What Would Happen if We Related to Money Differently? (Elizabeth Ralph)

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Elizabeth Ralph is a former finance trader who took a couple of left turns and eventually founded The Spiritual Investor. Today, she helps people reach financial freedom in less traditional ways. She does this in part by helping people explore the stories they tell themselves around money, and by helping people to relate to money in healthier, less triggering ways.

Today, we talk about some of my own outlandish stories around money, which I think many of you will relate to. We talk about bridging the material and the spiritual, and why Elizabeth says the spiritual world has to “wake up to money.” We talk about where our ego and identity comes in to play. And how Elizabeth tries to help people to move toward a place of money neutrality, where it feels like money doesn’t have such a tight grip on us.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

ELIZABETH:

Hello. Oh my gosh, it's so great to meet you. Thank you.

ELISE:

How are you?

ELIZABETH:

I'm great. I'm really great. Yeah. How about you?

ELISE:

I am, honestly, I'm good. I mean, it's such a weird question in these days. It's like, what's the context? Personally, I'm great. Collectively, I'm concerned.

ELIZABETH:

Okay, I know you might not want this role, but we need people like you

ELISE:

Being collectively concerned or

ELIZABETH:

I think so. Yeah, to a certain degree.

ELISE:

You don't think everyone is a little concerned?

ELIZABETH:

I think to a certain degree, yes, I do. I think we shoulder it in a different way, and I think that's almost adding to the collective is you shoulder a piece, I shoulder a piece, someone else shoulders a piece, and then we sort of pull back and we're all better as one. I kind of think of it.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I do think, yeah, we each hold a piece of this puzzle and yeah, it's incumbent on us I think throughout our lives to figure out what that piece is and where it fits.

ELIZABETH:

I think it is, and I think a lot of people that's kind of like, are they busy trying to figure out the puzzle piece or are they living through the puzzle piece? I think so many people are even struggling with How can I help more? And I think money even comes into that because people feel really limited by money.

ELISE:

Oh, Elizabeth, I mean, do they? Yes, and I think life would lose all of its mystery and magic and wonder if you were like, I know my puzzle piece and this is my puzzle piece. I think that part of it is understanding its contour and shape and questioning it somewhat compulsively and recognizing that maybe it will shift and change too, but I think if we each came in knowing exactly what we were doing, life would be so certain and so boring. It's definitely not boring.

ELIZABETH:

It would be, and I question even if we could even get to our pinnacle, because I know I would not be here unless I did all that dumb shit I did before. I had to go through that, and I had to be so willing to unknow that version of myself that I was like, this can't be right what I want by being this version. Right. Thank God I didn't meet my pinnacle of being one of the first female motocross racers. Thank God that parallel reality did not work out.

ELISE:

Were you one of the first motocross racers?

ELIZABETH:

No, I was not, but I wanted to be so badly, so I worked for it and it didn't work out, and then I ended up working on a trading floor and actually I took my dirt bike with me to work. I was so still into dirt bikes even at that age, and I had a four runner and I had a hitch thing on the back and I'd put the dirt bike on. This is in San Diego, and I would go down to the border. This was before the border was the border now, and people were down there. They would build jumps and drinking beer, and I'm down there and I'm jumping my dirt bike, and then I would get in and I'd go to the corporate job and I would park in the parking garage in downtown San Diego and then I'd shower and I'd go up and I'd be there for 12 hours a day trading oil and natural gas and electricity. I think that was the better life, the one that I was spending the attention on.

ELISE:

The Dirt biking,

ELIZABETH:

No finance, thank God for the finance. Right.

ELISE:

All right, so normally, and the genesis for this conversation is that I was talking about the struggle to bridge the material and the spiritual in my own life and the story of scarcity that I run, that I think I largely picked up from my mother, and I've gotten much better at unwinding her patterns, but I certainly have not done that entirely. They rear their head. Several people reached out and were like, oh, you should talk to Elizabeth Ralph, and normally I can ground myself in a book. I love interviewing authors because it gives me a pretty deep handle on how they see the world and their framework for understanding reality. So this is different for me, so I detect an accent. I don't think you're a San Diego native. Can you briefly explain to me who you are and where you came from?

ELIZABETH:

Well, I was born in Tennessee and then I escaped Tennessee freshman year of high school and moved to California then, so I lived in California and I lived in Ventura, and then I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is where I went to college and I was going to be a doctor and my degree is in microbiology of all things. And then I thought, okay, I love hiking, I love everything. And then I thought maybe I need to get a real job though, and I'm just going to hike and ride your bikes and hang out with my friends here. So I moved to San Diego. I knew someone down there and they said, well, we've got a job for you lined up working in a lab, and I thought, I just can't see myself doing that. I decided not to go to medical school and I decided I can't do that.

