Story, you saw many of my travels. I was shooting all day every day in Delhi, Jodhpur, the Blue City, Varanasi, which is the mecca for Hindus, and Kerala, which is the epicenter in Ayurveda in South India.

I’ve shot lots of video content as well, which I’m going to be sharing with you guys in the coming year. And really did a lot of deep soul-searching. Right before I left, I found out that I had adrenal fatigue, which is something that is so common, so many of us have, and we don’t even know about, and it’s basically when our bodies are in this constant state of stress, and hustle, and they aren’t able to calm down. So through a saliva test I was able to see my cortisol levels throughout the day, and it showed me that my cortisol levels were a little bit too low than what they should be when I first wake up in the morning. And then normally it’s supposed to be the highest in the morning, and declined throughout the day.

But what was happening to mine is at nighttime started going back up. So my body at nighttime would suddenly get this surge of energy, which was why I couldn’t sleep at night, and I would you know, start doing all my writing, and working at like 10:00 PM, but actually it’s because biologically, my cortisol levels are going up, so I’m unable to sleep because there’s so much adrenaline going through my body. And you know, over a period of time of continually doing this, it puts your body into fatigue, and that’s what adrenal fatigue is.

So I’ve been working on healing that, I’ll do another podcast episode all about what I’ve been doing for healing it. I already feel so much better in the past month, but one of the first things I was looking at was my relationship to work, my relationship with social media, how much time I spent on my phone, on the computer, answering emails, and really just having no boundaries between me and my work. And always being hustling all the time, and how that really wasn’t conducive to, you know, my actual well-being.

And it brought me deeper into this thing that I’ve been working on the whole year, which is my relationship with money and finances, and it’s something that really came up for me in India, and I’ll share more of this in this episode. But it’s something that really came up to me, and you know, last year I set an intention to myself that I wanted 2017 to really be the year of financial freedom for me, and just not being a slave of money anymore. And you know, when you don’t have money, you actually are a slave to it because it’s always on your mind, and I didn’t want that for myself. I want to be free of worrying about, you know, can I buy this coconut water, can I not, can I get a massage, can I not? I just didn’t want that to be something that was holding me back from living my most full life.

And that intention really came true for me in 2017, it was by far the most abundant year that really blew me away. And so much more is to come in 2018, and in this journey I just realized how important finances are, and how they’re like that one thing that I really didn’t want to look at because I was like, “Uh, money, numbers, I hate math, money’s icky.” I had all these weird feelings with money that I think a lot of us have, and by doing a lot of work around this, reading books, just really going deep with my relationship with money and financial wealth. I’ve realized that it was all my own blocks, all my own limiting beliefs, and that was really the reason why money was coming so hard to me was because of my view of what money really is.

So I wanted to share that with you in this episode, and the reason it came out more in India is because India, as you guys know, is one of the world’s most populous countries, a billion people in this country, and there’s really not enough space for everyone, there’s not enough resources for everyone. So it’s a constant battle for who can get this tourist, who can get this dollar. And so many people in India are living off of less than $2 a day. And in some areas, like in South India, where there is more socialist type governments, and healthcare and education are provided for in most of South India, it’s not a big of a problem.

But in North India, which is where, you know, Delhi, and Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh, which is where Varanasi is, and these areas. It’s definitely not a socialist government. It’s highly, highly capitalistic, and the caste system is a very much real thing that still exists today. And there’s a huge, huge, huge wealth disparity, and this year India has instated a new tax where there is about a between like an 18% to even 20% tax on many things. So for example, our hotels all had a 28% tax on it. You know, you’re paying for your hotel, plus an extra almost 30%. That’s a huge increase.

So because of this tax increase, tourism has significantly gone down in India this year. In Kerala in South India, when I went three years ago, and this is high season in December there were a lot of other tourists around, and this time I was literally the only tourist on the beach. So you can imagine how many people are flocking to me trying to sell me this, sell me that, get me to come into their shop, get a massage, this, that. Like people are hungry, people need to eat, and there aren’t tourists coming in anymore. So the level of desperation that I saw was at an all-time high, and it was just really heartbreaking to just see how many more beggars there were, how much just more real like desperation there was around money.

