The Dynamics of "Self-Investment": Why it's so hard to spend money on ourselves when we know it's good for us.

Hello friends and followers, 

If you have visited my website and looked at the cost of some of my offerings you may notice the supporting words “self-investment fee”. This is not just some marketing mumbo jumbo, but a serious inference to where the money is being invested. Yes I will be receiving cash as an energetic exchange for my services with 10% of it going to The Healing Foundation, but that money is really being invested in yourself - in your own healing and in your own transformation. This is not consumerism, this is conservationism for your health & wellbeing.

So, today I want to share a little bit about “self-investment”, what it is and why most of us have serious blocks in this area. 

Most have been conditioned to disregard expenses such as seeing a healer, psychologist or coach as luxuries, but quite happily go out wining and dining or shopping every weekend and take self-indulgent holidays every year. Most of us address our mental health issues with a large glass of wine or a couple of pints followed by some Netflix. This is normal. Most of us stop educating ourselves when we finish college / university and stop dreaming of who we really want to be after we get our first job. This is also normal. It is also very sad.

Our health, wellbeing and flourishing is not a luxury! It is a necessity! We deserve to be healthy. We deserve to be happy. And we deserve to have that dream in our hearts become reality, as it will not only be of great benefit to us, but to the world - our undiscovered potential is a great loss for a world that is deeply in need of our unique gifts.

And all this is possible with self-investment, but first we need to be able to see ourselves as someone worthy of investing in - worthy of good health, worthy of pristine wellbeing, and worthy of those dreams we so deeply desire. Because what we are really saying to ourselves when we deny ourselves “luxuries” like a healer or psychologist is “I’m not worth it”. It’s true, deep down we really don’t believe we are worth it, that’s why we’d rather spend money on numbing and distracting ourselves from this painful truth. 

Each and everyone of us has deep rooted self-worth issues stemming back to childhood when our perfection wasn’t reflected back to us from our parents and peers - “I’m unworthy of love”, “I’m not good enough” etc. etc. These beliefs keep us trapped in our dysfunctional behaviour patterns and our limiting beliefs - the very thing that healers, coaches and psychologists are there to help us with. 

Yet, we will not invest. We may tell ourselves self-deceiving stories such as “it’s not the right time” or “I’m too busy”, which reinforces the subconscious belief that our health and wellbeing is secondary to everything else in our life. We trick ourselves into believing that whatever else we have on is more important when it just plain isn’t. There is nothing more important than our personal health and wellbeing. Nothing. And that includes the health of our family, because what use are we to our family when we are not healthy? What kind of example are we setting for our kids if we don’t look after ourselves or aspire to do great things? Can’t we see we will be a better mother / father / husband / wife / employee / business owner, if we prioritised our health and wellbeing?

It all comes down to our limiting beliefs, the beliefs that have been conditioned into us from our parents and society. None are more prevalent around this issue than the belief in “scarcity”. The belief that “I don’t have enough”. This belief creates a perception of the world that “there is not enough X” - X being money, time, resources etc. We believe our resources are scarce and that we must be very stringent with them because the world's resources are scarce and we probably won’t get those resources back. This is the belief and although it accounts for all the greed in the world, it is not a reality.

The reality is that the world is totally abundant in resources. There has never been a more abundant time where money can easily flow to us from any number of avenues, often in a matter of moments. But this is not what we were taught, and so this is not what the subconscious mind believes. The subconscious mind believes that money is precious and there are limited amounts of it, so we must look after it - kind of like Smeagol in Lord of The Rings - “My precious”. It doesn’t have any understanding of “self-investment” - the idea that you can invest money in yourself now, so that you will get returns on that investment later, whether that be in health or indeed more money.

Interestingly it's quite a paradoxical belief given that healthier people tend to make more money, whilst unhealthier people tend to struggle financially. Our health is inextricably tied to our wellbeing - financial or otherwise. 

Deeper than this is the belief that “money = love”, which we unconsciously learn to associate as children when our parents give us gifts or allowance money. Most of us learn that love is conditional, based on our good behaviour. If we are good we get rewarded - a gift symbolising our parents' love. If we are bad we get scolded and unconsciously believe that love, like gifts and money, is scarce and dependent on specific conditions. This belief is why it is sometimes so painful for us to part with our money. It literally feels like we are giving our love away when we do it and that we won’t ever get it back.

So, when we spend money on our health and wellbeing we are not giving away our love or wasting our money we are giving ourselves love and investing our money - it just doesn’t feel like it in the beginning. However, like all conditioning it can be overwritten with time and persistence. 

Up until early 2021 I had never willingly invested a single dollar in my health and wellbeing - only reluctantly for doctors and dentists, but something changed in me at that time. I had been on my healing and deconditioning journey for about two years and had been relentlessly doing it all myself, believing that I didn’t “need help”. Aside from the beliefs mentioned above, I believe I felt there was shame in getting help from another, like it meant that I wasn’t capable enough myself - another limiting belief. 

Recognising this, I decided to invest in my first “course” - part healing, part further education, which after turning out to be a great success, opened the door to more courses and more healings. Suddenly, it felt so good to be investing in myself - my health, my skills and my intelligence, and it felt amazing to be getting knowledge, wisdom and healing from amazing people further along the path than I. 

Since that point I have spent well over $7k on personal healing and over $20k on further education and courses and the vast majority of it I have felt to be vital to making me into the man and healer I am today - who said getting healthy and educated was cheap? 

It ain’t cheap and it shouldn't be cheap, not if you are investing well into yourself. With the exception of a tiny minority who spontaneously self-realised, all the teachers and healers you see out there have invested handsomely in themselves in order to become the people they are today - some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars e.g. Tony Robbins. If you are looking for bargains in healing and courses you are likely cheating yourself, but it can be really affordable.

I realised early on that it was important to practice discernment, to be really clear on what you want, who can genuinely help you get it and what may just be something flashy that caught your attention. For this, you need to rely on your intuition, which never lies or sends you down a wrong path. 

If we all just started asking our hearts, which believe in abundance and the need for expansion, rather than our minds, which believe in scarcity and the need for security, we would be spending A LOT more on ourselves and we would begin growing and transforming at an incredible rate. Old patterns would disappear, we would become healthier and happier and our dreams would start to seem more like yet to be realised realities rather than figments of our imagination. 

Now doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile investment?

With Love,

Alex, Your Friendly Neighbourhood Shaman