Making peace with MONEY
What We've Learned About Money and Ourselves in This Substack Series
We've taken quite a journey together through the landscape of money and our internal systems. We started by noticing the pit in our stomachs that money can trigger. We explored the parts that drive our financial decisions. We sat with the raw reality of financial trauma. We examined the exhausting split between meaningful work and financial survival.
Each step has been building toward something: a completely different relationship with money.
Not one where money stops mattering or where we transcend material concerns (I don’t believe that this type of transcendance is possible haha), but one where money becomes what it was always meant to be - a tool in service of our actual lives.
This isn't about achieving some perfect financial state. It's about developing sovereignty over how money moves through your life, rather than being controlled by our activated protective parts.
What Sovereignty Actually Means
Financial sovereignty isn't about having unlimited money or never feeling stress about financial decisions. It's about making those decisions more from Self rather than from activated parts. It's about money serving your values instead of your values being compromised by money fears.
I see this in my own evolution. Years ago, financial decisions felt dramatic and charged. Should I take this job? Can I afford this purchase? Every choice carried the weight of survival anxiety or identity questions.
Now, money decisions feel more like... decisions. Still important, requiring thought and care, but not laden with the emotional intensity that comes from parts who learned that money equals safety, worth, or love.
This shift didn't happen because I have more money or fewer financial concerns. It happened because I developed a different relationship with the parts that get activated around money.
The Thread Through Everything
Looking back at our exploration, there's been one consistent thread: the difference between reactive and conscious choice.
Whether we were talking about spending parts seeking emotional relief, survival parts hoarding resources, or shame parts punishing us for past financial mistakes - the invitation was always the same.
Could we bring more Self-energy to our parts? Could we respond rather than react? Could we connect rather than punsh and push away?
This is what transforms any relationship - the gradual development of consciousness where there was once only automatic response.
In the financial realm, this consciousness creates space for choices that actually serve your life. You can spend money on things that genuinely nourish you without guilt from parts that believe all spending is dangerous.
You can save money without obsession from parts that equate accumulation with safety.
You can invest in your growth without shame from parts that believe wanting more is selfish.
Money as Spiritual Practice
Here's something that might sound strange: I've come to see money as one of the most profound spiritual practices available to us.
Not only because money is sacred in itself (everything is sacred), but because our relationship with money reveals everything about how we relate to security, trust, power, generosity, and worthiness. Every financial choice is an opportunity to practice consciousness, to choose response over reaction, to align actions with values.
This perspective transforms everything. Paying bills becomes an act of gratitude for services received. Saving money becomes an expression of care for your future self. Spending money becomes a conscious choice about what you want to support and create in the world.
Even financial struggles become opportunities for practicing presence, resilience, and creative problem-solving rather than just sources of stress and shame.
The Long View of Change
Building financial health is like growing a garden. You plant seeds of conscious choice, tend them with consistent attention, and trust the gradual process of growth.
Some financial decisions will come from clear Self-energy. Others will still be driven by activated parts. Both are part of the process. The goal isn't perfection but gradual expansion of consciousness and choice.
I think about clients who have transformed their financial lives not through dramatic external changes but through shifts in internal relationship to money. The chronic overspender who learned to pause and ask what her parts actually needed. The compulsive saver who developed the capacity to spend money on genuine enjoyment. The serial entrepreneur who stopped using business ventures to escape emotional discomfort.
These transformations took time, patience, and lots of compassion for the parts that had developed financial strategies for understandable reasons.
Beyond Individual Healing
Something beautiful happens when you develop a more conscious relationship with money: it ripples outward. Your family experiences less financial stress because you're not making money decisions from activated parts. Your workplace interactions shift because you're not driven by desperation or unconscious money fears. Your community benefits because your financial choices reflect your actual values.
You become someone who uses money as a force for what you believe in rather than being used by money forces you don't understand.
This matters beyond personal benefit. In a world where money often serves extraction and exploitation, every person who develops a conscious relationship with money contributes to shifting how money moves through our collective systems.
Questions for the Path Forward
As we close this exploration on money, I want to leave you with questions that honor the complexity of this work:
How might your relationship with money continue evolving as you grow and change?
What would it look like to make financial decisions from your deepest values rather than your activated parts?
How could money become a tool for expressing who you're becoming rather than protecting who you've been?
What becomes possible in your life when money anxiety no longer drives your choices?
How might your conscious relationship with money serve something larger than your individual security?
The Practice Continues
Your relationship with money, like all relationships, will keep deepening throughout your life. There will be seasons of scarcity and abundance, periods of clarity and confusion, times when old patterns resurface and times when new possibilities emerge.
The practice is staying curious, bringing compassion to your parts, and returning again and again to the question: how can I use money in service of what I most value?
Gratitude for the Journey
Thank you for walking this path of transformation with me. For bringing honesty to patterns many of us keep hidden. For being willing to examine the tender places where money intersects with our deepest fears and longings.
By doing this work, you're not just healing your own relationship with money. You're participating in a larger transformation of how humans relate to material resources. You're modeling that it's possible to be both practical and conscious, both financially responsible and spiritually aligned.
Your parts that carry financial wounds and dreams deserve the same loving attention you'd give any other aspect of yourself that's trying to help you navigate this complex world.
I invite you and me, of course, to Keep going. Keep noticing. Keep choosing consciousness over reaction. Choice over inertia.
The world needs people who know how to use money as a tool for love rather than a weapon for fear.
In gratitude,
Anna
Transformational IFS Coach @ www.annamilaeva.com & Co-founder @ www.fino.website - Incubator for Self-leadership.