And I totally understand why it’s going to be the difference whether you’re going to eat or not, you’re going to bother that tourist 300 times hoping that maybe they’ll say yes because you don’t have any other choice. But for, you know, people who are going to India as a tourist, I totally understand it can really bother them and be really overwhelming when swarms of beggars are following you everywhere that you go. So it really just showed to me more how important money is, and how important is that we change our relationship with money and become friends with it so it doesn’t overpower us.

So, I want to talk a little bit about this concept that I’ve been thinking about called financial self-care, and it’s something that I actually do want to write a book about, maybe this year. And financial self-care is really looking into the financial area of your life, and giving it the same love and attention as you would your physical or your spiritual or your emotional or mental body. There is a misconception that to be a good or spiritual person, money cannot be desired or even talked about. You know, we hear phrases like money is the root of all evil, or more money more problems. And we label those with money as selfish, shallow, greedy. So no matter how much you try to forget that money exists by only swiping your credit card, and never using cash, and never checking your bank statement. Money very much exists, and it’s actually what is keeping us alive today.

So money is what puts a roof over our heads, it’s what buys our groceries, finances our education, buys our clothes, pays for our vacations and travels. It’s also the number one thing that couples argue about, and causes the most number of divorces. Money can either free us or enslave us. It can liberate us or suffocate us. Just depending on our relationship with it. But really, all it is, is a green piece of paper that society has placed some value on. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just a physical depiction of an energy exchange. It flows, circulating millions of hands, and millions more are printed every single day. We can choose which side of the coin we want to be on: those that receive, or those that block. And if you’re listening to this podcast episode, I’m assuming you want to be the latter.

So let’s talk about money, what is money? An energy exchange. It’s how much perceived value we place upon a service, an item, or an experience. The amount of money we receive is based off of how much value we believe that we have, which is echoed back to us by others. So for this reason, by changing your belief of how much you’re worth, you can actually change how much money you make. Just as long as you can back it up with action. Money is a mindset. And the beautiful part about it is that we can master it. By getting honest about our beliefs and rewiring our thought patterns, we can radically transform the influx of money coming to us, which I’ve experienced profoundly this year. Money is a belief consciousness, and one that we can transform through deep transformational work.

So let’s dive deeper into the thought patterns that are holding you back from financial flow and freedom, which are one in the same. I want you to take a few moments right now, close your eyes if you’re not driving, just come into your breath, come into your body, come into the present, come into this moment. Just reconnect with yourself.  Now think back on your first experience with money ever as a child. You may have been five years old at the toy store, begging your mom for a new doll, and her responding that it’s too expensive. Or overhearing your parents fight about whether they could send you to private school or not because money’s too tight. Think back on your first experience with money ever.

Believe it or not, most of us have experiences with money when we are toddlers that have ingrained our relationship with money today. I remember my first experience with money. I was around six years old, and I went to get ice cream with my dad and brother. Normally, my mom would take us, and I would order the vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles, and my brother would just get the chocolate in a cup. I hated chocolate ice cream, and he didn’t want anything to do with my girly rainbow sprinkles either. But that day, my dad was taking us for ice cream. And when we went to order, he said, “What? You can’t get two separate flavors. If you each order a small, it’s going to cost $2 each. But if you split a medium, it will only be $3.40, therefore we’ll save 60 cents, and you’ll still get the same amount of ice cream.” Okay, I’m six years old. So I look at him totally puzzled. I’m like, “But I like vanilla, and he likes chocolate. We don’t want the same kind of ice cream.” And then my dad replied, “So then get coffee. Just decide on something you both like. It’s ridiculous to get two separate flavors, just pick one and share.”

You see, I had never experienced this before. You know, I got my vanilla with the sprinkles, he got his chocolate, that’s what it was. We were two different people, but suddenly we had to pick one flavor because it was 60 cents cheaper. So I looked through every flavor, asking my brother, “Do you like cookie dough?” He’s like, “No, I like Rocky Road.” I’m like, “Well, I don’t like Rocky Road. I don’t like anything with chocolate. Do you like strawberry?” “No, I only like chocolate flavors.” So there was nothing we could decide on. So my dad’s like, “Well, looks like you guys aren’t going to get any ice cream since you can’t decide on a flavor,” and ordered his own coffee ice cream and ushered us to leave.