So I ended up, I was really good at math and short story is I ended up being a programmer in a financial company and then in order to program the computers, I had to learn about finance and then I ended up going back to school for finance and taking all the exams and everything. And then I looked around and I was like, well, who has the best job here? People on the trading floor, people leave them alone. They do what they want. They play golf on Fridays, they get paid well, they have a challenging job. And so that is where I ended up in the trading group and it was mostly men, of course, there was myself and there was one other woman who, she came from Bulgaria, but I spent a decade basically traveling with a bunch of older white men and I knew I needed to be there because I knew that there was something for me to learn.

My parents got divorced early and it was kind of a tumultuous childhood. I didn't have a lot of consistency. I didn't have a lot of discipline or anything, so I knew I needed to be there. It was just this underlying feeling. I also kept getting this message that I needed to have optionality in my forties, and it's just so weird. I didn't even understand it, but I got the same message and it just kept coming up and coming up and I literally patterned my life around it, okay, build a foundation now get whatever knowledge or finance that I needed. So I decided I was going to honor that and I was going to really lean into it, and I decided to basically buy my way out of being on the trading floor. I knew I didn't want to do that. In fact, I was already starting to feel there was a little piece of me dying every time I got into the elevator and got shot up to the fifth floor with the security badge.

I was like, oh God. I'm like, I can't sit in one more meeting. So I did. I started investing. I was buying real estate in San Diego after the financial crisis and I was investing in stocks, but then I got to a point where I was like, I hate this. It's I feel like I'm living in a spreadsheet. It's all numbers. Can I do numbers? But that's not really me. I'm more of a flowy actually, I have no earth in my signs at all. I'm more of a fire airy, and I'm like, I got to figure this out. So a guy who is from India joined my group and he was really struggling on how to fit in the us. He and I became fast friends. He taught me spirituality. He brought me all these Hindu texts like Urbano and Roman Maharshi and all these things.

His mom would come over and cook and we'd sit on the floor and I was fascinated by this. So I was drawn into this spiritual world, yet I'm in parallel living this corporate world, if you will, and finally one day I was like, I have to bring these two things together and I just need to figure out the way that they're going to fit. I just need to make this up. And so there was three vacation rentals in San Diego at the time, nobody had even heard of what they were. Airbnb didn't exist, so VRBO was available, and so I bought a house that was a designer boutique. It was in the historic district of Mission Hills in San Diego, and I thought, I'm going to make this more of a boutique hotel kind of thing and then see what happens. I can always rent it full time.

Well, four years later, fast forward, it's making huge amounts of money. I'm donating the money to horse rescues. I was really into saving horses and it got on HTTV and all this stuff. Anyways, I'm like, this is how this works. So you basically design what you want. You have to put action items behind it and you need to frame it with the money, but you don't need to be the money. That's not your identity. That's where people get it wrong. They're like, if I am a millionaire, that has to be my identity. Why? Money's just ones and zeros. You choose what you're to be entangled in. So I was making money in the background, but I was entangled, if you will, in the design that I had done the creativity with money and the horses and all the people that were staying in the vacation rental. We had horses and I got to hear their stories and it became its own little cultural bright light in my life and became the story that I told at Christmas dinner rather than, yeah, I just became a multimillionaire. Sure, that's true, but it's only relevant to the people who would want to hear that because ultimately that amount really doesn't matter what matters. Are you free? Do you feel free? And that's really why you want to build up a support system with money. We cannot do it unless we disentangle ourselves from it first. Ironically,

ELISE:

We have a lot of stories I guess I would say about money and we have a lot of stories about people who have money and we have a lot of stories about people who have a lot of money, and I'd say particularly in the spiritual community, although this is obviously not true of everyone, there is this feeling that money is corrupting, base, not spiritual and that to want it or require it or demand it for your services. I know I have so many friends who are healers and they're just in a bind all the time because there is this feeling, and this goes beyond healers and this probably goes beyond spiritual people as well, which is if I want to be in service to the world, if I want to do great things for other people, I can't charge for it somehow or to charge a lot, even though there's a tremendous amount of energy expended in creating this service is wrong.

