Money is more than just a currency; it’s a deeply personal experience tied to our emotions, body, and sense of self-worth.
In this episode, Aimee explores the topic of money trauma—exploring its roots, its impact on our bodies, and how recognizing and releasing these traumas can bring financial and emotional healing.
She also provides valuable insights for anyone looking to understand and heal their relationship with money through a mind-body approach.
So, whether you're dealing with stress around finances or looking to uncover hidden patterns, stay tuned as this conversation sheds light on money as a pathway to personal growth.
In this podcast episode, Aimee shares:
- How financial stress in Western societies creates "money trauma"
- The concept of money trauma and its effects on the body and nervous system
- Aimee’s personal journey with money trauma from her childhood
- Why feeling guilty about wanting wealth might stem from childhood experiences
- Nine signs that indicate money trauma is stored in the body
- The surprising connection between back pain and financial insecurity
- The importance of self-worth in healing and progressing financially
- Ways to recognize your body's response to financial stress
- Practical techniques for releasing money-related tension from your body
- How somatic release work can help release stored money trauma
And so much more!
Follow Aimee Takaya on:
IG: @aimeetakaya
Facebook: Aimee Takaya
Learn more about Aimee Takaya, Hanna Somatic Education, and The Radiance Program at www.freeyoursoma.com.
LISTEN WHILE READING!
A: Hey there, FreeYourSoma listener. Have you felt stressed and frustrated by our financial situation in the world? Money is a huge source of stress for many of us growing up, especially in Western nations, not to mention everywhere in the world.
In today's podcast, we're going to explore the way that money trauma is held in our bodies and the way that you can start releasing it and bringing back balance not only to your nervous system, but to your financial world. Stay tuned.
A: Every day, there is a forgetting, and every moment there is the possibility of remembering. Remembering who you truly are, awakening to your body, to the inner world, to the experience of being alive. Here is where you find the beauty, the joy, and here is where you free your Soma. I'm your host, Aimee Takaya. I'm here to help you move from pain to power, from tension to expansion, and ultimately from fear to love.
A: Hello, everybody. Okay, I have been really excited about recording this podcast for a while, and I've actually been sitting with some of this for years, some of what I'm about to share with you. And so, disclaimer, I want you to understand that the things that I'm going to be speaking about today are from my own experience, and I'm not finished healing these things. It's an ongoing practice, just like regulating my nervous system and taking care of my body is an ongoing practice.
Okay, it's never over, and there's always more and more that we can become comfortable with, that we can become more free to experience, that we can become more safe to experience. Right? So the things that I'm going to share with you today, you're probably going to relate to a lot of them, but don't feel like it's some sort of achievement or like, oh, I got to hurry up and get over these things.
There's a lot to learn in these processes in this somatic awakening journey, and each step along the way is actually really valuable and important. Right? So I'm going to talk about the nine signs that your body is holding money trauma. Okay, I've kind of broken it down into all these different categories. And the ninth one, right, the final one I'm going to talk about, actually relates to all of the above eight.
Okay, so it's kind of like the fundamental challenge that a lot of us have around money, but also around self-worth, and also around like, you know, moving forward in life, right, in the various ways that people look to move forward in life, whether it's through their relationships, their financial wealth and position in the world, or their own personal happiness. Okay, so number nine, super important, hang on till the end. Okay.
All right, so a little bit of backstory about me. I grew up in a single-mother household, and my dad, as many of you have maybe heard about him, I'm going to interview him eventually on the podcast. He has been such an incredible somatic mentor to me, and a transformational like human being in my life. And he has struggled financially pretty much his entire life, just not wanting to deal with or knowing how to handle money.
Okay. And I inherited some of that from him, not to mention my mother's own struggles with money. And I mean, we could really go back into kind of the lineage and the stories and the histories that many of us have, where our families came from very little, or they came from, you know, having had some kind of wealth and then having it taken away or having some kind of, you know, challenge in which they lost everything and then rebuilding from that place, right.
And their descendants, like me, still carrying on some behaviors and money habits, habits and behaviors around money that are not particularly helpful, but are part of a healing process. Okay. So when I grew up, I really didn't have a lot of financial literacy. And I just want to say that's like super normal, especially in this country, for many of us to grow up without any financial literacy, and for our parents actually to have grown up without a lot of financial literacy.
So what I found out and learned about money was through my own living experience, you know, in my, in my childhood, in my life, watching how the adults in my world handled their money situation. And the one in particular was my mother, right? And so a lot of these kinds of money traumas, quote-unquote, that I have experienced, I recognize came from witnessing my mother going through these same cycles and behaviors around money. Okay. So let's get right down to it.
