How I manifested an unexpected $35,000 tax refund — and what finally shifted after years of money mindset work, failures, and emotional suppression.
I have been learning prosperity and wealth consciousness tools for the past few years. Some of these programs have worked quite well for me. Others, not so much. I was still in pursuit of that holy grail that would help me make money in the way I had always desired — because money has always been a sticky area in my life. Something I wanted immensely, but deep down believed was never truly meant for me – at least in the way I was hoping for — not in the way of creating generational wealth.
How Your Financial Past Shapes You — For Better or Worse
When I was a child growing up in Mumbai in the 80s and 90s, I saw poverty on the streets. While I came from a middle-class family, my father had his own financial challenges, and some very firm money beliefs were hammered into me: we are not rich, middle class is a good thing, having your own business is too risky, get a safe 9-to-5 job, marry someone stable, study hard and get a good job.
While those beliefs helped me earn a great income, they didn’t afford the freedom I didn’t realize I craved — until I had my kids.
When you learn things during those tender years, they can have a lasting impact on your life decisions — for good and for bad. My parents had a tumultuous marriage. You often repeat patterns you witnessed in childhood because that chaos feels familiar and safe. Thankfully, I stumbled onto a book in 7th grade — Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus — that I borrowed from the library. My parents didn’t supervise my reading, and the foundations I built from that book still hold my marriage together to this day: full of kindness and devotion.
I do wish at times that I had picked up a Napoleon Hill book when I was younger as well. But my teenage self had other ideas about suitable reading.
The Gap Between Learning and Embodiment
When you’re young, you pick things up fast and embody them fast. But as you get older and your foundation solidifies, it becomes much harder to break what’s already been built.
In my 30s, wanting to build an empire so I could quit my dreaded 9-to-5, I read Success Principles by Jack Canfield — cover to cover, highlighted. I had a plan and couldn’t wait to start. If you’re familiar with Human Design, I have Gate 53: the gate of new beginnings. The gift of this gate is starting things with energy. The shadow is not seeing them through to completion. And I lived that pattern over and over: start, not see results, talk myself out of it, abandon.
I took many money mindset courses. Some worked well, and I even manifested quite a bit of money through a select few. But my deeper issue was how I took — and didn’t stick to — action. I was desperate to quit my job. I had no patience (classic Manifesting Generator) and would change direction every time results didn’t come fast enough.
My biggest blindspot? I was looking at money as a source of security. I thought I needed to create a path for wealth to flow to me. There was a deep suffering and control trauma around money that I genuinely couldn’t see. I thought it was just normal. And the harder I tried to force my business to succeed, the deeper I dug into the rabbit hole of doing and controlling.
My Money Story: Energetic Maximum and Minimum
A big shift happened when I realized I couldn’t operate the way I had before. I didn’t have the time to take all the actions and force my business to work. So I paused.
I wish I could tell you that pause changed everything. It didn’t. But what it did do was put a path of emotional healing in front of me that I had never considered before.
I have an open solar plexus in Human Design. This means I don’t generate my own emotional waves — I absorb them from others. People with open solar plexus centers can be deep empaths, and I have been that. It’s likely why I didn’t realize how much money trauma I had taken on from those around me.
Even after all the money mindset courses, I noticed I couldn’t remove those blocks because they were so intangible. A concept that really landed for me was the idea of a money thermostat — your energetic maximum and minimum. These are the invisible financial boundaries your subconscious has set based on what you grew up with, your belief systems, your perceived skill sets, and the proof of concept around you.
This was undeniably true in my life. I hit my glass ceiling. No matter what I did, I couldn’t surpass a certain income level. Even when I manifested extra money, it would get absorbed by unexpected bills. It always evened out.
Then, as the world contracted in a way I had never seen before in 2025 — the news cycle, layoffs, inflation — my energetic maximum started to shrink with it. Where I once expected pay raises and better opportunities, I stopped expecting them. And reality reflected that right back to me.
How Hitting Rock Bottom Taught Me to Stop Forcing Money
I hit my lowest point in 2025. I felt financially doomed, and it showed up everywhere — unexpected bills, bad performance reviews despite working hard, the AI revolution, staggering inflation. I restarted an affiliate business, put everything into it, and then the company I had built around shut its doors. And then came something that broke me even deeper through the news cycle — realizing that some people in positions of power viewed ordinary people as something to be controlled. Something to be discarded.
I felt like everything I had worked for was crumbling. The life I had built was falling apart.
I took time away. Away from the hustle, the ambitions, the endless doing. I decided to go back to being a student — tabula rasa, no agenda. I had all the tools and all the knowledge. Now I needed to see where that took me without trying to force an outcome.
The goal was no longer a successful business or a new job. The goal was to be shown a way. To finally prove to myself: is there really magic in this world? Is there a higher intelligence, or just the cold 3D reality? Was everything I had experienced before just luck?
I had to prove it to myself so completely that I could share it with the world — not from a place of making money, but from a place of redistribution. Of putting wealth into the hands of good-hearted people. Of lifting the collective.
