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.
I’ve thought a lot about how to hold money in my healing practice. I love the approach of dana – letting it be about gifting and generosity, letting it be non-transactional. For some reason, this doesn’t feel right for where I am right now.
I keep feeling that money, in this moment for me, represents central channel alignment.
I work with a few healers who are quite expensive. It’s constantly brought up the emotional content I have around this. There’s an anger that such a fundamental piece of what it means to be human could possibly cost so much money, an indignance that it’s not easy for me to access it, and a shame that the only way I could access it is through receiving support from those I love.
And yeah, that’s there.
But there’s something beyond that too. The amount of money I need to pay to work with these healers forces me to bump up against the edges of what my needs are and how much I am allowed to receive.
Like: I am allowed to take up this much space, and really acknowledge that this healing work is a need? Am I allowed to have needs beyond what is ‘easy to justify’? Can I love myself enough to say: Receiving attuned connection is something that I won’t compromise on?
And, can I then become big enough to make the changes in my life that are needed for that? If this is a need, then I need to stand up for it – I need to own how much money that I need to receive in order to pay for it.
Receiving money for my own healing work feels like an honoring of my needs. It feels like saying: this is what it takes, for me to show up fully in my essence – this is the amount that supports that. And then loving myself enough to stand by it.
I have often gotten stuck in the belief that money reflects value. A lot of the world treats people as a function, and money is downstream of that. If you are X level of skill, you can perform Y function, and so you can earn Z amount. It ignores the human being, and attaches a linear relationship between output and money.
This gets super funky when you apply it to healing containers.
A big part of what healing work looks like in today’s world is re-finding our humanness, our sense of being a person who matters intrinsically rather than a function.
When we’re in touch with that, the worldview looks very different. My gifts are interwoven with my essence, and offering my gifts is the same as living my fullest and best life. There isn’t a binary between what I do for me and what I do for others. Living in a way where I am offering my gift is the greatest gift I can offer myself.
The world wants me to bring my essence. When I do, it lights everything up. The world wants me to bring my essence. It is asking for it, praying for it. It doesn’t want me to serve a function, to bring just a piece of me. It wants me to bring everything I have. It is begging me to bring my full self. And that requires me to stand for what I need. This is what it means for me to be here in the world. This is what it means for me to shine as brightly as I am meant to.
I am allowing money to reflect importance to someone, rather than value as a function. I am holding the money I ask for as a reflection of what I need to bring my essence in, knowing that some people will find my gift that important to their life.