That's the story. The people who need it the most probably can't afford it. And I have found in my own life workarounds similar to what you just described, where I put myself into a frame of, and this is true, I don't have that many wants. I really love my life. I want to like many people, I want to take care of the people I love. I want to pay my mortgage, I want to go on a couple of nice vacations, I want to educate my children and I want to retire and I want to be able to do the work that I love. At the end of the day, I don't care. I don't have that many material wants and the only way that I can get into this could be a lot easier for me and I could have less anxiety and feel a scarcity if I made more money. The only way that I can do that is when I'm like, well, if I had more money, I could give more money away.

ELIZABETH:

Yes, I love this conversation. So there's a few things here. Okay, so going back to, well, you're talking about the healers and being in service and really not wanting or caring about the money side of it, and they just want to go out and help people. So anything that is not neutral in the world means that we have an opinion about it and anything that has an opinion about it means that there is going to be some form of identity around it. And the spiritual world in my opinion, has to wake up to money because the not wanting of money or the flip side of that would be believing that they're more in service by not charging as much is actually their ego and the conditioning in disguise. That's all it is. It's the reverse and it is the politically correct version of conditioning because if they were really in service to the world, then they would want access to all of the money that they could possibly ever need in order to get their message out. And you know this to be true because if you were to give that same person 10 million in their account, they would not give it back.

ELISE:

This is true. There's a story though. We all saw wild, wild country. We've seen the megachurches, we've seen obscenity, the greed, the Rolls Royces that can come in some of these spiritual communities too in a way that's like, what's that?

ELIZABETH:

Well, if you're driving the nail in, you don't blame the hammer, and so money is the hammer, and so everybody likes to jump on board with money, but money is just ones and zeros. It's just energy. It's nothing. If we don't define it, then it's meaningless. And so it's actually the intention behind the person that is doing something horrible with money. That's the issue. And if we could get beyond that, then just that would in itself change the world in a greater way because that person who got beyond it would then put themselves into a stake that I call money neutrality and more money would come to them and see, this is my whole goal out there is that how can I help spiritual people be the ones who hold the majority of the wealth? Because if you put wealth in the hands of people who are conscious, that changes everything. And what's happening is the people who are conscious are the ones blocking it because they think it makes them feel more conscious.

ELISE:

I mean, I understand this, it's heady, but I get it. I mean I put myself in that group and then there are many others. I think that part of it too though, and yes, I agree with you and I want more women to have more money, all the things. This is the material game and we've got to become better players of this game. Otherwise we're fucked in a world where yes, it's zeros and ones and it's also very proximate to power a certain kind of power and it enables, it's the primary currency of our world, although I know time and energy are currencies as well, but it's a major currency. It enables you to rescue horses. That's a mission I very much admire and would love to do. I rescue cats, but I love horses. I would love love to rescue horses. Okay, so thinking about, I'm with you, conscious people need money, but then it feels, I'm hoping you can disabuse me of this and I'm thinking of myself in this context and sort of the online marketplace, and you're in this world too. You have a podcast and you're on social media and you sell a course of the savoriness through which it feels like you have to operate particularly at this moment of time. I feel like that's fracturing, but it hasn't fractured, and what is your advice there?

ELIZABETH:

And I do get that and I see how much that's holding people back, this unsavory that you're talking about or this icky feeling or I don't want to look at my account or I don't want to look at my money type of thing. I think we can equate it to anything else in our life though. You hear people say the same thing, they start a business and they're like, I just want to help people. I don't want to go out there and market or do sales or anything. And then you go, well, if you're just being yourself, then what are you really doing? What's the difference? It's only your relationship to it and your ego that makes it different, so to speak. And so it's the same thing with money. If we didn't bring our identity into not having money, then we could still have money and keep our lifestyle the same.

We could still live in the same house. We could still drive in the same car most of the time. If people do that, then they have to tell everybody that they're still driving the old car or that they're still living in the same house, then it flips, then it becomes I am so wonderfully poor. So it's be either side. And I think once people realize that when it comes to money, so in our ego and it's ego, whether you are feeling like you're a good Samaritan or whether you're a complete asshole, it's still ego. And because if we can get people beyond that, then what will happen is they will truly show up as who they are. Because a lot of times when people start to talk about money, they can't call money in because money is energy. So it gets invited in. They can't call it in because what happens is their own conditioning and energy rushes into the space. They're trying to help people, but it's their money energy that's blocking that. And so that's why I said money is part of our own spiritual awakening and in my opinion, I think if you want to help people in the world, it's your responsibility to be wealthy.