The number one sign that your body is holding money trauma is feeling guilty about wanting and desiring wealth. Now, this may not be something that you're consciously aware of. I wasn't totally consciously aware of it myself, that I felt shame and guilt about wanting money, that somewhere along the lines in my childhood, I had picked up on this idea, you know, through things, what do you have it like Robin Hood or looking at ultra-wealthy people in the world, you know, and feeling like I'm seeing all the disparity, the lack of wealth for others, you know, the lack of wealth in my own upbringing, that at some point I got the message that wanting and desiring wealth was shameful, right. And that maybe even having a lot of wealth was morally wrong. Right?
And I didn't even realize that I was like holding that belief pattern until it started unwinding until I started getting in touch with my body and doing the somatic release work, which is what I do full time now, right, for with and for others, right? I got in touch with the depth of that feeling of shame in my body and noticed when it would come up around financial things, around watching someone gain a lot of wealth and feeling this like paying of like jealousy or frustration and also immediately jumping to like, you know, thinking there's something must be something like shady that's going on, they can't be, you know, making this amount of wealth and it be altruistic, you know, purely they have to be kind of doing something wrong in order to achieve that kind of wealth, right.
And so as I started to unpack this, I realized that you know, the guilt and shame that I was carrying about desiring wealth and money, about wanting that for myself, was absolutely getting in the way of me being able to achieve some kind of financial freedom, some kind of financial independence. And so that's, that's a good place to start is asking yourself the question and noticing yourself as you go about your day as you go about your life when you have these desires for more wealth and wealth comes in all forms, it's not just physical currency, it's a quality of life. It's having leisure time in your day where you're not grinding where you're not going after it, like, are you feeling guilty about wanting and desiring more leisure time?
Are you feeling like there's something shameful and wrong about that for you to not be productive all the time, right? Just start noticing that and noticing where it's showing up in your body. You know, for me, a lot of it was in my sacral area was in my hips, and in my lower belly.
I would feel myself kind of clench and tighten up there when I would have a desire for, I don't know, like a beautiful vacation where I could just like lay around and do nothing, or even laying in bed and like luxuriously just pleasure reading a book for hours on end. You know, that's a form of wealth in my opinion that we're not, you know, grinding, working our asses off trying to get our basic needs met. You're feeling guilty about that. Like I said, number one sign that your body is holding on to some money trauma to some trauma around wealth and worth. Okay.
Number two, on the signs that you're holding money trauma in your body, that you're spending frivolously and compulsively to feel more regulated in your nervous system. Okay? So many of you may be familiar with this idea that when we do certain things, there's certain behaviors, we get this little hit of dopamine, right? That is exactly what happens when you buy something. And this is not to just like minimize it. This is like for real, like retail therapy, that is real. We feel better, and we feel good in our physical bodies when we get those neurotransmitters like activated, right? When we buy something.
And so if you are finding that you're kind of leaning into that, or even very compulsively anytime that you're feeling overwhelmed or distraught or down or depressed that you find yourself like going on those little apps like Amazon and Poshmark. I'm so talking about myself here, right? And finding that you're like looking at a new cute outfit when you actually have like a thousand super cute outfits in your closet, right?
When you're going through the store, and you don't really need anything more in the store, but you're now just like browsing and looking for some kind of extraneous fun things to buy. This is kind of a relationship again with money or with what's valuable, where we're kind of just using it as a way to feel a little bit better for a moment. And this can be also a sign that we're holding money trauma in our bodies because we're not really fully respecting the currency of money. Now, I just want to say that you can totally like spend money on frivolous things and enjoy it. There's nothing wrong with that.
I'm talking about when it's become compulsive, when it's become one of your major coping mechanisms for how to get through the day or for how to get through like a difficult emotion rather than having the capacity to sit with it, having tools to regulate yourself beyond going out and buying like a cute new sweater. Because the truth is, is that buying that cute new sweater, it like wears off really fast. And then you're like a hungry ghost just reaching for the next thing to get that little hit of dopamine to feel a little bit better. And your pocket's going to run dry. You're going to find that, oh my god, how did I spend like this much money at Sephora?
Like I'm not even using all these products. This is another sign that I said, like I said, you're holding some patterning around money that can be traumatic problematic over time, that it's become this way that you're coping instead of actually dealing with the upset, the emotions, the fears, the sensations in your body that are asking to be felt, asking to be experienced so that you can be present and learn and regulate. Again, not knocking retail therapy, there's a time and a place, I'm talking about, but it's become very compulsive and frivolous, and it's become that crutch.
Number three, sign that you're holding money trauma in your body. Back pain. You might think your back pain is from sitting at your desk all day. It might be from that injury that you had playing sports 15 years ago, the car accident, having a baby, and it's not from those things. It's absolutely part of the contraction in your back. And there can be a psychosomatic layer of contraction in your lower back muscles that's about not feeling supported. Your back is the support of your whole body as you stand up and walk around.
There's some of the deepest, strongest muscles in your body that you started developing as an infant to hold up your head, to walk around in the world, and to basically be part of the world. And when we don't feel supported, when we're holding onto a belief or an experience in our lineage, perhaps, or in our own personal lifetime, where we don't feel supported by the world at large, we don't feel supported by God or the universe, we're not sure that God or the universe actually has our back. And there can be very good reasons why we're questioning this, why we're not sure of it.
