Money Beliefs - the story we didn't choose
This Tuesday, I hosted the second Lighthouse Labs - a session with Jole Berlage-Buccellati on money beliefs. (You may have seen it called a Lighthouse Talk before - the name has grown into something that fits better. More of a lab than a talk. More experiment than presentation.) If you missed it, or if you were there and are still processing, this is my attempt to share what happened and what it's still doing in me.
Jole Berlage-Buccellati - somatic practitioner, deep process facilitator, and someone whose thinking I find inspiring - opened with a provocation: most of what blocks us around money doesn't live in the mind. It lives in the body. In patterns inherited from people who survived things we have no conscious memory of. Famine. Displacement. War. Poverty so deep it became identity.
She introduced the idea of mind viruses - beliefs that sit below our awareness and function like background programmes. Things like:
To prosper means to harm others. If I succeed, I will lose my people. money doesn't grow on trees, rich people are greedy, money changes people, we can't afford that, you have to work hard for every penny.
Not beliefs we chose. Beliefs that we inherited.
We talked about the cost of changing your money story - how poverty can become a culture, a place of belonging. Go back far enough in any ancestral line, and you might find a moment when everybody needed to stay poor in order to stay in the community. That logic made sense once. It got encoded. And here we are, carrying it.
Then Jole led us through a meditation.
The invitation was to bring one money belief - the one with the most charge - and notice where it sat in the body. Then to follow it back. To imagine the ancestor it might belong to. To meet them with kindness. To say: this once served a purpose. But it isn't mine. And I return it to you with love.
For me, it landed on the left side - the mother's lineage - before Jole had even explained what left meant.
What came up was my mother. She grew up on a farm, with not much money. Sent to a boarding school - practical, not privileged - and spent her life breaking out of that world. Into culture. Into art, theatre and music. Into something larger.
We had a saying in my family: We have money like garbage.
My mother's phrase - half sarcasm, half fierce commitment. It didn't mean we were wealthy. It meant: for the things that truly matter, we will always find the money. It was her way of refusing the scarcity she came from.
In the meditation, I saw her differently. Not just the woman who said that phrase, but the girl who needed to. The one who made the leap the best way she knew.
And then I brought her a new idea - one that has been forming in me recently. That money is like water. Not something to hoard or fear or refuse. Something that flows. That nourishes. That stagnates when we block it and moves freely when we let it.
When I offered that to her, what I felt was joy. Relief. Like something had been waiting to be said.
Jole said something near the end that I keep returning to: nobody heals if they're told there's something wrong with them. Fixing assumes something is broken. The work starts somewhere else - with curiosity. With a genuine wanting to understand, not force applied to what we want to get rid of.
That feels important beyond money. It feels like a way of being with yourself.
Something else I want to name.
We are in changing times. Much of the world's money sits in very few hands, held tight, used as control. But something else is also happening. Many people - with small amounts, with ordinary choices - are letting it move differently. Spending intentionally. Choosing where their coins go. No single person changes much. Together, we are shifting a great deal.
To play our part, we are invited to clear whatever blocks us from showing up - the inherited beliefs, the mind viruses, the fear of losing our belonging - and to be willing to receive. To experience what enough actually feels like. To take it slowly. There is no rush.
If this has stirred something, you don't have to sit with it alone.
The post that led into Tuesday's session - We Have Money Like Garbage - goes deeper into where this began for me. Worth reading if you haven't.
And if you'd like to explore what's getting in the way - in your business or in how you're showing up to it - I offer a free 15-minute conversation. Come as you are. Book here: thinkvisual.ie/letschat
The next Lighthouse Labs is on Tuesday, 7th July. George Hanover, actor and facilitator, will be joining us to explore how you can build confidence showing up when all eyes are on you. More soon. Book your spot here.
Photo by USGS on Unsplash
