The Cost of Avoidance: How to Stop Paying It - S1E8

If manifestation hasn’t fixed your relationship with money, it might be because you're fighting a nervous system response. What if ending financial avoidance began with addressing the “energy drain” at its somatic root?

 In this episode you’ll learn why financial avoidance can be so hard to stop, especially for midlife women who may have income, responsibility, experience, and intelligence, yet still feel financial anxiety when it’s time to look directly at money.

 We’ll look at the connection between high income anxiety, overworking and money, and the hidden energy drain that can keep you avoiding balances, decisions, conversations, or financial tasks. You’ll also learn why financial healing often has to begin in the body, especially when old money fear, pressure, or money trauma keeps your nervous system bracing before you ever take action.

00:00 The hidden cost of avoidance
01:52 When money tasks become charged
04:10 A charged example
05:27 Avoidance uses energy
07:33 What "Focusing" is (And how it shifts avoidance)
08:56 Why money avoidance lives in the body
09:50 The neighbor story and the feeling of being disregarded
13:28 Why inner work doesn't replace outer action
15:25 Guided Focusing practice for releasing financial avoidance
24:10 What to practice this week to anchor this new ability
25:20 What’s coming in the next two episodes

 In this episode of The Rhythm of Money, we explore the cost of avoidance, not as a character flaw, but as an energy pattern your body may have learned to repeat. Then we move into a guided practice to help you notice where avoidance lives in your body, soften the charge around it, and begin creating a different relationship with financial clarity.

 If this episode names something you recognize in yourself, the most helpful thing you can do for the show right now is leave a rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It takes about thirty seconds, and it helps the show find the next woman who needs it. Thanks so much if you do. 

 In the next episode, we’ll be looking at how to anchor your day in what sustains you, so there’s less to clear and more to build from. Follow or subscribe so you don’t miss it.

 This is The Rhythm of Money. Living your true note.