ELISE:

It's interesting that you mentioned driving the same car and living in the same house because I was just thinking in my mind, Warren Buffet, right? And that's one of his things which I admire, and he's obviously had no problem making huge amounts of money both for himself and for everyone who works for him and for people who invest with him. He's incredible at this. What's happening there then in your estimation? His ego is not attached to living in the same house and driving his old car?

ELIZABETH:

No, I think that he is attached to that, but for him, that can exist because it doesn't matter if he's in his ego or not. What matters is that he hasn't allowed his ego to prevent him making money. The reflection of his money is just that's where he is in his journey. So what he did is he decided, he's like, I'm going to work for someone else until I make 2 billion. Once I make $2 million, I'm going to go out on my own because I love investing. And he did it for the creativity. His wealth came from his own intuition. I mean, he started with sitting at the bridge club, he and his wife and everyone was drinking this thing called Coca-Cola, and he's like, oh, that seems pretty popular. And he started investing in Coca-Cola and then Gillette razors, they came out and everybody bought the razor, but then they started charging triple for the razor part, not the handle. And he's like, oh, that's a brilliant business model. So it's the same thing we see all the time. Money is very creative and artistic. So what he did is he laser focused on money as his art. Now what his ego and his conditioning does is fine, just like with all of us. His doesn't block money though.

ELISE:

Alright, so let's talk about how it blocks money. You can use me as an example if it's helpful, if it's less abstract, I don't care. But what do you see most of us doing in terms of blocking? And I would say I don't think I'm blocking. My story is primarily I need to work really, really, really, really hard in order to make money. So I make things incredibly hard for myself. I don't trust money that comes to me without effort. Even as I say this, I feel like a real idiot, but I have eight jobs and part of that is a defense I think against anyone who would say, oh, you're doing too well from anything that's sort of remotely spiritual. I think that that's probably what I'm doing without maybe being fully conscious of it.

ELIZABETH:

And I love this. So let me just ask you, what would change about your life if you had the 10 million account, let's say just somebody said, Hey, here you go, boom, it's yours. You don't have to do anything for it. What would change?

ELISE:

So very little because this is one of the other things that I do is that I like to manufacture scarcity for myself. I would save it, I would invest it and then I wouldn't let it impact my day to day. I would still function. I would live based on what I could make.

ELIZABETH:

Okay, it's interesting you used the word let it, you said I wouldn't let it. It has some control over you and so you have to keep it over here in this little space over here like contained in a cage or else it's going to change you. So you give money way too much control. That's the first thing. So you're diminishing your own power because you're giving it control. Another thing that I see since we're having this fun game, we get to use you as the Guinea pig here. Thank you, is you have a tremendous magnetism about you and so you have been brought here, this is where my beliefs come into this. You have the power to carry a lot of people on a frequency, and so a lot of people come into your world and that's not more work for you actually. That's your actual effortless path to money is that you've been given this magnetism.

So you have two choices. You can either continue to stay on your same frequency, nothing wrong with it, your frequency is attracting exactly the amount of money because we all create our own worlds and that frequency is reinforcing the identity that you need to work hard for it and that's okay and you'll still expand and you'll still be great and you'll still do wonderful things and help a lot of people, but you'll be exhausted if you're not already to a certain degree, you'll be exhausted. And so that's living in the matrix, that's the finite path to money. Now you could, if you wanted to use your magnetism and the way that you would use your magnetism is you would go within, and so what would become as important as all those other eight jobs would be your literal clearing out of not just money stuff.

This is where people get it wrong. It's not just about money. What you're doing in one area of your life is the same thing you're doing in the other area of your life. What you're doing in your relationships, what you're doing with your health, what you're doing with all of this. It's all a function of commitment, responsibility and belief. And so you would wrap those up and you would take a giant mirror and look at yourself and you look at yourself in a way that says, I see this block, but then what do I need to do to completely not be that person? So example, so with the 10 million, what you would do, because you know like to keep that over here in a box, what you would do is you would go, oh my God, it feels horrible to go out and buy. I dunno what it would be like some audacious thing.

It'd feel horrible to go out and buy that, but I'm more interested in meeting that version of me because that's in a different frequency. That is different. That's what you're trying to do. I call it breaking the structure. You have to break the structure of you in order to actually find you because you're not this person who wants to keep abundance away. You think you are nobody. We're not here for that. We're here to allow all abundance. So you would actually break that strategically so that then you could meet that version and then you can feel her. It's not about the circumstances, it's not about what goes on in the 3D world. That's it. Because then and only when you feel her, can you make a decision from there on how to build your magnetism even more. You don't have access to the answers right now.

