Earning Versus Deserving

Healing deep subconscious wounding around money

If you’re doing the work to heal money wounds and rewire old stories about worth, this one’s for you.

It’s about untangling earning from deserving—two things we’ve been taught to confuse. This isn’t a money mindset pep talk. It’s a real moment from my own life, standing in front of a car I could afford but wasn’t sure if I deserved.

Call it subconscious reprogramming. Call it remembering what’s always been true. Either way, I hope it meets you where you are.

I woke up this happy, good Monday morning—the start of April—with a burning transmission about earning versus deserving, and I wanted to start to untangle those concepts, 'cause they are quite separate. Meaningfully separate. But… whatever it is—capitalist control structures, let’s call it—they’ve muddied the waters. It previously hasn’t been time for these concepts to become clear, but now it is time.

I’m gonna tell some stories from my own life.

I had a really hard time buying the car that I now drive. Let’s just cover that this is a 1995 Celica I bought for 85,000 pesos—like $4,200. And still, I struggled with: do I buy this? Do I not buy this? I had to move some money around, and it wasn’t the best time for me to be making a big purchase.

I’m struggling with another big purchase again, 'cause I’ve got a little over a thousand dollars’ worth of water purification stuff I’d really, really like to purchase for my home. My goal is to make these decisions without justifying that I deserve these things—'cause that’s shaky ground. I could feel I was standing on bullshit.

When I said, “I deserve this car,” I knew I didn’t effin’ deserve this car. If anybody deserves this car, everybody deserves this car.

In Mexico, cars are quite a luxury. Just the gas alone to keep one going, much less the cost of maintenance, purchasing, insurance, all that.

It’s more than that though, a world in which everyone has a car means no one can drive anywhere because the traffic is too bad. There’s more to unpack about a basic right to transportation than I can cover in this post, so put a pin in that, please.

So I knew I didn’t “deserve” the damn car, but I also had this upwelling sensation that it was correct for me to buy it, so I had to find the ground to actually stand on. Where I landed was: I earned the money. I have the money. There’s no problem.

I was checking in with my guides, checking in with divinity. There’s no problem with me buying the car. Well, why? Why do I get to buy a car if I don’t deserve it? Because I earned it. It’s really straightforward. I earned the money. I received the gift of this money from people who happily gave it to me, and now I get to happily give it to Enrique who’s selling it and would be delighted to sell it to me.

Earning and deserving have to be disentangled when you reach a certain point in your energetic journey—when you're cleaning out the gunk: the resentment, the hunger for more, the overcorrections, the reactivity, the repression. Pulling those two concepts apart clears out some of the cruft. It helps us start to feel into where society is fractured—where the story no longer holds.

What are the underlying things we all deserve?

We all deserve clean water. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world doesn’t have clean water. I don’t wanna go on a whole tirade about that, but it’s such a fundamental human right. That’s the difference: if I deserve it, everybody deserves it.

Everybody deserves clean water. I'm gonna stand on that. It’s absolutely fundamental to our health as human beings. We deserve clean air. We deserve clean food. We deserve clean homes. We deserve a home that is stable and safe.

There are things we just deserve. Humans have always deserved them. Does everybody always have them? No. That’s not the case. But don’t get tangled up in the evidence that because not everybody has it, you don’t deserve it either. No. We all deserve what we all deserve.

This is what I’d love to see us have more compassion around. How do we start to orient into a world where our actions bring about that superabundance for everyone Because the world in which everyone has clean water is a very different world than the one we inhabit.

So buy what you buy.

Be a good steward of the money you’ve earned. And I have a lot more humility now that I don’t think I "deserve" this car, you know what I mean? Like—it’s a gift. The money I received for my labor was a gift. My labor was a gift to them. Their money was a gift to me. And with that gift, I gifted myself a car. But it’s just a gift, and it can be taken away.

I just had my cell phone stolen.

The trick is removing your self-worth from your money in the bank and your material possessions. When you treat them with that lightness—that they are a gift—you take back your power from any thieves. And you can genuinely enjoy.

I know I’m not gonna have that '95 Celica forever. It’s a 30-year-old car. It might stop running. I might have to junk it. I might get in a crash. Somebody might steal it. Who knows? I might die.

I might still have that car in 2095 when I’m planning on dying. I doubt it, but who knows? Maybe. Maybe it'll be running on zero-point energy by then. That’d be hilarious. Maybe it'll be a flying Celica. That’d be hilarious too.

But still—I’ll lose it at the point of death.

That just makes it a much lighter and more enjoyable journey with our money and our possessions. Because even if you have a lot of money and a lot of possessions, it’s no cure for that anxiety.

There is no amount of money that will heal your money wounds. There’s just not.

If you don’t think Elon Musk has money wounds—or Bezos, or any of the millionaires or billionaires, most of whom we don’t even know the names of because they just wanna live in secret… their money kinda ruins their life. They have to live these strange lives where they hide from fame because so many people want their money.

Oh my God—it’s tragic and hilarious at the same time.

They don’t even know if people are in their life for the right reasons. Everybody’s motives get questioned—their wife, their children—the money poisons every interaction they have until they make peace with it.

It’s literally true no matter how poor or how rich: this essential aspect of healing your deservingness, healing your relationship to how you earn, how you spend, how you hold the life force that is money in your being, in your body—that’s the work.

Moving through the old programming we’ve all been given—that had its space and time, but is now being upgraded. It will not get us where we’re going, and the whole world is coming to that realization right now.

So: earning versus deserving. Hold that in your contemplation, please. I’d love to hear what comes up for you.

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