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome back to the rhythm of money. You know, the thing you're avoiding may already be costing you more than the thing itself. That unopened letter, that account you haven't logged into, that conversation you keep postponing, that financial question you keep moving to another day. It may not be the outer situation that's draining you the most. It may be the energy it takes to keep not looking. And I don't mean that as a motivational slogan. I mean that very literally. Because when something in your life becomes hard to approach, it doesn't simply disappear because you're not dealing with it. It keeps living somewhere in the background. You may be making coffee, answering emails, driving to the store, talking to someone you love. And still, somewhere in your system, that unresolved thing is there. Not fully conscious, not fully hidden, just quietly drawing from you. And in my years of working with people around money, both as a business consultant and as an investment advisor, I saw this many times. The issue was not always that the person didn't know what to do next. Often they knew. Open the letter, make the call, have the conversation, create the plan. But knowing the next step and being able to take the next step are not the same thing. Because by the time something has been avoided long enough, you're no longer just dealing with the task. You're dealing with everything the task has come to mean. That's what we're working with today. Because avoidance isn't just the absence of action. Avoidance takes energy. It takes energy to not open the letter. It takes energy to keep steering away from the account. It takes energy to keep telling yourself you'll deal with it later while some part of you is still carrying it all day long. And in my years of working with people around money, especially as an investment advisor, I saw this pattern many times. Capable people, responsible people, people who were often doing much better than they felt they were doing. But there was one area of their financial life they could not quite bring themselves to meet directly. And it's not because they didn't care, nor because they didn't understand that it mattered. Because the thing they were avoiding had become charged. It had started to feel like it would tell them something about themselves they didn't want to feel. And that's a very different problem than simply needing more information. And it needs a different kind of entry point. That's where we're going in this episode. If this is your first time here, stay right here. The show does build over time, and the earlier episodes are there when you want them, but this episode can stand on its own and still make sense. Today we're working on a very specific thing. The place where something in your financial life has become hard to approach, and how you begin shifting the inner experience of that before you focus on the outer action. The practice we're using today is called focusing. And I've used it in my own life for decades. And the first time I really understood what it could do, it actually had nothing to do with money. It had to do with an upstairs neighbor, hardwood floors, and months of being woken up in the middle of the night. And I'll tell you that story in a few minutes because it shows something about this practice that explanation alone doesn't quite capture. But first, let's bring this into the kind of money moment we're actually talking about. So think about an unopened letter from the IRS sitting on your counter. Right? So you picked up the mail, sorted through it, that one was in there, some things got opened right away, some things got put down. That one got put down for for later. Now it might be a bill. It might be nothing. It might be a threatening demand. It might be a routine notice, maybe a policy update. It might be something that requires no action at all. But you don't know because you haven't opened it. So now the letter is no longer just a letter. Now it has a presence. You see it when you walk into the kitchen, you see it when you go through that doorway, you see it when you make your coffee, you see it when you're trying to leave the house. And every time you pass it, something in your body responds. A little tightening, a low-level dread, a flash of irritation, a drop in the stomach, a sense of, I can't deal with this right now. And the strange thing is, you may not be consciously thinking about the letter most of the day, but part of you is still carrying it. That's what I mean when I say avoidance uses energy. The thing you're not looking at, it doesn't simply disappear from your system. It takes up residence somewhere in the background and it keeps drawing from you. It keeps asking to either be dealt with or pushed away again. And that pushing away becomes part of your days. Now imagine you open the letter and it turns out to be routine. Nothing owed, nothing wrong, nothing complicated. The relief you feel isn't just about the letter. It's about all the energy that comes back when you no longer have to hold the not knowing at bay. And even if the letter does require action, at least now you're working with reality instead of the fog around reality. That fog is often the most exhausting part. Now, before I go further, I want to ask you something. I gave you an example of a letter from the IRS, but is there some other place in your life, in your financial life, or honestly anywhere in your life, where you've noticed the avoidance itself costing you more than the actual situation probably would if you dealt with it? I'll put that question in the comments too. Because sometimes naming the pattern is the first moment the pattern starts to loosen. And here's the question: this episode is really built around. What if you didn't have to wait until you opened the letter or logged into the account or made the call to start getting some of that energy back? What if there was a way to work with the inner experience of the avoidance itself so that something in you begins to shift before the outer action happens? That's what focusing helps you do. Focusing is a practice developed by psychologist Dr. Eugene Ginlin from University of Chicago. We touched on the first layer of it in episode five. Today we're going to go a little deeper. The basic idea is this. Your body holds something about every situation in your life, including the ones you've been avoiding. Not as a thought exactly, not as an emotion exactly, as a felt sense. A felt sense, a felt wisdom, a felt knowing is the body's whole, quiet, not yet verbal experience of a situation. It's the thing you can feel before you can explain