We may have gone through a specific trauma around money. We may have lost a lot of money at one point, or maybe someone in our lineage had, and you may have been destitute. We may have thought that we could trust someone with our money and then found that we couldn't, and we lose that faith in ourselves and we lose that faith in others that we are going to be supported and that we can support ourselves.
So sometimes a layer of discomfort and pain that is going on in your back can absolutely be about not feeling that support in a financial way from yourself, from your partner, and from the world at large. It's an absence of trust that you're going to be held and supported no matter what. And that can be a really interesting thing to unwind because I'm not going to be giving you mindset tricks for this. Absolutely. Use those. They're great. Use affirmations. Absolutely great. It's not going to go as deeply into your body unless you somatically release the muscular contraction on a physical level.
It is actually in the decreasing of the muscular tonicity through the only part of your brain that can do that, which is your motor cortex, that you're going to actually release and have access to that muscle pattern, slash belief, slash mental, emotional construct, slash patterning, whatever we want to call it, that feeling that you're not supported, that feeling that you're weak in your back, that feeling that your back is about to give out on you at any moment. It has to be released on a muscular level for all of those other things to work well. That's my personal belief because my body is very like physical.
Yes, I'm sensitive to energies and things like that, but I need things that literally work with my physical body. And I've had to learn this over and over. There are no shortcuts in terms of actually changing the physical structure of what's happening in your brain and your body. That is the deepest point that we can go to. And then all of the other things, the energy work, the mental and emotional work, is going to work that much better because we have that basis, that foundation of actually changing what our brain is doing in relation to our neuromuscular system or any other system in your body for that matter because they're all connected.
Okay, so back pain and addressing it on a neuromuscular level can absolutely be a huge step in healing your issues around money and wealth. And like I said, I'm going to keep going into this, all the things that we kind of want to improve our quality of life that come from a feeling of worthiness and being of value in the world.
Number four. Sign that your body is holding onto money trauma. You are afraid to take risks and you're staying in your comfort zone financially, even as your dreams call to you. This is kind of related, as you can see, to this idea of trust. Trusting that it's okay to make an investment, to actually take a big leap forward, not knowing exactly how it's going to turn out. That you can trust that even if worst-case scenario, it doesn't work out, you're going to be able to pick yourself back up again and be okay and recover from whatever it is.
But that it's so much more valuable and necessary to go after our dreams in life and not let the idea of, I'm going to go into this in a moment, but debt or losing money scare us away from chasing after what we really want in life. So I'm going to tell a little story here about kind of actually the basis of FreeYourSoma of my business. So this is after several years of somatic releasing, I have to say. So I had already done a fair amount of releasing in my system.
And this is a story that demonstrates how even when you have done a lot of releasing like there are layers, there are layers and layers that you're still continuing to work through and release at the pace that your nervous system is ready to actually work through those things. I realized I really didn't want to keep working the job that I'd been working.
It was starting to feel so unresonant on all these different levels. And I'm actually going to share more about this story in a podcast some other time. But basics kind of here are that I was working as a live-in caregiver for a disabled woman. And this was during the time that I had first had my sons, who he was like five months old when I started working for her. And I worked for her for several years as a live-in caregiver.
And it was hard work. And especially because she had a certain kind of lifestyle and certain kinds of habits that were really not in alignment with how I choose to live my life. So being exposed to that constantly was challenging for me, especially because I know from my personal experience that we can heal our bodies through natural means. And I'm not knocking medication or other more allopathic ways of doing things.
Those can actually absolutely be part of it. But my focus has always been on healing my body through eating healthier food, cutting out toxic things, and working with my body to achieve better and better health. Seeing my body as something that I want to invest in, invest my time and energy in.
However, this woman was living in an entirely different paradigm in which she was basically just waiting around to die and really not that interested in doing anything that was healthy because she honestly, my judgment on is that she had a lot of self-loathing. She had a lot of shame that she was living with that she had never really dealt with properly. And so she was just enjoying the last little leg of her life.
And she did that through drinking soda, watching reality TV all the time, and eating a lot of fast food, junk food, constantly eating candy, just all these things. And when I kind of saw the way that she was living, I tried to make some slight adjustments with her if she wasn't super open to it. I did get her to start drinking water, and she did give me cred for that, that I was one of the first caregivers who got her to start drinking water.
But basically, after several years of this, it didn't really feel like caregiving to me. It felt like I was just helping her kill herself slowly, which was very, very hard on my heart and very, very hard on me. And so I really didn't want to work this job anymore. And yet, I felt very locked in and dependent on it because I hadn't figured out how to make semantics a thing that would finance my life. Long story short, I tried a few different things, one of which was opening an Etsy shop, taking an idea and creating a brand, and opening Moon and Libra Vintage, which is still up if you want to go check out my little vintage shop.