Until your why is something you’d give things up for, it won’t carry you through the hard parts. Your why needs to ignite a fire. It doesn’t need to be the thing you’re doing — but it needs to be the reason you wake up early or stay late. I had always heard of a burning desire. In 2026, I finally felt it.
The Day I Stopped Controlling and Finally Let Go
In the past, I used my tools to get somewhere. Hypnosis to rewire my subconscious. Meditation to receive inspired action. Energy work to raise my vibration. It was always doing something to fix something — as if I was perpetually broken.
That’s when I realized: even reaching for tools was a form of control. It was trying to manufacture an outcome rather than letting inspiration come naturally.
So I did something I had never done before. I set a clear intention — to manifest an extra $5,000 that week from unexpected sources — and I let it be fully open. I surrendered. No plan. No strategy. No how.
The Emotional Work That Made Detachment Actually Possible
After setting the intention, I could still feel the emotional charge around my intention, the attachment to it.
And so I reached for tapping — the way I do it is different. I tap while saying exactly how I feel out loud, no matter how ugly or irrational it is. I let the emotional gunk move through me and out. I kept at it for 2 hours – one thing led to another led to another. I felt all the emotions – the anger, the sadness, the despair and let it all come out of it.
I started going deep into my money beliefs. What they really said. What patterns they pointed to. The biggest one: money never chose me.
As I sat with that, something deeper surfaced. My mentor told me my relationship with money was mirroring my relationship with myself. I finally saw it. I had taken an unconscious oath to never be chosen. To never be seen. Because being chosen felt dangerous. Unsafe. Like it could mean death. And our emotional bodies don’t just carry our own trauma — they carry our ancestors’ too, because it is their DNA that lives on in us.
Something shifted when I understood: it is safe now. It is safe to be chosen. There is nothing I need to do or be to attract money. I make money because I am. Because I exist. I let it all out until I hit a point where all the emotional charge just went away – money felt like air — neutral, always available, not a thing — it would always stay.
A few days later, I thought casually — just as a passing thought — that I should get a head start on my taxes since it’s easier to get promo codes early. I was so detached, so unbothered by the how, that I didn’t even clock it as significant or an inspired action. I just started gathering documents and sent them to my CPA.
Three days later, my tax return was ready. I had been expecting to owe $3,000–$8,000 as I had in previous years.
Instead, I was owed a refund of $35,000.
My jaw dropped. I had blown past my intention within five days, seven times over. And the entire time — I had not once felt the nagging pull of money worry. Not even a flicker. If anything sticky came up, I tapped it out immediately. I wasn’t in some euphoric high-vibe state. I was stressed about work, wrangling my kids, doing laundry. I simply wasn’t making money a thing. It was energetically neutral — and that neutrality is what made space for it to land.
Before You Reframe It, You Have to Empty It
Here’s the part no one wants to hear — and the part I was missing for years:
The emotional reaction you have to money isn’t just a thought pattern. It is energy stored in your body. And until you neutralize it, no amount of reframing will hold. If the belief is still emotionally alive inside you — if it still carries anger, grief, fear, shame, or resentment — affirmations will feel fake. Reframes will feel hollow. You’ll need to repeat them thousands of times and still feel that quiet, nagging question: but how? Because your nervous system is still in protection mode. Before I could shift anything around money, I had to let myself feel everything I had suppressed about it.
The unfairness. The jealousy. The exhaustion. The anger at working so hard. The grief of feeling overlooked. The fear of instability.
I didn’t process it intellectually. I let myself feel it until it burned out. I said it out loud — the ugliest, most unreasonable, most embarrassing versions of it. It felt like throwing up poison that had been stored in my body for years. And there’s a moment in deep emotional release — if you’ve experienced it, you know — where you cry so hard there are no more tears left. Or the anger peaks so intensely you scream, and then it dissolves. And what’s left afterward is not chaos. It’s quiet. It’s peace. It’s that exhale of: ah. It’s gone.
That’s when the shift happens. Not when you convince yourself of abundance. Not when you repeat affirmations. But when the emotional charge leaves your body. Emotion is energy in motion. If it’s not allowed to move, it stays stored. And stored emotion becomes subconscious identity. And subconscious identity becomes your financial ceiling.
When I fully felt the grief around ‘money never chose me,’ something emptied. It stopped being a wound and became just information.
That’s the difference.
You cannot build wealth consciousness on top of suppressed scarcity emotion. It will collapse under pressure every time. But when you fully empty the emotional container — when you let yourself feel the worst of it without trying to fix it — something extraordinary happens. The belief loses its charge. It becomes neutral. And neutrality is where wealth can finally land. Because neutrality means safety.
So before you ask, ‘What should I believe instead?’ Ask first: ‘Have I allowed myself to fully feel what’s already here?’
Don’t bypass it. Don’t spiritually override it. Let it move. And when it leaves — clarity will arise on its own. You won’t need to force a new belief. It will just be there.
Have you ever allowed yourself to fully feel into your money beliefs — even all the ugliness, all the shame, all the things you think make you a bad person for feeling? I’d love to know where you are in this journey.