Healing my Relationship with Money

I had always had enough money — that wasn’t the issue.

Growing up in a middle class family, there was always enough. And as an adult, I worked as a recruiter at a hedge fund and had done very well with investments in cryptocurrency.

Yet, for some reason I felt a sense of tightness around money.

I was always wanting to make more, fearful of losing what I had, always thinking three steps ahead and carefully calculating financial decisions.

I thought I was being smart and strategic, yet in reality, it didn’t always feel good.

In short, there wasn’t enough flow, freedom, or generosity in my relationship to money.

I thought I had the whole money thing pretty well figured out, but my curiosity or intuition felt otherwise, and I found myself taking Money Coaching with Karen McAllister.

As we got into the work together, I came to realize how much tightness, fear and greed I had internalized around money.

As an American, a big goal of mine was to amass as much wealth as I could as quickly as possible so I could retire early. Yet through working with Karen I saw that this was an expression of an unhealthy view of and relationship with work — imagining that work is necessarily drudgery and inherently cannot be fulfilling.

She showed me how much of this tightness around money was inherited from my culture, from my family, from the environments I found myself in, and people I surrounded myself with.

In a real way, this tightness and compulsion to accumulate was an expression of a hyper-capitalist culture and I came to viscerally realize the suffering inherent within this view. 

And it turned out that a huge part of the antidote was generosity — give it away, give it away, give it away. Giving away not just money, but interest, attention, kindness, and acts of service, all of this contributing to a virtuous cycle of benefiting others and benefiting myself by loosening up this inner tightness and helping me step into greater ease and flow, not just around money but in all aspects of life. 

Yet the generosity didn’t stop there. I started exploring alternative career paths, looking for something fulfilling that would directly benefit others and allow me to express generosity through my work.

And as a result of this exploration, I made the decision to go back to school to study Traditional Chinese Medicine.

If not for money coaching, I wouldn’t have realized how I was holding myself back with my internalized tightness around money and wouldn’t have made the leap to start on a new career path more aligned with my personal vision. 

Above all, I discovered the freedom in stepping out of my cultural narrative and giving to something beyond myself. 

by Devon Streich