It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a…metaphor?

Daffodil #2, © Sarah Marie Lacy. $25.00 USD

Doing the art festival this weekend caused me to take a really close look at the struggles I have with money, selling and how I see it. After struggling with this for quite some time, I decided to try something different – I decided to use Havi’s wacky metaphor techniques.

Disclaimer: I am going to talk about what I did. This is not necessarily exactly what Havi teaches and if you want actual advice, please go to her. I’m probably going to mangle this magnificently. (Mmmm…mangle magnificently!)

Step One

So after spending some time pressing various acupressure points and doing some  meditation, I sat down and wrote out everything that I associate money with, from specific words, all the way out to feelings and impressions. There were a lot of things that didn’t surprise me, but surprisingly enough there were a lot of things that did surprise me. (Surprise!)

Let’s start with the obvious. Things like scarcity, never enough, hard to get, greed, money is bad, evil, and hurts people. It means power, freedom, independence and approval. If you have more than enough that’s wrong, and terrible.

That stuff I expected. But then some other stuff came up that really shocked me.

Things like, luxury is bad and spiritually wrong. If you spend money on yourself, you’re a disgusting human being. If something is beautiful and expensive, it must be evil and greedy and the work of that devil, Capitalism. That things like beauty are not necessary, and in fact, bad. If you are truly spiritual, you will surround yourself with ugly, inexpensive, purely functional things and nothing else.

That surprised me. I never realized how, for me at least, money was very tied up with beauty and luxury, and that I thought having those things was bad, and producing them was even worse.

I never noticed how starved I felt before.

Step Two

Okay, so now I know what my money views were, and apparently my views on luxury and beauty too, but what would my ideal view of money be? What would that look like? What would that feel like?

Immediately, I had a vision of a garden, overflowing with life. The sun shines down, warming your skin, and you turn your face towards it, blinking in the light. The air is fresh and clear, and you can breathe deeply here. There is a sense of freedom, and abundance – everything is growing happily. There’s an angel fountain in the centre of the garden, and water is gushing out of it, gurgling cheerfully. This is a place of flourishing, a place of generosity and love, and joy.

It’s perfect. It’s heaven.

Let’s flashback 3 years

I sometimes do intuitive collaging, where I just go through magazines, rip out images I like, and stick to them construction paper. I don’t really think about it very much, and just zone out and see what comes up.

Three years ago, I did one and every single image I picked was of flowers, gorgeous old houses, art, and words like “Luxury”, “Beauty” and “Art”. Even back then, my subconscious knew I was starved for those things. It just took me three years to catch up.

Yes, you can laugh now.

Step Three

The idea that came to me strongest was the image of a garden, unwatered and neglected, where everything is dying and dehydrated. Not fun. Obviously I’m not going to leap to my ideal world, but is there a bridge I could build? A middle ground I could grow to and that would form the base of creating my ideal world, where me and money and luxury and beauty are really great friends and hang out all the time?

I think so.

So let’s say that instead of just scraping by with barely enough, how about having just a little bit more than enough? Enough to cover all my costs, stay out of debt and put a little in savings. That doesn’t seem too scary does it? That’s a garden that’s well tended, and well watered – it’s just young. It needs time to grow and flourish and expand, but it’s got good roots and is being lovingly taken care of.

Suddenly, money doesn’t seem so scary after all.

(p.s. I’ll be having a secret sale of some secret art and prints and cards soon, so if you wanna know about it, you’re going to have to sign up for my mailing list! Just saying is all.)

Tags: Abundance, metaphors, Money, thriving