I don't really like post a lot of things on it recently, but it's there. And that was my first experience of taking an idea and turning it into something viable and actually making a bit of an investment. I spent the money on the product. I went out to places and got the product to sell in the store, and I invested my time and my energy in that. And it was relatively successful. It wasn't successful enough that I could quit my job yet, but it was something that was working out.
I see on my Instagram feed a friend of mine who I met while I was traveling as a yoga teacher in my 20s, and she has become a business coach. And she is saying, you have a message. You have skills. Let's turn them into an online program. So I really kept feeling like her messages were speaking right to me. I started thinking about the ways in which I could take semantics and also the food healing philosophies that I had developed and turn them into something really viable. And her posts were convincing me and convincing me.
I ended up hopping on a call with her, attending a few of her, like, you know, live, whatever, going live on Facebook to talk about her work. And I was like, I need to do this. And yet I had this story going on in my head, in my body, that it was too expensive. Now, was it too expensive? I don't know. She charges like 10 times more than what I paid now. I think it was like still like less than $2,000 for her three-month program.
And I still had it in my head that it was too expensive. And I waited until like two weeks before the program started, even though I'd been eyeing it for like months to actually take the leap and commit. And I had told her that multiple times, I just can't afford it. I just can't afford it. And part of it was that I had just spent that money, you know, on the Etsy shop development, and it hadn't really paid off yet. So this was like another risk that I was asking my body and my nervous system to take. But thank God I did.
And I'm considered one of her great success stories, because I earned back, you know, that $1,500, $2,000 that I spent, I earned that back, being able to start talking about and promoting my work and selling what is now my radiance program. I was able to sell that to two people individually, right, to do the program as like a beta with those two people for six months. And then, like month three or four of working with those individuals, I felt confident enough to start my online six-month program, right, like the group one, not just one-on-one.
And that first round, I had three or four, it was four participants, right, who paid me, you know, multiple thousands of dollars, I think that I started at $5,000 for my program, right? And this was a huge leap forward for me to take that initial risk of going from I can't afford this to I can't afford not to do this. Now, I will say the reason that I was such a wild success story for her and probably many other people who are able to really go and take like an online program and just run with it and become like rock stars at it and achieve what they want to achieve, it's not just all about ambition.
It's about how passionate is the person and how regulated is their nervous system. I don't think I could have even like said yes to taking that leap if I hadn't had this foundation of more and more somatic safety in my body, right, that I see as being like the huge game changer here. So afraid to take risks, staying in your comfort zone financially, telling yourself you can't afford that investment in yourself, right? The biggest investments you can make are in yourself and your own well-being. Okay, I'm going to say that again. The biggest, most valuable investments that pay off the most in life are when we invest in our own well-being and our own development as human beings.
That is why I consider, you know, what I when I'm offering to people, yes, it's an investment, but it is something your body, your soul, your life, your 30, 30 years from now, your whole system will thank you for having learned how to release tension, stress, and pain from your body, like hands down 100%, you will not regret having learned how to actually physically relax and release pain and stress patterns from your body.
It is such, you know, a no-brainer kind of investment if you're ready to take that next step, right? So when you're thinking about the risks in your life, whether it's an investment, right, whether it's a vacation, you know, whether it's something that you really want for yourself or for your family. But what's holding you back or what is, you know, what you're afraid of is that you don't have the means or that it is going to cost something, and you're not sure how it's going to work out yet. I'm not saying, you know, be reckless.
I'm saying that there's a way, and it comes from regulating your nervous system and really regulating the stress, the ongoing stress that's going on in your body, healing those traumas and fears on a somatic level that you can start to feel more comfortable to take those calculated risks and to show up for your business, your family, your relationship in a way that is courageous and willing to step out into the unknown. So, yes, that was probably one of the longer ones here. I'm going to jump into five now.
A: Did you know that your muscles are holding on to thoughts, memories, and feelings? If you have a tight neck or back, you're not just getting old. You're experiencing a buildup of tension from the life you've lived. Most people don't know this, but there is a part of your brain that can reverse and prevent chronic tension. When you relax your muscles, you not only move better and regulate your nervous system, but you also free yourself from the grip the past has over your body. So you can live with freedom, confidence and enjoy your life now. How does that sound?
Join me, Aimee Takaya, and discover what my clients are raving about at youcanfreeyorsoma.com.
A: Five is actually connected. They're all connected, as you can see. It's this beautiful connected everything's kind of relating to everything else in this conversation.
If you have constant worrying and fear around debt and you're making it mean something about you, this one continues to go on in me and I continue to work with it and learn from it. I wouldn't say on a daily basis anymore for a while. It was daily.
Now it's like, I don't know, just intermittently. But I watched my mother go through bankruptcy when I was 13. Maybe some of you also watched your parents stress and struggle and get totally freaked out about debt. Maybe you even still have people in your life that are very alarmist about debt.
