Healing in a paid container is a strange, strange thing. In an ideal world, we’d all live in a village, and your healing would come from your friends, community, elders. Maybe there would be a few village healers. You’d show up at their door when you need it. There would be tea, sunlight, and time. It would take as long as it takes. Maybe you would visit once or twice in your life, maybe every week. You may show up and find a process already taking place, that you were meant to be part of.
We don’t yet live in this world.
And in some ways, maybe it’s important that we don’t live in this world.
I think often about the integral stages (The mystical through the ages). As we move from orange and green into turquoise, we are re-integrating the wisdom of the collective and the sense of universal connection and mystery into modernity. We cannot go back to the times of the shaman, only forward into this strange complex system we are creating that engages with the mystical from alignment with the individual.
I think, too, about a quote from Barbara Brennan that humanity is only just beginning to integrate the intellect. When we’re inside of the modern worldview, it is all we see – it feels like we have been in this phase of capitalism, individualism, techno-centrism, for a million years. But it is so recent. And we are in the painful process of bringing the intellect, and everything it represents, into alignment with the rest of our beings.
Money represents many things, but it is in large part a symbol of the orange individualist phase – the modern energetic machinery. To reject money is to distance ourselves from the world as it is. Which we can do – we can form communes, and live off the land, and not engage with the system. But to be part of where humanity is going, we need to do the work to bring money into alignment with wholeness and integrity.
Right now, the strongest association with money for me is the energy of the central channel. Paying money for something says: This matters to me, and I am willing to give up something to stand in that. It represents commitment, internal alignment, and intention.
Receiving money for your offering says: I matter, and my needs matter.
I’m starting to unwind money from the idea of ‘providing value’. I think, perhaps, a better frame is ‘importance’. It’s saying: This is how much I need to be taking care of myself and my needs. For some people, this offering will be exactly this important to them. And if I stand firm in that, those people will find their way to me.