I was heartbroken, literally. I mean why could I not pick the flavor that I wanted because of a 60-cent difference? I wasn’t even sure if 60 cents was a lot of money or not, but I knew that it had a control over me in that moment. Because I didn’t have the 60 cents, or any money at all, not only could I not decide what kind of ice cream that I wanted, but I couldn’t get any at all. And it was in that moment that I realized I never wanted money to have power over me again. And I declared to myself, no matter what, I’m going to be making my own money, and get all the rainbow sprinkles.

You see, there’s this misconception that the more money you make, the more you’re stuck thinking about money. When really, it’s quite the opposite. Let’s be real, have you ever been broke before? If so, you know what I’m talking about. When you don’t have money, it’s all you can think about. You’re constantly calculating how much your meal will cost, and how much the tax will be, and how much tip you have to leave, and whether you can even go to lunch with that friend or not. You know, you cancel meeting up with friends because you don’t have the money for the Starbucks. Let’s be real, it’s always on your mind.

It makes the difference whether you have to walk through the snow to work or school, or can hop in an Uber. If you can buy a new outfit, or are stuck with hand-me-downs. If you can travel the world, or will remain stuck in your bubble. If you can seek education through workshops and classes, or if that’s considered a luxury inaccessible to you. If you can see healers and body workers, or that’s not even in your vocabulary. It’s really a big deal.

The people who are the most preoccupied with money are actually those who make the least. Because every dollar makes a difference. It will determine whether you’ll put food on the table, the quality of your lifestyle, the future of your children. When you don’t have money, you become a slave to money. Money is not evil. It finances all the good things in your life as well. Ask yourself, could you feed yourself organic foods, get massages, buy self-care products and non-toxic household products, live in a nice neighborhood, go to the beach, go to Disneyworld, or even just survive a single day without money.

The answer is no. And because these things like organic foods, and non-toxic makeup, and household products, and living in nice neighborhoods are more valuable, they’re going to cost more than run-of-the-mill fast food, or chemical laden products, or living in governmental housing. We were each born with a unique deck of cards, and for many of us, that included poverty. However, that doesn’t mean you have to remain there. It just means we have to do a little more work shifting our mindset because we didn’t grow up with healthy examples of it. And even if we did grow up with money, plenty of rich people are still extremely greedy, and lack a fluid relationship with their cash flow. Being rich is one thing, but being abundant is a totally different ballgame.

You see, you can be rich in numbers, but still very, very small in your mindset. You can have multiple houses, and still live in constant fear that they’re all going to be taken away. You can have sports cars, and private jets, and still not an ounce of generosity. However, if you’re abundant, you realize that money comes and goes, and you will only receive if you give. You can have nice homes and cars, but you aren’t attached to them as part of your identity. You’re rich in thoughts, love, gratitude and generosity. This is what it means to live abundantly.

So this is a call right now. More spiritual people need to rise up into their abundance. We have to let go of this belief that one cannot be spiritual and still have a healthy bank account. Health transcend in all levels:

• Physical

• Mental

• Emotional

• Spiritual

• As well as financial

We can’t take care of the physical, go to the gym, eat these super foods, practice yoga. Support the mental, find balance in the emotional, and create space for the spiritual if we lack in the financial. An imbalance in one creates an imbalance in all. And it’s time for us to begin this discussion about the financial section of our self-care practices. We all have rituals that we do for our bodies, skin, minds, and souls. But what about for our abundance? Whatever we keep track on, grows. And it’s important we begin taking care of the financial area of our lives to allow it to flourish into prosperity.

Money is just a microscope for who you are. One of the most common beliefs around money is more money more problems. We’ve all heard stories about simple people who become rich overnight, and now the husband has left the wife for the secretary, and the kids are all on drugs, ugh, these rich people. But it wasn’t the money that caused this. It was just a reflector glass of deeper imbalances that already existed in the family dynamic. Money doesn’t change you. But rather, it makes you more of who you are. If you’re a greedy person, more money isn’t going to make you become generous, but rather more grasping of your wealth.

If you are a giving person, more money will provide you with more opportunities to support causes that matter to you. If you are corrupt person, more money is just going to amp up the playing field for your corruption. If you are an honest person, more money is going to be spent supporting hardworking people who deserve every dollar. Families doesn’t break apart because of the money. The money may have just sped up the process, but they were already broken. There are plenty of carrying close and supportive families without any of the TV melodrama that have plenty of financial wealth. They’re just not the stories that we hear about.