I feel like there's practically a culture that is built around being fearful and shameful about debt in our American society, which is super strange because most people are in debt. Now I'm not saying that that's like correct or that's a good thing. It's just how it is. And so I feel like considering that that's just how it is and that the status quo in this country is really important. is actually to be in debt, maybe we can start being with that in a realistic way rather than constantly shaming ourselves for it and like having intense anxiety about it constantly.
Now again, this goes back to regulating your nervous system. I had this kind of, I wouldn't say irrational, it's actually quite rational when I think about it, but I had this fear that my debt would get to a certain point that my nervous system wouldn't be able to handle it. Now it didn't sound like that in my head. It sounded more like I won't be able to handle having this much money that I owe other people.
I won't be able to handle being this far in the hole that I would have to go through bankruptcy, and I would imagine it would be like this little movie that would play in my head where I would be like, I would be like ashamed and I would be stressed and I would finally break down and like go through that process of you know, filling out the paperwork and doing all the things to declare bankruptcy and like, you know, I would just feel like my life was falling apart, right?
And you know, it took me some time of like really watching that movie to go like, wait a minute, like that's one version of events. Let me take this like worst-case scenario thing and like how would it be if I was doing all of those same things if I was going through bankruptcy, this horrible thing that I'm like terrified is going to happen to me because I saw it happen to my mother, right? And experienced her stress about it. What if I went through that experience and I was actually okay? I was actually like regulated. I was actually like able to call myself, right?
How radically different and experience that exact same thing could be where I'm filling out the paperwork, but instead of being stressed and freaked out and overwhelmed, I'm like proud of myself or accepting of myself, or I'm like, what a relief. It's going to be hard to rebuild after this rebuild my credit, but God, what a relief because this has been heavy on me, right? And I was able to actually feel like, in a strange way, kind of triumphant going through that process.
The other thing I looked at around debt, you know, is like, first of all, how many people are in debt. Here's my kitty for those of you who are watching the YouTube video. She tries to sit on my lap during these interviews or any time I'm in this chair and there really isn't a space for her.
So it gets kind of dramatic because I'm going to kick her off. It's like we have these stories about debt, and we make it mean something about ourselves that we're weak, that we're stupid, that we are negligent, that there's something wrong with us, that we can't figure out this whole money thing.
But we're literally living in a world that is designed to put you into debt, not just for your education but for really anything that you want in this world, you know, credit cards, blah, blah, blah. It is the whole construct of our modern society is built around, around, around loaning money, and then the loans themselves become a certain type of currency, and there's a huge market that is completely dependent upon American stain and debt. Now, is that fucked?
Yes, that's totally fucked up, and it is just the soup that we're in. So kind of back to this idea of working with it instead of against it, instead of using that paradigm to like make yourself wrong, how can you start to look at debt and your ability to get into debt as a strange form of abundance? Okay, because I was terrified of credit cards. I just didn't even have credit cards in my 20s, and like the one credit card that I have, I like forgot to pay it because I was so and we'll get to this avoidant, right, around my financial situation that it was like $300 on like a Kohl's credit card and like I think I ended up paying like $1300 in like fees on that thing, you know, over the course of several years because I just kept forgetting about it and not dealing with it.
You know, like, that's crazy, right? But I did that, and it was a learning experience. It also made me afraid to have cards again. Well, when I came back to the United States and I took on the somatic educator training, right? And at this point, I had been doing the somatic work with my dad already. I decided, like, okay, like I'm going to do it, like I'm going to get a credit card and I'm going to keep track of paying the minimum payment, and I did that.
And now here we are years later and the amount of money that I can borrow on my credit cards is absolutely insane. Like to me, it's insane, like that I could borrow like $150,000 on credit cards that I have credit cards that have these huge like, you know, five digit credit lines, right? I don't max them out. There's certainly not many where near maxed out. But I have access to that. If I needed it or wanted it, that's kind of crazy to me.
But I also look at that, and instead of being like terrified of it, I'm like, wow, this is like actually like a weird form of abundance. Or if you've been able to borrow money from a bank to get a house, if you've had the privilege of, you know, being able to incur debt, you know, through a financial institution, we don't think of that or see that as a privilege, but it absolutely is. There are some people who like don't qualify for that. There's some people who are so struggling with their getting their basic needs met, you know, for safety and like nutrition and all of the things that, you know, they can't really step into a higher functioning activity like regularly paying their credit card bill or even keeping a job, right?
There are people in the world who are struggling at that level. And your ability to actually be in some level of debt is a sign that you like have some level of regulation in your system or some red some level of health. So that's kind of flipping the script on the idea of debt, you know, and I'm not promoting that we should all be in debt, but the truth is most of us are already in debt. So how can we start to flip that narrative and work with that? And again, it's through regulating our nervous system, it's through releasing the stress in our body, so that we can show up to the debt conversation, even within ourselves differently.
