When people focus on the spiritual law of attraction and manifesting abundance, they reach a point where they are feeling positive and want to continue to feel positive, so they tend to squelch negative reactions and emotions. I understand it. If a person tastes the freedom you get when you leave behind the groove of thinking negatively about money, it’s hard to lose.
Sometimes people are surprised to hear that I (a certified financial planner practitioner) believe in the law of attraction; I believe too much is taken out of context, which tends to give it a bad rap, as well as the misinterpretation of the idea of manifesting anything you want (it’s more complicated than that, folks). But we’re not discussing that today; I want to discuss what happens when you’re trying to manifest abundance and things go wrong.
No matter how much you’re focused on the positive, something inevitably happens. Something didn’t go the way you wanted it to go; you have an unexpected expense or another setback. Maybe you reached a “feeling positive” plateau. Or maybe you reacted too strongly to something small and apparently insignificant. Your reaction seems to fly in the face of everything you have been telling yourself. So with the tenacity of a kid wedging himself on the slide so he can climb back up to the top, you put a stop to your negative reaction. Incidentally, the brain scientist who suffered a stroke at 37 and went on to recover completely, Jill Bolte Taylor, says that your reaction and physical response is only automatic for the first 90 seconds; after that, it’s your choice to continue to stay in negativity or to move out of it.
But this is where things get tricky. Your brain is trying to feel something, but because you perceived it as negative (and that doesn’t go with manifesting abundance), you squelched your emotion before it fully bloomed. And squelched emotion isn’t gone, it’s just delayed. The negatively hasn’t played itself out yet, so it’s still in there, waiting. And that’s only the stuff you KNOW about . . . your body also maintains files and info on historical trauma, incidents you dismissed and unconscious squelches too.
The point is you can’t heal your emotional life with intellectual thought. And the intellectual knowledge you have about money cannot be applied to your emotional knowledge of money. We go through life expecting to navigate rationally, using our brain, when in fact we often need to allow our emotions OUT in a messy, non-rational way so we can be even MORE level-headed.
I am a recovering squelcher. Men are better squelchers than women, and to fit in with the male-dominated industry of finance, I squelched with the best of them. In fact, I have been called Spock by several different people, and believe me, if you’re compared to a Vulcan, that’s some world class squelching.
I know that I can still knee-jerk squelch, but I feel SO MUCH BETTER when I allow myself to feel my feelings. It’s scary to surrender at first, but the decision to surrender is actually the hardest part—after that, the release is natural.
I find after a meltdown/release, I am reenergized. I have more clarity, focus and I am more aware of opportunities and people around me. Having the meltdown actually puts me back on track faster than when I squelch.
Think about de-cluttering a house. You methodically go through the rooms of your home and categorize excess to trash, donate, sell, etc. Stuffing it back into a closet somewhere defeats the purpose. By the same token, you also don’t pick up the thing, run out the door
and immediately place it in the trash; you set it aside in a bag so you can accumulate enough to make it worth the trip.
By doing thought and energy work and getting clear about your issues, you have started the de-cluttering process. You have (unconsciously) categorized your clutter and identified what is worth keeping and what needs to be tossed. And now, as you have a meltdown, you’re taking out the trash.
Most of the time, people don’t even realize they have been holding on to gunk. They have cleared out most of their conscious thoughts about money, but your subconscious, emotional self is saying, “Hey, aren’t you going to take these bags out too??”
Don’t despair when you have a meltdown; you’re not losing any ground so you should just go for it. Feel the yuck, let the snot flow. A meltdown is not an indication that you’re not as far evolved as you thought; it’s an indication that you’re ready to step up to the next level of your evolution.