It gives people more satisfaction on the other side of the fence to say, “Ugh, those rich people, their lives are full of problems. I would never want to be one of them.” Than it does to actually take a good look at your relationship with money and change some deep-seated patterns. If more money created more problems, and less money made you happier, then low income communities should be the happiest places in America. Have you ever been to the inner city or poverty stricken areas? Sadly, those with the lowest incomes per household are those with the most gang violence, domestic abuse, rape, sexual assault, teen pregnancy, high school dropouts, stealing, shootings, obesity and malnourishment.

We can’t deny that money is the fabric of modern day society. It can’t replace love, truth, or purpose, but it doesn’t have to. You don’t have to choose between being rich or honest, wealthy or happy, well off or kind. You can be all of the above. It’s time for us to step up into our abundance. So we can be the kind of rich people we wish the world had more of. Those that support important causes exemplify generosity and embody their higher missions.

So I would love to hear more about your relationship with money in the “Mind Body Balancers” “Highest Self” podcast Facebook group, which is a free Facebook community I created, which you can find on the podcast show notes. If you just look up on Facebook “Mind Body Balancers” you’ll see it there, and you can request to join. This topic is something that I really feel like not enough people are talking about, especially those coming from a spiritual background, and I think it’s really time for us to merge the two worlds because everything is energy, money inclusive, and we’re missing out on a huge part of our lives if we keep this topic out of the discussion.

So if you liked this episode, please leave a review in the iTunes store, even if you’re not listening to this on iTunes. That’s how I receive feedback, that’s how we spread this podcast to more people, that’s how iTunes determines the rank and shows it to various listeners. So please, please, please, this podcast is totally free to you, and for me has a lot of expenses and time that I put into it because I love it. And it would mean so much to me if you can just give two seconds of your day and write a beautiful review in the iTunes store. You can just look up “Highest Self” podcast on iTunes, or just Google it and go on the website and write it there. You don’t need an Apple computer or anything to write the review.

And let me know what you thought of this episode if you would be interested in me writing a book about this subject, what your questions about money are. I really want to get this topic of discussion going so we can put more money in the pockets of well deserving people who are going to spread the financial and emotional generosity that comes with abundance. So I want the wealth to come to you, to everyone listening to this podcast. So we can create ripples of change that will make a big, big difference in the world.

You know, when I’m in India, when I’m in these place, I see what will make the most difference in their lives are donations, are money. And that’s really what they need. If they had that, they wouldn’t be begging, they wouldn’t be sold into slavery, they wouldn’t be put into these situations. It all comes down to money. So when we teach people to change our relationships with money, we are empowering people to take control of their lives and creating ripples of change that will really drastically change the vibration of this entire planet. So I hope you take a greater look at your financial self care and please let me know how you liked this episode in the iTunes review. Thank you so much and talk to you guys next week.

Hi, guys. I just wanted to post a little update. This is me, two days later, and last night I was just taking a bath and thinking about how grateful I am for everything this year has brought me, and how changing my relationship to my finances has really created such an abundant life for me, and just feeling so much gratitude and really wanting to share it. So I remembered that in October I went to a conference, Aspen Lead With Love, and one of the speakers was a man who was a Hollywood producer, went on a trip to Cambodia to meditate, and discover himself, and drove by a huge dumpster that was filled and filled and filled not just with trash, but with humans living in the trash.

And the temperatures in this dumpster are about 120 degrees or more a day, so the plastic is melting, the children are living in it, the diseases are rampant, and thousands of people live here, a lot of children are dumped by their parents who don’t want them in this dumpster. So most of them are kids who live by themselves, and then as they age, they create families and homes made out of the trash in this giant dumpster. And, unfortunately, it’s grown and grown and grown not just with the population throwing their trash there, but with more and more people throwing their children there.

And I shared this workshop on my Instagram story when it was happening, and it really just struck a chord with me, and just really like, you know, I knew that this happened, but seeing the videos and the pictures of the kids, and this man decided to give up everything, give up his career, sell all of his belongings and move to this exact area, living in the trash, spending his days trying to help these kids, get them out of there, get them into school. You know, so many of their parents are dying from diseases in their arms. So much AIDS, so much just like preventable diseases as well.