Okay. Number six sign that your body is holding money trauma. A lack of trust in yourself that you can handle larger sums of money. Again, you can see how this kind of relates to what I was talking about about having those huge credit lines.
And it was a fearful for me at for a moment because I looked at those, and I was like, ooh, I don't know if I can handle that. That's like how much debt I could be in versus trusting myself, trusting myself that I can handle it, right? That I'm not going to be frivolous and silly about it, that I'm going to stay on top of things, that I'm going to be able to perform well enough in my job and, you know, take care of myself well enough that if something happens, like it's not going to be the end of the world, that I'll be able to get by and even thrive under, you know, circumstances that are challenging.
That's a level of trust in myself that I just didn't have. And again, it goes back to that idea of trusting ourselves to take financial leaps, right, to plunge into the unknown and make an investment in our well-being, right, or in our future. So the trust that I could handle larger sums of money, if you can imagine not having that trust, it's going to be much harder for you to buy a house.
It's going to be much harder for you to get that loan, right, when you're holding this lack of trust in yourself, when you're showing up to that conversation with the broker or the banker, with hesitation that you can actually be trusted. That trust that other people have in you, it has to start in you, and it has to be demonstrated through your way of being in that moment, that you show up as a person who trusts themselves and follows their truth, right, and is therefore trustworthy to others.
Number seven, and this is, you know, these are all of these are related, and I'm just excited to get you guys to number nine, because number nine is like going to tie it all together, like it's the huge theme of all of this that I've been talking about, right. So number seven, not charging enough for your services or undervaluing yourself, okay, so money trauma isn't just about money, it is about worth, it is about value, it is about what is of worth, what is a value, what do you value, what are you prioritizing in life. So when you're not charging enough for your services, you're basically telling the world like, I'm not as valuable as someone else who's charging what the what you know what the market rate is for this, right, I'm undervaluing myself, I'll be the cheap version of this.
Well, what is that going to do, like I can completely understand if you want to have a sliding scale, if you want to be accessible to people, you can do that while still having your standard price, right, you can do that while still saying like, this is what I'm, this is what I'm valued at, and I will make an exception for you. And I have these special offers for people who are, you know, struggling financially, that is absolutely possible. But what I'm talking about here is the belief that you're not worthy enough to charge that amount, who am I to charge $1,500 for an online program, who am I to ask for that raise at work?
Who are you not to, you know, what level of integrity do you have inside yourself? And if, if that's what's in the way, is feeling again, like you can't trust yourself, then there's a there's a fair amount of releasing that you really do need to do, because you're going to uncover your worth, you're going to uncover that trustworthy, steadfast part of yourself when you release the stories, the beliefs, and the physical contractions that keep you on that loop of believing that whatever happened in the past is defining you in the present.
The somatic work, again, the neuromuscular release work that I offer, hand-as-somatic education, not every hand-as-somatic educator's talking about it the way I do, I will say that, like if you go look it up on the internet, it's very clinical. My way of working with this is much more holistic, because that's been my experience with it. But ultimately, it's about releasing your physical body from the stories that are being held in your musculature, not just the stories that could be emotions, it could be fear, right?
It could be anything that's being stored in hell, that could be other people's experiences, which is kind of a trip. When we start to release that, when we unwind that, then we come back to who we really are. Then we discover who we really are underneath all of those things from the past, from our lineage, from our past relationships that weren't really us, but we had gotten so used to them that we had started to adapt ourselves to those stress patterns, to those emotional difficulties, right?
Because most of us never had a way of actually releasing that, processing it and integrating it into our full self. So it just accumulates. So when you start charging more, it's saying, this is what I'm worth, this is where the boundary is of my time and energy, and you actually have to start owning that in yourself.
And it's a journey. I still sometimes struggle with telling people what it costs to work with me, because I know that some people are going to be turned off by it. At the same time, I absolutely do when I tell someone what it costs to work with me, and they let me know, okay, I really do want to work with you, but I can't afford that, but I really do want to work with you. I'll let you know when I can afford it. I will turn it right around and say, okay, for a select number of people each year, I will cut the price in half.
I will work with you, right? Because it's more important to me to actually make a big difference in someone's life rather than just have a high price point. Now, I still need to hold my high price point because the work that I do is very, very valuable. And the specific energy that I bring to it, I guarantee you're not going to find it anywhere else the way that I do it, right? So that's the kind of confidence that you can build through releasing your muscular stress, tension, and pain, and actually start charging what you're worth, putting those boundaries up in your personal life of your time and energy or your resources.
Number eight, this one is also a doozy, and it's one that I still struggle with. And this extends to all different areas of life, not just money, but it's a one that's very, like, very easy for me to slip into in regards to money and my financial well-being, okay? And that's dissociating from my financial responsibilities. Avoidance, okay?
