In the ever-popular game of blog tag, I've been challenged by Slade at Shift Your Spirits to explore and write about my relationship with money and how I think that changing that relationship has affected, or could affect, my life - spiritually and otherwise.

The Personification of Money is a critical spiritual exercise, for a few reasons:

• You interact with Money as deeply and as often as any living person you know
• You believe in Money as much or more than you do your God, your Guardian Angels, your Spirit Guides (at least, you certainly behave as if you do — you think about Money everyday; do you think about your spirit everyday?)
• No abstract concept has a greater tangible effect on your life
• Many of the techniques required to personify and talk to Money come from the same head space that you must employ to communicate with your spirit guides
• Money / Abundance is one of the oldest, most enduring relationships you have
• Your relationship with Money is most likely to remain dysfunctional, because you don’t treat it as a relationship that can be improved upon

Few things come with as many demons as money. Our human relationship with money is dizzyingly complex and more often than not it brings out the worst in us. Throughout the entirety of human history, money - or its equivalent - has led people to do all sorts of morally and legally questionable things and money is the motivator for all kinds of behavior, most of it nothing that people would be readily willing to admit to. Yes, people do use money to do good things, but you rarely hear about someone being rewarded with money for doing something good. Why do you think that poverty is so often associated with virtue?

For me, attaching a moral value to money is precisely the problem. As magickal people, we learn that energy is neither positive nor negative, it simply exists. How we choose to use energy is where our ethics guide us. Likewise, money is a neutral thing; how we behave in response to money - getting it, spending it - is when morality comes into play. I don't believe that having money automatically makes you immoral and I don't believe that poverty makes you virtuous. I also have never accepted the view that just because someone has a lot of money that that makes them somehow special or better than anyone else. Money simply is.

But considering money from a philosophical point of view - or any other point of view for that matter - is anything but simple. And writing about one's own personal relationship with money, well that's downright terrifying! Why is it terrifying? Because it forces you to face your demons and to be honest about them. Facing one's demons is difficult and most people are content never to do it at all.

As part of my shamanic training I spent a lot of time confronting my shadow self. It is not quite as scary to do again once you've done it before and you know what a transformational experience it can be. So I was willing to face my personal money demons in order to address the question of my relationship with money.

Slade's challenge is based on an exercise of creating a personification that represents one's relationship with money and then giving "money" a "makeover." My version isn't so much a makeover as it is an evolving series of relationships with different personæ.

In my story there is Older Money, Old Money, and New Money.

Older Money

Older Money was Fey. (As I write that, the significance doesn't fail to escape me, knowing that Fey, or Sidhe, are often referred to as the "old ones." But I digress. My brain does that sort of thing to me all the time.)

Unlike humans who are so attached to outcomes, Fey live entirely in the moment. Older Money was a college student who liked to hang out in cafes with her friends and watch obscure foreign films at odd hours of the night. This lovely, naive Fey and I believed that the simple pleasure of the company of our friends was more important than money and so when it came time to pay for fun, whoever had money at the time covered the one who did not. Our relationship was sweet and idealistic. No one kept track of who spent what. It wasn't necessary, it would all come out in the wash, and besides, that wasn't the point.

Then the Fey left that rarified world - she graduated and got a job. So did I. And I encountered Old Money.

Old Money

Old Money was an arrogant, haughty woman who wore designer clothes and expensive jewelry. She held a big job with a fancy title, had her achievements touted in her alumnæ magazine and local newspaper, and sneered at anyone who did not measure up to her level of success. She was married to a preppy husband with a pedigree and an Ivy League degree and they owned an expensive condo in the city as well as a house on the socially acceptable island of the time.

Being in a relationship with her was very difficult because she made me feel inadequate and insecure. I was measuring my success by her definition and I was failing with my little job in the arts. So I took my considerable skills (for which I did not give myself enough credit) and used them to get a job with a very large salary. That was my sole reason for taking the job. Eventually it made me miserable and I still didn't have the things I thought I needed to be happy. So I bought lots of other things to fill the void in my life. That was when the relationship with Old Money went from bad to worse.

Old Money got me into lots of trouble. In addition to other problems it created, my relationship with her caused a great deal of difficulty in my romantic relationship at the time. And of course she never gave me a second glance when I decided I had had enough and walked away from my well-paying job to try to figure out what it might be that would truly make me happy.

It took me a while, but eventually I met New Money.

New Money

New Money is Fey too but she has picked up a few things over her years of living in the human world. For one thing she has a fierce shoe habit and in this world shoes don't grow on trees. While she lives in the moment, she knows that taking responsibility for herself is one of the best ways to maintain freedom. No matter what, she always pays the rent on time, but she's been known to splurge on something pretty she just had to have and worry about how to pay the electric bill later. She is a true individual, a free spirit. She's a little bit nutty but she exudes confidence, style, wit and charm. She draws the line around her life and she has a big eraser.

Having learned from the mistakes I made with Old Money, I've developed a healthy friendship with New Money. New Money and I are not competing; she provides a much-needed sense of balance. My relationship with New Money has taught me the value of defining success for myself. By coming to terms with the fact that it is OKAY not to have the big job with the big title and the big salary, instead of trying so hard to be something that someone else is I can focus on becoming something that I am. I'm not naive enough to believe that wealth (or abundance) doesn't matter, because it does, but I'm wise enough to know now that as long as I have enough to live my life the way I want then that is wealth enough for me. Part of the wisdom that New Money has given me also is that I don't have to apologize to anyone for having my own definition of abundance.

What does this mean to me?

Sometimes I still feel pressure to be a success in the obvious ways our culture defines for us. I read about Old Money's accomplishments and I feel twinges of shame that at my age I don't own my own home and that I don't have anything of obvious value to show for myself. But then New Money reminds me that I am the one I have to prove something to and that I have the ability to build whatever it is that I want for myself. Will I be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company? No, and truthfully I don't want to be. But I hope to be the owner of my own shoe store before too long. And imagine how happy New Money and I will be then!

My relationship with money has evolved as my sense of self has and in this way it is like any other relationship. The stronger my sense of self, the less I need relationships to define me or make me happy. And of course the irony is that it is precisely that lack of dependence that ultimately makes us better partners in our relationships.

Does this have anything to do with my spiritual life? Yes. It has been part of my journey toward Wicca that has given me a stronger sense of self. Discovering a source of truth in one area of life makes it easier to find truth elsewhere. It also has been interesting for me to observe that no matter what group of people you associate with there is a certain amount of pressure to conform to the group norm, whatever that may be. Even among Pagans, who generally consider themselves to be non-conformists, it takes a person with a strong sense of self to feel comfortable being a part of the group if you don't look or behave like the rest in some way.

There might be some people in my Pagan community who look at me and wonder what I'm doing there in my fancy shoes and obvious lack of the usual trappings. But I don't care. I am who I am and if I've learned anything over the past few years it is that the only person whose opinion counts when it comes to living my life is my own.

Posted by Angela-Eloise at 4:57 PM