xo,
Sunni
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Expensive: adjectiveentailing great expense; very high-priced; costly.
I personally pretty much stricken this word from my vocabulary many many years ago…
because to me it implies that something is beyond my means. And I do not choose to believe or tell myself that anything is beyond my means, EVEN if it IS beyond my means in this moment. I don’t choose to use a word that tells myself that it is beyond my limitations or possibilities to create if I want to.
This is a personal choice, of course.It’s not right or wrong, better or worse,it’s just a mindset.
Clearly there are many many things I cannot currently buy, but that does not mean they are beyond what I can have or receive in my life, it just means that if I do want something in that realm, then I now get to set that intention and move towards it one step at a time.
I don’t use this word because there is so much meaning wrapped up in it that sits just below the surface of using it. It’s not so much the word as the way people use it. It’s the energy behind it that I FEEL.
I feel it energetically as a judgment and contraction, a disconnection, a shutting down and a walling off inside. It carries old energies of oppression and resentment in it, blame and shame, anger and sadness and bitterness. All of this hangs in the air like thick smoke when this single word is said. This isn’t detectible by most people, but it is by me. I FEEL it in a truly palpable way.
If it wasn’t for all of that old meaning, then saying something is “so expensive” would be as harmless and totally neutral as saying something is “so blue”.
If someone says something is “so blue”, there is no rightness or wrongness about it, there is no superiority or inferiority about it, it is just stating what something is in one persons view.
But with the word “expensive”, there are ALL KINDS of implications. There are all kinds of meanings and feelings of rightness or wrongness, and all kinds of judgements, and pain, and hard feelings attached. And of course there is! There is thousands of years of history attached to that word, painful history. And that history is living and breathing in all of us still.
But that does not mean it cannot change. And it is certainly my endeavor in this life to change it as much as I can.
I look forward to the day when the word ‘expensive’ is as neutral to me as the word ‘blue’. Where it is just a description, and not a judgement or expression of peoples secret pain.
I guess, in the end, the reason why the word bothers me so much is because of that expression. It is a single word that expresses in one breath so much of peoples pain and how they feel limited and boxed in in their lives. And I can feel all of that every time people say it.
And it breaks my heart.
Freedom being one of my number one values, I personally cannot stand to feel boxed in in any way.
When I tell myself I am limited I experience that as a lie. So I try to identify the things I say to myself and others that do that, and to tell myself a new story in those places, so I can create something new.
I haven’t yet found a great alternative to using the word expensive. I usually just don’t comment on prices at all. That’s been my solution so far. I say yes to what works, or what I really want, and no to what doesn’t, or what I’ll have to wait on or can’t do right now.
But I don’t judge it, and I don’t tell myself I can’t have it, or it’s too much for me, or it’s ridiculous or anything like that. I just know if I really want it it will come in time, and the means will come with it. I surrender that and trust the flow as much as possible. I do what I can from where I am right now and focus on what IS here, what I DO have (even when the mind tries every which way to focus on what isn’t here and what I don’t have).
As you can see from the dictionary definition of the word, “expensive” is a statement of cost to you, and thus (very often) a statement of VALUE. Things that are high priced are perceived and assumed to be high value and high quality. And things that are cheap are assumed to be lower value and quality.
This is not always the case of course! Value is totally subjective. What is valuable to one person may be totally worthless to another person. And likewise, what is worthless to one person may be highly valuable to another person. Something that is really highly priced may be trash to one person, and something that is really cheap might be absolutely priceless to another.
What that means is that the cost of things has no absolute meaning of value. It only has the value we assign to it personally. To me, nothing “costs me” anything if it is something I want in my life and choose to spend on it.
To me, everything “pays me”, not “costs me”.
So, for example: my water bill, pays me water. The money I spent on my winter jacket pays me warmth and coziness on my walks. The check at the restaurant paid me time with my loved ones, food in my belly, and the experience of being fed and supported by helpful people who prepared and brought me the food. My electric bill pays me in light and warm showers and toasted toast, and televised entertainment that makes me laugh or cry or whatever other adventure I might want to go on a particular evening.
I don’t focus on the “cost to me”, I focus on the pay. I focus on what I’m receiving, so what I’m receiving grows.
In this way, what I spend can never cost me or deplete me,
it is always only ever filling me up.
I also try not to focus on whether something is “worth it” for any price, I just focus on what I am receiving or wanting to receive from this thing I am spending on, and whether I still want to receive that (from this source) or not.
I know this is not the way most of the world operates, but it’s how I operate. And it has truly changed my life in the best ways!
So I thought I would share some more of an inside look at how I think and operate around money in my personal life, in the hopes that it might inspire you to play with that yourself, in your own ways.
I realized recently that part of the reason why I view things so differently than most people is because I see myself as life itself (spirit, energy, consciousness, atoms & quarks, whatever you want to call it), not as just a person.
I could never really figure out why people thought about things the way they did, and why they couldn’t seem to see what I was saying about this (and other) stuff, and I realized that it’s because when you see yourself as a person expressing a life, rather than life expressing as a person, than you are bound by the parameters of that person, instead of being as unlimited in potential as life itself.
So how do YOU see yourself and feel yourself in the world? How do you feel about the word ‘expensive’? What does all this bring up for you? And how do you maybe want to change your relationship with that word?
How we speak about things is SO POWERFUL (as I mentioned in last weeks post). So really begin to bring more consciousness to this and to the feelings that are attached to your words.
Please hear me when I say that this post is not asserting that there are not very real and painful limitations with money happening all over this world right now, it is simply saying that all change for the better begins with the vision that things CAN INDEED CHANGE, and then holding that vision until you get there.
They say people buy what they most want to feel. We humans do EVERYTHING in life based on how we most want to feel. So why on EARTH aren’t more people creating starting with how they want to feel and skip the middle man!? It only makes perfect sense right?!
It’s because we’ve been so conditioned to believe that if we could just control and wrangle external world and circumstances into submission we will feel better, and so we’ve totally lost touch with the fact that we need to START with how we want to feel on the inside and work out from there.
In my Feast or Famine No More Course we create and call in money from how we want to feel, instead of trying to create how we want to feel, with money. In other words we skip the middle man, start living more of our dream right now, and allow the money to follow and support more of that – which it WILL for no other reason except you’ve finally chosen it.
When you shift, the world shifts.
You have more magic in you than you know.
Let’s see what you can do with it, shall we?
And as always, if you’d like some help with that, along with others who are doing the same, then I invite you to check out my Feast or Famine No More Course. If it calls to your heart, I’d love to have you join us » you know where to find me »