And he created an organization called The Cambodian Children’s Fund, and he was sharing it and actually created a boarding school that these kids can live and sleep in the school, go to college, K-12, and if they get accepted to college it fully pays for them. And it really gets them out of poverty because, you know, if you send a kid to school and they go back to the dump, they’re not going to really learn. So this really every aspect of their life it teaches them about Cambodian wisdom, they even have mentorship programs where they help the grandmothers, the elderly women, and connect them with a teenager so they can pass along the Cambodia traditions and wisdom.

So he created this boarding school, this sponsorship program that people can sponsor children and grandmothers there to really turn around their lives. And when you sponsor a child, not only do you help them, but if they have any family members, it pays for their housing, it pays for all of their medical bills, pays for the kids’ schools, the uniforms, everything that he or she needs. And I remember seeing this and I was like, “Oh my god, wow, I wish I could do this,” but at that time I felt like I still wasn’t financially ready to be able to give $150 a month. And you know, once you start, like it would be really hard to stop. You know, give a kid resources for a year, and then send them back to the dump. So I just felt like I still wasn’t ready for it, but I still really wanted to.

And last night it came to me that I am so, so, so ready for it. So it’s on my Instagram Story now, it’s going to be gone when this is up, but I went online, and I went on the website, and I looked up the kids who needed sponsorships, and it was so difficult, so, so, so difficult, how can I choose one? These kids are all beautiful, these kids all need help, these kids all deserve school, and medical expenses paid. These are human rights, like how can I just choose one kid? And it was really, really difficult. And finally I decided I’m going to choose the youngest child because the youngest child has the rest of his or her life in front of him, and I can help them for the longest time.

So I have a sponsored daughter now named Dani. She is four years old. And I have committed to provide for her and her family, not just for this year, but for the next 16 years. And however long, if she needs help, if she wants to go to college, whatever it is. And when you sponsor a child, you are really close with them, you email them every week, you are able to go to Cambodia and visit them, which I’m definitely going to do. Whenever they pass exams they show you, they Skype with you, you can send things back and forth to each other, so you’re really involved. So I’m just so excited to have this new daughter, this beautiful four-year-old.

And just so grateful because I would not have been able to do this if I hadn’t changed my relationship with money. There’s no way. And I made the commitment to myself that there’s no backing down. I’ not going backwards. I’m not going to ever, ever, ever take away these resources from this girl no matter what. I am committing myself to success not just for myself, but for her. And next year, not only do I plan to keep sponsoring her, but two kids, and maybe four kids the year after that, and the possibilities are endless. And I could have not afforded that if I had not taken a good look at all areas of my life.

So if this is something that you want to do, and I really don’t know anyone who wouldn’t want to do something like this, then I really want you to take a good look at your life. And I’m not telling you just to focus on where you spend your money. It is important to look at where you spend your money and holes, but a lot of us are still living as tight as possible. So I’m telling you to focus on how you make your money. Focus on earning more instead of spending less. You know, I want you to be able to afford to go to yoga classes, and buy high quality supplements, and eat organic foods, and see holistic and alternative doctors, visit health coaches, and practitioners, and body workers, and go to workshops, and buy green juices, and educate yourself, do teacher trainings, go back to school, travel the world, take days off, buy essential oils, non-toxic skincare, household products. All of the things that come with leading a healthy lifestyle.

I want all of that for you, and to still have enough to give freely and generously. You know, many people have this connotation that making more money means you’re going to spend it on Louboutins and sports cars. Not at all, especially not in the new paradigm. More money means more support to the causes that you value. Whether it’s protecting animals, educating children, ending human trafficking, saving the environment, or anything else that you value. Making more money means creating a planet that you love. It is more than possible to be able to live a fruitful healthy life while still having ample resources to give.

In fact, my friends, this is how we beat the system. So you can find out more on cambodianchildrensfund.org to sponsor your own child. And if you like this, you like hearing more about creating more abundance in your life so you can serve the planet and live a fruitful, generous life, then please let me know on the iTunes review. Thank you. Namaste.

Episode 046 – Financial Self-Care – Why Abundance Is A Mindset We Need To Pay Attention To with Sahara Rose