Money has always been a loud theme in my life. Not loud in the way people talk about ambition or wealth, but loud in the way that a wound is loud. It was always asserting itself into the picture, shaping decisions, creating pressure, driving me toward things I didn't fully understand. For most of my life, I thought the issue was money itself, that if I could just solve the money problem, everything else would fall into place. It took me decades to realize that money was never the actual problem. It was the surface where a much deeper pattern kept expressing itself. And that pattern, the belief that something about me was fundamentally broken and needed to be fixed, ran my life far longer than I'd like to admit.
What Gets Built in a Kid
I grew up lower middle class. When you're a kid, everything around you is normal. It's just your life. But looking back now, I can trace how both subtle and not-so-subtle events shaped my wiring in ways I carried well into adulthood.
My parents cared. They tried their hardest, and that was never a question. But we didn't have access to resources the way other families around me did. Not being able to go on certain trips because they cost money. Not having new clothes. Not getting a new bike when everyone else was getting theirs. These seem like small things, but they're not. They're the moments where a kid starts quietly building a story about what comes to them and what doesn't. About who gets to have things and who doesn't.
And underneath the surface, things were harder than they looked. There were nights my mother had to take me and leave the house. We'd stay in a shelter because my parents were fighting, and sometimes it turned physical. A lot of my dad's anger came from the stress of not being able to provide for the family. He couldn't afford what he felt he should be able to, and that pressure had to go somewhere. It went into the house and that anger went to my mom. And without anyone ever saying a word to me directly about money, the message landed in my nervous system anyway: money is dangerous, money is scarce, not having it destroys things.
When I was about ten, fourth grade, my parents divorced. My dad moved to New Jersey, and we'd drive I-95 to meet halfway for the handoff. The divorce dragged on for a while primarily because of money. My mom's family had some resources, but my grandfather insisted she get what she was owed in alimony. My dad resented that. So every exchange, every phone call, every interaction between them had this energy. Even as a kid I got tired of it.
When Access Means Belonging
As I moved into high school, the gap between what I had and what the people around me had became harder to ignore. It hit hardest when it became clear that my friends were all going to college, that they'd have that experience and that trajectory, and my family simply couldn't afford it.
That was the moment money stopped being about stuff and became about access. Access to experiences, access to a future that looked like everyone else's. And access, in the way I was processing it internally, meant normalcy. Being normal meant being accepted, and it meant not being the one on the outside looking in.
So when I found myself working forty hours a week and squeezing in a few classes at community college, not because I had a plan but because it was the only way I could think of trying to keep up, I knew something had to change. I needed to solve this problem I had with money. The issue was that I had no understanding of the energy and beliefs I was carrying about money. I just knew it felt urgent, and I was behind.
My solution, at eighteen, was to start selling weed. Not because I thought it was noble or wise, but because it felt like the fastest way to close the gap between me and the life I thought I was supposed to have.
The Hustle That Teaches You Everything Except the Thing That Matters
Here's the thing about that life: it worked, in a very specific way. I became good at it. I could suddenly afford things I never could before. And it was teaching me things about business, about people, about risk and reward, that no classroom was going to offer. At least not with the same immediacy. First-hand experience is a faster teacher than theory.
Between that and working a regular job to keep the legitimate side of my life running, I eventually made my way out to California. I needed to get away from my family situation, away from the East Coast, away from an energy that just didn't match what I was looking for in life.
I landed in Chico, a party town in Northern California, with four thousand dollars to my name. It was fun for the first six months. Because the reality of not having a long-term plan catches up fast, especially in a small town where the college makes up a good portion of the population. Within eighteen months, I had no job, no home, and was struggling for basics like food. I crashed on friends' couches. I remember being so deeply grateful when my mother sent me thirty-five dollars, just because I was so hungry. Thirty-five dollars. That was the distance between me and not eating.
Eventually a lifeline appeared. A bit of money came through, and because I'm a social person, I met enough people to figure out how to get back into my old profession. But selling weed in California is a different game than on the East Coast. The competition is fierce in quality, in volume, and in the sheer number of people doing the same thing. After a while, I realized the smarter play was to bring what I had access to in California back to where there was more demand, three thousand miles east.
What started as mailing packages eventually turned into driving. I was moving twenty to thirty pounds at a time from California back to Washington, D.C. I made quite a few successful trips, but if you do something like that enough times, the story only ends one way, and in 2011, in the middle of Illinois, I was arrested.
What Scarcity Does to a Body
I spent about a year locked up, seven months at Stateville Penitentiary, then four months at Dixon Springs, Illinois. I got lucky because I qualified for a boot camp program for first-time offenders, and that program saved me from eight years in prison.