ELISE:

So when I go and meet her, I'm meeting a version of myself that's like, I'm going to buy five carat diamond earrings. That's what you're saying? Yep. I'm going to buy a fully loaded electric Porsche cayenne, that version of me,

ELIZABETH:

And you're not going to do it from a place of flaunting it because that's not within you. You're probably going to do it and then you're going to want to hide it. Then what you're going to do is you're going to go, oh, there's my ego again. Oh, there's the conditioning, and then you're going to do something from there. You're going to take action. We are here because the answers are already here and it's just we're giving ourself greater access to the answers. All we're doing is rising and rising and rising in frequency here. That's it.

ELISE:

Well, what's interesting, I don't know if I've admitted this on the podcast yet, so maybe I have, but I've been thinking about it a lot. So I did this astrology reading with this man named Ravi Carr, and it was a very different type of reading. He's amazing. He's speaking of money, very expensive. It was a gift. See, look at what I'm doing there. It was a gift from a friend for my birthday and it was incredible and it was very different structurally, very different than any other. I always hear similar themes and beats in every reading that I get, regardless of whether they have any understanding of who I am or not. Typically they don't. I use a fake name. So Ravi, he did not say this to me, but he was talking to me about the polarity in my chart, which is deep introversion, but most of my power comes from being with people and needing to balance between the two. And my primary value is holding this collective energy with groups of people, which is interesting to me, and I also recognize that. That's exactly right, and even though I would much rather be in my bedroom reading, he's like, you're spilling your identity out with your industriousness. More or less what he said to me. And then after he was talking to my friend who gave me the reading and he said, your friend has the chart of a cult leader.

ELIZABETH:

Wow, okay. I love this. I love where this is going. It's so fun.

ELISE:

I know that this is true. I've been told that my karma in this life actually is that in a previous life I was an indolent lay about who wanted the good life without working. I also think I had a past life as a abusive cult leader, or I've seen enough stories in this life that I want nothing to do with that energy. So I think that's also one of my blocks. I don't want to have that much attention on me, even though I want my work in the world to grow, and I primarily want my work in the world to grow through shining the light on other people, which is one of the joys of the work that I do is building this really big net and pointing people to the teachers that they might need for that particular phase of their life. But it diffuses the energy for me as well, which feels important. I don't want the projection. I don't want to be seen as someone who has all the answers, even though I'm sitting here, this is what I do. I recognize that people come to me because they think that I have insight, so I recognize the insanity as I say it, but I wish I could just be a disembodied voice in people's ears.

ELIZABETH:

Yeah, this is so fascinating because there's two sides of it, because you can feel your own power when it comes to the stuff that you're talking about. It's a drawing in feeling, right? And you see it happening around you. You are in full awareness that powerful people come to you. It's almost like you understand your place in the world, and I think that does give you a certain silence, and I think that does give you a certain contentment to be doing that. There is also an element when you say, because you said it earlier too, the same thing, which is I'll take a lot of money and then I can give it away. So there's an element of lack of self-love that exists when you do any kind of quantification of something outside of me is greater than me, right? Because if the self-love was equal, then you couldn't have a quantification.

It would all just be one thing. And so in reality, you're a conduit and the cleaner that you become in terms of that's fine, give me $10 million, it's not going to change me. In fact, it can go away. I'm a conduit, so it's going to come back again. That's your power. That is a tool. We came here to utilize the tools and the reality is that is a tool that's a hammer, and if I keep ignoring that I need a hammer in order to exist and do the things I want to do in this world, then shame on me. I need a hammer. But you don't have to have any relationship to the hammer. That is when money becomes unstoppable because you are at a point where you just become a conduit for money and you can do anything with it and it can become your story or that's your next level. To be honest with you,

ELISE:

That feels significant to me. I think that's probably significant for everyone listening because money and a friend of mine, this woman Ann Emerson, who does work limiting self-conscious beliefs, I remember having a conversation with her where I was like, I don't care about money. And she was like, honey, that may be true. And yet your whole life is structured around money. It's not a bad thing, it's just you got to make a certain amount of money to make your life happen, and it's consuming to you clearly in the way that it is consuming to most of us, all of us, majority of us, a good portion of us. But there's this desire, right, to bypass it. I don't want to think about it. I don't like it. I don't want to celebrate it. I don't want to think about money, but I need to actually address money. Does anyone ever get to not think about money?

