I Told Women to Stop Digging Into Their Wounds. But I Wasn't Following My Own Advice.

For years, I told women to stop digging into the wound.

Get your energy up first. Then look at the money, or the wound, or the challenge. From an elevated place.

Honestly? I wasn't practising what I preached. I was saying the words. But my energy wasn't elevated. I was out of alignment.

I was at the end of my fifty-third year. Still menstruating. I know, WTF! Brain foggy, annoyed, and not functioning on all cylinders. Some days it took everything I had to climb back to my centre. Some days it never happened.

It's true. It's not an excuse. I've had fifty-three years of practising, of leading my own mind and my own body. I knew how to do this. But in that moment I was doing it in the fog, which is its own kind of work. Heavy lifting.

And some parts of it are working. I lost fourteen pounds in four months. Slow. No shortcuts. Eating in a way that actually feels possible for me. Some days I fall off. Then I come back. That's the whole thing. I have so many examples of how falling off the wagon is a type of learning.

But first, I realized that my energy was running backwards. Ahhh! Exhausting actually.

Maybe twenty percent of me was lit up. Possibility. Belief. Creativity. Aliveness in the actual cells. The other eighty percent was busy and heavy, grinding through work that never seemed to move the needle.

Now, this ratio of 80/20 showed up everywhere. In my body. In my business. In the type of people I was attracting.

So I decided to flip it. Eighty percent elevated. Twenty percent everything else. That's the practice now. Not perfect but getting there.

The part I don't usually talk about is my sh*t.

Don't get me wrong, I love my clients. The work they do is incredible. I mean that.

I could see my limitations, and I just couldn't bust through them. We can only take someone about as far as we've gone ourselves. A little below where we function from. Not past it. And my clients were showing me that. The type of clients I attracted didn't play HUGE. Some played big and expanded, but not HUGE. They also couldn’t sustain the growth and success.

When you try to take someone further than you've actually gone, imposter syndrome walks in. That "who am I to do this" feeling. Not enough. And over time it wears you down. It's not a business you can sustain. It's not something that feels like alignment.

Especially in this work about money. I help women get aligned with their money. If I'm not aligned with mine, my body knows. My business doesn't grow, and I stay the same.

So the ceiling, for me and my clients, is co-created. We attract the level we're vibrating at.

Then life does what life does

You get sick. Someone dies. Menopause disorganizes you. You and your partner want different things. The ordinary weight of a challenge pulls you out of alignment.

It's going to happen. To you, to me, to everyone.

I say this to clients all the time.

Build the system.

Understand your numbers.

And I promise you, you'll fall off.

You will. Everyone does.

The measure was never whether you fall.

It's how long it takes you to get back on.

This is magic and so important to remember. I've learned this over and over again. The bigger you go, bigger business, bigger dreams, bigger love, bigger capacity,

The more you'll fall off.

That's not failure.

While you're expanding, you're building the muscle to hold this new size. So when you slip, the climb back is shorter than it used to be. We get stronger and more resilient, and we know how to get back into alignment.

Falling off is contrast. And contrast is how we create. It's how we learn what we like and what we don't. What we want and what we're finally done with. Who we are, and who we thought we were, and who we're becoming.

So I celebrate the fall now. I don't shame myself for it. It's not the opposite of the work. It is the work. I now measure how long it takes me to get back into alignment.

Last week my stepdaughter modelled alignment in a beautiful way.

Rebekah didn't just want a birthday party this year. She wanted to lead a sharing circle.

Leading people into alignment is her actual vision, so she made her own birthday the place to practise it. She told everyone up front. Cacao, meditation, journaling, sharing.

About twenty-five people came, and thirteen stayed for the circle. Not everyone's ready, and that's okay.

The thirteen who stayed. Something beautiful happened in that room. We imagined the year ahead. We wrote down what we're ready to let go of, and we burned it.

We shared what we' were calling in for this next year.

And almost everyone said the same thing. "I keep thinking I should do this. I never do."

Once a year isn't enough. Doing it regularly keeps you in alignment. Birthday, New Years, once a month even. Recalibrate regularly.

I watched these thirty-somethings build their lives from alignment on purpose, and I felt that energy in my own body again. I'm not envying it. I'm allowing it back in. Fifty-three years of momentum is mine, and I'm stepping into it. I get to borrow the benefits of my thirty-year-old self and build the second half of my life on top of everything I already know.

Now bring this to money

Because that's where I live.

Most of us open the banking app from the a low vibration. Braced for the summer numbers. The over spend. Then we try to plan September from there.

You can't build a bigger life from a nervous system that's flinching. And you can't step into an aligned life from an unaligned place.

Let's flip it. Elevate first. Then look. Be in the possibility mindset, and then do the work.

September's almost here. Back to school. The big spends are real. And you'll meet them so differently from a settled body than a braced one.

Start with the energy. The numbers come after. And then it is about building your future vision now and living into it.

Picture Your Prosperity is the tool for exactly this. The envisioning, the future self, the becoming. It's free, and it's where the reset starts. www.brendastlouis.com/Pictureyourprosperity

And when you're ready to take the vision into your real September numbers, that's Paycheck to Prosperity. Forty-seven dollars to begin. The place the elevated energy turns into an actual system you can hold. Check it out here: https://www.brendastlouis.com/paycheck-to-prosperity

With love, Brenda