In Alignment with My Higher and More Authentic Self
I’ve been grappling with my home improvement want list. I’ve been living in the same house for five years, a record for me. As you can imagine, merging households with my mother in law has been a slow process. I am very much a "do it now, closure, impulsive spender” type person, so it’s hard to wait. It’s really hard to wait. This year, we built a new office for me once my husband and I realized we could no longer share our home office (bedroom) during the pandemic. I want rugs, art, plants and dishes for that space alone, not to mention many other empty walls and several large projects like flattening walls, landscaping and replacing the deck.
As a financial coach, and former debtor / overspender, I need to work on sustaining my own healthy relationship with money too. After all these years, sometimes tending to my finances feels easy, but there are times I struggle with the basic routines (tracking, bill paying, paperwork). For me, resisting my money is a form of avoiding the truth. While I would much rather get everything I want as soon as possible, that is just not my reality. I share money with my husband and we rubbed all of our pennies together this year for our construction project (a luxury, I admit) but there isn’t much, actually there aren’t any reserves leftover for the kind of spending I want to do, so it would not be in integrity.
One of the many take-aways I got from taking five courses at Landmark Education LINK, is that integrity means doing what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. Since 2010, I’ve been sharing my experience, strength, wisdom and advice on the best practices for healthy personal and small business finances. I can’t stop now! I can’t ignore what I know, what I teach other people and go against the very practices and principles my clients are I work so hard on together.
This fall, I lost a lot and without regular childcare, I had to (got to!) spend more time with my kids. I was forced to drop the to-do lists, projects and many of my expectations. Life invited me to slow down and tune into nature again. And actually embody the dream I had for so long, being a mom. I relearned how to speak deeply and intuitively with my family. I was able to put the phone down, be more present and literally did not have time to scroll on social media. I don’t miss it. I am relieved and free from the pull. I feel back in alignment with my higher and more authentic self. I didn’t set out for this, in fact, I was planning to be "busy-busy” this fall with other things, but none of it mattered in the end and there was a certain peace with letting go. What’s honest and realistic is that this fall health, family and love came first.