it. You may not know what to call it yet, but you can sense that something is there. It sometimes will feel tight. It sometimes will feel heavy or foggy, sharp, compressed, buzzing, hollow, dense, or just kind of difficult to approach at all. And when you give that felt sense your attention without trying to force it or fix it, something can begin to move. It's not always dramatically, and generally not all at once, but something in the system begins to shift. That's why this matters for money. Because many financial situations are not only practical, they carry meaning, and that meaning can get in the way of us dealing with it with our full capabilities available to us. They can touch safety, competence, trust, regret, shame, self-respect, the future, the past, the part of you that wants to be responsible, and the part of you that's afraid of what responsibility is going to ask of you. So when you're avoiding something financial, you may not only be avoiding the task, you may be avoiding the inner experience that has gathered around the task. And that's something we can creatively and productively engage. Now, let me tell you the story I mentioned at the beginning. At one point in my life, I was renting a room in Harlem. The building had hardwood floors, and I'm a light sleeper. A couple of months after moving in, I was exhausted. The upstairs neighbor seemed to be moving furniture around above my bedroom at around two o'clock in the morning, every single night, I mean, overnight. And I had to get up to start getting ready for work at 7 o'clock the next morning. I couldn't just sleep in because I was up two or three hours in the middle of the night. Now I talked to him several times, and each time he was kind and understanding. He said he would try to be quieter, but I still kept being woken up every night. So one evening I decided to do a focusing session on it. I let myself settle. I brought my attention to the situation, almost like bringing a flashlight towards something in a dark room. And I let myself feel what was actually there. But I didn't jump right to labels about it. I did the process that I'm about to teach you in a few minutes. What I eventually came to, after maybe 15 minutes of staying with what came up, I landed somewhere I hadn't consciously expected to go. The feeling underneath all of it was about being disregarded. That was the word. Disregarded. Not just annoyed, not just tired, not just frustrated or exhausted. Disregarded. Like my needs didn't matter enough to be taken seriously. And once that word came up, the whole thing opened because the feeling was connected to something much older than the neighbor. An image came to me, and with that image, feelings and thoughts came flooding in. And I thought of how my father had left when I was a toddler. And that same flavor of felt sense was there. The same sense of dismissal, the same sense that my needs were not important enough to change anything. That had been sitting underneath the neighbor situation the whole time. So I stayed with it. I let the practice unfold within me. I let the grief move through. And then I finished the practice normally. Went to bed that night at my usual time. And I woke up to my alarm the next morning. And the next day, the same. Went to bed at my regular time. Didn't wake up till the alarm rang at seven the next morning. And the next. Eventually I went upstairs and I left a note for the neighbor thanking him for whatever he had changed because he was no longer waking me up. He called and he said that he hadn't changed anything. That was his office. There was nothing he could do about his chair dragging on the floor when he got up and down in the middle of the night as he worked in that office. But he was glad it had stopped bothering me. Now, something had shifted, but it had shifted on the inside of me. And the outer experience, well, yeah, it changed in the sense that outwardly I was no longer getting woken up and I could sleep through the night, but nothing out of me changed in terms of somebody else doing something differently, right? The outer situation was the same, even though the experience of it was different. Now, I want to be very clear about what I'm saying and what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that inner work replaces outer action. It doesn't. Sometimes the letter just needs to get opened, right? The account just needs to be checked. The bill needs to be handled, the conversation needs to happen. But sometimes the part of us trying to take the action is carrying more than the action itself. And that's getting away from our being able to ideally meet the moment. It's carrying an older meaning sometimes, an older fear, an older feeling of being dismissed or judged or exposed or powerless or foolish or unsafe or alone. And when that layer is met, the next practical step can become more available. That's what we're going to practice now. We're not going to solve a whole financial situation. We're not going to force any action. And we're not going to make you push past yourself. We're going to meet the felt sense of the situation as it's living in your body right now. That's enough for today. So I want you to bring to mind the area of your financial life you've been most avoiding. Whatever comes to mind, let that be the one that we'll work with today. And you can always do other topics applying the same approach whenever you need. If you're driving or doing something that needs your full attention, don't do this practice right now. Just listen and kind of you know take in how it's done. And you can come back later to be guided as you actually do it. But if you're somewhere that you're able to settle, let's do it now. So settling wherever you are. Letting your shoulders soften, your jaw soften, letting your breath find a little more room than it had a moment ago. And feeling what's supporting your body right now. The chair, the floor, the ground, whatever is holding your body on the earth. Now bring to mind that area of your financial life you've been avoiding. We're not gonna analyze it or try to solve it, but just let the issue be present. Now notice where in your body you feel a response as you think about this issue. Is it in your chest, your stomach, your throat, or neck, or shoulders, your breath, or somewhere else? Just locate the response in your body. Alright, that response is the felt sense of this situation as it's living in you right now. It's not the situation itself, it's your body's experience of carrying it. And we're going to give it some more attention. So as we go, again, we're really focused on that feeling, on that felt sense in the