Some things have happened since my letters to money.

A surprise tax bill.

A mysterious foot problem (not covered by my health insurance because I have not met my deductible).

Lice. Did you know the going rate to have lice professionally removed from your hair is $100/hr?  Yep.

So basically, since my little experiment with money and manifesting I am now minus nearly $4,000 in just one month.

PLOT TWIST

Now to be certain, I’m grateful that none of these things was life threatening. I’m grateful my children are healthy and whole. I am grateful was able to pay for it all (credit cards). I’m disappointed though… and even closer to the edge of a financial crisis. I can be grateful and disappointed. I can have health and wealth and freedom and be spiritual. Right?

If that age-old superstition is true and bad things come in threes, I can now breathe a sigh of relief. Till next time. Wink wink.

The first thing that comes to mind when getting curious about all this is how you do anything is how you do everything. My letters to money could have been letters to God or the universe or my ex boyfriend.

While my letters to money were an amusing and playful way to explore my beliefs about money, they were something else too.

I noticed that there was a theme of lack in my letters and vague sense of something beyond curiosity. Agenda. I secretly had an agenda to get what I wanted. I wanted more money in my bank account.

And while there is nothing wrong with that, loads of money in the bank can certainly be a wonderful thing, when we approach life or money or boyfriends with a preset agenda (things to be done, plans to be acted on), we are not in the present. Nor are we open to possibility or receiving.

Agendas come with expectation and expectation means things have to happen just so. They suggest something is wrong. Something needs fixing. And our world of acceptance grows smaller and smaller. As with money and God and ex’s this is where things can get all fucked up as we try to force circles into squares, and partners into band aids for our boo boos.

It’s tempting to say I’m not doing it right. There must be something I’m missing, some essential part of me that’s not “right”.  That’s why it’s not working out (the way I want it to).

And so I continue to seek out what’s wrong, and this time I am doing it in the name of “mindfulness practice”. I work and strive and effort. It’s kind of exhausting, just being, in this way.  I let ego turn my practice against me.

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What I have learned from meditation, from my teachers, from practice, is that showing up is enough. Seeing is enough. I am enough, just as I am. Each moment is enough, just as it is. Miracles happen when I sit in stillness. Miracles as Marianne Williamson calls them – are shifts in perspective. Insights. Ah ha moments. They come when I am ready to receive them and not a moment sooner. I can’t say it more beautifully than Rainer Maria Rilke:

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Offered with love and awe in your courage to show up and look. It’s wonderful to be a human being with you.

Xo