Last week, I hosted my long-running masterclass, “10 Ways of the Sex-Money Connection”.
Because I’ve noticed people are hurting deeply around these two aspects right now.
As I told the participants last week, “The way you do sex is probably the way you do money.”
One huge connection is that we’re not asked to think about our relationships to sex and money. It’s a huge revelation in of itself. People are blown away at how their relationship with sex and money has been shaped by their past experiences.
Revealing, however, is only one part of the puzzle. You recognize you’re having problems around sex and money and you know they are connected.
Now what?
Sex and money issues do not fix themselves. They require energy, focus and skill just like anything else. Today I’m going to share the 5 phases of growth that are required in order to shift out of feeling sad, frustrated and unfulfilled into an empowered place around both sex and money.
Breaking down the sex and money process into phases helps it to not feel so overwhelming. What happens in sex is mirrored in money and vice versa. So this process helps us take them both intentionally into our own hands and make the changes we really want to make.
- Identify where you actually are and how far you need and want to go
- Develop mindset mastery and a shift in beliefs
- Learn and practice skills
- Create sexual and financial practices that support your life
- Choose a new orientation: freedom, abundance, wholeness and fulfillment
Identify where you actually are and how far you need and want to go
You have to know where you are—and be really honest with yourself about that if you are going to grow. Both financially and sexually. Or you can’t change anything. If you keep lying to yourself or pushing it under the rug and trying to ignore it, it will just crop up in another way. It always does. Until you deal with it.
Ask yourself: Where are you really with sex? Where are you really with money? Are you where you want to be?
You have your own story about money that led you to where you are. I finally had to sift through that story to get to the bottom of why I had experienced so much lack in my life, and yet I was so good at what I do. Being good doesn’t really matter. It’s about 10-20 percent of the whole. If you don’t have the mindset to be able to overcome obstacles, and the skills to use that mindset effectively to create the life you want, you won’t have it. Period.
The other thing I will say is that this is a journey, and every time you uplevel to a new place, there will be MORE. More things to examine, more things to overcome and obstacles to remove. As they say, New Level, New Devil. This is a spiritual journey.
I’ve done a lot of work to reprogram my own beliefs about what I learned about sexuality and relationships. I do not carry any of these beliefs today.
In order to get on the road to where you want to go, it is essential that you are honest about where you currently are. You may wish you were somewhere else, but if you’re not, you can’t pretend you are. If I want to get to New York, and you plopped me down in the middle of a desert and I had no idea where I was and you gave me a map, could I get there? There are no signposts, it’s me and the road…I’d be running around in circles if I didn’t know where I was starting from. You have got to know where you’re starting from or you won’t get where you want to go.
Take a quick self-assessment
From 1-10, 1 being none at all, abysmal, and 10 being tons, amazing, beyond my wildest dreams
- How much do you avoid dealing with sex and sexuality?
- How much do you avoid dealing with finances?
- What are your patterns?
- Where do you need support/education/role modeling?
Develop mindset mastery and a shift in beliefs
People’s beliefs about themselves and their circumstances are what either hold them back or propel them forward. Period.
We all have work to do on mindset mastery. The Dalai Lama calls this cultivating a skillful mind. Most people do not ever take this seriously in their whole life. They let their thoughts and beliefs just run away and yank them all over the place without really taking control of it and deciding to control their mind and to guide their thought into a place that supports them. It’s hard to see on your own—we almost always need others to point it out which is what therapists and coaches are often so good at. I am so grateful to the mentors who have helped me with this.
This is where understanding Natural Law comes in.
Natural laws are the laws of the universe and they supersede all human-made laws. Natural laws are always at work…they never DON’T work. For instance, gravity is a natural law. It doesn’t work some of the time. It works every single time. You wouldn’t jump out of a window to test it. There is onlyOne Truth about that…you can’t have multiple truths about gravity. It’s a law.
Life/spirit/energy/universe/whatever you want to call it has one purpose: to create more life. To be truly free. The Spirit wants to be free. It’s the nature of spirit. What would your life be like if you were totally free? What gets in the way of your own freedom? I mean deep freedom. Freedom fighters like Mumia Abdul Jamal or Nelson Mandela did not allow a prison to imprison them inside…they still claimed their freedom. I’m talking on a deep soul level. The truest aspect of who and what you are. Which is that you are the whole universe and have the glory of it inside of you and available to you. When your energy gets numbed or depleted, you don’t feel like that.