Stateville was survival in its rawest form. The food... I'll spare you the full picture, but the meat in there had names for what they served us. Slick meat. Freddy Krueger meat. Not a fun time. For a while, I refused to eat it, so quickly I was starving in a way I'd never experienced before, a level of hunger that wasn't just physical but existential. When you don't know if you'll eat, or if what's in front of you is edible, something changes in you.
To this day, I eat my food extremely fast, and if food is available, I overeat. That's not a choice I'm making. It's a pattern that got written into my body during a time when scarcity wasn't a concept; it was a physical reality. And that's the thing most people don't understand about growing up without enough, or going through an experience like incarceration: the scarcity doesn't just live in your mind. It lives in your nervous system.
Trying to Fix What Isn't Broken
When I got out, I actually tried to go back to my old life. But the universe kept slapping me upside the head, shutting every door I tried to walk through. So I turned to the only path that was left: an honest job, finishing college, building something legitimate.
It was around that time that I started taking yoga seriously. Not casually, but as a real practice. And yoga, slowly, became the first doorway into self-inquiry. Up until that point, I have no idea what, if any, self-reflection I had done. I had all that time to myself in Illinois, but I wasn't really reflecting on what got me there, just what I was going to do when I was finished. Nevertheless, I eventually started teaching, became quite good at it, and found a stable career that also turned out to be, without me fully realizing it at first, the biggest tool for my own growth.
Looking back at it now, I was only scratching the surface. The practice was real, but the motivation underneath it was still running on the same fuel: that deep, inherited belief that something was wrong with me. Even as things started to look "better" on the outside, I could feel that something was still off. I just couldn't name it. I didn't know what I was actually looking for. I thought I was looking for the solution, the thing that would finally make me feel settled, clean, redeemed. What I was really doing was trying to solve a problem I hadn't properly identified. I was hunting for an answer instead of examining the foundation: the hidden assumptions and survival logic that were making my choices for me. The beliefs underneath the hustle, underneath the shame, underneath the constant self-improvement project.
Because by that point, it wasn't just a relationship with money. It was an identity. I had made so many mistakes, serious ones with real consequences, and I had fused with those mistakes. They weren't things that had happened to me or decisions I'd made in a certain context. They were me. Proof that something at my core was broken. And every new endeavor, including yoga, became, without me realizing it, another attempt to fix the thing I believed was wrong.
That's an exhausting way to live. When fixing is your orientation, you can never arrive anywhere, because the premise underneath all your effort is that you are a problem to be solved, and a problem that's been solved is just a problem waiting for the next thing to go wrong.
The Prayer That Changed Everything
Toward the end of my time teaching yoga, just before Covid, my relationship with the practice had gotten healthier. But the search was still alive in me. I still felt like there was something I wasn't understanding, some fundamental piece of how life works that I couldn't access. I kept looking for how to fix the thing that was causing my patterns, and I kept failing. So I asked, because I was exhausted, and I had nothing to lose.
I said something like: How does this all work? I know there's something I'm not understanding. I keep looking for how to fix myself, and I keep failing. Please, show me. That prayer, if that's what it was, opened a door for me that brought the answers in the form of Paul Selig's channeled books.
What landed differently about that work, what made it not just another tool in the self-improvement toolkit, was that it started from an entirely different premise. Every other modality I'd tried was essentially saying: There's what's wrong with you, and here's how to fix it. Selig's guides were saying something radically different: you were never broken. The aspect of you that knows, that truly knows, is present now and has always been present. You are not acquiring something. You are agreeing to what has always been true.
That distinction, between fixing and claiming, between improving a broken self and realizing a self that was never damaged, cracked my entire story open. Because the money fear, the scarcity, the not-enough, the hustling, the prison, the yoga, the searching... all of it had been organized around the assumption that there was a problem to be solved. And what I was being shown, for the first time, was that the one who was doing all the fixing was the only thing that had ever been in the way.
The survival ego, the part of me that had been running from scarcity since I was a kid watching my parents fight over money, wasn't evil or wrong. It had been trying to protect me. But it was operating from a lie: that I am what happened to me, that I am my worst decisions, that worth is something you earn by finally getting it right.
That shift didn't fix my life. It didn't erase the patterns overnight. But it changed the orientation completely. I was no longer trying to solve myself. I was learning, slowly, to let in what had been waiting for me all along: the knowing that prosperity, wholeness, and belonging were never withheld from me. I had just been too busy trying to fix the thing that was supposedly broken to notice that it wasn't.
Now there's some more nuance to this, and there have been some tremendously impactful tools such as plant medicine that have also contributed to my growth, but that is for a whole different writing.