If you had to answer the question: who are you at your essence? What would you say? I know for most of my life, I wouldn't be able to answer that question other than giving you my name and history, and I'll share why this question, and being able to answer it confidently, is such an important reveal in creating the life you love every moment.
The Grind That Goes Nowhere
In my 20's I was teaching yoga and running breathwork sessions just to make rent. Largely struggling with money, I had read every money book I could get my hands on. I had a budget spreadsheet, used many different tools to get finances under control. I did all of the affirmations, visualizations, tools, tricks, tips, all of it. My empty bank account, amongst other things, was plenty of evidence that I had to fix these problems, and I genuinely believed that if I could just find the right strategy, the right system, the right piece of information I was missing, everything would click into place. That belief kept me going for years. What I didn't realize was that it also kept me completely stuck.
I know a lot of people are living in a similar mindset right now and don't realize there's a different way to what they want in life. For the longest time I felt I was pushing a boulder uphill every single day and watching it roll back down every single night. I would have a good month teaching and immediately start calculating how fast the money would disappear. Something in me was allergic to the very thing I was chasing in financial stability. And the worst part was that I couldn't figure out why, because I was doing everything right. I was working hard. I was showing up. I was disciplined. But nothing moved. The number in my bank account would fluctuate, but over a long enough time frame, nothing changed.
Trying Harder From the Same Place
I was convinced though the problem was tactical. I thought I needed a better side hustle, or a more aggressive savings plan, or maybe I just needed to want it more. So I doubled down. I tried harder. I read more. I hustled harder. And the more effort I threw at the problem, the more I stayed in exactly the same place. It was like running on a treadmill in the dark, convinced that if I just ran faster, I'd eventually get somewhere.
What I couldn't see at the time, and what took me years to understand, is that the software I was running in my mind was the same version of me that had created the problem. The person trying to fix my money was operating from the same fear and scarcity, the same inherited sense of "not enough" that had built the entire situation. I was asking my programming to debug itself, wondering why nothing ever changed.
The Question That Changed Everything
So I eventually hit a mental bottom, even though things were fine on the outside, on the inside, something was off. I was exhausted, and I needed help. I remember specifically looking up at the ceiling on my bed one night and asking: "How does this all work?" I know I am missing something, but I'm tired of searching. Low and behold, a month later, I come across a resource that explained identity, and why our understanding of that question I first asked is the key to everything else.
Here is what I learned. Your fundamental identity existed long before everything that was layered on top of it did. Before the fear. Before the scarcity. Before someone told you that money was hard or that wanting more made you selfish. This isn't a version of you that you need to build from scratch or earn your way into. It's the you that was already there, the one that got buried under decades of conditioning. And your worth isn't something that version of you needs to prove, because worth is what it's made of. It's the condition of your fundamental identity, not a reward for performing well enough.
What fascinated me is that this isn't just a spiritual concept. Quantum physics has shown that at the most fundamental level, everything in the physical world, every atom, every particle, exists as pure potential until it's observed into form. The observer and the observed are not separate. Consciousness and matter are entangled. Which means who you are, the identity doing the observing, is not a passive bystander in your life. It is actively shaping what shows up. If you keep observing your life from the same identity, the same inherited fears and assumptions, you keep collapsing the same reality over and over again. Same patterns. Same results. Same ceiling. Not because reality is fixed, but because the observer hasn't changed.
Seeing the Program
That reframing hit me in a way that nothing else had. It meant that every strategy I'd tried, every hack, every hustle, every morning routine, had been executed by an operating system that someone else built. The version of me that was cobbled together from my parents' fears and my culture's rules and my own early experiences of not having enough was the one making all the decisions. And that version of me could only take me as far as its programming allowed. It could rearrange what it already had. It could not take me beyond it, because it had never been beyond it.
The shift, when it came, didn't look like what I expected. I thought transformation would feel dramatic, like the clouds would part and I'd suddenly know how to be wealthy. But it was quieter than that. It started with seeing. Not fixing anything, just seeing. I started to notice the program as a program instead of mistaking it for reality. I noticed the tightness in my chest when something good showed up. I noticed how quickly I would deflect a compliment, or look for the catch when an opportunity appeared, or brace for the other shoe to drop whenever life got a little easier.
And instead of trying to override those reactions with willpower or positive thinking, I just watched them. I let them be what they were: old code, running on autopilot, doing exactly what it was designed to do. And something remarkable happened. The moment I could observe a pattern without trying to fix it, I realized I wasn't inside it anymore. I was no longer the person running the software. I was the person watching it run. And from that vantage point, a question started forming that the old operating system could never have asked: what if this isn't who I actually am?
What This Isn't
I want to be clear about what this is and isn't, because I think it matters. This isn't fake-it-till-you-make-it. It's not standing in front of a mirror telling yourself you're a millionaire while your overdraft fees pile up. That's just the old identity wearing a costume. What I'm talking about is recognizing that the person you've been trying to fix was never the real you in the first place. He was a construction, a very convincing one, built over decades and reinforced by everything around you. But a construction nonetheless. And you don't have to keep living inside something just because it's familiar.
What Actually Shifted
When I stopped trying to change my money and started changing who I was in relationship to it, the external stuff began to shift in ways I couldn't have engineered. Not because I manifested anything or found some secret, but because the person making the decisions was different now. A different person makes different choices, sees different opportunities, and has a different tolerance for what they'll accept. The old me would have said no to things before he even knew he was saying no. The old me had a ceiling that he treated like the sky. When that identity loosened its grip, the ceiling turned out to be made of paper.
The Foundation
The deepest thing I've learned is that identity is the foundation. It's not one piece of the puzzle, it's the table the puzzle is sitting on. When identity shifts, your mindset shifts because you're thinking from a different place. Your relationship with all forms of abundance shifts because you're no longer relating to your environment from fear. Your capacity to receive shifts because you're no longer unconsciously pushing things away. Everything else is downstream.
And the thing I wish someone had told me when I was deep in the grind is that the version of you that can hold a completely different life isn't someone you have to become. It's someone you already are, buried under a lot of code that was never yours to begin with. The work isn't building something new. It's clearing away what was never true, and letting what's been there all along finally run the show.
This is part of my ongoing exploration of what actually shifts your relationship with abundance. If this resonated, the next piece goes deeper into the inherited patterns, where they came from, why they repeat, and what it looks like when the signal starts to change.