Abundance is for EVERYONE. No one is special or not entitled. That makes absolutely no sense. ALL the abundance is available to ALL of us. We do not get punished and not given our share because we were “bad”. Although that may have been our experience growing up—it was for me. We all have access to the same supply. What is different is the way we are each programmed from the moment we come onto the planet. We live in human systems but there is a greater system governed by natural law and understanding that is critical.
That’s the power of natural laws. They always work.
Learn and practice skills
Sex requires skills. Many skill sets in fact.
Money also requires skills.
et we treat both of them like we don’t need to learn them. Like they come naturally. One of the biggest myths about sex is that it’s natural. Or instinctual! That’s crazy! Sex is learned. We learn it and develop it….
That can look all sorts of ways…we take a class, we read a book or we get one-on-one support.
However, we go about it, learning and practicing is the only way forward. It’s not your fault. You’re not broken. You just haven’t developed the skills. But it’s never too late to learn.
Create sexual and financial practices that support your life
Once we have skills, we have to develop practices and make it a way of life. I teach sexual practices the way people talk about spiritual practices. We also need practices around money. These practices support what we are creating for ourselves.
This can look different for different people.
Maybe you need a daily ritual of connecting to your body. Maybe you need a monthly practice of looking at your finances and to see if your spending is reflecting your values.
However, they look these are essential to create. These habits and practices are what really moves us forward to the person we want to be and living the life we want to live.
Choose a new orientation: freedom, abundance, wholeness and fulfillment
This means you must break through illusions of lack and unhappiness every single time they crop up and continue to make your highest sexual and financial good a priority. People who do live the happiest lives.
It might sound simple but it is deep and it requires diligence to break through the things that have kept you where you are for so long. My commitment to empower myself sexually was a huge commitment—the biggest one I’ve ever made, for I created my life’s work out of that journey. My commitment to break through all the lies I’d been told about money has been a serious and persistent commitment as well. It has been so fulfilling to see what is possible when we begin to uncover the things we’ve buried about money, resources and having more.
I got to a point where I could not live the way I had lived for so much of my life, in struggle, never making much money, thinking my partner was always going to make more than me, thinking I’d never have anything to invest or build. And then creating a sexual situation in my relationship that began to mirror that feeling of deprivation. That’s when I knew: something had to change.
Napoleon Hill, studied success for 20 years and wrote that “The turning point in the lives of those who succeed, usually comes at the moment of some crisis, through which they are introduced to their ‘other selves.”
Breaking through these things is a process and a deep commitment to yourself and to living life on your terms. Once you make the decision that things are going to change and you commit to them being different, things start to move. I am always amazed at the stories of my clients when they commit to the process of shifting these two very important parts of their lives.
For years I have offered deep dive Sex, Money & Power retreats for women and so many women have told me how they’ve grown into their power like never before because they transformed their relationship with sex and money.
“I feel like I had really unhealthy views of money and sex but had never really taken the time to explore why or how to change it. This weekend, I confronted it and in doing so, I can see how I can grow. This program has been an incredible and eye-opening experience. It has empowered me to name and acknowledge the parts of me that held me back in sex and money. And the small group setting really helped me to feel comfortable and come out of my shell.”
“Before this weekend I was grounded in my sexuality but shaky in my emotional self, and lacked self-care. I was stuck in survival mode with regards to money, so much so that everything else fell by the wayside. I found the intimacy of the group process both challenging and effective. The Sex-Money-Power Weekend is an eye opening experience that will help women tap into the personal power they have within.”
And now I’m offering it to all genders and virtually for the very first time.
Because, right now, everyone is hurting. It seems like everyone is feeling depleted in their sexual and/or financial lives. And I truly believe that to be empowered involves us working on internal issues as we also work on improving the systems we exist within.
Not only are you going to create a clear vision of the sexual and financial life you want and develop tools to create it, you’ll also dive deep into how we can collectively fight for a better world.
It takes both individual and collective empowerment for true transformation.
I can feel the world is ripe for that transformation right now. Something massive is shifting.