That means just not looking at my bank account for a while, not looking at my credit card bill for a while, not filing those receipts right away, but just letting them pile up and just not wanting to deal with it. And, you know, like I said, this is something I am still working through. And one of the really powerful little shifts for me in terms of, I don't know, changing the narrative, changing the stress pattern around this.
And it may sound like what I'm about to say is like a mental thing, but because of all the somatic work I've done, it's yeah, it's mental because my mental body is part of my physical body, it's part of my Soma, right? And if you're not clear on what I mean by that, then let's talk. But the thoughts that I'm having are actually part of my physical experience and the physical sensations.
It's simultaneous. That's basically what I'm saying, right? When I am dissociating from my financial responsibilities and avoiding certain things, I'm avoiding the sensation of stress. I'm avoiding the sensation of worry. And sometimes, there's a very good reason for that.
Maybe I am sensing in that where my nervous system is tuned at at this moment, looking at my bank account at 9.30 at night when I'm totally tired and wiped out, is actually going to stress me out and put me into a mindset or a physical state that is not conducive to sleeping or particularly helpful. And so avoiding it is actually super reasonable, smart, and perhaps necessary. However, staying in that avoidant pattern, even when I'm regulated enough to actually like do something sensible about it, you know, isn't isn't where I want to be.
So it takes that awareness for me to go, okay, I've been avoiding this for a little while, those receipts are piling up, like I'm going to take the time to put that on my calendar and get that shit done. Now, the other thing that's very important here, and it's a little mindset shift perhaps or a physical somatic shift in my experience, is that when I finally sit down to do it, do I give myself a hard time about it? Or do I congratulate myself for finally doing it?
Sometimes it's a combination of both, but I've been leaning more and more into, oh, you're such a good girl, good job on finally getting this done. You know, you are taking responsibility, you are doing it, even if it took you three, six months a year to do it. You know, for example, the first year of my business, I was completely overwhelmed by the idea of doing my taxes.
And yes, I could have gotten resources, I could have gotten coaching around it. But I was honestly in my dissociating mode, because I was still so focused on building my business that perhaps I didn't have the capacity to actually take on that level of learning while I was learning so much, you know, just from working with clients and things like that. So the first year that I ran my business, I didn't file taxes.
Now, that's not to say that I planned on never filing taxes, I just didn't do it that year. The second year of my business, I was feeling much more like capable and regulated around my business. And I felt like ready to just, you know, go legit and like do my taxes and do all the things, right? The second year of my business. And so I went back, you know, I started trying to do it myself, I realized, oh, this is not going to happen.
It's too much for me. And I hired a CPA. And I had my CPA file back taxes for the previous year. Now, in the past, I might have felt like ashamed of myself. Oh, I might have felt like a bad person that I didn't pay my taxes and I had to file back taxes. This time, I was like, you're doing it. I was congratulating myself the whole time.
I was feeling good in my body about having done that. Now, when I have to pay the IRS, like whatever I had to pay them, that was kind of unpleasant, right? But that's life, right? And not everything is going to feel good. And I can learn to be with that as well. So this is all to say that when we're dissociating from our financial responsibilities, when we're avoiding stuff like that, there are sometimes very good reasons for it.
So we're not going to knock that behavior. Sometimes that's exactly what you need to do at 10 o'clock at night when your spouse is like suddenly talking about the finances, you can feel yourself getting overwhelmed. And sometimes the exact thing to do is to shut that down because you're not going to sleep well if you can go keep going down that road. At the same time, when you finally do get that thing done, give yourself a hearty pat on the back, congratulate the fuck out of yourself. You are doing it. You are facing this stuff head on and taking responsibility. And you need to be rewarded rather than punished.
And all kinds of fun ways to reward ourselves for taking a step in the right direction. Number nine, this is the number one reason that we are holding money trauma in our bodies. And it's actually in that phrase holding money trauma. We're holding onto something. We're gripping a hold of something. We're clenched. We don't even know that we're clenched because we've been clenched for so long. Perhaps being clenched is just how we grew up. Maybe both of our parents are clenched and our grandparents were clenched and everybody was all, whoa, in this, what are they calling it now, like scarcity mindset.
There's not enough. Now, the number, the number nine sign that your body's holding money trauma is that you don't know how to and have not been taught how to actually receive. Receiving is something you can only do when there's openness. We cannot receive when there's no openness. Let's just literally imagine that idea of holding, holding onto money trauma, holding onto these patterns, holding onto these beliefs, holding onto these constructs, holding onto these identities in which we are small or trapped or less than or not deserving of, right?
And we're holding onto that. And maybe it's gripping our back or our neck or our jaw. If both of my hands are clenched tight around something and you try to hand me another something, I'm not going to be able to receive it very well because I either have to drop what I'm holding or I have to figure out how to manage receiving that thing with my hands and arms full with my body already doing something. There's no openness.