ELIZABETH:

Yes, actually, yes. I think that's the state we're going for is that money. You don't even really think about it. Money comes in, money goes out, your life gets paid for. You go, you meet someone who works at McDonald's and you like this person and you're like, Hey, I'm going to retire you forever. You're wonderful. Go out and just hug people and be happy. Yes. I think that absolutely. I mean, that's what people would want, but until you actually allow yourself to fully have money flow through you and feel the same feeling that you're allowing basically people to flow through you until you have that same feeling, you are not going to be able to do as much in the world as you're here to do because it's all just energy. And we don't get to say what energy that we want and what energy that we don't. It's all abundance, and I think you're positioning yourself for that. I feel like you're ready for that. I feel like that's kind of your next step with it. I don't know. You told me though.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, I think I'm slowly orienting myself around to, I might not like what we were talking about, the marketing, even though this is what brands pay me to do, is to help them market and tell their stories and connect. As much as I don't like it, I am also recognizing, oh, I can create some space for this. It doesn't really matter whether I like it or not, but there's probably an investment that I need to make here in doing it. I don't have to do it. I can hire people to help me do it, but abstaining from the game and hating the game is again, as you said, it's a story and that I just need to stop caring because who cares? And not judging it while I'm doing it, thus judging myself, but just to let it all go. And so actually when I think about, oh, if someone said, here's $10 million, I think I would take a million dollars of that money and invest it in team and resources and someone to help me think through the things that yes, I'm capable and competent. I've operated before in the world in a commercial and corporate way similar to you, but it's not the highest and best use of my time, and I cannot be objective about myself. So yeah, I would probably invest and say, let's use this money to build something and see what happens.

ELIZABETH:

So do you see how your container has even expanded? So now that's in your vision. You dipped your toe in the water, you took part of that 10 million that a few minutes ago you were like, no, no, that's a locked cage. You see what I'm saying? You are playing in a different frequency and you're seeing some of the lies. So basically it's all lies because if you say that you don't care about money, you get to see that that's a lie because if someone was on the street and they were in pain and they needed $10,000 to be able to fix them, you were the type of human who would go and get that $10,000 would probably be there tomorrow. You're a massive money magnet when you actually are aligned and you get beyond your conditioning with it, right? Then you do care about money.

So that means that you saying that you don't care about money, right? That's a lie. And we all tell ourselves lives, right? All we're trying to do is uncover it. Also, you do expect a certain amount of money to come into your life. That's the money that costs you whatever it costs you to pay your bills and to do all of that stuff. You are good and well accepting that. So why is that? It's just a number. Why are you good and well accepting? Let's just say 20,000 a month versus 200,000 a month. What does that mean about you? And if you got rid of what it means about you, you would see that's the only gap. That's it. If we got rid of this belief that money was going to somehow change us and that we're going to become this version of who we're not now, because that's saying that something outside of us can change us, we would be in a different situation.

And I've asked people this question because they say, okay, it's hard to make, let's say a hundred thousand dollars a month. Oh my God, it's so hard to make a hundred thousand dollars a month. Okay, well, is it hard to make a hundred dollars a month? No. Do you make a hundred dollars a month? Yeah. Do you think about it? No. Just comes in a hundred dollars a month. So remember we were talking about that point where you don't think about money, that feeling and that energy and that power when that's applied to a hundred thousand dollars a month and your message and your magnetism is broader than you are in greater service to the world, and it has nothing to do with money.

ELISE:

Okay, that makes sense. I always feel anxious when it's too much about me, but I feel like this applies to all of us on some level, right?

ELIZABETH:

Exactly. You carry this global consciousness, very evolved, intelligent. We want to learn from you. And one of the reasons that you do that is because you have very little ego in this area, and so you allow us access to you, and really what we're wanting is to see ourselves through you. And so I see you and I'm like, oh, wait, I see myself in her. I'm drawn into her. Right? And so if you want to look at the way you're using your energy right now, and you can then apply that to money and it will feel exactly the same way. If you're not in your ego, and if it starts to feel icky, then that's the mirror, and then you jump right back into it. If you do that, you won't be working any harder. You won't feel that effort. But what you'll notice around you in retrospect is that more money will be coming to you.

This is something that I have to practice, and part of it is, even as you've been doing throughout this conversation, checking the lies, which I would say the stories that I'm telling myself about money or what's required for money, and then holding it or making that conscious and saying, is this true? And then recognizing in my own behavior. So for example, I am on boards, et cetera. I fly business class. When I go to those board meetings, it's part of my contract. And I'm always like, what if someone recognizes me and sees me flying business? And I don't think that people give a shit, and yet I feel so defended it. Clearly there's a big story there for me.