body. If it starts getting so vague that you really aren't feeling it, just think a little bit more about the issue, what's involved, why you're avoiding it, what it would take to engage it. Think about it in those ways, but don't get lost in figuring it out. We're looking for the felt response to the body's reaction. So when you've thought about it enough that you can feel the reaction, just stay with the feeling and let go of the thoughts. So feeling more into this part of your body that's responding as you think about this topic with money. Now giving me the first answer that comes to mind with no editing. If this feeling had a color, what color would it be? Okay, but the first one that came to mind, that's the one. Now if this feeling had a shape, what shape would it be? Again, don't decide, you should just get a kind of a flash of an answer. So let it come from the feeling itself. If it had a shape, what shape would it be? Is it round like a sphere or flat like a circle? Is it pointed, tangled, square? Is it something with clear edges or something more diffuse? How large is it? Is it dense? Like something compact and heavy? Or is it more airy, more spread out? Just notice. Stay with the felt sense and the color, the shape, the density. Just being present with it. Your attention itself is what's doing the work right now. Now speak inwardly toward this felt sense and ask it, what are you? Don't look for an answer in your head just as we did with the color and the shape. Let whatever comes come from the feeling itself. It might be a word, an image, a memory, a sentence that arrives from somewhere. Or it might be quiet for now. That's fine too. Whatever came, let it be there without arguing with it or trying to fix it. What are you? Now take a breath in and let it out slowly. Notice if anything in the felt sense has shifted. Sometimes the color changes. Sometimes the shape softens or moves or transforms. Sometimes a word comes that feels exactly right, like something clicking into place. Sometimes very little seems to happen in the moment, and something shifts later, on its own. Either way, you've done something. You've given this situation your attention directly. Not by pushing past it, not by white knuckling through it, but by meeting what is actually there in the way that it's prepared to communicate with you. Now take one more breath and let your attention come back to the room. Come back fully to where you are now. What we just did is something Most people never learn to apply to their financial lives. The standard advice is usually very practical. Open the account, make the call, face the letter, handle the thing. And there's a place for that, there really is. But if the inner experience of that area of your life is sending up a strong enough signal, the just do it approach hits a wall. And that wall isn't made of laziness. It's not made of irresponsibility. It's made of something that needs to be met first. Focusing lets you meet it. Not to analyze it endlessly, not to perform some kind of emotional excavation before you're allowed to take action, but to give the felt sense your attention. Let something move, and find that the outer action may become more available on the other side. You don't have to feel completely different to have done this well. You might still feel some discomfort around the situation. That's fine. What matters is that you made contact with it. You didn't turn away. And if my neighbor's story surprised you, I understand that. I've thought about it a lot over the years. The part that stayed with me wasn't the outside world magically changing. It was that my experience of the outside world changed when the older meaning underneath it was finally met. That same thing can happen with money. The thing you've been avoiding, the letter, the account, the conversation, the decision, the thing that has been quietly draining your energy has a felt sense in your body and it is affecting more than you know it's affecting. And when you bring your attention to that felt sense, something can start to move before you've made a single external change. That doesn't mean the external change no longer matters. It means you may be able to approach it from a different place, a more empowered place. That's where I'd like you to take this practice this week. When you notice you're avoiding something in your financial life, even a small thing, instead of pushing yourself to just deal with it, try this first. Pause, bring the situation to mind, find where it lives in your body, give that place your attention. Notice the color, the shape, the density. Ask what it is. Stay with whatever comes. You might find the outer action becomes easier. You might find something else shifts instead. You might find that you need to do this more than once with a particular situation before something moves. All of that is normal. The practice is the same whether you're using it with an unopened letter, an account you know you need to open or move, a conversation you've been putting off, or something much bigger. You meet the inside of it first. Now, before we close, I want to give you a clear sense of where the next two episodes are going because we're entering the final stretch of season one, and what comes next is substantial. In the next episode, I'll give you the practice I do every single morning. It's only in like 10 seconds. It's not as long as what we just did. It's not a tool for hard moments. We have the reset for that, and it's not as deeper a process like we just did today. This is more of a daily baseline. It's something you do before the day demands anything of you, so that steadiness is already in you when it does. It's quick, less than 10 seconds, it's precise. And once you have it, it changes the ground you're standing on. And in the episode after that, we're going to do something we haven't done yet this season. We're going to look at the full picture, not one account or one letter, all of it. The assets and liabilities, the you know, what you own, what you owe, the cash flow, you know, what comes in, what comes out. You've heard some of these terms before. And we're going to arrive there from the steadiest ground you've had all season. This isn't a reckoning and it isn't a test you might fail. It's the moment the inner work begins to meet the outer terrain of your financial life. The thing that has been running your life from the shadows finally gets to step into the light. And once it's in the light, it becomes much more workable than the story you've been carrying about it. That's where we're going. This is the rhythm of money. And you're living your true note in this very moment.