There's no open hand ready to receive. This is the number one reason why we don't actually make progress in our relationships, right? And grow as people because our nervous systems and our bodies are already busy doing a bunch of stuff related to the past survival patterns, stress patterns, protection patterns. We're full up and we actually don't have the space to receive another person into our life, to receive that love, or to receive that nourishment when our system is already busy doing something else. The way to actually start receiving is by creating openness in your physical body, openness in your energy field, openness in your mind. And some of us think that we're open-minded, but then our bodies are all clenched up and tight.
And we're wondering, what's the disconnect? Why is it that I can release these things mentally and I can process things emotionally? And yet my body stays resistant. And yet when I'm with my lover or my partner, I feel like I'm not getting the love that I need.
Maybe, just maybe, and I'm speaking to myself like five years ago here, maybe the love that you want is actually right there waiting for you. It's about you dropping what's in the way of receiving that. This is maybe what some of these self-help kind of manifestation gurus would say too. What if the wealth that you want in life is just waiting there for you? That money is not this thing that you're not worthy of, you're absolutely worthy of wealth and deserving of money in life.
And yet we might have these beliefs, we might have these physical patterns that are keeping us from receiving what is already available and ready for us. Money is an energy. Money is a construct. And it's also something that in this day and age is necessary for our function and well-being.
And so looking at money instead of this like evil bad thing or this thing that I want that I can't have or this thing that I'm not sure I'm worthy of, what if money was just something that I could receive if my body, my Soma, my mind was open to receiving? So I would say not being able to receive and receiving also means listening. How well does one listen when another person speaks is a huge part of communication and actually being able to communicate with someone.
If you're sitting there and listening to the other person talk and your mind is racing a million miles a second and coming up with all the kinds of things that you can't wait to say in response or agreeing or disagreeing, that's really problematic because you're not receiving what the other person is saying. You're not receiving not just what they're saying but maybe what they're feeling, what they mean by what they're saying.
There's so much that can be going on in communication. There's so much listening can provide for us that is deeply nourishing if we're present for it and aware for it, if we're actually taking it in. So whenever I'm sitting there with a client or with a friend and I notice myself busy and not actually attending to what the person is saying, I know that I need a little bit more space in my life.
I know that I'm running on a little bit too high an elevation of my nervous system and that symptomatic movements, even just taking a deep breath and feeling the weight of my body in the chair, doing a little micro arch and slow release of my back is going to give me that reminder to actually settle in and receive what's available. So you can see through this conversation that when we're talking about money, especially talking about money trauma that's being held in our bodies, it's not just about the literal coin coinage and currency of money.
It is about self-worth. It is about self trust. It is about basically receiving what the world has to offer and trusting that we can be open and allow stuff to come in and not be so clinging on to things that we're afraid of letting it go out again, being so afraid of spending money that we hold back on our dreams. I hope that this has been helpful and enlightening to you all. I would love to hear your comments about what you got or what you related to in this podcast. It's an ongoing conversation that I'm having with myself.
I just want to toot my own horn for a second. I have come so far from who I was in my 20s around money. Like I said, that Cole's credit card, it was like a nightmare, and it was like constantly stressing me out for years because I was avoiding it. I wasn't dealing with it. I was still continuing to frivolously spend money and sometimes use the card even though I wasn't paying attention to when I needed to pay it. But more than anything, I just wanted to stay the hell away from money. Like I had this belief that having money was just going to bring me trouble. And so of course, I lived my life without money, and did I do well at that?
Sure. But I was broke all the time. I had just enough money to get from country to country. I had to borrow money sometimes. I had to get an advance on my yoga paycheck and it worked out. But it's so much better now to actually have a regulated nervous system over so many reasons. But money being one of them as well, that I can trust myself to make a financial risk or take a financial risk, that I can trust myself to have that conversation with someone about what it actually costs to work with me.
And that I can feel free to be flexible in all those areas and not stuck in one way of operating around my financial responsibilities and freedom. So again, if you have any thoughts on this conversation, hit me up on Instagram @AimeeTakaya and send me a DM. I do check my message requests from time to time. You can also follow me there at AimeeTakaya. You can check out the video version of this if you're not watching it already on YouTube at AimeeTakaya. And if you're interested in learning about how to actually release these muscle patterns and tensions and pain from your body because believe me, the benefits are remarkable. The benefits are miraculous, and the benefits are endless.
Go to youcanfreeyoursoma.com and you can book a call with me and we can start on this somatic adventure together. Okay, peace out everybody. Thank you again for listening. Have a beautiful day.
A: Hey there, friends. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I would love to hear your thoughts. Follow me on Instagram @AimeeTakaya, and send me a DM about this episode. I'd like to thank you for being part of this somatic revolution. And if you'd like to support the podcast and help more people learn about somatics, consider leaving a review or a rating.
And finally, if you'd like to have the experience of relief in your tight hips or back and learn to understand what your body is really saying to you, visit youcanfreeyoursoma.com. I can't wait to share with you what is truly possible. Bye for now.
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