Need to make some cash? Organize your underwear drawer.

The Abundance Frequency: taking care of what’s in your control and allowing the Universe to do the rest.

This is Week 4 of my 90 Day Magic series. 90 Day Magic is a framework to support your creative practice and find sustainable systems to manage your time and energy. I’m currently creating a workbook, online course and planner! Stay tuned for updates!

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Here’s what I know about money:

I’ve never been someone who did not have to worry about money— and yet, every time I come up against a material deficit, something appears.

I’ve been running a business with my partner for the last year or so and even though we have doubled our income in the last 12 months, we’re still having to monitor every dollar. We’ve both been burned financially by past partners and our own internal patterns, mostly in our willingness to give away agency over our financial lives. Knowing this, when we entered our partnership we were able to highlight this issue as one we both wanted to work on and we committed to doing so. This requires us to sit down every week or two and go over our spreadsheets and account for every business expense, every personal expense, every joint expense. We square up our accounts and make sure we have enough money until our next round of invoices. Working for yourself is scary, but forcing ourselves to check in with the accounts on a very regular basis has given us both a sense of hyper vigilance and paradoxically more peace.

The other day we were stressed. We’re bringing in more money month to month, but sometimes cash flow is tricky or a client has to push pause on services for an undetermined amount of time. Whatever the reason, I was in between meetings trying not to spiral and I decided to put away my laundry while listening to a podcast. House chores are often soothing to me, but I decided to take it a step further and organize the drawers in my dresser as I put the clean clothes away. I felt my shoulders drop, felt my anxiety melt, suddenly I remembered that everything is actually fine. When I tend to what is in my control, I can allow the solutions to reveal themselves.

A mantra I often repeat to myself is, “I have everything I need, I can have anything I want.”

Everything I Need:

• A roof over my head

• Clothes on my back

• Warm water to bathe in

• Clean water to drink

• Food in the fridge

• A bed to sleep in

Everything I Want:

• Workout classes (I’m having a love affair with ClassPass right now)

• A nice car to drive

• Quality skincare products

• Well-made furniture

• Candles and incense

• Books

• Art supplies

I’ve always been a fan of trusting the Universe to provide. But at times that has allowed me to stick my head in the sand and blindly leap into the void. 98% of the time the net has appeared- an unexpected gig came through, a refund was issued, a bill miraculously resolved itself. However ill-advised that attitude might be long term, it gave me enough evidence to know that somehow, someway, I will be provided for.

When I feel scarcity I go around my house and take pictures of things that make me feel abundant. It re-grounds me in how much I *HAVE* and tap into the past versions of myself that YEARNED for everything I have today.

At my brokest, sometime in pastry school, a fellow 23-year old friend and I would coach each other through our anxiety by reciting how many steps there were between where we were in the current moment and “waking up in a ditch.” Once we walked into a strip club looking for jobs and decided we weren’t there yet. Looking back, we were closer than we should have been, but we survived.

Life is a spiral- a twisting spiral like a strand of DNA or a grand staircase. The same lessons I was learning at 23, I continue to learn at 34. The core messages are the same, but the circumstances have changed. The question of, “what will you do for money” is forever an equation I’m turning. If I continue to evolve and grow and draw closer to my (our) inherent nature, which is one of abundance, I will run into the same themes and problems as the last time I “came around” to this moment in the trajectory of my learning. I’m learning to stretch my capacity for abundance, for material wealth, and when I finally fulfill that stage of the lesson, I’ll move on until I come up against the next obstacle in this “module.”

If you’ve never sat with your own money stories, I encourage you to think about

• Your family’s story about money:

  • How far can you get into the telling of your family history before you mention something about the material standing that you’re family had or did not have? (I can barely get a single sentence in.)

• What did you inherit from your family’s stories about money and what did you reject?

  • How does that show up in your values?

  • Does that impact how you spend your time and energy?

• What emotions have you attached to money?

  • What emotional problem do you think you more money would solve?

Money only solves money problems— but for most people, those are not abstract problems. Money problems are hugely foundational to our survival- will you be fed, will you be clothed, will you be housed? The closer you are to “no” on any of those, the higher the stakes and the harder it is to lessen your emotional attachment to material wellbeing. Privilege is a huge factor, obviously. And yet- my deepest intuitions tell me there is abundance available to everyone. I don’t know how that is possible and I don’t want to be insensitive to anyone’s plight with money or material wellbeing, but I suspect it’s a frequency thing.

What would it look like to allow yourself to operate on the frequency of abundance?

Did your shoulders just crunch up into your ears after reading that sentence? Investigate why. Investigate what comes up for you when you imagine yourself on the frequency of abundance. Is your brain screaming, “Impossible!” or is your intellectual mind searching for evidence on why that just can’t be true?

I’m not saying this because I have it figured out- it seems deeply fucked up to me, too. And yet it still feels true. Not that you can think your way out of poverty, but if you’re aligning actions with evolution that starts in the mind, setting your compass to “Abundance” and putting one foot in front of the other, I believe you’ll work your way closer to that frequency. It takes daily reassurance to remind myself that money won’t solve my identity cris(e)s, or my shame, it does what money can do- which is pay the rent and keep the lights on.

I am deep in my money stories at this point. I’m 34, divorced and in debt from said divorce, an artist who is also running a small business. My rent is more than I ever thought I’d pay even on a mortgage. But living here means being close to people I love and doing the work I’m called to do at this moment in my life. I live a decent life and I might be counting dollars to make sure I’m ok, but I am equally TRUSTING. I have to. I have to trust in order to continue creating and I have to create in order to live a life that means something to me.

If you’re a paid subscriber, stay tuned for some journal prompts after the paywall! I’m including a little video for you too to say a personal hello and chat through some nuances about the prompts. Lots of goodies to come for paid subscribers, but I promise to always keep the majority of my work here available for free.