ELIZABETH:

Absolutely. Okay, so you just gave us a perfect example. Well, guess what? People transact with money. People transact with money. So do you see the connection here? Money is an invite. It's getting invited into your world, and are you going to allow that? What do you have to do to allow that? Well, the first thing, and take this or leave this, but you have to drop the past with money. And one of that is that you said at the beginning you got this stuff from your mother, but that was then you're not the same version who you were when you got all those stuff from your mom. So why do you keep that?

ELISE:

Yeah, and I think one of the stories that I picked up from my parents, and again, this is my mom's own scarcity growing up in total lack and the oldest of seven, and I get it, I understand, but she's never been able to drop the story despite living well within her means. And my father from Montana, I was a physician. We had nice upper middle class, upper class life in a town where there wasn't a huge amount of wealth disparity. And my mom still operates with this extreme hypervigilance and anxiety about money that she tries to pin on my dad and say, oh, your dad's cheap. But meanwhile, my dad has no anxiety about money. He's not at all flipped about money. But it's interesting because even the flying thing, my parents, my dad is cheap. My parents, even though they're 75 and 80 years old to this day will come and visit.

At this point, I'm like, send me your itinerary before you book or let me book your flights. Because they're outrageous about the lengths that they will go to save 50 bucks, right? They'd rather sit in an airport apparently for three hours in the middle of the night, take a direct flight. And so I carry that too, and I can feel their judgment when I make things easier for myself. And in some ways, I completely respect where they come from. And the other time I'm like, if you don't spend your money, then I guess I will. But what are you doing?

ELIZABETH:

This is so great too, because you, from different lens, you're seeing this, well, it's kind of about energy. Why are you putting that energy out there to take another flight to save the $50? And so we can see that the money values dictate so much energy that could have been put somewhere else that we almost have to go. We're creating our own worlds and we're making these conscious choices. They're making a choice to take up more time or end up somewhere in the middle of the night. That's a choice. It's because of money, but it doesn't have to have anything to do with money. And then you get to look at small things in your life. And I do too where I'm like, no, I don't want to pay the extra $500 for that. But I think sometimes we don't recognize the cost that it costs us to hold up our identity to be poor. It's a burden.

ELISE:

It is a burden. And what we forego, I think I've included this conversation in my book, but conversations with my mom where I'm like, mom, I want you to have some therapy. And she is like, no, honey, I'd rather save that money for you. And I'm like, mom, I don't want your therapy money. I would much rather you attend to your consuming anxiety and get some of this stuff out of you so that you can look at it. But then I'm like, don't use me. I'm not an excuse for you to anyway. It's a whole thing. But I recognize clearly, and when I'm in the front of the plane, I'm like, oh, my parents would die.

ELIZABETH:

Yeah, exactly. And you know what this really comes down to? And I love that money is such a great teacher because what you can see in this is, and it's probably easier for you to see even with your parents, but there's a version of you that's playing small. And so you have this great magnetism, but that magnetism is going to stay at a certain dial unless you stop playing small, because where you're playing small in one area is where you're playing small in the other. And even though to people out here, they're like, no, she's not. She's not playing small. Look at what she does, right? It's a testament to you actually, because look at what you've done already with your foot on the gas and the brake at the same time. Would you be willing to take your foot off the brake? Is there a part of you that knows that cult leader part? Is there a part of you that knows that and is intentionally holding yourself back because this limited money thing and this conditioning and this, this is just the past. You are using that and you're keeping yourself away from us.

ELISE:

No, and I think as I talked to you, and I think about this too, we are missing models in this world. There are some clearly, but what it looks like to have power and not get corrupted by it, to have money and not be corrupted by it. And so I think too, we need more examples collectively of, oh no, you can be sturdy enough in who you are that this isn't deeply affecting to you and that it facilitates your work and the way that you can show up and the amount of support that you can call in and the amount of people you can employ, et cetera. And it's not going to, as you said, change you. But our world is littered with people who the richest men in the world doing grievous harm to the people with the least amount of power. This is on full display. And so we need the counter to that as well. And there are examples of this. I know, but actually you can accrue power. You can accrue money without letting it distort, corrupt you and or do damage in the world. That's possible. We certainly don't seem to have enough examples, but it feels like that's also what's being called forward.

ELIZABETH:

You have the power to be one of those models who allows millions and millions of dollars to go through them and does not change. And that is a way that you can actually inspire people if you'd be willing to take it on. And if you did take it on, money would be a huge, huge opening and an awakening for you.

ELISE:

This has given me so much to think about. You have to come back. We'll see how I do. This is what you teach spiritual investing, right? Because obviously some people work in a way that can be expansive. I work for myself. I have that capacity. Other people work in an environment where they earn a salary and maybe a bonus and maybe they have some equity upside or not. In your world, you're teaching people how to invest and create optionality through lots of levers that don't require their job necessarily. Yeah,

ELIZABETH:

Exactly. When things go haywire in the economy and all this stuff that we've seen recently and people get into fear, the best way to really protect yourself and your family and everything is just to say, okay, we live in the matrix. We live in a 3D world, and there's a certain amount of money that if we could get to that point and it was diversified enough, if we had it in enough different buckets of assets, then we wouldn't need to be so dependent on the world. And it's not a function of needing to be multimillionaire or needing to be poor. It's actually outside of ego. It's a recognition. But what it feels like is, okay, I need to brush my teeth every day. I need to get sleep at night. It's a recognition. I live in this body. I live in this world. If people would truly approach financial independence from that point of view and go, okay, I need to actually, there's this money coming in over here and this channel, all I need to do is just look at that and not push it away, pull it in, and then decide what am I going to do with it?

Every dollar is a gift. What am I going to do with it? And then expand it through investing and then create an automated machine. Then they could effortless be becoming wealthy and then still doing what they're doing out there in the world. If we could get people to a place of being able to do that from neutrality, then all these outside forces that we're seeing that are getting stronger and stronger and coming in and coming in, they wouldn't have the access that they do now because putting people in a financial squeeze scares the hell out of them. And I get that. And people are under this belief system that whatever job they have now or whatever they're doing now, that's their only way to make money. That's one of the biggest lies, is you came here as an infinite being and you can only do one thing for 45 years to get outside of that. And I think that if we could have more people who are in ease when it comes to money, we could actually get more of the authentic version of them instead of that ego front that we're seeing now. So where I stand, I get it. That money has done a lot of damage. Where I stand is that money has the power to come in and provide a lot of ease and space for people to really show up as who they are as well.

ELISE:

No, I a hundred percent agree. And when we are in fear, we go below the line. It is not a good place to be, and it's not the best place to encounter each other either. This is a certain way of holding us captive and holding us hostage. All right. Thank you for your work. I think it's really powerful. And oh, these money stories, they sure are sticky.

ELIZABETH:

They are. But we're one second away from getting rid of them.

ELISE:

That was really interesting. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect, but I heard from many people saying, talk to Elizabeth. So she runs this club. You can join for, I think it's 17 bucks a month, and it's all about spiritual investing. And I agree with her. I recognize even as I struggle with this myself quite mightily, that it is a responsibility that we all share. Anyone who's interested in the things that I'm interested in, who listens to this podcast, we need more conscious people. I like her frame. I usually say women, but I think we need conscious men too to have more money. Period, end of story. Certainly. I mean, it's fascinating, even just some of the plays that we're seeing, and your friend Jen says that it's like a kabuki theater all the time in this world. But even just watching the astronauts on one hand and then Mackenzie, Scott, Jeff Bezos's, ex-wife on the other, and just watching Melinda Gates for example, some of these women operate in the world who are leveraging massive fortunes and what they're choosing to do with it.

It's very different energy, I think, than Elon, Jeff Bezos, et cetera. And they need more of us to join their rank. So I'm going to go and become a multi, multi, multi, multi-billionaire. Hold your hats friends. Let's do this. Yeah, no problem. But yeah, I recognize everything, what Elizabeth is saying, that so much of my identity is wrapped up in fear of becoming one of those people. And then I recognize that is this insane fear that's just actually not who I am, even remotely. And I don't say that as a brag either. It's just not what interests me. It's not what I want. No shame or shade on anyone who wants that. It's just not my bag. So I don't need to worry that that will become my bag. And if it does, so be it. I always get anxious and these episodes that I feel like are too much about myself, but if she is right, and to be fair, throughout my career podcasting, which is quite long now, that's what I hear.

I feel like we're the same person or we should be friends, or I thought I'm the only one who had that story, et cetera. So there is some commonality about me that I think chimes with a lot of you, and there is a resonance, and I'm just going to run with that and assume that if it applies to me, it likely applies to many of you as well. Okay, friends, it's wild out there. I will see you next time. If you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend. That's how it grows. It is so helpful. Second, please support my sponsors who make this show possible. And if you are interested in sponsoring the show, you can email me at admin [at] elise loehnen [dot].com